Growing up, when I was taught history (yes, that used to happen, but not always well) the 28th president was revealed as a man of peace, the principled Big Kahuna at the Versailles Treaty conference, and the champion of 14 Points. Alas, his deserved legacy dashed by a series of strokes (implied, if not outright stated) brought about by an intransigent Republican Senate that kept America oh-so-foolishly out of the League of Nations. Fifth grade boys and girls learned of no downside to Thomas Woodrow Wilson. He was a great and august and noble Democrat.
What we weren’t taught was that Wilson was an unmitigated bigot, whose initial action upon occupying the White House in 1913 was to adopt segregation regulations throughout the U.S government. Nor were we taught that, as a college president, Wilson tried to keep blacks out of Princeton. Nor did we learn that as an author he praised the Klan in A History of the American People, or that the first film ever played in the White House was Birth of a Nation.
Nope, as a nation we didn’t and don’t learn about the reality of the dark roots of the Democratic party and its heroes. Not through more formal means anyway. And that is in part why Dinesh D’Souza, Bruce Schooley, and Gerald Molen (who won an Oscar for producing Schindler’s List) have produced Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, which opens nationwide tomorrow. From Andrew Jackson’s brazen abuse of Indians, to the Civil War and the KKK, to Wilson and the antics of thuggish big city mayors, and on to the Clintons, the film is a capsulized symposium on the racist, corrupt, and feather-bedding roots of the party, and the new frontiers to which Hillary will take it.
You can learn more about Hillary’s America at its Facebook page.