How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (24 page)

The other important lesson you need to learn about Wilson is that he was just a walking sack of death. In addition to the previously mentioned partial blindness, he also suffered constant crushing headaches that never went away, and lived with recurring stomach
pain that was so bad he traveled with his own stomach pump, which he used on himself every single day at the suggestion of a shitty physician until a White House doctor said,
“Who told you to do that? HOLY SHIT STOP THAT.”
He had writer’s cramp in his right hand and stabbing pains in his left shoulder and leg, and lived through what many medical historians refer to as “just a
buttload
of strokes.”

His already shaky health was tested even more in his second term, which Wilson devoted to the League of Nations. Wilson proudly kept America out of World War I in his first term, but when Germany refused to stop attacking American ships, Wilson was forced to declare war and drop the hammer. And drop it he did! Wilson led us into war during his second term and made sure that our soldiers always had food and ammo, and he signed a peace treaty before his term had ended. Seeing peace even in war, Wilson thought of World War I as an opportunity to build the League of Nations, an international super-friends team focused on maintaining global peace
by any means necessary
(diplomacy, usually). At the time, no one else was behind Wilson’s idea, and the lack of support just seemed to make him sicker and crazier. Oh, right, the craziness. Wilson was, by his own description, “impulsive, passionate, canny, tenacious, [and] cold,” and he once compared himself to a “dormant volcano, placid on the outside, a boiling caldron within.” When he pitched his League of Nations to the world only to get laughed at, the lava he kept stored on the inside started to bubble to the surface. He became angry and rude and bitter and his body started falling apart in a really bizarre manner; it started morphing in such a way that it caused his appearance to line up with his inner anger/craziness. The strain of having to deal with uncooperative foreign allies “contracted [Wilson’s] usually relaxed facial muscles into sharp ridges of hostility,” making him appear “haggard”; he perpetually looked angry and ferocious. Also, that one blind eye started twitching and fluttering like a tiny, round humming bird, trapped in an angry volcano face.

During this time, Wilson was irritable and grew suspicious of even his closest friends (something later historians attributed to undiagnosed brain damage). Wilson went days without sleeping and his
brain slowly started deteriorating, which, like everything at this point, only made Wilson angrier and more stubborn. Determined to win public support for the League of Nations, which became his white whale, Wilson decided to, against the orders of his wife, physicians, and basic common sense, tour the country and give speeches to rally the people to his side. He was riding all over America, coughing and sneezing and being fed predigested foods (the only food he could eat) by day, and giving rousing speeches by night (sometimes five before bedtime). He delivered his speeches with closed eyes, shaking hands, and a weakened voice. With his wheezing, his sleeplessness, his strained mumbling, his rapidly failing body, and singularly
obsessed focus, it’s not completely uncalled-for to label Woodrow Wilson our first Zombie President.

After his first stroke, Wilson cut the tour short and went back to the White House to relax, because presidenting is such a cakewalk of a job that we should all do it when we need a vacation.

Here was the problem: the doctors believed that if Wilson stepped down and left the White House, the disgrace and humiliation would kill him, but they also thought that if he actually tried to continue to be president, the
stress
would kill him, because “Hey, I’m a doctor in the early 1900s, I can say whatever I want and no one can stop me.” Wilson’s health had gotten so bad that he could barely walk, his mind was deteriorating so thoroughly that he could barely make decisions, and his demeanor was getting so nasty that his aides started to resign, one by one, having grown tired of the president’s hurtful outbursts and personal attacks.

So … who was actually running things?

In 1919, Wilson’s second wife, Edith, became the unofficial president of the United States. She decided which matters would be brought to Wilson and which ones would be thrown out. She secretly presided over the country while Wilson, her Crypt Keeper of a husband and president, got sicker, crazier, and angrier. This was kept far out of the public eye (people back then were, as people today, very much against the idea of a mummy being president).

All that said, don’t feel bad about fighting him, even though punching him will probably feel like hitting a helpless old man who has pneumonia instead of bones. Wilson did a lot of good for America, but he also earns distinction for being one of our country’s most racist presidents, and he wasn’t even one of the presidents who personally owned slaves. Most of
those
guys were
less
racist than Wilson. Wilson’s administration sought to increase the amount of segregationists and decrease the amount of black people in office, and he even segregated federal government offices, something that hadn’t been done since the mid-1800s. It could be argued that Wilson was from a different time, but it could
also
be argued that
so was Lincoln, you asshole
.

Keep all of this in mind when you enter the cage or ring or Thunderdome with the twenty-eighth president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. Focus on how much of a racist he is, and that should make your punches and kicks feel a little more satisfying. Remember how driven he was, parading himself around as president for a few years even though he was basically a bag of farts and racist death wails two months into his second term, and remember how full of rage and boiling lava he was. Also remember that he is just a time bomb of illness and weird body shit. Try to avoid letting him sneeze on, cough on, breathe on, or look at you, at all costs.

Historians often like to point out how easy it is to ridicule twenty-ninth president of the United States Warren G. Harding for his spectacular failures as a pathetic worm of a president, but they neglect to mention that it’s also incredibly fun and very justified. Harding is one of the most consistently hated and shat-upon presidents in the history of both politics
and
shitting. Throughout his life, enemies, friends, family members, and voters walked all over Harding and every time he just
took
it, sitting idly by while members of his cabinet royally ripped off America in scandal after scandal. The first time he tried to speak in front of a large gathering of Republicans, his own party
booed him
. Roosevelt’s daughter called him a “slob”
for no clear reason
. His miserable presidency was so full of bad decisions, you’d think it was a high school date-rape ad. And he just took it all with a smile and a “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

The only president who ranks lower than Harding on any poll is William Henry Harrison, and that’s because Harrison died thirty days into his term. All Harding had to do to be better was live slightly longer, which he did, but that was
it
. He gave cushy government jobs to all of his longtime friends, who swiftly and efficiently learned how to illegally make massive amounts of money off of the trust of the American people. He made his friend Albert Fall the secretary of the interior; Fall was later arrested for accepting bribes in exchange for selling American oil fields to personal business associates. This came to be known as the Teapot Dome Scandal, and it was just the most famous of the scandals to rock the Harding administration, not the
only
one. The head of the Office of Alien Property
and
the head of the Justice Department were
also
convicted of accepting bribes, and the head of the Veterans Bureau skimmed profits and organized a small, underground drug ring (which, yes, is a
supervillainesque
level of evil).

One of Harding’s smartest career moves was quietly dying in office while traveling around the country in 1923. He had an enlarged heart, but not the kind that the Grinch had, the kind that kills shitty presidents. Mysterious circumstances surrounded his death, but no autopsy was performed, presumably because the coroners figured that if he was poisoned, he was sort of asking for it.

It is specifically this rich history of straight-up “taking it” that makes Harding a ticking time bomb. Don’t confuse Harding’s ineptitude as a political leader with an inability to handle himself in a fight. Harding, for all of his many faults, was very calculating and
sneaky
. He liked to put up a front as a softie and a gentleman while surreptitiously advancing his own agenda in the background, as he did in 1884 when he acquired the
Marion Star
, a sinking ship of a newspaper in Ohio with only seven hundred subscribers. With Harding at the helm, the
Star
quickly surpassed its competitors. Some people credited shrewd business practices, or the goodwill Harding had built up in the community, but Harding’s charm and likability were just a distraction. The
Star
succeeded because Harding trashed the ever-loving shit out of the name of his paper’s biggest competitor, the
Marion Independent
. According to Harding scholar Robert K. Murray, in his public and private life Harding the man always seemed to have an “amiable and genial personality”—which is why it came as such a shock when his paper started charging the competing
Independent
’s owner “with being ‘a liar,’ ‘a lickspittle,’ ‘a moral leper,’ and ‘a disgruntled and disappointed old ass.’ ”

Whether or not the owner was, in fact a “lickspittle,” and whether or not such a word was ever even a thing, is all lost to history. The bottom line is it worked and the
Independent
collapsed under the might of the ballsy, tough-as-nails
Star
. Harding later used the influence of his paper to launch his political career and attract the attention of the Republican Party.

As a politician, Harding didn’t really have any policies about which he felt passionate, he just
wanted
the presidency so badly, it didn’t matter what he had to say or do to get there. He had a track record of voting based on what he thought was going to
win
, regardless of whether or not he thought he was voting for the
right
side. It wasn’t about morals, it was about backing the right horse to avoid being left behind. He didn’t want to help the nation or create jobs or change the world, he just wanted a position of power and was determined to get it. At any cost.