 Paving
the Road to Hell
Bill Bonner
The
Daily Reckoning
April 11, 2005
The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS:
The path
that led America to its place as the biggest debtor... biggest
consumer... and most meddling military in the world was not forged
alone. But, as Bill Bonner points out, there is one world improver
who stands out among the crowd...
We are dogged
by history. Down the street from our old office in Paris was
the site of the world's first central bank, put up by John Law,
before he was forced to high-tail it out of town. Around the
corner from our new office, is the Crillon Hotel, where Franklin
Roosevelt, then an Assistant Secretary of the Navy, dined in
high style while pretending to be getting the low-down on how
the doughboys were doing in the trenches. In the next war, Ernest
Hemingway claimed to have liberated the bar at the Crillon from
the Nazis as they left for the Rhine.
But it is back
in Baltimore where the hounds bay the loudest. In our very own
office, according to the local history buffs, Woodrow Wilson
got together with U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Theodore Marburg,
and ginned up one of the grandest wish lists of all time - the
League of Nations.
You'll recall
that two weeks ago, we wrote about some of America's best presidents:
Chester A. Arthur, Millard Fillmore, Warren Gamaliel Harding.
While the clumsy giants left their deep footprints in the earth
along Pennsylvania Avenue and trod upon practically everyone
who got in their way, these midgets managed to make their way
through the nation's highest office leaving hardly a trace. That
is, they left people alone... and left the nation as good as
they found it.
This week we
write about one of America's worst presidents... Thomas Woodrow
Wilson. In the crowded contest for "America's Worst President,"
Wilson stands out. As a world improver, Wilson's stature is world
class. He was humorless, immodest, and self-righteous - ranking
along with the great scoundrels of the 20th century... Che, Mao,
Lenin, Mussolini, just to name a few. Each was full of good intentions,
or so they say.
America has
come to such a position of prominence in the world. It is the
world's biggest debtor. It is the world's biggest consumer. It
is the world's most aggressive and meddling military power. No
country on earth is so godforsaken as to escape America's notice...
nor too poor to lend it money. We pause a moment and wonder how
we got where we are. We go to the scene of the crime and look
for evidence. There, we take a few samples... over to lab. And
what do we find? That the DNA samples are those of Thomas Woodrow
Wilson.
We do not blame
the man. Or hold him uniquely responsible. His protégé
at the Navy Department, Franklin Roosevelt, was an eager accomplice.
Lyndon Johnson drove the getaway car. Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan
and George W. Bush were certainly members of the gang. But Wilson
was the mastermind. It is he that gets our attention today.
"A mentally
ill, pitiless, mythomaniac, ... an enlightened man who believed
himself in direct communication with God, guided by an intelligent
power outside of himself... " thus did the father of modern
psychoanalysis describe America's 28th president. But Freud's
judgment of the man was too generous. Wilson was a self-satisfied,
sanctimonious delusional bungler, who almost single-handedly
turned the country into a hollow, mocking parody of what it was
supposed to be.
We begin our
inspection with a quotation, attributed to Wilson after his presidential
election victory: "Remember that God ordained that I should
be the next president of the United States. Neither you, nor
any other mortal or mortals could have prevented this."
Is there any
doubt that Wilson was mad? He claimed to be a Democrat. Later,
he claimed to want to make the world "safe for democracy."
But right here, we see he believed that divine providence decided
leadership issues. He had not been elected by the people; he
had been chosen by God. Why then, bother to have elections at
all?
We also pause
to wonder how the former college professor could have known of
God's mind. We have tried ourselves, many times. Does God intend
stock prices to rise, we ask ourselves? Will God let this plane
land safely, we wondered recently? Where the hell did God let
me leave the car keys? But though we have given the matter a
good-faith try... we have never mastered it. Each time, we merely
hear a booming voice that says: Find the damn car keys yourself!
Surely, Woodrow
must have supped with God. Perhaps he had God's ear... or even
His throat. For the man could look into the future as easily
as you or I could look into an empty glass of beer. He knew not
only that he was destined to become president, but that he could
build a world even better than the one God had given him - by
replacing the private plans of millions of people with plans
of his own.
Where did those
plans come from? How did he know that the world would be a better
place if a Federal Reserve System were set up to control the
nation's money. How did he know that Mexico would be a worse
country... and a worse friend to the United States - if it had
General Huerta at its head, rather than Wilson's man, Carranza...
or even Pancho Villa, whom he also backed for a while. What made
him think that his own judgment was better than that of the Mexicans
themselves? His "democrats" in Mexico murdered priests
and nuns. Wilson must have thought it a reasonable price to pay
for the benefits of enlightened government - and nothing compared
to the price the world paid in Wilson's European War - but what
made him think that a democracy was so superior to a constitutional
monarchy?
Wilson's judgment
about nearly everything was atrocious. In his April 2nd, 1917
speech, in which he urged the nation to war, Wilson noted that
the Russians had always been "democratic at heart."
"[W]onderful,
and heartening things... have been happening with the last few
weeks in Russia," he continued. What had been happening
was the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution. Germany feared
America's entry in the war on the enemy's side, and she desperately
needed to stabilize the Eastern Front so she could turn her attention
to the renewed threat in the West. Her technique was as clever
as it was calamitous. She found a revolutionary named Lenin who
had been exiled from Russia many years before. He was put on
a train, bankrolled and sent back into Russia with the express
purpose of making trouble. It was the trouble he made that Wilson
applauded... and would later regret. Lenin led the Bolshevik
uprising that knocked Russia out of the war. How could Wilson
be so sure that the revolutionaries in Moscow and St. Petersburg
would be better than the Romanoff's they replaced?
Readers will
rush to judgment themselves. "He made a mistake." They
will say. "Or, how could anyone know that the Russian Revolution
would be followed by one of the most cruel and absurd episodes
of bad government in the entire history of the planet?"
Of course,
he could not know. But Wilson wasn't really thinking at all;
he was just pawing the ground and looking for a head to butt
or a purse to steal. And he didn't particularly care whose. Later
even sent troops to Russia to try to beat back the Bolsheviks.
But this was typical of Wilson. He seemed to want to intervene,
not merely on one side - but sometimes both.
And now, we
pause again to wonder at the woebegone majesty of it all. For
it is neither love nor money that makes the world go 'round -
but vanity. Wilson had no particular love... and not much money.
King George V drew his measure as accurately as Freud, calling
him "an entirely cold academic professor - an odious man."
But vanity he had in abundance.
People flatter
themselves. Animals may act on instinct and primitive urges,
but we humans - albeit descended from animal species - operate
in an entirely different manner. We think... and coolly adapt
our own behavior to the opportunities and challenges that present
themselves. And yet, a naturalist dropped down from another galaxy
would have a hard time telling where thinking begins and instinct
ends. Stags and bulls butt heads from time to time. So do men.
Men strut and puff themselves up too - like cocks on a walk.
Throughout the entire animal kingdom, fighting, bullying and
bluffing are just a part of life. Males come with a desire to
dominate... to show that they're superior. They do this out of
no evil motive; it is just nature's way of allowing females to
choose the best mates... like putting a rich lawyer in a Mercedes.
Hardly any man thinks about it, and no female either. But then,
who thinks about breathing?
Woodrow Wilson
was a thinking man. But his thoughts nearly always brought him
to want to boss other men around. There was no logic to it. He
had no more idea than anyone else what was coming... or what
might actually make the world a better place. Yet, he was eager
to disturb the plans of millions so that his own plans might
be pressed down on them... and his own vision of a better world
might be forcibly imprinted on everyone's landscape.
Wilson had
a "self-regarding arrogance and smugness, masquerading as
righteousness," says historian Paul Johnson, "which
was always there and which grew with the exercise of power. Vanity
got the best of him. He had no need for the polite constraints
of bourgeois society, simple truth, or constitutional government.
He was like so many democrats, who can wish their neighbor 'Good
day' in the morning and vote to take his property or his life
in the afternoon."
Wilson had
"a passion for interpreting great events to the world,"
he had told his first wife. He wanted to "inspire a great
movement of opinion."
So he did.
On April 2nd, 1917, Thomas Woodrow Wilson stood before a joint
session of Congress and dazzled the assembly a torrent of rhetorical
air. He had hardly to say a word. The animals had been snorting
and prancing for years. The European powers had locked horns.
Now, it was America's chance to join the battleand Wilson's chance
to become Alpha Male of the entire world.
Every great
public movement begins in deceit, develops into farce and ends
in disaster, usually the exact opposite of what the "movement"
was intended to accomplish. Wilson's war was no different. The
idea of making the world "safe for democracy," was
pure humbug. The Europeans had been fighting for two years. If
it were a fight for democracy, it came as news to them. Wilson's
intervention stretched the conflict out for another year and
a half of killing, leaving millions dead - including hundreds
of thousands of Americans. Was the world any safer for democracy?
Not on the evidence. It was just the opposite; in the aftermath
of the war, and Wilson's inept settlement, arose democracy's
most aggressive and ruthless opponents - men who had ideas about
how to improve the world themselves and few scruples about how
to go about it.
But the history
of WWI is well known. Let us look at a Wilson's other interventions.
History dogs
us here too. Every time we go to Nicaragua we learn more about
a sordid and absurd episode in America's history. This, too,
has Wilson's DNA on it. Marines were sent into Nicaragua in 1916.
The country became almost a protectorate of the United States
- despite the fact that it was a sovereign nation.
Wilson did
not stop there. Soon he had U.S. soldiers all over the diarrhea
belt. He sent them into Haiti and the Dominican Republic, too.
In Mexico, he backed one partythen, a splinter factionand then,
when the splinter group began killing people on both sides of
the border, Wilson sent a force of 6,675 Punitive Expedition
down to the Rio Grande to hunt down and kill the splinter himself
- Pancho Villa.
From humbug,
to farce, to disaster; in the end, the effect of these interventions
was just the opposite of what Wilson had hoped for. Instead of
increasing America's friends in the region, the number of her
sworn enemies multiplied. For the next two generations, in many
Latin American countries, "Yanqui go home" was practically
the national anthem.
All Wilson's
great movements ended the same way. In disgrace, yielding the
exact opposite of the improvement that had been promised. This
was true of Wilson's wars. It was also true of Wilson's great
domestic interventions. Wilson set the Federal Reserve System.
Wilson imposed the income tax. Wilson took the federal budget
from less than 3% of GDP to over 20%.
The Federal
Reserve, the creation of excess credit and phony money was probably
Wilson's greatest achievement. With it in place, Wilson was able
to pave the way to America's Empire of Debtand its biggest disaster
ever.
More to come...
Regards,
Bill Bonner
email: DR@dailyreckoning.com
website: The
Daily Reckoning
Bill Bonner
is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning.
Bill's book,
Mobs,
Messiahs and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and
Politics, is a must-read.
He is also the
author, with Addison Wiggin, of The Wall Street Journal best seller
Financial
Reckoning Day:
Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century (John Wiley
& Sons).
In Bonner and
Wiggin's follow-up book, Empire
of Debt:
The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, they wield their sardonic
brand of humor to expose the nation for what it really is - an
empire built on delusions.
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