The war against Woodrow Wilson reaches the top

Through three Trump campaigns for president, the question loomed: If we have to make America great again, when was it great? Then, after his second victory in 2024, President Trump answered the question. And the answer was, before Woodrow Wilson became president for the first time in 1913. 

“We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913,” Trump said days after taking office. “That’s when we were a tariff country. And then they went to an income tax concept. It’s fine. It’s OK. But it would have been very much better.”

Joy Reid, formerly of MSNBC, recorded a video declaring Republicans were waging a war on “the 20th Century” because some of the “super rich” have never believed there should be an income tax, which Wilson and his Congress instituted, or Social Security, or Medicare or Medicaid and that the poor should just “figure it out.” She might also have added other institutions for which Wilson was responsible, including the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission. 

This resentment of Wilson’s progressivism dates back to 2008, when conservative author Jonah Goldberg published Liberal Fascism, which made a case against Wilson and included many of the thoughts from a soon-to-be popular 2005 book entitled Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism by Professor Ronald J Pestritto of Hillsdale College. Wilson hate exploded in the early days of the Tea Party during Barack Obama’s first term, when then-Fox News host Glenn Beck made it regular feature on his show to declare, “I hate Woodrow Wilson.” That was largely because he had read Pestritto’s book. He made Pestritto a regular guest on his program. Pestritto’s sales soared.

I have been writing on this blog about some of the aspects of Woodrow Wilson’s intellectual career that appalled fans of Beck, Pestritto and Goldberg in the early 2000s, such as his derision for the preface of the Declaration of Independence. Conservatives also recoiled at his endorsement of a “living constitution,” a phrase he coined, which endorses the view that the constitution needs to evolve.

“All of the stuff about Wilson has been completely erased from the popular histories,” Goldberg said in an interview in a book called The Progressive Century that among other things tracks the influence of Wilson-detractors. “I'm a fairly well-read guy. No academic, but historically literate by American standards. I had no idea about some of that stuff. So it was compelling on the merits. But it was also seen as evidence in a larger indictment that liberals have been "hiding" a lot of stuff from us. I don't mean that in the paranoid sense. But when Liberal Fascism came out there was a boom in history books purporting to tell the history liberals don't want you to know, yada yada yada. And this was stuff a lot of smart, book-reading people simply didn't know.”

In 2020 a book came out purporting to track the lack of coverage of what Goldberg called “all of the stuff about Wilson” in the historical literature over a century. Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea by Bradley C.S. Watson included brief synopses of most of the popular and some academic histories of the century, noting again and again the omission of discussion of Wilson’s rejection of natural rights and the endorsement of the “living constitution.” The book doesn’t put this rejection in a historical context, or quote those who point out such a view was quite common in the 19th century when Wilson began to voice it, among both liberals and reactionaries, largely because the French Revolution of 1789 was fresher in mind in the 19th Century, as discussed in a prior blog post. But the book reflects the influence of critique of Wilson furthered not only by Pestritto but also the school he attended. It has been called “the Clarendon critique.”

Thus the movement against Wilson’s influence began to shape the Tea Party movement, according to Steven M. Teles in a chapter of The Progressive Century titled “How the Progressives Became the Mortal Enemy of the Tea Party.”

The view that Wilson was our worst president remains popular among conservatives and liberals today, even though he ranks in the top 15 in rankings of the presidents among historians. That ranking has been dropping in large part because of his abysmal record on race and during World War One on civil liberties. 

The Internet is full of derisive memes about Wilson. One shows a cartoon of Winnie the Pooh remarking to Piglet, “I love honey. But you know what I don’t love? Woodrow Wilson.” Another shows Joe Biden’s Tweet that Trump is “the worst president we’ve ever had,” followed by a photo of Wilson asking “Am I a joke to you?” Most tellingly, perhaps, is a graph which shows the reasons the Left and Right hate Wilson. The chart is divided in four quadrants; all four are filled with reasons to despise Wilson. 

Ironically, Trump himself seems not to mind Wilson.

"Can anyone believe that Princeton just dropped the name of Woodrow Wilson from their highly respected policy center," Trump wrote in a Tweet after petitions against Wilson’s racism at Princeton found purchase in 2020. "Now the Do Nothing Democrats want to take off the name John Wayne from an airport. Incredible stupidity!"

And, equally ironically, Michelle Obama tweeted the opposite argument at about the same time. "Heartened to see my alma mater make this change, and even prouder of the students who've been advocating for this kind of change on campus for years," Michelle Obama wrote. "Let's keep finding ways to be more inclusive to all students--at Princeton and at every school across the country."

As the quote that leads this article makes clear, Trump’s favor for 1870-1913, what historians call “the Gilded Age,” is mainly related to the prominent use during that period of tariffs to fund government. Wilson campaigned against the overuse of tariffs as early as 1882, when he testified before a commission examining their use in Atlanta while he was still a 25-year-old lawyer. It was his first involvement in politics. Before the commission he made the point that tariffs had  been used after the Civil War to pay off the significant debt incurred in the conflict. “Free trade has been a slumbering question” as a result, he said, but “will soon” become one of the leading political questions as “now that peace has come the people of the South will insist upon having the fruits of peace, and not being kept down under the burdens of war.” 

He had been influenced in this position by his love for the classical liberals of Victorian England, most notably William E. Gladstone, who was a consummate free-trader. Wilson is said to have hung a picture of Gladstone on his desk as an adolescent and declared that he wished to follow in his footsteps. It’s one of the aspects of Wilson’s politics that he carried with him to the Oval Office, and historian John Milton Cooper says he re-read John Morley’s biography of Gladstone while in the White House. Gladstone and the free traders of Britain had rallied for the repeal of tariffs under the symbol of cheap bread, as taxes on foreign grain caused the cost of food to rise to what they considered unacceptable levels. This is of course analogous to the concern about rising prices under tariffs today. Trump has acknowledged that, contrary to what he said on the campaign trail, there may be some “pain” as a result of price increases because of the hefty tariffs he has proposed. 

When Wilson became president one of his first acts was to slash the tariffs. He began negotiating an act to do so before he took office. As it happened, the first income tax was simultaneously being formulated in Congress, and though this was less a personal initiative of President Wilson he signed it into law. Last year Trump declined to rule out the elimination of the income tax. 

Wilson’s detractors acknowledge his accomplishments have turned out to be surprisingly difficult to repeal. What they manage to accomplish in this administration remains to be seen.