Woodrow Wilson, Racist

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Woodrow Wilson, who was president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, remains a hero of “progressive” internationalists and a pioneer of American interventionism. As Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster shows, Wilson articulated the messianic foreign policy objective that has prevailed in the State Department ever since his day, at least until Donald Trump began to call it into question on a large scale. America’s goal in World War I, Wilson declared, was not to protect American interests or indeed to do anything for the benefit of the United States at all; rather, it was to “make the world safe for democracy.” But besides this savior-complex globalism, Wilson had an even darker side.

The future President Wilson was born on December 28, 1856, in Staunton, Virginia, to a Presbyterian minister and his wife, and was still a baby when his family moved to Augusta, Georgia. One of his earliest memories was hearing, at the age of three, that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president and civil war was on the horizon. When it came, young Woodrow saw his father’s church turned into a hospital for Confederate soldiers wounded in the Battle of Chickamauga and other Civil War battles.

It is likely that Wilson’s father was happy to turn over his church for this service. His parents were fervent supporters of the Southern cause, and it is clear that they imparted their sentiments to their son. Even after Woodrow Wilson moved north in the course of his academic career, he retained the racist attitudes he learned in his youth. When he became president, he made them U.S. government policy.

In 1915, two years into Wilson’s presidency, the notorious film The Birth of a Nation became the first motion picture to get a screening in the White House; the film portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes, denigrated blacks in numerous ways, and quoted Wilson as a respected authority. Wilson was quoted decrying the supposed “policy of congressional leaders” to “put the white South under the heel of the black South.” In response, Wilson went on, as quoted in the film: “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.”

The showing of The Birth of a Nation was indicative of Wilson’s attitudes: during his administration, government departments in Washington were segregated. Wilson abandoned the interests of the American people in his embrace of racism and segregation, which only prolonged the injustices done to black Americans and contributed to making the race issue the national trauma and a bleeding sore that will not heal to this day. As he was also the first internationalist president, who put the interests of the world ahead of the interests of his country, his presidency was an unmitigated disaster for the country he was twice elected to govern.

In that first election, Wilson only triumphed because the Republican Party was bitterly split between the supporters of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. During Roosevelt’s presidency from 1901 to 1909, Teddy several times demonstrated his desire to heal the nation’s racial wounds. Roosevelt was friendly with the black American educator Booker T. Washington; just weeks after taking office, the new president invited Washington to dine with him at the White House.

Many Southerners were enraged; Senator Ben Tillman of South Carolina said that Roosevelt’s action would require Southern whites to kill a thousand blacks to remind them of their subservient place in society. Roosevelt was dismayed by the reaction, and never invited Washington to dinner again, although he did consult with him at the White House. In 1905, President Roosevelt visited the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for the Training of Colored Young Men and Women, which Washington had founded, and he served on its board of trustees.

But whatever progress this represented, Woodrow Wilson ended. He did so in much the same way as Barack Obama ginned up the present-day racial tensions during his supposedly post-racial administration. So why does the left still love Woodrow Wilson? The most obvious reason is because they’re racists themselves, as they demonstrate whenever a member of a racial minority stops supporting them. One other reason is because they realize how damaging Wilson was to America, and damaging America is just what they want to do.