Woodrow Wilson: The More We Know About the History of the Democratic Party, the Sicker They Look

I was taught early on by family members who survived the NY Times on Divisions in the Democratic Party

Woodrow Wilson

depression that the Democratic Party was better for working people than the Republicans. They loved FDR. But the more I learn FDR looks like an anomaly. After all, they were often viewed as the party of slavery -- note some interesting history I posted yesterday about party history preceding the civil war in the very first NY Times Magazine piece in 1896 when the party was also undergoing divisions:

When you think of it, the Dems didn't hold power from Lincoln through FDR in 1932 other than Woodrow Wilson 1912 -20  Grover Cleveland who was elected to two separate terms. But he was no progressive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland)

But what I want to talk about is the increasingly awful Woodrow Wilson, a man of supposedly high ideals but low in every other way. I'm watching the wonderful 3 part series on PBS on the Great War and Wilson is flat out a dog. A major racist who brought Jim Crow to Washington that lasted through the 1960s. He also dragged us into WWI and is the architect in many ways of us being the policemen of the world - a high level interventionist and globalist view. Until Wilson we mostly intervened in our own hemisphere - except for the 1898 war with Spain.

Imagine Wilson's making the world safe for democracy slogan while destroying democracy at home by having even people like Eugene Debs arrested for opposing the war. When you think about how people frame Trump as being an authoritatian threat to democracy, Wilson makes Trump look like a pussycat.

Now I say all of the above from the perspective of someone with a BA in history and 30 grad credits in history. So why do I feel I only recently have been getting a different view of Wilson that I had for decades? Maybe it was the way history was presented to us in school. A liberal and neo-liberal view that made Wilson look like a tragic hero instead of the dog he was.