Roo_ster: It is rare when I meet someone with a lower opinion of fdr than i. Tell me, good man, what you think of woodrow wilson?
I think Wilson took Lincoln's federal leviathan and brought it to the next level with his entry into WWI which we should have sat out. If we had, the Central Powers may have won or promulgated a stalemate so the Treaty of Versailles and would never have created the conditions for the second WW to follow thanks to the heavy-handed behavior of the victors. Possibly even strangling the Russian Revolution in its cradle. All counter-factual speculation, of course.
Here is a taste of who Wilson really was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Protective_LeagueJohn Maynard Keynes (a fellow villain) on Wilson:
"His thought and his temperament were essentially theological not intellectual, with all the strength and the weakness of that manner of thought, feeling, and expression."He was a socialist Progressive who saw the government as the ultimate instrument of good. It is instructive that the core of his thinking was Hegelian which had a tremendous influence on Marxian thought.
Marvin Pipher did a magisterial job of summing up what he thought in an Amazon review of Pestritto's book on Wilson:
"With this in mind, Wilson's primary aim became one of distancing the nation from the constitutionalism of 1787; a task to which he devoted much of his life. In his writings, for example, he opposed the separation of powers (executive, legislative, and judiciary) on the grounds that it was an inefficient form of government. The United States Constitution, he claimed, should not be construed as having a fixed meaning, but, rather, must be interpreted to mean whatever the times required it to mean. He felt that if the times demanded something, the Constitution had to be interpreted to allow for it. The judiciary, therefore, had to be politicized in order for it to become an instrument of progress. To achieve this end: he argued for an "activist judiciary" partnered with a charismatic and forceful president, and a professional bureaucracy sheltered from politics, the cares of this world, and the influence of the public; the bureaucracy to perform many of the legislative functions of Congress. He called for Congress to abandon its Constitutionally mandated function of legislating, leaving that responsibility to the "experts" in the bureaucracy, and to concentrate instead on broad oversight, emphasizing that Congress must actually cease considering itself as part of "the government."
Wilson was well aware that his "modern" government ran counter to the Constitution. As a result, he also saw the need for an external organization voluntarily formed and independent of the law (the Constitution) the object of which would be to bind the actions of the three branches of government more closely together. He saw this as being the function of the two political parties. Finally, he urged that rather than studying the American Constitution's forms or ideas, one should instead study the history of the development of the American "State."
Wilson shared the Progressive conviction that the national government should be used as an active instrument of social progress through the exercise of its regulatory powers. He also contended that socialism is much closer to his idea of true democracy than is any notion of government that attempts to limit the power of the state by protecting the sphere of individual rights."I could not have said it better.
