Wayne O'Leary

Cancelling Wilson

What’s come to be called the “cancel culture” has claimed another victim. In the August 3/10 issue of The New Yorker, a lead editorial by staff writer Margaret Talbot referred to Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the US, as “a Southern Democrat and patrician racist,” thereby succinctly assigning Wilson to his newly established place in the negative pantheon of America’s ongoing racial reckoning.

The dismissive implication of the Talbot evaluation was that there’s nothing else we need to know about Wilson. He was a bad guy, a Trump-like bigot whose career offers no redeeming qualities worth mentioning. He’s simply another in the growing list of formerly respected figures from the nation’s past who need to be banished forevermore from public consciousness (cancelled, in the current vernacular) for the race-related evil they perpetrated in word, deed or thought during their lifetimes. Enough said.

In recent months, Wilson has been joined in this retrospective gulag by an impressive cast of disparate characters. Lillian Gish, legendary film star from the silent-screen era, has had her name excised from Bowling Green University’s Gish Film Theater for having appeared in D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” in 1915. Gish’s offense was that she failed at age 19, in accepting her first major movie role, to appreciate the racial implications of the now widely condemned former film classic. Too bad; reputation cancelled.

John Muir, a revered founder of the Sierra Club and patron saint of the American environmental movement, stands accused of racially insensitive remarks made in some of his obscure early writings. The pending punishment for Muir’s offending opinions, which date from the early 20th century, has yet to be announced by the club’s leadership.

The spasm of cancellations includes renowned Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who’s had her name removed from the reproductive-rights organization’s leading clinic in Manhattan for supposedly not encouraging racial diversity and for dabbling briefly in eugenics, which the Nazis made radioactive by tying it directly to racial theories.

Questions have even been raised about famous figures from the ancient past, such as the Greek philosopher Aristotle, whose ethical lapses included an acceptance of slavery. Should his writings be consequently discarded as beyond the pale by modern students and scholars? An insightful commentary by University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard (New York Times, June 23) argued to the contrary that Aristotle was a product of his time and place, born into a world of slavery, his thinking shaped accordingly; and his valuable intellectual contributions on other subjects should therefore not be dismissed out of hand.

But back to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson’s been a flashpoint for campus-generated political correctness on race for half a decade. Beginning in 2015, a movement got under way at Princeton University, where the future chief executive matriculated, taught and served as school president, to strip his name from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, as well as a residential complex, and to remove a prominent mural depicting him. Earlier this year, university trustees, prompted by a black student group, carried out these sanctions and eliminated virtually all references to the one-time president on campus. Fortunately for Wilson, there don’t appear to be any statues of him waiting to be toppled.

The rebuke of Wilson, which Princeton trustees admitted was a symbolic response to the recent police killings of George Floyd and others, amounts to revisionist overkill; it takes sides in evaluations of Wilson’s racial attitudes that remain controversial. This is equally true of many other historical figures now under attack.

The case against Woodrow Wilson is premised largely on two indisputable facts: (1) that his Southern-dominated administration (the first since the Civil War) attempted to reimpose selective segregation in the federal civil service; (2) that he approved a White House showing of the infamous film “Birth of a Nation,” which paints an unflattering picture of African-Americans in the postwar Reconstruction South.

As to the first of these, Wilsonian segregationist policies were instigated not by Wilson himself, but by two of his racially biased cabinet secretaries, Georgia-born Treasury head William Gibbs McAdoo and Postmaster General Albert Burleson, a Texan. The president did not initially object, apparently in order to retain support for his reform program among Southern senators and congressmen, but he later engineered a reversal of policy under public pressure. As to the second charge, Wilson biographer Arthur S. Link established that Wilson was basically inveigled into airing the Griffith film by its publicists, and later disavowed it.

Without question, Wilson was not a crusader for civil rights; like FDR a generation later, he had other priorities. Mostly, these consisted of objectives embodied in what we know as the Progressive movement, which Wilson, together with Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette, came to personify. Legislatively, his reformist administration was responsible for the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Clayton Antitrust Act; it also championed pioneering workers’-compensation and child-labor laws, and established the federal graduated income tax. Along the way, Wilson managed to appoint judicial icon Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court.

Most dramatic (some would say heroic) was Wilson’s failed campaign for Senate approval of the Versailles Treaty ending World War I, which broke his health and shortened his life. The treaty, incorporating Wilson’s brainchild the League of Nations, anticipated the United Nations, created 25 years later to secure world peace.

These efforts and accomplishments would seem sufficient to ensure Wilson an honored place in history, but not in the era of America’s so-called racial reckoning. The intolerant absolutists pushing anti-racist symbolism, who would erase him from the collective memory, are not liberals, progressives, populists or democratic socialists. To the extent they have any coherent ideology at all, they are social radicals advocating for an agenda based purely on group identity.

Sadly, the problem they perceive and the absurd terminology they use to describe or address it — cultural appropriation, microaggression, trigger warnings, safe spaces — comes directly from the politicized world of higher education, where a new, narrowly focused generation of professors and administrators wants (in the words of The Economist) to “define everyone by their race and every action as racist or anti-racist” — in the service of an abstract academic construct called critical race theory. Viewed in that light, the Wilson controversy is less past history, more present politics.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2020

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