I keep hearing that history will not to be kind to DJT.

[MIButterfly]

I'm not so sure. Look how they whitewashed Ronald Reagan into Saint Ronnie, the best president we've had in decades. The truth is he was ineffectual at best and horrible at worst. Among other things, which I'm pretty sure led to where we are now, he was in the midst of Alzheimer's which they did their best to hide from us, while others actually ran the country (which they did poorly in my opinion). They propped him up and told him what to say and luckily for them, he was able to get through it unlike DJT, who can't even read a teleprompter without sounding like a babbling idiot.

Look at how they whitewashed Gerald Ford. When he died, they heaped all kinds of praise on him, saying he "put country above party" when in reality, he let Nixon get away with all his crimes in exchange for becoming president. He pardoned Nixon before he had even been charged with any kind of crime! Not exactly putting country above party. More like self-service in my book.

Look at how they try to "sanewash" DJT now. Years from now, people will remember how bad he was, but a century from now? When nobody is left who actually lived through this shit, I'm afraid the history books will not tell the truth. They always seem to make people sound better than they actually were.

On the other hand, I could be wrong..........

I hope I'm wrong. I hope he's reviled like Hitler and Mussolini and all the others.

[Goonch]

1. ;-{).........

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Dunno. To the best of knowledge, Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding

were not rehabilitated.

And Wilson's feeble attempt at The League of Nations in Paris and D.C. couldn't erase the fact that he was a racist, despite being a pre-Civil Rights Democrat.

[ITAL]

7. Wilson's an interesting case

For years he was generally rated top ten (and even top 5!) by historians and even now tends to rank fairly high (12-15 on surveys).

Wilson did a lot of things that would build on Theodore Roosevelt and presage FDR domestically (and Franklin was a big fan of Wilson, working in his Administration). He also was involved with the creation of the Federal Reserve, which which gave us the central bank rather than the various systems we had prior. Further Wilson helped birth the Federal Trade Commission to protest consumers. He also pushed through bills ending child labor and an 8 hour workday for railroad workers (which quickly became the norm in most other industries). Also despite initial ambivalence about the ratification of the 19th Amendment (for largely political reasons given the South's reluctance -- Wilson actually advocated for the state passage of giving women the right to vote, especially in New Jersey where he lived), near the end of WWI campaigned heavily for it, and was involved in the final ratification after it squeezed through Congress and went to the States.

On the other hand like you said there were his racism and the massive cracking down on dissent during WWI and its aftermath (I suppose given the German sabotage rings in the US prior to our entry it makes some sense, even if it presaged later presidents who didn't have a war to justify it).

Foreign affairs he seems like a revolutionary with the League of Nations and his general tendency toward pacifism, but he also got involved in Latin American affairs multiple times (sometimes unwillingly, but still).

I've sometimes say Wilson is kind of a perfect encapsulation of the US. There's a lot to admire and just as much not to.

[EuterpeThelo]

3. And let's not forget

how so many have tried to rehabilitate W's image. Admittedly, I'd take him and even CHENEY back in a heartbeat over whatever the fuck this is we have now, BUT...

Starting wars based on lies (that killed at minimum a hundred thousand people, many of them innocent civilians, drained our treasury/exploded the deficit and from which it took a generation to disentangle ourselves); exploiting our pain over 9/11 to massively erode our civil liberties at home (cough, cough, PNAC, anyone?); demolishing our reputation/standing on the world stage; allowing gun violence to become not just normalized but celebrated; practicing extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and torture; cramming our government full of unqualified cronies and religious bigots; appointing some of the WORST supreme court justices we've ever had (his REAL legacy); handing out our hard-earned tax money to every Monopoly man with a monocle who didn't need it while slashing our safety nets.

And he just got to fuck off and go paint dog pictures and never say a word to stand up against the twisting of his "party" into the lethal hate machine we see before us now. His administration (among others) never being held accountable is what led us here.

The man was simply a bumbling idiot who did whatever his Machiavellian handlers told him to do. The architects surrounding him began their evil plans during the Nixon and Reagan years, but really W's administration is when everything went into warp drive towards where we are now. Well, that and Newt Gingrich a few years before deciding that governing with civility and cooperation was for the birds.

My late husband and I talked often about creeping authoritarianism even back then and we didn't think it could ever get any worse...

[maxrandb]

4. Funny, but until your post, I hadn't heard Reagan"s name in decades

Recorded human history is about 6,000 years old. American history is about 250 years old.

Unfortunately, social media has kinda trained people that "history" was last week, or yesterday.

5,000 years ago, the Egyptians were feeling pretty good about their "history".

3,000 years ago, the Greeks were feeling pretty good about their "history".

2,600 years ago, the Roman's were feeling pretty good about their "history".

I am pretty sure the Germans were feeling pretty good about their "history" in 1931.

Hell, about 16 years ago, we were celebrating the demise of the Retrumplican Party.

I don't know much, but I am confident of a couple things.

1. We write our own history.

2. We will eventually write this MAGAt shit into the ash-heep of history.

[MIButterfly]

6. I hope you're right. Please let it be so.

As for not hearing Reagan's name in decades, Republicans worship him. They're the ones that bring him up frequently. They love all the horrible things he did. Dems never talk about him.

[Swede]

5. I worked with a guy that moved here from Austria. Nice fella.

He said Hitler was a relative. That members of his family changed their names, with the Canadian government in agreement, from Hitler to common Austrian names, when they came here.

I bugged him a few times about this, but he stuck with the story. I still take it with a grain of salt.

But in 50 years, the Trump name will be dirt. I hope.

[GreatGazoo]

8. 'What is taught as "History" in high schools would more appropriately be called "Patriotism"' - J Loewen

In "Lies My teacher Told Me" James Loewen examines the dynamics of history. He notes that generally the longer it has been since an event the more coverage it gets in high school history books. So the Revolution gets 20x more coverage than Vietnam or Iraq. He also notes that second only to sex ed, history is the most common reason that parents request an opt out.

Until recently history was treated as a branch of literature, eg of fiction. It was nice stories about "great men" driven by the magic of fate to do great things. We are moving toward a more forensic and fact-based discipline with a new and healthy emphasis on primary source documents.

I don't know if history will "be kind" but likely it will ignore many of the things that we currently view as existential threats. Nothing ever seems as bad in hindsight because we know how it turned out; we know we survived it and that deflates the threat.

"The present is a a bully, always making us think the molten moment we inhabit is the most alarming ever, while the past seems to slip into that specious category of "simpler times". The 1950s now basks in the sunshine of false memory: sock hops, genial Ike, two-car garages, Elvis and a victorious America, her manufacturing plants unshaken by a single Axis bomb in the war, bestriding the industrial world.

Few saw the decade like that as they were making their way through it. In 1947 H.W. Auden published a book-length poem in which four characters in a New York City bar discuss the cosmos. It won the Pulitzer in 1948 but reading it could be heavy going. Nevertheless, it at once became universally known because of its title: The Age of Anxiety. That's what millions of Americans thought they were living in.

And with reason. The war had ended with the thunderclap of two doomsday weapons over Japanese cities, and just four years later Soviet Russia, recently an ally, now a threat, possessed those weapons too. "

- "Disney's Land" Richard Snow, 2019

Few people today would name Woodrow Wilson, Truman or Andrew Jackson as the worst president(s) ever but serious historians regularly do. Wilson segregated the government, praised the Klan and "Birth of a Nation", embraced eugenics, entered WW1 for no good reason and was credited with "winning the peace" for the Confederate South, eg. "they lost the war but won the peace." Wilson oversaw changes to the US dime coin that put the symbol of fascism into the pockets of millions of Americans until 1945. The damage he did reverberates to the present day.

Harry Truman incinerated 200,000 people and killed another 200,000 more slowly. Practiced law with no license or college education. Entered the Korean War. Started the NSA / CIA. Embraced and expanded authoritarianism. Set the stage for endless middle east conflicts.

Andrew Jackson committed genocide to expand slavery, "owned" hundreds of enslaved people, censored anti-slavery materials out of the US mail service, committed war crimes, executed POWs, embraced ethnic cleansing, fostered the 7-year economic collapse of 1837 and was studied, emulated and praised by Adolf Hitler.

[ITAL]

9. Perhaps some historians might

Generally all three rank in the top half on presidential surveys done by historians and political scientists though. Wilson tends to rank in the top 12-15 (and he used to generally get ranked top ten until around a decade ago). Truman has consistently been ranked in the top ten ever since the 1960s. Even Jackson usually ranks in the 20-23 nowadays, coming down from a much higher perch the last twenty years or so.

[GreatGazoo]

13. showing how much can be ignored by those willing to do so

Truman's popularity was lower than Nixon during Watergate.

Wilson is finally getting the rep he deserves. History is funny that way. This is guy, Patton, is Phd in History whose father is History prof. He is one of many who are detailed and relentless in their condemnations of Woodrow Wilson:

ETA: Wilson is especially relevant here because Wilson was obsessed with rewriting history, Lost Cause, etc. Wilson infamously said of "Birth of a Nation", ""It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

[ITAL]

15. That guy's videos generally frustrate me

I find this take to be much more nuanced and closer to the truth.

As far as Truman goes, he left unpopular and his reputation has only risen since. He's not the first president that has happened to.

[intheflow]

10. This is different.

Saint Ronnie was nuts but he was way more popular than Trump. Reagan came into office and 3 months later had an overall approval rating of 73%. Trump has never had approval ratings anywhere close to that. Reagan also wasn’t crass, he didn’t publicly revel in cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and he didn’t decimate governmental structure, threaten a third term, seek to imprison members of Congress for speaking truth, and as far as I recall, he didn’t send masked goons into the streets to terrorize children, poets, and nurses.

[yaesu]

11. Since the majority of states are red tRumplican states they will dictate the history standards of school books

and I am sure they will make sure their orange God and their dirty destructive deeds are given an A+ rating.

[usonian]

12. I look forward to the Donald Trump Memorial Library.

He is already worshiped several times a day in Japan (this is real, folks)

[maxsolomon]

14. Which history?

The history being made by Right Wing propagandist's bulk-buy hardcovers? That one will never stop as long as there are Billionaires.

[BannonsLiver]

16. You're overthinking it.

[flvegan]

17. We said the same thing about GWB. n/t