You also get weird situations like a great, great (great?, not sure how many greats), grandfather of mine. My family on my maternal grandmother’s side was German. One of a group of sponsored German immigrants to South Africa from the vicinity of Bremen, in the mid 1800s. First German settlers in southern Africa. My great Aunt was the family genealogist, and tracked down the branch of the family that stayed in Germany, and there was family lore of the branch that went to Africa, and disappeared out of the local family knowledge.

Just before WWI, my ancestor went back to Germany on business, and was promptly interned by the Germans on the outbreak of war because he was a “British Subject”.

He returned to South Africa afterwards, re-established himself and his business, and upon the outbreak of WWII, was promptly interned by the South African government because he was an ethnic German!

You can’t make stuff like this up!

There were the hordes of so-called “Four-minute Men” that were run by the Committee on Public Information, who would harangue the public at every opportunity. Woe to anyone who dared question them, what they said, or who dissented, because someone would be waiting in the wings to beat them up in many cities.

There were networks of quasi-official informers that would turn people in for things like “hoarding”, simply because they’d saved their sugar rations to make things like preserves. My great-grandmother fell foul of these creatures in Portland, Oregon, that bastion of upright Progressivism. They came into her house, tore it apart because someone reported that she’d “hoarded” sugar; what she’d done was carefully go without and saved it, in order to make her prize-winning preserves. A jealous neighbor turned her in; her supplies, laid in to prepare for winter, were confiscated and taken down to the local Democratic Party headquarters, where it was handed out to Democrats. Great-grandmother, you see, was not “one of them”, and her family came from back east, with a well-known reputation for being abolitionist. Members of the family went bankrupt during the Civil War, supporting things like the Massachusetts black regiments.

The crap that went on under Wilson has all been swept under the rug, just like Roosevelt’s confiscation of gold specie. It’s all carefully forgotten, and if you mention it in the wrong venue, they will call you a liar–But, the documentation is out there, buried in the libraries. I could hardly believe some of the stories that were passed down, so I went looking. The newspapers from that era are fascinating reading, when you realize the implications. It’s not hard to understand how they got Prohibition through, in that era–The votes were rigged, and the whole thing was an epic fraud perpetuated mostly by Democratic Party operatives.

The sad fact is that the American public is basically incredibly stupid and easily misled about things; the real history, and the implications of it all are oftentimes utterly ignored.

What’s hysterically funny, though? The Nazis studied Wilson and his methods, enacting as many of them as they thought they could. Ironically, there were things that Wilson and his coterie of fanatics did that even the Nazis thought were over the top, and refused to try to enact…