Although most conventional liberal historians, blinded by their adulation for politicians who embrace “progressive” causes, continue to regard Woodrow Wilson highly, a few others have issued highly negative opinions about our 28th president.
For example, historian Walter Karp, in his 1979 book, The Politics of War, writes,
Wilson simply could not afford to think realistically about his “association of nations.” For the burdens he was willing to inflict upon an unwilling America only a transcendent goal unsullied by the skeptical judgment of practical statecraft could possibly serve as adequate justification. In order to become a “great statesman,” Wilson had, of necessity, to forfeit every quality that makes a statesman great. Self-deception, self-elation, and self-regard were the chief ingredients of Wilson's celebrated “idealism.”
In Wilson's War, the nonliberal and unconventional historian Jim Powell buttresses Karp's assessment, regarding Wilson as the worst of our presidents for having so blindly pursued a belligerent policy calculated to involve the United States in the European bloodbath of World War I. The book not only exposes the utter foolishness of Wilson's moves — in clear opposition to the desires of most of the American population — to bring the United States into the war against Germany, but also makes it clear that the horrors of World War II would probably have been averted had it not been for Wilson's intervention. Political meddlers have brought untold misery upon mankind, and after reading Wilson's War it is easy to make the case that Woodrow Wilson must be listed among the greatest malefactors in history.
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