A friend of mine has been reading James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Taught Me, a book which takes American History textbooks to task. I've noticed the author seems to have a bit of a leftist bias at points (and I noticed a few other comments saying the same) but nonetheless, scores a number of very good points. One of the more interesting topics covered has been on Woodrow Wilson.

Hitler's opposition to communism didn't make him a rightist any more than the Menshiviks' opposition to the Bolsheviks made them conservatives. Leftists often fight each other (not that rightists are immune); being against a particular group of leftists doesn't necessarily make you a rightist.

So when one hears Democrat Woodrow Wilson was a fierce anti-communist, one might be tempted to assume he was a rightist. But no, he was in tune with the liberal ideology of the day, right down to racism and eugenics. And along these two lines, his views closely resembled those of Hitler's later National Socialist Party.

Loewen highlights the unwillingness of the various textbooks to give a non-whitewashed account of Wilson's misdeeds. I can't help but wonder if Wilson's political party affiliation to his name has something to do with that.

In the section excerpted below, Loewen focuses on Wilson's many interventions abroad. Wilson overthrew many democractically elected governments, led to dictatorships which survived until recently, and may have started or helped fuel the cold war...

When I asked my college students to tell me what they recall about President Wilson they respond with enthusiasm. They say that Wilson led our country reluctantly into WWI and after the war led the struggle nationally and internationally to establish the League of Nations. They associate Wilson with progressive causes like Women's sufferage. And handful of students recall the Wilson administration's Palmer Raids against left-wing unions. But my students seldom know or speak about two anti-democratic policies that Wilson carried out; his racial segregation of the Federal government and his military interventions in foreign countries.

Under Wilson, the United States intervenied in Latin American than in any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson's presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918. Throughout his administration, Wilson maintained forces in Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua's president and enforce passage of a treaty preferential to the United States.

In 1917, Woodrow Wilson took on a major power when he started sending secret aid to the "White" side of the Russian civil war. In the summer of 1918 he authorized a naval blocade of the Soviet Union and sent expeditionary forces to Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok to help overthrow the Russian Revolution. With the blessing of Britian and France, and in a joint command with Japanese soliders, American forces penetrated westward from Vladivostok to Lake Baikal, supporting Czech and White Russian forces that had declared an anticommunist government headquarted at Omsk. After briefly maintaining front lines as far west as the Volga, the White Russian disintegrated by the end of 1919, and our troops finally left Vladivostok on April 1, 1920.

Few Americans who were not alive at the time know anything about our "Unknown War with Russia" to quote the title of Robert Maddox's book on this fiasco. Not one of the twelve American history textbooks in my sample even mentions it. Russian history textbooks, on the other hand, give the episode considerable coverage. According to Maddox, "The immediate effect of the intervention was to prolong a bloody civil war, thereby costing thousands of additional lives, and wreaking enormous destruction on an already battered society. And there were longer-range implications. Bolshevik leaders had clear proof... that the Western powers meant to destroy the Soviet government if given the chance."

This aggression fueled the suspicions that motivated the Soviets during the Cold War, and until its breakup, the Soviet Union continued to claim damages for the invasion.

Wilson's invasions of Latin American are better known than his Russian adventure. Textbooks do cover some of them, and it is fascinating to watch textbook authors attempt to justify these episodes. Any accurate portrayl could not possibly show Wilson or the United States in good light. With hindsight we know that Wilson's interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Comozas, whose legacies still reverberate. Even in the 1910s, most of the invasions were unpopular in this country, and provoked a torrent of criticism abroad. By the mid-1920s, Wilson's successors reversed his policies in Latin America. The authors of history textbooks know this, for a chapter or two after Wilson they laud our "Good Neighbor Policy", the renunciation of force in Latin America which was extended by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Textbooks might (but don't) call Wilson's Latin America actions a "Bad Neighbor Policy" by comparison. Instead, faced with unpleasanties, textbooks wriggle to get the hero off the hook...

Loewen goes on to point out that many of the textbooks try to say Wilson's actions were justified, or demanded by the population. He quotes one of them which cites pressure from America's business community to protect it's "investments" in Mexico as the reason -- a standard leftist prevarication.

In truth, nobody forced Wilson's hand in any of these matters, quite to the contrary, there was popular outcry against many of them (and yes, including in the business community) and it was, rather, Wilson who was doing all the forcing...

... as in this example from The Challenge of Freedom: "President Wilson wanted the United States to build friendships with the countries of Latin America. However, he found this difficult...."Some textbooks blame the invasions on the countries invaded: "Necessity was the mother of armed Caribbean intervention," states The American Pageant. Land of Promise is vague as to who caused the invasions but seems certain they were not Wilson's doing: "He soon discovered that because of forces he could not control, his ideas of morality and idealism had to give way to practical action." Promise goes on to assert Wilson's innocence: "Thus, though he believed it morally undesirable to send Marines into the Caribbean, he saw no way to avoid it." This passage is sheer invention. Unlike his secretary of the navy, who later complained that what Wilson "forced [me] to do in Haiti was a bitter pill for me," no documentary evidence suggests that Wilson suffered any such qualms about dispatching troops to the Caribbean.

All twelve of the textbooks I surveyed mention Wilson's 1914 invasion of Mexico, but they posit that the interventions were not Wilson's fault. "President Wilson was urged to send military forces into Mexico to protect American investments and to restore law and order," according to Triumph of the American Nation, whose authors emphasize that the president at first chose not to intervene. But "as the months passed, even President Wilson began to lose patience." Walter Karp has shown that this version contradicts the facts -- the invasion was Wilson's idea from the start, and it outraged Congress as well as the American people. According to Karp, Wilson's intervention was so outrageous that leaders of both sides of Mexico's ongoing civil war demanded that the U.S. forces leave; the pressure of public opinion in the United States and around the world finally influenced Wilson to recall the troops.

Textbook authors commonly use another device when describing our Mexican adventures: they identify Wilson as ordering our forces to withdraw, but nobody is specified as having ordered them in! Imparting information in a passive voice helps to insulate historical figures from their own unheroic or unethical deeds.

Some books go beyond omitting the actor and leave out the act itself. Half of the twelve textbooks do not even mention Wilson's takeover of Haiti. After U.S. marines invaded the country in 1915, they forced the Haitian legislature to select our preferred candidate as president. When Haiti refused to declare war on Germany after the United States did, we dissolved the Haitian legislature. Then the United States supervised a pseudo-referendum to approve a new Haitian constitution, less democratic than the constitution it replaced; the referendum passed by a hilarious 98,225 to 768. As Piero Gleijesus has noted, "It is not that Wilson failed in his earnest efforts to bring democracy to these little countries. He never tried. He intervened to impose hegemony, not democracy." The United States also attacked Haiti's proud tradition of individual ownership of small tracts of land, which dated back to the Haitian Revolution, in favor of the establishment of large plantations. American troops forced peasants in shackles to work on road construction crews. In 1919 Haitian citizens rose up and resisted U.S. occupation troops in a guerrilla war that cost more than 3,000 lives, most of them Haitian. Students who read Triumph of the American Nation learn this about Wilson's intervention in Haiti: "Neither the treaty nor the continued presence of American troops restored order completely. During the next four or five years, nearly 2,000 Haitians were killed in riots and other outbreaks of violence." This passive construction veils the circumstances about which George Barnett, a U.S. marine general, complained to his commander in Haiti: "Practically indiscriminate killing of natives has gone on for some time." Barnett termed this violent episode "the most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken place in the Marine Corps."

Haiti is still a mess today, as recent headlines demonstrate. And the U.S., under Democrat Woodrow Wilson, played no small part in that unpleasantness. We're not a perfect country, and have never been. But our ideals were exceptional, failure to reach them is no reason to reject them.