"Progressives"

[syrakusos]

Ellen, yes, contrary but not contradictory. It is true that the political franchise is important. The marketplace (including the marketplace for ideas) is more powerful, more equitable, more dynamic.

I don't see the material Adam quoted in post #16 as ... Seems to me you're reading into material .... a presumed subtext which I can't identify.

Ellen

Must be my x-ray vision.

[Selene]

Well now, as Bob Kolker would say, now we know where the "wood" in Woodrow comes from...

Maureen Dowd...on Wilson:

“She was widowed very young,” Berg said of the buxom Galt. “She had not been in love with her first husband and so along comes Woodrow Wilson, the great lover. I’m telling you, she didn’t call him Tiger just because he went to Princeton.”

The author, sounding a bit gobsmacked, continued: “Wilson wrote thousands of letters to his first wife, several hundred to his second. These are the most passionate love letters I’ve ever read. They’re not pornographic, so you don’t have to run out to look for that, but they are incredibly romantic, often sexual, very emotional, deeply, deeply emotional letters. At a certain point, they get sickening. They’re just too much.”

For example,

After 10 years of marriage to Ellen, his first wife, he wrote her: “Are you prepared for the storm of love making with which you will be assailed?” When he should have been focused on the sinking of the Lusitania, he was addled with gushy courting of the younger Edith.

She cleverly gets her points in under the tent flap of praise...

Despite the superficial similarities to the other smarty-pants in the White House now, Wilson was better in one way — he haunted the President’s Room in the Capitol to keep a sustained dialogue going with members of Congress — and far worse in others.

As one young woman from the Wilson Center put it, “History has judged Wilson as a racist and a sexist.”

As the world mourned Nelson Mandela, Berg had to agree that the Virginia-born Wilson was a racist, even if he was “a centrist” for his time.

“He made statements, no matter what age they were uttered in, they are racist in nature,” the author said. “More important, he famously brought Jim Crow back to Washington. They were just starting to integrate the Postal Service, the Treasury Department, and it was Wilson’s cabinet members, specifically McAdoo, his Treasury secretary, and Burleson, his postmaster general, who insisted that you can’t have integration in federal offices. The truth is, Wilson’s cabinet was largely made up of Southern racists.”

And he did not want to cross the block of Southern senators and congressmen he needed to get his progressive “New Freedom” agenda passed. When he was president of Princeton, Wilson worked to curb elitism, trying to get rid of eating clubs, but he did not work to curb racism. When a poor student at a Virginia Baptist college wrote beseeching to come, Wilson answered “that it is altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton.”

He made jokes in black dialect and felt that interracial marriage would “degrade the white nations.”

“For me,” Berg said, “the worst thing Woodrow Wilson did as president was what he didn’t do. That was in 1919 when the soldiers came home from the war. Many of them were African-Americans. They came home thinking: ‘This is our moment. We’ve lost brothers, we have shed blood, this is the time we have shown we are full-blooded Americans.’ But he said nothing on the subject. He had global things on his mind.”

Charming little snake!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/opinion/sunday/woodrow-wilson-stud-muffin.html?ref=maureendowd&_r=0