Reputations

Fabio P.Barbieri

Woodrow Wilson was the worst President the US ever had, not excluding Buchanan. He managed to sell the world on his idealistic image, which amounted to hideous racism at home (he segregated Washington DC and the Federal government, which had never been segregated before, and presided over the resurrection of the KKK and its transformation into a near-alternative government), stealing his opponents' policies after having insulted them, bullying abroad, destroying the Alliance in order to assert his own primacy, and, finally, violating every article in the Constitution and Bill of Rights in his pursuit of a "Red Scare" which saw the USA come as close to a tyranny as they ever did. The man was a psychopath with no empathy for any decent human feeling, and an ideologue whose monstrous book-fed egotism was more like Lenin's, Stalin's, or Hitler's than that even of many tyrants. It is time that all his statues were knocked down and all his undeserved positive notices erased. He deserves the ancient Roman penalty of Damnatio Memoriae.

dearieme

Wilson: I compliment you on your restraint. His racism was obnoxious even for his era. As for underrated: Wilson's wife and Doctor, who ran the country perfectly well for a year while he was gaga.

Don

I agree with you about Nixon. He's, strangely, getting much higher on my list. Two good books, somewhat hard to find, are Franz Schurman's The Foreign Policy Of Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Politics Of A Guaranteed Income. I disagree about Reagan. He was much more pragmatic than he's made out to be and actually got quite a bit done. Also, his election managed to free up the conversation of ideas in this country. It's hard to remember that many free-market/conservative ideas were not even considered prior to Reagan's election. In other words, the range of discussion in the U.S., which I believe to be quite important whatever your politics, was dramatically increased by Reagan.

Clive

I agree on the question of Wilson's racism. And fair point, too, about Reagan's views. Sorry for the delay - I sent a reply yesterday, but it must have been chewed up in the system.