Charles Evans Hughes: “Now who’s the bitch, bitch?”
The Democrats started turning away from racism in 1948, when Hubert Humphrey insisted on a civil right plank. That led to the Dixiecrats leaving the party and nominating Storm Thurmond.
From a political standpoint, it made sense: Black voted Republican because they were the party of Lincoln and because southern Democrats infringed on their rights. Nothern Democrats were more willing to let Black voters vote and the plank drew them to the Democratic Party.
The Democrats were always divided into northern and southern wings. The urban, northern Democrats were against de jure segregation and the Ku Klux Klan; the southern Democrats were in favor.
The Klan, BTW, was pretty much dead at the time Birth of a Nation came out. The movie created interest, and the Klan not only was against civil rights, but was strongly nativist, pushing for immigration restrictions.
By the 20s, the Klan was an important political force, but it was also a multilevel marketing plan. Much of its popularity was due to Klansmen getting a cut from Klan regalia sold to members. It also benefitted from the movement of social organizations like Rotary and Lions and Kiwanis. People liked joining clubs and the Klan was another (though with racist attitudes).
That’s also why Harry Truman briefly joined the Klan. A campaign advisor said he should join in order to appeal to those voters. For Truman, it was like joining Rotary to get their votes. Just after he joined, a Klan member came by and demanded he keep any Jews out of office. Harry quit during that meeting.
As for Wilson, he accomplished many good things in his presidency. His racism is a black mark against him.
I’m surprised there are dopers who didn’t know Wilson was racist. The BOAN quote must be the best-known quote from any POTUS about any film, surely?
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I’m all for nuance. My position is that it is perfectly reasonable to ask an institution to reconsider who it memorializes because of the baggage associated with the honoree. An institution is free to argue that the person they are honoring did more good than bad, but if that judgement call is hard to factually support, then perhaps that institution deserves to be criticized if it keeps that name.
Well, if your position is that these men deserve to be honored forever, regardless of what they come to represent in the eyes of many, I disagree. If the values of society change, why shouldn’t the historical figures who are memorialized?
Yes, I’d agree with that.
But to put the quote in context, “writing history with lightning” was probably not meant by Wilson as “Whoa, awesome sauce!” Wilson may have not seen many motion pictures before; university presidents did not frequent the Nickelodeons. And very few Americans had ever seen a picture of the sophistication, duration, and serious subject matter of The Birth of a Nation.
Oh, pooh, I just looked up Cabiria, Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 epic film set during the Second Punic War. Wilson had that screened at the White House, and it was the FIRST movie screened at the White House.
Apart from it being apocryphal, yes. (Previous thread.)
I don’t believe that we owe anyone’s legacy not to change names of buildings and other honors when in balance that person no longer broadly represents something that we can all endorse as a whole.
Well, he was POTUS, not just some community figure. A few kids are offended by history, so we should re-write history? Orwellian much?
Interesting.
From a new editorial from the NYTimes Staff, starting with:
and ending with:
At my college the dorm I lived in was named after a donor. I think everyone knew it was not because the administration thought he was a great guy and endorsed every single one of his ideas but because of his contributions to the college. In Wilson’s case the contribution to the college was in the form of his years as president of the university and not a big check.
Lance Armstrong was an athlete who cheated so it makes sense not to want to name a gymnasium after him. However I don’t think it would be appropriate to take his name off the cancer fighting stuff since that had nothing to do with his cheating.
It’s hard to see any politician or anyone for that matter being worthy of having a building named after them if this becomes the new standard. Take Clinton, for example. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell looks shockingly backwards some 20 years after it was mainstream. Even the Obama of 5 years ago before his “evolution” looks backwards on gay rights. Wouldn’t a gay student have cause to complain if they had to live in the Clinton dorm?
I don’t really have a problem with not naming public structures after people as a form of honor, even it’s a person I generally support. I don’t believe in hero worship.
Looks like there will be a slam-dunk conviction of Wilson over race, which is where he’s indefensible.
But he did much, much more damage in foreign policy, IRT Mexico and Europe. A lot of high-minded, hypocritical meddling by someone with access to too much military power (but not exerting any power over the USA’s business interests who’d caused its involvement in the war).
If someone came into your business with great ideas but no a similar level of competence, you wouldn’t let him anywhere near your servers. But Wilson, more than any other one person, created the conditions that made the end of WWI no more than a breather before WWII.
But because of those high-minded ideals, a lot of people will think him “a flawed man, as all great men are, cursed with a blind spot where race was concerned.” Bullshit.
That is a link that *may be behind a paywall - if so, sorry.
It is an excellent essay on The New Yorker’s website about the Naming issue. It is by Joshua Rothman (I am not familiar with his work by name in the New Yorker).
It provides an opening story about a stadium built by Mussolini with Fascist iconography and how Italy has addressed it. It discusses the concept of Dissonant Heritage: Heritage is the parts of history we want to use to “tell our story;” dissonance is when some bad parts are purposely maintained in the heritage.
It then pivots to Yale and Princeton and their respective Name issues. Yale’s Calhoun issue seems straightforward - his big status on the campus is fairly recent and “detachable” from Yale heritage. The fact that Elihu Yale was invovled in slave trading is more difficult - with a case made for dissonant heritage being maintained. However, there is also a bit of shade thrown Yale’s way, describing how it “relic-ifies” its buildings and ensure they show the right Look.
Wilson is presented as both plainly racist and essential to Princeton’s history. Not really “detachable” from their heritage regardless of any attempt to root it out. The argument is made for dissonant heritage here, too. Building a monument/space right outside the Wilson School building which speaks to that dissonance.
It is for a historian to discover. But the crucial fact is that he rolled back the relatively benign policies of the civil service. The NYTimes of Tuesday contained an op-ed piece by the grandson of a man who was a high official in the post office who was reduced to a menial job at great loss of pay by Wilson’s policies. None of the previous post-civil-war presidents had done that. A historian can tell us who reintegrated the civil service. Was it Roosevelt? Truman? Or even earlier, Coolidge? I think it quite fair to say that Wilson was an unreconstructed southerner. This means he was not more racist than the average southerner, but much more so than the average American.
No, it’s not even a little Orwellian. I don’t think we should re-write history. But I also don’t think that a historical figure’s importance to us in the present is some unchanging fixture.
We should be clear-eyed about the past, and if that means that at some point, we can no longer hold unambiguously positive feelings towards a historical figure, then we should not hesitate to take away secondary symbolic honors, such as naming things after him or her.
That’s not re-writing history, that’s not ignoring the past. It’s exactly the opposite.
If that means that we eventually end up taking all or most politicians’ names off of buildings, then I’m comfortable with that. After all, that’s the logical result of a progressive society. It’s already a proven fact that every generation is smarter than before. If every generation is also better than before—to the point that historical figures can no longer be comfortably revered—then that’s a good thing.
Seems to me that acknowledging Wilson’s racism is genuine history. Rewriting history would be pretending his racism didn’t exist.
Heh. My stepfather (b. 1939) was actually named after the President - his middle and last names are Woodrow Wilson. One or both of his parents must have been a fan.