Why Dwight Eisenhower was WORSE than Woodrow Wilson as president of the US

[00:00:00]General Z John with a super chat.

[00:00:03]General Z John. I like that. Who was a worse president to you, Dwight Eisenhower or Woodro Wilson?

[00:00:11]Don't do this to me, General Z. John.

[00:00:14]Don't do this to me, General Z. John. I am just trying to make it in this YouTube sphere. I'm just getting started. I'm trying to get to 10,000 subscribers. I'm hoping to make it bigger as a historian's YouTube channel.

[00:00:27]and you come with a question that's going to get me in trouble, and I don't know where I'm going to answer it yet, but this is going to get me in trouble with the YouTube historical sphere because I actually think it's a lot closer than people think. I'm going to debate this upfront with myself and with you guys and give you guys my thoughts on everything with Woodro Wilson vers Dwight Eisenhower and determine who I think was the worst president. So the context for this for those who don't know, Woodro Wilson has been getting a lot of hate on the YouTube sphere in recent years and been falling down historians rankings for a lot of good reasons. His racism was pretty bad. His attacks on the First Amendment were really, really bad. Lots of things to criticize. And I think because of the way historians have ranked him so high for so long, there has been a determination to contradict that in the history sphere because there's frustration that he could be ranked so high when he did so many bad things. But the way many historians feel about Woodro Wilson now, particularly YouTube historians, is while I agree with is also the way I feel about Eisenhower and Dwight Eisenhower. I think if you guys have seen my on my list of most overrated presidents of all time, Dwight Eisenhower is number one and I've got a lot to criticize for him.

[00:01:39]Eisenhower and Wilson are very similar to me in this way. They're both massively overrated, ranked way too highly, but I don't think they're anywhere near like the bottom five or bottom tier presidents of all time. I don't. So, before you think I'm crazy for this being a close one, let me just point out that up until about 2000, historians ranked Wilson higher than Eisenhower in their presidential ranking list. It wasn't until about 2010 that that changed. So, I'm going to compare the worst things they did to the best things they did, and we'll see which one comes out. So, let's start with the worst thing Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower did. And the worst thing to me that Woodro Wilson did, his racism is pretty bad, but I actually think the worst thing he did was ignoring the Spanish flu outbreak. He was trying to focus on the war efforts, but he suppressed any reports on the Spanish flu, and he called for super spreader and training events and was sending soldiers to and from Europe when he knew it had broken out. And that turned out to be a disaster. 675,000 Americans died from the Spanish flu.

[00:02:46]Tens of millions, I believe, worldwide died from it. Just a total disaster. And indirectly ignoring it got him the Spanish flu, which is what caused his stroke in 1919 and made him unable to sell the League of Nations. So, Woodro Wilson ignoring the Spanish flu was his worst action. Dwight Eisenhower's worst action was the CIA interventions all over the world that he presided over with Alan Dulles as head of the CIA, who he made head of the CIA. And I'm talking about in Iran when he overthrew Muhammad Masadiki in 1953 because Masadik committed the ultimate crime of believing that the Iranians had the right to their own natural oil and Eisenhower felt that the British should be able to colonize them. So he overthrew Muhammad Masadik installed the Sha. We're seeing the problems of that today. But not just that, Guatemala when he overthrew Yakoba Arbans because Yakoba Arbans was demanding that the banana workers in his country get fair wages in United Fruit Company wanted to enslave those people. And so Dwight Eisenhower made sure to overthrow the leader of Guatemala to install a US puppet dictator to make sure the people picking the bananas were still enslaved and forced to pick them for United Fruit Company, which changes name to Chukita.

[00:03:59]that eventually deteriorated the country so much that it caused a civil war in which 200,000 people died. The Congo because the leader of the Congo at the time was trying to nationalize his country's uranium when Eisenhower for defense contractors wanted that material for sheep particularly when the US was in a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. So Eisenhower's interventions versus Wilson ignoring the Spanish flu.

[00:04:25]Now, that's the worst thing they both did. And they were both horrible. And I don't care about Eisenhower saying beware of the military-industrial complex because he said that at the end of his presidency, three days before he left office. Throughout his presidency, he was the ultimate abuser of the military-industrial complex using the CIA.

[00:04:43]The Spanish flu was worse combined than everything Eisenhower did. But how much of the Spanish flu being as bad as it did is on Wilson?

[00:04:51]I think a significant portion. I don't think enough to say it outweighs Eisenhower's military coups. And before anybody says it was the CIA, not him.

[00:05:01]No, I'm not doing that. You are accountable for the people you hire as president. And he put Allen Dulles in charge of the CIA. So Eisenhower is accountable for everything the CIA did under Alanis. That's how it works for the president. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. I hold that for every single president possible. Andrew H from WT3JI who I've shared before did point out that Wilson invaded Haiti and the Dominican Republic and that is true.

[00:05:27]Wilson was continuing the dollar diplomacy of William Taft at the time.

[00:05:32]And it is worth noting that Haiti and the Dominican Republic um given what was happening and with Germany's intervention in parts of Central and South America, those countries falling into instability was much more of a threat to the United States than anything they had to worry about with the Congo or Guatemala or Iran. And by the way, I want to point this out. I haven't even started on Cuba and Vietnam yet. Eisenhower is responsible for the Vietnam disaster too. Let's remember how that happened.

[00:06:02]In 1954, Vietnam splits, Indochina wars end. North Vietnam is communist. South Vietnam is capitalist. South Vietnamese president Yoding DM is a brutally repressive dictator towards his own people. And Eisenhower sends in a thousand military advisers to back his brutal repression of those people, which did nothing but further deteriorate the situation and create sympathy for Vietkong. And then Kennedy made it worse by sending more troops and then tacitly approving the ouster of President DM in 1963 which collapsed the country even more. And yes, Lyn B. Johnson was held holding the bag in which he admittedly made the wrong decision. But that starts with Eisenhower. The Bay of Pigs invasion that Kennedy gets flacked for.

[00:06:40]That was an Eisenhower program.

[00:06:42]Eisenhower came up with the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy was just seeing it through early on into his presidency.

[00:06:48]Look it up. That was actually put together and planned under Eisenhower.

[00:06:51]another disastrous move and most notably the Castro regime on its own is Eisenhower's fault because the sympathy for the Castro regime that led to the revolution was because Eisenhower in the early part of his presidency was backing Batista Fogio Batista the brutally repressive dictator of Cuba because guess what the brutally repressive dictator of Cuba was giving the US sugar companies using basically slave labor to make sure they got cheap sugar. So in terms of the worst thing they both did, I think Eisenhower's military coups were worse than Joe Wilson ignoring the Spanish flu. Sorry. So that's one point for Wilson to be a better president. Now the second worst thing they both did.

[00:07:32]For Wilson, it is resegregating the federal government and his ultimate racism that allowed for the rise of the clan, holding back [snorts] black people from positions of power within the federal government, demoting many of them. Horrible. Horrible.

[00:07:47]nothing to defend about that with Woodro Wilson. But Eisenhower oversaw the Lavender Scare, which did the same thing to gay people in the federal government.

[00:08:00]And before anybody comes at me and says, "Well, it was the 1950s and that was broadly how people felt about homosexuality." No. Just like Wilson's reegregation of the federal government was a step back in racism in the 19s, Eisenhower's firing of suspected homosexual workers, up to 5 to 10,000 of them, was a step back for the gay community from where they were in the 1930s and the 1940s.

[00:08:23]So, if you talk about raw numbers of people that were affected, the Lavender Scare to me is worse than Wilson's reegregation of the federal government.

[00:08:33]And also when it comes to race issues, one of the things we're leaving out is Eisenhower also did a policy that deported a bunch of people of Mexican descent, many of whom were American citizens, back to Mexico, called Operation Word that starts with a W that I'm not going to say on here. And lastly, Eisenhower, I have to say, one of his best policies, the Interstate Highway Act, was not all good. As a matter of fact, on issues of race, it was really, really, really bad. The Interstate Highway Act leveled black communities in this country. They used imminent domain to force black people out of their homes, level their neighborhoods, so the highway can go straight through there, straight through cities, which has created segmented cities all the way across the country.

[00:09:23]That caused problems to this day in our inner cities. Black people were forced out of their homes and because of redlinining they couldn't go anywhere else even if you paid them properly or compensated them properly for the homes they lost. There were no other neighborhoods that they could move to.

[00:09:36]So many black people were forced into public housing projects because of the interstate highway act. Martin Luther King said quote this government has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. He was talking about the interstate highway act. Eisenhower himself was critical of the design of interstate high of the interstate and the federal highway program. But the design was by people in his cabinet. And as I said, you're accountable for the people in your cabinet. You're accountable for the people you appoint. So Eisenhower is accountable for those. So with that in mind, I think Wilson's racism is worse than Eisenhower's. But in terms of just straight up bigotry against different people, Eisenhower actually harmed more people than Wilson did as president when you compare the two. Now Wilson also screened Birth of the Nation at the White House. There's nothing on Eisenhower's record of doing that.

[00:10:26]Although there were a lot of Have you all ever seen those family propaganda films in the 1950s? Check them out. It once called a date with your family where they basically are just putting out massive propaganda on how everything should be catered towards the man of the house and things like that. But I'm not going to hold that against Eisenhower. I actually think that started under Truman. It was very much anti-communist propaganda on how to conform to fight communism, ironically. So there's that.

[00:10:50]Now Wilson was a eugenicist and his eugenicist ideas made their way into the public school systems and in the education systems which created another generation's worth of racism.

[00:11:04]But Eisenhower oversaw project MK Ultra where literally the CIA experimented on human brains oftentimes with people who were suspected to be homosexual and there they didn't conform to behaviors.

[00:11:20]So honestly Eisenhower's bigotry is worse I think than Wilson's actual bigotry and racism. The results of it at the very least not what's in his heart.

[00:11:27]We can compare how they handled the Red Scare. I don't like how Wilson handled the Red Scare. I don't I don't like it at all. He really facilitated the first red scare of 1919. I thought that was pretty bad. He got involved in the Soviet Civil War for a minute, the Russian Civil War. That was stupid.

[00:11:43]But Dwight Eisenhower, contrary to what anybody says, turned a complete blind eye to Joe McCarthy and what McCarthyism was, what was going on with McCarthyism in the 1950s. Now you will hear historians and Eisenhower defenders say, "Oh, Joe McCarthy Eisenhower was secretly working against him." There's no proof of that. No one has ever shown me any level of evidence as to what Eisenhower was doing to secretly work against Joe McCarthy. Here's what I do know. Eisenhower publicly distanced himself from George Marshall, who he served within World War II after Joe McCarthy went at him.

[00:12:19]So miss me with the whole Dwight Eisenhower was secretly working against McCarthyism. No, he wasn't. No, he wasn't. A lot of these things I'm criticizing Eisenhower for doing Harry Truman got the ball rolling on, but say what you want about Truman, he was much more viciferous in his opposition to Joe McCarthy publicly than Eisenhower ever was. Oh, and I Okay, I did forget this one. Wilson's massive violation of the First Amendment with the Espionage Act.

[00:12:40]I don't know how I forgot that one. That one's pretty bad, too. But Eisenhower had his own assaults on the First Amendment. I mean, in God we trust being put on currency, adding under God into the pledge of allegiance. really Christian nationalism uh infiltrating our government, which he did, which tied into the Lavender Scare.

[00:12:59]Wilson's violation of the First Amendment was worse. Don't get me wrong.

[00:13:02]Eisenhower's was still pretty bad, though. I'm not going to lie. Now, let me be fair. Let me do some good things for Eisenhower and Wilson. Let me say what's good about them both. One of the underrated things Eisenhower did in 1958 was when there was a recession, Eisenhower was very aware that this was due to transitioning to a more domestic economy and as opposed to a wartime economy. and he refused to back off his hard money stance, including refusing to lower taxes, funny enough. And he refused to pressure the Fed to lower interest rates, which usually you do in a recession. But he was right to not do it then because it had nothing to do with some sort of market correction. It had to do with the transition to the type of economy America was going from a military economy, wartime during the Korean War to a domestic economy with his public works projects like the Interstate Highway Act. In the Interstate Highway Act, it's another great thing. So holding firm even at a short-term political cost like the 1958 midterms on his economic positions which combined with his support for the Interstate Highway Act actually helped usher in or his passage of the Interstate Highway Act I should say is what ushered in the golden age of American capitalism in the 60s when the America had the greatest economy the world had ever known in the mid 1960s.

[00:14:10]Eisenhower gets all the credit in the world for that. Eisenhower also he very much and publicly supported the arts. He felt the government should support the arts but not dictate the direction of the arts. The Kennedy Center, it wasn't called that then. That was an Eisenhower project. I'm a huge fan of that. His embracement of science and technology and NASA are huge things. I think those are all great things. Eisenhower deserves a ton of credit for them. You will not see me criticize Eisenhower for that. I give him credit for his handling of the Swiss Canal crisis and for not invading in the Hungarian revolution when he was pressured to do so by a lot of people. It's the one time he actually showed some restraint when he was out here overthrowing countries all over the world. Now, the good things Woodro Wilson did and they're more controversial, which is why I understand why he's a little more despised now because if you are on the right, you aren't going to like these things. I find the progressive policies of Wood Wilson largely to be positive in his first term. I think the Federal Trade Commission was good. I think ending child labor was good. The Federal Reserve, look, I think it was a good thing. I'm sorry. Compare the number of crashes we had between Andrew Jackson dismantling the second national bank and the start of the Federal Reserve. The panic of 1837, the panic of 1873, the depression of 1882 to 1885, the Black Friday gold panic of 1869, the panic of 1893, the panic of 1907, and then we put in the Federal Reserve and we have the Great Depression because of a lot of things happening and after that we don't have anything again close to any of those crashes. Even the financial crisis of 2008 or the stagflation crisis of the late 70s pale in comparison to every single economic crash that happened between 1837 and the founding of the Federal Reserve. There's no debate about that. I understand if you think taxes are too high, but I also when you talk about establishing the IRS, I think an income tax is a much more effective way to raise revenue for the federal government than tariffs. I do. From a foreign policy perspective, guys, I agree with Woodro Wilson getting involved in World War I. I do. I think it was necessary because talking about the SpanishAmerican War which turned America into a superpower through World War I. There was a lot of involvement in the Americas and a lot of potential involvement in the Americas by European powers. And the truth of the matter is the United States was under genuine threat if other countries, other European countries began fighting wars over which Central and South American countries they could colonize, which would have happened. And I personally think that it was important for the United States to get involved in World War I because we had a vested interest in making sure Germany didn't decide that they had a right to get involved in the Dominican Republic, in Haiti, in Mexico.

[00:17:00]Where my problem with Woodro Wilson is though is um his idealism overtook his pragmatism. So his leadership qualities pale in comparison to Eisenhower pale because I think Eisenhower was a lot more pragmatic and wasn't so my way or the highway. Wilson could have gotten the US to join the League of Nations if he just compromised with the Republicans on his 14 points. They wanted some compromises.

[00:17:26]He refused. That's a big reason he couldn't get the US to join. His leadership qualities alienated so many different people in Congress. And that's a huge negative on him. By the way, you can say it's cuz he was pressured. You can say it's because he fought it till the end, but the fighting for the 19th amendment, he did publicly finally back it. You can't give Eisenhower credit for sending federal troops to integrate Little Rock in 1957 if you're not going to give Wilson credit for backing the 19th amendment because in both cases they were very hesitant to move on social issues. Eisenhower was very hesitant to move on civil rights issues much to the frustration of the black community because sending in troops to integrate Little Rock happened three years after Brown v. Board and a year after the MC or two years after the McGomery [clears throat] bus boycott and he was not getting involved and would not move on civil rights and it finally took that situation in Little Rock for him to send in federal troops. So those are positives for both of them on social issues. So if I'm comparing the two between the two I gotta say Dwight Eisenhower's bads are the interventions all over the world, m ignoring McCarthyism, um the deportation of Mexican civilians in this country back to Mexico with a racial slur, the Lavender Scare, Project MK Ultra, Christian nationalism, Wilson's our very poor leadership in the lying about getting us involved in World War I and his my way or the highway approach that led the League of Nations to fail, ignoring the Spanish flu, resegregating the federal government, and assaulting the First Amendment. For me, the goods for Wilson are the FTC, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, child labor laws, um strengthening the Sherman Antitrust Act, the National Park Service, Eisenhower's, NASA, ushering in the strong economy of the 1960s, publicly funding the arts, and embracing science and technology in the Interstate Highway Act. the Interstate Highway Act is a mixed bag because it fueled more segregation and racism in this country with the way it was handled.

[00:19:35]So I think when I put all this together, Wilson had more bad things and more good things. Eisenhower's bad though does rival Wilson's bad a lot more than his good rivals Wilson's good. So with all of that, I honestly have to say I think Dwight Eisenhower was a worse president than Woodro Wilson. I do. I do. Having compared them both together, Dwight Eisenhower was a worse president than Woodro Wilson. They're both in my C to D range.

[00:20:02]I think both I I agree with the YouTube historians sphere that Wilson is massively overrated. I'm not here deny that to deny that by historians. I mean, he was ranked number five, I think, in 2000.

[00:20:13]But I also think that Dwight Dwight Eisenhower deserves his record deserves the same level of scrutiny. So, that's going to be my take on Eisenhower versus Wilson. A great point. Uh, ruminating Reptilia in 5907. The way I see it, he would have been one of the greater presidents had the horrendous way his second term went neutralized that um yeah, the Wilson's second term neutralized how people feel um about him. I certainly agree with that. Carlin 8809 says Eisenhower is better remember because overall the economy at least for white people was pretty good which shoots up his rating a lot. That's true.

[00:20:47]True. The economy was very strong in the 1950s, strong for Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The thing about me though is I don't, and I understand why you would say that because you're right. I I'm just not um I'm just not somebody who gives usually gives pres presidents credit for the economy that they're presiding over in that moment.