Ok let me explain that one.
So one day I was browsing on youtube, and I saw a video from one of my favourite youtuber,AlternativeHistoryHub. It was called "The election that ruined everything (and if it never happened)". It was about the 1912 election, and how President Wilson caused many of the bad thing in the 20th century (WW2, the rise of communism, the cold war, etc.). There was also 2 other videos from the Cynical Historian who made two videos about him, and both thumbnails features Wilson as the devil with red horns and glowing red eyes and everything. He talked pretty negatively about him.
I started to look further into this, and to my suprise, I have discovered that he is very hated online. On AlternativeHistory.com, he is often blamed for many things, sometimes jockingly, sometimes seriously. Whenever someone mentions him in a comment under a video on youtube, in the commment and in the reply section, he is always talked about in a very negative way as well.
For the context, I am not american, I live in Hungary, and the only time I was taught about him before going to university is in relation to the Paris Peace Conference and his 14 points. I only learned about his more controversal policies, like resegregation when I was in universty. Where I live, he has a somewhat positive image, so when I discovered how many people hate him, I was really suprised by it.
The fact that so many people blames him, it feels wrong to. I tought "the great man of history" theory is no longer accepted, so why so many people think that he alone is resposible for everything?
For the record, I don't belive we should idealize him, because he certanly did some questionable things. I am just thinking this "Blame everything on one person" thinking is not good, and it is not helpful for future historical discussions. History is complicated, and one person can not cause events big as ww2 to happen. Even the most infuential people in history could not alter history this radically on his own, and many times, the circumstances were simply in the right place in the right time. Or something like that. In short, I feel like he is blamed for things beyond his control.
So I am curious: Is he really responsible for any of the awfull events of the 20th century, or these events would have happened with or without him?
Alternatively, was he always this hated, or this is something recent?
Woodrow Wilson was the first President to really push the United States into being a global actor. There were occasions before, when the US had tried to be useful: Theodore Roosevelt had brokered the peace deal between the Japanese and Russians in the Russo-Japanese War. But Wilson saw the devastation caused by WWI, saw the US was the least damaged and in the strongest position. His famous Fourteen Points pushed for changes: to have open diplomacy and no secret treaties, to dismantle colonial empires and give populations the right of self-determination ( notably, for you, within the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and to create a general association of nations that would "afford mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small States alike".
There was great opposition to this within the US. Many people did not want the US to be a global actor, involved in world diplomacy. They didn't like Wilson's grand ideals: one journalist, H.L. Mencken, called him "The Archangel Woodrow". And, within the US, this opposition won: Wilson exhausted himself campaigning for his Fourteen Points, became ill, and the League of Nations came into existence without the US. And that was a big reason it became ineffective in preventing WWII. After WWII, there was a move towards a truly effective association of nations, which became the United Nations. Wilson became seen then as a visionary. If you had asked US historians in 1960 , most would have given Wilson very high marks, would have said he was very important. One historian, Arthur S. Link, wrote an important admiring biography of Wilson that's 5 volumes.
However, there were, and are now, plenty of Americans on the Right who dislike the US being an idealistic global leader. They think spending money and time trying to build democracies around the world has had little benefit for the US, and that it should instead try to just compete with other countries and work to its own advantage. Wilson is a useful symbol for them, a bête noire . They can point to him and say, if Wilson hadn't popped up with his 14 Points, the US would be much better off today, and really the whole world. (It also doesn't help his reputation with conservatives that he created the first Federal income tax). Now, how much the US should or should not be a force for democracy in the world is a political debate, but to blame Wilson for all the problems of the 20th c. is, like you say, absurd: he died before the League of Nations had its great test, in the 1930's, over the rise of fascism, and was not around for the creation of the United Nations after WWII. There were other people involved in making the 20th c.- Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Mao Tse Tung had a lot more to do with it than Wilson.
To the anger of the Left, there is also no doubt that Wilson was a racist. He was from Virginia, like many important leaders of the Confederate army, and was firmly in favor of segregation. He thought the KKK was a valiant force for good, instead of a White terrorist organization. When he became President, there were quite a number of Federal employees who were Black, and had the same rights as White ones. Wilson reversed that, and re-segregated the Civil Service. Wilson may have been looking forward, when it came to greater democracy and self-determination in the rest of the world, but when it came to democracy and self-determination for Blacks in the US, he very much looked backward.
In the US of 1960, this racism was common, even expected for political leaders of the South, so Wilson's racism was for a long time pretty much ignored ( I should note that Arthur S Link was, like Wilson, also from Virginia). That has very much changed. There are now plenty of people who only know Wilson as a racist. They want his name removed from monuments, all statues of him taken down. This is a very emotional debate, and I won't even try to pass judgement on it, except to say that when you look very closely at many political leaders probably very few are purely good enough to deserve statues. At least, big, tall statues.