Axis of Evil: America’s Three Worst Presidents

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Thomas J. DiLorenzo
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The Siena College Research Institute, the American Political Science Association, and C-SPAN all publish rankings of American presidents by “mainstream” historians, political scientists, and other “presidential experts.” Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt usually alternate in first and second place, but occasionally George Washington will come in second. In the past several years, Donald Trump has been ranked dead last in all of them while Joe Biden has ranked a respectable 13 or 14, demonstrating once again the gross left-wing bias in academe.

For years Woodrow Wilson enjoyed a very high ranking, sixth in Sienna’s 1982 ranking, for example. More recently he slipped to the 13–14 range after the “presidential experts” apparently discovered that he resegregated the US military.

In his book Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty Ivan Eland ranked presidents according to how well they protected life, liberty, and property. His number one ranking went to John Tyler, the Jeffersonian vice president from Virginia who became president when President William Henry Harrison suddenly died in 1841. Naturally, Tyler is ranked near the bottom by the “mainstream” presidential experts, as are other more freedom-friendly presidents such as Grover Cleveland and Martin Van Buren. Most Americans today have probably never heard of John Tyler.

In reality Lincoln, FDR, and Wilson were by far America’s worst presidents because of their shared penchant for dictatorship, corruption, lawlessness, attacking constitutional liberties, warmongering, and imprisoning dissenters and political opponents, as well as for socialism, economic fascism, and lame-brained government interventionism.

Lincoln

Lincoln destroyed the voluntary union of the Founding Fathers and replaced it with a union held together by war and the mass murder of Southern civilians (at least fifty thousand according to Princeton historian James McPherson), turning it into something resembling the old Soviet Union more than the original American union.

The uniquely American system of federalism was destroyed along with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution and the states’ rights of nullification and secession, and Americans became the servants rather than the masters of their own government. Government’s “just powers” didn’t come from the consent of the governed, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, but from the barrel of a gun. At least that was Lincoln’s thinking.

Lincoln waged war on Southern civilians for four long years, ordering the bombing and burning of American cities to the ground and rewarding the commanding generals of his armies of plundering, raping, and murdering arsonists with promotions and glory. The population of the South was around nine million at the beginning of the war. Scaling the death toll for today’s US population, McPherson’s estimates of the war’s fifty thousand civilian deaths are the equivalent of 1.9 million civilians being killed by the US government in just four years. And coming from Lincoln cultist James McPherson, the fifty-thousand figure is bound to be an underestimate.

Reading books like War Crimes against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco, which is based on the US government publication The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, one learns how more than twenty-two thousand artillery shells exploded during the six-month bombardment of civilian-occupied Charleston, and that unexploded shells are still being discovered more than a century later. Then there is William Sherman’s four-day bombardment of Atlanta, with as many as five thousand artillery shells exploding in a single day, when only women, children, and elderly men remained in the city. Thousands of survivors were rendered homeless at the onset of winter. Lincoln’s favorite general called the corpses of women and children lying in the streets “a beautiful sight.”

Lincoln’s first inaugural address should be known as his “Slavery Forever” speech. He started out announcing that he had no intention of disturbing slavery, that he never had any such intention, that this was clearly stated in the 1860 Republican Party platform, and that it would have been unconstitutional do to so anyway. He then expressed his strong support for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which compelled Northerners to capture runaway slaves (and which was strongly enforced in Washington, DC, during his presidency).

Near the end of his first inaugural address Lincoln declared his support for the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which would prohibit the government from ever interfering with Southern slavery and which had just passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate. He said he considered slavery to be constitutional and had no objection to its being made “express and irrevocable” in the text of the Constitution. The amendment was named after Ohio congressman Thomas Corwin, but in fact it came from Lincoln himself. Using original sources, Doris Kearns Goodwin showed in her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln that before the inauguration Lincoln had instructed Senator William Seward to get the amendment through the Senate, which he did. In his inaugural address Lincoln lied about never having actually seen the amendment. This was an amendment to enshrine slavery in the Constitution, passed by his own party, which he was the leader of, and ratified by his home state, and he claimed ignorance of it. The amendment was ratified by Illinois, Rhode Island, Ohio, and “border states” Kentucky and Maryland, which were under Union Army occupation and control at the time.

In the same speech Lincoln used the words “invasion” and “bloodshed” as promises of what would occur in any state that refused to collect the federal tariff on imports, which had been more than doubled just two days earlier. At the time more than 90 percent of federal tax revenue was from tariff collection. The Confederate states did not intend to send tax revenue to Washington, DC, any more than they intended to send it to London or Paris. Lincoln followed through with his threat and invaded his own country over tax collection.

For over a hundred years the death toll of the “Civil” War was said to be 620,000, but recent forensic research has revised the number to as much as 850,000, with more than double that number wounded. In terms of today’s population, that is almost nine million deaths in less than four years, all over tax collection according to Lincoln himself.

In April of 1861 Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ordered the military to arrest and imprison tens of thousands of Northern civilians without due process merely for criticizing him and his war policies. Treason is defined in article 3, section 3, of the Constitution as “only . . . levying war upon the United States” or “giving aid and comfort to their enemies” (emphasis added). The word “their” is all important here, as it refers to the United States in the plural, meaning the individual, “free, and independent states,” as they are called in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln levied war upon the Southern states and was therefore guilty of treason, along with the entire high command of his Union Army. He took it upon himself, dictator style, to legally redefine treason to mean any criticism of him.

There were great protests over all this tyranny and death, so Lincoln shut down over three hundred opposition newspapers and had many owners and editors imprisoned. Included among them was the grandson of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” who was a Baltimore newspaper editor who had editorialized against the illegal suspension of habeas corpus.

The slaves were used as pawns in a war that had nothing to do with them according to the 1861 War Aims Resolution of the US Congress (the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution), which announced to the world that the purpose of the war was supposedly to save the union and not to disturb “the established institutions of those states” that had seceded, by which they meant slavery. As Jim Powell points out in Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery, all the rest of the world—including New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other Northern states—ended slavery peacefully during the nineteenth century, something that Lincoln never seriously considered doing.

Instead, Lincoln was a lifelong advocate of “colonization,” a euphemism for shipping all the black people out of America. Whenever he did talk about emancipation, it was always coupled with colonization. He was a manager of the Illinois State Colonization Society, which sought to use tax dollars to deport the few free blacks who resided in the state. In Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page note that to his dying day, Lincoln and his Cabinet members worked diligently to calculate how many ships it would take to deport all the freed slaves while negotiating land purchases with other countries for that purpose.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was as phony as a three-dollar bill, and the whole world knew it. It specifically exempted all areas of the US where the Union Army was in control and could have freed slaves. This included the entire state of West Virginia, which became the last slave state to enter the Union when the Lincoln administration orchestrated its secession from Virginia and began running the government from Alexandria, Virginia. It also specifically exempted every parish in Louisiana, where the Union Army was in control, and announced that the proclamation would become defunct the minute the Southern states returned to the Union as American taxpayers.

On economic policy Lincoln was a corrupt advocate of Hamiltonian crony capitalism. When he announced his entry into politics in 1832 he said his purpose was to push for protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for the railroad and canal-building corporations, and the resurrection of a central bank that would subsidize it all (Thomas Jefferson described such a bank as “a permanent engine of corruption”). This was always Lincoln’s main agenda, and he succeeded in imposing most of it on America. He raised tariffs ten times, raising the average tariff rate to nearly 60 percent, where it remained until the federal income tax was adopted in 1913. His 1862 Pacific Railway Act opened the door to corporate welfare, rent seeking, more-blatant cronyism, and the corruption and criminality of the Grant administration with its Crédit Mobilier scandal.

Lincoln signed America’s first military conscription law, which came into effect in 1863 after hundreds of thousands of Northern men had deserted the US Army, including ninety thousand on the eve of the Battle of Antietam according to Ella Lonn in Desertion during the Civil War. To enforce conscription Lincoln ordered the execution of deserters by firing squad. American soldiers were forced to watch their friends and colleagues shot dead and shoved into predug graves on a weekly basis. When there were draft riots in New York City in early July 1863 Lincoln sent in fifteen thousand troops from the recently concluded Battle of Gettysburg. They shot into the crowds, murdering hundreds of draft protesters and giving the rest of the country a lesson in obedience. To the thousands of draftees who died in the war, conscription was worse than slavery, as it robbed them of life itself.

The “Great Emancipator” was not so great at emancipating. To advance his political career, he married into a wealthy Kentucky slaveholding planter family, the Todds, who were closely connected to Henry Clay, the leader of the Whig Party, Lincoln’s original party. Lincoln claimed that Clay was the inspiration for all of his political ideas and called him “the beau ideal of a statesman” in his 1852 eulogy to Clay delivered in Springfield, Illinois.

When Lincoln’s wife inherited her family’s slaves, they became her husband’s property by law. Lincoln sold the slaves instead of freeing them (see The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed by Kevin Orlin Johnson). (Robert E. Lee’s wife, a descendant of Martha Washington, also inherited slaves, and General Lee freed them in accordance with his father-in-law’s will).

Wilson

Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 reelection campaign slogan was “He Kept Us Out of War.” Three months after Inauguration Day he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. The slogan implied that he would continue to keep America out of war, but of course he lied. The US entered World War I in 1917, and the result was 116,516 Americans dead and 320,000 wounded. All the soldiers who saw combat were psychologically damaged as well, as are all soldiers in all wars. All this over a war that had nothing whatsoever to do with defending anyone or anything in America. Wilson’s war and the Versailles Treaty then led to Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin.

Germany wanted peace talks in 1916, but the belligerent British refused to have a conversation once the US entered the war. The war could have ended right then and there. Instead, Germany was demonized and said to be a threat to world democracy, which apparently is why Wilson claimed that the war’s goal was to “save” democracy. However, Germany at the time had freedom of the press, including criticism of the kaiser; a broader voting franchise than England’s; rule of law; and due process. And the kaiser had fewer executive powers than the American president did.

Wilson was essentially playing God when he once bloviated that “there will come sometime . . . another struggle in which, not a few hundred thousand fine men from America will have to die, but many millions . . . to accomplish the final freedom of the peoples of the world.” Millions of American men would have to die, but not a hair on Woodrow Wilson’s head was to be disturbed.

Wilson bribed the Russian Provisional Government with American tax dollars to enter the war. The result was some four hundred thousand dead Russians. The Bolsheviks were the only antiwar party in Russia, and that gave the communists a tremendous political boost, so much so that Lenin once said, “Our revolution was born of the war.” Well done, Woodrow.

In his famous 1931 speech, “War Is a Racket,” Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine in US history, explained how he had spent his career not defending his own country but essentially making parts of the world safe for American corporations to profit and plunder. “War is a racket” and “always has been,” said General Butler. Wilson himself was a world-class racketeer, having ordered invasions of Mexico (eleven times!), Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Panama.

Wilson imposed what is known as war socialism on Americans by nationalizing myriad industries. His 1916 National Defense Act gave him the power to order corporations to produce military products under threat of felony conviction. The 1916 Army Appropriations Act gave him power to seize private property and led to the government takeover of the railroad industry. This was pure socialism. His War Industries Board engaged in full-fledged central planning of the entire economy, Soviet style. American socialist intellectuals were ecstatic, hoping that war socialism could morph into peacetime socialism once the war was ended.

Military conscription was again imposed in 1917 along with an espionage act that established a twenty-year prison term for “interfering” with conscription, which meant criticizing Wilson and his war. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was given a ten-year prison sentence and stripped of American citizenship for publicly criticizing the Espionage Act. Others received twenty-year sentences. All telephone and telegraph communications were censored during the war, and thousands were imprisoned for publicly opposing the war, Lincoln style. And the Germans were said to be the dire threat to democracy! Wilson responded to Ku Klux Klan violence in New Jersey, Ohio, and the Midwest (not Alabama and Mississippi) by having the FBI spy not on the KKK but on the black people in those areas. And of course he resegregated the military.

Some 2.8 million men were subjected to the slavery of conscription. Although the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude, a corrupt and politicized Supreme Court (is there any other kind?) ruled that the slavery of conscription was “necessary and proper” because Woodrow Wilson said so.

Lincoln could do little about the massive desertions of hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers during the Civil War apart from ordering some of them to be publicly executed. Now, armed with the income tax and the legalized counterfeiting of the Fed, the government could easily create a vast bureaucracy to enforce conscription—and virtually anything else.

To finance Wilson’s war, Congress increased the top tax rate of the new federal income tax from 7 percent on incomes of $500,000 or more in 1913 to 73 percent on incomes of $200,000 or more by 1920. Wilson’s 1912 “New Freedom” agenda included support for income taxation, the creation of a central bank, alcohol prohibition, and the Seventeenth Amendment, which would replace the appointment of US senators by state legislatures—a last vestige of American federalism—with direct elections.

The founders established a system of appointments for the US Senate so that the people of the states could have some degree of direct control over their senators. If a senator promised one thing and then voted the opposite way, he could be recalled and replaced immediately. With direct elections a newly elected senator who did that would have six years to collect “campaign contributions” from out-of-state lobbyists that would virtually guarantee his reelection. That is exactly what has happened.

FDR

FDR brought economic fascism to America with his 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act and his 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act. His harebrained theory behind the two massive bureaucracies created by this legislation was that having the government force up prices with price floors would increase business and farm incomes. Price cutting was made illegal by the government’s “price codes,” and FDR predecessor Herbert Hoover’s policies of forcing farmers to grow fewer crops and raise less livestock (presumably to reduce the food supply and increase food prices and farm incomes) and of paying them to produce less were greatly expanded. Making food more scarce and more expensive during the Great Depression was perhaps the most idiotic and cruel thing FDR could have possibly done. It exacerbated unemployment as well, since it was all essentially a gigantic, government-run scheme to force monopolistic pricing in virtually every industry by restricting production. The National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were both ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935, in what was probably the last sane Supreme Court ruling on an economic topic for the next six decades.

Unemployment was further exacerbated by “New Deal” policies that increased the price of labor at a time when only lower labor costs would increase employment. These policies included payroll taxes for Social Security and unemployment insurance, minimum wage laws, and laws that empowered unions over employers. In their book Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway conclude that such policies made the unemployment rate 8–10 percentage points higher than it would have been otherwise, making the Great Depression both more severe and longer lasting.

In his book Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor World War II veteran and career journalist Robert Stinnett shows that FDR provoked the Japanese government to invade Pearl Harbor by doing such things as using naval power to cut off Japan’s oil supply (Japan has no domestic oil source). We now know that the US had broken the Japanese naval code before Pearl Harbor, and we also know that the Japanese fleet did not maintain radio silence on its way to Pearl Harbor. FDR knew the attack was imminent but did not inform his naval commanders.

As is the habit of the US politicians, FDR waged attacks on civil liberties, including “interning” thousands of Japanese Americans in concentration camps for the duration of World War II. His friends in the US Senate launched government investigations of critics of the New Deal, and his friend Senator Hugo Black (“FDR’s favorite Ku Klux Klansman” according to Brion McClanahan) demanded the release of millions of private telegrams in an attempt to intimidate Republican donors, which turned out to be quite successful.

Senator Sherman Minton proposed a bill to outlaw “false news” about the government, similar to Hillary Clinton’s 2024 proposal to imprison the spreaders of “false information” on the internet. In both cases, the government itself would decide what was false. The Federal Communications Commission turned the entire radio industry into FDR flunkies by threatening to withdraw the licenses of FDR critics, and it barred newspapers critical of the war from using the United States Postal Service, which is how many papers were still being delivered.

FDR was a fascist on economic policy, an enemy of civil liberties, and a coldhearted warmonger who befriended the likes of Stalin. His New Deal policies made the Great Depression much worse. The unemployment rate, which was 3.2 percent in 1929, was 17.2 percent in 1939, when his policies had been in effect for years. Americans’ standard of living declined further after the US entered World War II in 1941, since so many resources were diverted from consumer to military uses. Drafting millions of men did not end the Great Depression. It only removed all of them from their homes, jobs, and families and sent them overseas. The Depression did not end until 1945, when the war was ended, the military was demobilized, FDR was gone, the more radical New Dealers were muzzled, and the federal budget was reduced by two-thirds (until 1948).

The next time you see one of those “mainstream” rankings of American presidents, turn it upside down. You will get a clearer picture of reality.