Liars (7 page)

“Well, tell me,” Astor had asked, “what is the number of this boat so I may find her afterwards?”

“Number four.”

Astor had kissed his wife on the cheek and watched her boat
being lowered to the choppy sea. He had known he would never see her again, nor would he ever get to lay eyes on his unborn child.
ⁱ

He'd asked for the lifeboat's number simply to calm her fears.

In the three decades that preceded the sinking of the
Titanic
, the public in both America and Britain had been gripped by a fear of oceanic sailing. The waters of the North Atlantic, which were the most transited in the world—and arguably the most dangerous—claimed hundreds of lives each year. A young woman named Eleanor Roosevelt herself was on the White Star Line steamship
Britannic
when it nearly sank after colliding with another ship. Dozens of men who had boarded a lifeboat before realizing that the ship was not actually sinking sheepishly returned to the scornful eyes of passengers and crew.

In the twelve years leading up to the sailing of the
Titanic
, there was at least one major maritime disaster per year, with more than six thousand passengers lost at sea. While the fear of oceanic travel among the public hadn't quite reached the level of a clinical phobia yet (thalassophobia, fear of the sea, however, is a real clinical disorder), the general mood in the United States and in Europe was that transoceanic sailing was, in fact, a dangerous proposition. The White Star Line was so anxious to allay public fear of ocean crossings that the
Titanic
was built and marketed as “unsinkable” as early as 1909, two full years before its steel hull ever touched water.

The marketing campaign worked brilliantly. The
Titanic
's maiden voyage sold out in mere days, and White Star had bookings as far out as a year in advance. The
Titanic
and White Star Line's “unsinkable” campaign provided relief, giving the public an antidote to the fear that had been building with the stories of so many lives lost to the waves.

At long last, the public had hope.

That hope was quickly dashed when an iceberg ripped through the “unsinkable” vessel. News of the
Titanic
's tragedy flashed across a horrified world, although one famed historian could not resist dark-humor parallels to another, larger tragedy about to befall America. Henry Adams, who had booked passage on the doomed liner's return voyage to Europe, wrote a longtime female friend, “I do not know whether Taft or the
Titanic
is likely to be
the furthest-reaching disaster.”

Incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft faced the fight of his life against both Theodore Roosevelt, his old friend and immediate predecessor, and that year's Democratic nominee, former Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson. Both Roosevelt and Wilson ran as passionate progressives—a term that had entered the lexicon thanks to Democrat William Jennings Bryan and was later adopted by Republican Roosevelt during his “trust-busting” presidency.

Teddy Roosevelt was the first chief executive to endorse a federal income tax and a national health-insurance program. He also waged war against big business, and he almost single-handedly transformed the presidency from its nineteenth-century practice of quietly administrating government, taking its lead from Congress, to making it the center of all power in the nation's capital.

In 1910, Roosevelt declared, “The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful
men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” He also said that the government “should permit [their fortunes] to be gained only so long as
the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

This was a Republican essentially saying that private wealth is only allowable to the extent that it benefits the greater good. Roosevelt also argued that accumulated property is “subject to the
general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” He advocated concentrating power in the presidency to make this system work. “This New Nationalism,” he said, “regards the executive power
as the steward of the public welfare.”

By 1912, Roosevelt labeled Taft, his designated heir, insufficiently progressive and unsuccessfully challenged him in the Republican primaries and at the hotly contested convention. In the general election, Roosevelt bolted from the GOP to run on a radical Progressive (or “Bull Moose”) third-party ticket. The Roosevelt-Taft split guaranteed the election of Woodrow Wilson, the most radical Democrat in U.S. history. Wilson garnered a mere 41.8 percent of the popular vote but received 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's minuscule 8.

Just a month after the
Mackay-Bennett
completed its grim recovery operation, the hatchet-faced Wilson addressed the prestigious Economic Club of New York at a hotel bearing the name of one of the
Titanic
's most prominent victims. Speaking to business leaders at Times Square's Hotel Astor, Wilson pushed back against complaints that his ideas opposed the free-enterprise system. He believed that wealthy families such as the Astors had turned the American republic into their own fiefdom. The rich, he said, had to be reined in, their wealth confiscated for the public good, if necessary.

“The very thing that government cannot let alone is business,” Wilson blustered. “Government cannot take its hands off business.
Government must regulate business because that is
the foundation of every other relationship.”

The tragic sinking of the
Titanic
, a ship that its owners boasted was unsinkable, was the consequence of hubristic, humanist assumptions about man's ability to control natural law and defy the will of God.

And so was the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson.

If you've listened to me on radio or TV, you probably know that I'm not a member in good standing of the Woodrow Wilson fan club. What you might not know, however, is that neither is the American public. Not a single recent public-opinion survey lists Wilson as among the greatest U.S. presidents. Even Jimmy Carter is more popular.

Yes, even Jimmy Carter.

Unfortunately, the people who write history haven't quite figured out just how awful a president (not to mention a person) Wilson actually was. In fact, few former presidents are held in such high esteem by modern liberals. Historians, most of them progressives themselves,
routinely rank Wilson among the top ten of the nation's chief executives. In fact, two polls conducted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. both
rated Wilson behind only Lincoln, Washington, and (big surprise) Franklin Roosevelt.

How can that be explained? Here's Howard University historian Edna Medford's attempt: “How we rank our presidents is, to a large extent, influenced by our own times.
Today's concerns shape our views of the past, be it in the area of foreign policy, managing the economy, or human rights.”

If that's true, well, it only makes the liberal academic fetish for Wilson even more bizarre. Few presidents displayed such open contempt
for the Constitution they swore to preserve, protect, and defend. Even fewer had such a severe disdain for women, minorities, and anyone else who deviated from Wilson's view of the “perfect citizen.”

Some modern progressives have mixed emotions about Wilson. Embarrassed by his blatant prejudices, a few have demanded that his name be stripped from Princeton's elite Woodrow Wilson School of Government.
ⁱⁱ
Yet most still seem to excuse him, in much the same way they excuse the abhorrent behavior of people like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, or Robert Byrd simply because these people represent an ideology they support.

Never is this more apparent than in the case of Wilson. Here, for example, is an all-too-typical description of him from the “nonpartisan” University of Virginia's Miller Center:

Woodrow Wilson was
one of America's greatest Presidents. His domestic program expanded the role of the federal government in managing the economy and protecting the interests of citizens. His foreign policy established a new vision of America's role in the world. And he helped to make the White House the center of power in Washington. Most historians rank him among the five most important American Presidents, along with Washington, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts.

Note how the Miller Center folks call him one of the “greatest”—not the “most consequential,” which might actually be accurate—and also note how they directly tie his “greatness” to expanding the role of the federal government and to the creation of an imperial presidency.

It's not just academics like those at the Miller Center who display a fawning love for Wilson. A 2002 episode of the PBS series
American
Experience
glowingly “explores the transformation of a history professor into one of America's greatest presidents.” Radical Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who in many ways was Britain's version of Wilson, once
even likened him to Jesus Christ.

In the 1960s, President Lyndon Baines Johnson—another Wilson acolyte—spearheaded the formation of Washington, D.C.'s Woodrow Wilson Center. In announcing the project, Johnson proclaimed that there “could be no more fitting monument to the memory of Woodrow Wilson
than an institution devoted to the highest ideals of scholarship and international understanding.”

In November 2015,
Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen even penned an article titled “Woodrow Wilson Was Racist,
but He Deserves Our Understanding.” Why does Wilson deserve our understanding when others do not? Is it because he was a “transformational progressive” who supported liberal causes such as the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, the implementation of the federal income tax, and the creation of the world government League of Nations?

You bet it is.

Wilson's presidency was the beginning of the end for the radical experiment in individual liberty that the Founders had fought for. How did it happen? Well, much like the case of the
Titanic
, the story of how something goes from mighty, brave, and unsinkable to slowly breaking apart and becoming a footnote in history requires the same relentless forces of humanity that the Founders tried so hard to protect citizens from: hubris, greed, and, most of all, fear.

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.”)