If you are rolling your eyes at the recent news of rallying Princeton students, I point you to this enlightening article:
Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist, even by the standards of his time.
The article is void of cites and is pretty vague about who did what. Im not saying it isnt factual, but it needs more evidence. Wilson appointed the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice; Louis Brandeis. Again, that doesnt mean he wasnt racist.
For an article in the popular press, it has plenty of cites. So does this article from the Washington Post, which points out the same things.
For a history as bad as that, one would think Wilson’s contributions to race relations would be such common knowledge there wouldn’t be a need for vox to furnish a bibliography. That kind of says something.
The second article does have cites. The cynic in me says the reason this isnt well known is his political party.
Wow. I have to say that I never knew, before reading these articles, just how much of a racist Wilson was. And yet, it should have been obvious: he was a Southern Democrat during an era when the Southern Democrats were essentially the political wing of the Ku Klux Klan. Of course he was a racist.
I’m surprised. I thought it was common knowledge.
Here’s another interesting Wilson article, from a law prof at the U of Chicago.
I’ve known Woody was a pig racist for a long time. He was also one of our most progressive 20th century presidents. To what extent does his 1910s Southern Democrat anti-black douchebaggery darken his otherwise admirable political record?
Who is this Wilson fellow? Was he the president who supposedly said about Birth of a Nation, “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true,” or is he Tom Hanks’ volleyball?
Nah, we threw out most of the ones like him fifty years ago. He is now the nation’s embarrassment, not just that of the Democratic Party.
The president who overcame his Confederate Apologist upbringing was Truman. Interesting fellow.
If anyone is have difficulty with ‘Democrat’ of 1915 and ‘Democrat’ of 2015:
See 1948 Democratic National Convention: Hubert Humphrey called for the Party to abandon ‘State’s Rights’ and embrace ‘Human Rights’. This caused the ‘Dixiecrats’ to walk out en masse.
It was Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ of 1968 which brought these ‘Good ol’d boys’ into the GOP.
Southern whites endorsed the Democratic Party because Lincoln (and the ‘Radical Republicans’ who followed him) were Republican.
The split occurred in 1948. The move to the GOP was cemented in 1968.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by LBJ - a Texan (who predicted that it would be 50 years before another Democrat was elected in the South).
IIRC, I first read these sorts of un-pretty things about Wilson in the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen (original edition from 1995 I think).
Same here. I thought most people knew Wilson was a racist. At least towards black and brown people. I don’t know if he was equally bigoted towards Asians or Native Americans.
Was he more racist than Lincoln?
Hard to compare. Lincoln faced questions like “would it be humane to send freed blacks to live in Liberia?”. Wilson faced somewhat different questions.
Perhaps one way to compare these men would be to look at whose thinking evolved more over time. I know little about Wilson, but I’m guessing the answer to this question would be “Lincoln.”
Can’t he be both, like the late Earl Spalding?
Most of our presidents have been racist. Racism has been the norm since way before this country was founded.
I knew about Wilson’s past too. Any one who does enough reading outside of a high school history text book will probably glean enough to know that Wilson didn’t like the blacks. But I think the article is a good one because it reminds us that Wilson wasn’t simply a man of his times (like Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt). He was actually backwards, and it’s okay to judge him harshly because of it.
Well summarized. I had retained Racism in Wilson’s persona over the years - kinda like I retained a recollection that his wife and cabinet were functionally president after he had his stroke (again, IIRC). So when Princeton had its of-the-moment on-campus disruption, I guess the first thing I felt was “oh…right. Oh yeah, that was coming…”
It does raise the whole Founding Fathers who Owned Slaves question: if this effort to truly root out the “Racist Wallpaper in our everyday Lives” continues over the coming era, is there a way to navigate that, so their ownership/treatment/concubinage(word?) of humans is fully represented, but also their founding of the country?
This is going to be interesing.
Maybe we shouldn’t name all our institutions after “great” individuals of the past. There’s no need to do so.
Or alternatively, we can name institutions after supposedly great individuals, but realize these names need not be permanent and can be changed over time. Like when we realize that we’d be better off honoring someone whose contributions to history don’t involve putting people in cages because of the color of their skin.
I started thinking about this a while back. If you look at old money, it doesn’t seem to have as many faces of actual people, it tends to have depictions that are more represententative of ideals. I think it would be better to go back to that. I’m not really one for this cult of personality stuff.
I think it’s best to judge people by the standards of their time. I agree that Wilson’s main problem isn’t that he was racist by 2015 standards; it’s that he was racist by 1915 standards.