Woodrow Wilson was a bad president.

Those who assess the quality of presidents are often impressed by communication skills and charisma. Both of those characteristics account for President Woodrow Wilson’s standing in several lists of good presidents. However, Wilson, like other presidents should be judged not on charisma, but on how his policies affect the nation and the world during his presidency and over the course of history. The policies were catastrophic.The “ruler” with which I will categorically evaluate Wilson’s presidency are the criteria of peace, prosperity, and freedom. Peace allows human beings to be free from unnecessary suffering at the hands of other men and lays the foundation for sound economics and the protection of civil liberties. Prosperity increases the standard of living of humans within its scope and of trading nations. Freedom allows a human to exercise his protected rights in any manner he chooses (so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others), and is a fundamental aspect of human nature’s desires. Wilson is scored negatively on all of these criteria; thus, making him a bad president.Peace 1: Wilson decided to enter World War I.In 1916, he ran for reelection of the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” but in April 1917, shortly after his narrow reelection and second inauguration, he asked Congress to declare war on Germany. As early as December 1916, the Germans desired peace talks, while wanting to keep the land they occupied in Belgium and France. But because Britain and France expected that United States entry into the war was likely and would turn the tide of the war in their favor, they rejected Germany’s settlement. If the US had stayed out, the French and British would have been forced to take this settlement and end the war. As a result of US entry into the war, millions more men were killed in combat and billions of dollars was wasted in an effort to “win” the war. Because of the harsh reparation payments forced on Germany to get the US war loans from Britain and France, the the usurpation of its foreign lands, and the stringent control of Germany’s industry, World War II was essentially created by the Treaty of Versailles. Many historians trace the roots of World War II to the Treaty of Versailles of which he was an integral supporting member.Peace 2: His military policies instigated decades of aftermathWhile generating support for the Treaty of Versailles and League of Nations, was oblivious to the fact that he would be held largely responsible for the largest, costliest, and bloodiest war in world history: World War II. World War I brought to power three monstrous dictators: Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler. He also played a role in triggering the Russian Revolution and then meddles in the ensuring Russian Civil War, i.e. he inadvertently helped the communists take power initially in Russia and then made them hate the United States; thus, paving the way for a Cold War that lasted more than forty years. In that Cold War, two confirmed false nuclear launch signals from both countries was received which could have ended civilization in a nuclear holocaust. He was the most interventionist president in United States history. He ordered military interventions in Mexico in 1914 and 1916, Nicaragua in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Cuba in 1917, and many other military operations that have generated lasting animosity against the United States.As a result of World War I and II, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and civil wars and conflicts spawned by the Cold War (most of which can be traced to US entry into WWI) the twentieth century was by far the bloodiest century in world history. Even in the 21st century, people are still losing their lives in conflicts ( e.g. Iraq) indirectly generated by the US entry into WWI. If the loss of approximately 110 million lives is not enough to make you think Wilson was a bad president, we still have two more categories to go.Prosperity 1: Promoted pre-war economic interventions.Even before Wilson mobilized the entire economy to fight World War I, he was pursuing an activist domestic agenda contrary to the history of the Democratic Party, which had been a bastion of small government. Like Wilson’s faith-based foreign policy, which included total war,religion also fueled his missionary ardor for the progressive movement at home. He is among the three most legislatively active presidents in the 20th century, and with this came disastrous consequences of both progressive politics and its economic intervention. Decades after the idea of a national bank was buried, his “New Freedom” legislative agenda created the Federal Reserve System, which Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman showed to be the cause of the Great Depression, as it excessively expanded the money supply during the 1920’s. The Federal Reserve has also been proven to be the cause of the boom and bust business cycle, the financial crisis and the housing bubble among other economic fiascoes.In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, which allowed the return of the income tax. At first the tax was minimal, but then he (with inspiration from the Ten Planks of Communism) decided to get a more sharply graduated income and inheritance taxes passed. In a classic example of the “ratchet effect” (going up, but not going down), some of the high taxes on incomes and corporate profits were retained after the war extended. The tax continues to progress today, and is one of the primary causes of unemployment and economic sluggishness and deadweight loss.His programs laid the groundwork for expanded government with his setting precedents of the FDA, Overman Act, Enemy Act, Fuel Control Act, and Railroad Administration, etc. His creation of agencies to try to fix problems inspired FDR’s New Deals which prolonged and exacerbated the great depression.Freedom 1: Undermined constitutional check and balances.Wilson used World War I to vastly enlarge the president’s powers. Under the National Defense Act of 1916, he could appoint all commissioned and noncomission officers of the National Guard. This encroachment subverted the states’ constitutional right to appoint the officers of the militia. The act effectively increased the president’s authority over the military and undermined the constitution’s provisions for ensuring some state control over militia as a counterbalance to federal power.Freedom 2: Eroded civil liberties.In US history, WWI and its after math were probably the worst times for the erosion of precious and unique American civil liberties. Conscription, a form of involuntary slavery, was resurrected from the Civil War. The Congress passes the selective service act of 1917, which authorized him to draft men against their will to fight in a distant war, thereby taking away their own liberty. The Espionage act of 1917 and the sedition act of 1918 were “probably the most serious attacks on the civil liberties of Americans since the short-lived alien and sedition acts of 1798” during the administration of John Adams. Yet the Supreme Court upheld convictions under these unconstitutional WWI-era laws.Freedom 3: Set bad policies toward blacks and women.To Wilson, some racial groups were more equal than others. A Democrat originally from the South and a blatant white supremacist, he sought unsuccessfully to get Congress to pass legislation to restrict the civil liberties of African Americans. During and after his administration, racial violence spiked, in some measure because of the racist tone he had set The results were lynching, anti-black race riots, and the emergence of the second KKK to dominate the Democratic party in the southern and western states.Similarly, Wilson had women suffragists arrested, because of his blatant misogyny. But later, under intense continuing pressure, he campaigned for the 19th Amendment.