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Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921)

On 18 November 2015, over 50 student protesters staged a 32-hour sit-in outside of the university president’s office to protest Princeton University’s enduring commitment to the legacy of the 28th U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was memorialized on the campus through murals, buildings, and the prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

One popular school of thought concerning Wilson's racial attitudes, associated with Arthur S. Link, grounds his racism in his white southern heritage. Wilson's sympathies were drawn to the moderate white, elite southerners who viewed segregation as a progressive arrangement that upheld social peace by keeping whites and blacks at a safe distance from each other.

Wilson succumbed the widespread prejudice expressed against the new immigrants of the 1890s, those from eastern and southern Europe. In one notorious passage in the last volume of his History of the American People, he demeaned the new immigrants as men coming out “of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor intelligence.” It was “as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year.”

Wilson eventually changed his tune of white immigrants. In a July Fourth oration given in Philadelphia in 1914, he declared: “We opened our gate to the world and said: “Let all men who wish to be free come to us and they will be welcome."We said, “This independence of ours is not a selfish thing for our own exclusive private use. It is for everybody to whom we can find the means of extending it.""

Wilson's "History of the American People" found virtue in the system of plantation slavery: “There was almost always moderation," he wrote, “a firm but not unkindly discipline, a real care shown for their [the slaves'] comfort and welfare.” Masters taught their slaves handicrafts and meted out justice fairly, he claimed. They treated their domestic slaves with "affection and indulgence" and did everything they could to avoid breaking up slave families. They behaved responsibly and dutifully toward field slaves, even though the latter were “indolent” and “like a huge family of shiftless children” who often did not earn their keep. Where the masters managed their plantations, in other words, slavery proved to be, in his view, a humane system. That African Americans may have suffered, either materially or psychologi-cally, from chattel slavery was not a thought to which Wilson gave expression.

Coming to the history of Reconstruction (1865–1877), wilson's analysis is driven alternately by his contempt for African Americans and their aspirations to be free and self-governing, and by anger at northern whites who believed that the South and America could be reconstructed by policies that gave "the negroes political privilege but also to put the white men of the South, for the nonce at any rate, under the negroes' heels." The freedmen, he wrote,“had the easy faith, the simplicity, the idle hopes, the inexperience of children. Their masterless, homeless freedom made them the more pitiable, the more dependent, because under slavery they had been shielded, the weak and incompetent with the strong and capable.” Given their limits, it was hardly surprisingthat many swelled the ranks of “vagrants, looking for pleasure and gratuitous fortune." Nor was it surprising that the freedmen became easy targets for carpet-baggers “swarming out of the North” to fatten their purses on Southern misfortune.

These northern adventurers, Wilson wrote, “became the new masters of the blacks,” who could not, of course, become their own masters. The carpetbaggers "gained the confidence of the Negroes, obtained for themselves the most lucrative offices, and lived upon the public treasury.” In small southern towns, freedmen themselves became the office holders, even though they were “men who could not so much as write their names and who knew none of the uses of authority except its insolence.” In these towns, Wilson intoned, the “policy of the [Republican] congressional leaders wrought its own perfect work of fear, demoralization, disgust, and social revolution" and brought the South to the edge of ruin.

Steve Fuller noted "One of the great mysteries of American politics is why it was that a former President of Princeton University, a founder of the political science profession in the United States, turns out to be the person who decisively reversed the reforms established in the spirit of the emancipation of Blacks from slavery. The only unequivocally ‘intellectual’ figure to have occupied the Oval Office appears to have been the most overtly racist in his political judgment – barring the nation’s founding fathers, of course..... There is no doubt that Wilson was a ‘racist’ by today’s standards, which is to say, he used racially based arguments publicly to justify his policies. The question is whether this fact tells against him in a way that justifies the removal of his name from buildings, institutes, fellowships, etc. – especially at Princeton, which he converted from a glorified finishing school to a major research-based university....

"Wilson believed – rightly or wrongly – that racial differences were less significant than class differences in American society, and that the latter had to be addressed even at the expense of the former. ... For Wilson, the first native of the Old Confederacy elected president in the 50 years since the end of the Civil War, the main threat of insurrection in the United States came not from the Blacks – who were fitfully making their way through a reconstructed America – but from the poor Whites who felt they had been given a raw deal in the post-war settlement."

In his 1912 break with the Republicans, Theodore Roosevelt organized his new Progressive Party as a whites-only body in the South. These policies impelled some prominent African Americans, led by W.E.B. Du Bois, to support Wilson for president in 1912 – much to their later sorrow.

In the Wilson Administration, the State Department routinely ignored and dismissed Black citizens’ pleas to speak out against lynching and other forms of discrimination. In fact, the administration was proactive in perpetuating segregation. Wilson and his cabinet actively worked to re-segregate federal offices and limit opportunity for Black Americans. A Postmaster within the Wilson administration once told reporters “There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place in the corn field.”

On 31 March 1915, Wilson attended a special screening at the White House of THE BIRTH OF A NATION, a film by D.W. Griffith based on THE CLANSMAN, a novel written by Wilson's good friend Thomas Dixon. The film glorified the Ku Klux Klan and disparaged the freed slaves. It falsified Reconstruction, presenting blacks as dominating Southern whites and sexually forcing themselves upon white women. After the screening, Wilson enthused: "It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Wilson’s alleged endorsement of the film as “history written by lightning” was invented by a Hollywood writer twenty years later. At the screening, the president seemed preoccupied and left midway through the showing.

W.E.B Du Bois in 1915 his The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races quoted at Dr. Stephen S. Wise, of New York, writing in the New Statesman of London "'The Birth of a Nation' is an indefensible libel upon a race, that it is nothing less than an indictment of a whole people, the more damning because it purports to be historical and impartial. 'The Birth of a Nation' is not history; it is travesty. It is not realism; it is an abomination save from the viewpoint, perhaps, of sheer spectacular mass-production."

Judson MacLaury wrote "The White House of Woodrow Wilson and the Executive branch were filled with conservative Southern Democrats, a group that also dominated Congress. Washington was resistant to meeting the rising expectations of the Negro community and workforce. "During the 1912 presidential campaign Wilson, a progressive Southern Democrat, had encouraged Negro support with vague promises to be "President of the whole nation" and to provide Negroes with "absolute fair dealing." He specifically promised that he would at least match past Republican appointments of Negroes to patronage positions. The NAACP endorsed Wilson and Negro groups worked vigorously for his election. Wilson's victory was mainly attributable to the Taft-Roosevelt split and the Negro vote was not decisive. Yet Negroes were proud of their involvement in the campaign and, heartened by the idealism of Wilson's inaugural address, looked forward to turning vague campaign promises into concrete advances for working Negroes and the whole race.

"Hard political, social and racial realities lurked to counter this hopefulness once the inaugural euphoria dissipated. Wilson, despite his campaign promises of racial fairness, remained a man of the South and shared the paternalistic if benevolent racism of the men and women of his patrician class. Wilson also needed the support of Southern Democrats with strongly anti-Negro views if his ambitious program of progressive economic reform was to be enacted. This was his over-riding goal and, as historian Kendrick Clements wrote, "Wilson's attitude was always that there were more important issues to be pursued than racial justice."

"Anti-Negro forces soon held the upper hand in Washington and Jim Crow began to hold sway. Negro patronage declined markedly from the low, token levels of previous Administrations. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan broke a precedent of many years by appointing a white as ambassador to Haiti. Wilson himself appointed only two Negroes in his first two years in office while allowing a total of 12 positions filled by Negroes appointed by President Taft to lapse into white hands.

"Patronage had an important but largely symbolic value to the Negro community, whereas the government's treatment of its own Negro workers had a direct impact. At a Cabinet meeting early in the Administration, Southern members expressed disingenuous concern over alleged friction between Negro and white government employees. Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, a Texan, proposed segregating the races to eliminate the supposed problem. Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo supported him. Burleson also claimed support for the idea from moderate Negro leaders such as Bishop Alexander Walters, president of the National Colored Democratic League. The rest of the Cabinet, along with the President, while not explicitly endorsing segregation, did not oppose it.

"Some departments adopted the policy with a vengeance. Burleson immediately set out on a program to segregate, downgrade and, in some cases, discharge Negro workers. All of them but one were transferred to the dead letter office, and the Negro who remained had the humiliating experience of being surrounded by screens so that white workers would not have to look at him. Burleson also ordered segregated window service to the public. Fortunately segregation was not widely adopted elsewhere in the federal government. Many departments either failed to institute the practice or actively resisted it. Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post was a founder of the NAACP and his department was another that remained relatively free of the taint of Jim Crow.

"By the end of 1913 the segregationist wave broke after coming up against a wall of resistance from the Negro community. In August 1913 the NAACP filed a formal protest against the practice. By late September the campaign against segregation was in full swing and the Negro press was filled with it. Wilson finally agreed to receive a delegation from the National Independent Equal Rights League which presented a petition signed by 20,000 opponents of segregation and discrimination. Wilson was evasive but cordial at the meeting and after that, while segregation remained entrenched in a few departments, the growth of the practice was largely halted by the end of 1913.

"The agonizing and enduring problem of lynching was another flashpoint of White House-Negro relations. The NAACP pursued an unsuccessful campaign for a federal law against the practice. Finally in August 1918, with the U.S. at war with Germany, Wilson finally spoke out against lynching and mob-violence, emphasizing that it played into the hands of German propagandists. Wilson did not mention the Negro race and did not push for federal legislation against lynching, which mounted ever higher.

"Wilson's call to end domestic violence in order to further national unity was emblematic of a war driven shift in federal policy toward Negroes. With the U.S. declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, Negro support and Negro labor were now crucial to both the civilian and the military war efforts. Wilson and his Cabinet began to rebuild ties to the Negro community that had been damaged by his toleration of Jim Crow in the government. Negro leaders buried the hatchet and quickly rallied in support of the national war emergency. "It was in the military that wartime issues involving Negroes first arose. The Selective Service Act of 1917 allowed, but did not guarantee, the induction of Negro conscripts by local draft boards, but the U.S. Army was permitted to continue its tradition of segregated Negro units. Under pressure from the NAACP, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker allowed the training of Negro officers at a new, if segregated, facility. After a conference with Negro educators and others in August 1917, Baker agreed to the creation of a new all-Negro combat division, the famous Ninety-Second, which broke existing bars to service by Negroes in combat duty.

"In October 1917 Secretary Baker created a Special Assistant post to deal with Negro issues in the military. As head he named Emmett Scott, a long time associate of Booker T. Washington. At the time there was only one other federal office dedicated to Negro affairs, the obscure Division of Racial Groups in the Bureau of Education. Several other federal agencies followed the lead of the War Department, including the Food and Drug Administration, the White House Committee on Public Information, and the Federal Railroad Administration. The latter, which took over the nation's railway system during the war, required payment of equal wages to whites and Negroes doing the same work.

"A program to mobilize Negro workers and deal with their issues during the Great War was created in the War Labor Administration under Secretary of Labor Wilson. Known as the Division of Negro Economics, it established a national program to maintain Negro workers' morale and promote better race relations. The Division originated after Negro leaders began to call for government involvement in their issues. In January 1918 the National Urban League, long involved in issues of the migration and concerned that the exodus was about to intensify, held a conference which called for "one or two competent negroes [sic]" to be appointed in the Department of Labor to assist in the distribution of Negro labor.

"Following up on the resolution, a group of Negro leaders presented a more detailed proposal to Louis Post on Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1918. He recommended their idea to Wilson and argued that "there is an absolute necessity that the Department of Labor come into comprehensive and comprehending relations with ... the Negro race." With his scribbled "Approved Feby. 16 -18, WBW," Wilson officially endorsed a policy of engagement with the Negro from which the federal government occasionally strays but which it has never repealed.

In 1930, Princeton established the School of Public and International Affairs, a small interdisciplinary undergraduate program. In 1948, a graduate professional program was added, and the named changed to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs after 1879 alumnus Woodrow Wilson –– 13th president of Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, and 28th president of the United States. In 2020, the School was renamed when the Princeton University Board of Trustees voted to remove Woodrow Wilson's name because his "racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school or college whose scholars, students, and alumni must stand firmly against racism in all its forms." The idea to change the name had been urged by students and alumni over the years, most recently by the Black Justice League in 2015. A Wilson Legacy Review Committee made up of University Trustees decided to keep his name attached to the School in 2016, calling instead for a more full telling of the negative elements of his legacy, featured in the installation "Double Sights" on Scudder Plaza. Today the School is known as the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

The Woodrow Wilson Memorial Commission, created by joint resolution of Congress, recommended that an International Center for Scholars be constructed in the District of Columbia in the area north of the proposed Market Square as part of the Nation's memorial to Woodrow Wilson. The Wilson Center, chartered by Congress in 1968 as the official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, is the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue to inform actionable ideas for the policy community. In 2019, the Wilson Center was named the #1 regional studies think tank in the world. Three decades after its founding, the Wilson Center had grown out of its initial housing. The Center, which once fit comfortably in the Smithsonian Castle, now found that its growth was being limited by its environment. In the summer of 1998, the Wilson Center moved into its permanent home on Pennsylvania Avenue.