How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

by Ben Shapiro

The infamous three-fifths clause, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of congressional apportionment, was actually designed to prevent increased power in slaveholding states—counting slaves fully would have boosted southern representation in Congress without increasing the number of actual voting citizens.

The war also prompted yet more government interventionism at home. Wilson pursued dissenters with the force of law using the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), and propagandized about anyone who opposed any aspect of the war. As Jonah Goldberg states, “Even after the war, Wilson refused to release the last of America’s political prisoners, leaving it to subsequent Republican administrations to free the anti-war Socialist Eugene V. Debs and others.”59