THE RACIST AND MISOGYNIST “WHITE PRIVILEGE” OF WOODROW WILSON
* * *
Wilson was white and essentially Southern, Scotch-Irish, and highly intellectual. And if you weren’t a member of one of his various tribes, you would feel his wrath.
He served as president of Princeton University and later as governor of New Jersey, but it’s impossible to overstate just how Southern (actually, Confederate) he really was.
Wilson never abandoned his Southern sympathies. His cabinet was full of Southerners. But he very carefully picked and chose which Southern values he retained. He junked any idea of separation of powers or limited government, yet he retained a rabid racism and a belief in the forced segregation of the races.
Even when he served as president of Princeton, Wilson’s prejudices tainted his decisions. He once said that the “whole temper and tradition of [Princeton] are such that no negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems unlikely that the question will ever assume practical form.” He turned away black applicants, deeming any need or desire for their education to be “unwarranted.”
His racist policies continued while he was governor of New Jersey, yet he successfully employed vague promises of equality to capture a sizable portion of the traditionally Republican black vote in 1912. African-Americans, however, soon discovered Wilson’s true racial attitudes: this “Father of Progressivism” was really a rank white supremacist who “brought Jim Crow to the North.”
Just a month after his inauguration, Wilson resegregated parts of the federal workforce (including the Navy Department, where a young Franklin D. Roosevelt was serving as undersecretary). Demonstrating the coldness of character that defined so much of his human interactions, Wilson dismissively claimed that he had made “no promises in particular to Negroes, except to do them justice.”
Blacks felt betrayed. With Boston newspaper editor and Harvard graduate William Monroe Trotter, African-American leaders came to the White House to protest his actions. An incensed Wilson lectured them that segregation wasn’t “humiliating but a benefit.” He later signed a law banning interracial marriage in the nation’s capital, segregated the U.S. military and parts of the federal workforce, and deprived African-American soldiers, sailors, and Marines of the opportunity to fight for their country.
Wilson even championed the nineteenth-century terrorists the Ku Klux Klan. He wrote in 1903:
The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers. . . . Every countryside wished to have its own Ku Klux Klan, founded in secrecy and mystery . . . until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an “Invisible Empire of the South,” bound together . . . to protect the Southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.
WILSON AND THE KKK’S TRIUMPH OF THE WILL
Perhaps Wilson’s most egregious public racism was his embrace of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 pro-Klan, pro-segregation film The Birth of a Nation, which was based on Thomas J. Dixon Sr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman (Dixon was Wilson’s friend and Johns Hopkins classmate). This truly shameful film—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan—was sprinkled with racist quotes from Wilson’s writings and featured white actors in blackface portraying racist stereotypes of African-Americans.
Wilson not only liked and supported The Birth of a Nation, but he even screened the movie at the White House. At the showing, some reports (which may be apocryphal) claimed, he stated that the film was “like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
There’s a saying that life imitates art. Race relations during Wilson’s administration not only imitated The Birth of a Nation, but they far exceeded it—and in the most negative possible sense. May 1916 witnessed one of the most brutal lynchings in American history, that of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas. The details are too horrific to repeat here; you can google it if you really want to read about what happened. I mention it only to highlight how Wilson reacted: he didn’t. Even as brutal race riots rocked East St. Louis in 1917 and Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, and Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1919, Wilson took no action.
This reaction from the top, along with his embrace of The Birth of a Nation, sparked a rebirth of the long-defunct Ku Klux Klan. And when it came back, it was meaner and more bigoted than ever, spreading its hatred beyond blacks to Jews and Catholics (“Kill the Kikes, Koons, and Katholics”).
Wilson’s dismal record on race was the precedent for more than a century of progressives taking advantage of African-Americans by promising the sky to get their votes and then not delivering. FDR followed in his footsteps (he didn’t even bother to desegregate the armed forces or the District of Columbia), and the practice has not stopped since.
Wilson admired the Protestant peoples of the British Isles, either the English and the Scottish themselves or his own Scots-Irish kinsmen. He had little use, however, for the flood of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island from the non-Nordic portions of the European continent. In 1902, he committed these prejudices to writing:
Immigrants poured steadily in[to America] as before, but with an alteration of stock which students of affairs marked with uneasiness. Throughout the century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country, or men from the Latin-Gallic stocks of France and northern Italy; but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population, the men whose standards of life and of work were such as American workmen had never dreamed of hitherto.
Again, through the miracle of rebranding and the reliance on short memories, progressives have somehow whitewashed this anti-immigrant past to become the group that supposedly stands with open arms and open borders toward all those who want to come here.
Wilson’s firm belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority led him to embrace one of the most disgusting notions of his time: eugenics. He believed that the human race could be improved through selective breeding.
In 1907, Wilson supported Indiana legislation mandating the compulsory sterilization of criminals and the mentally retarded, the nation’s first eugenics law. After becoming governor of New Jersey, he wasted little time in implementing similar legislation there, proudly signing into law a bill calling for the compulsory sterilization of the “Feeble-minded (including imbeciles, idiots and morons), Epileptics, and other defectives.” (Fortunately, other people with more sense prevailed, and the bill was quickly overturned by the New Jersey Supreme Court.)
This overt disdain for whole classes of people was pretty typical stuff for Wilson-era progressives, but many eugenics laws were less obvious. Take the minimum wage, for example. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and Wilson’s commissioner of labor statistics, explained how economics can easily be used for human engineering: “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work . . . better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”
Wilson also seemed to despise women—or at least not to think of them as being equal to men. He was a late and very reluctant convert to the women’s suffrage movement, and he characterized the female mind as a “vacuum.” He professed to be “frustrated” when teaching at Bryn Mawr, a women’s college, because those students never challenged him. In fact, Wilson felt women were not “the intellectual equal of men.” If their
weaker minds couldn’t handle the weighty questions of politics, why should they receive the privilege of voting?
From the moment Wilson stepped off his train in Washington, D.C., on the day before his inauguration, the suffragists stole his thunder and made his life miserable. As protesters became more frustrated and more militant in their tactics—which included daily rallies outside the White House—Wilson grew more and more irritated.
Initially cordial, he soon became rude and then downright nasty. He was “repelled by the militant suffragists outside his gate.” To him, “their methods were insulting, unfeminine, and unpatriotic.” Eventually, many were jailed and beaten. Those who protested further by going on hunger strikes were force-fed.
Several years into his presidency, Wilson finally relented, if for no other reason than to stop the incessant shouting of protesters outside his bedroom window. The fact that women could also form a core constituency for a new U.S. war abroad also didn’t go unnoticed. Wilson would grin and bear granting the “lesser sex” the right to vote if it would mean that he would now have political support for war.
For progressives, the ends always justify the means.
WILSON AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
* * *
Wilson was really the first “internationalist president.” As a young man, he fell in love with the British parliamentary system (a system with no checks and balances). In such a system, a prime minister and his or her ruling party call the shots, and if anyone disagrees, well, that’s just too bad. When Wilson campaigned for governor of New Jersey, he even vowed to be an “unconstitutional governor,” planning to run roughshod over the state’s legislature.
His justification for this was pretty simple. He didn’t believe that the wisdom of the Founders applied anymore. He didn’t believe in American exceptionalism. That experiment, he felt, had grown outmoded and woefully out of touch with current conditions. Limited government, God-given rights, and more than a century of American political traditions meant less than nothing to Wilson.
THE FIRST FASCIST PRESIDENT AND THE ESPIONAGE AND SEDITION ACTS
Wilson’s disdain for democracy was most aptly represented by his support for the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. These crypto-fascist laws, passed in the midst of World War I, played on the fear of German propaganda and sabotage and made “disloyalty and subversion” punishable offenses while barring the sending of “seditious” materials through the U.S. Mail.
Thousands were arrested as a result of these acts, and they led to a highly bigoted anti-German crusade. Numerous volunteer “security” organizations sprang up, such as the American Protective League, a quarter-million-strong body of semiofficial government spies in the guise of citizen patriots; the National Security League; and the Boy Spies of America. These were American brownshirts, plain and simple.
Instead of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Wilson sought to control the minds of the masses by effectively repealing the First Amendment and criminalizing antiadministration free speech. That’s tyranny, plain and simple, and there is no greater insult to U.S. history or threat to the U.S. republic.
This elitism knew no borders—literally. Wilson’s ultimate goal was not just to bend the United States to the will of his “benevolent” expert elites. He and his progressive allies fixed their eyes on a much larger goal: an all-encompassing progressive global government to rule all of humanity under a big-government yoke.
But to do so, Wilson had to get the United States—his base of power—to shake off its natural and historic hostility to foreign wars and engage in the great conflict raging across Europe: World War I.
Throughout the 1916 election, Wilson ran on the slogan “He kept us out of war.” It helped him gain an eyelash victory, and he reiterated his supposed desire to stay out of the European conflagration during his March 4, 1917, inaugural address. “We stand firm,” he declared from the Oval Office, “in armed neutrality.”
Five weeks later, the United States declared war on Germany. It was a complete turnaround by Wilson, one that still puzzles many historians.
Wilson mobilized more than four million Americans to bear the brunt of his world-building ambitions. More than three hundred thousand were killed or injured, shattering not only their own lives but also those of millions of friends, family members, and loved ones.
Their sacrifice proved decisive. With the introduction of millions of fresh American troops, the Allies vanquished Berlin, opening the door for Wilson to carry out the next phase of his plan for global dominance: the creation of the League of Nations.
America—and the rest of the world—feared the mass bloodshed of future wars. But, like any good progressive, Wilson knew how to exploit that fear and bend it to his will. Wilson’s League of Nations would ostensibly prevent future conflicts and keep the world safe for democracy, but it was much more than just a peacekeeping organization; it was a truly radical global governing body, the first of its kind. Wilson hoped the League would mature from a place of discussion and compromise into one of command and control.
In December 1918, he began a tradition of presidential globetrotting, personally traveling to Europe to negotiate a peace treaty and secure his precious League. His imperious attitude won him few friends abroad (“I could not bear him,” Britain’s King George V complained), and his unwillingness to compromise won him few friends at home.
Returning from Versailles, Wilson refused to cooperate with Republicans to secure Senate ratification of his treaty. He stooped to insults and threats instead, attacking opponents of his new world government as “blind and little provincial people” with “pygmy minds” who should be “hanged on gibbets as high as heaven, but pointing in the opposite direction.”
“Any man,” Wilson proclaimed, “who resists the present tides that run in the world will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from his human kind forever.”
Wilson, like a future acolyte named Barack Obama, was handsomely rewarded for his globalist efforts by winning the highest honor in the progressive, globalist land: the Nobel Peace Prize.
The U.S. Senate wisely rejected Wilson’s plea to join the League, but the damage was already done. Two and a half decades later, Wilson’s protégé Franklin Roosevelt picked up the world-government mantle by helping to create the United Nations, while across the pond, the European Union has forced progressive internationalism on an entire continent.
Although the progressive effort to place elites in charge of society and redefine world governance is incomplete, it is still very much under way. As Christine Legarde—head of the International Monetary Fund, a key component of the progressive world order—stated in a 2011 speech (fittingly held at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center):
More than anyone else, it was Woodrow Wilson who championed the cause of multilateralism and global fraternity. The seeds he planted bore fruit in the postwar milieu that produced the IMF and its sister organizations. For at the heart of our mandate lies a simple but powerful idea—that cooperation can bestow not only economic stability, but a better future for all.
Wilson’s quest for top-down governance and globalism has not died with the passing of time. In April 2012, the Wilson Center bestowed its Award for Public Service on none other than Hillary Clinton. During the ceremony, Clinton sang the praises of the Wilson Center, but she did not once mention the sordid chauvinism, elitism, and bigotry at the heart of Wilson’s life and agenda.
Drawing on the progressive German influences of his studies at Johns Hopkins and his later writings that openly despised the Constitution, Wilson began the first wave of progressivism, a wave that would forever change the relationship between the federal government of the United States and its citizens.
In 1896, 1900, and 1908, Americans soundly rejected populist and progressive William Jennings Bryan for the White House, but by 1912, the public had become desensitized enough to elect Wilson president. (Wils
on, in turn, appointed Bryan as secretary of State.)
No longer was progressivism confined to the universities and fringe candidates in American politics. It finally found a home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. With sweeping constitutional amendments such as the Sixteenth, the Seventeenth (allowing direct election of senators), and the Eighteenth (banning the sale of alcohol), Wilson led a political revolution that forever changed Washington, D.C., and the ways it interacted with the daily lives of Americans.
In Washington, progressivism served as an ideal excuse for further seizing control of the nation. Leaders of both parties shrewdly embraced this new ideology as the best way to expand the federal government’s authority (as well as their own, of course) under the guise of improving the lives of all citizens.
Progressive acolytes filled newsrooms, university faculty rosters, church pulpits, and newly opened government agencies and bureaus within walking distance from the White House. They proselytized with a missionary zeal that their movement could help the poor, end the scourge of alcohol, reform politics, remedy income inequality, battle special interests, improve working conditions and living standards, and create a kind of heaven on earth—if only the right people were in power. They were Republicans and Democrats. They were members of the House and the Senate. They were judges and government lawyers. They were unelected government officials and administrators.
But they all shared a commitment to “progress.”
One of Wilson’s greatest admirers was a tall, striking man with an irresistible smile and an infectious laugh. For years, he had labored in obscurity in the bowels of the Navy Department across the street from the White House. What the young man lacked in national prominence he would eventually make up for with his singular ambition and his already familiar last name: Roosevelt.