Beck's Broke: Beck attacks Wilson, flunks basic scholarship

Glenn Beck is very proud of his new book, Broke, having once boasted that it “is our most scholarly effort” with fifty pages of “just footnotes.”

In a literal sense this isn't true. Broke contains not a single footnote, which are little notes at the bottom -- or “foot” -- of the page that allow the reader to know immediately the sources you cite. Nor does Broke contain endnotes, in which sources listed at the back of the book correspond to numbers sprinkled about the various chapters. No, what Broke has are known simply as citations -- a series of pages that attribute a source to a specific quote on a specific page.

And Beck manages to screw them up regardless, getting wrong both the name and publication date of one of Woodrow Wilson's books, in addition to ripping a quote from it out of context.

Anyone familiar with Beck knows that he despises Woodrow Wilson -- “a man who did more damage to the fabric of America than anyone who's come before or after,” as he puts it on page 49. And on page 51, Beck makes the case that Wilson was power-mad:

What made Woodrow Wilson especially dangerous was that he had taken the faith of his Presbyterian minister father and his mother, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, and mixed it with a lust for power leavened with a heaping dollop of socialism. In fact, in his own writings, Wilson made no secret about his fixation with power. In his book Congressional Power, Wilson wrote, “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.” Apparently, atrocities at the hands of dictatorial governments and regimes never crossed his mind, even as the country suffered through a world war.

First things first -- Wilson's book was not called Congressional Power. It was called Constitutional Government in the United States, as Beck's “footnote” for this quotation makes clear. However, the “footnote” claims that the book was published in 1917, which is wrong. It was published 1908. This is significant, in that World War I had not yet broken out and Wilson would therefore have had little reason to reflect on the war-induced suffering of his country, as Beck claims he should have.

But what of the actual quote? Let's take a look at the context from which Beck plucked it. On pages 105-106 of Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson discussed the peculiar nature of the House of Representatives:

It is very difficult for public opinion to judge such a body as the House of Representatives justly, because it is very difficult for it to judge it intelligently. If it cannot understand it, it will certainly be dissatisfied with it. Moreover, it is very difficult for a body which compounds its legislation by so miscellaneous a process as that of committees to bring itself into effective cooperation with other parts of the government, -- and synthesis, not antagonism, is the whole art of government, the whole art of power. I cannot imagine power as a thing negative, and not positive.

Presented in the (lack of) context Beck provided, that quote makes Wilson out to be licking his chops at the idea of amassing power. Presented in the proper context, we see that Wilson was actually discussing his view that governmental power arises through the cooperation of the various branches and not through “antagonism.”

But wait -- there's more! In Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson railed against autocratic governments of the type seen in Bourbon France and Romanov Russia, writing: “Many a long age stretches between the moment when a nation begins to awaken to the consciousness that it has common ties and a common interest as against a too masterful and selfish government and the triumphant moment when it sees its own chosen leaders in actual control of its law and policy.” [Page 30]

So when you come down to it, pretty much everything about Beck's allegation of Wilson's power madness is completely wrong, including the “footnote,” which is not actually a footnote.

“Most scholarly effort,” indeed...