Quotes from Arthur Herman

Sedition Act," a rider to the Espionage Act. The Sedition Act, which Wilson signed on May 16, 1918, made it illegal to speak, print, write, or publish any "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government, the Constitution, the military, or the flag—certainly the single most restrictive gag on free speech and freedom of the press in U.S. history.

Like many high-minded people, Wilson, when faced with opposition that he considered evil but which refused to yield to his arguments, felt no compunction about simply crossing his arms and refusing to play the game.

Mandates were largely a fiction, of course. The distinction between "mandate" and "colony," especially in highly colonized Africa, was meaningless. But the idea provided a fig leaf for Wilson's insistence that the Paris conference not become the tool of European imperialism. France and Britain accepted Wilson's phony compromise.

Debs ran for president, in 1920, it would be from behind bars, as Convict No. 9653 in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.

They stand as living proof of Marshal Ferdinand Foch's words "The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.

the Secret Service had unearthed a covert industrial spy network operating at the behest of a German commercial attaché

bombs set by German agents exploded in two factories in New Jersey.

Mussolini would be a powerful example of how the events of 1917 shaped the future—and of the unexpected product of a failed and increasingly bankrupt Wilsonism.

With a commander in chief handing out a general license to hunt for spies, it's not surprising Americans responded.

to a generation of westerners reared on white supremacist dogmas and Darwinism, the clause seemed to offer a dangerous precedent. Such a clause might apply to the Japanese, British foreign minister Balfour pointed out, but what about central Africa?48 The proposal went nowhere.

The result was a double disaster. The Chinese delegates refused to sign the final treaty, and left Paris in high dudgeon. When the news reached China, anti-Western and anti-Japanese riots exploded across the country. On May 4, some five thousand Chinese students stormed into Tiananmen Square in Peking to protest the Treaty of Versailles.

all German-language newspapers in the United States were required to give English translations of anything they printed about the government.

When the chairman of the Democratic National Committee came to see him after the election to ask for some political favors, and reminded Wilson that he owed his election to that party and its leadership committee, Wilson coldly cut him down to size. "Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States," he told the astonished chairman. "Neither you nor any other mortal could have chosen another president."30

The roots of a future war were planted that fateful spring; Wilson's failure to support Japan's highest aspirations would end with bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor.

When a German American vacationing in Florida was caught unprepared by a cold snap and exclaimed within hearing of witnesses, "[D]amn such a country as this," he was arrested for having violated the Espionage Act.

Did Wilson suffer a stroke on that day in late April? The evidence strongly suggests he did. It may not have been severe enough to render him unable to attend meetings or to cause him to withdraw from public settings, but that he was physically and mentally a different man after the date seems indisputable. If it was a stroke, it would leave him impaired just when he most needed his strength.

The German delegation, led by a clutch of Social Democratic politicians, arrived in Paris in early May. They expected to be treated, especially by Wilson, as a fellow democratic nation, there to negotiate a final equitable peace. Instead, to their shock and humiliation, they were received as a beaten adversary to be punished and reduced to impotence, while Wilson sat mutely by, doing nothing.

The U.S. president's consent to the Versailles Treaty did more to damage his reputation among his fellow liberals than anything else he did that crucial year. It also sowed the seeds for a bitterness among Germans that would ripen into the political movement that led to Adolf Hitler and World War II.

human ingenuity will find a way to defy government rules and regulations, such as customs tariffs, when they fly in the face of self-interest.

Knowledge is power—all Scottish philosophers recognized this— and the route to knowledge is through experience. But Reid insisted that that power belonged to every man, regardless of any other attributes. Human progress rests on expanding that capacity to its utmost and to as many people as possible, so that we can all become truly, morally free.

What Wilson aspired to be, to be hailed as the savior of his people and the light of humanity, Lenin had already achieved, but through unbelievable brutality and ruthlessness, and in a broken, starving country.

If America didn't join the League, it would be "a death warrant" for its children, who would die in the next war.34

Their actions highlight the curious self-righteousness of the American Progressive mind, and the belief among Progressives that their views once arrived at were beyond criticism; as with Wilson, opposition itself became a sign of disloyalty, even of evil.29

This is the legacy of the African continent to the nations of the world," George James says in Stolen Legacy, which "laid the foundations of modern progress." Later, the Greeks and other whites managed to steal all these civilized skills from the African man, leaving him in darkness. When he heard this, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger asked skeptically, "How does one lose knowledge by sharing it?