Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom

“Either the Constitution means what it says, or it doesn’t.”

America’s founding fathers considered liberty a basic part of our nature—something to be guarded, not usurped by the federal government. As a result, they enshrined separation of powers and guarantees of freedom in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

But a little over a hundred years after America’s founding, those God-given rights were laid siege by two presidents—Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson—who cared more about the advancement of progressive, redistributionist ideology than the principles on which the country was founded.

No one understands and articulates their disastrous impact better than constitutional scholar, former state Superior Court judge, and Senior Judicial Analyst for Fox News Judge Andrew P. Napolitano. In Theodore and Woodrow, he reveals how they engineered and oversaw the greatest shift in power in American history. Where once authority resided in individuals and states, Roosevelt and Wilson vested it in a bloated, overreaching federal bureaucracy.

Their destructive legacy still dominates the nation in the form of the progressive income tax, state-prescribed compulsory education, the Federal Reserve, perpetual wars, and the constant encroachment of a government that coddles special interests and discourages true marketplace competition. Today, inescapable bureaucracy invades virtually all aspects of public and private life.

Pegging Roosevelt and Wilson as ideologues bent on using the presidency to redistribute wealth, regulate personal behavior, and consolidate federal power, Judge Napolitano exposes the intellectually arrogant, autocratic, even racist impulses that drove them to poison the American constitutional system.

Anyone concerned about civil, economic, or individual liberty will find Judge Napolitano’s exposé informative, infuriating, and indispensable.