Woodrow Wilson. By Paula Span. A chorus of conservative pundits portray Wilson as the man at the helm when everything began to go wrong for America. The Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist George Will made a startling assertion when he took the podium last year at a banquet sponsored by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington, D. C. But after a lengthy and bitter academic feud, in 1. When Wilson lost,” Will told the black- tie crowd, “he had one of his characteristic tantrums, went into politics and ruined the 2. The audience chortled and applauded, but Will was only half- joking. Wilson left Princeton for a new career as a crusading politician, and after soaring to national prominence during a short stint as Democratic governor of New Jersey, in 1. Ph. D. In his first term he pushed through a flurry of Progressive Era economic and regulatory reforms, and during the second he was hailed abroad as “the savior of humanity” after America and its allies had won World War I. Wilson remains a top- 1. But as the centennial of his ascension to the White House nears, he has also become a target for an increasingly raucous chorus of conservative pundits who portray him as the man at the helm when everything began to go wrong in America. Will whimsically refers to Wilson as “The Root Of Much Mischief.” Others are less subtle or circumspect. They blame Wilson for things he did, like creating the Federal. The Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist George Will made a startling assertion when he took the podium last year at a banquet sponsored by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington, D. C. But after a lengthy and bitter academic feud, in 1. When Wilson lost,” Will told the black- tie crowd, “he had one of his characteristic tantrums, went into politics and ruined the 2. The audience chortled and applauded, but Will was only half- joking. Wilson left Princeton for a new career as a crusading politician, and after soaring to national prominence during a short stint as Democratic governor of New Jersey, in 1. Ph. D. In his first term he pushed through a flurry of Progressive Era economic and regulatory reforms, and during the second he was hailed abroad as “the savior of humanity” after America and its allies had won World War I. Wilson remains a top- 1. But as the centennial of his ascension to the White House nears, he has also become a target for an increasingly raucous chorus of conservative pundits who portray him as the man at the helm when everything began to go wrong in America. Will whimsically refers to Wilson as “The Root Of Much Mischief.” Others are less subtle or circumspect. They blame Wilson for things he did, like creating the Federal Reserve System and implementing a progressive income tax, and for things he didn’t do, like supporting eugenics or causing World War II. To tearily dramatic radio talk show host Glenn Beck, Wilson has become nothing less than the source of all political evil. Wilson was a bigot who sanctioned official segregation in Washington, D. C., say critics on the left. He used America’s entry into World War I as a rationale for crushing civil liberties. He was autocratic. Such assaults on an intensely cerebral president, to whom many contemporary Americans have given scant thought since memorizing “League of Nations” for their history SATs, may reflect our ongoing jousting about the proper role of government—a question that intrigued Wilson himself since his graduate school days. They also reflect the fact that another Democrat with an ambitious first- term agenda now occupies the White House. If culture wars can rage over museum exhibits, Christmas and nutritional advice, why not over the 2. United States?“He was what we’d call today a polarizing figure,” says Barksdale Maynard, a Wilson biographer prone to scholarly understatement. From the bay window of the Princeton president’s office in 1. Hall, Maynard points out during a walking tour of the university’s spired campus, Wilson could gaze directly down Prospect Avenue at the row of eating clubs he despised and tried in vain to vanquish. It must have been a galling view. Alumni had built these sprawling brick and stone mansions, and the groups had grown so socially important by the turn of the 2. Tiger Inn or the Ivy Club, ignoring the adjacent university where they were supposed to be educated. A God- fearing lifelong churchgoer, he was the son, grandson and nephew of Presbyterian clergy. Never wealthy, he only rented the unpretentious Tudor house, a short walk from the campus, where he lived as governor of New Jersey and where he received the telegram announcing he’d won the presidency. Scholars and graduate students labored over this enormous project for decades (they had to decipher the old- fashioned shorthand Wilson once favored); the 6. Political scientist Ronald Pestritto, whose 2. Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism drew on that material, used scholarly language but lobbed serious accusations, charging, for instance, that Wilson’s leadership “is not as democratic as it seems, but instead amounts to elite governance under a veneer of democratic rhetoric.” Such ideas soon began cropping up in more popular writing, like Jonah Goldberg’s 2. Wilson as an imperialist, totalitarian warmonger who, from his youth, was “infatuated with political power” and then corrupted by it. Woodrow Wilson, Message to Congress, 63rd Cong., 2d Sess., Senate Doc. 566 (Washington, 1914), pp. Woodrow Wilson, a leader of the Progressive Movement, was the 28th President of the United States (1913-1921). After a policy of neutrality at the outbreak of World War I, Wilson led America into war in order to 'make the. Glenn Beck read Pestritto’s book at the recommendation of political philosopher Robert George, who now holds the chair created for Wilson at Princeton and is among his gentler conservative critics. But there’s nothing gentle about the way Beck has vilified Wilson in his best- selling books, on a syndicated radio broadcast that reaches an estimated 1. Fox News television show that the network recently pulled the plug on. Welcome and thank you for your interest in Wilson College. I encourage you to take your time and browse our website to get a sense of the special place this is. The Wilson experience is about you. It is an individualized. He blasts Wilson as an “S. O. B.,” charges that he “perverted Christianity” and ranks him No. Top Ten Bastards of All Time” lists—ahead of not only both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, but also Pontius Pilate, Hitler and Pol Pot. Even the conservative Weekly Standard scolded Beck last year, declaring, “This is nonsense. Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin.” That hasn’t slowed Beck’s assault. He consoles himself, he has said, by looking up from his desk at a treasured gift: a framed front page of a 1. Woodrow Wilson Is Dead.”Many presidents’ standings wax and wane over the decades, of course. But rarely has a debate about a historic figure’s accomplishments and shortcomings turned so vitriolic. So whence this wave of animosity? It starts with the progressive movement that helped elect Wilson and that also can claim Theodore Roosevelt. Government therefore had to adapt.“The Constitution was not meant to hold the government back to the time of horses and wagons,” Wilson wrote in his scholarly tome Constitutional Government in the United States (1. He deplored the way the branches of government checkmated each other to stall progress—or what he saw as progress—and admired the British parliamentary system as more efficient. The problem, in the conservative critique, is what results. In George Will’s words: “Concentrate as much power as possible in Washington, concentrate as much Washington power as possible in the executive branch and concentrate enough experts in the executive branch” to administer a much larger government. And it was Wilson, adds Robert George, who made progressivism “a doctrine, not just a sensibility. He’s the guy who laid out the justifications and ideas.”Perhaps, though, it’s less Wilson’s ideas that trouble his critics than what he managed to do with them, especially in his first term as president. Knock, a historian at Southern Methodist University and another Wilson biographer. But the list goes on: The Federal Trade Commission. The Clayton Antitrust Act. Support Woodrow Wilson's Legacy. As a private foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum relies on the vital support of private individuals to achieve its mission of educating. Situation; Arrondissements: 8 e, 16 e: Quartier: Gaillon: D Roy Wilson became the 12th president of Wayne State University on August 1, 2013. Since assuming leadership, President Wilson has realigned the university’s numerous research divisions to emphasize team science and. Explore the history of the Woodrow Wilson House, home to President and Mrs. The first downward revision of the tariff and the implementation of the progressive income tax (though the 1. Amendment was actually passed and ratified just before Wilson took office). The first federal law establishing an eight- hour day (for railroad workers). The first federal law restricting child labor (later struck down by the Supreme Court). The appointment of Justice Louis Brandeis, the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court. Wilson’s second term was another matter. He couldn’t live up to the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war,” of course, and some supporters never forgave him for America’s immersion in the mechanized horrors of World War I. Nor did he succeed in engineering American participation in his cherished League of Nations, though he—literally—nearly died from the physical stress he experienced trying. But his blazing domestic record includes actions some conservatives condemn to this day.“If those on the right want to blame him, put him in the pantheon, the Hall of Shame for people who expanded the state and made it more interventionist, especially in the economy, fair enough,” says University of Wisconsin historian John Milton Cooper, author of several Wilson biographies. In the 1. 91. 2 election, each vied to portray himself as the greater advocate of strong government. Why not lambaste Franklin Roosevelt, whom Wilson appointed to his first national post, assistant secretary of the navy? Surely FDR’s New Deal proved at least as threatening, to those with a taste for limited government, as Wilson’s New Freedom agenda. One could argue that talk radio hosts have a penchant for discovering and trumpeting supposed hidden truths, revealing to their listeners what high school textbooks, college curricula and the media (all, in this scenario, controlled by conniving liberals) have concealed. Attacking FDR is way too obvious; everyone knows he steered the nation leftwards. Wilson’s role as the alleged destroyer of the Constitution makes for more piquant programming. Or perhaps Wilson’s academic background, seen as an asset at the time, brands him a member of the Eastern elite, despite his middle- class Southern upbringing.
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