Woodrow Wilson in 1913
Electoral Brawlage, #28
“Electoral Brawlage” examines the first inaugural address of each president in U.S. history, with some commentary and analysis. Check back on Mondays for more.
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I #$%&ing hate this guy.
In a few months when we cover the 2000 election, I’ll have something to say about how easily people are manipulated by the media into outright hating a candidate for president about which they know pretty much nothing. [Candidate] Derangement Syndrome is real. Stop it. Get help.
The feelings I harbor toward Woodrow Wilson, our twenty-eighth president, are well-researched and well-founded and well-justified. Anyone who tells you that someone other than Woodrow Wilson was the worst president of the 20th Century has not done their homework. Even FDR didn’t cause as much damage, for the same reason that Sauron was less evil than Melkor: he long served another. (Or rather, he was downstream of him.)
Here’s the hell of it: Woodrow Wilson is Teddy Roosevelt’s fault. I don’t care how much you like Teddy, that is a cold, hard, mathematical truth.
The Progressive Error
After one term in office, Teddy Roosevelt got extremely butthurt that Taft would dare to govern as a conservative. Taft backed away from Teddy’s initiatives on trust-busting and conservation of natural resources, and also fired Gifford Pinchot from the Forest Service during what was called the “Ballinger Affair.” Pinchot was a Teddy ally and Taft had been Teddy’s hand-picked successor. For the Rough Rider President, it must have been hard to see “his party” wrested away from him, but by 1912 it was the Taft Show all day, and Teddy would just have to accept that.
Whoops! Teddy was a silver-spoon old-money family guy and wasn’t accustomed to not getting his way, so he threw an all-time temper tantrum and started his own operation called the Bull Moose Party, built on “Progressive” politics. The government would be expanded, social welfare would proliferate, and nationalism would be the order of the day.
Look, I like Teddy. I like reading about his childhood and his life before politics and even the earliest years of his career in the New York assembly. I don’t have any problems with his presidency off the top of my head. But this? This was bulls***. He wasn’t in charge and he still wanted to be and he couldn’t read the room. His ego wouldn’t let him. He thought if he started a new party that he could just suck up all the oxygen and prove to the Taft GOP that he was the belle of the ball.
Let’s see how that played out, shall we?
The 1912 Election
Republicans: Taft (incumbent) and Nicholas Murray Butler.
Taft’s previous VP, James Sherman, had died one week before the election so Butler was a snap replacement. He was the president of Columbia University.
Democrats: Woodrow Wilson (New Jersey) and Thomas Marshall (Indiana).
Progressives (Bull Moose) Teddy Roosevelt (New York) and Hiram Johnson (California)
Socialists: Eugene V. Debs (again) and Emil Seidel (who cares)
Hey. Hey Teddy.
Ugly Takeaways: FIRST, Taft set a record for incumbent Electoral Votes (8) that will probably stand until the end of time. Even Teddy got more EVs than he did (88).
SECOND: The Socialists getting almost a million votes out of ~15 million was a warning, not a laughing matter. Still, they didn’t dent the Democrats.
THIRD: The Democrats took the White House with roughly the same amount of popular support as Abraham Lincoln did in fifty years before them, and that s*** started a war.
But Graham, you’ve spent six months dunking on anyone who supports the popular vote!
Yes, I have, in the context of winning elections. (And it’s been decades, not months.) The only number that matters is the Electoral count, as God and the Founders intended. The right-wing parties were, in total, far more popular than the left-wing ones. So it was beyond stupid for Teddy Roosevelt to take that popularity and rip it in half.
If you have more than fifty percent of the electorate behind you, and you divide it by two, then your opponent only needs a third of the electorate to beat you. And in every state that voted (including Arizona and New Mexico for the first time), Wilson’s Democrats were able to win with 35-45% of the votes.
And that s*** went all the way down the ticket.
Moral of the story: third parties do not work, they only hand the dub to people who want to kill you.
Teddy’s Folly Wasn’t Just Executive
The Bull Moose/Progressive Party also submitted slates for Congress. It went as well for them as it did for the man on top. The outcome? The Democrats took the House and Senate for the first time in decades. Teddy didn’t beat Taft for the party nomination and he didn’t beat him at the national level either. He flipped the game board because he was out of pieces and wasn’t getting his way. We still carved his face on Rushmore for some reason. The more I think about this, the angrier I get.
Why? Because it handed the butthurt Democrats every single lever of power we have, and they used it to light boxcars of dynamite under the bulwarks of the Republic. You want to talk Federal Reserve? Inflation? Bad monetary policy? Fraud? Foreign aid abuse? All that began in 1913 with legislation passed by this Congress and signed by this president, and they were practically SHOVED into power because one man who’d had his turn was mad that he wasn’t still in charge.
Teddy, bro, I love you, and that’s why this hurts so much. You bastard. You've damned us all to this. We’re still paying for this mistake.
So what about Wilson?
Who cares? He sucks and I hate him. The Federal Reserve Act and the 16th Amendment are coming down the pike for American Documents this week, so I’ll save the details for that. Here’s his inauguration address. It’s a lot of gum-flapping about the sins of government (numerous) and how we waste too much (sure), and how we need to slowly remake our entire economic system (what) into what it should be (capping the hours anyone can work in certain industries) and edging government into more control of private business (he did this, the frigging wanker.)
Without getting too far into the weeds with a specific naughty list of Wilson’s crimes, let me say this: first, Jonah Goldberg had a good book on the subject, regardless of what you think about Goldberg or NRO. And second, Clarence Thomas called out the entire philosophy of Wilsonian thinking at its roots:
“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the 28th president of our country, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism. … Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany…”
“Progressivism, in other words, is retrogressive. As Calvin Coolidge said on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration… ‘If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.’”
More on Calvin Coolidge soon. Hang in there, my fellow Americans.
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Will you be covering President 28.5, Edith Wilson?