Grading Woodrow Wilson

"Like Roosevelt before him, Woodrow Wilson regarded himself as the personal representative of the people. 'No one but the President,' he said, 'seems to be expected ... to look out for the general interests of the country.' He developed a program of progressive reform and asserted international leadership in building a new world order. In 1917 he proclaimed American entrance into World War I a crusade to make the world 'safe for democracy.'"

About the Presidents, Whitehouse.gov

The White House website presents the received view on Woodrow Wilson that most of us learned in school. Woodrow Wilson, the story goes, was the professorial leader who looked out for the people of the United States as if they were his flock. He was a brilliant and elite son of a reverend, a man who made the world safe for democracy and attempted so spread American ideals throughout the world with the idealistic zeal of a preacher. Wilson won World War I, the story continues, and gave us the League of Nations in an attempt to ensure that there would never be another Great War. It is Woodrow Wilson that the mainstream Democratic Party seems to most wish to emulate. Barack Obama, with his Harvard law degree and his later experience teaching at Harvard Law School seems to resemble Wilson the academic more than any earlier American president. But is Woodrow Wilson a president that today's American leaders should wish to emulate? In what follows Woodrow Wilson will be evaluated and graded on the categories of foreign affairs, check and balance against legislative power, Supreme Court nominations, and constitutional restraint.

On foreign affairs, Woodrow Wilson's record was that of a warmonger dressed as an academic. Despite posing as a dove and promising the American people that he would keep the republic out of the Great War, he used the "big stick" of American military might whenever and wherever he could. His foreign misadventures made Theodore Roosevelt appear a dove in comparison. The most interventionist president in the history of the republic, Wilson even made George W. Bush seem a man of restraint in comparison.

George Washington, in his Farewell Address in 1796 presciently warned against the United States getting involved in foreign entanglements. Washington asked "Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?" Woodrow Wilson completely ignored this warning despite the fact that avoiding involvement in European politics and European wars had helped make the republic prosperous. Despite winning re-election in 1916 on the slogan "he kept us out of war," Wilson decided by 1915, two years prior to the American entry into the war, that the United States would not allow France and Great Britain to lose the Great War. The Central Powers -- Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria -- posed no threat to the United States. The trench warfare that had become the way the war was fought could not possibly effectively threaten a republic that lay an ocean away. As a result, the American people and the Congress wisely wanted no part of this European war for colonial domination. But Wilson did everything that he could do to draw the United States into this conflict. Despite the warnings of the German government that British merchant vessels carrying armaments were subject to attack, Wilson stated publicly that it was safe for American citizens to travel on such vessels. As warned, German U-boats sank the RMS Lusitania, killing 128 Americans. When even this did not encourage the Congress and the American people that entry into the European war was necessary, Wilson took further steps. Against the will of Congress, he armed U.S. merchant ships and shipped crucial war materials to England and France, despite the avowed neutrality of the republic. Germany had resumed unrestricted U-boat warfare in response, and sank seven of these merchant ships, precipitating the Congress to declare war in April of 1917. Continuing the trend started by McKinley in response to the Maine incident and continued by Franklin Roosevelt with Pearl Harbor, Lyndon Johnson with Gulf of Tonkin, and George W. Bush with 9/11, Woodrow Wilson did not let a crisis go to waste, even one which he had created through his own machinations.

If the new policy of American intervention in European wars and the over 116,000 American lives lost in World War I were not bad enough, Wilson's actions during and immediately following the war planted the seeds for nearly every foreign threat that has faced the republic since the end of World War I, threats which continue to affect the United States to this day. The United States entry into the war had broken what would have ultimately been a stalemate. This prolonging of the war led to the collapse of Russia and to the Bolshevik Revolution. Cold War? Thank Wilson for that. Wilson stood by as the European victors of the war divided up the German colonies and oppressed Germany with the Treaty of Versailles through the "war guilt" clause and through crippling reparations which would quickly destroy the German Weimar Republic and lead to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. World War II? Thank Wilson for that as well. World War I, rather than making the world safe for democracy, made it safe for imperialism. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire precipitated by the American entry into the war, England grabbed up Palestine and much of the rest of the Middle East as colonies. Wilson had championed the idea of "Self Determination" in his ineffectual "Fourteen Points." However, he ended up ignoring this when it came to Palestine, standing by as the British broke their promise to grant Palestinian Arabs independence in exchange for having helped fight against the Ottoman Empire. Instead, England seized Palestine as a colony and later granted part of Palestine to returning Jews, setting in motion the Arab-Israeli conflict which continues to tear up the Middle East to this day and which has ultimately led to three American wars (with more surely to come). Middle East tensions? Thank Wilson for helping to plant that seed as well.

Even with Wilson's machinations behind the scenes, America's entry into World War I was Constitutionally declared by the Congress. However, Wilson also used the American military numerous times in unconstitutional undeclared wars without the backing of Congress, setting a precedent which continues to haunt the republic. Wilson invaded Mexico (a total of eleven times), Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. The vast majority of these unnecessary and unconstitutional invasions were counterproductive, setting the stage for subsequent dictatorships rather than promoting the values of democracy and freedom. These unofficial wars also served no ascertainable national interests, but instead furthered the interests of large corporations. This is best exemplified by the famous quote of celebrated Marine General Smedley Butler: "I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the internal banking house of Brown Brothers .... I brought light to the D.R. for American sugar interests in 1916." 

 

Wilson's imprudent actions leading the republic into an overseas war in which it had no interest set a dangerous precedent involving European entanglements. The war and his actions in its aftermath created scores of problems which continue to haunt the United States to this day. His use of the military to carry out unnecessary and wars in Latin America for the purpose of securing corporate interests set another dangerous and unconstitutional policy. Woodrow Wilson receives a grade of F in the category of foreign affairs.

As president, Woodrow Wilson signed into law numerous unconstitutional pieces of legislation which had the effect of beginning its transformation from a free republic based on Constitutional principles to a Progressive nation that has gradually become something the Founders would not recognize.

On October 3, 1913, the Revenue Act of 1913 was ratified. While not unconstitutional given the imprudent passing of the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing for an income tax, the very act of using this power began the long decline of the United States into the post industrial neo-feudal society that it is nearing. An income tax is itself a form of slavery, as it allows the government to "steal" the fruits of a person's labor at the barrel of a gun. It then redistributes these ill gotten gains from those who earned them to cronies and to citizens whose votes politicians are attempting to "buy." At its inception, the republic raised revenues through land sales, user fees, and tariffs. Such a system was more voluntary and less a form of slavery as while one cannot refuse to work (unless one is already fortunate enough to be independently wealthy), one can avoid paying taxes against one's will for the most part under the earlier system. While the typical libertarian position is to oppose tariffs, the "free trade" that has resulted as income tax (and the Federal Reserve's illegal "inflation tax") has replaced tariffs as the method of raising federal revenue has led to the outsourcing that has de-industrialized the United States.

In December of 1913, Wilson signed into law the single worst piece of legislation in American history, signing the Federal Reserve Act into law and with it giving a private central bank the legal authority to issue legal tender. With one unconstitutional stroke of the pen he sold the entire republic and all of her citizens to a cabal of investment bankers. The economic recessions and depressions which the Federal Reserve has caused along with the destruction of the value of the American dollar which it has caused have put the republic on the brink of economic collapse. The Federal Reserve Act also gave the federal government an insidious method by which it could steal from its citizens in order to fund the welfare/warfare state without the citizens even being fully aware of it.

Wilson also signed into law legislation which began what would become "corporate welfare" to farmers and farm corporations. In 1916 he signed the Federal Farm Loan Act into law, creating regional Farm Loan Banks to serve members of Farm Loan Associations. While the act was meant to give smaller farms the ability to compete with larger ones, it continued and enlarged the dangerous precedent of "corporate welfare," a.k.a. government subsidies. Despite the Court's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland a century earlier, it is patently obvious under the Constitution that Congress does not have the power to charter banks. Another related piece of legislation passed under Wilson was the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Act of 1917, which provided federal funds to train people who were entering into agricultural work. In addition to being another example of corporate welfare to farmers, this act was an illicit use of the Spending Clause as it was not for the general welfare but only for a small group of fledgling farmers. Even worse, it got the federal government into the education business. The federal government's gradual domination of the funding of higher learning has made such education prohibitively expensive and has made more and more Americans into slaves with yokes of educational loans which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Wilson attempted to increase the grasp of federal regulators over American business by signing legislation which transformed the Commerce Clause into the leviathan of domination over Americans and American business that it has become. The Adamson Act of 1916 established an eight-hour workday and overtime pay for interstate railroad workers. While these railroads did engage in interstate commerce, workers are not commerce and hence are not constitutionally appropriate for regulation under that clause. Furthermore, this bill violated the right of autonomous workers and employers to voluntarily contract. Wilson furthered the efforts of Congress to reach even further beyond the contours that the Founders provided for the Commerce Clause by signing the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916, which prohibited the sale in interstate commerce of goods manufactured by children. While the proponents of the act in Congress pretended that its purpose was for the welfare of children, like most such legislation its purpose was just to eliminate cheaper labor to benefit labor unions. If anything, it hurt children from poor families by preventing the children from having the ability to earn money. It was also violative of the Tenth Amendment by usurping the police power of states. The Supreme Court wisely overturned the act as unconstitutional in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), holding that the Commerce Clause did not give the federal government "authority to control the states in their exercise of the police power over local trade and manufacture."

However, the most dangerous constitutional excesses of Congress that Wilson signed into law were acts that used the war as excuses to give the federal government totalitarian powers, beginning the long and sad American descent into fascism. The Food and Fuel Control Act became law on August 10, 1917 and gave the federal government the totalitarian powers to "Provide Further for the National Security and Defense by Encouraging the Production, Conserving the Supply, and Controlling the Distribution of Food Products and Fuel." It gave the president the vague power over nearly everything involved with "the production manufacture, procurement, storage, distribution, sale, marketing, pledging , financing, and consumption of necessaries which are declared to be affected with a public interest." Wilson used this power to control the prices of agricultural products, a power that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. Luckily, this unconstitutional legislation was gutted at the end of 1920 when Warren Harding was in office, but such wartime measures usually tend to remain in place long after a war has ended.

The Selective Service Act passed on May 18, 1917 made all American males aged 21 to 30 (and later amended to 18 to 30) into slaves of the federal government by requiring them to register for military service and to used at the whim of Wilson in his foreign misadventure in Europe. The Webb-Pomerene Act gave immunity to antitrust laws for companies that combined to operate and export trade that was deemed essential for the war effort. This bill furthered fascism, the partnership between government and business, by allowing corporations to gain monopolistic powers during the war at the expense of rival businesses and at the expense of the American people. However, the most fascistic of bills passed during Wilson's tenure was the Railway Control Act of March 1918. This act nationalized the republic's railroads and gave control of them to a newly created unconstitutional body called the United States Railroad Administration. While ostensibly a legitimate use of the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause, this legislation made all businesses potential targets for the overreach of the federal government during times of war.

Wilson allowed the Congress to gut the freedom of speech guaranteed under the First Amendment, again using the war effort and national security as the excuses. On May 16, 1918, Congress passed a law -- the Sedition Act -- which gave Wilson totalitarian powers to violate the natural right of freedom of speech in ways that made him an even greater totalitarian dictatorial powers than the Kaiser possessed in Germany at the time. This law forbade the use of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces or that caused other to view the American government with contempt. The freedom to criticize the government and its members was one of the most cherished freedoms that were won in the Revolutionary War, but Wilson and the Congress proved that the federal government can be all too willing to disregard natural rights guaranteed in the Constitution with the slightest justification, particularly when national defense could be used as an excuse. What part of "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" did Wilson and Congress not understand? Could the Founders have stated it any more clearly?

Wilson presided over a Congress that unconstitutionally sought fascistic control over business through the Commerce Clause, nationalized railroads, enslaved young American males in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibition against slavery and indentured servitude, and abridged the natural right of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. He took no steps to oppose these bills and instead used them as a means to make himself a virtual dictator. For this, Woodrow Wilson receives a grade of F in the category of check and balance against the legislature.

Woodrow Wilson appointed three members to the Supreme Court during his two terms in office -- James Clark McReynolds, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, and John Hessein Clarke.

James Clark McReynolds is most famous for having joined with Pierce Butler, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter to form what was dubbed "the Four Horsemen," a coalition within the Supreme Court which opposed the unconstitutional statist machinations of the New Deal during the Franklin Roosevelt administration. McReynolds served as Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson, earning a reputation as a strong enforcer of antitrust laws. McReynolds was confirmed to the Supreme Court on August 19, 1914. During his nearly three decades on the Court, McReynolds was a champion of natural rights and a critic of federal statism.

McReynolds was a champion of natural rights, writing that the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment included an individual's right "to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, to establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, and generally to enjoy privileges, essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." He authored landmark opinions in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) championing the natural right for parents to rear their children without unconstitutional government interference. Meyer overturned a conviction of a teacher who was convicted under a law forbidding the teaching of the German language to students above the ninth grade. Pierce overturned a law which made it illegal for parents to send their children to any schools other than public schools. McReynolds' Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence cleared the way for the Fourteenth Amendment to become a means by which the Ninth Amendment's recognition of traditional natural rights not enumerated in the Bill of Rights could find a place within Constitutional Law.

During the New Deal, McReynolds and the "Four Horsemen" provided a last bastion against the totalitarian statism of the New Deal. In United States v. Butler (1936) they were instrumental in voiding the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, a monstrous Congressional act which redistributed wealth from farmers to other farmers who would reduce the amount of crops they grew. This heinous use of the Commerce Clause to create an unconstitutional agency to increase the price of crops through a reduction of crops grown during the Great Depression was even more disgusting when it is remembered that many Americans were literally starving at that time. In Carter v. Carter Coal Company (1936), McReynolds and the Four Horsemen struck down legislation that regulated the coal industry, standing against an illicit enlargement of the powers of the Commerce Clause by holding that the clause did not allow for the regulation of industries which are local such as mining. In Morehead v. New York (1936), they struck down a New York minimum wage act for women and children, the purpose of which was an attempt to take an end run around the Constitution in order to exclude women and children from the workplace to prop up the wages of union workers. In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935) McReynolds and his compatriots also struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act, fascistic legislation which, against antitrust laws, permitted cartels and monopolies in an alleged effort to stimulate economic recovery. The Act also gave the government the power to control wages and prices as if it were a Stalinist central planning committee. In the case, the Court held unanimously that industrial "codes of fair competition" violated the separation of powers as an impermissible delegation of Congressional power to the executive branch. Just as importantly, the Court held that the Commerce Clause could not be used to regulate purely intrastate commerce.

However, McReynolds, though consistently a champion of natural rights and the Constitution, did deviate from that position at times. In Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, he voted with the majority holding that Minnesota's Moratorium Law, which allowed for modification of foreclosure terms in mortgages during the Great Depression was constitutional. This state law was a clear violation of the Contract Clause of the Constitution, which states that "no state shall ... pass any ... law impairing the obligation of contracts." The Constitution must be the law of the land during all times, whether times of prosperity or economic depressions. There will always be crises, and if the Constitution can be ignored during such crises, then it stands for nothing.

Even more egregious was McReynolds' opinion in the landmark Second Amendment case United States v. Miller (1939) in which a law outlawing sawed off shotguns was upheld because there was no evidence that such weapons had a reasonable relationship to a well regulated militia. While perhaps the holding itself was modest, the case came to be interpreted to stand for the proposition that the right to bear arms was a collective rather than individual right. This interpretation stood until the recent Heller and McDonald decisions which have begun to swing the jurisprudential pendulum swinging back in the proper constitutional direction. What precisely is so difficult to understand about "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed?"

Finally, McReynolds was not a champion of Fourth Amendment freedoms against unreasonable search as seizure as evidenced by his voting with the majority in Olmstead v. United States (1928) that the Fourth Amendment did not extend to wiretapping of phone conversations.

Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court on June 1, 1916 after a bitterly contested battle in the Senate. Brandeis became a champion of First Amendment rights as well as the natural right to privacy. On economic freedoms, Brandeis was initially an advocate of Constitutional freedom against the New Deal, publicly opposing Franklin Roosevelt's extortionist threat to pack the court in order to salvage his struggling statist New Deal schemes. However, Brandeis eventually became a statist supporter of the New Deal.

In Gilbert v. Minnesota (1920) Brandeis dissented against the Court's decision to uphold a law prohibiting any interference with military enlistment efforts. He wrote that the statute affected the "rights, privileges, and immunities of one who is a citizen of the United States; and it deprives him of an important part of his liberty ... the statute invades the privacy and freedom of the home. Father and mother may not follow the promptings of religious belief, of conscience, of conviction and teach son or daughter the doctrine of pacifism. If they do, any police officer may summarily arrest them." In Whitney v. California (1927), Brandeis joined with Holmes on a concurring opinion in which he argued forcefully that no speech could be viewed as creating a "clear and present danger" if there is time for discussion. He also argued that mere unpopularity does not make an idea dangerous under the First Amendment.

Brandeis anticipated the Court's later recognition of the natural right to privacy against government surveillance (finally codified in 1967 in Katz v. United States) in his dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928), where he argued against the holding that the Fourth Amendment prohibition did not extend to wiretaps, Brandeis pointed out that at the time of the Founders, only force and violence were potential methods by which forced confessions could be extracted but that technology had increased such methods. He contended that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments were meant to provide protection from all threats to such liberties and not just those imaginable at the time they were written.

However, both Brandeis and McReynolds voted with the majority in the horrific decision in Buck v. Bell (1927), which upheld a eugenicist Virginia law that called for the compulsory sterilization of all mentally retarded persons. Thus, neither justice thought that the right to privacy of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to those less intelligent than they were. A large black mark against both men as well as a cautionary tale of the dangers of eugenics based thinking.

Brandeis initially correctly opposed the machinery of the New Deal, seeing it for the unconstitutional statism that it was. In Louisville v. Radford (1935), he wrote the majority opinion, writing for the unanimous Court that the Frazier-Lemke Act, which prevented banks from foreclosing on their property for five years on farmers, was a violation of the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause in that it took private property without compensation. Brandeis also voted with the unanimous Court in Schechter as described above. However, he voted with the Progressive wing of the Court in favor of upholding nearly every other piece of New Deal legislation, supporting the erosion of economic rights and the creation of the welfare state which has bankrupted the republic in subsequent decades.

John Hessein Clarke was confirmed to the Supreme Court on July 24, 1916. In his brief six years on the Court, Clarke consistently voted in favor of expanding the virulent tentacles of government regulation. In famous dissents in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) and Bailey v. Drexel (1922), he argued that the federal government may, by using the Commerce Clause and the Spending Clause, regulate child labor in the states.

Clarke typically voted with his more liberal colleagues such as Brandeis and Holmes in support of the First Amendment. However, he voted with the majority in Abrams v. United States (1918), contending that during times of war, the freedom of speech may be abridged ever where a "clear and present" danger of violence did not exist. Anyone can champion natural rights during times of calm prosperity. However, a person's true view on the Constitution is best determined during times of crisis. Therefore, here Clarke showed his true colors as a jurist who did not truly believe in the freedom of speech. Clarke's greatest contribution to Constitutional freedom was resigning and making room for the nomination of George Sutherland, who was much more a champion of Constitutional freedoms.

Woodrow Wilson's three Supreme Court nominees represented a wide spectrum of views. McReynolds supported economic natural rights and typically supported natural civil liberties. Brandeis supported the natural right to freedom of speech and privacy but did not support natural economic rights. Clarke was hostile to natural rights of all kinds during his brief tenure on the Court. Based on the legacy that these three justices represent, Wilson receives a grade of C+ in the category of Supreme Court nominations.

Woodrow Wilson said of the Constitution that it "is not a mere lawyer's document: it is a vehicle of life and its spirit is always the spirit of the age." In other words, Wilson viewed the Constitution not as a concrete standard but as a nebulous rule of thumb to be interpreted relativistically. Wilson consistently ignored the Constitution where it suited his purposes and twisted it where it suited his purposes.

Wilson showed no Constitutional restraint where use of the military was involved, abusing his powers as Commander in Chief and carrying out corporatist wars in Latin America without Congressional declaration of war. Only Congress has the power to declare war under Article I of the Constitution. The Prize Cases (1863) gave the president the power to immediately use military force to resist invasion by a foreign nation, however no such immediate threat emanated from the Latin American countries that he so often invaded during his regime.

Wilson also overstepped his Constitutional bounds by setting up a propaganda arm of the executive branch, the Committee on Public Information. This propaganda machine, which was purportedly used as inspiration by Nazi Joseph Goebbels, used propaganda and disinformation to stoke support of the American citizenry for World War I. Nowhere in the Constitution does it state that the president has the power to use such propaganda against the people. Furthermore, such propaganda is not necessary for the president to use the powers of Commander in Chief. Given that it is Congress, who are elected by the people, which has the power to declare war, it is of the utmost importance that the people have access to the truth concerning war rather than being exposed to Big Brother style propaganda. Just as the president does not have the Constitutional power to declare war against foreign powers, he also does not have the power to declare a psychological "information war" against the people of the republic by dubbing the Germans "evil Huns" when in fact Germans at the time possessed more rights than Wilson's English allies and the German Kaiser possessed less dictatorial power than Wilson himself had unconstitutionally grabbed.

Wilson used the unconstitutional Sedition Act of 1918 and Espionage Act to crack down on natural rights at every turn, turning the republic into a police state against which even the Patriot Act police state of George W. Bush and Barack Obama pales. He arrested and convicted thousands of socialists for opposing World War I. He used the Post Office to censor telephone and telegram traffic. In a turn of events that shocks, Wilson had filmmaker Robert Goldstein thrown in prison for making the patriotic silent film The Spirit of '76, a silent film which had the audacity to show Wilson's World War I British allies in an unflattering light. While the British atrocities depicted in the film were most certainly fanciful, Wilson created a climate in which no cherished freedom of speech was safe.

Two years after the end of World War I, Wilson vetoed an attempt by Congress to repeal the Sedition and Espionage Acts. Even if such laws were constitutionally justified by war, continuing such a statist power grab after the cessation of hostilities is clearly an extreme overstepping of constitutional bounds.

Wilson was a vehement racist, and used this motivation to violate the Constitution. Upon taking office he fired most blacks within the federal government. He also re-segregated the navy, allowed his cabinet to attempt to impose strict segregation in federal administrative agencies, supported Jim Crow Laws and the Ku Klux Klan, and attempted to coax Congress to pass legislation to restrict the civil liberties of blacks. Thus, Wilson did not show the Constitutional restraint to obey the Thirteenth Amendment, which was interpreted in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) to apply to "the badges and incidents of slavery," which Wilson's aforementioned actions invoked.

Wilson was also a misogynist, having female suffragettes arrested on dubious pretenses. Yet paradoxically, he supposedly allowed his wife to make executive decisions during the period that he was infirm following a stroke. If this is at all true and not just an apocryphal tale, then it is yet another egregious violation of the Constitution in letting an unelected person perform such functions.

Wilson did not demonstrate one iota of restraint in overstepping the bounds of the Constitution. Therefore, in the category of constitutional restraint, Woodrow Wilson receives a grade of F.

Woodrow Wilson's eight years in office marked a period of needless war, unconstitutional unofficial "wars," unconstitutional legislation which he did not oppose, unconstitutional violations of civil liberties, and most alarmingly, the creation of the Federal Reserve, which has been the most virulent disease that the United States has ever faced, destroying the value of its currency, impoverishing its citizens, and creating economic busts which threaten to cause total collapse. He receives grades of F on foreign policy, check and balance against the legislature, and constitutional restraint. He receives a grade of C+ in the category of Supreme Court nominations. However, even the contributions that McReynolds made to the defense of economic freedoms and the contributions that Brandeis made to the defense of the First Amendment cannot erase how bad a president Woodrow Wilson was. He was the worst American president.