Liars (9 page)

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.

Wilson was white and essentially Southern, Scotch-Irish, and highly intellectual. And if you weren't a member of one of his various tribes, you would feel his wrath.

He served as president of Princeton University and later as governor of New Jersey, but it's impossible to overstate just how Southern (actually, Confederate) he really was.

Wilson never abandoned his Southern sympathies. His cabinet was full of Southerners. But he very carefully picked and chose which Southern values he retained. He junked any idea of separation of powers or limited government, yet he retained a rabid racism and a belief in the forced segregation of the races.

Even when he served as president of Princeton, Wilson's prejudices
tainted his decisions. He once said that the “whole temper and tradition of [Princeton] are such that no negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems unlikely that
the question will ever assume practical form.” He turned away black applicants, deeming any need or desire for their education to be “
unwarranted.”

His racist policies continued while he
was governor of New Jersey, yet he successfully employed vague promises of equality to capture
a sizable portion of the traditionally Republican black vote in 1912. African-Americans, however, soon discovered Wilson's true racial attitudes: this “Father of Progressivism” was really a rank white supremacist who “
brought Jim Crow to the North.”

Just a month after his inauguration, Wilson
resegregated parts of the federal workforce (including the Navy Department, where a young Franklin D. Roosevelt was
serving as undersecretary). Demonstrating the coldness of character that defined so much of his human interactions, Wilson dismissively claimed that he had made “no promises in particular to Negroes,
except to do them justice.”

Blacks felt betrayed. With Boston newspaper editor and Harvard graduate William Monroe Trotter, African-American leaders came to the White House to protest his actions. An incensed Wilson lectured them that segregation wasn't
“humiliating but a benefit.” He later signed a law
banning interracial marriage in the nation's capital, segregated the U.S. military and parts of the federal workforce, and deprived African-American soldiers, sailors, and Marines of
the opportunity to fight for their country.

Wilson even championed the nineteenth-century terrorists the Ku Klux Klan. He wrote in 1903:

The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers. . . . Every countryside wished to have its own Ku Klux Klan, founded in secrecy and mystery . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an “Invisible Empire of the South,” bound together . . . to protect the Southern country from some of
the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.

Wilson's dismal record on race was the precedent for more than a century of progressives taking advantage of African-Americans by promising the sky to get their votes and
then not delivering. FDR followed in his footsteps (he didn't even bother to desegregate the armed forces or the District of Columbia), and the practice has not stopped since.

Wilson admired the Protestant peoples of the British Isles, either the English and the Scottish themselves or his own Scots-Irish kinsmen. He had little use, however, for the flood of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island from the non-Nordic portions of the European continent. In 1902, he committed these prejudices to writing:

Immigrants poured steadily in
[
to America
]
as before, but with an alteration of stock which students of affairs marked with uneasiness. Throughout the century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country, or men from the Latin-Gallic stocks of France and northern Italy; but now there came
multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence;
and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if
the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population,
the men whose standards of life and of work were such as
American workmen had never dreamed of hitherto.

Again, through the miracle of rebranding and the reliance on short memories, progressives have somehow whitewashed this anti-immigrant past to become the group that supposedly stands with open arms and open borders toward all those who want to come here.

Wilson's firm belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority led him to embrace one of the
most disgusting notions of his time: eugenics. He believed that the human race could be improved through selective breeding.

In 1907, Wilson supported Indiana legislation mandating the compulsory sterilization of criminals and the mentally retarded,
the nation's first eugenics law. After becoming governor of New Jersey, he wasted little time in implementing similar legislation there, proudly signing into law a bill calling for the compulsory sterilization of the “Feeble-minded (including imbeciles, idiots and morons), Epileptics, and
other defectives.” (Fortunately, other people with more sense prevailed, and the bill was quickly
overturned by the New Jersey Supreme Court.)

This overt disdain for whole classes of people was pretty typical stuff for Wilson-era progressives, but many eugenics laws were less obvious. Take the
minimum wage, for example. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and Wilson's commissioner of labor statistics, explained how economics can easily be used for human engineering: “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work . . . better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to
bring forth more of their kind.”

Wilson also seemed to despise women—or at least not to think of them as being equal to men. He was a late and very reluctant convert to the women's suffrage movement, and he characterized the female mind as a “vacuum.” He professed to be “frustrated” when teaching at Bryn Mawr, a women's college, because
those students never challenged him. In fact, Wilson felt women were not “
the intellectual equal of men.” If their weaker minds couldn't handle the weighty questions of politics, why should they receive the privilege of voting?

From the moment Wilson stepped off his train in Washington, D.C., on the day before his inauguration, the suffragists stole his
thunder and made his life miserable. As protesters became more frustrated and more militant in their tactics—which included daily rallies outside the White House—Wilson grew more and more irritated.

Initially cordial, he soon became rude and then downright nasty. He was “repelled by the militant suffragists outside his gate.” To him, “their methods were
insulting, unfeminine, and unpatriotic.” Eventually, many were jailed and beaten. Those who protested further by going on hunger strikes
were force-fed.

Several years into his presidency, Wilson finally relented, if for no other reason than to stop the incessant shouting of protesters outside his bedroom window. The fact that women could also form a core constituency for a new U.S. war abroad also didn't go unnoticed. Wilson would grin and bear granting the “lesser sex” the right to vote if it would mean that he would now have political support for war.

For progressives, the ends always justify the means.

Wilson was really the first “internationalist president.” As a young man, he fell in love with the British parliamentary system (a system with no checks and balances). In such a system, a prime minister and his or her ruling party call the shots, and if anyone disagrees, well, that's just too bad. When Wilson campaigned for governor of New Jersey, he even vowed to be
an “unconstitutional governor,” planning to run roughshod over the state's legislature.

His justification for this was pretty simple. He didn't believe that the wisdom of the Founders applied anymore. He didn't believe in American exceptionalism. That experiment, he felt, had grown outmoded and woefully out of touch with current conditions. Limited government, God-given rights, and more than a century of American political traditions meant less than nothing to Wilson.

This elitism knew no borders—literally. Wilson's ultimate goal was not just to bend the United States to the will of his “benevolent” expert elites. He and his progressive allies fixed their eyes on a much larger goal: an all-encompassing progressive global government to rule all of humanity under a big-government yoke.

But to do so, Wilson had to get the United States—his base of power—to shake off its natural and historic hostility to foreign wars and engage in the great conflict raging across Europe: World War I.

Throughout the 1916 election, Wilson ran on the slogan
“He kept
us out of war.” It helped him gain an eyelash victory, and he reiterated his supposed desire to stay out of the European conflagration during his March 4, 1917, inaugural address. “We stand firm,” he declared from the Oval Office, “
in armed neutrality.”

Five weeks later, the United States declared war on Germany. It was a complete turnaround by Wilson, one that still puzzles many historians.

Wilson mobilized more than four million Americans to bear the brunt of his world-building ambitions.
More than three hundred thousand were killed or injured, shattering not only their own lives but also those of millions of friends, family members, and loved ones.

Their sacrifice proved decisive. With the introduction of millions of fresh American troops, the Allies vanquished Berlin, opening the door for Wilson to carry out the next phase of his plan for global dominance: the creation of the League of Nations.

America—and the rest of the world—feared the mass bloodshed of future wars. But, like any good progressive, Wilson knew how to exploit that fear and bend it to his will. Wilson's League of Nations would ostensibly prevent future conflicts and keep the world safe for democracy, but it was much more than just a peacekeeping organization; it was a truly radical global governing body, the first of its kind. Wilson hoped the League would mature from a place of discussion and compromise into one of command and control.