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?
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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.
ReplyDeleteThat is my official poli-sci opinion. ;)