Early Soviet Threats

Although the label ‘Cold War’ is often thought to apply to the years from 1946 to 1989, a similar mood prevailed in earlier decades. Shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union worked influence the United States.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a communist front which presented itself as a labor union, orchestrated a general strike in Seattle, Washington, terrorizing the city and holding the ordinary citizens hostage. When the strike ended, many IWW leaders fled to the Soviet Union.

In the years prior to WWII, the Soviet Union made use of enlisted agents, who engaged in espionage by extracting classified information about national security and sending it to Moscow, or by influencing policymakers in their decision-making. The Soviets also used unwitting dupes, usually naive idealists, who might not have been aware of the extent to which they were being manipulated to act in the interests of the international communist conspiracy.

Evidence has emerged that the Soviet Union had large numbers of both employed spies and unsuspecting pawns in the 1930s in the United States. Samples from a long list of names include Philip Keeney, Mary Jane Keeney, Haldore Hanson, Dorothy Kenyon, and one of the most famous spies: Alger Hiss.

Although this era lies more than half a century in the past, historians are still reconstructing the plan of the vast Soviet espionage network which existed inside the United States. The task is huge, and as more evidence comes to light, the work grows. Historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

Of note in this respect, covert by nature and kept that way for decades, was the nonstop backstage warfare that was waged between the opposing forces even as peace in theory prevailed among the nations. Only by degrees have we come to understand the extent of this clandestine combat, and a great deal more is still waiting to be discovered. Even so, with the revelations of recent years we have enough data in hand to sketch the outlines of an astounding tale and fill in specifics about some matters long uncertain or contested.

Successive estimates at the scale of Soviet intelligence activity have proven to be too small. Each disclosure of new data reveals the efforts to undermine the United States government to have been larger than previously thought.

Historians will be processing this information for decades to come, and new troves of documents are probably yet to be discovered.

Coolidge and Taxes

President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon agreed that taxes were a burden to ordinary citizens, and that taxes should be reduced. Mellon held his post already under President Harding, so when Coolidge took office, Mellon was solidly in place.

Mellon had already worked with Harding to get one round of tax cuts through Congress. Coolidge and Mellon would introduce additional tax reductions for congressional consideration in 1924, 1926, and 1928.

Already by 1924, Mellon and Harding had largely removed income taxes from the ordinary working class. In that year, Mellon and Coolidge would work on reducing the tax burden on the middle class. Historian Amity Shlaes writes:

Now, on taxes, Coolidge and Mellon pushed forward. The men told themselves they had the angles covered. The Treasury was readying a plan to publicize the tax problem: a National Tax Reduction Week, scheduled for early April. Mellon, cheered to have the support of such an ally, even planned to market his ideas. Mellon’s deputy, David Finley, was pulling together statements by Mellon and the administration into a little book that Macmillan would publish. The regular worker did not pay the income tax, but, Mellon believed, the regular worker would benefit from the tax rate cut. Therefore he titled his book Taxation: The People’s Business. The book was remarkable in its clarity, and for what it did not contain: the word “tariff” appeared only once, and revenues from customs were described as “abnormally high.”

While Mellon saw tax cuts as an encouragement for economic growth, Coolidge saw them as a matter of justice. If it was possible to relieve the working and middle classes, and reduce their tax burden, then justice required that it be done. If high marginal rates caused the upper classes to find loopholes in the tax code, then lower marginal rates would free that money to flow through the economy and stimulate growth.

Coolidge’s sense of justice about these matters was not primarily a legalistic morality driven by a need to follow rules, or make sure that others followed them. Instead, his sense of virtue was forward-looking, and was about taking action to improve one’s community.

Economics was, for Coolidge, an outgrowth of his spiritual worldview. He steered between a legalistic religion of rules and a worldly worship of governmental power, avoiding either extreme. Historian David Greenberg writes:

Less a censorious Puritan than a pious man of sentimental faith, Coolidge shunned the era’s new secularism as well as its resurgent fundamentalism; he saw religion as a source of virtue, not of division, oppression, or intellectual limitation.

Although motivated by his concept of personal virtue, Coolidge was still a man who’d worked his way through electoral cycles. He understood that tax cuts would help him at the polls.

President Harding was slightly more than halfway through his four-year term when he died, nudging Coolidge into office. Coolidge knew that the voters would be wondering about who he was. A tax cut was a way to send a clear signal about his political identity.

With the election in November 1924, the spring of that year was a good time to send that signal. Historian Robert Ferrell writes:

Personal income tax rates were highly political propositions, both in recommendation and in passage through Congress, and it is noteworthy that Coolidge proposed the Mellon tax cut of 1924 in March of that year, in time for the Republican convention and the subsequent election. It immediately placed the president in the public eye.

Economic policy would define the Coolidge administration in the popular imagination.

He took significant actions regarding race relations: Coolidge snubbed the KKK, which had enjoyed presidential favor during the Wilson administration; Coolidge promoted anti-lynching laws; he was the first incumbent president to deliver a commencement address at a historically Black college when he spoke at Howard University.

He also laid the foundation for a decade of peace. Coolidge worked with Charles Dawes; the result was the Dawes Plan, which restructured the payment of war reparations in 1924. Coolidge selected Dawes as vice president later that year. Coolidge appointed Frank Kellogg to be Secretary of State; the result was the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a treaty designed to offer diplomatic negotiations in an attempt to resolve international conflicts before they turned into open warfare. Although the war had ended only a few years before, Coolidge saw that tensions between various nations were already rising and that another war could easily erupt.

Despite his impact on both race relations and world peace, it was Coolidge’s economic policy that most affected the daily life of the ordinary citizen, that formed the popular image of him in the collective consciousness, and that is most remembered.

Coolidge: a Symbol of the Twenties

President Calvin Coolidge not only worked to implement his political agenda of personal political liberty and economic freedom, but he became a popular symbol for his era, even among his detractors.

The 1920s saw the emergence of technologies like film and radio into the mainstream consciousness. These, in turn, ushered in new styles like jazz and Art Deco.

Coolidge had little or nothing to do with these trends in popular culture, and in fact retained the aura of the earlier generation from which he came. Yet he embraced the technology as a way to explain his agenda to the voters. Citizens were already accustomed to seeing photographs of their presidents, but Coolidge was the first president whose voice and moving image became familiar to the public.

While Coolidge’s predecessor, Harding, had been a commanding orator, speaking to crowds of thousands, Coolidge became regular on the radio. Historian Amity Shlaes writes:

The radio, the new medium, had proved Coolidge’s friend. On the radio you didn’t need to have a strong voice but a clear one. And Coolidge’s was clear - it had wire in it, as someone would say later.

While he was, by nature and by reputation, taciturn, he gave 520 press conferences during his presidency, more than any other president, before or after. There is a paradox in the fact that the president who was so reticent that he earned the nickname ‘Silent Cal’ was also the president who frequently exploited the medium of radio and the occasions of press conferences.

Because of his comfort with, and skilled use of, the media, Coolidge became an image in the popular consciousness. Historian David Greenberg writes:

President from 1923, when he acceded to the office upon the sudden death of Warren Harding, until 1929, when he retired after forswearing a second full term, Coolidge was enormously popular throughout his tenure - an icon of his era every bit as much as Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, or Charlie Chaplin.

Becoming icon entails the risk of become a caricature, which includes a loss of substance. The image and popularity of Coolidge belie the complexity and rigor of his economic thought.

Meticulously, Coolidge combed through the federal budget, searching for any chance to unburden the taxpayers. His thoroughness was targeted at finding ways to cut spending, cut taxes, balance the federal budget, reduce the deficit, and reduce the debt.

Keeping the federal budget roughly the same from year to year, while the economy grew significantly, was a way to reduce the burden on the ordinary taxpayer. Andrew Mellon was already Secretary of the Treasury before Coolidge took office. Historian Robert Ferrell writes:

The main contours of the budget, the object of cooperation between Mellon and Coolidge, are not difficult to relate. In the 1920s, the size of the budget remained virtually the same, after it decreased from the wartime era. In fiscal year 1921 (July 1920 through June 1921), federal expenditures were $5.1 billion; in fiscal year 1922, $3.3 billion. They stayed there during the Coolidge presidency, amounting in 1923 to $3.294 billion and in 1929 to $3.298 billion. Sources of revenue changed a great deal from prewar years. In 1913, one-third of the federal budget was from excise taxes on liquor, two-thirds from the tobacco tax and the tariff. In 1930, with no liquor tax, one-third came from tobacco and the tariff, one-third from personal income tax, and one-third from corporate income tax. The income tax, permitted by the Sixteenth Amendment, had gone into effect during the war.

The triumph of Coolidge’s economic policy not only eased the tax burden on citizens at all income levels, from the lowest to the highest, but also boosted employment levels and wages at all levels. The prosperity which Coolidge brought permeated all sectors and regions.

He also paid off a significant fraction of the national debt, a rarity in economic history.

Beyond economics, Coolidge made progress in extending personal liberty. He sharply denied the KKK’s attempt to gain more influence in national politics, departing from the pattern of the Wilson administration’s fondness for the Klan.

Coolidge encouraged Congress to pass anti-lynching laws, and became the first incumbent president to deliver a commencement address at a historically Black college when he spoke at Howard University in 1924. He was consistently popular with African-American voters.

In foreign policy, Coolidge worked to keep Europe stable. Despite, or because of, the treaties which ended the war, tensions between nations continued to simmer. Coolidge wanted to prevent another war.

Coolidge encouraged Charles Dawes to implement a plan to make the payment schedule for war reparations more realistic. The Dawes Plan went into effect in 1924, and Dawes later became Coolidge’s vice president.

Coolidge’s Secretary of State, Frank Kellogg, negotiated the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which sought to organize negotiated and diplomatic opportunities to address conflicts before they escalated into war. The pact was finalized in 1928.

Adolf Berle: Assistant Secretary of State

A child prodigy who entered Harvard at age 13, Adolf Berle was also the youngest person to ever graduate, in 1916, from Harvard Law School at the age of 21.

(He’d stopped between his bachelor’s degree and law school to get a master’s degree. Otherwise, he’d have been even younger when he got his law degree!)

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Adolf Berle served as Assistant Secretary of State for President Franklin Roosevelt. In this capacity, he received information from Whittaker Chambers, who up until 1938 had been working for the Soviet Union, gathering information about the United States and sending it to Moscow.

Chambers told Berle about two brothers, Alger and Donald Hiss, who were also Soviet agents, and who were endangering the security of the United States by sending classified information to the various Soviet intelligence agencies, and by influencing policy decisions within the Roosevelt administration.

Concerned about a security problem, Berle attempted to alert other members of FDR’s administration. Ann Coulter reports the results:

Berle also told Dean Acheson, then Roosevelt's undersecretary of the Treasury, what Chambers had said about the Hiss brothers. As Berle described the meeting, Acheson "said he had known the family and these two boys since childhood and could vouch for them absolutely." When Acheson later became assistant secretary of state, he immediately requested Donald Hiss as his assistant. Berle again stepped in to remind Acheson that Chambers had identified Donald Hiss as a Soviet agent.

When Acheson appointed Hiss to a position with access to classified information, he executed a casual and pro forma investigation of Donald Hiss.

He asked Hiss if he was a Communist, Hiss denied it, and Acheson sum­marily announced that "the matter was closed."

Apparently, Berle felt torn between his loyalty to the Roosevelt administration and his horror about its “non­chalance about Soviet agents on their staffs was scandalous.” While privately warning other members of the administration about these national security threats, he publicly defended the administration.

In public, Berle would downplay the Roosevelt administrations’s

promotion of two traitors with an inane straw-man argument: "The idea that these two Hiss boys … were going to take over the United States govern­ment did not strike me as any immediate danger."

Yet, despite his respect for FDR, it was clear to Berle that the president’s attention to detail was impaired by his declining health, and that some of the president’s appointees were either not troubled by, or refused to entertain the possibility of, the fact that there were Soviet operatives at high levels within the State Department.

As even Berle admitted, "We were all trying not to tell anything that ought not be told, and there were pretty consistent leaks whenever anything went through [Alger Hiss's] office."

Decades later, it would proven by the Soviet Union’s own records that the Hiss brothers were on Moscow’s payroll.

The deaths and horrors caused by the Soviet Union’s domination of Poland and other eastern European nations are directly attributable to Alger Hiss’s influence on FDR. Hiss gave advice to the president about how to negotiate with Stalin.

Thomas Paine - Constitutionalism as a Principle

A written constitution - a systematic consistent coherent plan for governing - is a truly modern phenomenon. By ‘modern,’ let us understand the intellectual trend whose early examples include Descartes and Locke.

A constitutional system includes, but is more than, the concept of the rule of law. A constitution is a meta-legal document, and takes the objectivity of ‘rule of law’ and raises to cover not only positive laws, but the entire structure and function of government.

Thus while the twelve tables of Roman law, the Decalogue of Moses, and Hammurabi’s code are all examples of rule of law, they are not constitutional systems.

Thomas Paine, writing in the 1790s, points out that a constitution is prior, both logically and temporally, to a government:

A Constitution is a Thing antecedent to Government, and a Government is only the Creature of a Constitution. The Constitution of a Country is not the act of its Government, but of the People constituting a Government. It is the Body of Elements to which you can refer and quote article by article; and which contains the principles upon which the Government shall be established, the manner in which it shall be organized, the powers it shall have, the Mode of Elections, the Duration of Parliaments, or by what other name such Bodies may be called; the powers which the executive part of the Government shall have; and, in fine, everything that relates to the compleat organization of a civil government, and the principles upon which it shall act, and by which it shall be bound. A Constitution, therefore, is to a Government what the laws made afterwards by that Government are to a Court of Judicature. The Court of Judicature does not make the laws, neither can it alter them; it only acts in conformity to the laws made: and the Government is in like manner governed by the Constitution.

Surveying the world of his time, specifically the constitutional system in the United States, the failed constitutional attempt in the French Revolution, and the quasi-constitutional accretion of texts and common law traditions in England, Paine ventures some general remarks about constitutional systems. He denies that England has, in the strictest sense of the words, a constitutional system; he argues that it is an ad-hoc compilation of legal thought over the centuries, and a poor defender of liberty.

Paine is broad-minded enough to consider that the United States Constitution is not the only conceivable or practical constitutional possibility. British philosopher A.J. Ayer writes:

Concluding that no further proof is needed to show that if governments are to serve the interest of a nation, they need the backing of a Constitution, Paine proceeds to consider what that Constitution should be. As one would expect, his proposals are mainly in accordance with the American Constitution, but not entirely so. There are at least two important points of difference.

Paine is willing to consider that the traditional tripartite division of power (legislative, judicial, executive) as we find it in, e.g., Montesquieu is not the only way to divide power. He argues for the possibility of having only two branches of government, the legislative and the executive. He is willing to configure the judiciary as a part of the executive.

In the legislative branch, Paine considers the possibility of a unicameral legislature to be as viable, and in his opinion occasionally superior, to a bicameral legislature.

It is not the specifics of any one particular constitution which caused Thomas Paine, and so many other thinkers of his era, to seek written constitutions as the foundations for government. Rather, it is the general idea of an objective and external text, publicly accessible, and approved by the citizens, which gives the notion of a written constitution its attractiveness.

It embodies both the notion of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. If the rules by which the government operates are objectively set down and published, then even if those rules are quirky, or even corrupt, there is a measure of equality inasmuch as every citizen is entitled to engage in both interpretive debate and parliamentary maneuvering.

That humans inherit the right to ‘pursuit of happiness’ is instantiated in the publication of the operative rules of government, and each citizen is entitled to his attempt to negotiate a path through those rules as best he can calculate.

But if the constitution is illegitimately changed, even in an effort to make it more “fair” by some definition, then the rule of law has been violated, and any good faith effort made to work within the system has been betrayed. Constitutional scholar Mark Levin writes:

If the Constitution’s meaning can be erased or rewritten, and the Framers’ intentions ignored, it ceases to be a constitution but is instead a concoction of political expedients that serve the contemporary policy agendas of the few who are entrusted with public authority to preserve it.

The constitution may be likened to the rules of a game. Consider a variety of games, from chess to poker, from tennis to checkers, from Monopoly to Parcheesi. Any change in rules, once the game has started, corresponds to our intuitive notion of “unfair.”

One might well imagine a discussion among four card players, or twenty-two soccer players, about altering the rules of the game once a tournament has begun. The majority would certain object to changing the rules in the middle of a game, and any serious attempt at implementing such a change would result, not in a more “fair” event by any intuitive sense of the word, but rather would result in chaos, anarchy, the end of the game, and a net loss to all players - ‘loss’ here being, at a minimum, the loss of the opportunity to participate, and potentially much more.

Constitutional government yields justice - again, in any reasonable and intuitive sense of that word - because it objectively and publicly externalizes the rules of government by posting them for inspection and thereby setting the field for discussion of them. There is no claim that a constitutional government is perfect, rather only that it is less flawed than any other form. But a constitution which can be changed ex post facto, either explicitly or by judicial interpretation of its words, fails to function as a limit or restraint on government.

If a constitution contains within itself a mechanism for its own legitimate change - an amendment process - then any other change, i.e. a change not authorized by its own internal mechanism, including a change introduced by redefinition of the words in its text, is a violation of every citizen.

American Leaders in the Mexican War

The war between Mexico and the United States in the 1840s was not only a conflict between nations, but also a competition between substantial egos on the American side. A president, James K. Polk, a future president, Zachary Taylor, and would-be candidate, Winfield Scott, were key players in the unfolding military action.

Winfield Scott, who would ultimately be a defining military leader in the years between 1783 and 1860 - in the years between the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War - had an unpromising start to his career decades prior to the Mexican War. Historian Brion McClanahan writes:

Scott was a large man, standing six foot five and weighing around 230 pounds. He was a good student, briefly attending William and Mary College and then studying law in Petersburg, Virginia. He found little scope for his sense of adventure in a stuffy law office, and when the threat of war with the British arose in 1807, Scott immediately joined the Virginia cavalry. For the next few years, Scott bounced back and forth between the law and the army, until in 1810 he was court-martialed on trumped-up charges of making “ungentlemanly” comments about a superior officer - General James Wilkinson, a man now widely regarded as the most corrupt general in American history.

The mounting tensions in 1846 centered on land claims in the southwestern United States. Texas, which had declared itself to be independent from Mexico in 1835/1836, had fought to affirm that declaration.

Mexico begrudgingly accepted the existence of Texas as an independent republic, but when Texas joined the United States in 1845, Mexico began preparing for war.

Mexico disputed the location of Texas’s southern and western borders, and was not happy at the prospect of the United States being larger and closer to Mexico. The annexation of Texas would ensure that the United States was both.

In addition to Mexico’s wounded pride, at the thought that the Texans chose to leave Mexico and join the United States, there were also border disputes west of Texas, in New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

Polk sent diplomats to Mexico in an attempt to avoid war by paying cash for the disputed territory. The Mexican government at the time was in such disarray that the diplomats found it difficult to learn with whom they were to negotiate. Key leaders in Mexican foreign policy often held office for only a few months, and so the talks had to be restarted with different Mexican officials.

Predictably, talks broke down, and on April 25, 1846, Mexican soldiers under the command of General Mariano Arista fired on U.S. soldiers. In Washington, the Congress declared war on May 13, but, as historians Peter Maslowski and Allan Millett report,

Two major battles had already occurred. On the last day of April Arista’s army crossed the Rio Grande, and on May 8 it confronted Taylor at Palo Alto. Taylor told his men “that they main dependence must be in the bayonet,” but American artillery bore the brunt of the battle, forcing the Mexicans to withdraw. Just south of Palo Alto the open prairie gave way to dense chaparral sliced by river beds known as resacas. At Resaca de la Palma, Arista’s army assumed a strong defensive position. The tangled growth made it difficult for American artillery to deploy, and the resaca formed a natural breastwork. The battle was a melee as the chaparral shattered unit cohesion. The Mexicans again lost, fleeing across the Rio Grande. In two battles Taylor’s smaller army inflicted 800 casualties and sustained fewer than 200.

A simplified narrative of the war shows General Zachary Taylor moving southward from Texas with his army, and General Winfield Scott bringing his troops by ship southward through the Gulf of Mexico to the Bay of Campeche, landing at Vera Cruz, and fighting westward to Mexico City.

A more nuanced reading of the war includes the action of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Squadron, under the command of John Sloat, along Mexico’s western coast and up to California; includes Col. Stephen W. Kearny leading his troops from Leavenworth, Kansas, westward to the Pacific coast in California; Col. Alexander W. Doniphan leading forces southward parallel to Taylor; General Philip Cooke leading troops from Santa Fe to California; and includes John Fremont bringing troops west to Sutter’s Fort in California and to Santa Barbara.

Of all these campaigns, Scott’s was of perhaps the greatest strategic value, while Taylor’s received the most praise in the popular press of the day. This may have been the result of Polk and Taylor conspiring to manage the war as a launching pad for Taylor’s political career. Comparing Taylor’s action to Scott’s, historian Russell Frank Weigley writes:

In the other principal campaign of the Mexican War, General Taylor showed himself to be an altogether less thoughtful and accomplished strategist than Scott. Taylor’s campaign in northern Mexico also had less strategic merit than Scott’s apart from the shortcomings of the general officer commanding. Once Taylor had secured President James K. Polk’s version of the new United States-Mexico frontier created by the American annexation of Texas, namely, the line of the Rio Grande, the strategic objects of his subsequent operations into Mexico were not clear. Too much difficult country intervened between the Rio Grande and the City of Mexico via the overland route for there ever to have existed any serious intention that Taylor should advance to the enemy capital. The American government’s hope for Taylor’s campaign of invasion across the Rio Grande into Mexico’s northern states was that occupation of those states would penalize Mexico enough to compel her to make peace, recognize the annexation of Texas, and grant the United States the other territorial increments which President Polk and his fellow expansionists desired, westward to the Golden Gate. Mexico’s northern states were so remote from the center of her national power, however, that General Scott was right to be doubtful from the beginning that Taylor’s operations could cause the Mexican government to conclude a peace satisfactory to the United States.

It might be possible to justify Taylor’s campaign by arguing that he kept Mexican troops occupied in the north so that they were unable to offer more resistance to Scott in the south. But evidence for such an interpretation is thin or nonexistent.

In any case, Scott, habitually cautious, understood the risk he took. Irving Levinson writes:

The critical phase of the conflict began when General Winfield Scott landed at Collado Beach on 9 March 1847 and marched north to the port of Veracruz and then westward to Mexico City. As he prepared to lead a force smaller than a single modern division through or near Mexican states that were home to more than 4 million people, he no doubt considered the grim threats that might be posed by a hostile populace.

Scott’s brilliant success was due not only to his own careful planning, but also to the fortunate circumstance that Mexican society was experiencing significant internal divisions at the time of the war. These divisions prevented a more efficient defense against Scott. Indeed, some factions of Mexican society were not at all supportive of the Mexican government’s war efforts, and offered no resistance to Scott whatsoever.

Woodrow Wilson - Racism in the White House

Several questions revolve around the presidency of Woodrow Wilson: How, and why, did the nation elect a vicious racist like Wilson? Which factors formed and influenced Wilson’s version of racism? Who promoted Wilson’s career, and why?

Historian Brion McClanahan notes two influences on Wilson: his childhood in the South and his education. During Wilson’s student years, certain universities were permeated by the influence of elitist progressivists whose racial views not only assumed that Africans and African-Americans were inferior, but that Anglo-Saxons were superior to all other genetic groups.

Wilson was the first Southerner to be president of the United States since Andrew Johnson in 1865 and the first Southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor in 1848. His style of governance was uniquely influenced by his Scots-Irish and Southern roots, but more importantly by the evolution of his political philosophy in the year during and after his graduate work at Johns Hopkins.

A complicated version of racism, not only did progressivism see Blacks as inferior, but also thought that the Anglo-Saxons (for practical purposes, the British) were superior even to other whites like immigrants from Poland, Russia, Finnland, Hungary, Italy, etc.

Wilson and his mentors used this racial view to justify a political philosophy of imperialism and interventionism. Wilson’s progressive imperialism meant, to him, that his Anglo-Saxon culture and gene pool allowed him, or even compelled him, to manage other parts of the world because his heritage and genetics gave him superior abilities and he was morally obliged to arrange matters for inferior groups. His interventionism meant that he was obliged to manage matters inside his own nation, because his insight gave him the ability to determine the proper state of things regarding economics, politics, education, etc.

Of course, Wilson didn’t believe that this was true only of himself; he was part of a team of elitist progressives who would manage matters both foreign and domestic. The man who claimed to want “to make the world safe for democracy” had in reality no desire to let a democratic process override his ability to manage both society and government.

One of Wilson’s compadres in the clique of progressive elitism was Herbert Croly, most famous for a book titled The Promise of American Life. Croly argued that the United States should abandon both the concept of individual rights and the concept of limited government.

Croly hoped for a nearly omnipotent government which would have the freedom to manage, adjust, and regulate nearly any conceivable human activity. If the government were to be free to do this, then the individual must surrender such freedom.

Wilson and Croly had a deep faith that the government, if given enough power and allowed to do as it pleased, would optimize life.

Brion McClanahan writes that “Wilson personified and implemented the” racist and elitist “progressivism that had been pushed by Herbert Croly.”

Judge Andrew Napolitano, a constitutional scholar, writes that “when Woodrow Wilson came into office, he brought with him not only the same racial ideas that” the Croly and other progressive elitists

held concerning the hierarchy of races, but also a severe hatred for black Americans. He exacted revenge for the woes of the Civil War and brought Jim Crow to Washington. He feared what would happen to his native South should it be “ruled by an inferior race.” This notion and his fear of black Americans were the inspiration for for many of Wilson’s racial policies designed to keep black Americans subdued in society. Once enacted, this state sponsorship of racism would run well into the 1960s in Washington.

When demands for desegregation and integration arose in the 1950s and 1960s, they were demands to undo that which Woodrow Wilson had done.

Some government offices had been desegregated during Reconstruction. After three or four decades of such integration, Wilson ordered, for example, that the workers in the Post Office be segregated. Wilson single-handedly undid half a century’s worth of civil rights progress.

Woodrow Wilson also made no secret of the fact that he was a fan of the KKK. Not only did he show The Birth of a Nation, a seemingly pro-Klan film, in the White House, but also wrote effusive words about both the clan and the film.

Unsurprisingly, African-Americans voted largely for Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding when Wilson’s term expired after the election of 1920. Harding and Coolidge worked to undo Wilson’s work in a broad range of civil rights activities.

Coolidge, as an incumbent president in 1924, spoke at the commencement ceremony at Howard University, a historically Black college. This was a bold and even shocking move on Coolidge’s part.

He deliberately mocked the KKK in his 1924 slogan, “Keep Kool with Koolidge.” Wilson had issued supportive statements about the Klan, but Coolidge refused to do so, angering the KKK.

Both Harding and Coolidge had urged Congress to pass anti-lynching laws, and Harding had spoken eloquently about the matter in front of thousands of listeners.

It took years to undo the damage caused by Woodrow Wilson.