Trump Is Woodrow Wilson, Out of Control, On Steroids and in Overdrive
Trump is the worst president in U.S. history, but he is taking lessons from another inglorious president of more than a century ago, Woodrow Wilson.
Trump has imposed devastating tariffs and upset world financial markets, persecuted and exiled innocent immigrants, used his office to pad his own wallet, compromised U.S. security through incompetent cabinet appointments, claimed falsely to have saved billions of dollars in government waste, promoted crazy and dangerous health claims, turned his back on allies and offered ridiculous promises to quickly end wars in Ukraine and Gaza and he has left no stone unturned in violating the constitution. In blinding speed, trump has skyrocketed to the bottom. And of course, the lies are endless.
Trump can trace his tradition to Wilson, a Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921. Wilson won the presidency based on lies he told about keeping the U.S. out of World War I, he lorded over a program that wrongly and cruelly charged and imprisoned thousands of Americans for disloyalty, he was a champion for racists, and he continued leading the nation when he was obviously and severely physically and intellectually impaired.
Trump has dined with known white supremacists and has been critical of nations populated by people of color. Wilson was more blatantly racist. Wilson was born and raised in the South by parents who were committed supporters of both slavery and the Confederacy. Wilson was an apologist for slavery and the Redeemers, a political coalition in the South during the Reconstruction Era that followed the Civil War. Redeemers, who were the Southern wing of the Democratic Party, sought to regain their political power and enforce white supremacy.
Wilson also was one of the foremost promoters of the “Lost Cause” mythology. Lost Cause is an interpretation of the Civil War still popular among white supremacists. It is viewed by most historians as a myth that attempts to preserve the honor of the South. It attributes the loss to the overwhelming Union advantage in manpower and resources, celebrates an antebellum South of supposedly benevolent slave owners and contented enslaved people, and downplays or altogether ignores slavery as the cause of war.
As president of Princeton University, Wilson actively discouraged the admission of African-Americans as students. As president, Wilson included segregationists in his Cabinet.
During Wilson’s presidency, D. W. Griffith’s pro-Ku Klux Klan film “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) was the first motion picture to be screened in the White House. Though he was not initially critical of the blatantly racist movie. He distanced himself from it as public backlash mounted and he eventually released a statement condemning the film’s message while denying he had been aware of it prior to the screening.
By the 1910s, African Americans had become effectively shut out of elected office. Upon taking office, Wilson fired all but two of the 17 black supervisors in the federal bureaucracy appointed by Wilson’s predecessor, President William Taft. African-Americans employed prior to the Wilson administration were either offered early retirement, transferred, or simply fired.
While segregation had been present in the Army prior to Wilson, its severity increased significantly under his administration as he ordered the Army and Navy to refuse to commission new black officers.
Like trump, Wilson used bigotry and hatred to win support for his policies. During World War I, Wilson psychologically prepared the nation to join the war against Germany by calling for American loyalty as he defined Americans of German descent to be enemies of the U.S. Hundreds of German-Americans were deported after minimal due process even though they were American citizens and were not convicted criminals.
“Any man who carries a hyphen about with him, carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic when he gets ready,” Wilson said. He called Germans “Huns” and a “race of barbaric raiders” who once swept through Russia and Europe in the Middle Ages.
Like trump, Wilson used his office to prosecute political rivals, largely through mass raids authorized through the Espionage Act of 1917. Wilson was president during a reign of terror that ignored the Bill of Rights and has largely been forgotten. The raids began the night of Jan. 3, 1920, when around 4,000 Americans were rounded up, homes were searched without warrants and people were jailed without due process and for no sound reasons.
The actions were known as the Palmer Raids, after Attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer. The targets of the raids were radicals and leftists deemed by the Wilson administration to be hostile to “American values.”
Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916, claiming that he had kept the U.S. out of World War I, though he authorized non-neutral aid for Britain and France. America finally entered the war in April 1917 after Germany declared unrestricted warfare on ships carrying supplies to its enemies. Within a week, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to convince Americans the war was righteous. The government’s first big propaganda campaign included CPI-approved war news, speakers, school materials, posters, buttons and stickers.
Two months later, Congress passed the Sedition Act. Any person who made “false reports or false statements with intent to interfere” with the war effort could face 20 years in jail, a fine of $10,000 or both. It was amended in May 1918 by the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to write or speak anything “disloyal or abusive” about the government, the Constitution, the flag, or a U.S. military uniform.
Congress repealed the Sedition Act in 1920 along with a host of wartime restrictions and reversed most convictions under the Sedition Act. The Espionage Act survives in the federal criminal code as “seditious conspiracy,” defined as two or more people conspiring to “overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force” the government, to illegally seize property or prevent the execution of any law. In 2011, Chelsea Manning was convicted of violating the Espionage Act by allegedly leaking government secrets to Wikileaks. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but the sentence was commuted in 2012 after a Pentagon analysis concluded that none of the documents Manning released had any strategic impact on American war efforts.
Wilson wanted new powers to control the media which the White House said were “absolutely necessary to public safety.” The Congress refused Wilson’s calls after numerous hostile editorials ran in newspapers across the country.
Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory encouraged Americans to become “volunteer detectives,” to “spy on other Americans” and report suspicions to the Justice Department. In months, the department was receiving about 1,500 accusations of disloyalty every day.
During World War I, more than 2,000 dissenters were prosecuted for “allegedly disloyal, seditious or incendiary speech.” Many Americans were charged for trivial acts of dissent that today would be protected by the First Amendment.
Farmers Prosecuted
An early case of prosecution under the Espionage Act was Baltzer v. United States, the 1918 prosecution of South Dakota farmers who had signed a petition criticizing their governor’s administration of the draft, threatening him with defeat at the polls. They were charged with obstructing the recruitment and enlistment service and convicted.
The most shameful example of Wilson using his office to punish political rivals involved the activist and socialist Eugene Debs. Wilson had defeated Debs in the 1912 presidential election and sharpened his knives of revenge in 1918 after Debs made a scathing, anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the military draft. Wilson ordered Debs arrested and charged with violating the Sedition Act, which was signed a year earlier and made it a crime to criticize the draft.
At his trial, Debs pointed to the hypocrisy where “it is extremely dangerous to exercise the constitutional right of free speech in a country fighting to make democracy safe in the world.”
Debs, leader of the Socialist Party of America, offered no defense at his trial but gave a speech prior to his sentencing.
“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence,” Debs said. “This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately, I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a great economic and political movement that spreads over the face of all the earth.”
Debs was charged with 10 counts of sedition and was found guilty of incitement and obstruction, He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and while imprisoned, he ran for president and got more than 3 percent of the vote. Wilson’s successor, President Warren Harding, commuted Deb’s sentence on Christmas Day 1921.
Debs was the most sensational case but far from the only person who was jailed for expressing views opposed to those of Wilson.
Kate Richards O’Hare was a socialist party activist, editor, and orator best known for her controversial imprisonment during World War I. O’Hare’s first involvement in socialist politics came when she joined the International Association of Machinists. In 1901, she moved to Girard, Kans., to attend the International School of Social Economy. She was married and started organizing women for the Socialist Party of Oklahoma.
O’Hare lost a 1910 bid for Congress, running on the Socialist ticket. As a journalist, she wrote about the need for reforms to favor the working class. When America entered the war in 1917, O’Hare gave an anti-war speech in Bowman, N.D. She was later charged and convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and was sentenced to five years at the Missouri State Penitentiary. In prison, O’Hare met the famed anarchists Emma Goldman and Gabriella Segata Antolini, and worked with them to improve prison conditions. O’Hare was pardoned in 1923 by President Calvin Coolidge. After her release from prison, O’Hare led a campaign to free America’s “Political Prisoners.”
Rose Harriet Pastor Stokes was a socialist activist, writer, birth control advocate, and feminist. She traveled throughout the United States, speaking and contributing articles to various newspapers. In 1918, Pastor Stokes wrote a letter to the editor of the Kansas City Star in which she criticized U.S. involvement in World War I. She accused the government of being allied with profiteers. Controversy over the letter led to a federal indictment for violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Pastor Stokes was tried and convicted in one of several indictments of activist women during the World War I years. She was sentenced to 10 years in Missouri State prison, but the conviction was reversed on appeal. The government ultimately dismissed the case in 1920.
In 1909, Pastor Stokes took part in the Shirtwaist Strike, to show support for the 40,000 garment workers in New York. She said her “ideal is that we all be economically interdependent. We should not be independent like millionaires, nor dependent like laborers. My ideal is that we all be interdependent. And I’m not working in a losing cause.”
John McClelland Work was a socialist writer, lecturer, activist, and political functionary. He was a founding member of the Socialist Party of America and wrote one of its best-selling propaganda tracts of the first decade of the 20th century.
In 1902, Work was the candidate of the Socialist Party for Mayor of Des Moines, Iowa. He ran the next year for Governor of Iowa for the first time.
In January 1905, Work wrote an introductory work on socialism called “What’s So and What Isn’t.” The short book became one of the Socialist Party’s propaganda standards of the Debs era. The first 10,000 copies of the work appeared in the March 1905 edition of Wayland’s Monthly. The book was ultimately published in more than a dozen editions, with a total print run of well over 165,000 copies.
In May 1917, Work was named an editorial writer at The Milwaukee Leader. The Leader was an anti-war publication, that drew the ire of the Wilson administration and its Postmaster General, Albert S. Burleson. In October 1917 The Leader’s Second Class mailing privileges were revoked. In August 1918 the publication was deprived of the right to receive First Class mail, with all letters from subscribers and readers returned to sender with envelopes stamped “Mail to This Address Undeliverable Under Espionage Act.” The Milwaukee Leader closed in 1942.
Under Wilson, religious opposition to fighting in World War I also was a reason for prosecution under the dreaded Espionage Act. One case involved the Rev. Clarence H. Waldron, an early Baptist-turned-Pentecostal minister who was central to the first important criminal court case involving religious opposition to World War I.
Historians later determined that the conviction was based on suspect allegations made by members of Waldron’s Vermont Baptist church who did not like the pastor’s embrace of the Pentecostal revival.
Waldron’s case was based on his refusal to allow the church to participate in a patriotic-themed “Liberty Loan Sunday” event. He told his congregation that Sunday morning services were for preaching the gospel and not for politics or nationalism. Waldron also was accused of advising through preaching and the distribution of literature, that Christians should not bear arms in war.
In March 1918, the jury returned a guilty verdict, and the judge sentenced Waldron to 15 years in federal prison. After the war ended, Wilson commuted Waldron’s sentence, but the ordeal led to the pastor’s death in 1926 at the age of 41.
Others prosecuted under the Espionage Act included Rose Pastor Stokes who was sentenced to 10 years for saying “I am for the people, and the government is for the profiteers.”
D.T. Blodgett got 20 years for circulating a leaflet urging voters in Iowa not to reelect a congressman who voted for conscription.
Robert Goldstein was convicted of producing a motion picture about the American Revolution that portrayed the British (allies in the fight against Germany in 1917) in a negative light.
Trump has attempted to strong arm universities to follow his rules. Wilson also went after colleges and universities that did not follow his philosophy.
Scott Nearing was a radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, pacifist, vegetarian and advocate of simple living. Nearing called for creation of economic republicanism based on “four basic democratic concepts — equality of opportunity, civic obligation, popular government, and human rights.”
Nearing’s social activism brought him into conflict with the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, where he was a professor. He was dismissed by Penn’s board of trustees which was dominated with bankers, corporation lawyers, financiers, and corporation executives. One historian later termed the dismissal of a professor as “the most famous breach of academic freedom” of the era.
Nearing founded the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Peace, a national pacifist organization and joined the Socialist Party, lecturing for six years in economics and sociology at the Socialist Party’s Rand School of Social Science
Nearing was tried in 1919 for allegedly obstructing American military recruitment during World War I. During the trial, Nearing was asked if he was a “pacifist socialist.” He responded, “I am a pacifist in that I believe that no man has a right to do violence to any other man.”
The prosecution claimed that Nearing’s writings against militarism had illegally interfered with the ability of the government to conscript troops. The government failed to show even one instance where recruiting was obstructed or where Nearing’s writings triggered insubordination, disloyalty, and refusal to duty.
Judge Julius M. Mayer dismissed the first two counts of the indictment, alleging conspiracy. Following deliberation, the jury found Nearing not guilty but the American Socialist Society guilty on the third and fourth counts of the indictment. On March 21, 1919, the society was fined $3,000. The penalty was ultimately collected through small donations from Socialists, labor groups, and civil libertarians in New York City.
Max Forrester Eastman, a prominent political activist and poet also was a writer on literature, philosophy and society. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes.
In 1913, Eastman became editor of the nation’s leading socialist periodical, “The Masses,” a magazine that combined social philosophy and the arts. Its contributors during Eastman’s tenure included Sherwood Anderson, Louise Bryant, Floyd Dell, Amy Lowell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Minor, John Reed, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, and Art Young.
The Masses included numerous denunciations of U.S. participation in World War I. As a result, Eastman was twice indicted under provisions of the Sedition Act. He was acquitted each time and later said that the government’s aggressive prosecutions of dissent meant that “[you can’t even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage.” In 1918, The Masses was forced to close due to criminal charges based on the Espionage Act of 1917.
Wilson Stroke
Trump’s mental and physical health have been questioned, and Wilson’s also came under intense scrutiny. Wilson was known to have a destructive and self-defeating personality. In October 1919, he was campaigning in Colorado to gain support for his plan for a League of Nations, when he collapsed, suffering a stroke that left him incapable of conducting the nation’s business for six months.
The stroke left him paralyzed on his left side, and with only partial vision in the right eye. He was confined to bed for weeks and sequestered from everyone except his wife and his physician, Cary Grayson. Bert E. Park, a neurosurgeon who examined Wilson’s medical records after his death, wrote that Wilson’s illness affected his personality in various ways, making him prone to “disorders of emotion, impaired impulse control, and defective judgment.”
Historian Arthur Link wrote that by November 1919, Wilson’s “recovery was only partial at best. His mind remained relatively clear; but he was physically enfeebled, and the disease had wrecked his emotional constitution and aggravated all his more unfortunate personal traits.
No one close to Wilson was willing to certify, as required by the Constitution, to the president’s “inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office.” He was essentially replaced by his wife, First Lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. Wilson’s doctor controlled access and information about the President while he and the First Lady blocked information Vice President Thomas R. Marshall, the Secretary of State, and the English Ambassador from gaining information about the President.
Cabinet members and others urged Marshall to take the role of acting President, but he refused because of the precedent it would set. It didn’t help that both Wilsons hated Marshall. The 25th Amendment, which outlined the formal process of temporary and permanent succession, would not be passed for half a century.
The White House was largely paralyzed for the remainder of Wilson’s second term while his hope for a just peace in Europe and American membership in the League of Nations were killed. During this period, the Los Angeles Times insinuated that there was insanity in the White House.
Wilson died in 1924.
Conservative Court
And not unlike today’s conservative Supreme Court, the court in Wilson’s time also ruled in his favor and against constitutional protections.
One important case was Dennis v. United States in 1951. The case was brought against Eugene Dennis, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA. The court ruled that Dennis did not have the right under the First Amendment to exercise free speech, publication and assembly, if the exercise involved the creation of a plot to overthrow the government. Eighteen years later, Dennis was de facto overruled by Brandenburg v. Ohio.
The case involved 11 Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) leaders who were convicted in 1948 of advocating the violent overthrow of the government and for violating several points of the Smith Act. The party members, who had been petitioning for socialist reforms, claimed that the act violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and that they served no clear and present danger to the nation, a requirement of the Smith Act.
The government alleged that the Communist defendants did not have a specific plan to violently overthrow the government, but rather the government alleged that the CPUSA’s philosophy generally advocated the violent overthrow of governments. As proof, the prosecution proffered articles, pamphlets and books such as The Communist Manifesto) written by authors such as Karl Marx.
The defense claimed the CPUSA was a conventional political party, which promoted socialism by peaceful means; that it employed the “labor defense” tactic to attack the trial as a capitalist venture which could never provide a fair outcome to proletarian defendants; and that it was using the trial as an opportunity to publicize CPUSA policies.
On October 14, 1949, after deliberating for seven and a half hours, the jury returned guilty verdicts against all 11 defendants. The judge sentenced 10 defendants to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine each.
The convictions were all affirmed on appeal. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Dennis as a leader of the Communist Party in the United States. Dennis had been convicted of conspiring and organizing for the overthrow and destruction of the United States government by force and violence under provisions of the Smith Act. The court ruled that Dennis presented a clear and probable danger.
Dissenting justice, Hugo Black wrote that the defendants were not guilty because they were not charged with attempting to overthrow the government.
“They were not even charged with saying anything or writing anything designed to overthrow the Government,” Black wrote. “The charge was that they agreed to assemble and to talk and publish certain ideas at a later date: The indictment is that they conspired to organize the Communist Party and to use speech or newspapers and other publications in the future to teach and advocate the forcible overthrow of the Government. No matter how it is worded, this is a virulent form of prior censorship of speech and press, which I believe the First Amendment forbids.”
In 1969, the high court ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio that “mere advocacy” of violence was per se protected speech. Brandenburg was a de facto overruling of Dennis, defining the bar for constitutionally unprotected speech to be incitement to “imminent lawless action.”
In another notable case, Schenck v. United States, (1919), the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Charles Schenck and other members of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia, illegally distributed flyers to draft-age men urging resistance to induction.
The First Amendment did not protect Schenck from prosecution, even though, “in many places and in ordinary times, the defendants, in saying all that was said in the circular, would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“The words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent,” Holmes wrote.
In 1969, Schenck also was largely overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limited the scope of speech that the government may ban to that directed to and likely to incite imminent lawless action.
The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., held that Schenck’s criminal conviction was constitutional. Essentially, the court held that the circumstances of wartime allow greater restrictions on free speech than would be allowed during peacetime, if only because new and greater dangers are present.
In Abrams v. United States, argued before the Supreme Court a year after the end of World War I, the justices were split. At issue was the conviction of two Russian immigrants who threw leaflets from an apartment window in 1918 denouncing U.S. interference in the Bolshevik Revolution. Seven justices claimed that the action met the “clear and present danger” test, but Holmes and Justice Louis Brandeis disagreed.