The Strange Case of Woodrow Wilson
James Joyner did a post yesterday highlighting the fact that it’s easy to find “horrible quotes” from “beloved figures.” I thought it was odd that one of the beloved figures in question is Woodrow Wilson. Is he really that beloved? Gene Healy pointed out to me that of 13 surveys of scholars asking them to rank presidents, Wilson enters the top ten in 11 surveys, and is number 11 in the other two.
This seems slightly nuts to me. Wilson is obviously an important historical figure but he doesn’t seem to me to have been much of a president. For one thing, he was a huge racist. Noting racism on the part of past historical figures is sometimes a cheap shot—Abraham Lincoln said things that people would find repugnant today, but was very progressive for his time—but Wilson was a real racial reactionary who turned the clock backwards. He signed a bill banning miscegenation in the District of Columbia and segregating DC streetcars. He appointed white southerners to his administration who introduced segregation into their previously unsegregated departments, including the postal service which was a major employer. Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt had African-Americans appointed to federal office, but Wilson did away with that.
His administration’s handling of the great influenza pandemic was disastrous, and his record on civil liberties was the worst in American history. On the pro column, Wilson’s tax policy (lower tariffs, higher income tax) was good and he did some good regulatory things. On the other hand, the switch from “trust-busting” lawsuits to attempting to use the FTC to establish regulatory cartels doesn’t seem to me to have been a great idea. Creating the central bank system was a good idea, but I don’t think it was distinctively Wilsonian.
On foreign policy, Wilson had some very important ideas about international institutions and global governance. But his actual policy implementation was a disaster. He joined World War One to get us a League of Nations, but then couldn’t get a League of Nations! And it’s worth noting that even if he’d had more success at this, his particular vision of the liberal internationalist project was fatally compromised by his run-amok racism.
124 Responses to “The Strange Case of Woodrow Wilson”
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December 11th, 2009 at 8:34 am
I’ve often seen conservatives take it as a given that liberals admire Wilson, the way we admire, say, FDR or JFK or Truman, but I can’t remember reading any kind words from Wilson from liberals.
Is it a generational thing? Did liberals in the 50s or 70s really admire Woodrow Wilson?
December 11th, 2009 at 8:39 am
And the other one was Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt, likewise, was a psychotic imperialist in the context of his time.
This is all, for what it’s worth, a function of “Presidential History”, the most useless, sclerotic, ethically backward, CNN-mongering of all fields of academic research. (After economics, that is.) People like Wilson and Roosevelt are consistently praised by these morons. If you really want to see horribleness, check out what these people write about the greatest American genocidaire, Andrew Jackson.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:39 am
I can’t believe you’d write a whole post on the disaster of Woodrow Wilson and wait until the second-to-last sentence to refer to his greatest disaster, and then only glancingly.
Anybody who thinks Woodrow Wilson deserves his oddly high reputation should read JM Keynes’ “The Economic Consequences of the Peace.” Wilson’s ineffectiveness at Versailles reflected a huge strategic failure: the man was obsessed with the mere existence of the League of Nations at the expense of much more consequential aspects of the postwar settlement, to the extent that Clemenceau and Lloyd George were able to buy him off with something worthless in exchange for getting everything they wanted from Germany.
Wilson had tremendous moral authority with the electorates of basically every European country when their own political leadership was compromised by their involvement in the disastrous war, and a skilled politician could have used that position to dictate the settlement he wanted–namely, one aimed at peace rather than exploitation. Instead he was dictated to by his much more skillful counterparts.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:40 am
I think a case can be made that Wilson was being dishonest and/or insincere when he campaigned suggesting he wanted to stay out of the war.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:41 am
Have you considered the possibility that the other 30 odd presidents were even bigger scumbags?
December 11th, 2009 at 8:43 am
There is an unfortunate tendency to automatically highly rank Presidents who presided over wars we didn’t lose. I also think Wilson gets sentimental bonus points in certain circles for being an intellectual/academic.
By the way, on a relatively minor point: the FTC may or may not have been a good idea, but the Clayton Act turned out to be very important in fostering effective enforcement of our competition laws, while at the same time specifically exempting labor unions.
On a less minor point, Wilson was indeed terrible on ethnic issues, but he also helped to push the 19th Amendment through Congress.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:54 am
I’d like to note that the US racism was, at the end of Wilson’s term, a well-known thing outside the US. For example, when Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German, visited the US in 1920’s, he was stricken by the prevalent racism. (Later, he went on to fight for free Christianity against Hitler and became a Christian martyr in 1944.)
December 11th, 2009 at 8:55 am
It’s a war thing. Lists of great presidents are incredibly stupid things that, for whatever reason (though getting at that reason is the interesting question), are greatly biased toward war presidents. And of course Wilson didn’t just bring the United States into WWI. By some measures used in International Relations, Wilson used force abroad more than any other president. There were several interventions into Latin America – and geez we even sent troops into Russia.
I think here his ranking is also due to what was accomplished domestically on his watch, which was impressive, whether or not it really happened because of him.
And I find it odd you’d even bring up his racism. Was it awful and abhorent? Sure. But such things haven’t typically been brought up in evaluations of who is or isn’t a great president. They certainly weren’t when these lists were first created decades ago. In fact some might’ve seen it as something of plus (in that it made him more willing to invade even more places).
December 11th, 2009 at 9:00 am
If you want to be disabused of any regard you might have had for Theodore Roosevelt, read James Bradley’s “Imperial Cruise”. Were it not for his work on conservation and regulatory reform of capitalism, you would say chip his visage off Mt. Rushmore.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:04 am
OK, bob h, but TR’s work on conservation and regulatory reform ain’t exactly peanuts.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:07 am
dear Yglesias fans: where is the post in which Sullivan created his ‘Yglesias award’?
December 11th, 2009 at 9:11 am
I mostly agree with this. One point I like that you’re making is that Wilson’s racism compromised his ability to set and enact good policy.
There’s a difference between recognizing that growing up in different cultures gives us all different “default” settings (which themselves vary from individual to individual within a specific culture), and that history creates certain group resentments and alliances, versus thinking “the African cannot govern himself.”
I think racist sentiment has created far more problems than is generally appreciated. I think we all are quite aware of the downside for the people who were being segregated, but there’s a lack of understanding that racist thinking has created enormous problems for the people enforcing the segregation, and who were setting policy based on their own racist thoughts.
I mean, having your husband die in a colonial war absolutely stinks, whichever side you’re on. Having your labor undercut by slave labor is awful. Segregation led to an incredible loss of national human resources, one that reverberates to the current day. Being a racist means these are policies you implement, because they make sense to you. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:11 am
In addition to helping pointlessly destroy and embitter post-war Germany, setting the stage for the Nazi rise and WW2, Wilson also deeply snubbed the Japanese attempt to become an equal diplomatic player, setting the stage for hardliners to win out and WW2.
I’m not sure if he did something to piss off Italy, but, hell, probably.
Thanks, Wilson.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:13 am
It always seems to me that presidential rankings are made based on each president’s contribution to the current historical context, which sort of assumes that we are on some optimal path of history.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:14 am
Wilson had the support of liberals in his campaign for President, during which he indicated that the US should stay out (many liberals supported the revolutionists in Russia), only to become a “war President” once elected, which caused liberals to abandon support for Wilson and for Wilson to turn on them with spies and other (now) illegal tactics. And Marshall’s comment is correct: Wilson’s awful performance at Versailles (he was already seriously ill) was a major contributor to the rise of the extreme right (Nazis) in Europe following WWI and to WWII that resulted. Yes, Wilson was a catastrophe, for which the liberals’ support in his election should serve as a lesson.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:22 am
his record on civil liberties was the worst in American history
Unless you’re going back to the racism again (which is fair enough), what Adams did to Bache was worse than what Wilson did to Debs.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Regarding your last comment on the affect of Wilson’s extreme racism on his international view and foreign policy, I’ve read that his racism prevented him from heeding calls from Ho Chi Minh for self-determination in Vietnam. The thought being that we could have avoided the disaster of the Vietnam War if we had someone more thoughtful with a real vision of the future as President at that time.
I think it really points to how important it is for us to have leaders who set the stage well for those who come later. Though we don’t need to look far for leadership disasters to tell us this.
I read this bit about Wilson several years ago in Lies My Teacher Told Me. I think people’s views of Wilson are more generous than they ought to be because he was president at an important time in the 20th century and people want to have a certain view of the United States and themselves.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:24 am
[...] Matt Yglesias wonders why Wilson was beloved, given that he wasn’t a very good guy even by the standards of [...]
December 11th, 2009 at 9:26 am
I think there’s a tendency for the right to assume that the left engages in the same kind of idolatry of its leaders as the right. Outside of possibly FDR, I would argue that there is no name that is invoked by liberals in the same religious tone that conservatives use to speak the word “Reagan”.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I would have to disagree with MR Yglesias’s assertion that Wilson got us invoved in World War 1 in order “to get us a Leauge of Nations”.I think U Boat activity and the Zimmerman telegram were the main reasons.
I would agree with MR Yglesias though about Wilson being a racist .Wilson also was EXTREMLY bad on the issues of civil liberties.Anthony Lewis devotes a whole chapter to Wilson in his book “The First Amendment: A Biography.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Woodrow Wilson was of the Southern (i.e. pro-slavery, racist) branch of American historiography that was ultimately de-throned and discredited beginning in the early 1960’s by historians like the late, great Kenneth Stampp.
Wilson once described the freed slaves as “a horde of dusky children untimely put out of school.” He was a bad man.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Regarding comment 17 by Brian from Chicago
MR Brian
I think that you may be thinking about President Johnson.Wilson was president from 1912-20.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Yes, Woodrow Wilson was a terribly racist. Yes, he was bad on civil liberties during the War (though I think you can make a pretty decent argument that Debs was wrong for advocating resistance to conscription- Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinon upholding his sentence, saying that it essentially followed a earlier, similar ruling). But Thomas Jefferson was an inveterate racist as well, and bad on civil liberties during the Embargo, and the first president to involve us in war in the Middle East. But the influence of a president had little to do with how nice a guy he was, and there was precious little movement on civil rights between Grant and Truman.
I think the bigger lesson to take from Wilson is not the idea “Wilson actually sucks”, but that some presidents with historically bad reps (ex. Grant, Taft, Harding) were actually better than the conventional wisdom gives them credit for.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Woodrow Wilson was the goy of liberal facism.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Outside of possibly FDR, I would argue that there is no name that is invoked by liberals in the same religious tone that conservatives use to speak the word “Reagan”.
To be fair, in at least certain Democratic circles I think one or more of the Kennedys play a similar role. But that is not as broad-based as the GOP’s Reagan thing, and in general I think the Kennedy thing is gradually dampening out (although maybe if the modern GOP was attracting any young people, the same would be true of their Reagan thing).
December 11th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Worst of all, Wilson was also a great big fascist. Jonah Goldberg told me.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:42 am
(many liberals supported the revolutionists in Russia)
This is a cheap shot that is kind of a piece of crap. When Wilson ran for President in 1912 and 1916 there hadn’t been any revolutions or revolutionists in Russia for “many liberals” to “support” (1917 was the big year) – and regardless, the revolution, when it happened, was a democratic revolution that deposed an autocratic regime – something that anyone who supports constitutional government would support, regardlss of whether they are conservative or liberal. The fact that the communists later hijacked the russian revolution has little if anything to do with anyone in America regardless of your feeble attempts to smear liberals by association.
Go play in traffic, troll.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:43 am
I have seen pictures of John F. Kennedy sitting amongst the clouds, like God, in various homes, schools, and bars in Massachusetts.
Pete from Baltimore,
Ho Chi Minh approached the nascent League of Nations about Vietnamese independence shortly after World War I.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Before most of you guys were born I read Rossiter’s “The American Presidency”, which I think is where a lot of the older generation’s attitudes came from (people older than me). Rossiter admired all strong, successful presidents, especially war presidents, and promoted Polk(Mexican War) for that reason .
The Democrats and Republicans were realigned by the Civil Rights Bill in the sixties, but FDR also transformed the party in a big way. Before 1932 the Democrats were about as conservative as the Republicans and more racist. The two parties differed mostly on regional issues (Republican Northern Protestants versus Democratic Catholics and Southern Protestants). Both parties were dominated by finance, and if there it was a significant difference, it was that the Democrats favored resource industries and low tariffs and the Republicans manufacturing and high tariffs.
The “liberals” of the time were Populists and Progressives who were either third party members or dissident Republicans and Democrats. In the last two years of his first term Wilson was slightly progressive, mostly for opportunistic political reasons.
In 1892 the Populists first brought egalitarian and progressive ideas into American politics in a serious way (the common people vs. the money power), and that shook the two parties, but it took forty years for most of them to become reality, and even Roosevelt was only semi-progressive — after about 1938 war preparations trumped progressivism.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Regarding comment 22 from Pete:
No, Brian is right. A young Ho Chi Minh petitioned Wilson at the Versailles conference for independence from France but was ignored.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Regarding comment 28 from joe from Lowell
MR Joe
Thanks for the correction.I was not aware of that fact.
My apoligies to MR Brian from Chicago.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Unless you’re going back to the racism again (which is fair enough), what Adams did to Bache was worse than what Wilson did to Debs.
It’s more difficult to critique Adams on civil liberties, however, since there obviously was nowhere near as much precedent on the subject at the time of his activities.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Outside of possibly FDR, I would argue that there is no name that is invoked by liberals in the same religious tone that conservatives use to speak the word “Reagan”.
I suppose there is Kennedy, yes. But the Kennedy infatuation isn’t nearly as taken for granted as the Reagan one. Maybe for historical reasons, since Kennedy was 20 years before Reagan, the Reagan cult simply hasn’t died out yet. But you just don’t hear Kennedy’s name solemnly invoked 30 or 40 times in a debate among Democratic candidates for office being held in a library dedicated to the memory of Kennedy, while having arguments on who is most like Kennedy and best understands the principles that Kennedy used to govern.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Wilson is not to be blamed for the Versailles Treaty, except that he failed to resist Clemenceau and Lloyd George effectively enough.
Talking about “liberals” ca. 1914-1918 is a bit misleading. You had conservatives and progressives in both parties, with the conservatives dominant, and you had fairly significant radical movements. The liberals of the time were distinguishable from the progressives and were still pretty much an elite intellectual group.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:05 am
wilson was also the first Pres. to show a movie in the White House and said movie was Birth of a Nation
December 11th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Wilson is also responsible for that toxic meme, the “right of self determination,” which was a product of his Southern bitterness.
Every ghastly corner of the world nowdays is made thus by some worthless thug who scores a crate of AK 47’s and decides to impose his variation on that idea.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:17 am
In all fairness, It should be pointed out that Wilson’s reputation among historians has a lot to do with their long-standing affection for the Progressive Era, which is the era in which modern American liberalism was born. Wilson has been quite important in the liberal narrative of American history because, especially in his first term, he was enormously effective in advancing the progressive vision. Yes, he was a seg [though hardly an "extreme racist"; this was an era when US senators publicly defended lynching, after all, and racial categorizing was mainstream], but civil rights didn’t move to the center of the liberal agenda until after World War II [and it took a while even then]. FDR wasn’t much good on race, Eleanor notwithstanding. In those days the central task of liberalism was viewed as dealing with the rise of corporate capitalism, and in that framework Wilson was very much on the side of the angels. I think at the root of Matt’s antipathy is the fact that that history [which was still important to my generation] is literally ancient history to his–and that of most of his commenters. Progressivism, too, looks flawed to us, not simply because of its racism but because of its obsession with top-down control ["liberal fascism," to give Jonah his due], which led to the embarrassment of civil liberties during World War I. But I’d suggest that Matt’s disdain for Wilson–and by extension his age–is as selective as he accuses earlier historians of being.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:17 am
True, except for the precedent of the war fought a decade and a half earlier for the ostensible purpose of permenantly securing the liberties that the UK and King George were accused of riding roughshod over.
(plus, while happened to Bache and Debs should be no different as a moral matter, as a practical matter, Debs was more on the margin, but Bache was a lot more mainstream)
December 11th, 2009 at 10:19 am
It’s somewhat ahistorical to blame Wilson for not listening to Ho Chi Minh–how many presidents take foriegn policy advice from food service workers in their 20’s? (the legend that Ho was a pastry chef working for Escoffier is probably exaggerated) It would surprise me if Ho’s petition even made it to Wilson through his staff.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Wilson seems to be loved by the foreign policy establishment, who seemed to have ignored his horrible domestic policies. Richard Hofstadter in his The American Polilitcal Tradition has very negative view of Wilson while one of his pupils, John Milton Cooper, has written a new book about Wilson that has more nuanced view of the president.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:24 am
And it’s worth noting that even if he’d had more success at this, his particular vision of the liberal internationalist project was fatally compromised by his run-amok racism.
I would quibble with this too. For instance, the vision of the ‘liberal project’ of the American founding was definitely compromised by racism, but was not fatally so.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Yes– but at least he was also progressive domestically.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I would argue that Wilson might get a lot of credit for his international ideas. I mean, his execution definitely left something to be desired (but the Senate shares some of the blame there) but he was one of the first President’s to push the United States into an active diplomatic role on the world stage.
Also, the League of Nations was a pretty revolutionary concept, right? Without that the UN probably would never have happened. He had his failings, but I would certainly rank him in the top 20 Presidents just for that!
December 11th, 2009 at 10:32 am
It’s a teleological view that equates the rise of the extreme right with Nazism. The Nazis were late to the party, having been anticipated by Mussolini’s Fascists. Italy was on the winning side, of course, which suggests that being on the wrong side of Versailles was only tangential to the rise of right extremists. If you look at the rise of right extremist parties, the distribution has little to do with who won or lost WWI.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:36 am
It’s somewhat ahistorical to blame Wilson for not listening to Ho Chi Minh–how many presidents take foriegn policy advice from food service workers in their 20’s? (the legend that Ho was a pastry chef working for Escoffier is probably exaggerated)
As dramatically portrayed in The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones:
http://indianajones.wikia.com/wiki/Winds_of_Change
December 11th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Another thing that annoys me is that Ronald Reagan is ranked number 8 on this list of great American presidents, Reagan’s fiscal and deregulating policies paved the way for this current economic trainwreck. I bet most of the American history professors give credit to Reagan for ending the Cold War while professors of Russian history such as Stephen Cohen have stated that it was Gorbachev alone who was responsible for concluding the Cold War. These American history professors probably did not consult Russian experts or any other professors of other countries and hence are blinded by American exceptionalism in their selection of both Wilson and Reagan as top presidents of this nation.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Roosevelt arguably was less of an imperialist than his predecessor, McKinley (started a war with Spain, took their colonies in the Phillippines and Puerto Rico, swallowed up the independent nation of Hawaii) or Wilson (frequent military interventions in Mexico and such).
Yglesias’ take on the awful Woodrow Wilson is spot-on. He did time our entry into WWI beautifully, though.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:52 am
The real work in American politics 1892-1940 was done by dissidents and third-partiers. William Jennings Bryan was a Democrat, not a Populist, but he co-opted the Populists in 1896, effectively destroying the party. Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican, not a Progressive, but he parasitized LaFollette’s Progressive Party in 1912. Wilson stole a few Progressive ideas but was anti-Progressive before and after doing so. Even Roosevelt relied on Progressives to his left both for support, and to frighten the conservatives into supporting his more cautious plans.
It’s true that in the end the progressives could get their ideas into effect nationally only by persuading orthodox members of the two major parties to support them, but it’s also true that the two major parties are corrupt and sluggish never do anything right except in response to external pressure.
What’s different today is that the external pressure isn’t there, and the two major parties are able to get away with murder (just as they did during the reign of the Bourbon Democrats and Standpat Republicans 1870-1932.
Next time you hear a regular Democrat sneering about how ineffectual the outsider movements have been recently, you should understand that he’s bragging about how totally his party has succeeded in suppressing progressive forces.
If you want to know why healthcare reform and finance reform both failed, it’s because the Democratic Party has been so successful that it doesn’t need to listen to anyone to its left.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:52 am
What a bizarre attack against a fairly well respected president. Supporting segregation and bans on interracial marriage hardly put him out of the mainstream back then. The influenza outbreak was catastrophic all around the world and is hardly something you can blame Wilson for. The damage to civil liberties was caused by the Supreme Court because it was faced with the prospect of civil unrest (or worse) during the mobilization for WW1. It’s nice how you dismiss one of the most important legislative accomplishments of the 20th century (the Fed). He did “get” a League of Nations; he just didn’t “get” the senate to ratify the treaty, even if it later resulted in the UN.
You dismiss the fact that under him child labor was outlawed, and the work week (without overtime pay) was set at 40 hours. Oh and there was that thing about winning WW1, which he did not do to “get us into the League of Nations” but because, after 3 years of avoiding the war, the threat of it spreading here became too great.
Sometimes you really set me off with your quixotic and meaningless views. Why don’t you go back to ranting ad nauseam about something I don’t care about again, like your favorite Scandinavian countries. That was another thing. When you got back from Europe I really didn’t care that “the Danes do it” this way or that. That was so annoying I almost unsubscribed this blog from my RSS feed.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Ha ha, Wilson won in 1912 with fewer votes than the two Republican candidates got. Does that give you a clue as to why the elections are usually a binary choice?
You guys seem to think that historians rank presidents on the basis of how much they like them, or if they won a war, or if they were ‘good’ people. Ranking people on that kind of criteria is actually the job of the public, when they go to vote.
The job of the historian is quite different, and, ideally, does not include rankings on the scales of whether the prez was a good guy or a big success. It has to do with what happened, and how the president responded, and what were the results of that response.
For example, when Hoover let MacArthur and Patton attack the veterans camped at the Anacostia Flats, it probably cost Hoover the 1932 election. The job of the historian is to try to figure out what was happening and try to develop an understandable picture. The job of the voter is to turn Hoover out of office. There’s only a small intersection of these two roles.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:54 am
I would argue that Wilson might get a lot of credit for his international ideas… he was one of the first President’s to push the United States into an active diplomatic role on the world stage.
Wilson did not understand politics and thought that simply creating an international institution would bring about the goals of peace and prosperity. Some fools think that, but they usually don’t attain the Presidency. As for the “active diplomatic role,” Wilson was, I suppose, highly “active” at Versailles but completely ineffectual. Under him, the US totally squandered its moment after WWI, and good intentions don’t excuse that.
Italy was on the winning side, of course, which suggests that being on the wrong side of Versailles was only tangential to the rise of right extremists.
Not at all. All of the incumbent European political class was discredited by the war, so at Versailles the British, French, and Italian principals’ strategy was to secure their position by bringing home the bacon in terms of divvying up what remained of Germany’s accumulated wealth and hobbling German and Austrian political power. Alternatively, Wilson could have stuck forcefully with the terms of the conditional surrender of 1918, which were somewhat favorable to Germany as a means to cut the war short.
Wilson didn’t do that and the incumbents survived for a time. But the Italian political system never stabilized and the German electorate came to believe that their wellbeing would never be served by an international political order aimed at raping them. The rise of the extreme right in both countries was a consequence of the missed opportunity to enact European integration in the aftermath of WWI, an opportunity that Wilson frittered away.
I don’t usually like to ascribe great consequence to supposedly autonomous decisions made by powerful men, but I think this is one of the few instances in history where it’s possible to do so. There were diplomatic norms against, say, Wilson giving a speech in defense of the conditional surrender in the East End of London in the late summer of 1919, after it had become grotesquely clear that the settlement was a disaster. But Wilson’s narrow-minded approach saw only the fiction of the League of Nations, so he never turned against Versailles as would a politician with a clearer grasp of both the political and moral reality.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:56 am
There is an unfortunate tendency to automatically highly rank Presidents who presided over wars we didn’t lose.
Imagine that. What a bunch of shallow people those historians are!
December 11th, 2009 at 10:56 am
All this is very true, but how can you leave out the fact that he had a stroke with 18 months remaining in his term and basically became an invalid whose wife ran the administration?
December 11th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Wilson’s racism was of much less account until recent years. Only in the last ten years or so does it seem to be regarded as anything but an unfortunate side show, only occasionally even mentioned. More and more, it gets portrayed as the main event.
During the cold war, Wilson was taught as a flawed but important president because he started “liberal internationalism”, flanked before and after by isolationists. He was said to foreshadow the UN, NATO, and every other kind of US involvement in the world. Both republican and democrat cold warriors could find elements to claim as their own. Popular history ( and High school history texts) also talked about his progressivism and organization of the war economy as a preview of new deal democrats, but that got less attention.
[As an aside, until the NRA was declared unconstitutional, there was a large fraction of progressives that believed cartels, regulated monopolies, etc were the answer to maximizing output and defeating the worse excesses of capitalism. See Rexford Tugwell]
Any good used bookstore will have a copy of “When the Cheering Stopped”, which was a popular history of Wilson and Versailles. That will give you the flavor.
Since Vietnam, “liberal internationalism” has become a whole lot less well regarded by liberals, and morphed into Bush/McCain style interventionism.
Different eras. Different concerns. Different history.
December 11th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Yes, he was a seg [though hardly an "extreme racist"; this was an era when US senators publicly defended lynching, after all, and racial categorizing was mainstream]
Sorry David, he *was* an extreme racist, even given the context. He wasn’t passive or just a ‘man of his time’. The Senators who defended lynching were extreme racists, too. The ‘mainstream’ passive racists of the time didn’t lynch people and didn’t push new segregation.
You know who loves Wilson? Neoconservatives. Also Richard Nixon.
December 11th, 2009 at 11:02 am
My guess is that Reagan’s legacy is going to fade into no-better-than-average (and maybe worse) once there are no longer a bunch of people around who voted for him. The notion that he helped end the Cold War will probably continue to help, but I think the Great Recession is going to end up being traced back to him.
December 11th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Adam,
“Oh and there was that thing about winning WW1, which he did not do to “get us into the League of Nations” but because, after 3 years of avoiding the war, the threat of it spreading here became too great.”
Reality check. As much as anything, we got into WW1 because: 1) the American upper class eastern establishment was Anglophile; and 2) New York banks basically owned Britain and France, and it looked like they might lose and default.
The threat of Mexico invading was a joke, on the order of Nicaragua sending parachutists to Colorado. Useful to convince the wooly headed.
December 11th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Adam, don’t be ignorant. Every point of what Matt said was mainstream (though not universally accepted).
Wilson was an active racist who advanced segregation. He was more racist than his times.
S. Catowner, you may be right, but Rossiter disagreed with you. He ranked the Presidents and even labelled them “Great” down to “Failure”.
December 11th, 2009 at 11:25 am
I’m not sure if he did something to piss off Italy, but, hell, probably.
Yes, if I remember Wilson took the Yugoslav side on the Fiume question (Italy basically felt it should get the entire Dalmatian coast from what had been Austria Hungary as a reward for being on the Allied side).
December 11th, 2009 at 11:31 am
@PSP:
You’re right. At my age, I hate the wars we’re in now, and I think the Fed is a deflationary monster and that’s where my worldview comes from.
Never mind Versailles–what if Wilson had stayed out of WWI altogether? The British and French would have had to let the Germans and Austrians and Ottomans have a more equitable peace if the thing was ever going to end.
And the US could have spent the 20th century as a NORMAL nation–no WWII. Possibly no Cold War if Europe had turned on the USSR after concluding WWI in a way that left the Central Powers intact. No Third World interventionism.
No bloated Pentagon to gut the treasury and torpedo the social welfare state in this country.
No wars in Iraq, which might still be an Ottoman province.
No superpower. No hyperpower. No US intervention in the Middle East, no US troops in Arabia–so no 9/11.
Just an ordinary country that takes care of its own people and leaves the rest of the world alone.
Wilson stopped that from happening. And for what? The Zimmerman telegram urged Mexico to get into the war only IF we did, so would have been no threat to us had we not. The Lusitania was a horrible thing, but our neutrality could have been preserved with by a credible THREAT to get into the war.
Before you all attack me as “unserious” just ask yourselves: Wasn’t the twentieth century in US foreign policy a disaster and a human nightmare of genocide abroad? Don’t you wish you could undo it?
December 11th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Wilson was a horrible person, a horrible president, and a major factor leading to the Great Depression and WWII. And that is just starting… people on all sides of the political spectrum should hate Wilson….
December 11th, 2009 at 11:48 am
the big fat guy: no floody hetch hetchy
this one: ha ha ha i floody hetch hetchy
December 11th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Re building the nationalist credentials on bashing free trade and the president with the sanest foreign policy or something like that after the healthcare posts?
December 11th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
What’s going on here is that Matt is cheaply echoing the glibertarians at Reason who have bashed Wilson over his racism for years. But really they don’t have a problem with racism, b/c the glibertarian ideas they foist upon us are highly racist in practical effect.
In fact Mat should know everyone was racist back then. Highly racist. Instead of doing remakes Hollywood should do a movie about a perpetually offended hipster liberal who travels back in time when everyone was racist and sexist. The liberal would be so offended at the behavior of past America they would faint.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
And why do the glibs hate Wilson so much? Partly b/c of his Wilsonian international idealism (i.e. his Jewish neoconishness).
But mainly because he created the Federal Reserve Bank which everyone know is the source of all evil in this world.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Instead of doing remakes Hollywood should do a movie about a perpetually offended hipster liberal who travels back in time when everyone was racist and sexist
Or they could just make Ubik into a film.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the Nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men… We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world—no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”
– Woodrow Wilson 1916
A very strange quote from a man who had signed the Federal Reserve Act into law three years earlier.
Why do men so often destroy the thing they purportedly love -in Wilson’s case, democracy.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
The Zimmerman telegram is a joke. In 1917 Mexico had been in a state of civil war for seven years, and it wan’t until three years later that it had a government that could claim to control all territory. Black Jack Pershing had actually mounted an expedition to Mexico the year before to hunt down some warlords (Interestingly enough the force was made up of mostly Black soldiers).
The U-Boat thingy could had been avoided altogether, it the US had been serious about neutrality, but it wasn’t.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
The reason the italians were upset after WWI, was because the allies had lobbied so hard, to get them into the war and then when splitting the spoils, Britain got Germany’s colonies in Africa, Japan the ones in the Pacific, France got a couple provinces from Germany proper… and Italy got nothing to show for 600K deaths.
The ruling class was completely discredited for having the Alllies take them to the ball, and then botching the military campaigns. Hence the rise of Mussolini and the Original Liberal Fascists.
December 11th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Wilson seems to be loved by the foreign policy establishment, who seemed to have ignored his horrible domestic policies.
Indeed, horrible policies like the Federal Reserve and legalizing labor unions.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
“In fact Mat should know everyone was racist back then. Highly racist.”
Who’s calling who glib? Wilson was not passively racist; he was actively racist. He promoted reactionary racist policies. Does one’s standing on decisive social and moral questions not count for anything? Are we not allowed to judge the Supreme Court that decided Plessey versus Ferguson, either?
December 11th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I haven’t read the whole thread so I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this. Anyone who deigns to speak about Versailles must read Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Wow, sorry I’m late to this party. At this stage in history taking pot shots at Wilson is like shooting fish in a barrel. Eveything bad you can say about the man is true. Everything good you can say about the man is true. Whatever else you can say his unrealism about what being involved in World War I would mean is to me his most damning legacy. Just because you have no desire to go to war doesn’t mean you don’t hedge your bets, and not to have a plan just in case was just plain idiotic. That is to say, the Army was forbidden to make plans until the actual declaration of war.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
@53—This is true. He was functionally out of office for nearly half of his second term.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Actively racist or passively racist, just about everybody was racist back then. By the 30’s, the Communist Party was only organized political group that wasn’t actively racist. That is one of the often cited reasons so many very liberal liberals were attracted to the party.
Did you never meet anyone from the world war two generation or before? The generation that was too young for the first go around, and too old for the second (my grandparents), were worse. White northern working class ethnics were just as bad as any southerner. Know anyone from the WW2 generation still alive? Ask them.
This is making me feel old.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
“Actively racist or passively racist, just about everybody was racist back then.”
Undoubtedly. Everyone was crazy and paranoid after 9/11, too. That doesn’t let Bush off the hook for his actions. Is it asking too much to expect leadership from the President?
December 11th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Tomemos.
Given the time and place, it is more like asking Bush to be a vegan peacenik.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
“Given the time and place, it is more like asking Bush to be a vegan peacenik.”
“It”? What is like that? What do you think I am “asking”? No one is saying Woodrow Wilson should have authored the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But look at the steps backward Wilson took; look at the ways in which he was more reactionary on the question of race. Do you think that’s really par for the course?
December 11th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
By the 30’s, the Communist Party was only organized political group that wasn’t actively racist.
But what’s germane here is how you define ‘active’. I think there’s a moral difference between levels of agency. That doesn’t excuse the unions, et. al. But there is a different moral calculation depending on how much you can actually affect whatever it is. Wilson’s racism was truly ‘active’. Scapegoating is a character flaw, one of many Wilson had.
I’d also say that there’s nothing inherently illegitimate about judging historical figures by present day standards, depending on what they are. Racism in the 20s was not like ‘how could anyone know lead/mercury is bad for you?’. It’s more like cigarette smoking in the 40s-50s: people may not have had at their fingertips the scientific specificity about exactly HOW bad for you it was, but everyone knew it was.
December 11th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Given the time and place, it is more like asking Bush to be a vegan peacenik
No it is not you stupid fuck. The time and the place did not have a segregated federal government. Wilson segregated it, showing that he was much worse than the racist status quo, ie his active racism was worse than societal passive racism.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
EVerytime I think I’m out, they pull me back in.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
“Racism in the 20s was not like ‘how could anyone know lead/mercury is bad for you?’. It’s more like cigarette smoking in the 40s-50s: people may not have had at their fingertips the scientific specificity about exactly HOW bad for you it was, but everyone knew it was.”
Jonnybutter, I agree with the gist of what you’re saying, and with your comment in general. But one of the problems with racism in the early 20th century is that much of the scientific (and especially the pseudoscientific) establishment were actually in agreement that racism was scientifically valid. People like Nordau and Lombardo provided scientific-sounding justifications for racist beliefs, and justifications like that are generally very welcome (just look at Charles Murray…). So I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that “everyone knew it was bad for you.”
Of course, maybe in your analogy someone like Nordau is like the doctors endorsing Camels in the 40s…
December 11th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
It’s not true that everyone was racist. Segregation always had its opponents, but after 1890 or so the leadership of both parties accepted the status quo, so the opponents got nowhere.
But Wilson was more racist than the status quo.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Wison grew up in the south. He was the son of a slave owning confederate veteran, and a child during the civil war. He was the first democratic president in decades, at a times when all the blacks voted republican.
To expect such a person to not be racist, to not fire every black patronage employee in the federal government that he possibly could, to not be a segregationist, is an total anachronism. It is totally unrealistic and ahistorical. What you think of as immoral, would never even cross his mind as immoral, and wasn’t considered immoral by the vast majoritiy of his contemporaries.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Roosevelt, in 1912, decided to go with his radical progressive side. Too bad he didn’t win. A more European, socialist democratic economy would have been the result – especially nice would have been the curbs on speculation, fundamenally altering that engine of all depressions, the stock market. Once you had a stock market that was rigidly regulated so that it only reflected the fundamentals of the companies issuing stock, the p/e dance would have been over before it began – excellent news for the real economy. Unfortunately, didn’t happen. Eventually, it will – making the stock market a casino has done infinite damage to the American economy and it continues to do so, benefiting only wall street plutocrats.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
ps – oh, and Taft should be credited, too, with instituting income tax – one of the great Constitutional accomplishments of the the Republican party.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
This is the correct answer.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Henry:
The reason the italians were upset after WWI, was because the allies had lobbied so hard, to get them into the war and then when splitting the spoils, Britain got Germany’s colonies in Africa, Japan the ones in the Pacific, France got a couple provinces from Germany proper… and Italy got nothing to show for 600K deaths.
No, not true. Italy got the South Tyrol and a bunch of backwoods German-speakers. It’s not that Italy actually got screwed at Versailles — it’s that the Italian nationalists and business elite thought that Italy got screwed. They were totally unrealistic about what Italy was actually likely to get after “victory.” All of a piece with how the Italian ruling elite actually ran the country from 1860 to 1922. See Bosworth’s Italy, Least of the Great Powers for more detail.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
84: What kind of crap is that? You’re just explaining why Wilson was bad in the particular way that he was bad. Why should anyone accept that as a justification? And what’s the crap about “anachronism”?
It’s not true, either, that everyone was racist in those days. Many were anti-racist, and most were less racist than Wilson. Wilson made a difference with regard to racism, and the difference he made was to increase it.
The Democratic Party of today is different than the Democratic Party of (say) 1955, and still more different than the Democratic Party of (say) 1930. It’s not just “not identical to” those earlier Democratic Parties; there were fundamental changes after 1932 and after 1965. One of the things that this means is that some of the Democratic heroes of the past don’t look so good now. Wilson (who once was widely admired) is one of those whose reputation has suffered most.
December 11th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
If you want to be disabused of any regard you might have had for Theodore Roosevelt, read James Bradley’s “Imperial Cruise”. Were it not for his work on conservation and regulatory reform of capitalism, you would say chip his visage off Mt. Rushmore.
Yeah, scoped out that bit of vituperative nonsense at Borders then other day. As Atrios always points out, so much of American dialogue on foreign affairs starts with the premise “It’s all about us!” Japan had her own plans for Asia and the idea that an American president was going have any serious impact on Japan’s imperial dreams is laughable.
A more rational, and less racist narrative might start with this:
— The Italians went fascist in the 1920s because they thought it was a good idea at the time.
— The Germans went Nazi because it felt good and they thought it was a good way to solve their problems.
— The Japanese were planning to become a modern Imperialst power from the Meji period onward, and eventually turned to rabid, genocidal militarism because it suited their culture and national ambitions.
These are the only countries that can claim any large share of the moral blame for World War II. No one else wanted that war, not even Stalin. The bungling of the British and French in the aftermath of the Armistice can rightly be denounced as contributing factor, but they certainly weren’t trying to generate future war. The fascists, Nazis, and militarists were.
Denouncing Woodrow Wilson for any of this is like blaming the weatherman for last week’s blizzard. There were probably some things he could have done to alleviate the oncoming catastrophe, but there were powerful forces operating that virtually no one at the time understood–and certainly, the president of an isolationist, mostly disarmed country was never going to be a decisive player in the drama.
December 11th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
“Wison grew up in the south. He was the son of a slave owning confederate veteran, and a child during the civil war. He was the first democratic president in decades, at a times when all the blacks voted republican.”
Insofar as they got to vote at all.
“To expect such a person to not be racist, to not fire every black patronage employee in the federal government that he possibly could, to not be a segregationist, is an total anachronism. It is totally unrealistic and ahistorical. What you think of as immoral, would never even cross his mind as immoral, and wasn’t considered immoral by the vast majoritiy of his contemporaries.”
I’m with John Emerson: what kind of crap is that? Now it’s okay for him to be even more racist than his historical context, because of his personal biography? His party was racist, therefore it’s okay that he was racist? How could anyone judge anyone for anything without being anachronistic, in your mind?
Let’s do Bush again, by your standard. Bush was raised wealthy, without any exposure to the poor; how can we hold his tax cuts for the wealthy and his opposition to social programs like SCHIP against him? He belonged to an absolutist, fanatical party; how can we blame him for refusing to compromise or listen to counsel? He was president at a time when people were frightened of terrorism; how can we blame him for torturing prisoners and tapping Americans’ phones? You’re imagining a world that is so deterministic that no such thing as moral agency exists. That’s your right, but how could there even be such a thing as a “good” or “bad” President in such a world?
Wilson’s biography doesn’t let him off the hook, because he wasn’t an average citizen selected randomly off the street. He ran for election for chief executive of his country, and won. Expecting him to be more morally farsighted than his time is not unreasonable. That he was less is an indictment of his leadership and moral judgment.
December 11th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
The Democratic Party of today is different than the Democratic Party of (say) 1955, and still more different than the Democratic Party of (say) 1930. It’s not just “not identical to” those earlier Democratic Parties; there were fundamental changes after 1932 and after 1965.
Of course, the whole liberal facism thing is beyond stupid. DO NOT confuse me with Lucian Goldberg’s idiot son.
I’m just saying that those moralizing that Wilson’s racial beliefs should be the same as their’s today are forgetting it was a different time with different morals and expectations. Not only is it not even a little bit realistic, it wasn’t considered a signifigant part of Wilsons legacy until very recently.
December 11th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
A more rational, and less racist narrative might start with this:
— The Italians went fascist in the 1920s because they thought it was a good idea at the time.
— The Germans went Nazi because it felt good and they thought it was a good way to solve their problems.
Call me a racist if you will, but to me this does not seem to be a very powerful analysis.
December 11th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
“I’m just saying that those moralizing that Wilson’s racial beliefs should be the same as their’s today are forgetting it was a different time with different morals and expectations.”
If that was what anyone was moralizing, I’d agree with you. As we already explained, the problem is that Wilson went out of his way to be racist. That’s part of his legacy.
December 11th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
“Call me a racist if you will, but to me this does not seem to be a very powerful analysis.”
John: Especially since this “less racist” analysis goes on to say that the Japanese “turned to rabid, genocidal militarism because it suited their culture.” So the Germans and Italians just had a pro-fascist vibe, but the Japanese resorted to their innate oriental cruelty. Less racist!
December 11th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
….a different time with different morals and expectations. Not only is it not even a little bit realistic, it wasn’t considered a signifigant part of Wilsons legacy until very recently.
You keep om coming back.
During his own time, Wilson was one of the worst. He moved the ball in the wrong direction. At the time, not everyone agreed with what he did. How many times do we have to repeat this?
The people who ignored that part of Wilson’s legacy were misleading people, and the ones who paid attention to it were correcting the record. I remember being given a sugar-coated picture of Wilson in my youth, and am grateful for having access to a more accurate one.
Up until as late as 1965, the Democratic Party was the party of racism, and since 1980 or so, the Republican Party has been the party of racism. Them’s the facts.
December 11th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
“At the time, not everyone agreed with what he did.”
I think this all started when it was pointed out that the number who disagreed at the time was damn few.
December 11th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
These are the only countries that can claim any large share of the moral blame for World War II. No one else wanted that war, not even Stalin.
Stalin wanted a piece. World War II started when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17 in compliance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
December 11th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
You’re making shit up, PSP. That’s just not true. No one “pointed that out”. Someone claimed that.
As part of dirty political deals in the late 19th century, the institutional Republican Party agreed to tolerate Southern racism , but this was recognized as a dirty political deal and a lot of people were unhappy about it.
When Wilson did what he did, he was undoing earlier progress achieved by people in power who were less racist than he was (i.e., not just disagreeing with marginal critics). It’s really open and shut.
You really misunderstand the direction of movement. During Reconstruction, considerable progress toward racial equality was made. Reconstruction ended in 1877, and slowly and steadily racism was re-institutionalized. About 1890 the Republicans stopped fighting entirely, and from that point on things got steadily worse. In particular, blacks in the South lost the vote.
Wilson’s actions after 1912 weren’t an expression of the times, except as part of the slow progress of the southern racist effort to make the US more racist than it had been. The US was more racist in 1912 than it had been in 1890, and partly because of Wilson, it was more racist in 1920 than it had been in 1912.
Maybe the
December 11th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Lincoln was worse on civil liberties than Wilson. Some like to give Lincoln a free pass though.
December 11th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Given that there was an actual civil war going on, with enemy miles 90 miles from the capital, there are reasons to give him a break.
I suspect that the Straussian’s admiration for Lincoln is mostly based on his suspension of habeas corpus, though.
December 11th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Mr. Emerson,
I don’t think you recognize that we are agreeing. I’m certainly not disagreeing with your description. I think racism topped out in the 20s, when the KKK took over Indiana.
December 11th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
“I’m not sure if he did something to piss off Italy, but, hell, probably.”
Yep, but the Italians weren’t exactly blameless
Italy was pissing off Britain & France by insisting that the entire Austrian navy should go to them as reparations
2 ex-Austrian battleships awarded to Yugoslavia were being blockaded by Italy, the crews hoisted American flags and sailed out past the Italians and surrendered to a tiny USN patrol boat
December 11th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Stalin wanted a piece. World War II started when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17 in compliance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
The Soviets invaded Poland because they wanted a piece of Poland–and chunks of most of their other neighbors–but they did not want a world war. They weren’t vaguely ready for a large scale war. Stalin was kissing up to Hitler in the hope that Germany, France, and Britain would bleed each other out while he re-built their military. He was still doing so on June 22, 1941, as the Germany army swept over his borders, shipping valuable raw materials, including oil, to Germany, strengthening its fleet and air force for its ongoing war against the British and, IIRC, an anticipated war against the United States.
Germany, on the other hand, invaded Poland as part of an overt attempt to remake the map of Europe and change the balance of power world-wide. Hitler needed war on a continental scale to achieve his aims.
December 11th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Sorry, not reading 100 posts so I apologize if someone has already mentioned these things.
Wilson also created the Federal Reserve system, arguably one of the most consequential acts in American history.
You can’t really blame him for not getting a League of Nations in the face of an isolationist Congress and a cerebral hemorrhage. On the other hand, you can credit him for the idea of a systematic approach to international law.
He created the agriculture extension system. Not so important today, perhaps, but critical in the past in disseminating innovative agricultural practices to small farmers.
You denigrate his approach to antitrust, but he did make two major changes in the law as it existed at the time. He made it possible for individual corporate executives to be held liable for antitrust violations, and he ended union liability under antitrust laws. Samuel Gompers called this particular act the Magna Carta of union legislation.
For better or worse, he was an unofficial supporter of Zionism and the Balfour Declaration, countering some (but by no means all) of the harsh racial commentary above.
Historians seem to think of presidential rankings in terms of most influential, rather than along some moral scale of rectitude. By that measure, Wilson was certainly higher ranked than most.
December 11th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
“Actively racist or passively racist, just about everybody was racist back then”
Even the founders of the NAACP? The CIO? Eleanor Roosevelt? Really????
”Did you never meet anyone from the world war two generation or before?”
Yeah, they raised me, and they raised me to not be a racist, I even met my Grandfather from the Great War who opposed racism
”The generation that was too young for the first go around, and too old for the second (my grandparents), were worse. White northern working class ethnics were just as bad as any southerner.”
Like the guys who passed the Voting Rights Act?
December 11th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
“The Soviets invaded Poland because they wanted a piece of Poland”
Not exactly, they invaded Poland because if Hitler took all of it he would be that much closer to Moscow
December 11th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
A more rational, and less racist narrative might start with this:
— The Italians went fascist in the 1920s because they thought it was a good idea at the time.
— The Germans went Nazi because it felt good and they thought it was a good way to solve their problems.
Call me a racist if you will, but to me this does not seem to be a very powerful analysis.
It isn’t an analysis, it is an observation of basic facts that assumes free will on the part of the populations of the two countries involved.
Germans, as a nation, made the choice to become and/or support Nazism and genocide. They weren’t forced to become Nazis by economic hardship, they weren’t conned into it by smarter and more learned foriegn interlopers. They made their own choices, enjoyed them when they seemed to be working out. Blaming the rise of Nazism on Versailles lets them off the hook for their own bad decisions.
Blaming it on Woodrow Wilson is hyperbole, at best, malicious, at worst, like a drunk driver blaming his vehicular homicide on the waitress who was rude when she tried to stop him after the third round. Wilson may have bungled the execution of his peace policy, but at least he had one. The Europeans foolishly thought they could punish Germany without permanently crippling her and she would return to the old balance of power game. It didn’t work out.
Roosevelt cut a deal with the Japanese a dozen years earlier when it was common knowledge that they were planning on conquering bits of Asia and he had a chance to protect his country’s interests and a few bits of Asia they had less interest in conquering. About the same time, Japanese nationalists were pressing for a limited war with the United States to settle those same issues. They could have won a limited war fought by 19th Century diplomatic rules, but wiser heads prevailed. I don’t recall the details of the debate, but possibly someone in Japan understood that the United States would not fight a limited war of that sort. Four decades later, the wiser heads did not prevail, and the result was the destruction of the Japanese empire.
In both cases, that of Germany’s need for vengence and Japan’s drive for empire, the choice was theirs. They had options, their potential opponents were willing to talk, and they chose war.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Populations don’t have free will. And this isn’t a legal case or a moral disputation about guilt. This is about politics and history.
I defended Wilson above because he wasn’t really responsible for the Versailles treaty. But the Versailles treaty is generally regarded as having a lot to do with the rise of Hitler, and you’ve said nothing to damage that opinion.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
“The Soviets invaded Poland because they wanted a piece of Poland”
Not exactly, they invaded Poland because if Hitler took all of it he would be that much closer to Moscow
Both, per the last of my readings. Stalin, like Putin today, was a strong believer in “spheres of influence” in the stronger sense. That is, he didn’t just want harmless neighbors, he wanted dependencies, protectorates, border provinces, whatever he could lay his hands on. In that same time period, he snarfed up the Baltic States, Moldavia, and part of Finland. He was also nosing around Turkey and Persia, with an eye on getting naval bases on and secure trade routes to the Med and the Persian Gulf.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
My impression is that U.S. entry into WWI set off something of a national manic-depressive nervous breakdown from 1917 into about 1922. Harding’s much sneered-at campaign promise to restore “normalcy” not only makes sense under the circumstances, but actually seems to have worked to some extent.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
I defended Wilson above because he wasn’t really responsible for the Versailles treaty. But the Versailles treaty is generally regarded as having a lot to do with the rise of Hitler, and you’ve said nothing to damage that opinion.
No problem with that judgment from me. It’s all a matter of how intense the language is in the various comments. This topic has come up before, and there are people here who would swear Germany HAD to conquer Europe to overthrow Versailles. Yeah, and OJ HAD to use that knife, because he loved the woman so much.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
“Harding’s much sneered-at campaign promise to restore “normalcy” “
Who sneers at it? He won a landslide with out even campaigning
December 11th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
[...] Liberals and conservatives should agree: Woodrow Wilson was a lousy president. [...]
December 11th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
[...] Liberals and conservatives should agree: Woodrow Wilson was a lousy president. [...]
December 11th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
A few of Wilson’s saving graces that nobody has mentioned:
-He appointed Brandeis to the Supreme Court; a great liberal justice and the first supreme of Jewish descent
-He vetoed the Volstead Act, seeking to keep America wet (congress over-rode his veto)
-He vetoed the racist immigration quotas favored by Republicans at the time (these had to wait for the Harding presidency)
-He wrote a good essay on the (lack of) power of the presidency. That was years before his administration, of course, and has no bearing on the question at hand.
Otherwise, there’s not a lot to like about him, and a lot to dislike. Those who argue that “everybody was a racist” ought to consider that even though “Birth of a Nation” was a popular and successful movie, its racial demogogery still made it quite controversial at the time of its release.
December 11th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
John Emerson:
Up until as late as 1965, the Democratic Party was the party of racism, and since 1980 or so, the Republican Party has been the party of racism. Them’s the facts.
That’s a pretty broad statement and no, they aren’t the facts. You could say that the Democratic Party was on the level more actively racist than the Republicans before the civil rights era. But to say there was a “racist party” in the U.S. is joke because in general, everyone was racist to one degree to another at the time, no matter what region people came from, America was a fundamentally racist society back then in a way that would shock many people nowadays.
Some Democrats were anti-racist, especially some of the New Dealers who not from the south and there were some Republicans who were also anti-racist. But there was no “anti-racist” party out there having a moral fit over racism except for the Communists and a few other far-left parties prior to the mid-1950s.
The dirty truth is that both major parties and the American people were generally quite comfortable with a racist status-quo prior to 1960 with few exceptions.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Germans, as a nation, made the choice to become and/or support Nazism and genocide. They weren’t forced to become Nazis by economic hardship, they weren’t conned into it by smarter and more learned foriegn interlopers. They made their own choices, enjoyed them when they seemed to be working out. Blaming the rise of Nazism on Versailles lets them off the hook for their own bad decisions.
I disagree to a point, the people voted for the Nazi’s for all kinds of complicate reasons, just like people decide to vote for politicians today. And we must not forget that Hitler was appointed, not elected, the Nazis’ popularity was on the wane by the fall of 1932 and the Nazis’ had to burn down the Reichstag to finally take hold of power since Hitler needed a coalition with German National People’s Party and an agreement with Von Papen’s Catholic Centre Party to rule through presidential decree.
When considering the Nazi’s rise to power, people forget that by 1933 that Germany had seen ten years of recurrent political violence in the streets, a virtual military dictatorship under Von Schleicher and an economic catastrophe. So I agree with you there that Versailles was not the sole reason.
But you seem to assume that a polarity of Germans voted for and supported the regime. This is a common trope but its far from the truth and partly a product of Nazi propaganda of time. So I disagree with you there since that is an historical illusion.
After 1933, do all Germans have some kind of responsibility in what went down? Certainly. But they didn’t all approve of it or walk blindly into it. It’s funny how people perceive that so simplistically.
December 12th, 2009 at 1:39 am
James Loewen in “Lies My Teacher Told Me” has a fabulous discussion of Wilson’s racism and why his racial attitudes were vile even by the standards of his day. Loewen also points out that Wilson’s stance on the women’s movement, on civil liberties, and on ethnic immigrants were all also abominable.
On the other hand, Loewen is I think more positive than Matt in his assessment of some of Wilson’s progressive achievements.
December 12th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Shocking how many people are willing to gloss over, excuse, or minimize Woodrow Wilson’s racism. Everybody was racist, hm? Well, not everybody made segregation the official policy of the federal government. That was good old Woodrow.
Oh yes you can. There was a compromise to be made. Lodge and the Republicans would have voted for the League if Wilson had met them halfway. He wouldn’t.
Awful, awful president. And something else that no one has mentioned: his selfish refusal to resign his office after the stroke left him incapacitated. Marshall could have been a caretaker President in 1920.
December 12th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Kropotkin,
That is not true, and you know it’s not. One party — generally the party that includes the South — has always had more racism and that racism has been more aligned with the planks of the party platform. To say that the Democratic party in 1860 was not, relative to the Republica party, a racist party, is simply a mockery. On the one hand, you had J.C. Calhoun, saying that slavery frees blacks from the horrors of Northern capitalism and that if slavery were abolished that raised the horrifying prospect of white enslavement. On the other hand, you had Lincoln saying that the Constitutional design of the country permitted making all territories free, and that the founders intended and hoped for slavery to die a natural death.
These were, more or less, the racial positions of those parties at around 1860. But no party was discernably the “racist” party? You’re lying or stupid when you say that.
December 12th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
You all forgot Wilson’s love for Ku Klux Klan: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.
-A History of the American People, vol. 5., Reunion and Nationalization (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), 58–60.
December 12th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
To say that the Democratic party in 1860 was not, relative to the Republica party, a racist party, is simply a mockery. On the one hand, you had J.C. Calhoun, saying that slavery frees blacks from the horrors of Northern capitalism and that if slavery were abolished that raised the horrifying prospect of white enslavement. On the other hand, you had Lincoln saying that the Constitutional design of the country permitted making all territories free, and that the founders intended and hoped for slavery to die a natural death.
These were, more or less, the racial positions of those parties at around 1860. But no party was discernably the “racist” party? You’re lying or stupid when you say that.
Nick056,
Well, first off, what time frame are we talking about? The parties of 1860 were much different than the parties of 1916 or 1960.
If you want to talk about the Republicans of the 1860s, they were not an angelic, diverse party interested in racial parity. If you ignore Lincoln, Seward, Saloman Chase and some other leaders; outside of hardcore abolitionist circles the rank and file Republican Party were as racist and xenophobic as much as their political rivals in the north.
Many were very opposed to slavery, but that was about it for for outside of elite abolitionist circles. Many of them were former northern Democrats or Know Nothings who had supported laws disinfranchising blacks outside of the New England states. None of the key Republican political leaders (except for post-1863 Lincoln and Chase) really believed that African Americans were human beings who were equal in every respect to white people, hell, a few of them didn’t think blacks should have had citizenship or the right to own land.
They were opposed to slavery because it was a particularly extreme moral outrage and the fact that they thought that slavery was an unfair (and backwards) economic competition with small farmers and wage laborers in the north. Not because they all thought that blacks had a right to an education, own land, vote or testify in court.
If you want to compare the Democratic Party of 1860 to the Republican Party of 1860, of course they come out looking good. But if you compare to Pat Buchanan to Tom Metzger, of course Pat Buchanan looks good, but even though he isn’t encouraging people to assault Jews like the Neo-Nazi Metzger, he’s still an anti-Semite, just to a lessor degree in his radicalism.
The Republican Party of 1860 was by in a large a racist party, but a less racist party than the Democrats in that they didn’t believe in the enslavement of people or the extreme degradation of black people, they still never saw black people as full human being deserving of all the rights of an American citizen.
The point was that both parties were racist, but to a different degree. The Republicans of the time deserve praise for fighting against slavery, but not all of Republicans did it out of altruism and they certainly could not be described as a non-racist or anti-racist party. Got it?
December 12th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
I think people underestimate the sheer nastiness of Wilson’s anti-civil-liberties legislation, most of which is still on the books. Look up the “Espionage Act of 1917″ and a bunch of others from the same time; they’re not about espionage, they’re about suppressing all political dissent. This is the era of the Palmer Raids.
If we ever manage to get rid of the atrocious Bush-era authoritarian legislation, Wilson’s is the next most important target. Wilson’s laws were actually worse, and they did permanent damage; they also ended up setting court precedents which enabled further abuses.
It’s not surprising there was a lot of dissent for Wilson to suppress given that Wilson ran on an explicitly dishonest platform: “He kept US out of war.” What, he got us into war just after he was re-elected? What, his opponent warned us about that?….
Wilson deserves quite a lot of credit for the anti-corporate progressive/populist developments which he supported, though as others have noted the heavy lifting was done by others. But he is really quite horrible in other regards, partly due to his sheer effectiveness.
On women’s rights he was notoriously against them, but he was enough of a politician that he eventually gave in to one of the largest, most powerful, and best-organized political movements ever. He does seem to have been an astoundingly astute politician, very good at getting what he wanted whether it was a good idea or not and whether it involved lying or not — and he was essentially nonfunctional by the time the League of Nations treaty came to the Senate, which accounts for *that*.