The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson
"Wilson was also a Leftist busybody tyrant who permanently reversed America’s non-interventionist foreign policy and set us on a course for 100 years of international failure, death, and debt. Maybe the worst president of all time."
Wilson believed God’s plan for him was to become president of the United States, and he might have been right.
MANY people believe that Trump is the worst President of all time, by a mile.
Until now, Trump has not faced a crisis.
We will see how he responds.
One of the bigger strikes against Wilson's legacy is the Espionage Act of 1917 and the accompanying Sedition Act of 1918, which made
criticism of the government punishable by 20 years in prison, a direct shit dumped on the Constitution. This would be the same era that Earnest Starr was convicted of refusing to kiss a flag and sentenced to hard labor for that refusal, as well as the first playing of the national anthem at baseball games.
One of the effects of this institutional self-delusion was that the so-called "Spanish" Flu epidemic was swept under the rug and underreported. In fact the only reason it's called the "Spanish" flu was that Spain was the only country suffering from it that
didn't hide its numbers as the US and European countries did on the basis that if people were getting sick they might not want to engage in war (how's that for blaming the victim).
Wilson's "Committee on Public Information" disseminated propaganda and quashed any negative stories including any question of going to war as well as the flu epidemic.
>> The consequences of this campaign would be an unknowable number of American lives. In Philadelphia,
newspaper editors wary of disloyalty accusations avoided publishing doctors’ warnings about the public health risks of an upcoming parade. Within 48 hours of the event, thousands in the city fell sick with Spanish flu,
but public officials continued to insist it was business as usual. “Bodies remained uncollected in homes for days,” researchers at the
National Academy of Sciences write, “until eventually open trucks and even horse-drawn carts were sent down city streets and people were told to bring out the dead.”
Despite mounting death figures in Chicago, one local public health official stated he would do “
nothing to interfere with the morale of the community.” A Wisconsin newspaper that factually reported on the danger posed by the flu was targeted for
prosecution by an Army general under the terms of the Sedition Act.
.... All told, the Spanish flu
killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people globally, including 675,000 Americans. The Wilson administration’s mishandling of the Spanish flu pandemic—minimizing the virulence of the virus, censoring reports on precautionary measures that might help stint the disease’s spread, and undercounting deaths despite contradictory and observable local evidence—eventually caused a loss of public trust and made the virus yet more lethal. <<
Fast-forward 102 years later and we have Rump, at the CDC being told that even regular flu infections kill tens of thousands each year, actually says:
“I never heard those numbers. I would’ve been shocked. I would’ve said, ‘Does anybody die from the flu? I didn’t know people died from the flu.’"
He said this with a straight face
even though his own grandfather died from the flu at the ripe old age of 49.
His own father witnessed it.
Wilson's War on Free Speech instigated the Palmer Raids which deported people for their
political beliefs, got Earnest Starr hard labor for refusing to bend over for a mob, begat the jingoistic strongarm bullshit of bringing the national anthem to sports events, and put a Presidential candidate in jail:
>> “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives,” [Socialist Eugene] Debs said, later adding, “These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty.”
Weeks later, Debs was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act with “intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States.” He was sentenced to 10 years in jail, though the sentence was commuted two years later by Wilson’s successor. <<
As mentioned upthread, Edith Wilson and biased historians have tried to sanitize his legacy over the intervening years but there's just no way to rehabilitate this shit. So when we analyze worst-ever POTUSes, we can talk Buchanan, Pierce, Johnson the first, Bush the second, and needless to say the current occupant but Wilson's anti-American anti-Liberalism has got to be in the conversation.
