Margaret acted as full-time nursemaid to her mother until Anne eventually died a few years later. Throughout those years of bringing her mother food and water, changing her bedclothes, and holding her while she was wracked with coughing fits, Margaret never forgot the lowly, evil men who had brought her mother to this state. The fear she endured that night had turned into hatred. And then into a blinding rage. She never forgave them. And she eventually dedicated her life to making sure that people like them—and anyone who, in her judgment, shared any of their undesirable traits—would be driven out of existence.
• • •
Victims of rape or violent assault often experience lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a form of psychological panic that closes off part of the human brain where reason is processed. Margaret Sanger’s experiences as a child, witnessing the attack on her mother and encountering hundreds of other vagrants who had boarded in her own home because her father believed it to be a moral duty to help, are classic examples of events that trigger PTSD. The consequences can be varied, but they almost always include a powerful combination of ongoing shame, fear, and guilt.
The fear comes from not having control or the power to stop the event from recurring, and the shame and guilt come from not being able to stop it.
Sanger’s own description of the attack against her mother is surprisingly short, but it is told in the first person, so we know that she was at home and personally witnessed it. Absent from the short narrative, however, is any mention that Margaret herself stepped in to stop it or to help her mother in any way, even after the attack was over and her mother lay unconscious and bleeding on the ground. It wasn’t until her father returned home that Margaret had dared to come downstairs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sanger became a passionate advocate for abortion, eugenics, and forced sterilization of both men and women (with particular focus on minorities, such as African-Americans and Chinese immigrants). Her desire to rid the world of what she saw as troublesome underclasses that produced violent vagrants is probably a direct result of her childhood experiences and the shame she must have felt over her inaction.
Merriam-Webster defines eugenics as “a science that tries to improve the human race by controlling which people become parents.” Eugenics research, funded by America’s elite industrialists, was carried out by scientists dedicated to the perfection of the human race. Their work influenced a generation of progressives and socialists—including Adolf Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, and, of course, Margaret Sanger.
As Sanger grew older, she became an early and earnest supporter of this diabolical science, a field that formed a pillar of the early progressive movement in its fixation on manipulating genetics to “perfect” humanity. In words that might well be approved by Hitler or David Duke, she wrote this about her plans for humanity:
The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics. The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection and segregate.
Sanger believed in a policy of “race improvement,” once saying that it was necessary to create a “race of thoroughbreds.” In 1926, she even saw fit to present her views before a women’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which led to “a dozen invitations to speak to similar groups.”
Sanger also believed that families with too many children (remember, she was one of eleven kids) posed an unnecessary hardship on the rest of society. “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its members,” she wrote in 1920, “is to kill it.” (It’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood claims that this quote is out of context, that it is really about the rising infant death rate among large families at the time. Let’s assume they’re right—does that make this statement OK? It’s merciful to have a child and then kill it just because there is some percentage chance that it might die anyway?)
Sanger is perhaps best known as an early, staunch advocate of birth control, including abortion, and as the founder of the organization that would eventually grow into Planned Parenthood (its original name was more honest: the American Birth Control League). But the reasoning behind her zeal was deeper and darker than simply a disregard for individual human lives. Sanger believed that contraception, especially preventing birth among certain undesirables, was better for the human race as a whole.
In 1922, she wrote:
Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble minded. Many become criminals. . . . Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born.
Despite these radical views, Sanger is, to this day, a progressive hero.
In 2009, Hillary Clinton proudly accepted the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood. “Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award,” Clinton said. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision.”
For a singular moment, Clinton told the truth. She admires—as she said in her own words—this racist, bigoted, self-appointed deity who saw fit to decide who should get the gift of life.
♠
2
First Wave:
Wilson, the Philosopher President
The difference between democracy and socialism is not an essential difference, but only a practical difference.
—WOODROW WILSON
The North Atlantic
April 19, 1912
For four excruciating days, a lone ship plowed the waves through fog, darkness, and rough, freezing seas. It sped toward a cursed patch of icy sea four hundred miles south of Newfoundland that had recently echoed with the desperate screams of twenty-two hundred souls.
The CS Mackay-Bennett, a two-thousand-ton cable-repair ship berthed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had been overhauling a communications cable linking Canada and France when it received the White Star Line’s desperate plea for aid. It embarked immediately after its macabre cargo—embalming supplies for hundreds of floating corpses and a hundred empty coffins—was aboard. This time, there was no cable line in need of urgent repair. This was a mission of recovery and retrieval. This was a search for death.
The April 15 sinking of the British luxury liner RMS had claimed more than fifteen hundred passengers and crew, chiefly because the Titanic, this grand, state-of-the-art vessel, sumptuously appointed with all manner of luxuries and modern conveniences—from a squash court to a lending library to a Turkish bath—had simply not carried enough lifeboats for everyone on board.
The dead who wore life vests bobbed on the ocean like human buoys. The Mackay-Bennett recovered 306 corpses, far more than the number of caskets it carried. The bodies included that of a nineteen-month-old English boy named Sidney Leslie Goodwin; Isidor Straus, the seventy-seven-year-old owner of Macy’s Department Store (his wife’s body was never found); and a well-dressed, light-haired, fifty-year-old man whose shirt collar and gold belt buckle bore the initials J.J.A.
He was, the crew later learned, John Jacob Astor IV, the richest man aboard the Titanic and, in death, the richest man now aboard the Mackay-Bennett.
As the elegant Titanic capsized, Colonel Astor, a Spanish-American War veteran, had ensured that his pregnant eighteen-year-old second wife, Madeleine, her nurse, and their maid had safely boarded a lifeboat. “Might I be allowed to go with her?” the multimillionaire had asked a ship’s officer. “She is in a delicate condition.”
“No, sir,” the officer had replied. “No man is allowed on this boat or any of the boats until the ladies are off.”
“Well, tell me,” Astor had asked, “what is the number of this boat so I may find her afterwards?”
> “Number four.”
Astor had kissed his wife on the cheek and watched her boat being lowered to the choppy sea. He had known he would never see her again, nor would he ever get to lay eyes on his unborn child.i
He’d asked for the lifeboat’s number simply to calm her fears.
ONE DISASTER FORETELLS ANOTHER
* * *
In the three decades that preceded the sinking of the Titanic, the public in both America and Britain had been gripped by a fear of oceanic sailing. The waters of the North Atlantic, which were the most transited in the world—and arguably the most dangerous—claimed hundreds of lives each year. A young woman named Eleanor Roosevelt herself was on the White Star Line steamship Britannic when it nearly sank after colliding with another ship. Dozens of men who had boarded a lifeboat before realizing that the ship was not actually sinking sheepishly returned to the scornful eyes of passengers and crew.
In the twelve years leading up to the sailing of the Titanic, there was at least one major maritime disaster per year, with more than six thousand passengers lost at sea. While the fear of oceanic travel among the public hadn’t quite reached the level of a clinical phobia yet (thalassophobia, fear of the sea, however, is a real clinical disorder), the general mood in the United States and in Europe was that transoceanic sailing was, in fact, a dangerous proposition. The White Star Line was so anxious to allay public fear of ocean crossings that the Titanic was built and marketed as “unsinkable” as early as 1909, two full years before its steel hull ever touched water.
The marketing campaign worked brilliantly. The Titanic’s maiden voyage sold out in mere days, and White Star had bookings as far out as a year in advance. The Titanic and White Star Line’s “unsinkable” campaign provided relief, giving the public an antidote to the fear that had been building with the stories of so many lives lost to the waves.
At long last, the public had hope.
That hope was quickly dashed when an iceberg ripped through the “unsinkable” vessel. News of the Titanic’s tragedy flashed across a horrified world, although one famed historian could not resist dark-humor parallels to another, larger tragedy about to befall America. Henry Adams, who had booked passage on the doomed liner’s return voyage to Europe, wrote a longtime female friend, “I do not know whether Taft or the Titanic is likely to be the furthest-reaching disaster.”
Incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft faced the fight of his life against both Theodore Roosevelt, his old friend and immediate predecessor, and that year’s Democratic nominee, former Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson. Both Roosevelt and Wilson ran as passionate progressives—a term that had entered the lexicon thanks to Democrat William Jennings Bryan and was later adopted by Republican Roosevelt during his “trust-busting” presidency.
Teddy Roosevelt was the first chief executive to endorse a federal income tax and a national health-insurance program. He also waged war against big business, and he almost single-handedly transformed the presidency from its nineteenth-century practice of quietly administrating government, taking its lead from Congress, to making it the center of all power in the nation’s capital.
In 1910, Roosevelt declared, “The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” He also said that the government “should permit [their fortunes] to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”
This was a Republican essentially saying that private wealth is only allowable to the extent that it benefits the greater good. Roosevelt also argued that accumulated property is “subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” He advocated concentrating power in the presidency to make this system work. “This New Nationalism,” he said, “regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare.”
By 1912, Roosevelt labeled Taft, his designated heir, insufficiently progressive and unsuccessfully challenged him in the Republican primaries and at the hotly contested convention. In the general election, Roosevelt bolted from the GOP to run on a radical Progressive (or “Bull Moose”) third-party ticket. The Roosevelt-Taft split guaranteed the election of Woodrow Wilson, the most radical Democrat in U.S. history. Wilson garnered a mere 41.8 percent of the popular vote but received 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt’s 88 and Taft’s minuscule 8.
Just a month after the Mackay-Bennett completed its grim recovery operation, the hatchet-faced Wilson addressed the prestigious Economic Club of New York at a hotel bearing the name of one of the Titanic’s most prominent victims. Speaking to business leaders at Times Square’s Hotel Astor, Wilson pushed back against complaints that his ideas opposed the free-enterprise system. He believed that wealthy families such as the Astors had turned the American republic into their own fiefdom. The rich, he said, had to be reined in, their wealth confiscated for the public good, if necessary.
“The very thing that government cannot let alone is business,” Wilson blustered. “Government cannot take its hands off business. Government must regulate business because that is the foundation of every other relationship.”
The tragic sinking of the Titanic, a ship that its owners boasted was unsinkable, was the consequence of hubristic, humanist assumptions about man’s ability to control natural law and defy the will of God.
And so was the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson.
LIBERAL IDOL . . . AND BLIND SPOT
* * *
If you’ve listened to me on radio or TV, you probably know that I’m not a member in good standing of the Woodrow Wilson fan club. What you might not know, however, is that neither is the American public. Not a single recent public-opinion survey lists Wilson as among the greatest U.S. presidents. Even Jimmy Carter is more popular.
Yes, even Jimmy Carter.
Unfortunately, the people who write history haven’t quite figured out just how awful a president (not to mention a person) Wilson actually was. In fact, few former presidents are held in such high esteem by modern liberals. Historians, most of them progressives themselves, routinely rank Wilson among the top ten of the nation’s chief executives. In fact, two polls conducted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. both rated Wilson behind only Lincoln, Washington, and (big surprise) Franklin Roosevelt.
How can that be explained? Here’s Howard University historian Edna Medford’s attempt: “How we rank our presidents is, to a large extent, influenced by our own times. Today’s concerns shape our views of the past, be it in the area of foreign policy, managing the economy, or human rights.”
If that’s true, well, it only makes the liberal academic fetish for Wilson even more bizarre. Few presidents displayed such open contempt for the Constitution they swore to preserve, protect, and defend. Even fewer had such a severe disdain for women, minorities, and anyone else who deviated from Wilson’s view of the “perfect citizen.”
Some modern progressives have mixed emotions about Wilson. Embarrassed by his blatant prejudices, a few have demanded that his name be stripped from Princeton’s elite Woodrow Wilson School of Government.ii Yet most still seem to excuse him, in much the same way they excuse the abhorrent behavior of people like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, or Robert Byrd simply because these people represent an ideology they support.
Never is this more apparent than in the case of Wilson. Here, for example, is an all-too-typical description of him from the “nonpartisan” University of Virginia’s Miller Center:
Woodrow Wilson was one of America’s greatest Presidents. His domestic program expanded the role of the federal government in managing the economy and protecting the interests of citizens. His foreign policy established a new vision of America’s role in the world. And he helped to make the White House the center of power in Washington. Most historians rank him among the five most important American Presidents, along
with Washington, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts.
Note how the Miller Center folks call him one of the “greatest”—not the “most consequential,” which might actually be accurate—and also note how they directly tie his “greatness” to expanding the role of the federal government and to the creation of an imperial presidency.
It’s not just academics like those at the Miller Center who display a fawning love for Wilson. A 2002 episode of the PBS series American Experience glowingly “explores the transformation of a history professor into one of America’s greatest presidents.” Radical Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who in many ways was Britain’s version of Wilson, once even likened him to Jesus Christ.
In the 1960s, President Lyndon Baines Johnson—another Wilson acolyte—spearheaded the formation of Washington, D.C.’s Woodrow Wilson Center. In announcing the project, Johnson proclaimed that there “could be no more fitting monument to the memory of Woodrow Wilson than an institution devoted to the highest ideals of scholarship and international understanding.”
In November 2015, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen even penned an article titled “Woodrow Wilson Was Racist, but He Deserves Our Understanding.” Why does Wilson deserve our understanding when others do not? Is it because he was a “transformational progressive” who supported liberal causes such as the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, the implementation of the federal income tax, and the creation of the world government League of Nations?
You bet it is.
Wilson’s presidency was the beginning of the end for the radical experiment in individual liberty that the Founders had fought for. How did it happen? Well, much like the case of the Titanic, the story of how something goes from mighty, brave, and unsinkable to slowly breaking apart and becoming a footnote in history requires the same relentless forces of humanity that the Founders tried so hard to protect citizens from: hubris, greed, and, most of all, fear.