YOUNG, CAREFREE, AND POWER-MAD
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Thomas Woodrow Wilson was a proud son of the South. Born in Staunton, Virginia, in the calamitous decade preceding the Civil War, he grew up mostly in Georgia and South Carolina. His father, a transplanted Ohio Yankee, was a passionately devoted secessionist and a Presbyterian minister.
Among Wilson’s earliest memories was the searing sight of Union soldiers marching through his small town in the deep South at the end of the Civil War. They were Yankee invaders, a victorious occupying force, who wanted to make life as miserable as possible for Confederates like the Wilsons.
As an eight-year-old boy in Augusta, Georgia, he watched in horror as Union troops led the captured Confederate ex-President Jefferson Davis through the streets in chains. He recalled his mother tending to wounded Confederate soldiers, victims of the barbaric Northern aggressors. Although he would later hide it, he had severe contempt for the Union, for Abraham Lincoln, and for African-Americans. All of them had stood in the way of creating an elite Southern society that would prosper on the backs of slaves.
Most likely dyslexic, Wilson did not learn to read or write until he was nearly ten years old. But despite the slow start, he turned into an ivory-tower academic for his whole life. Whatever his official job title, he always remained an elitist “intellectual” who believed that experts (like him!) should be in charge of, well, just about everything.
Wilson came to define the nihilist, humanist philosophy that drives institutions of “higher” learning to this day. There is a sweet irony in the fact that the virulently racist Wilson was the prime mover in a progressive movement that is directly responsible for the hypersensitive, multicultural, and “trigger-warned” college campuses of today.
While he’s had some competition through the years, Wilson remains the most “academic” of any U.S. president. After a short stint at North Carolina’s Davidson College, Wilson enrolled at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), where he graduated in 1879. He also briefly attended the University of Virginia Law School but soon abandoned practicing law. In 1883, he received his doctorate in political science and history from the recently formed Johns Hopkins University.
Wilson had been a student for more than a decade, so it was surely time to leave academia behind for the world of business, right? Of course not. Instead, he went into teaching, bouncing from Cornell to Bryn Mawr to Wesleyan and then finally back to Princeton as a professor and, eventually, as its president.
It wasn’t until 1910, when he was in his fifties, that Wilson eventually got his first “real” job—if you consider being governor of New Jersey a real job (after Jon Corzine and Chris Christie, I have my doubts). Just two years later, a man who had spent more than three decades with his head in the academic clouds (and not one day in private enterprise) became president of the United States.
But let’s be clear on something: Wilson defied the absentminded-professor stereotype. He was no bookish wallflower. Quite the contrary, he was a powerful speaker with a rich baritone voice. His students worshipped him. But he was also cold, calculating, and power-hungry from a very early age. (As a child, he printed up calling cards reading “Woodrow Wilson, United States Senator from Virginia.”)
Wilson didn’t spend decades in academia simply to learn. To him, higher education was a tool to hone a new philosophy of American government led by Hegelian experts focusing on the collective instead of the individual, an elite cadre of intellectuals at the helm working to perfect society. Wilson plotted to be the captain of that ship.
His time at Johns Hopkins only helped cement his big-government attitudes. Many of that university’s early professors were German-trained. Through them—particularly the influential early progressive economist Richard Ely—Wilson lapped up an admiration for Prince Otto von Bismarck and the powerful new authoritarian German welfare state. He also imbibed a belief in Darwinism, concluding that a more powerful, centralized government was critical to society’s evolution.
It all added up to an absolute infatuation with governmental power. “If any trait bubbles up in all one reads about Wilson,” observed historian Walter McDougall, “it is this: he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power.”
Wilson was passionate and ambitious—and also quite arrogant. In 1886, as a young Bryn Mawr professor, he wrote, “[A]ll the country needs is a new and sincere body of thought in politics.” Wilson had earlier made a “solemn covenant” with a friend in which the co-conspirators swore “that we would school all our powers and passions for the work of establishing the principles we held in common; that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power; and that we would drill ourselves in all the arts of persuasion . . . that we might have facility in leading others into our ways of thinking and enlisting them in our purposes.”
These new “sentiments” and “ways of thinking” amounted to an entire rejection of the American experiment in limited government and classical liberalism. According to historian Charles R. Kesler, as “an undergraduate, graduate student, professor, and university president, Wilson spent three decades in the academy contemplating the failings of the old American constitutional system, testing his critique of it, and preparing the rhetorical case for its transformation.” Even before finalizing his education, Wilson had already embraced “a new theory of the presidency and of the whole political system.”
ORDAINED BY GOD
You might not always like a politician’s policies or ideology, but up close and personal, you sometimes discover that he or she is actually a very kind person.
That is not the case with Woodrow Wilson.
He was, of course, intensely ambitious and convinced that he was meant for great things. Beyond that, he often exhibited what he proudly called his Scotch-Irish fighting streak. This made him a tough, unbending, unforgiving enemy.
His closest political ally was probably Texas power broker Colonel Edward Mandel House. House once explained that the best way to convince Wilson of something was to “[d]iscover a common hate, exploit it, get the president warmed up, and then start your business.”
Wilson eventually broke with House, just as he broke from almost every person who aided his rise from Princeton to the New Jersey State House to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. House was a strong personality, but most of the time, Wilson simply loved the sound of people saying yes to him, telling him just how wonderful he was. He had many followers but few close friends.
“Wilson,” progressive journalist William Allen White once explained, “in his gayest hours, in his times of greatest happiness, stood always aloof, distrusting men instinctively. It was this suspicion of men, founded upon ignorance of men, which led Wilson always to question the strong, to fraternize with the meek, and to break ruthlessly and irrevocably, without defense or explanation, any friendship which threatened his own prestige.”
When Wilson captured the White House in 1912, his arrogance was already so great that he reprimanded one supporter with these incredible words: “I wish it to be clearly understood that I owe you nothing. Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal could have prevented that.”
Yes, Wilson would let nothing stand between him and power. The 1912 Democratic platform had demanded a one-term limit on the presidency, but Wilson violated his party’s pledge and ran again in 1916. Even crippled by a major stroke, he angled for a third term in 1920.
Death was the only force with the power to fully silence his ambition.
MORE POWER FOR FEWER PEOPLE
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Woodrow Wilson believed that “the State” was everything and that individual rights basically meant nothing. He even went so far as to claim that “the State of today may be regarded as in an important sense only an enlarged Family: ‘State’ is ‘Family’ writ large.”
The State he had believed in for most of his youth was the Confederacy of the old South, run by a patrician elite. It didn??
?t matter that African-Americans had no part in the State except to generate revenue in the form of cotton exports; in Wilson’s eyes, they weren’t really citizens.
Prior to Wilson and his progressive allies, this concept was not only laughable but also insulting and dangerous to the most important human institution: the family. But family, faith, and the individual—not to mention the Constitution itself—weren’t bedrock principles to him; they were mere hindrances to be overcome. In keeping with the progressive mind-set, he believed that men could not reach perfection on their own; only the forces of society—unleashed, administered, and monitored by the State—could do that for them.
Wilson believed that America’s founding principles were outdated at best and distasteful at worst. He loathed “blind worship” of the Constitution and thought veneration of the Founders prevented Americans from appreciating a “more glorious time” to come. “Progress, development—those are modern words,” he said. “The modern idea is to leave the past and press onward to something new.”
Wilson’s generation was the first to question the wisdom, efficacy, and relevance of the Constitution. And much like today’s progressives, he looked across the Atlantic to Europe for guidance on how to do things “better”—to Britain’s ancient Parliament and Germany’s newfangled welfare state.
Perhaps most damning of all, Wilson is the father of the single biggest philosophical threat to the Constitution the country has ever faced, one that splits the U.S. Supreme Court to this day. Wilson believed, in violation of everything the Founders stood for, in a “living and breathing constitution” that can and should be “modified by its environment.” These “living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice,” he wrote in 1908.
The Constitution was, in Wilson’s mind, subject to the concept of “survival of the fittest”—not bedrock at all but more like shifting sands. In the Wilsonian view, the government had to keep evolving, changing to meet the needs of the environment around it. There was no such thing as natural rights endowed to us by our creator or immutable principles.
Wilson’s scorn for the Constitution rings clear and strong. He even derided the U.S. system of checks and balances: “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live.” He ridiculed the idea of individual rights:
No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle. [However, the] rights of man are easy to discourse of, [but] infinitely hard to translate into practice. [Such] theories are never “law”; no matter what the name or the formal authority of the document in which they are embodied.
In a 1912 campaign address titled “What Is Progress?” (a speech he later included in perhaps the most ironically titled book of the twentieth century, The New Freedom), Wilson laid out in the starkest terms the progressive approach to the Constitution: “All that progressives ask or desire is permission [in an] era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word, [to] interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”
Wilson was equally contemptuous of the Declaration of Independence, claiming, “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface” (that is, that whole “all men are created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” thing). To Wilson, the “question is not whether all men are born free and equal or not,” because we all “know they are not.”
Wilson argued that Americans “are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” because we “are as free as they were to make and unmake governments.” Americans, he said, should not “worship men or a document.”
Unless, of course, that man was him.
COMMUNITIES ARE SUPREME OVER MEN
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Like all progressives, Wilson had a barely concealed elitist’s disdain for the regular Americans he allegedly wanted to help and protect. As governor of New Jersey and later as president of the United States, Wilson rarely talked about socialism, but he was much less guarded during his years in academia.
Wilson’s brand of socialism was something he called “state socialism.” “The thesis of the state socialist,” he wrote, “is that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will; that omnipotence of legislation is the first postulate of all just political theory.”
Wilsonian progressive thinking leaves no room for protection from the state, however. “Communities are supreme over men as individuals,” Wilson said. “Limits of wisdom and convenience to the public control there may be: limits of principle there are, upon strict analysis, none.”
Wilson is perhaps best known for urging America to make the world “safe for democracy.” Yet his core values—his core progressive values—drove him to undermine the very essence of American democracy in favor of state socialism:
Democracy is bound by no principle of its own nature to say itself nay as to the exercise of any power. Here, then, lies the point. The difference between democracy and socialism is not an essential difference, but only a practical difference—[it] is a difference of organization and policy, not a difference of primary motive.
Let’s pause for a moment and consider the gravity of this statement, one made by a revered American president. He is saying that there is nothing exceptional about American democracy because, with just a few “practical” tweaks to “organization and policy,” it can be transformed into socialism.
And people wonder why I have the front page of the newspaper declaring “Woodrow Wilson Is Dead” hanging in my office.
FIRST BLOOD: THE SIXTEENTH AMENDMENT
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Wilson—who once referred to paying taxes as a “glorious privilege”—was instrumental in passing the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorized the previously unconstitutionaliii federal income tax: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
The amendment, which took effect just a few weeks before his inauguration, was one of his “practical” tweaks that would erase the “essential difference” between America’s capitalist, democratic system and the state socialism Wilson so admired.
Once in office, he embraced the amendment with alacrity, summoning a special session of Congress to pass the Revenue Act of 1913, which by our current standards seems pretty innocuous. Its lowest rate was a mere one percent. Its highest rate at the time was just seven percent, and that was only on annual incomes of more than five hundred thousand dollars.
SOCIALISM: AN AMERICAN MASS MOVEMENT
American socialism flourished in the early 1900s. The Socialist Party elected dozens of mayors (including the mayor of Milwaukee) and state legislators. In the 1912 presidential election, Socialist Eugene V. Debs garnered six percent of the vote. While that’s a small percentage, it still amounted to more than nine hundred thousand American voters supporting the overt Socialist banner.
Despite personal differences between Debs and Wilson—Debs was actually sentenced to ten years in prison under Wilson’s Sedition Act for speaking out against the World War I draft—many socialists saw a fellow traveler in Wilson (and supported his reelection in 1916), and more and more radical leftists were drawn to an increasingly extremist Democratic Party.
In 1934, author Upton Sinclair, a prominent ex-Socialist then running for governor of California as a Democrat, theorized about how this continued leftward drift would play out in America:
The American people will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. . . . I certainly proved it. . . . Running on the Socialist ticket [in 1932] I got 6
0,000 votes, and running [two years later as a Democrat] on the slogan to “End Poverty in California” I got 879,000. . . . There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to outflank them.
It’s ironic that it took a writer to understand the immense power of words. Change them, and you change everything—even if the meaning is identical. Of course, by the time Sinclair said this, Debs-style socialism under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was already well on its way to becoming reality.
Progressives initially framed federal income taxes as only focusing on corporations and the very wealthy—targets their political heirs still favor today—but of course, they didn’t stop there. Progressives never stop demanding more. Within a couple of years, the lowest income-tax rate had doubled from one percent to two percent. The highest rate had skyrocketed from seven percent to thirteen percent. But this was nothing compared with what Wilson would soon hit taxpayers with: a top marginal income tax of seventy-three percent! (Franklin Roosevelt took the top bracket to ninety-four percent during World War II, and it remained above seventy percent until Ronald Reagan took over.)
Obviously, the issue of taxes is not really one of economics; it’s one of ideology and redistribution of capital. Building a massive central government is expensive. Without an income tax, all of the proposals for new programs and initiatives had no chance of being funded. But the Sixteenth Amendment made a constantly growing state encroaching into nearly every area of life nearly inevitable.