President's Day Presidents Thread for Pontificating about Presidents

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > President's Day Presidents Thread for Pontificating about Presidents

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

i have been doing a histographic paper on Nixons legacy? any tips or sugestions. here is all the sources i have used so far.

all the president men by woodward and bernstein

all the volumes of The Nixon Watch by John F oseborne

Richard Nixon memoirs.

the nixon trilogy by stephen Ambrose(probably using the last two books more)

Nixonland by pearlstein

Invisible Bridge by Pealstein

Richard Nixon: the life by John A. Farrell

president Nixon:alone in the white house by richard reeves.

Reinventing Richard Nixon by Daniel Frick(talks alot about the museum and how the media rehabilitated his image)

and Being Nixon: a man divided by evan thomas(who wrote a great book on Eisenhower)

i am trying to find the source/article that first talks about him killing the paris peace talks. also any other suggestions.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2018 01:36

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:46

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

Richard Nixon: A Life, by John Farrell

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, by Robert Dallek

thanks.

my basic outline is, he was viewed as a giant piece of poo poo after he resigned but ambrose and his museum slowly made him sound decent through various bullshit and decorum. most works now treat him as either a evil gently caress who took lessons from nixon or a weird complicated rear end in a top hat.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2018 02:09

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Here's my post about Chester Arthur.

Chester Arthur was a bad man. He was slimy and corrupt and made lots of money stealing from the government. This culminated in him being nominated as vice president so he could do the bidding of his evil masters. Then the president got killed, he became president, and all of a sudden became a good man! He had some change of heart, probably a Christmas Carol situation with ghosts visiting him in the night, and he became a huge reformer. He got some major anti-corruption legislation through, didn't try to get reelected, everybody loved him and they still do, and he had wonderful facial hair. The end.

i mean Garfield was basically murdered because of the patron system anyway by a crazed syphilitic man who wanted to be a consul and then spent months in horrible agony as doctors poked around him until he died. i am sure Arthur saw alot of it. plus sphilic dude screamed "arthur is president" over and over again when he was tackled. so that could have lead to change too.

# ¿ Apr 15, 2018 05:30

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Rappaport posted:

Why is it so important to maintain an illusion that gross people aren't? The Kennedys had one girl lobotomized because she talked too much.

Joe Kennedy sr was a evil piece of poo poo. kinda of fred christ trump style rear end in a top hat.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2018 20:55

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

TONS OF AWESOME WRITING AND STUFF.

I knew he ended up being pretty cool with anti corruption stuff, but i didnt know about the pro civil rights he was.

in general, who would you say was the last good Republican president. if going by the last 70 years or so(not counting the progressive eras ones) id say Eisenhower.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2018 00:18

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

Eisenhower is the only one you'd have had to convince me not to vote for.

Perhaps I will cover him at some point.

Yeah, i have been reading a good evan thomas book on him. he did/made lovely mistakes that would gently caress us in the future but he did good domestically.

I have been writing my final term paper on Nixon and how his legacy has changed throughout the years. maybe when i finish it i will some up some of my lovely findings.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2018 03:05

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

I'd like to read that. Your paper could be the effortpost on Nixon

maybe. i might PM you for some question. either way, right now i just finished summarizing is autobiography and i am getting into how american becoming more conservative during and after carter led to he rehabilitation. i know a bunch of it came from clowns like buchannan and such and kissenger and stephen ambrose. what sucks is its a historiography term paper so i cant do a straight narrative.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2018 03:16

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

All right, fellas. It looked close for a while there, but I think we have a winner: Franklin Pierce, the man from Concord.

Pierce is a deeply flawed President and a very tragic figure as well. Get ready.

he is the one who saw his son get horrifically killed in front of him in train, right and it broke his wife(understandably) and she spent the entire term in the bedroom praying.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2018 03:41

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

DC Murderverse posted:

i think instead of Alter Ego writing a big long 8-post epic about how awful Ronald Reagan is we should just have a book club reading of The Invisible Bridge and The Clothes Have No Emperor and all regale in tales of Ronald Reagan's soulless, empty-headed, country-ruining time on our planet.

i have been using invicible bridge for my paper. its good poo poo but i cant pleasure/hate read because paper

# ¿ Apr 28, 2018 15:50

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

great post alter ego, as always. basicaly grant did what most of the other union generals didnt do. he realized confederates didnt have resources or manpower and if he kept punching them, they would eventuality give up. a bunch of the other generals were either overly cautious and or didnt push any advantage when they had it. or they were just lovely commanders.

# ¿ May 6, 2018 20:55

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

almost finished my nixon paper and i find myself in a weird quandary. even though he is far worse monster then trump(and most modern president maybe other then W) i find myself relating to him much more and being much more "likeable". From reading all his bios and memoirs and poo poo, i can at least understand why he believed in what he did and i can sorta understand why he did it. he was a paranoid little man who pushed people away because he was afraid of dragging others down with him. like at least nixon has depth. trump is just a dumb monster who doesnt care about anyone but himself. nixon had the same streak but that mostly started in his second term when everything started going to hell. i am not defending him at all but nixon was fascinating creature.

# ¿ May 7, 2018 22:34

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

That's why I find Nixon's character fascinating. You get the feeling that if he had had even slightly more confidence in himself that his life would have been drastically different.

yeah. he had a massive chip on his shoulder because he didnt go to an ivy league school(back when that mattered a ton) and he came from poverty and he always felt looked down up by the rich liberals(he was probably right about that) He was only the VP because he was the palin of the time and it would keep the hard right satisfied because Eisenhower was pretty liberal and wanted to expand on parts of the new deal while pretending he wasn't. its interesting stuff.

# ¿ May 8, 2018 00:34

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

You may be slightly disappointed.

he wasn't that bad of a guy. hell he did a ton of good. the problem was he was stuck in the hard line conservative belief that goverment couldn't do poo poo about depression and "it had to sort itself out" also he was a crushed a peaceful demonstration with women and children with loving tanks.

# ¿ May 8, 2018 16:30

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

tigersklaw posted:

There�s a line from that Oliver Stone movie where I think Kissinger says something like �Nixon would have been a great man if someone actually loved him� or something like that. I could be wrong and yea it�s a movie not a documentary but I�ve always found that fascinating too

its not far off the mark. l can find it in my self to "forgive" him sorta for watergate. to use the excuse a bunch of his supporters used, everyone probaly did that sorta poo poo to an extent though he took it insanely far. thing is he did so much worse then that. his worse act was sabotaging the 1968 peace talks with the NVA.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/06/nixon-vietnam-candidate-conspired-with-foreign-power-win-election-215461

Dapper_Swindler fucked around with this message at 22:31 on May 8, 2018

# ¿ May 8, 2018 22:20

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

DC Murderverse posted:

nixon is a garbage human being please stop this dumb dumb line of discussion. go read Hunter S. Thompson's memorial of the man if you seem to have forgotten that fact.

yeah, i know. I am sorry. I deep in the trenches of reading stuff about him. He is an evil monster but i can see why he became one in a depressing way i guess. and yes i love that article too.

# ¿ May 9, 2018 19:14

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

tigersklaw posted:

Nixon was absolutely a trash monster of a man, a villain of the highest order, and if there is a hell (there�s not) he�s frying in it now. That being said he didn�t come out of the womb a fully formed shitbag of a person. It�s occasionally interesting to speculate on how he became the rear end in a top hat he was

this. Nixon is the story if Horatio Alger Jr wrote a book about a broken rear end in a top hat who became president. he grew up poor and was bitter shithead but was smart and knew how to read people. basically he knew how to divide and conquer. I guess i just hate trump more then him. if nixon is the original presidential monster, then trump is the lovely sequel with none of the "good" and all of the bad but with more dumber versions of bad.

# ¿ May 9, 2018 22:07

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

DC Murderverse posted:

Trump is all the worst aspects of Reagan (stupid, senile) combined with all the worst aspects of Nixon (paranoid), with an extra helping of corruption (which both men had in spades) and topped off with the cherry of being incapable of feeling shame. I completely understand hating him more than the others but it�s also like saying which type of cancer is the worst.

well that and i am living during his presidency. both HW and Clinton when i was little. to young to remember outside the sex scandal vaguely. I liked W and fox news because i was little dumb shithead young republican in my early teens, mostly because of my "cool" uncle. grew out of that because of a ton of reasons and became an online woke liberal during obama and i gradualy turned cynical dirtbag sorta chapo left toward the very end of obamas term and under trump.

Dapper_Swindler fucked around with this message at 22:49 on May 9, 2018

# ¿ May 9, 2018 22:44

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

sean10mm posted:

Trump has the least amount of anything you want of any president ever. There's nothing loving there.

Others were more capable of accomplishing rotten things*, but none were as completely a piece of poo poo as him.

*So far

yeah, he is your angry moron/rear end in a top hat relative but with money and now power. he is smart enough to gently caress a ton up, but he is also dumb and cowardly. I have seen both sides of the aisle try to pain him as smart chess master. he just reacts. all of those tweets of him acting like he will take away press access or destory the FBI are just impotent bitching from his angry little mind.

# ¿ May 9, 2018 22:59

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

achillesforever6 posted:

He's also probably more corrupt than Warren Harding too

harding is kinda tragic. he didnt really want to be president and was unsuited for it. he was picked because of his looks basically.

# ¿ May 10, 2018 23:52

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

All right, you jerks asked for it.

Herbert Clark Hoover, 31st President of the United States

Yes, folks, it�s time for the one, the only, the man who blew the whistle and sent the country straight into the shitter...it�s Herbert Hoover! That line comes from a little ditty that came out around the early part of the Depression:

Hoover blew the whistle;
Mellon rang the bell;
Wall Street gave the signal;
And the country went to Hell!

Yes, Herbert Hoover is one of the most poo poo-upon Presidents of all time, mostly for his status as �The Guy Who Was Running The Joint When The United States Almost Died�. Hoover occupied the White House between the years 1929-1933, and the policies he espoused were roughly in line with the new Republican orthodoxy--most of which consisted of stepping out of the way while big business drove the economy and ran the show.

But let�s be clear. Hoover was by no means the genesis for these policies, and while his inaction after the crash in late 1929 is certain worthy of scorn and derision, I would submit to you that no one--NO ONE--in American politics possessed a cure for what ailed the country when the Great Depression set in for real. Hoover�s inaction was not born of malice; it was born of indecision and a stubborn commitment to (albeit wrong and misguided) principles. And I promise you--once you hear a bit more about what Hoover did with himself before the Presidency, you might just change how you feel about him a little.

But, as with everyone we�ve talked about so far, we�ve gotta start at the beginning.

The Young Quaker

Aww, he was adorable. A little "Children of the Corn", though.

Herbert Hoover was born in a little backwater town in 1874 called West Branch, Iowa. Though his father was of German ancestry and his mother Canadian, both were devout Quakers.

Hoover, therefore, grew up really devout, but tragedy struck very early on. His father Jesse died in 1880, and his mother, after working her fingers to the bone for the next four years to pay off her husband�s debts, died herself in 1884, leaving 9-year-old Herbert and his two siblings in the care of a fellow Quaker, appointed his guardian.

Incidentally, I think Hoover is really the only President who essentially grew up with no parents.

I will say this for Hoover--he grew up with an incredibly strong work ethic. After bouncing around several relatives� houses, he eventually went to live with his uncle Dr. John Minthorn in Oregon, attending night school to learn bookkeeping, typing, and math so he could be an office assistant at Minthorn�s real estate office in Salem.

Hoover�s a Stanford man too! Entering the college in its inaugural year of 1891 despite failing the entrance exams, Hoover found a stability and a happiness at Stanford that had eluded him his entire life. A very ending for a crappy early life, I think.

Here�s where it gets interesting. Hoover had no idea what he wanted to major in when he entered college, but he got a job working for geologist John Casper Branner. He loved it so much he switched his major to geology, and he interned for Branner and the U.S. Geological Survey during the summer months. A shy young man, Hoover began to come out of his shell. He was elected class treasurer and he even found love--a classmate of his, Lou Henry, who would eventually become his wife.

But he had a problem. He was gonna graduate in 1895, in the middle of the economic Panic of 1893. So what was a young, enterprising geology major to do?

Hit rocks with hammers, I guess.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It�s Off To Work We Go

Hoover took what is a rather unorthodox career path at the time, working for several mining firms in the West before ending up in Western Australia as an employee of Bewick, Moreing and Company, a London-based gold mining operation. He worked at several different gold mines in the area around Perth, including Big Bell, Cue, Menzies, and Coolgardie (loving Australia and their weird place names).

Coolgardie was the center of what was known as the Eastern Goldfields at that time, a place Hoover described as a land of �black flies, red dust, and white heat�. Very evocative. In fact, you can still find some things of Hoover�s at the Palace Hotel in Kalgoorlie-Boulder--a poem he wrote to a barmaid he met and an antique mirror.

Hoover was an ambitious little poo poo too. At age 23 he was made mine manager for the Sons of Gwalia gold mine, and he brought in a bunch of Italian immigrants to cut labor costs and undermine the labor movement in the Australian work force.

As the scion of Italian immigrants myself, I�m not sure how I feel about that.
If you�re not sure, try this on for size. Hoover got promoted mainly due to his opposition to a minimum wage and workers� compensation, believing them �unfair� to owners.

Yeah, I got nothing except .

In 1898, Hoover had finally reached a point where he was financially secure enough to marry Lou Henry. He cabled her from Australia and popped the question. When she accepted, Hoover returned to the United States to marry her.

He�d never go back to Australia, but he wouldn�t stay stateside either.

China And Beyond

If you look closely, Hoover appears to be making the mother of all faces.

Wait...China? Yes! Hoover�s employer, Bewick, Moreing & Co, deployed Hoover to the enormous Kaiping Mines in China. Working for the Chinese Bureau of Mines and as GM for the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, Hoover also became lead engineer at Bewick, Moreing & Co.

He and his wife studied Mandarin Chinese, and Hoover would actually use it a great deal during his Presidency to confound anyone who might be listening in on his conversations. He remains to this day the only President who could speak Chinese. Hoover�s stance on worker�s rights improved somewhat during his tenure in China. He made recommendations to end the practice of long-term servitude contracts (basically slavery) and to institute reforms for workers (but they were still merit based).

Fun fact: Lou Hoover was a bit of a badass. Not only was she fluent in Mandarin (Hoover himself was conversational), but she could saddle and ride a horse and was adept with both rifle and pistol (she carried a .38 caliber pistol with her everywhere). She also volunteered her time at hospitals around Tianjin when the Boxer Rebellion trapped the Hoovers in China around 1900.

Very �Calamity Jane�, don�t you think?

Anyway, one other thing worth mentioning before we move on: Hoover came up with a revolutionary process for mining zinc when he founded the Zinc Corporation in 1905. Hoover had been made a full partner at Bewick & Moreing by this point, and there was a mine in New South Wales called Broken Hill that was full of lead-silver ore containing tons of zinc. Problem was, you couldn�t extract the zinc without, y�know, poisoning the miners.

What the Zinc Corporation came up with was something called the �froth flotation� process. What this consisted of was grinding the ore to fine powder and dumping it in a giant water tank to form what�s known as a slurry. The tank is then aerated with compressed air. The hydrophobic particles (in this case the sulfides) cling to the air bubbles and rise to the surface, forming a �froth� which is then filtered off. What is left is the zinc that was so sought after.

I tried to find you a picture of this process, I really did, but all the diagrams I found were lovely and had spelling errors.

Despite Hoover�s diagnosis of Broken Hill as �one of the dreariest places in the world at this time�, he and his associates became suppliers to the world�s zinc industry.

Hoover�s lucky streak continued. He managed the Namtu Bawdwin Mine for the British firm Burma Corporation. Despite catching malaria in 1907, he managed to produce silver, lead, and zinc in large enough quantities to make the mine very profitable. He also agreed to take over one of the Russian Czar�s mines in the Altai Mountains. Here, the lead-zinc-silver ore also contained copper and gold. Hoover proclaimed it �the greatest and richest single body of ore known in the world�.

This guy REALLY liked rocks. I guess I would too if they were making me that wealthy.

And they were making him very wealthy. Hoover was lecturing at Columbia and Stanford in his spare time, and his views on labor were evolving too--he was now voicing support for the eight-hour workday and for organized labor, as was evidenced in his book, Principles of Mining, published in 1909.

Hoover was worth around $4 million by 1914, an enormous sum for the time. He stood to make even more money from the Russian mines he had reorganized, too. But he was restless, unlike most wealthy people of his time...and war in Europe was brewing.

The Great Humanitarian

Hoover began organizing the removal of 120,000 Americans from Europe after war broke out in August of 1914. He led a team of around 500 volunteers in distributing cash, steamship tickets and supplies, saying �I did not realize it at the moment, but on August 3, 1914, my career was over forever. I was on the slippery road of public life.�

We know most of the details of the first World War; I won�t get into who was allied with who or who invaded who first (mostly because the answer is usually Germany). When there was a food crisis in Belgium after the German invasion, however, Hoover stepped to the plate and began a massive relief effort with the Commission for Relief in Belgium. As chairman, he worked with the Belgian Comite National de Secours et d�Alimentation (if anyone speaks French please feel free to translate) to feed the entire nation during the war. The CRB imported tons of food for the CNSA to distribute AND watched over the CNSA to make sure the invading Germans didn�t just steal it before it got to starving Belgians.

Fun fact--the CRB became so effective that they actually got their own flag, navy, mills, factories, and railroads. They practically became an independent nation. They were propped up by private donations and government grants, utilizing an $11 million/month (!) budget to keep Belgium alive.

Hoover was practically unstoppable. He was living and working in London and for the next two years he oversaw the distribution of food and supplies to over 9 million victims of war. He even acted as an emissary to Germany, crossing the North Sea over 40 times to meet with German authorities to persuade them to allow food shipments. It made Hoover an international hero and earned him the nickname �The Great Humanitarian�. There is even a city in Belgium that named their town square �Hooverplein� in his honor.

The American Relief Administration, as Hoover�s organization was known as by the end of the war, was feeding over 10 million people a day. But Great Britain grew uncomfortable about supporting it, preferring to emphasize Germany�s obligation to provide relief. The more militaristic factions of Britain�s politics considered Hoover�s aid efforts a �positive military disaster�.

In case you were wondering who the face of the opposition was, it was none other than this guy:

Britain�s former First Lord of the Admiralty and current Minister of Munitions, Winston Churchill earned Hoover�s intense dislike for his disparagement of the relief efforts in Europe.

His role in WWII notwithstanding, Churchill is and always was a dick.

Hoover�s efforts didn�t go unnoticed by the American government. He had greatly impressed the United States� Ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Page. Here�s what Page sent back to President Woodrow Wilson in December 1916:

In response, Wilson brought Hoover back to the United States when the country entered the war in 1917 and appointed him the head of the U.S. Food Administration. Created under the Lever Food Control Act in the same year, its purpose was to make sure the United States was fed during the war.

Hoover had done so much for the people of Europe; now he was about to come home and do the same for his countrymen.

___

End of Part 1. In Part 2 we�ll discuss Hoover�s political life and the Election of 1928.

stupid question but could you recommend some good books on hoover?

# ¿ May 17, 2018 20:46

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Night10194 posted:

Hoover is a man of endless good intention and ability who hosed up badly at one of the most critical moments possible. He is one of our most interesting disastrous presidents.

yeah.though i am curious about alter Egos opinion on Hoovers role with quashing the bonus army because he thought they were all communists.

# ¿ May 18, 2018 03:12

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

Only one I can think of is one that just came out: Hoover: An Extraordinary Life, by Kenneth Whyte.

thanks. i'll give it a look sometime. also great posts.

# ¿ May 18, 2018 03:12

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

My favorite part of that was that the rear end in a top hat he sent to do it got famous for being an even bigger rear end in a top hat 20 years later.

which one. there were 2 of them. and both were giant overrated assholes.

# ¿ May 18, 2018 18:28

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Alter Ego posted:

Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States

I�m afraid you guys have me at a loss. I don�t have any zippy one-liners or funny anecdotes to introduce Woodrow Wilson, but he is unique among his colleagues in a few respects. As the only President to hold a Ph.D, he�s officially Dr. Woodrow Wilson too. Unfortunately, given Wilson�s personality, he was probably one of those pricks at parties who insisted everyone called him DOCTOR Wilson (pre-Presidency anyway).

Wilson presents us with two distinct faces--on the one hand, he was a domestic policy giant and perhaps one of the most progressive voices of his time. On the other, his misfires on the foreign policy front and his unwillingness to confront racial issues (perhaps due to some latent racism of his own) have marred his legacy nearly a century later. Combining these two factors have made it difficult to place Wilson when ranking the Presidents. Nevertheless, his Presidency remains one of the most interesting ones of the 20th century, and his life story certainly makes for a pretty good tale.

I�m not sure what your opinions will be by the end of this biography; I only hope that you learn something. Take the red pill, Neo, and I can show you how far down the rabbit hole goes.

Birth Of A Professor

New Jersey likes to claim Wilson as their own, but I have bad news--Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia on December 28, 1856. His parents were Irish immigrants; hailing from what is the present-day Northern Ireland. His parents had christened him Thomas Woodrow Wilson as a tribute to his grandfather, the Reverend Thomas Woodrow, but from a very early age, his middle name was all anyone used--so Wilson went by �Woodrow� for the rest of his life.

Wilson�s father had been raised in Steubenville, Ohio, where he�d published a newspaper that was decisively anti-slavery. When Joseph Wilson moved to Virginia after marrying Woodrow�s mother, Jessie, they began to, er, change their tune a bit. Remember, it was the 1850s and it was still the antebellum South. Joseph Wilson owned slaves, and began ardently defending the institution even as he set up a Sunday school for his slaves. The family would become more embedded in Southern �culture� as Joseph Wilson moved his family deeper into the South.

Gross.

Wilson himself often recalled his earliest memory was at the age of three, when he heard that Abraham Lincoln had been elected. He�d even met General Robert E. Lee as a child.

Wilson may also be one of only two Presbyterians to hold the office (the other being George H.W. Bush); he had joined the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States after their split from their Northern half (wanna guess why they split?). He actually became a minister at the First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, where the family lived until 1870.

So remember how I mentioned that Wilson was a professor? Well, education for him wasn�t actually super-easy. It�s believed he may have suffered from dyslexia, which slowed him considerably and meant he didn�t read at an age-appropriate level until he was ten. Wilson himself? He blamed the lack of formal schooling, and one can hardly call Wilson lazy. He actually taught himself Graham-Pitman shorthand. For those of you unfamiliar, here�s a probably-falsified Wikipedia article on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand

Wilson pretty much willed himself to become educated. He lived in Columbia, South Carolina, during Reconstruction, while his father was at the Columbia Theological Seminary, then moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. He went to Davidson College for a year (you might know them if you�re a sports fan; I think they�ve experienced some NCAA tournament success the last few years), then transferred to the college that would make him famous, the College of New Jersey.

They didn�t stay called that for long. While Wilson was there they took on their current and much more recognizable name: Princeton University.

Not surprisingly, Wilson excelled. He graduated as a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, was active in the Whig literary and debating society, and wrote articles for the Nassau Literary Review. He even organized a debate club of his own, the Liberal Debating Society. In the shitshow that was the 1876 election, Wilson made a decision that would set the course for his political future: he supported the Democrat, Governor Samuel Tilden, over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

This may sound like a boring recitation of facts, but honestly, nothing in Wilson�s life gets terribly exciting until about a decade after this point. He studied law at the University of Virginia for a year, but when he got sick he returned home to Wilmington.

Unlike a lot of his contemporaries who studied law as a pathway to politics, Wilson, well...he thought it was just boring. He didn�t like procedural stuff, and anyone with a JD knows that most of your early law career is paperwork and procedure. Consequently, he gave it up to study history and political science over his parents� objections. I guess even then, parents assumed that a law practice was the path to Easy Street.

Wilson completed his education at Johns Hopkins University, earning his Ph.D in political science on his thesis, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics.

Nerd. That said, however, Wilson is probably one of our best classically-educated Presidents, at least until you get to the modern era with guys like Clinton and Obama.

No, It�s DOCTOR Wilson To You

So what was a young Woodrow Wilson to do if he wasn�t gonna be a lawyer? The answer, of course, was twofold: teach and write. For the next decade or so, Wilson would teach at a variety of colleges, as well as write some pretty well-known treatises on government.

But first, he�d fall in love. When his maternal uncle William died, Wilson was called back to Georgia to settle the estate. While he was there, he met the lovely Ellen Axson.

Ellen Axson was the daughter of a minister from Savannah, Georgia. �What splendid laughing eyes!� Wilson remarked to his cousin Jesse upon seeing Ellen for the first time. Their whirlwind courtship lasted only 5 months before Wilson asked her to marry him, and she accepted, although their wedding was postponed until after Wilson completed his Ph.D.

Unfortunately for you, dear reader, Wilson and Ellen were two peas in a somewhat horrible pod. When Ellen was pregnant with their first child she moved back to Georgia from Pennsylvania where Wilson was teaching at Bryn Mawr because she didn�t want her children to be born as Northerners.

Eurgh.

Wilson taught at a variety of colleges: Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, Cornell, and yes, eventually Princeton�s faculty. He taught ancient Greek and Roman history at Bryn Mawr, coached the football team at Wesleyan and created the school�s debate team, and was a guest lecturer at Cornell. Despite his abandonment of his law career, he became the first person to teach Constitutional Law at New York University Law School, alongside future Supreme Court Justice and campaign opponent Charles Evans Hughes.

Funny how that works. One thing you cannot dispute about Wilson--he was eminently credentialed and extremely well-read.

The Constitution Kinda Sucks

No, that�s not a typo. That�s literally what Wilson thought, and the thing is that he wasn�t wrong, especially now. He considered the Constitution �cumbersome� and �open to corruption�. Feeling that the legislative branch should have more bearing on who gets to be President, Wilson favored a parliamentary system closer to the British model with a bicameral Parliament and a Prime Minister.
He even wrote a book called Congressional Government in 1885 that advocated just such a thing. While supporters thought Wilson had the makings of a future statesman, his critics contended that his book was written without having any first-hand observation of the United States Congress in operation.

Wilson�s support of a stronger legislature reflected the times--1885 was in the heart of the Gilded Age in American politics, where a series of weak chief executives allowed Congress to not only regain the power it had lost under Lincoln but begin breaking new ground as well.

His second major publication was a civics textbook titled The State in 1890, and in this we begin to see some of the things Wilson would advocate for twenty years later as President. Wilson was perhaps one of the first to argue that government�s power should be used to allay social ills and advance society�s welfare in real, tangible ways--a school of thought that would be echoed by some of his Presidential contemporaries.

Some of the ideas Wilson would advocate included:

Any of that sound familiar? It should, because it�s exactly what Theodore Roosevelt would do once he entered office a decade later. We are talking about the 40-hour work week, the end of child labor, the regulation and supervision of goods, and regulations on business--stuff that Democrats would be talking about for the next 50 years. Wilson was also an advocate for what he called removing charity efforts from the private domain and �made the imperative legal duty of the whole�. For those of you paying attention, Woodrow Wilson had just conceptualized the welfare state.

In his last book, Constitutional Government of the United States, Wilson offered his thoughts on the Presidency, contending that �[it] will be as big and as influential as the man who occupies it� and hoping that Presidents could become party leaders in much the same way as Prime Ministers were in Britain.

I guess my point is this: hate Wilson for some of the things he did later on, but never forget that he was one of the earliest advocates for empowering government to take care of its people in every way it was capable.

Mr. President (Sort Of)

Throughout all of this madness in which Wilson became the Stephen King of treatises on government, he wasn�t idle in terms of his career. In 1892, the University of Illinois offered Wilson the President�s chair. The University of Virginia did the same in 1901. He declined both times.

But, like the swallows to Capistrano, the uber-nerd eventually got the uber-nerd position. After joining the Board of Trustees at Princeton, they promoted him to President in June of 1902, and what a President Wilson would become.

Princeton�s endowment was nearly $4 million--a princely sum for 1902. The current value of such an amount? Roughly $110 million. Yay for inflation.

The reason for Wilson�s appointment to the Presidency was the wasteful inefficiency of his predecessor, and Wilson sought to confound those expectations. Though he had $4 million to work with, Wilson�s goals were ambitious indeed: $1 million for a school of science, $3 million for salary increases and new buildings, and $2 million more for a preceptorial system of teaching wherein students would meet in small groups with their professors. He increased the size of the faculty by over 50%, bringing Princeton�s total of full-time teachers to 174--most of whom he selected himself. He was able to break the stranglehold that the conservative Presbyterian community had on the Princeton Board of Trustees, appointing the first Jew and first Roman Catholic to the faculty as well.

The stress of running the college was getting to him, however. One morning in 1906, an eerie bit of foreshadowing took place: he woke up to find himself blind in the left eye, the result of what was diagnosed later as a blood clot and hypertension. Modern medical opinions, however, assert that Wilson suffered a mild stroke. Wilson was amazingly self aware; he had described his problem back in 1896 during the sesquicentennial speech he gave at Princeton: �Your thorough Presbyterian is not subject to the ordinary laws of life, is of too stubborn a fiber, too unrelaxing a purpose, to suffer mere inconvenience to bring defeat�.

Shades of that bullshit �Protestant work ethic�. Wilson had no idea how true it would ring a couple decades later.

Presbyterian or no, Wilson decided to take a vacation to convalesce. It was there that things got...interesting.

It was in Bermuda on vacation in 1906 when Wilson met the woman in the above picture, Mary Hulbert Peck. She and Wilson became instantly inseparable for the duration of his trip and Wilson would actually write home to Ellen and tell her about their meetings.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Historians have no established proof that there was an affair, but you�d have to be an idiot to believe otherwise. There is already established proof that Wilson, for such a staid, religious, upright man, had a bit of a sexual appetite, and meeting a beautiful woman in a place so far away from his wife? Come on. It�s like Ike and Kay Summersby--you KNOW they did it. One of Wilson�s personal letters contains the very interesting shorthand notation: �my precious one, my beloved Mary�.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Ellen suspected a problem, but Wilson�s willingness to share the details of their meetings seemed to allay her fears. If you ask me, Wilson got away with one. For more on Wilson and Mary Peck, you can read this old Washington Post article I thought was interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...m=.033da4850382

Wilson�s disenchantment with Princeton only grew. The trustees got more conservative and more resistant to his recommendations, and a life in politics was looking more and more attractive. At the 1908 convention, Wilson had dropped some hints to the national Democratic Party that he might be interested in being on the ticket, but not as the Vice President, if you know what I mean, wink wink nudge nudge. When he didn�t win the nomination he took off for a vacation in Scotland, but the seeds had been planted in the minds of Democratic Party regulars.

Governor Wilson

Two of those regulars were former NJ Senators James Smith, Jr. and George Harvey. 1910 was a gubernatorial year for New Jersey and the Democrats needed a candidate. In July of that year, the professor was taken to meet New Jersey�s power brokers at the Lawyers Club in New York, which included Robert Hudspeth, Millard Ross, and Richard Lindabury. These guys were the Jersey political bosses and they liked Wilson immediately.

Labor wasn�t convinced. They thought Wilson too inexperienced, but the bosses nominated Wilson at the NJ Democratic Convention regardless. Wilson submitted his letter of resignation to the Princeton Board of Trustees on October 20.

His Republican opponent was the State Commissioner of Banking and Insurance, Vivian Lewis. Yes, that�s a dude. Wilson found his voice as a candidate, though, and quickly shed his stuffy professorial image in favor of an absolutely stunning orator. He presented himself to the voters of New Jersey as a full-fledged progressive in the mold of Robert La Follette (who had won the Wisconsin governorship nearly a decade earlier).

He was singing New Jersey�s song. Wilson beat Lewis by over 650,000 votes, an eye-popping margin considering Taft had taken New Jersey in the 1908 election by just over 80,000 votes. Edmund Morris, the author of the absolutely wonderful three-part Teddy Roosevelt biography that you all should pick up as required reading for this course, maintains that Wilson�s progressivism is what won him the election by such an absurd margin.

End of Part 1. Stay with me, guys--the rest of this will be much, much more interesting. We�ll dive into Wilson�s time as NJ Governor, then talk about the election of 1912 next time.

Wilson is one of those people/presidents id love to like if not for the horrific racism and segreagation policies. His ideas about building a post ww1 europe are admirable and pretty enlightened for their times. yeah he is overly high minded but i feel like if he had played politics at home better(he hosed the GOP and other democrats out of his peace trip and policies) he may have been able to pull it off.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2018 18:33

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

thanks for the great FDR piece. as it happens i am going with my godfather to his house and library. i'll take some pics for the thread.

# ¿ Jul 16, 2018 22:07

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

so i went to the FDR museum/library and childhood/adult home. gently caress me it was amazing. if you can go there. do it. its phenomenally done and they have great stuff on Eleanor too. as a physicaly challanged person, seeing his house brought a tear to my eyes.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2018 19:43

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Tony Gunk posted:

De Gaulle was more Roosevelt's problem, to be honest. Monty was, far and away, Ike's biggest problem. Every bio of Eisenhower that exists--Stephen Ambrose's Soldier and President and Jean Edward Smith's Eisenhower in War and Peace foremost among them--mentions Montgomery as the guy who fought Ike every step of the way in the planning for both North Africa and in France.

How is monty viewed in history now a days. i know a ton of books are writen about his north africa days because he beat the poo poo out of rommel and because of how overhyped rommel is now a days, he is viewed as the rommel killer. then he did his great gently caress up with market garden.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2018 02:57

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Lost Season posted:

I get what you're going for here, but Patton died in Germany in 1945 due to injuries sustained in a car accident^*, so I'd say that's the biggest reason why he never reached high office

^*And/or he was assassinated by Stalin for hating Communism too much, according to the book Bill O'Reilly "wrote" on the subject.

did't he also accuse stanton of wanting lincoln dead or what.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2018 02:59

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Lost Season posted:

Yep! Claimed Stanton wanted Lincoln dead so he could become president... somehow?

jesus, how loving stupid is that rear end in a top hat.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2018 19:45

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Harding because he is basically a non evil version of trump.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2018 03:39

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Tony Gunk posted:

We've reached that time again, folks...it's time to choose who our next topic for discussion will be. I'm your host, Tony Gunk, and let's play our game!

The Faces Of Mount Rushmore will be our theme today. It deals with the Presidents who've gotten themselves carved into a bunch of rocks in South Dakota. You are already familiar with the contestants, but I'll introduce them anyway.

1. Theodore Roosevelt.
Often thought of as the President who signaled the official end of the Gilded Age, the "Steam Engine In Trousers" was a political force of nature and has a life story worthy of epic poems. His environmentalist credentials were unmatched by nearly every President of his time, and he was perhaps the first President to attempt to regulate out-of-control big business.

2. Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's legacy has suffered some bruises...after the whole Sally Hemings story came out, he became less "the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence" and more "the guy who probably raped his slaves and fathered children on them". Nevertheless, Jefferson's genius is largely responsible for many of the central tenets we formed our nation around.

3. Abraham Lincoln
What can be said about Abraham Lincoln, really? He's often thought of as one of the greatest--if not the greatest President--we've ever had. A closer examination of his actual record, however, shows that he probably would have left office with mixed reviews had he not gotten shot in the head. That said, his leadership during the Civil War in a time when it was sorely needed is something I think few men could have pulled off.

4. George Washington
Yep. The man that started it all. The big kahuna. The Optimus Prime of Presidents. Lieutenant General George Washington set many of the precedents that became unwritten law for decades until some of them were enshrined as amendments to the Constitution. His career, love him or hate him, is a long and storied one...but I suspect my account will tell more unvarnished truth about Washington's military prowess than your textbooks did.

Cast your votes, dorks!

id say Lincoln and teddy. with lincoln being top.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2018 17:43

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Deteriorata posted:

It wasn't just McGovern's loss. Carter ran as a moderate and barely won in the Watergate aftermath, then Carter and Mondale both lost to Reagan and Dukakis lost to G. H. W. Bush. The country as a whole was embracing conservatism as the Dixiecrats had abandoned the Democratic party over civil rights. The path to an electoral majority largely disappeared for an overtly liberal agenda. The Democrats' abandonment of liberalism wasn't the cause, it was the effect of the country generally moving to the right in the '80s.

It doesn't matter how badly you want to effect positive social change if you can't get the votes for it. First you have to win, and that requires finding your way to a majority.

pretty much. people also forget that the end of the 60s and most 70s were a lovely time in general, gently caress tons of crime, lots of reported serial killers. various race riots, than the gas crisis and iran hostage crisis and jonestown carter gets alot of the blame even though alot of it wasn't his fault and he wasn't president during alot of it. but people didn't just the left or liberals any more. it didn't help that the DNC had had a mini civil war and were only left with centrists. the dixicrats left to be in the GOP as did the evangelicals once carter didn't stick to his promises. also the lefties had been purged out for a while and were back to eating each other or becoming state centered.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 00:07

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Android Apocalypse posted:

what a hell of a writeup!

And to think if we didn't have a turtle impersonator in control of the Senate, impeachment rumblings would be louder.

i think mitch is one of the few things keeping trump in power at this point. sure fox keeps the base happy, but trumps polls are getting worse by the day even on fox.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2019 05:19

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Fritz Coldcockin posted:

Nope. Pissboy and Obama are exempt; I would like to do one on Obama but I know how D&D feels about him as a whole and I don't want to drag USPOL/CSPAM bullshit into this thread, and Donald Trump makes me so loving angry when I even THINK about him that I would break things while writing about him.

id say do trump if he loses in november.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2020 02:20

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Fritz Coldcockin posted:

Regrettably, you're absolutely right. While Steve Bannon, for example, will most likely not be hired by future Republican administrations, Stephen Miller absolutely will worm his way into someone else's confidence. There's a reason that "DC staffer" is a lifetime job and not just a gig someone works for a few years under one administration. There's always another game, another grift, another lunatic to hitch your wagon to if you're a young Republican rear end in a top hat and you're ambitious enough.

idk. i feel like miller has bannons problem too that he is too obviously awful and visible and he makes an easy scapegoat for poo poo. like yeah miller will probably work at some super alt right think tank place. but the Romney/kasich types who will probably try to "reclaim" the party somewhat if trump loses will use miller as an obvious "look at this loving ghoul" type poo poo. its the fuckers like pompeo/barr/ratcliff who will keep worming their way around after trump falls.

# ¿ May 23, 2020 16:27

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

reading the whole ford thing. its interesting seeing the last shot of the GOP being socialy progressive or at least somewhat socially liberal. i always forget a sorta progressive wing of the GOP did exist after nixon and battle for the future of the party was happening for a bit before they were cast out by the evangelicals and reagan.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2020 00:26

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1266048518176641025.html?fbclid=IwAR3UVhj0a7oeEwiZHK_mAdyyEesjrCwD9AYnccNcpH3p7l0F4Bp_NjEhMc8

i found this today on my facebook. its a illustrated pamphlet made in japan about grant during his world tour. the assassination of lincoln looks like something out of the ideas of march or a Kurosawa film.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2020 18:28

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

DC Murderverse posted:

Anyone who's looking for more should listen to the first couple seasons of Slow Burn. I went through the entire show over the last week and learning a lot more about Watergate and Bill Clinton is a Scumbag-gate was very interesting.

it's also very funny because the second season (the Clinton one) is full of Republicans bloviating about the honor of the office of president and how Clinton besmirched it, which is real lol given the last 4 years (but also Bill Clinton is very much a scumbag)

yeah. i have listned to it too and its interesting as gently caress. anyway, a dark part of me is sometimes "relived" clinton imploded in 2016 when i read the hosed up poo poo about the clintons(the real stuff not the insane chud poo poo) because while the DNC will still kiss their rear end on some level(through cabinet picks and such) they are never gonna hold any full political power again. and they arnt exactly liked by younger progressives/leftists or even libs/independents. like i am happy that clinton was able to lead the DNC out of the wilderness it had been lost in since carter and earlier but it was a loving monkeys paw to some degree.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2020 04:38

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:46

Dapper_Swindler: Feb 14, 2012; Im glad my instant dislike in you has been validated again and again.

Ginger Beer Belly posted:

Extra History has recently put out a 5-part series on Teddy Roosevelt called "Teddy the Trustbuster". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reWe7POryt0

extra histories has gotten alot better in the last few years. its nice.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2021 20:05

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > President's Day Presidents Thread for Pontificating about Presidents