Woodrow Wilson Was Even Worse Than You Think | Talking Points Memo

Phil, Mississippi. The campaign start in Tulsa has its tradition…

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What she did for civil rights and for human rights must never be forgotten.

You remember, for example, the small part she played in Marian Anderson’s story. For those who are unaware: it’s re-told in the following (PBS, 2014) …

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The “Southern Strategy” began with Nixon, Reagan (or more properly, Reagan’s handlers) just fleshed it out…

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He seems to have made a habit of shirking his responsibilities due to a “cold.” I guess he’s lucky that he didn’t get bone spurs, instead.

After dropping out of Davidson College (he had a “cold”) and loafing about his parents’ home for a year…

He graduated from Princeton, but dropped out of University of Virginia’s law school after a year, again alleging a cold, and spent another sixteen months at his parents’ home…

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I have to wonder what the Democratic Party would be like today if FDR had not married Eleanor.

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I saw that too, Trump is a lot like him, just with a richer Daddy.

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Wait until we find out how much worse tRUmp was than we thought.

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Oh yeah. City with a history that Reagan’s team knew well.

I wonder if a copy of his racist tête-à-tête with Nixon is available yet?

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One of the first stories learned at my mother’s knee? Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. :grin:

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Yep. Pretty interesting article but stopped reading at that point. (Axis was a WW2 alliance formed well after Wilson was dead. Try “Central Powers” instead.)

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He never would have been president, assuming he’d got polio, for one thing. But I shudder to think.

The counterfactual I’ve been wondering about lately is almost a century older. What if Henry Clay had accepted the Whig nomination for Vice President?

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it is quite easy to demonize Wilson. by the same token, Lincoln can be painted as a dreadful racist as he too was convinced the black race was inferior to the white. while Wilson, being a son of the south did share the Jim Crow line, please note that most so called enlightened historians of the era also penned histories that tried to revise the story.
Wilson as Potus was not particularly concerned with race. he accepted the Union victory & was glad the Union persisted.
trying to denigrate his academic work here amounts to cheap shots. the book he wrote on our constitutional system was used as a textbook for most colleges for decades. he was responsible for fashioning an organized Democratic Party with a vocal leader as Potus in the same image as PM in GB.
of the early Progressives, he actually got some progressive legislation passed. he set the framework for FDR to use the party effectively in the future.
as to his racist excesses,…when he left office did Harding Coolidge or Hoover take any steps to reverse his discriminatory actions? no. because as dreadful as his views appear in our rear view mirror, Wilson was a man of his time. a child during the Civil War in the south, hardly shocking he developed his leanings.
an idealist? certainly. unrealistically so? definitely. but the values and aims he enunciated deserve praise. sadly, by the end of the war he was a sick man getting sicker. more hardened in his arteries and behavior. would not compromise and lost the League.
wiping out former Presidents for slave ownership or for holding views pretty much accepted by the white society…a tad too easy. you might as well remove every statute of every man, they all had warts faults. shooting fish in a barrel is a fine exercise. but looking at WW requires a bit more less jaundiced attitutude

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My grandmother worked in the Navy Department when Wilson was President and she told me how angry she got when Wilson instituted a racist purge of the Civil Service.

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This is one of the parts of this article that made me question the research behind it. That and the glaring historical mistakes some people have already pointed out.

Yes, Wilson was a bit of a monster. One might add the wartime persecution of German-Americans and the Red Scare to that list. But is it really necessary to denigrate everything he did? I’ve read his book “Congressional Government”, and it’s a brilliant analysis. He elevated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court (against screaming anti-semitic protests in the Senate and elsewhere). He sponsored plenty of progressive legislation.

That does not in any way mitigate his deplorable racism. But that should be enough to denounce him; there is no need to paint him as an academic failure when he was, in fact, an excellent political scientist.

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Glad to see some balance. There really is a temptation to reexamine every historical figure in light of modern sensibilities. None of this information about Wilson was unknown to anyone who studied American History.

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Woodard is a first rate journalist historian. His book American Nations restored regionalism to the public discussion after the consensus historians drive it out of the public discussion after World War II.
Read the American Nations foot notes carefully. He documents the rhetoric of the post-Reconstruction South with astonishingly racist beliefs of the Southerners who took over the government of Southern states. It’s all written down and preserved like the blood legacy it is.
His most recent book Union lays out the problem the rest of the nation faces now with astonishingbreasearch and clarity :innocent:

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And how many of them segregated the government?

I’m afraid it seems the cradle (and armpit) of the Confederacy has affected your judgment.

Wilson was a major scumsucker judged against his contemporaries.

As for his idealism, he could have had membership in his precious League, but he blew it off to spite Henry Cabot Lodge. First and last time a Lodge was ever the good guy in a situation.

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I have no dog in this hunt. As long as we recognize him as the second most loathsome President prior to the paskudnyak currently occupying Our House.

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He might have been a brilliant political scientist – that’s not my discipline and I won’t sound off on it. But as a historian, I can say Wilson has long been considered an embarrassment to the profession. If I had been his advisor, he would never have gotten away with his grad-school hijinks and his contempt for primary research. His “historical” writing is shockingly bad scholarship, useful today only for understanding the triumph of Lost Cause ideology beyond the bounds of the Confederacy.

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Wow, an even bigger asshole than I realized. His name should be wiped off anything even vaguely official. Obviously keep all historical records and references to him. We’re not looking to whitewash history (as he sought to do). But we should strike anything that whitewashes his vileness and racism, glorifies him in any way, and has anything to do with anything official and proper. I mean, we don’t name anything after Nixon or McCarthy, and we won’t name anything after Trump, right?

I was a history major in college, but decided not to pursue the field professionally, in part because I didn’t enjoy research (also because I’m a damn slow reader), and if that’s the case, you have no business being an historian, in fact can’t possibly be one. A historian who doesn’t do research is a polemicist, and universities don’t give PhDs in that. So, another racist phony covering his own laziness and failings by hiding behind some vile lost cause. Unsurprising.

Odd how he died just as another such type was just getting started on the other side of the Atlantic, fueled by the consequences of Wilson’s inability to impose a fair peace in Europe after the end of WWI.