Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom

by Andrew P. Napolitano

Overview

“Either the Constitution means what it says, or it doesn’t.”

America’s founding fathers saw freedom as a part of our nature to be protected—not to be usurped by the federal government—and so enshrined separation of powers and guarantees of freedom in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But a little over a hundred years after America’s founding, those God-given rights were laid siege by two presidents caring more about the advancement of progressive, redistributionist ideology than the principles on which America was founded.

Theodore and Woodrow is Judge Andrew P. Napolitano’s shocking historical account of how a Republican and a Democratic president oversaw the greatest shift in power in American history, from a land built on the belief that authority should be left to the individuals and the states to a bloated, far-reaching federal bureaucracy, continuing to grow and consume power each day.

With lessons rooted in history, Judge Napolitano shows the intellectually arrogant, anti-personal freedom, even racist progressive philosophy driving these men to poison the American system of government.

And Americans still pay for their legacy—in the federal income, in state-prescribed compulsory education, in the Federal Reserve, in perpetual wars, and in the constant encroachment of a government that coddles special interests and discourages true competition in the marketplace.

With his attention to detail, deep constitutional knowledge, and unwavering adherence to truth telling, Judge Napolitano moves through the history of these men and their times in office to show how American values and the Constitution were sadly set aside, leaving personal freedom as a shadow of its former self, in the grip of an insidious, Nanny state, progressive ideology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595553515
Publisher:	Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date:	11/12/2012
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano is Fox News Channel's senior judicial analyst, currently seen by millions of viewers weeknights on The Big Story and The O'Reilly Factor. Napolitano is the youngest person in New Jersey history to receive a lifetime judgeship. He is bright (graduate of Princeton and Notre Dame Law School), articulate (four times voted most outstanding professor at the two law schools at which he taught), and broadcast-experienced (as a daily fixture on Fox News Channel since 1998). He is the author of Constitutional Chaos and The Constitution In Exile.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Introduction: The Lives of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson xiii

Chapter 1 The Bull Moose: Roosevelt's New Party in His Own Image and Likeness 1

Chapter 2 Reeducation Camps: Compulsory Education 20

Chapter 3 Quiet Men with White Collars: The Rise of the Regulatory State 36

Chapter 4 The Government's Printing Press: The Federal Reserve 54

Chapter 5 Destruction of Federalism: The Seventeenth Amendment 75

Chapter 6 The "Lesser Races": Racism and Eugenics 93

Chapter 7 Service or Slavery?: Conscription 112

Chapter 8 The Government Tries to Pick Winners: Labor Law and the Regulation of the Workplace 125

Chapter 9 The Government's New Straw Man: Anti-trust 140

Chapter 10 Mismanagement, Waste, and Hypocrisy: Conservation 157

Chapter 11 A Fierce Attack on Personal Freedom: Prohibition 172

Chapter 12 "The Supreme Triumphs of War": Roosevelt and International Relations 184

Chapter 13 A Reverberation of Horrors: Wilson and International Relations 200

Chapter 14 Propaganda and Espionage: The Domestic Front During the Great War 219

Chapter 15 The Government's Grand Larceny: The Birth of the Federal Income Tax 235

Chapter 16 What Have We Learned from All This? 248

Postscript 251

Notes 255

Acknowledgments 277

About the Author 279

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

Fox News regular and former New Jersey judge Napolitano (Constitutional Chaos) seeks to prove that presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were not heroes but A-list bad guys.. Napolitano claims that Roosevelt and Wilson “pushed aside the traditionally accepted and constitutionally mandated restrictions on the federal government and used it as an instrument to redistribute wealth, regulate personal behavior, enrich the government, and enhance the government’s health with wars.” With the draft, instituted by Wilson in WWI, the U.S. instituted “a form of slavery and therefore tyranny.” Napolitano repeatedly links what he views as Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s Progressive era folly and perfidy to the present, claiming that Wilson instituted the federal income tax we know today, which the authors calls “theft” and that, thanks to Roosevelt’s foreign meddling, the U.S. is the “most imperialistic country in the history of the world.” This hit job takes on the Federal Reserve, compulsory education, industrial regulation, and race with equal lack of subtlety. Roosevelt and Wilson, according to Napolitano, were agents of central economic planning. Whatever political points Napolitano is trying to score, he doesn’t accomplish. Agent: Bob Barnett. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly