Possibly Worst President in US History

Woodrow Wilson really sucked

Woodrow Wilson typically wins a “near great” rating from historians, but for what? Historian Thomas J. Knock cited “the enduring relevance” of Wilson’s vision, in which “he remains unique among presidents of the American Century.” But judged by impact, Wilson’s record is one of America’s worst presidents, if not the worst.

We’re looking at him because he was president when the so-called Progressive Amendments were passed. That makes his legacy extremely relevant.

More than a century ago, Congress declared war on Imperial Germany. Why? Yeah…

The pretext for the World War I was an unimportant leader of tiny unimportant country related to a faltering dynasty was assassinated and countries declared war on one another like some sort of Appalachia family feud. The United States people didn’t want to get involved but Wilson was manuevering behind the scenes to get us into the war. There were all kinds of reasons not to take a side, and certainly no reason to get involved. By April 1917, Europe had been at war for almost three years and Germany was ready to agree to a negotiated peace, but England wanted their unconditional surrender—even though neither of those two countries were original parties to the war. Great Britain had imposed an illegal blockade and sought to redirect neutral trade for its own economic benefit, which eventually led to the Germans torpedoeing merchant vessels carrying arms to Great Britian. Instead of taking the high road of neutrality, the supposedly high-​minded Wilson chose to sacrifice thousands of his countrymen to fulfill his personal ambition and indulge his vanity.

Rise to Power and Domestic Agenda

Born in 1856, Wilson grew up in the South and was probably the most racist president to sit in the Oval Office since the Civil War. He served as president of Princeton University before being enlisted by Democratic Party bosses to break the GOP’s stranglehold in New Jersey’s statehouse. Once elected governor, however, he turned against the Democratic establishment and pushed a reformist agenda.

Trenton proved too small to contain his ambitions, especially after the GOP staged a legislative revival. At the 1912 National Democratic Convention, Wilson courted the progressive forces of William Jennings Bryan and won the nomination on the 46^th ballot. Not an auspicious start, except the Republican Party was split between establishment regular William Howard Taft and monomaniacal egotist Theodore Roosevelt, which gave Wilson the presidency.

While pretending to be a mild-mannered professor, Wilson unabashedly sought power. Convinced of his superiority over common folk, Wilson quickly became frustrated by the Constitution’s constraints on government and presidential authority. Seeking to remedy what he viewed as a flawed political system, he wasted no time signing into law the income tax and creating the Federal Reserve System after the ratification of the 16^th Amendment. He knew these two steps would greatly strengthen federal power, particularly in the Executive Branch.

Wilson’s principles rested upon an abiding sense of sanctimony so deep H.L. Mencken said he was waiting for “the first vacancy in the Trinity.” Wilson undoubtedly believed that he was fated to be the world’s representative of humanity. His behavior suggested someone who hated people while professing to love mankind. Wilson’s soaring vision was primarily for a Caucasian nation. He had support from leading African Americans until his polices proved racist and reactionary. When he arrived in Washington, D.C., the federal government was the District’s most significant integrated institution. It wouldn’t be when he left. Not only did he refuse to address Jim Crow disenfranchisement, he screened Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915. His administration actively segregated the federal bureaucracy, particularly the military, helping to cement the systemic racial injustices that defined American life in the 20th century.

Wilson’s domestic record was deficient in other ways. He paid little attention to the Spanish Flu epidemic, which cost 675,000 Americans their lives. Meanwhile, Wilson supported abortion and mandatory sterilization.

Wilson’s assault on fundamental American liberties stands as his most egregious crime, as asserted the transcendent rights of man while playing petty dictator. He demanded Congress grant him the authority to suppress dissent, considering criticism of him and his policies to be tantamount to treason.

“I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.” Woodrow Wilson, December 1915, Congressional speech

He then urged Congress to enact laws that would allow him to silence these Americans through repressive new legislation to penalize criticism of the president. Congress responded with the Espionage Act of 1917, which stopped short of formal press censorship, but punished individual dissent. Expressions of opposition to or even dissatisfaction with the war led to prosecutions and prison terms under the supposedly great “liberal” crusader.

One by one the rights of freedom of speech, of assembly, to petition the government for redress of grievances, to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, against arbitrary arrest, to have a fair trial, the principle that guilt is personal, and that punishment should bear some proportion to the offense were sacrificed to Wilson’s ego.

Eugene Debs was a socialist leader who ran for president and denounced World War I as “the capitalists’ war”. Even after the conflict ended the cruelly vindictive Wilson refused to release Debs from prison, leaving that task to Wilson’s Republican successor, Warren Harding. The contradiction between Wilson’s rhetoric and conduct was stunning. The war to make the world “safe for democracy” triggered the worst invasion of civil liberties in America’s history, undermining its democracy.

Finding the public insufficiently enthralled with fighting on behalf of European colonial powers in the Old World’s destructive war, Wilson and his aides made Uncle Sam the propagandist-​in-​chief, spewing forth inflammatory rhetoric to foster and exacerbate a state of public outrage, necessitated by the absence of any direct German attack on the United States. Wilson established a Committee on Public Information (CPI), flooding the nation with materials whose dominant theme was a demand for conformity and super-​patriotism. Many communities banned German-​language teaching and German-​language books, and citizens of German descent became frequent subjects of vigilante action, some of them recruited by the Wilson administration as “preparedness clubs” and “Minute Men” who targeted the slightest deviation from the purist standard of obedient patriotism. UFear and repression worked its way into every nook and cranny of ordinary life.

Bad Neighbor

Wilson treated the Monroe Doctrine as an affirmative grant of presidential authority, entitling Washington to routinely attack and occupy America’s southern neighbors, readily sending in the military to impose his will in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. After a 1913 Mexican coup, Wilson aided the insurgents, and occupied Veracruz (Mexico’s primary seaport) for a time. While he looked for an excuse to invade Mexico proper and it took foreign mediation to avoid hostilities. After that dictatorship was overturned, US troops again clashed with the recently established government. He was all too willing to inflict foreign complications on the largely non-aggressive American people.

Wilson’s grandiose geopolitical designs weren’t satisfied by these Central American and Caribbean misadventures. Although the US had no good reason to join Europe’s continental murderfest, Wilson desired to transform the entire world and that required the US to become a combatant. Otherwise, his extravagantly egotistical schemes for a new global order would be ignored by European leaders. He was precisely the wrong man to have in the White House with Europe aflame.

Entering World War I

Of course, Wilson could not be honest and tell non-aggressive Americans he planned to take them into war and sacrifice their lives to allow him to dictate the future to the rest of the world. To that purpose, he sided with Great Britain in the war’s maritime disputes and allowed events to play out. provoking the Germans while pretending to be innocent. British ships cut the transatlantic cable, allowing London to control what news reached America. Great Britain also employed skilled propaganda agents in America using fake atrocity stories to ruin Germany’s reputation. (A generation later, people would initially dismiss news of the Holocaust because having been fooled once, they weren’t eager to be fooled a second time.) In a barbarous war in which all powers abandoned any sense of humanity, Britain began by violating international law and the rights of neutral nations and imposing a starvation blockade on Germany. Berlin retaliated with U-​boat warfare. German submarines attempted to comply with the dictates of traditional maritime warfare by surfacing to challenge British merchant ships, but the latter rammed and sank the subs. As a result, Berlin began torpedoing British vessels without warning.

While still insisting he was neutral, Wilson refused to criticize London over its blockade, stating he wouldn’t impede Britain’s prosecution of the war, stating: “England is fighting our fight and you may well understand that I shall not, in the present state of the world’s affairs place obstacles in her way when she is fighting for her life, and the life of the world.”

More than 50% of the American population were of German descent. Such extreme anglophile views were held by a minute fraction of the American people, which made his view of Germany seem insane. According to Wilson, US citizens had an absolute right to book passage on British passenger liners which were sometime armed merchant vessels designated as reserve cruisers carrying munitions through a war zone. Berlin even ran advertisements warning against travel on British vessels, but Wilson insisted a single American boarding a de facto British warship meant Germany couldn’t attack it. This led to the May 7, 1915, sinking of the Lusitania. It probably would have survived the torpedo, but a secondary explosion of the munitions it was carrying sunk it.

In an attempt to forestall US intervention, Berlin backed away from unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson won reelection as the man who kept America out of war. But he pushed military “preparedness” and was frustrated by his inability to impose his will on the combatants from afar. As the conflict dragged on and hundreds of thousands of men died on both sides in fruitless trench warfare, Germany finally decided to return Britain’s favor by trying to starve the island nation into submission. In January 1917 Berlin unleashed unrestricted submarine warfare.

On February 3 Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany but held off on formal entry into the conflict, sensing rightly he lacked sufficient public support. On April 2, after a period of robust propagandizing and covering up the Lusitania’s munitions’ transport, he requested Congress declare war, employing what would in the future be known as the Big Lie. He claimed “the recent course of the Imperial German Government [was] in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States.” He expressed shock that a government “that had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations” would engage in submarine warfare, conveniently ignoring Great Britain’s illegal blockade which ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of noncombatants. On April 6, the House followed the Senate in voting for war and propelled America into the Europeans’ foolish imperial conflict.

The Human Cost

Contrary to what we were taught in school, the US entry into World War I was a disaster for Americans, Europe and the rest of the world. Few Americans other than Wilson, eastern banks which funded Britain’s war, and ambitious military commanders who sacrificed their soldiers’ lives in search of career advancement benefited from the war. Europe experienced a pyrric victory. With the collapse of Russia’s Tsarist government in April and Soviet revolution in November, Germany was able to shift troops to the west and make one last attempt at victory. Without America’s involvement, stalemate and a compromise peace seemed likely as the exhausted powers faltered. The French military mutinied while Austro-​Hungary teetered on the edge of collapse, and German morale plummeted under civilian starvation. All combatants desperately wanted to halt the killing and recover economically. But the United States entry into the war stalled peace and lengthened the pain.

While the Western Front ground to a halt, Wilson decided to interfere in Russia, a country he knew almost nothing about. Wilson joined the British and French in a disorganized mission to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war. US forces served in northern Russia in 1918 and 1919, and in Siberia from 1918 to 1920, collectively losing more than 400 men on a mission most of us have never heard of. Doomed from the start, the mission engendered enduring hostility in Moscow, which likely contributed to the later Cold War.

Diplomatic Incompetence

The infusion of US aid and troops bolstered Great Britain and her allies, giving Wilson an opportunity to dictate a glorious peace to the earth’s 1.8 billion people, which ended disasterously. Despite his purported eloquence, Wilson evidently (according to John Maynard Keynes, who attended the Versailles peace conference), hadn’t planned for peace. Keynes found his ideas nebulous and incomplete. Keynes observed: “He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of the life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House.”

To be fair, Wilson might already have been experiencing mini-strokes ahead of the main event that would happen some months later.

His sudden lack of vision forced his European allies to come up with their own plan. The Versailles peace treaty wantonly violated Wilson’s famed 14 Points as fellow allied leaders plundered the losing powers, traded subject populations like baseball cards, drew arbitrary borders, laughed at foreigners seeking equal treatment, and trashed principle after principle to gain advantage. They brilliantly used the president’s idealistic vision to suit their selfish ends. They took the League of Nations hostage. Throughout the spring, each of them would present a different ransom note, wringing concession after concession out of Wilson.

A Legacy of Impending Disaster

The pact was harsh enough to antagonize the defeated and ineffective enough to sap the will of the victorious. Few countries would or could keep the resulting peace as the Versailles Treaty spawned a gaggle of weak ethnically-based states like Czechoslovakia, which were dependent on the allies. Although nominally a victor, carried across the finish line by its partners-​in-​crime, Italy was deeply dissatisfied at not gaining more territory. After British Prime minister Lloyd George promised to squeeze Germany for reparations “until the pips squeak,” the British government grew embarrassed by its handiwork and sought to weaken the treaty’s terms. France feared facing a retaliatory Germany without help from London. The supreme allied commander, Ferdinand Foch, presciently predicted: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”

Yes, yes, it was!

Wilson’s ego ravaged and confidence shattered, he “returned to America, mentally unhinged, morally bankrupt, and politically weak,” where he grew increasingly irrational and opposed to any compromise with the US Senate. By then Americans had emerged from their militaristic-​nationalistic trance and few wanted to be guarantors of Anglo-​French dominance in Europe. The Senate rejected the pact, though Congress would later agree to a separate U.S.-German Peace Treaty in 1921.

The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia a few months after America’s entry into the war in 1917, creating the first communist nation after a lengthy and bitter civil war. In 1921 German army veteran Adolf Hitler took over a small nationalist party, which eventually pushed all others aside. A year later, Italy’s Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts staged the famous march that put his fascists in power.

World War II followed naturally, almost inevitably.

Germany felt no stake in maintaining a settlement that its people derided as the “Diktat.” Politics in the Weimar Republic radicalized, leading to attempted street putsches, assassinations of left-​wing politicians, extremist bids for power, street violence between communists and Nazis, and ultimately Hitler’s rise. Precisely 20 years after the Versailles conference, Germany invaded Poland.

Wilson died before seeing the ill consequences of his decisions. Indeed, he barely survived the war, suffering a debilitating stroke that left his wife effectively governing the country by disguising his enfeebled condition (and setting a precedent for a similar predicament during Joe Biden’s single term in office).

His grandiose ambitions in ruins, Wislon still wanted to run for a third term, even though he couldn’t manage a Cabinet meeting, let alone a campaign speech. Early in 1920 he penned some thoughts for a third inaugural address, and those around him played along. Nobody wanted to tell him that he couldn’t be the president any longer. The Democratic Party convention finally acted to make a conversation unnecessary when they refused to nominate him just because he was the sitting president. The American people awarded a landslide to the lackluster Warren Harding, whose most important qualification was not being Woodrow Wilson.

So what was great about Wilson as president? His biographers get A+s for propaganda. In making the world “safe for democracy” he truly made the world “safe from democracy.” His legacy was setting up World War II and the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, the segregation of the US federal bureaucracy, and the creation of the Administrative State that threatens all of our freedoms today.