{"id":4444,"date":"2023-09-18T11:42:06","date_gmt":"2023-09-18T15:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/?p=4444"},"modified":"2024-12-04T11:32:21","modified_gmt":"2024-12-04T16:32:21","slug":"woodrow-wilson-was-even-worse-than-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/?p=4444","title":{"rendered":"Woodrow Wilson Was Even Worse Than You Think"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson\u2019s presidency that sealed the victory.<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
\"Woodrow
Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, served two four-year terms from 1913-1921. Among his accomplishments was the establishment of the Federal Reserve banking system and the creation of the Federal Trade Commission. He declared war on Germany in 1917, during World War I, and attended the Versailles Peace Conference ending the war. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for his Fourteen Point peace plan and his work toward establishing the League of Nations. (Photo by Oscar White\/Corbis\/VCG via Getty Images)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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An incorrigible white supremacist, Wilson’s racism was fundamental even to his \u201cidealistic\u201d plans for a peaceful post-WWI world order.<\/em><\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

By Colin Woodard<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking Points Memo<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

June 29, 2020 – This article is part of TPM Cafe<\/a>, TPM\u2019s home for opinion and news analysis.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Princeton University\u2019s decision this weekend to strike the name of its former president \u2014 and ours \u2014 from its public policy school for his \u201cracist thinking and policies\u201d was long overdue. Woodrow Wilson was in wide company in being a white supremacist at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century, but he stands apart in having overseen the triumph of this ideology at home and abroad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Son of the Confederacy\u2019s leading cleric, apologist for the Klan, friend of the country\u2019s most prominent racist demagogues, and architect and defender of an apartheid international racial order, the amazing thing is that Wilson\u2019s name was ever associated with idealism or respectable statesmanship. In fact, delving deeply into his life to write \u201cUnion\u201d <\/em>\u2014 a book on the battle over whether the United States was to be defined by adherence to \u201cnatural rights\u201d ideals contained in the Declaration of Independence, or to Anglo-Saxon bloodlines \u2014 I came away wondering how any institution would have wanted to be associated with his name at all, even in the 1920s or 1940s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilson was raised in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy who made his name through the publication of his popular sermon arguing for the Biblical sanction of slavery. After the war the slaves who served the Wilson family in the Rectory became wage laborers, but little else changed until the elder Wilson relocated the family to South Carolina\u2019s capital, Columbia, a city that remained half-ruined after a fire spread during General Sherman\u2019s advance five years earlier. Under the protection of the U.S. Army, South Carolina\u2019s African-American majority had sent a 78\u201346 Black majority to the lower chamber of the State House, just four blocks from the Wilson\u2019s Greek Revival home, and ten to the 21-seat senate, where Republicans \u2014 then still very much the party of Lincoln \u2014 also enjoyed a majority. As an academic and president, Wilson would later reveal just what he thought of these developments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After dropping out of Davidson College (he had a \u201ccold\u201d) and loafing about his parents\u2019 home for a year, Wilson\u2019s father enrolled him at another Presbyterian, Southern-friendly college in Princeton, New Jersey which, unlike Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, or Brown, refused to admit African-Americans. Two thirds of Princeton\u2019s students came from the former Confederacy, but Wilson was confronted with non-Southerners for the first time, an experience that bolstered his reactionary politics and Southern identity. He took up the secessionist side in debates with classmates, and nearly came to blows with some Northern students during the contested 1876 election. He fumed over Rutherford B. Hayes\u2019s ascension to the presidency \u2014 \u201cHow much happier we would be now if [we] had England\u2019s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a Republic\u201d \u2014 and was outraged by the prospect of universal male suffrage, which he called \u201cthe foundation of every evil in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He graduated from Princeton, but dropped out of University of Virginia\u2019s law school after a year, again alleging a cold, and spent another sixteen months at his parents\u2019 home, writing articles nobody would publish. \u201cThe determination of the Saxon race of the South that the negro race shall never again rule over them is, then, not unnatural and it is necessarily unalterable,\u201d one concluded, arguing that Southern whites must maintain \u201cunited resistance to the domination of an ignorant race.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He eventually wound up at Johns Hopkins University to study history, but was soon annoyed by his professors\u2019 insistence that he do archival research, \u201cdigging \u2026 into dusty records\u201d and \u201cother rummaging work of a dry kind, which seemed very tiresome in comparison with the grand excursions amongst imperial policies which I had planned for myself,\u201d as he put it to his fianc\u00e9e. He made friends with a fellow Southerner, Thomas Dixon Jr., and wrote a book about the \u201cliving reality\u201d of U.S. government without once visiting D.C., a short train excursion south of Baltimore, and then dropped out, believing he did not need a doctorate to pursue an academic career. Discovering otherwise, he convinced his former mentors to let him submit his book as his dissertation and stand for oral exams specially devised to ensure his success. In June 1886, he was awarded a PhD he hadn\u2019t really earned.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He condemned Reconstruction \u2014 the effort to enforce the civil and political emancipation of African-Americans in the occupied South \u2014 and said allowing Blacks to vote was a \u2018carnival of public crime.\u2019 “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He ultimately taught at Princeton, where he made his mark with a compact textbook, \u201cDivision and Reunion,<\/em>\u201d about the Civil War and postwar reconciliation. Contained within was an outline of the post-Confederate vision of a nation reunited based on shared Anglo-Saxon interests. He declared the \u201ccharges of moral guilt\u201d leveled against Southern slave lords were unjust because slaves \u201cwere almost uniformly dealt with indulgently and even affectionately by their masters,\u201d who themselves were the beneficiaries of \u201cthe sensibility and breeding of entitlement.\u201d He condemned Reconstruction \u2014 the effort to enforce the civil and political emancipation of African-Americans in the occupied South \u2014 and said allowing Blacks to vote was a \u201ccarnival of public crime.\u201d The mass slaughter of Black people by white terrorists in Hamburg, Vicksburg, Colfax, New Orleans and other cities went unmentioned, as did attacks occurring in dozens of South Carolina towns right under Wilson\u2019s nose the whole time he was coming of age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDivision and Reunion\u201d<\/em> was met with mixed reviews, but was a commercial success, as it embraced an account that let white Americans put the Civil War and civil rights behind them. And it inspired Wilson to write \u201cA History of the American People,\u201d<\/em> a poorly written and shoddily researched five-volume, illustrated tome published in 1902. (\u201cA disappointment after the pleasure of examining the pictures is past,\u201d a leading journal wrote of it.) It furthered the white supremacist arguments in \u201cDivision and Reunion,<\/em>\u201d calling freed slaves \u201cdupes\u201d and the KKK a group formed \u201cfor the mere pleasure of association [and] private amusement\u201d whose members accidentally discovered they could create \u201ccomic fear\u201d in the Blacks they descended on. Immigrants were a problem because they were no longer \u201cof the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe\u201d but contained \u201cmultitudes of men of the lowest classes from the South of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland\u201d and Chinese people, \u201cwith their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life,\u201d who seemed \u201chardly fellow men at all, but evil spirits\u201d and who provoked understandable mass killings by white mobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then he went into politics, swapping the presidency of Princeton for the governorship of New Jersey by convincing the Democratic Party bosses of that state that he would be their puppet, but backstabbing them once he achieved power. After his 1911 inauguration, he did little governing, as he was soon laying groundwork for a presidential campaign. With the Republican vote split between incumbent William Howard Taft and the third party candidacy of former president Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson won the 1912 election with less than 42 percent of the vote, becoming the first Deep Southerner to hold the presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson\u2019s presidency that sealed the victory. Wilson presided over the segregation of the federal government, with Black civil servants directed to use only certain bathrooms and to eat their lunches there too so as to not sully the cafeterias. At the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, makeshift partitions were erected in offices so white clerks would not have to see their Black counterparts. Dozens of prominent African-American officials were replaced with whites, which came as a shock to many African American leaders who\u2019d supported Wilson because he\u2019d promised to treat Blacks \u201cfairly.\u201d When the (white) head of the NAACP, erstwhile Wilson ally Oswald Garrison Villard, begged the president to reverse course, Wilson told him it was all being done \u201cin the interest of the negroes.\u201d The president famously ejected Black civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter from the Oval Office for having temerity to tell him that his delegation came to him not as \u201cwards\u201d but as \u201cfull-fledged American citizens\u201d demanding equality of citizenship.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilson has been described as \u2018idealistic\u2019 because of his efforts to create an international governing order at the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I. But his plans for the world order presided over by the League of Nations paralleled his vision of the United States. “<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first Hollywood blockbuster was released in 1915, \u201cThe Birth of a Nation,\u201d<\/em> an epic film celebrating the KKK\u2019s reign of terror against African-Americans in the South Carolina of Wilson\u2019s adolescence and denigrating the black majority legislature that convened in his hometown with crude racial stereotypes. Co-produced by Wilson\u2019s friend from Johns Hopkins, Thomas Dixon Jr., who wrote the novel it was based on, it contained numerous quotes from Wilson\u2019s \u201cHistory of the American People\u201d<\/em> substantiating its point of view. Massive protests broke out in cities across the country, seeking to have it censored, a common occurrence in the years before the Supreme Court ruled that artistic productions were protected speech. Threatened with bankruptcy, Dixon turned to his old friend to intervene. Wilson screened the film in the White House for his Cabinet, and the following day Supreme Court Justice Edward Douglass White \u2014 whose statues in Louisiana and the U.S. Capitol are also subject of current protests<\/a> \u2014 agreed to show it to the other justices and congressional leaders because he himself had been in the Klan and loved the film\u2019s message. These tacit endorsements from the highest levels of power turned the tide and the film went on to be a massive financial success and was until very recently celebrated as a great work of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilson has been described as \u201cidealistic\u201d because of his efforts to create an international governing order at the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I. But his plans for the world order presided over by the League of Nations paralleled his vision of the United States. He promoted the principles of democracy and national self-determination, but only for European nations and Anglo-Saxon settler countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Czechs, Romanians, and Serbs deserved their own national states, African, Arab, Indian, and Pacific Island peoples did not. Those living in the Axis powers\u2019 former colonial possessions were sorted into a racial hierarchy of League mandates \u2014 Class A, B, and C \u2014 based on the level of tutelage they required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Japan, an allied power in the war, introduced a measure to include the principle of racial equality in the League\u2019s mandate. Wilson opposed it because it would have compelled the U.S. to ensure equal treatment to Japanese, Haitian, or Liberian citizens in hotels, restaurants, and transport across the Jim Crow South. The measure passed anyway, 11-5, but Wilson, who chaired the proceedings, unilaterally and arbitrarily declared the measure had failed because it was not unanimous. He also refused to meet Trotter, who had arrived with a petition for African-American equal rights, and a 29-year-old Vietnamese man seeking self-determination for his French-ruled people, who would later take matters into his own hand under his nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Princeton\u2019s school of public service was reorganized in 1948, eighteen years after its creation, to add graduate education and a new emphasis on training the governmental experts the U.S. was thought to need to win the developing Cold War. \u201cMany problems must be solved at home if our democratic institutions are to flourish,\u201d the New York Times paraphrased Princeton president Harold Dodds as saying at the time. Having named his institution for someone opposed to the ideals of human equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence seems a straightforward problem for Princeton to have finally solved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Colin Woodard<\/strong> is the author of six books including \u201cUnion: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood<\/a>\u201d and \u201cAmerican Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s said that the South lost the war, but won the peace, but it was Wilson\u2019s presidency that sealed the victory. An incorrigible white supremacist, Wilson’s racism was fundamental even to his \u201cidealistic\u201d plans for a peaceful post-WWI world order. By Colin Woodard Taking Points Memo June 29, 2020 – This article is part of TPM Cafe, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"blocksy_meta":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4444"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4834,"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions\/4834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ouleft.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}