Judging by relevant books, Lincoln's suppression of dissent was a more thorough attack on the constitution, American freedom, and American democracy than Wilson's.
In their different ways, he and FDR might have tied.
That does not mean Wilson was a fine fellow.
Has it always been like that in America?
We have only glorious histories of our revolution - not quite to the point, anyway - and few of 1812.
In 1917, Mencken collected a diary and notes from his recent sojourn as a reporter in Germany and burried them in his back yard in Baltimore, lest they be used to his harm.
Moderately pro-German, his dispatches had attacked British propaganda and vigorously resisted the efforts of Brits and their American sympathizers to drag America into the war.
His mail was opened, his house was searched, and the feds once tried to frame him.
He lost his column and went prudent while Debs, for example, went to jail for publicly urging young men to evade the draft.
"Mencken, The American Iconoclast," Marion Elizabeth Rodgers.
Well, it didn't go like that during the Vietnam War, anyway.
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