Woodrow Wilson--your thoughts good or bad

[WI_DEM]

He is often rated as a great or near great president. I used to think so too, but it seems he was like Bush--inflexible, especially in regards to the League of Nations. Perhaps his series of small strokes which culminated with his major stroke of October, 1919 had something to do with this. I know he did some good stuff especially in the first term as far as necessary reforms, but he was also a product of his day with regards to race and voting status for women.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Wilson set up the calamities of the United States for decades

after his debacle at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

Two quick examples. He let Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau run roughshod over Germany, letting them extract impossible debt payments for the war, setting up the country to print too many Deutschmark, causing runaway inflation, joblessness, hunger, etc. and the rise of Adolf Hitler as the savior to the Allied creditors. Wilson IMO helped to make sure that World War II was a continuation of the First World War by his obsessiveness with his League of Nations and not paying attention to what was going on otherwise.

Second, a young lawyer from Vietnam tried to approach Wilson in Paris to ask for help in gaining independence of his country from France. Wilson refused to see him. Ho Chi Mingh didn't go away and became an icon to the North Vietnamese and a scion to the United States during the Vietnam War.

And then Wilson was incapicitated by his stroke and his wife ran the country, not the vice president, etc.

That's plenty to make him anything but great.

[The Magistrate]

2. An Unmitigated Disaster, Sir

He did more than even Lenin to pitch the twentieth century into the catastrophes of war and horror that so closely shroud it.

"God contented himself with Ten."

[bigmonkey]

3. He was a white supremacist, or so I've read.

Ousted all African-Americans from the Federal government. The League of Nations seems like a good idea, but a lot of Wilson's policies were horrific. Very suppressive domestically.

[Time for change]

4. I have mixed feelings about Wilson

I'm sure that at least part of the reason that he is rated so high is that he brought us into a major war which we won.

He could be inflexible, he was highly ideological, and like Jimmy Carter his relationship with Congress was not good because he put his principles too far above the need to cultivate good relationships with Congress.

He was a racist, and as much as I hate racism I also recognize that in those days it was highly unusual for a southerner not to be a racist.

He did push some progressive domestic legislation during his Presidency, though I do not recall the details on that enough to discuss them intelligently.

What I admire him for were his efforts to bring our country into the League of Nations, which was his idea. He strongly believed (rightly IMO) that it was imperative that the U.S. join the League because he strongly believed in the concept of international law and cooperation (and that is probably the major aspect in which he differs from Bush). He toured the country on a campaign to drum up public support for the League, putting everything he had into that effort. He became deathly sick, but he kept on going, to the point that he developed a serious stroke. Maybe if he would have put a little more effort into developing a better relationship with Congress he would have been more successful in his efforts to get us to join the League, but still I admire him for his efforts.

[rurallib]

5. When I was young I was taught that he was great

Now that I can read on my own he has fallen many notches.

[originalpckelly]

6. SOB, who fucked America over. We didn't need to enter WWI...

and that lying sack of shit racist bastard played to the hatreds of Americans in order to do it. Not only that, he literally locked away war protesters simply for wanting us out of WWI.

He was like Bush, with a little more power.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

12. And allowed anti-German phobia to run rampant

Until that time, there were several German language newspapers in the major Midwestern cities; I think WWI basically shut them down. A German American socialist was lynched in Illinois; the German-American side of my family stopped speaking German at that time, and I believe that may have been when my great grandparents, who had always accepted German Lutheran ministers into their home, suddenly stopped the practice and joined the Presbyterian Church (there was no German Lutheran Church in the town where they lived).

[UTUSN]

17. Just reading Kitty KELLEY's bio of SINATRA, & there's this:

from "His Way: The Unauthorized biography of Frank SINATRA" by Kitty KELLEY.


**********QUOTE********

(pp 14-15, paper: ) ON April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson called for a declaration of war against Germany. Immediately, he made Hoboken a principal port of embarkation for American troops and ordered all two hundred thirty-seven waterfront saloons closed, making the city the first in the nation to experience federal prohibition.

The Germans who had ruled the town for so many years found themselves ostracized after German spies were discovered placing a time bomb aboard a steamship carrying sugar from New York to France. Throughout America, Germans became suspect, but wartime hysteria over imagined German espionage was especially high in Hoboken. German newspapers were banned and German beer gardens closed. The German part of the city was put under martial law, and military police rounded up "enemy aliens" and shipped them off to Ellis Island without even the semblance of a hearing. Panic swept through the German community, and thousands fled after being told to vacate their luxury apartments or face arrest.

The Irish now ascended to the ruling class, but the city became more Italian in character as thousands of immigrants moved into the downtown area. Their natural distrust of authority became heightened when the President insisted that everyone in the United States subscribe to "the simple and loyal motto: America for Americans." A few days later, the chairman of the Iowa Council of Defense received national attention with his announcement, "We are going to love every foreigner who really becomes an American, and all others we are going to ship back home."

Fearing deportation, the immigrants in Little Italy rarely ventured off their own blocks and seldom went uptown for anything. Some even tried to stop speaking Italian except in their own homes, and encouraged their children to learn English and become "Americanized."

************UNQUOTE**********

That description could apply to MANY eras in U.S. history, on into the present.

[LSK]

7. no opinion, do not know enough

[David Zephyr]

8. He took us into WWI and His Attorney General Imprisoned the Wobblies!

How on earth any Democrat, progressive or liberal could ever "overlook" the facts that Wilson took us into World War I and equally bad, permitted his Attorney General Palmer to round up and imprison union workers, socialists and the great Wobblies simply baffles the hell out of me.

Wilson is as rotten as they come.

[wuushew]

9. The Attorney General under Wilson was Alexander Palmer

big, big asshole.

[ramapodem]

10. he was a near great president but with a darkside

some of the major progressive reforms came during the Wilson Adminsitration. His darkside was that he had a bad habit of calling in the Marines more often then most presidents( i.e Mexico the Banana Republics, etc)

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

11. Wilson said we wouldn't go to war,

and then got us into WWI. He was the first Virginian in the White House since antebellum days, and I believe he was considered a racist. I find it interesting that his wife basically kept the White House going after his series of strokes, but I'm not up on this historical period to know why he didn't rely more on his Vice President.

[UTUSN]

13. He was my hero in my youth.

I don't regard inflexibility "in regards to the League of Nations" to be a negative. I also don't equate standing for GOOD or CORRECT things to be "inflexibility" or a neurological condition.

As said, when I was in my early teens I read the 7 volumes bio of him, outside of the curriculum, and thought of him as a martyred hero, the biggest thing in my pantheon second only to FDR. I was shocked in discussing him with my grandmother, who was a young adult while he was president, that she called him a semi-expletive. We didn't get to the reasons. But I strongly suspect it was because of what another poster said was his over-reliance on sending the Marines places.

It wasn't till several years later that I got my first glimpses through the clouds of institutional propaganda to see the colonialism angle. I still regard the idealistic layer of WILSON as something to strive for.

I TOTALLY OBJECT to the NeoCons' attempt to hijack WILSONian idealism as wallpaper for their Iraq attack, and certainly to the HATEFUL BUNK of attempting to paint Shrub as WILSONian----not to mention calling him TRUMAN or CHURCHILL or anybody else.

Shrub is his own thing, and we here all know who THAT is. He has nothing to do with all the aforesaid names.

[dad]

14. You should read Lies My Teacher Told Me

That guy fucking hated Wilson with a passion

[cool user name]

15. He was a fascist asshole.

[fujiyama]

16. A racist ass hole

and he didn't deserve to get the League of Nations due to his arrogance and poor political skills.

I'm also skeptical regarding his concept of the League. I don't believe he made any objections to colonialism at the time either, even though he wanted to "make the world safe for Democracy" - more like, "make the world safe for white democracies".

And he lied to the nation about entering WWI and had a fascist attorney general. Like Bush he also did his best to kill dissent in the country.

Yes, racism was much, much more accepted at the time, but Wilson didn't simply keep the status quo in place with regards to race (which was what FDR did to some extent). Instead he took the country backwards on it.

Sometimes historians are fucking idiots. If he is indeed rated that highly by them, they're judgment can certainly be in question. After all, there was some book a few years ago which rated Kucinich as one of the worst mayors ever in US history, but placed Richard Daley in the top ten (yes the same Daley of Chicago during the '68 riots).