BELONG THERE? — HE MADE IT WHAT IS TODAY! Richard Epstein: Does Woodrow Wilson Belong at Princeton?

As the Heritage Foundation notes, as a self-described “Progressive,” Wilson believed “that both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have outlived their usefulness—and their now outmoded truths:”

The scientific facts, Wilson coldly concludes, call for cooperation among the parts of government, not checks against one another.

Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop. All the progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle….

Wilson’s Darwinian constitutionalism means that an evolving human nature wipes away the need for the protection of individual rights by the separation of powers. Liberated from the old constraints demanded by an unchanging and flawed human nature, a government of now unlimited powers is unleashed to deal with the new political and economic conditions of corporations and political bosses.

Wilson laments that “Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence” ; they are not fighting today’s tyrants. The Declaration of Independence was an “eminently practical document…not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action.” His “new declaration of independence” enables Americans to fight the tyranny of “special interests,” of political machines and “selfish business.” Whatever the ills of the early 20th century, one might ask Wilson whether replacing the Declaration and the Constitution would not lead to even worse evils.

Such as airbrushing prominent yet suddenly inconvenient figures out of the historical record, just as Wilson proposed doing with that pesky Constitution that stood athwart him.