Woodrow Wilson was a horrendous president. He set the precedent for lying the country into war. He tossed critics and antiwar protesters into prison during that war he got elected to keep the US out of. Under his presidency, the income tax was begun, the Federal Reserve created, and Prohibition enacted. Throughout the country, the hysterical anti-German sentiment unleashed during and encouraged by the Wilson administration caused ethnic Germans to cower and paper over their heritage — lubing the slope for FDR to intern Japanese-Americans a generation later. In Bushwick, that manifested itself in the renaming of Hamburg Avenue, between Central and Knickerbocker, to Wilson Avenue, no doubt further feeding the megalomania of the authoritarian occupant of the White House.

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