Woodrow Wilson – Media Nation

The Andrea Estes saga leads the list of most-read Media Nation posts in 2023

It’s time once again to take a look at the state of Media Nation and share the most-read posts of the past year. It’s a little complicated this year — in late July, I moved the blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, and the numbers for January through July look different when compared to August through December. It seems to be an apples-and-oranges problem, but I can’t put my finger on it. Given that, I’m going to list the top five for the first seven months and the top five for the last five months. Presumably it will be easier to figure it out next year.

January-July 2023

1. Andrea Estes has left the Globe following an error-riddled story about the MBTA (May 4). One of The Boston Globe’s top investigative reporters was fired after the paper erroneously reported that three top managers at the MBTA were living in distant locations when in fact they were in the Boston area. Six others really were working remotely. The Globe has still not disclosed what went wrong, and, by fall, Estes was working at the Plymouth Independent, a well-funded nonprofit with some prominent Globe alumni.

2. Liz Cheney for speaker (Jan. 3). With the dysfunctional House Republicans unable to agree on a speaker, I suggested that a bipartisan coalition turn to Cheney, a hard-right conservative who had nevertheless endeared herself to some Democrats with her service on the House committee that investigated the role played by Donald Trump and others in the failed insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.

3. An ombudsman could have explained what went wrong with the Globe’s MBTA story (April 28). Following a lengthy correction to Andrea Estes’ story about the MBTA, I urged that the Globe, as well as other news organizations, bring back the ombudsman’s position, something that nearly all news organizations had abandoned over the past 10 years. Sometimes called the public editor, the ombudsman’s role is to act as a reader advocate and look into problems with coverage, standards, tone and other matters.

4. Globe editor Nancy Barnes tells her staff she’s working to unravel the MBTA fiasco (May 4). We’re still waiting — although, to be fair, Estes’ decision to file a union grievance may make it difficult to go public with any information about what went wrong, and who was to blame, in that botched MBTA story.

5. Why the Internet Archive’s copyright battle is likely to come to a very bad end (March 21). We all love the Internet Archive. In my view, though, it’s heading down a very bad road, claiming the right to copy and lend books without first reaching a licensing agreement with the publishers, as every other library does. Early indications were that the courts would not look kindly upon the Archive’s arguments, and I doubt that’s going to change. There are many negative observations I could make about copyright law, but it is the law.

August-December 2023

1. The late Matthew Stuart’s lawyer blasts the Globe (Dec. 6). After The Boston Globe published its massive overview of the 1989 Carol Stuart case, Nancy Gertner, who had been the late Matthew Stuart’s lawyer, took to GBH Radio (89.7 FM) and blasted the Globe for suggesting that Matthew may have been directly involved in fatal shooting Carol Stuart, the wounding of her husband, Charles Stuart, or both. (A brief synopsis: Charles Stuart, who had planned the murder, blamed the shootings on “a Black man,” turning the city upside-down for weeks, and then finally jumped to his death off the Tobin Bridge as police were moving in.) Several days after Gertner’s remarks, Globe columnist Adrian Walker, who worked closely on the project and narrated the accompanying podcast, appeared on GBH to defend the Globe’s reporting and assert that the paper did not draw any conclusions about Matthew Stuart’s role.

2. The Globe announces expanded regional coverage of Greater Boston (Sept. 6). The Boston Globe is among a tiny handful of regional newspapers that are growing and hiring — and the paper took another step in September by announcing more coverage in Cambridge, Somerville and the suburbs. The Globe already has bureaus in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Good news all around, although it’s no substitute for detailed coverage of local government, schools, development and the like. Some communities are now being well-covered by startup news outlets, most of them nonprofit; others, though, have little or nothing.

3. A devastating portrayal of Elon Musk raises serious questions about capitalism run amok (Aug. 23). The world’s richest person was unavoidable in 2023, mainly for his destruction of Twitter, the plaything he bought the previous fall. Ronan Farrow, writing in The New Yorker, took a deep dive into Musk’s life and career, describing him as an out-of-control egomaniac with scant regard for safety at SpaceX and Tesla, his grandiosity fed by what may be his overindulgence in ketamine. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk got more attention, but Farrow delivered the goods.

4. More evidence that Woodrow Wilson was among our very worst presidents (Oct. 9, 2022). Why this post from 2022 popped up is a mystery to me, but it’s nevertheless heartening to see that Wilson’s reputation continues to disintegrate. I shared a New York Times review of a Wilson biography by Adam Hochschild. The reviewer, Thomas Meaney, wrote that the book deals mainly with Wilson’s “terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison.” And lets not forget that Wilson was also a vicious racist.

5. Nobel winner weighs in on a shocking police raid against a newspaper: ‘It’s happening to you now’ (Aug. 12). One of several posts I wrote about a police raid of the offices of the Marion County Record in rural Kansas as well as the homes of the publisher and a city official. Publisher Eric Meyer’s mother, Joan Meyer, still involved in the paper at the age of 97, died the next day, apparently because of stress. “It’s happening to you now,” said Maria Ressa, the Filipino journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous resistance to her own country’s authoritarian regime. The ostensible reason for the police department’s thug-like action involved supposedly confidential driver’s records belong to a local restaurateur; more likely, it involved the paper’s investigation of Police Chief Gideon Cody’s alleged misconduct at his previous job. Two months after the raid, Cody resigned.

This might be my final post of 2023. Thank you, as always, for reading. And I wish all of you health and happiness in the year ahead.

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More evidence that Woodrow Wilson was among our very worst presidents

I find it astonishing that Woodrow Wilson’s reputation as a great president has been revisited only in recent years. For most of the century since his presidency, he’s been regarded as some of a visionary reformer and a liberal internationalist, his name adorning institutions and publications.

In fact, he was a vicious racist, a warmonger and an authoritarian who crushed civil liberties. We are still living with the consequences of World War I, and though he didn’t start it, he supercharged it by getting the United States involved (after pledging he wouldn’t) and grossly mishandling the peace talks.

Now there’s a new book about the Wilson years by Adam Hochschild called “American Midnight.” According to Thomas Meaney’s review in The New York Times, Hochschild deals mainly with Wilson’s campaign of repression. Meaney writes:

By some measures — and certainly in many quarters of the American left — the years 1917-21 have a special place in infamy. The United States during that time saw a swell of patriotic frenzy and political repression rarely rivaled in its history. President Woodrow Wilson’s terror campaign against American radicals, dissidents, immigrants and workers makes the McCarthyism of the 1950s look almost subtle by comparison.

I recommend “The Great War,” part of the PBS “American Experience” series. The three-part program debuted in 2018. You should be able to watch it if you’re a PBS Passport member, which gives you access to all kinds of great programming. We watched it a couple of years ago through the PBS app on Apple TV.

Even without trying to, the documentary makes the case that Wilson was, in fact, among our very worst presidents.

H.L. Mencken: Semi-forgotten genius or a flawed but talented figure?

I recently attempted to fill one of the many gaps in my education by reading an anthology of work by H.L. Mencken, a Baltimore-based journalist of some renown during the first half of the 20th century (“The Vintage Mencken,” edited by Alistair Cooke). I came away disappointed.

Though I had already prepared myself for his well-advertised racism and antisemitism, I hadn’t realized that he was a misogynist as well. And, though he could certainly turn a phrase, many of his pieces do not hang together with any sort of coherence. For example, the longest — a critical essay about Theodore Dreiser — begins by mocking him, moves on to trashing him and then concludes with the observation that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all. I say this without any personal insight into Dreiser, as I don’t believe I’ve ever read him, not even his best-known novel, “Sister Carrie.” I just thought it was odd that Mencken couldn’t make up his mind.

Some of Mencken’s writing, of course, was satisfying. I particularly enjoyed this description of life as young reporter and how it had deteriorated into something approaching factory work:

Whether or not the young journalists of today live so spaciously is a question that I am not competent to answer, for my contacts with them, of late years, have been rather scanty. They undoubtedly get a great deal more money than we did in 1900, but their freedom is much less than ours was, and they somehow give me the impression, seen at a distance, of complacency rather than intrepidity. In my day a reporter who took an assignment was wholly on his own until he got back to the office, and even then he was little molested until his copy was turned in at the desk; today he tends to become only a homunculus at the end of a telephone wire, and the reduction of his observations to prose is commonly farmed out to literary castrati who never leave the office, and hence never feel the wind of the world in their faces or see anything with their own eyes.

Some of Mencken’s best pieces are obituaries of the famous and the infamous, and he especially rises to the occasion following the death of William Jennings Bryan. “He was, in fact,” Mencken writes, “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses…. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard.”

Good stuff, even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Hunter S. Thompson’s monumental sendoff of Richard Nixon, which remains in a class of its own.

I enjoyed Mencken’s putdown of Woodrow Wilson, who has only gradually come to be regarded as one of our worst presidents. (“[H]e knew better than they did how to arrest and enchant the boobery with words that were simply words, and nothing else.”) Then again, Mencken disdained Franklin Roosevelt and even expressed some misgivings about Abraham Lincoln, offset by his grotesque nostalgia for the Confederacy.

I guess the best way to understand Mencken is not as a half-forgotten genius but, rather, as a flawed but talented writer who will probably continue to fade into obscurity.

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Pandemics and White House demagogues: How Wilson and Trump made everything worse

Woodrow Wilson in 1914. Photo via the Library of Congress.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The pandemic was spread not just by germs but by politics. The virus would have killed many Americans in any case. But a demagogue occupied the White House, and measures that could have reduced the number of victims — a ban on large gatherings, for instance, as well as an honest reckoning with the public — were discouraged at the highest levels. In the end, a tragedy that was the result of natural forces was made immeasurably worse by human failure.

You may think I’m describing President Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19. In fact, I’m referring to Woodrow Wilson and the influenza pandemic of 1918. According to John M. Barry’s 2005 book “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,” a considerable amount of suffering and death could have been prevented were it not for Wilson’s messianic mobilization for war.

“America had never been and would never be so informed by the will of its chief executive, not during the Civil War with the suspension of habeas corpus, not during Korea and the McCarthy period, not even during World War II,” Barry writes. “He would turn the nation into a weapon, an explosive device.
“As an unintended consequence, the nation became a tinderbox for epidemic disease as well.”

One example of how Wilson’s embrace of total war worsened the pandemic will suffice. In Philadelphia, the inept public health director, Wilmer Krusen, refused to take action even after the flu began to rip through the city — spread, as was so often the case, by troops being shipped around the country.

At the same time, Wilson’s propaganda chief, George Creel, exerted enormous pressure on Americans to buy Liberty Bonds in order to pay for the war effort — an outgrowth of Creel’s chilling mantra, “100% Americanism.” The newspapers didn’t dare question the official line, which was that the flu was no big deal. And so Philadelphia went ahead with a parade to promote Liberty Bonds, an event that turned out to be a major vector in the spread of the disease.

All told, about 20,000 people died in the Philadelphia outbreak — and, as described by Barry, death from the 1918 flu was gruesome, with victims turning deep blue as their lungs became unable to process oxygen and with blood pouring out of every orifice.

In all, about 675,000 people in the U.S. died from the 1918 flu (the equivalent of nearly 2 million today), and perhaps as many as 50 million worldwide.

By failing to level with the public, according to Barry, Wilson made a bad situation much worse. Barry writes that “as horrific as the disease itself was, public officials and the media helped create that terror — not by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure…. In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing. Society is, ultimately, based on trust; as trust broke down, people became alienated not only from those in authority, but from each other.”

And here’s where the parallels to our current situation are especially telling. Trump wanted to minimize COVID in order to save the stock market — not, as Wilson would have it, to make the world safe for democracy. Nevertheless, both Wilson and Trump played down the seriousness of the invisible enemy that had invaded our shores. As reported by The Washington Post, Trump dithered for more than two months — a time when the threat was becoming increasingly clear, and when steps could have been taken to minimize COVID’s spread.

According to scientists at Columbia University, some 36,000 lives could have been saved in the U.S. if social-distancing had been put in place just a week earlier — on March 8 instead of March 15.

Moreover, although the press isn’t under the threat of censorship today as it was in 1918, Trump has what is essentially his own media outlet — Fox News — which has been spreading disinformation from the start of the pandemic and cheering on the mask-disdaining anti-shutdown protesters who invaded statehouses a few weeks ago. Pandemic disease has become just another manifestation of the partisan divide. The result: More than 110,000 Americans have died, one-quarter of the worldwide total.

The analogies between 1918 and 2020 aren’t perfect, of course. Despite Wilson’s many flaws, he probably couldn’t have avoided entering World War I. The response to the influenza could have been managed better, but there were limits to what could be done during wartime.

Trump, on the other hand, has been an active impediment to anti-COVID measures by spouting false information about drugs and (lest we forget) bleach, by refusing to wear a mask in public and by interfering with state efforts to obtain medical equipment and supplies.

Also unlike 1918, the media are reporting plenty of uncensored, reliable information. The problem today isn’t censorship; rather, it’s a parallel universe of right-wing media more dedicated to advancing Trump’s political prospects than to the truth.

Now we are in the midst of our darkest period in many years, as we deal not just with COVID and economic calamity but with the Black Lives Matter protest movement, a long-overdue response to racism following the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, and of the deaths of numerous other Black men and women at the hands of police and racist vigilantes. As others have observed, we are simultaneously reliving the pandemic of 1918, the depression of the 1930s and the turmoil of 1968. A better, more just country may come out of this, but that doesn’t make the moment any easier to process.

One aspect of Barry’s book struck me as both unlike and yet resonant with the present crisis. At root, Barry tells a medical detective story, going into great detail about the lives of a small handful of scientists who attempted to find a vaccine and a cure for the flu. Modern medicine was in its infancy then. When a treatment for diphtheria was developed in 1891, it was the first time in history that any disease had been cured. A quarter-century later, the number of eminent scientists called to work on the 1918 influenza outbreak could be counted on two hands.

And they failed.

Today we know so much more — yet our experts have been groping for answers, too, changing their guidance on face masks and warning us that they may fall short in their frantic search for a vaccine and/or a cure.

Barry quotes one of the 1918 researchers, Victor Vaughan, as saying in disgust: “Doctors know no more about this flu than 14th-century Florentine doctors had known about the Black Death.”

It’s a lesson in humility and patience that we should keep in mind. After all, the flu pandemic eventually burned out of its own accord. COVID will, too. But coming up with solutions to racism, police brutality and economic injustice, the other unfinished business of 2020, is going to be up to all of us.

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