The Progressive Era! Three presidents, one accidental and nominally Republican who did a VERY good job, one Republican (and the first one's hand-picked successor) who was more prudent than Progressive and, as we later found out, used the Presidency as a stepping-stone to the Supreme Court, and one Democrat. Why am I writing about the Democrat? Because he presents more problems than either the Democratic Governor of New York who preceded him (whose term ended sixteen years before this Democrat took office) or the one who followed him (after twelve years of disastrous Republican rule). Today, we're discussing Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of these United States.
(Edmund Tarbell, 1921, from photographs, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)
My apologies, because it's substantially longer than my usual diaries in this series, but when you're finished you'll be able to come to your own conclusions (this is for you, FloridaSNMom). Complex, idealistic man, but a man of the late 1890s/early 1900s.
A brief sketch of Thomas Woodrow Wilson's life before he became president, from the Nobel Prize Committee (Yes, he won the Peace Prize in 1919 for his Fourteen Points, just as Theodore Roosevelt won it in 1906 for brokering the end of the Russo-Japanese War.):
Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856-February 3, 1924) was born in Staunton, Virginia, to parents of a predominantly Scottish heritage. Since his father was a Presbyterian minister and his mother the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow was raised in a pious and academic household. He spent a year at Davidson College in North Carolina and three at Princeton University where he received a baccalaureate degree in 1879.
After graduating from the Law School of the University of Virginia*, he practiced law for a year in Atlanta, Georgia, but it was a feeble practice. He entered graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1883 and three years later received the doctorate. In 1885 he published Congressional Government, a splendid piece of scholarship which analyzes the difficulties arising from the separation of the legislative and executive powers in the American Constitution. . . He was enormously successful as a lecturer and productive as a scholar [at Bryn Mawr, at Wesleyan and at Princeton].
As president of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, Wilson became widely known for his ideas on reforming education. In pursuit of his idealized intellectual life for democratically chosen students, he wanted to change the admission system, the pedagogical system, the social system, even the architectural layout of the campus. But Wilson was a thinker who needed to act. So he entered politics and as governor of the State of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913 distinguished himself once again as a reformer.
He was elected President in an unusual race in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt ran as the representative of the Progressive Party, and both Roosevelt and Wilson received more votes than the incumbent President, Taft.
To his credit, Wilson opened a new chapter in modern presidency. He was the first since John Adams to appear before Congress in person, the first to hold regular press conferences, and the last to write his own speeches. He was also particularly successful at implementing his legislative program, as Democrats now controlled both houses of Congress, and his legislative program represented measures associated with progressive reform.
Domestic Policy
First, he signed the Underwood-Simmons Tariff, which, when it was enacted in October 1913, was the first downward revision of tariffs since the Civil War. This was made possible by the Sixteenth Amendment which introduced a moderate but graduated income tax, which the Senate adopted in 1912 without a single dissent, and the House by a vote of 318-14, and ratified a year later, in February 1913. The amendment was made necessary by Pollak v. Farmers Loan & Trust Company which in 1895 struck down an income tax enacted in 1894 on the grounds it was unconstitutional and void because not apportioned according to representation" under Article I, Section 9.
This was followed in December by a complete restructuring of the banking and currency system in the Federal Reserve Act. This Act replaced a relatively inflexible system with a bank that could issue currency based on total assets. IT was intended to abolish depressions by issuing more currency in troubled times and retiring it in inflationary times. This helped curb Wall Street’s domination over the nation’s finances, balanced the needs of small and large banks by establishing 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, and, through the creation of the Federal Reserve Board, imposed federal supervision over the whole complex.
In antitrust, Wilson effected a merger of TR’s New Nationalism and his own New Freedom. In the fall of 1914, he signed the Clayton Act, this outlawed specific practices deemed to restrain trade like price discrimination or combinations for controlling the market for a particular product – organized labor and farmers liked it because it exempted labor and farmer organizations, but it included no provisions circumventing the Supreme Court’s reluctance to regulate manufacturing
Then, upon the urging of progressives, Wilson endorsed the creation of a regulatory agency which could exercise continuous governmental supervisory authority over big business by the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914.
Nobel Peace Prize! All these Progressive achievements. Why am I writing about Wilson? What did he do to annoy me during my lectures? Well, Wilson’s earliest supporters were southerners who lived in North, and he appointed several white Southerners to his cabinet. Wilson had stated the South was the only place he felt nothing had to be explained to him. In fact, he screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House and endorsed its view of Reconstruction as “history written with lightning”
He raised no objection when Postmaster General Albert Burleson expanded segregation in the federal government, and he also allowed Treasury to be segregated. When he he came under extreme pressure from African American leaders and from the northern liberal press, in late 1914, he quickly blamed his subordinates (it was THEIR fault). Wilson defended this to the brand new NAACP by saying he
honestly thought segregation to be in the interest of the colored people
He later later claimed that this hadn't been discrimination on race lines but a function of social cleavages. So discrimination by
social class is fine. Just wonderful.
Wilson also blocked a bill to establish system long-term rural credits that would have made low-interest mortgages available to farmers. He refused to support a child-labor bill that he considered unconstitutional interference in conduct private business, and, believing that states had the right to define their electorate, he withheld support from a federal amendment permitting women to vote (if women could vote, then there was a danger someone might want to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments in the South).
Foreign Policy - First Term
Meanwhile, the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had set off a great war involving all the European powers, who were linked together by treaties that made it impossible to negotiate a peace. Wilson didn't do foreign policy very well either, at least at first. The United States declared its neutrality almost immediately, but American commerce didn’t immediately stop dealing with Europe, which caused problems, as international law gave belligerents fighting a war certain rights with regard to neutral trade. In other words, neutrality didn’t spare us from becoming part of the conflict
Latin America
It's not exactly that we had been avoiding conflict either because Wilson was involved in several interventions in Latin America during his first term. In México, the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, which had lasted for 35 years, had been overthrown in 1910. Francesco Madero promised democratic reform, but he appeared hostile to American businesses in México, and Taft was all set to recognize the Madero government when Victoriano Huerta’s forces murdered him, and Huerta, with the encouragement of American business interests, established a full military dictatorship in 1913. Wilson thought Mexican people deserved better and withheld formal recognition of the post-Diaz government until a more democratically elected leader emerged
In the spring of 1914, American troops landed in and occupied the Gulf of Mexico port Vera Cruz in retaliation against the arrest of American sailors in Tampico, and people died on both sides of the skirmish. This was meant to secure Huerta’s resignation, which eventually happened but not until even Huerta’s opponents denounced the American intervention. THEN Wilson decided he was unhappy with the new provisional president, Venustiano Carranza, whose faction had caused Huerta to flee the country. Realizing he couldn’t control Carranza, Wilson considered supporting Pancho Villa until Villa’s military position within México collapsed. Villa, thinking Wilson had betrayed him, sent troops into New Mexico early in 1916, and Wilson, with Carranza’s permission, sent troops into Mexico in search of Villa. There was even talk of war between the two countries, but neither side wanted this. Wilson finally withdrew American troops from México March 1917
Wilson also sent expeditions to both Haiti (1915) and the Dominican Republic (1916) to “save” both countries from political disorder in which politicians assassinated each other and ordinary people were helpless to stop this. These interventions were intended to “teach” these people “how to elect good men” and American Marines and naval forces supervised elections, maintained order, and in the case of the Dominican Republic, took over cabinet posts in both countries. Troops were withdrawn from the Dominican Republic in 1924 (by Calvin Coolidge), and from Haiti in 1934 (by FDR).
World War I
Meanwhile, with regard to the Great War, Wilson declared on a number of occasions that the nation MUST maintain its neutrality in thought and behavior, because it was strictly a European affair involving disputes over matters of territory and sovereignty in which the United States was not concerned. Of course, it was obvious Wilson favored Britain. Who didn't? Americans with sympathy for the German cause (8,250,000 German-Americans) or opposition to the British (4,500,000 Irish-Americans). Eastern European Jews distrusted the fact that fact Russia was among the allies opposing Germany. These ethnic groups, realizing that most other Americans saw Britain as their mother country and as a sister Anglo-Saxon democracy, tried to keep the United States neutral. In early November 1915 Wilson called for preparedness “not for war, but only for defense;” remarks in December called for bigger armed forces and criticized immigrants who expressed “alien sympathies” and who poured
the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.
With regard to these ethnic groups, Theodore Roosevelt told a meeting of the Knights of Columbus that
the only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
Wilson stated that
any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic.
He acceded to demands that any immigrant who had failed to learn English after living in the United States for five years be deported, and went on to say
America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American.
Assertion of American neutral rights increasingly involved Germany, and in May 1915 the
Lusitania, British ocean liner with American travelers aboard, sunk by a U-Boat, killing everyone on board including 128 Americans. Wilson lodged a stiff protest, holding Germany accountable for any further loss of American lives, and accusing Germany of infringement of the rights as a neutral the United States had. Berlin quickly expressed regret but William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’s secretary of state, resigned in protest over what he saw as the harsh tone of Wilson’s remarks to Germany. Many Americans agreed with Bryan that, while the loss of American lives on a British liner was regrettable, it was equally deplorable that Britain’s naval blockade of Germany was an effort to starve an entire nation.
It became increasingly important to persuade Americans of the fact that the United States, even as a nonbelligerent, was playing an increasingly vital role in this European war and American actions would have serious implications for the outcome. As it happens, the War turned United States into strongest economic power in the world as a creditor nation. American ships even carried the products of some of the belligerent nations to Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. It was obviously necessary that global economic transactions NOT be disrupted even if the war was going on
Campaign of 1916
The Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, like Teddy Roosevelt, had been governor of New York (1907–10), where he brought about the establishment of the public service commission, the passage of various insurance-law reforms, and the enactment of much labor legislation. Hughes resigned the governorship when President Taft appointed him Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910, but left the Court in 1916 to run for President on the Republican ticket. He attacked Wilson’s pro-labor policies, and charged him with softness in defending American rights in Mexico and Europe, and he was supported by woman suffragists, because Wilson still refused to support a federal amendment.
Wilson was able to campaign as the labor candidate because he had the backing of Samuel Gompers and AFL, but he openly slandered those who accused him of being pro-British as “disloyal Americans”. Wilson, in fact, campaigned as the leader who had kept us out of war. A difference of fewer than 4000 votes in California (because Hiram Johnson, the progressive Republican governor who brought us initiative, referendum and recall, couldn’t support Hughes) would have removed Wilson from the White House. Wilson wound up with a margin of nine seats in Senate and basically none in the House (216 D, 210 R, 6 I)
Entry into the Great War
But of course we DID enter the war under Wilson. After Germany began an unrestricted U-Boat campaign January 1917, in which they began to sink American mercantile vessels in addition to British warships, Wilson was persuaded that Germany was not interested in a negotiated end to the war. In ate February, the United States intercepted a telegram from Alfred Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary, to the Mexican government offering an alliance between the two countries (and possibly Japan) against the United States in which he hinted that Germany might help Mexico recover the land it lost to the United States in 1848. Wilson submitted a declaration of war to Congress April 2, 1917. He argued that only a democratic government could be counted upon to pursue peaceful foreign policy, and, because the European democracies had been unable to combat German military power, the United States had to step in BUT as an “associated” power with its own command structure.
Home Front
The war in Europe went well for the United States. It wasn't so smooth on the home front. Increased production in war plants produced a “Great migration” of African Americans from the South to northern cities, but when this began, the Department of Labor’s Employment service acceded to the request of Southern politicians to suspend its program of its assistance to blacks headed north. Early in 1917, the Aluminum Ore Company in East St. Louis had begun to recruit black workers as strikebreakers. In late May, a mob of angry white workers appealed to the Mayor and the City Council to stop the inflow of black workers. On July 2, 1917, a full-scale race war broke out in which nine whites and even more African Americans were killed, and when Black leaders asked for federal action, the White House stonewalled them, refusing even to see the black delegations begging for an appointment. Wilson’s Attorney General was advised by Justice Department lawyers,that there was ample legal ground for federal intervention, but he informed Wilson that “no facts have been presented to us that would justify Federal action” and Wilson was happy to let the matter rest.
Wilson set up a partnership of public, private enterprise that set the tone for the New Deal agencies. He vested responsibility for industrial coordination ina Council for National Defense (6 cabinet members), assisted by a National Defense Advisory Commission of businessmen, professionals and labor leaders. He set up “Cooperative committees” for each industry made up of corporate executives who remained on their company’s payroll and came to Washington to work for a dollar a year. This didn’t work well and it’s where lobbyists came from.
And THEN Wilson set about trying to unite public opinion, or at least that's what he said he was trying to do. Almost immediately after war was declared, Representative Edwin Webb of North Carolina and Senator Charles Culbertson of Texas moved to arm Wilson with the tools of stern repression. The bills they developed, ostensibly aimed at checking espionage and treason, sought to give the government power to accomplish three objectives:
1) Censorship of the press,
2) Punishment of any interference with the activities of the armed services, including recruitment, and
3) Control of the mails to prevent their use for the dissemination of allegedly treasonable material.
If this is beginning to sound like the Alien and Sedition Acts John Adams enacted in case there was going to be a war with France in 1798, it should, since one of those acts was used by the Wilson administration.
The Espionage Act was enacted 6/5/1917 without any censorship provisions. The Act made it a federal crime
to make or convey false reports or false statements with the intent to interfere with the operations or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies; To willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States; Or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service of the United States.
In addition, the act authorized the postmaster general of the United States
to remove from the mails all materials advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States
and to turn anyone mailing such material over to the court system for criminal prosecution.
A concurrent Trading with the Enemy Act gave the postmaster general authority to censor American foreign-language newspapers. Postmaster General, Albert Sidney Burleson of Texas (a narrow, intolerant man who Wilson called “the Cardinal”) used his power under the act to figuratively break the backs of groups who depended on the mails to circulate news among their members, including ethnic communities, radical labor organizations and minority political parties. The Socialist Party was among the first groups to suffer, as the Post Office withdrew mailing privileges of more than a dozen publications during summer of 1917; it has been suggested that the American socialist movement never recovered from this. Several court cases resulted from this, and while a district court found that this violated the First Amendment (Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten [1917]) the Act was upheld on appeal.
As noted above, a provision of the Alien and Sedition Acts that gave President arbitrary control over unnaturalized subjects of a hostile nation during wartime (the Alien Enemies Act of 1798) had never been repealed. Wilson invoked this as soon as war broke out: 63 of these people who were deemed most dangerous were seized at once, and about 1200 people were arrested under this act during 1917. Initial restraints on using the act to deport people were slowly whittled away, with federal judges working on a fairly loose construction Espionage act and giving long prison sentences to individuals who said war violated Christian teaching or enriched profiteers.
This wasn't Wilson's fault, but it's worth including. In April 1918, near St. Louis, a mob seized Robert Prager, a young man whose only discernible offense seems to have been that he was born in Germany, and lynched him. A trial of the mob’s leaders followed, in which the defense counsel called their deed “patriotic murder” (there's a phrase for you). The jury took 25 minutes to return a verdict of “not guilty.” The Washington Post commented:
In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.
When the Attorney General asked Congress to expand the Espionage Act slightly in the interests of defusing criticism of federal laxity, Congress provided amendments proposing to prohibit
any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy
or any language that might bring these institutions into contempt, scorn or disrepute; this enacted into law May 16, 1918.
The Justice Department even found a way to strip naturalized Germans of their citizenship: if they expressed sympathy for the German cause, they were accused of lying when they took the oath of citizenship. I'll save discussion of the four cases (
Abrams v. United States,
Schenck v. United States,
Frohwerk v. United States,
Debs v. United States, all in 1919) that assessed these acts, for another diary. Suffice it to say that the Court upheld the acts as necessary.
The Fourteen Points
And now we can examine Wilson the idealist. The term "Fourteen Points" is probably familiar to all of you. In a speech that he gave on January 8, 1918, he said the following:
The programme of the world's peace, therefore, is our programme; and that programme, the only possible programme, as we see it, is this:
I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.
III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.
IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.
VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.
VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.
VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.
IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.
XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.
XII. The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.
XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.
XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong and assertions of right we feel ourselves to be intimate partners of all the governments and peoples associated together against the Imperialists. We cannot be separated in interest or divided in purpose. We stand together until the end.
Very idealistic. Very noble! It would make an excellent treaty, wouldn't it. But that's not what happened.
The Treaty of Versailles
The problem was that each participating nation in the Treaty of Versailles had its own agenda, and, as much as he wanted to, Wilson couldn’t dictate the terms of the treaty himself. Germany had agreed to a cease-fire on the basis of the Fourteen Points, and it expected to be left as the buffer against the spread of Bolshevik radicalism from Russia. But Britain, France and Italy were intent on making sure Germany’s armed forces were limited so nothing like the war would ever happen again, and France wanted Alsace and Lorraine. All three wanted Germany to pay reparations for their own postwar reconstruction and to keep Germany economically weak.
Wilson won two major points – the establishment of mandate system to govern former German overseas territories and the incorporation of the League of Nations Covenant as section I of the peace treaty, but he had to make concessions to the allies. His presence at the negotiations probably helped soften the wrath of the other Allied leaders, but the American presence on battlefield had provided the extra military weight that left Germans crushed, thus setting stage for a peace of vengeance rather than one of compromise.
The Treaty has to be seen as a modification of the Fourteen Points. It created Poland and Czechoslovakia, returned Alsace and Lorraine to France (undoing the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1), it prevented Germany from stationing troops on the western side of the Rhine, and it limited Germany to an enumerated list of military items. It also created Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia created from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece from the Ottoman Empire, as well as a multinational institution, the League of Nations, which sought to provide for the use of collective force if it ever became necessary (specifically, if a member nation violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of another nation) and which was intended to ensure that changes in national boundaries be the product of peaceful negotiation.
The League of Nations building in Geneva (it’s now the United Nations headquarters in Europe).
The League of Nations, naturally, ran into trouble in the Senate. The sticking point was Article 10 of the League covenant.
The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League. In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.
Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Massachusetts) chaired the Foreign Relations Committee, which included 6 “irreconcilables” who wouldn’t accept the treaty in ANY form. These irreconcilables (including Hiram Johnson, R-California) were opposed to the United States joining any organization that would compromise American’s independence and its sovereignty, and they believed that the treaty created and froze a new status quo. Other senators rejected the notion that because the world had changed the United States would be willing to depart from traditional policy of a free hand, and refused to give up the Monroe Doctrine to the dictates of an international body (the Senate in 1918 contained 48 Republicans and 47 Democrats).
Wilson himself still understood the world as one that consisted of sovereign states, but he was adamant about Article 10. Lodge wanted Congressional approval for any action the nation might take under Article 10, and Wilson didn’t want the implementation of the article to be subject to the will of Congress. Wilson went on a cross country tour to raise public support for the treaty, but when he returned to Washington, he suffered a major stroke which took him out of the public eye for two months.
On November 19, 1919, the Senate rejected the treaty. On March 19, 1920 when the treaty was reintroduced it failed to reach the 2/3 majority necessary for passage, and soon after Wilson vetoed a joint congressional resolution declaring an end to American belligerency
It finally fell to Warren Harding to proclaim the end of a state of hostility toward the Central Powers in the summer of 1921. United States negotiated separate peace treaties with Germany, Austria and Hungary, and never signed the Treaty of Versailles.
Conclusion
So how do we assess Wilson? Progressive, racist, idealist, authoritarian. In all of the rankings of presidents made by groups of historians since 1948, Wilson ranks between 6 and 11, and in an aggregate ranking, he's 6th (you'll have to scroll down to the table and then go to the end of the table at the far right and click on aggregate to get this result). Not, of course, Lincoln or FDR, but better than lots of other presidents in the eyes of historians, who were apparently ready to overlook the racism and the Espionage and Sedition Acts (and speaking of sedition, John Adams, in aggregate, ranks 11th) for his domestic accomplishments and the Fourteen Points, and let's not forget that the Nobel Peace Prize means something. This may be testimony to the ignorance of the American electorate (look at all the WORSE presidents we had); it may be also that I'm bringing a VERY critical eye to Wilson. I'd put him between 10 and 20 myself for the racism and the oppression, but nowadays there's behavior we just don't and shouldn't excuse.
And for your patience, here's some ragtime. James P. Johnson, Carolina Shout (1914), from a piano roll, as player pianos were simply de trop during Wilson's presidency.