My reading list for today includes Judge Andrew Napolitano's Theodore and Woodrow - How Two American Presidents Destroyed Your Constitutional Freedoms. Here's a snippet from the introductory Author's Note:
My first exposure to Woodrow Wilson was an example of three degrees of separation. As an undergraduate at Princeton University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a university at which Wilson once taught and over which he once presided as the school's president, I was steeped in the campus lore that he was a great man who saved America from the evil rich who would have kept us all in bondage. I even studied under a professor who studied under a professor who learned from Professor Woodrow Wilson himself.
My intellectual introduction to Wilson was courtesy of Professor Arthur S. Link, who was then and, though now deceased, still is today the academically recognized foremost scholar of Woodrow Wilson. Professor Link, who edited the massive Papers of Woodrow Wilson, spent his entire professional career studying, writing, and lecturing on Wilson. Professor Link, a charming, crewcut, pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing liberal, loved his subject. And he taught his students to do the same.
I have always challenged authority; just ask my parents, brothers, teachers, professors, and even the appellate judges who reviewed my work when I was on the bench. So the good Professor Link, who admitted me as an undergraduate to his graduate student courses, usually reserved for those intending to become professional historians, did not succeed with me.
I believed as a student, studying in the same majestic halls where Woodrow Wilson taught and administered, that Wilson sapped personal liberties, brought America into a useless and highly destructive war, trampled the sovereignty of the states, and institutionalized central economic planning mechanisms in ways that have diminished personal freedoms, reduced opportunities for prosperity, and created a large class of human beings dependent on the government. Though Professor Link never told us, Wilson as president was an old, stiff, cold academic who really believed he was smarter than anyone else in government. He was prepared to bend any rule, avoid any constitutional principle, and crush any individual liberty for what he believed was the common good.
Theodore Roosevelt was not much different, except that he could hardly be called stiff and cold. He was the life of any party he attended, joined, or created. But he also thought that the Constitution was just a guideline, rather than the Supreme Law of the Land as it declares itself to be. I had no youthful romantic familiarity with or adolescent revulsion of Theodore Roosevelt, as I did with Woodrow Wilson. On the contrary, his robust manliness, love of athletics, and nominal Republican roots were appealing to those who influenced my youth.
Interestingly for me, my studies of Wilson under Professor Link exposed me to Wilson's counterpart in the sport of assaulting the Constitution in the name of Progressivism. At a young age, I remember asking, "What is with these Roosevelts? They just wanted to control human life and plan it out for us from the White House."
Theodore's distant cousin, Franklin, is, in my view, second only to Lincoln in the degree of presidentially caused harm to constitutional government and personal freedoms in America; but it was Theodore who paved the way for Franklin to do what he did. It was Theodore Roosevelt who--in moments that today would be compared to Nixon going to China--was a traitor to the values of those who selected and elected him. It was Theodore Roosevelt who first made it acceptable for Republicans to desert their small-government roots, to trample federalism, and to fight wars of imperialism. It was also Theodore Roosevelt who fervently believed that there was no problem too small, no wish too unrealistic, no principle of law too well-grounded or restrictive to prevent him from using the federal government to address whatever he wished, on his own, from the White House.
You can see where we are going in this book. This is not a biography of either Wilson or Roosevelt. It does not purport to present them fairly. This is, quite simply, a case against them. A case you have not seen if you were educated in America's public schools; a case you will appreciate if you think the federal government today is too big and too rich and too controlling, and if you want to understand how it got that way; a case that would have scandalized the amiable Professor Link.
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