Mr. Roosevelt, however – all his wonderful traits notwithstanding – dramatically expanded the role of the presidency and with it the expectations of Americans.  Then later, Woodrow Wilson picked up where Teddy left off and transformed the office into one that became, in fact, an amazing colossal presidency.   And it wasn’t a good thing.

The day after his election in November of 1912, Wilson told his party chairman: “Before we proceed, I want it understood that I owe you nothing.  Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States.”  I think he may have showered in contaminated water that very morning.  He was, after all, from Jersey.

Wilson had written a book back in 1908 entitled Constitutional Government.  In it, he talked about his views of the presidency:  “The President is at liberty, both in law, and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.”  His administration was living proof of this.  This so-called “Progressive” man was a civil liberties wrecking crew, though revered by most Democrats today as a hero – even a saint.  The nation under Wilson, and at the end of The Great War, was as close to totalitarianism as it had ever been.   An editorial in The New Republic on November 16, 1918, gives a snapshot of what the country looked like, and this periodical clearly saw all of it as great:

“The whole issue hinges on social control.  For forty years we have been widening the sphere of this control, subordinating the individual to the group and the group to society.  Without such control, vastly magnified, we should not have been able to carry on the war. We conscripted lives, property, and services; we took over railroads, telegraphs and other economic instruments.  We fixed wages, prices, the quantity of coal, power, labor or transportation a man might command, and the quantity of food we might consume.  All this we did on the narrowest of legal bases, for no one dared question our power.”

It did happen here – thanks to an amazing colossal presidency.

In between Teddy and Woody came William Howard Taft.  Now largely dismissed by historians as a presidential failure, what it is missed is how much of a voice of reason he was.  Roosevelt’s handpicked successor ratified by the voters in 1908, Taft and TR eventually had a falling out and conducted a party-dividing battle for the 1912 Republican nomination.   Taft won that race, but Teddy decided to run as a third-party candidate that November, effectively conceding the overall election to Mr. Wilson.

It was humiliating for Taft and while in the political wilderness he wrote a book about the presidency entitled, Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers.  What he had to say back then needs to be read, and read again by Americans today, in this new age of the amazing colossal presidency:

“Ascribing an undefined residuum of power to the President is an unsafe doctrine and…it might lead under emergencies to results of an arbitrary character, doing irremediable injustice to private right.  The mainspring of such a view is that the executive is charged with responsibility for the welfare of all the people in a general way, that he is to play the part of a universal Providence and set all things right, and that anything that in his judgment will help the people he ought to do, unless he is expressly forbidden not to do it.  The wide field of action that this would give to the executive, one can hardly limit.”

Warren Harding appointed William Howard Taft as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921, the only job he ever really wanted.  Harding also undid much of the damage Mr. Wilson had done to the economy, not to mention liberty itself.  

Sure, Harding had his share of personal problems.  And Taft was not too great on the campaign trail.  But compared to some of the amazing colossal presidents we have had, I think the men who served before and after Wilson look better than the man in the middle, and even in some ways, though it’s hard to admit, than the man in the arena.