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I received the following comment on my entry about why I feel Woodrow Wilson felt it was his duty to expand the powers of the Executive Branch:

"With congress as corrupt as it is now, I think it was a good idea that Wilson took some executive power back into the presidential arena. If it was even worse back then, his actions were certainly justified."

A lot of critics say that Wilson and FDR expanded the powers of the Presidency too much, but I think part of the problem is whether or not the President in office can HANDLE the broader Executive powers.

Coolidge and Hoover are great examples of this. Coolidge took office under Wilson's expanded powers, but he looked around and said, "You know what, things aren't going too badly...let's not touch anything and see what happens." What happened was that things were pretty sedate, and Coolidge left office with a surplus budget. The powers of the presidency didn't really tickle his fancy, so he didn't get carried away with them.

Hoover, however, got into office and said, "Okay, I'm going to do this, and this, and change this, and this...and maybe that, too." Hoover left office with the country and economy a wreck. The Stock Market Crash had come and gone, and the country was in the throes of the Great Depression. He took enthusiastic advantage of the expanded powers of the office, but didn't know how to control them appropriately.

FDR, as an additional example, not only took enthusiastic advantage of the Presidency's powers, but expanded them even further than Wilson had. Although his economic successes are debatable, many of us agree that his policies to assist the less fortunate amongst us are of lasting value: in other words, he was well-equipped to handle a lot of power.

But this is definitely just my opinion.

Briefly Explaining Woodrow Wilson's Executive Habits

As a child of the Civil War Era, and with the presidency of Andrew Jackson still within living memory, Woodrow Wilson grew up under a Congress that was extremely corrupt and ineffective. It was a Congress more interested in business ventures and speculation than in governing the country, which is much as he describes it in his doctoral thesis Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics.

Like anyone else, Wilson was prone to judging things by his own experiences. Congress, at the time of his youth, didn’t offer him a lot of hope. Small wonder that he ended up thinking that the expansion of Executive powers was necessary in order to try and balance the scales.

I don’t always agree with Wilson’s approaches to handling the powers of the Executive branch, but I can easily see how he came to feel that usurping the powers of Congress was a reasonable course of action.

As a Southerner trying to put a life back together after the Civil War, with a Congress that didn’t really care about anything but making money for themselves, and a series of forgettable, Gilded Era figurehead presidents, what other logical conclusion was there for him to draw as a political science student?

Watching Twistory Unfold

As I write this, I am reading the collected speeches of President Woodrow Wilson, shopping for a USB to SATA or IDE adapter cable...and enjoying President Obama's Cairo speech live over Twitter, courtesy of the White House's official Twitter profile.

I've said from the get-go that I love Twitter. As a humble member of the hoi polloi, Twitter allows me to rub elbows with those I might not otherwise be able to meet. It also gives the political junkie in me the ability to watch government officials from both parties happily Tweet away, location be damned, as this February 25th article from CNN shows.

What really struck me about this morning, though, was that instead of actually turning on the TV to watch the address, instead of going somewhere on the internet to see the live video broadcast, instead of using an online audio stream, I followed along with President Obama over social media...and that, ladies and gentlemen, is watching history unfold.

As an historian, I often don't feel those historical moments come and go. I'm too stuck in the past to notice history as it's being made here in the present. Somehow though, I got the message today.

Unlike the President's previous speeches, to which the White House's Twitter account provides links, someone sat and Twittered passages of President Obama's speech as he uttered them, and I read along. Not since FDR started bombarding the radio, and Kennedy started asking for television broadcasts, has such an untapped social media been put to this kind of use. I'm looking forward to watching future uses of it by the White house.

As a side not, I found this all very exciting, but it left me wondering how past presidents might have used Twitter.

Wilson, who wrote all his own speeches (as well as many books), would probably like Twitter a lot. He liked to write, wrote well, and was all about being in control of his situation. I think he would've used the medium to make his points and sprinkle his witticisms. He often longed to be loved by the people, and this might have given him the chance.

FDR, I suspect, would use Twitter very differently. Rather than for politics, I suspect we would see a lot of pictures from his family gatherings, and updates about what he was doing. He liked to bond with people, and the people loved him. Twitter offers a way to seem close to people without having to BE close to them.