("Quid coniuratio est?")
MEESTER VEELSON
The one-dimensional Woodrow Wilson shown on the PBS series, "The Great War," is typical of supposed highbrow entertainments offered by "public" television: academicist subject matter but without depth or disagreement, sprinkled (naturally) with blab from various hired hands of the federal "truth" factories.
(Lest any say, "Ah hah. A white male with too much time on his hands. Why isn't he watching endless sports? Hey you! Get a life," note that I only watched the Woodrow Wilson part, not the entire 8-hour series.)
Funding for "The Great War" came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, i.e. from the federal government. So, of course, Woodrow Wilson appeared without blemishes and like all other noble beings who somehow invariably gravitate to Washington, D.C. This marvelous circumstance is echoed by another "coincidence": somehow the "truth" and federal funds for "scholars" always occur together; rarely does a "scholar" not find lucky federal dollars along the road as he journeys toward the "truth."
(The modern Rome on the Potomac does another interesting trick: it takes the money from a continental nation, its various functionaries rake off and/or steal their percentage, much of the loot gets distributed as largesse to corporate swine, and finally it does its big magic trick -- makes it appear as if a beneficent Washington, D.C. is generously giving money to its citizens. Many are fooled by this sleight-of-hand prestidigitated by Rome on the Potomac.)
As my personal protest against the cartoonization of history, here is information on Woodrow Wilson of a counter-sainthood nature.
John Dos Passos, in his book Nineteen Nineteen (usually included with two other of his books in a volume called U.S.A., a.k.a. "The U.S.A. Trilogy"), gives his own sketch of Woodrow Wilson in a section he calls, "Meester Veelson." Here are excerpts:
When he got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins he moved to a professorship at Wesleyan, wrote articles, started a History of the United States.
...in 1901 the trustees of Princeton offered him the presidency...
...and in 1910 the democratic bosses of New Jersey, hardpressed by muckrakers and reformers, got the bright idea of offering the nomination for governor to the stainless college president...
...so he left Princeton only half reformed to be Governor of New Jersey...
He was introduced to Colonel House, that amateur Merlin of politics who was spinning his webs at the Hotel Gotham. And at the convention in Baltimore the next July the upshot of the puppetshow staged for sweating delegates by Hearst and House behind the scenes... was that Woodrow Wilson was nominated for the presidency.
...he left the State of New Jersey half reformed... and went to the White House our twenty-eighth president.
While Woodrow Wilson drove up Pennsylvania Avenue beside Taft the great buttertub, who as president had been genially undoing T.R.'s [Teddy Roosevelt's] reactionary efforts to put business under the control of the government, J. Pierpont Morgan sat playing solitaire in his back office on Wall Street, smoking twenty black cigars a day, cursing the follies of democracy.
First it was "neutrality in thought and deed," then "too proud to fight" when the Lusitania sinking and the danger to the Morgan loans and the stories of the British and French propagandists set all the financial centers in the East bawling for war, but the suction of the drumbeat and the guns was too strong; the best people took their fashions from Paris and their broad "a's" from London, and T.R. and the House of Morgan.
Wilson became the state (war is the health of the state), Washington his Versailles, manned the socialized government with dollar a year men out of the great corporations and ran the big parade.
If you objected to making the world safe for cost plus democracy you went to jail with [Eugene] Debs.
With the help of Almighty God, Right, Truth, Justice, Freedom, Democracy, the Selfdetermination of Nations, No indemnities no annexations,
and Cuban sugar and Caucasian manganese and Northwestern wheat and Dixie cotton, the British blockade, General Pershing, the taxicabs of Paris and the seventyfive gun
we won the war.
On December 4th, 1918, Woodrow Wilson, the first president to leave the territory of the United States during his presidency, sailed for France.
On June 28th the Treaty of Versailles was ready and Wilson had to go back home to explain to the politicians who'd been ganging up on him meanwhile in the Senate and House and to sober public opinion and to his father's God how he'd let himself be trimmed...
From the day he landed in Hoboken he had his back to the wall of the White House, trying to save his faith in words, talking to save his faith in the League of Nations, talking to save his faith in himself, in his father's God.
He strained every nerve of his body and brain, every agency of the government he had under his control; (if anybody disagreed he was a crook or a red; no pardon for Debs).
In Seattle the wobblies whose leaders were in jail, in Seattle the wobblies whose leaders had been lynched, who'd been shot down like dogs, in Seattle the wobblies lined four blocks as Wilson passed, stood silent with their arms folded staring at the great liberal as he was hurried past in his car, huddled in his overcoat, haggard with fatigue, one side of his face twitching. The men in overalls, the workingstiffs let him pass in silence after all the other blocks of handclapping and patriotic cheers.
...on the train to Wichita he had a stroke. He gave up the speaking tour that was to sweep the country for the League of Nations. After that he was a ruined paralysed man barely able to speak.
The book, Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen has a few tidbits on "Meester Veelson," such as.....
** The Wilson administration hired two Japanese-Mexicans to try to poison Pancho Villa.
** "Textbooks might begin discussing the influence of multinational corporations on U.S. foreign policy with the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Pressure from First National Bank of New York helped prompt Wilson's intervention in Haiti. U.S. interests owned more of Mexico than interests from anywhere else, including Mexico itself, which helps explain Wilson's repeated invasions of that country. In Russia, the new communist government nationalized all petroleum assets; as a consequence, Standard Oil of New Jersey was 'the major impetus' behind American opposition to the Bolsheviks."
** "J. Edgar Hoover and the agency that became the FBI got their start investigating alleged communists during the Woodrow Wilson administration. Although the last four years of that administration saw more antiblack race riots than any other time in our history, Wilson had agents focus on gathering intelligence on African Americans, not on white Americans who were violating blacks' civil rights."
** Says Woodrow Wilson: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."
** Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history.
** "The filmmaker David W. Griffith quoted Wilson's two-volume history of the United States, now notorious for its racist view of Reconstruction, in his infamous masterpiece "The Clansman," a paean to the Ku Klux Klan for its role in putting down "black-dominated" Republican state governments during Reconstruction. Griffith based the movie on a book by Wilson's former classmate, Thomas Dixon, whose obsession with race was "unrivaled until Mein Kampf." At a private White House showing, Wilson saw the movie, now retitled "Birth of a Nation," and returned Griffith's compliment: 'It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true.'"
** "Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his own. But textbooks take pains to insulate him from wrongdoing. 'Congress,' not Wilson, is credited with having passed the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of the following year, probably the most serious attacks on the civil liberties of Americans since the short-lived Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798."
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