via
American Renaissance
There is a general consensus on the reputations of many presidents,
but there is disagreement about Woodrow Wilson. For students of foreign
policy, his name is synonymous with center-left arguments for a
militarized foreign policy and “humanitarian” intervention
abroad–particularly for wanting to make the world “safe for democracy.”
In international relations, a great deal has been written about his
famous “
Fourteen Points” and his ill-fated attempt to create an international body to tame the world’s ills.
Republicans, especially lately, have come to see him as one of the
earliest Democratic villains–a technocratic and elitist patriarch who
set the stage for FDR, LBJ, and of course, Barack Obama. Democrats, on
the other hand, think he was an effective politician who brought the
party out of William Jennings Bryan’s populism into a more serious and
international mindset. They still name
journals and
think tanks
after him. Libertarians loathe him for taking America into the First
World War, creating the Federal Reserve system, and establishing the
first permanent income tax.
How was Wilson on race? In his personal beliefs, and in many of his
official policies, Wilson was very sensible, but his larger legacy was
not good for white America.
Born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856, Wilson was raised by parents who
supported the Confederacy. His mother nursed wounded Southern soldiers
at a local hospital, and his father, a minister, helped organize the
Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America. The young
Wilson even
watched Union soldiers escort Robert E. Lee through town after the surrender at Appomattox.
Growing up during the war and coming of age under Reconstruction
clearly marked his racial views. While still a student at Princeton,
Wilson
supported
Samuel J. Tilden in the presidential election of 1876, writing in his
diary, “I most sincerely hope that it [America] will be sensible enough
to elect Tilden as I think the salvation of the country from frauds and
the reviving of trade depends upon his election.”
Tilden,
a Democrat who had been critical of Abraham Lincoln and opposed the
Radical Republicans, represented a chance for Southerners to break the
hated Republican stranglehold on the executive branch and finally end
Reconstruction. His opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, had fought for the
Union and would be the natural heir to the corrupt presidency of Ulysses
S. Grant.
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Samuel Tilden
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Tilden
narrowly lost,
but Wilson continued as a defender of the Lost Cause. After Princeton,
he began a career in political science, and much of his writing shows a
strong sense of pride in his race and in the Confederacy. In his
multi-volume,
A History of the American People (1902), he
wrote of Reconstruction:
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:
governments whose incredible debts were incurred that thieves might be
enriched, whose increasing loans and taxes went to no public use but
into the pockets of party managers and corrupt contractors. There was no
place of open action or of constitutional agitation, under the terms of
reconstruction, for the men who were the real leaders of the Southern
communities.
Even more boldly, he
described the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups as noble vigilantes who fought tyranny in the occupied South:
It became the chief object of the night-riding comrades
to silence or drive from the country the principal mischief-makers of
the reconstruction regime, whether white or black. The negroes were
generally easy enough to deal with: a thorough fright usually disposed
them to make utter submission, resign their parts in affairs, leave the
country–do anything their ghostly visitors demanded. But white men were
less tractable: and here and there even a negro ignored or defied them.
The regulators would not always threaten and never execute their
threats. They backed their commands, when need arose, with violence.
Houses were surrounded in the night and burned, and the inmates shot as
they fled, as in the dreadful days of border warfare. Men were dragged
from their houses and tarred and feathered. Some who defied the vigilant
visitors came mysteriously to some sudden death.
Wilson’s unapologetic views did not change when he won the 1912
election. As the first Southern president since a decade before the
Civil War, his inauguration filled the capital with “
rebel yells and the strains of ‘Dixie’.” For many Southerners, it seemed that “home rule” was at hand again.
In some ways, this was true. The epic film
Birth of a Nation,
which portrays the Confederacy and the KKK sympathetically, was
released during his tenure. He arranged for a special White House
showing, and remarked that the movie was “like writing history with
lightning.” He was the first president to lay a wreath at the
Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. Every succeeding
president,
even Mr. Obama,
has at least sent a wreath to the memorial even if not all have laid it
themselves. On the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg,
President Wilson delivered a
speech
at the battlefield to an audience that included Confederate and Union
veterans, praising them all as “gallant men in blue and gray.”
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Woodrow Wilson quoted in Birth of a Nation.
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After he took office, Wilson began implementing
measures on race
almost immediately. He segregated the Navy and large swathes of the
civil service, and made it a requirement to attach a photo to
applications for federal jobs to make it easier to screen out blacks. He
supported legislation to make interracial marriage in Washington, D.C.,
a felony.
Wilson appointed very few blacks to office. His predecessor, William Howard Taft, appointed 31 blacks, but Wilson appointed
only nine, all but one of whom were carryovers from Taft’s administration. Wilson also had the Washington, D.C.,
police and fire departments stop hiring blacks entirely.
In 1914, a delegation from a black advocacy group called the National
Independent Political League went to the White House to protest his
policies, but Wilson would not bend. To Monroe Trotter, the group’s
leader,
he explained,
“Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so
regarded by you gentlemen.” When Trotter, a Harvard graduate, disagreed,
Wilson replied, “If this organization is ever to have another hearing
before me it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me.”
Wilson probably received more black votes than any president before
him but did not let that sway him. “If the colored people made a mistake
in voting for me, they ought to correct it and vote against me,”
he said. This is in stark contrast with Teddy Roosevelt, who invited
Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House in 1901.
Even in international affairs, on which Wilson’s liberal reputation
largely rests, he kept race in mind. During the peace talks after the
First World War, Japan was emboldened by the acquisition of German
islands in the Pacific, and proposed that a “
racial equality clause”
be included in the Covenant of the League of Nations. A majority of the
delegates voted for the clause, but Wilson, who chaired the meeting,
made an unprecedented ruling, insisting on
unanimity. The Japanese were furious.
With Russia weakened by civil war between the Whites and the Reds,
Japan had designs on Siberia. Wilson had Secretary of State Robert
Lansing send a strong message to the Japanese that meddling
would not be tolerated. Wilson also
refused to meet representatives from Vietnam who wanted to end French colonial rule.
There was a KKK
resurgence
during Wilson’s presidency. As his historical writings suggest, Wilson
saw no problem with this, and let the Klan grow without harassment from
the federal government. By the 1920s, the Klan was a serious political
force, which supported the national-quotas
immigration legislation of 1924.
Wilson also surrounded himself with like-minded men. His secretary of the treasury and son-in-law,
William Gibbs McAdoo,
was a staunch segregationist whose aid and endorsement from the KKK in
1924 very nearly made him that year’s Democratic nominee. The man who
got the nomination was
John W. Davis, who had been Wilson’s first solicitor general, and then his ambassador to the UK. Decades later, he defended segregation in
Brown vs. Board of Education.
Wilson’s attorney general,
A. Mitchell Palmer, made a name for himself dealing harshly with the
Communist-fueled race riots in the summer of 1919. To this day, leftists bemoan the now infamous “
Palmer Raids.” The postmaster general (a very important position at that time) for both of Wilson’s terms was
Albert S. Burleson,
the son of a Confederate officer and grandson of a soldier for the
Republic of Texas, who insisted that the post office be segregated.
Wilson never made any excuse for his policies. Never much of a
constitutionalist, he thought government should recognize the newly
discovered sciences of the time, and
proposed to
“interpret the Constitution according to Darwinian principle.” Although
he never took national steps towards eugenic policies, as governor of
New Jersey he proudly signed a law requiring sterilization of criminals
and the mentally retarded.
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Woodrow Wilson
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For Wilson, the solution for the world’s ills, racial and otherwise, was state power. During his academic career he was deeply
influenced
by G.W.F. Hegel, who famously wrote, “The march of God in the world,
that is what the state is. The basis of the state is the power of reason
actualizing itself as will.” Wilson thought little of the
Constitution’s “checks and balances” and
believed
that “men are as clay in the hand of the consummate leader” and that
“the President is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as
big a man as he can.”
Wilson used his executive power to enforce segregation but his
presidency unwittingly brought integration in the North. With the
industrial buildup
and eventual entry into First World War, the North’s factories needed
cheap labor. Blacks who wanted something better than agricultural toil
went north in what is called “
the Great Migration.”
Between
1914 and 1920, around
half a million Southern
blacks moved north–at a time when the American population was one third
its current size. The black populations of Chicago, Buffalo, and New
York more than doubled between 1910 and 1920. Those of Detroit and
Cleveland more than tripled, and the black populations of Cincinnati,
Columbus, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee all rose between a
third and a half. Northern cities that had been 1 percent black at the
turn of the century were 7, 8, and even 10 percent black by 1930. This
started the
decline
of many northern cities, for which Detroit is the symbol. If the
country had steered clear of war in Europe and industrialized more
slowly, it is possible to imagine an Ohio as white as Oregon, and an
Illinois as white as Idaho.
This is the great irony of Wilson’s presidency. Historians debate
whether he had been secretly waiting for an opportunity to go to war or
had a change of heart. He campaigned for re-election in 1916 as
the peace candidate, but he also approved the
National Defense Act of 1916 that authorized a military industrial build-up and provided for greater government control of manufacturing.
Once America was at war Wilson went all the way. There was a
national draft, and the
Espionage Act limited press, freedom of speech, and the right to assembly. Wilson’s
War Industries Board
imposed greater state control on the arms industry. Whether he planned
it from 1914 onwards or begrudgingly accepted it in 1917, Wilson
conducted war as he did everything else: with massive government
involvement. He also certainly saw it as part of
his desire for a more democratic world, a task fit for large and powerful states.
The integration Wilson caused by America’s entry into the war was an
example of what the French economist Frédéric Bastiat meant when he
wrote of
the unseen:
“. . . a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of
these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously
with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently;
they are not seen.”
The Great Migration might have happened without Wilson’s war. The
industrialization of the North may have been inevitable. But without the
war the Great Migration might not have been so “great,” and Wilson’s
policies certainly did nothing to slow it. Blacks remaining in the South
would have been no gift to Southerners, but at least it was the status
quo.
Even a sound politician can cause accidental damage, and Wilson’s
record shows that an intrusive state is always a potential threat. In
our time, attempts to keep America safe from terrorism prompted military
interventions that have contributed to refugee crises and a mass
migration to Europe. Before Muammar Gaddafi was driven out of office,
his son Seif
warned,
“Libya may become the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean.
You will see the pirates in Sicily, in Crete, in Lampedusa. You will see
millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.” Sweden
today is
almost 2 percent Iraqi, and Iraqis started coming there only in 2002.
This is not to say that all government action should be eschewed, or
even feared, but it should always be carefully considered. It was not so
long ago that many white advocates supported Ron Paul, but with the
increasingly obvious uselessness of
Rand Paul and the Tea Party, that anti-state inclination has faded. Today there is much more interest in non-ideological figures such as
Donald Trump and in foreign pro-state parties such as the French National Front, the Danish Peoples Party, and Fidesz in Hungary.
On the other hand, to the extent that non-interventionist parties
such as UKIP and the Austrian Freedom Party take strong positions on
immigration, they deserve our support. Fighting dispossession is our
number-one goal, and we must set aside whatever political differences we
may have in order to achieve that goal.
Under virtually any conception of the state, government has the power
to control borders, and that is the first line of defense against
dispossession. What happens internally is a different matter, but as
Wilson’s record shows, even a combination of executive power and good
intentions is not always enough.
