Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-v2bm5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-11T02:23:46.568Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Transforming Silence into an Active, Present Awareness: What to do about Wilson’s Legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2016

Todd Shaw
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Woodrow Wilson is the only American political scientist to have served as President of the United States. In the time between his political science Ph.D. (from Johns Hopkins, in 1886) and his tenure as president (1913–21), he also served as president of Princeton University (1902–10) and president of the American Political Science Association (1909–10). Wilson is one of the most revered figures in American political thought and in American political science. The Woodrow Wilson Award is perhaps APSA’s most distinguished award, given annually for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in the previous year, and sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at Princeton University.

Wilson has also recently become the subject of controversy, on the campus of Princeton University, and in the political culture more generally, in connection with racist statements that he made and the segregationist practices of his administration. A group of Princeton students associated with the “Black Lives Matter” movement has demanded that Wilson’s name be removed from two campus buildings, one of which is the famous Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (see Martha A. Sandweiss, “Woodrow Wilson, Princeton, and the Complex Landscape of Race,” http://www.thenation.com/article/woodrow-wilson-princeton-and-the-complex-landscape-of-race/). Many others have resisted this idea, noting that Wilson is indeed an important figure in the history of twentieth-century liberalism and Progressivism in the United States.

A number of colleagues have contacted me suggesting that Perspectives ought to organize a symposium on the Wilson controversy. Although we do not regularly organize symposia around current events, given the valence of the controversy and its connection to issues we have featured in our journal (see especially the September 2015 issue on “The American Politics of Policing and Incarceration”), and given Wilson's importance in the history of our discipline, we have decided to make an exception in this case. We have thus invited a wide range of colleagues whose views on this issue will interest our readers to comment on this controversy. —Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor.

Type
Reflections Symposium: The Controversy over Woodrow Wilson's Legacy: A Discussion
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 768 - 769
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2016 

Probably William Faulkner’s most frequently cited quote is, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” This is especially true when the unexamined pain of history is not transformed but is instead transferred to a present era. Such is the problem and the prospective pain we confront if we leave the racial legacy of President Woodrow Wilson unexamined. Among many things, Wilson was a pioneering political scientist, a progressive reformer, a wartime president, and a moralist in international affairs. But he also was a tacit white supremacist in an era when record numbers of African Americans were being lynched, disenfranchised, and economically oppressed in parallel to the racialization of many other Anglo-American groups.Footnote 1

Few people know that Wilson spent part of his teenage years in Columbia—South Carolina’s state capitol. It is also a city in which I have lived, taught, and observed for more than a decade. It is not an historical coincidence that Wilson and his family, who were steeped in the racial beliefs and mores of the “Old” white south, spent a formative moment of his adolescence in this city that helped birth the Confederacy. Its state’s legislature was the first to ratify an “Ordinance of Secession” from the Union based in part on the right of white South Carolina aristocrats to own African Americans as enslaved property. Of course its sister city of Charleston sparked the Civil War. Columbia was also a ground-zero for the rise and fall of Reconstruction; especially when arch-segregationist Gov. “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and his allies, among other ills, enforced the legal disenfranchisement of blacks through intimidation and murder if deemed necessary.Footnote 2 In 1915b then-President Wilson was so awestruck by D.W. Griffith’s white supremacist epic—The Birth of Nation—and its tortured history of Reconstruction, that he infamously asserted, “It was like writing history with lighting, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” It played to sold out white movie houses in Columbia as throughout the south. The actual, terrible truth is that the racist lies that Griffith and Wilson endorsed had horrible implications even one hundred years later.Footnote 3

The same Confederate flag that Ku Klux Klan vigilantes flew in Griffith’s film in 1915 as they “redeemed” the south by lynching supposedly rapacious black men (white actors in black face) inspired a young, white supremacist to commit a horrific crime in 2015. Dylan Roof was convicted of murdering black state senator and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Rev. Clementa Pinckney and eight of his fellow parishioners by gunning them down in Charleston’s “Mother” Emanuel AME Church during a prayer meeting. The same types of racist symbols and mores that Wilson praised in 1915 ran through the biography of his family. His father Joseph, a Presbyterian minister, owned enslaved blacks and led a split in the national Presbytery over the slavery issue. The same father proudly saluted the Confederate flag as a Confederate army chaplain. And of course it was this mindset that justified President Wilson enacting a policy of legally segregating the federal bureaucracy among the other racialized policies of his administration.Footnote 4

The 2015 Charleston murders so shocked South Carolina’s leadership that Columbia became the scene for the long overdue retirement of the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds. Supporters had long argued it was an innocuous emblem of “Dixie pride” but its true origins where in slavery and a Jim Crow, white southern resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. Debate still continues as to what else must be done to retire or contextualize other white supremacist symbols on the statehouse grounds—especially the statues of Ben Tillman and Senator Strom Thurmond.Footnote 5

It is time to transform any silence about Woodrow Wilson’s racial legacy into an active, present awareness. We can retire Wilson’s name from various foundations, institutions, and monuments and/or maintain the presence of his name in limited respects but counter his racial legacy with historical markers and contrasting namesakes—e.g. W.E.B DuBois, Ralph Bunche, Jewel Limar Prestage. Whatever is done must demonstrate a commitment to the full truth and racial justice. Like the Confederate flag’s removal in Columbia, we must transform painful lies into the plain truth. For if we do not, a racist past will only bolster a racialized present whether through the white supremacy of a Dylan Roof or the white nationalism of a Donald Trump.

References

Notes

1 Cooper, John Milton, Jr. 2013. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. New York, NY: Random House, Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine and Stanley Harrold. 2009. African Americans: A Concise History. Upper Saddle, New Jersey: Pearson, Smith, Rogers M. 1997. Civic Ideals : Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press, Trotter, Joe William, Jr. 2000. “From a Raw Deal to a New Deal? 1929–1945.” in To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, edited by R. D. G. Kelley and E. Lewis. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

2 Edgar, Walter. 1998. South Carolina: A History. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, Lau, Peter F. 2006. Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

3 Edgar, Walter. 1998. South Carolina: A History. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, Weiner, Mark S. 2004. Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste. New York, NY: Albert Knopf Press.

4 Cooper, John Milton, Jr. 2013. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. New York, NY: Random House, Robles, Frances, Jason Horowitz and Shaila Dewan. 2015. “Dylan Roof, Suspect in Charleston Shooting, Felw the Flags of White Power.” in The New York Times. New York, NY: The New York Times.

5 2015, “Confederate Flag Lowered at the Sc State House for Last Time,” Columbia, SC: The State. Retrieved June 7, 2016, (http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article26947045.html), Larimer, Sarah. 2015. “Why a Vitriolic Jim Crow Advocate Is Still Memoralizefd on S.C. Statehouse Grounds.” in The Washington Post. Washington, DC: The Washington Post.