this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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You can lay blame at the feet of almost every single president since Wilson. We've never really been great, but Wilson was a real piece of work. It's wild that he's treated as some kind of progressive hero. It's really been a long, slow death by a thousand cuts.
What's the elevator pitch for Wilson being terrible? All I really remember about him is the League of Nations and some limited involvement in WWI.
Basically, he was all aboard with Eugenics, and he saw probably one of the most aggressive expansions in government power in US history while using WWI as an excuse. Stuff like shutting down newspapers that ran articles he didn't like; the news of the flu outbreak was pretty suppressed for a while because of the war IIRC. He also banned prostitution not because of any moral argument, but because soldiers were catching STDs at troop collection points and being kept from being deployed because of the STDs. So, 100 years later, it's still illegal because not using a condom kept a bunch of boys from being fed into the meat grinder.
There's a bunch of other pretty wild shit that isn't coming to me at the moment, but Wilson fucking sucked and generally doesn't deserve any of the praise that people seem to offer him now.
He wrote Southern Revisionist History, and used his Yale credentials to spread it even before he was even president. Once he was president, he refounded the KKK, built a ton of statues of Confederate traitors, segregated the federal government, and used presidential funding to help produce "Birth of a Nation," which he screened at the White House. I could go on.