Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

This year marks the 200 th anniversary of the Panic of 1825, a financial cataclysm caused in part by rampant speculation in Latin American stocks that wiped out many people including a young Benjamin Disraeli. In the three years before the crash, seven nations in South and Central America raised 20 million pounds, of which 19 million of those bonds were in default by 1829. More than 100 British banks closed by the end of 1826, according to recent scholarship (Jackson 2022; see bibliography below). Disraeli and his trading partners lost thousands of pounds investing in South American mining companies, a loss which when combined with his losses thereafter on a failed newspaper venture amounts to millions of dollars today. These events left Disraeli in debt almost to the day he died. He suffered a nervous breakdown after he wrote a sequel to his first novel Vivian Grey , which led him to write a relatively little-remembered 1828 satirical novella called The Voyage of Captain Popanill...

It may be shocking to modern ears to hear Woodrow Wilson did not agree with the founders about the inalienable rights of all men. But he did not: "We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence," Wilson said in 1907. "We are not here to worship men or a document." “No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual,” Wilson wrote a year later, “and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle. The rights of man are easy to discourse of … but they are infinitely hard to put into practice. Such theories are never ‘law.’ … Only that is ‘law’ which can be executed, and the rights of man are singularly difficult to execute.” Nowhere in the copious literature about Woodrow Wilson, it would seem, does anyone suggest that this surprisingly derisive view of the Declaration was bequeathed to him by his dad, a Presbyterian minister who pre...