There is such a
thick patina of reverence coating the reputation and presidency of Woodrow
Wilson that it is extraordinarily difficult to appreciate just how great a
disaster his election was for the United States. Part of this was due to
Wilson’s character. The rest was the result of his philosophy of government.
Whether Wilson’s
character formed his philosophy, or his philosophy formed his character,
however, is a question we are not prepared to address. Nor has it any real
relevance to this study. Our concern is the effect that Wilson’s character and
philosophy had on the office of the president and on the United States.
Governor of New Jersey
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| Woodrow Wilson: consumed by ambition. |
Wilson was a man
consumed by ambition. After nearly destroying Princeton University by trying to
centralize all power in himself as president, he managed to turn his campaign
for governor of New Jersey completely around by the simple expedient of “[going]
over completely to the reform program that progressives[1]
of both parties had been pressing for a decade.”[2]
This was not out
of conviction. It was simply the easiest and quickest way to gain power.
Fortunately for the state of New Jersey (and unfortunately for the United
States), Wilson spent most of his time as governor running for president.
Wilson’s
treatment of his private secretary, Joseph Patrick Tumulty (1879-1954), “his chief
aide and advisor during the gubernatorial battles”[3]
and the man most responsible for Wilson’s election as governor, was completely
in character. After his election as president, Wilson kept him on as advisor.
As part of his
program to disassemble the civil service reforms instituted by the Republicans,
Wilson rewarded Tumulty with determining political patronage policies in the
Northeast.[4]
While never popular with the rest of the inner circle,[5]
Tumulty was fiercely loyal and gave frequent advice (some of it actually good),
which Wilson followed whenever he had already decided to go that way.[6]
At the beginning
of Wilson’s second term in 1916, Edith White Bolling Galt Wilson (1872-1961),
Wilson’s second wife, and Edward Mandell House (1858-1938), however, persuaded
Wilson to get rid of Tumulty. Tumulty pleaded with Wilson to remain as Wilson’s
secretary, and was allowed to stay, but was thereafter marginalized.[7]
Wilson’s Racism
Wilson’s
treatment of Tumulty was nothing to his betrayal of the black Americans who had
supported him during the presidential campaign. Wilson had actively sought the
endorsement of such leaders as Oswald Garrison Villard (1872-1949), William
Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963), and William Monroe Trotter (1872-1934).[8]
 |
| Villard: white co-founder of NAACP |
Soon after Wilson’s
inauguration, Villard, one of the founders of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), approached Wilson with a proposal to
establish a commission to study race relations in the United States.[9]
Villard reported that Wilson appeared “wholly sympathetic” to the idea. Villard
went to Europe, fully expecting that Wilson would appoint a commission when
Villard returned stateside in July 1913.
Wilson not only
refused to appoint a commission, he refused to see Villard, although Villard
— credited with getting Grover Cleveland elected as the last Democratic president — made several attempts to do so.[10]
When Villard made a personal appeal to the president, Wilson finally responded
that the political situation was too “delicate” for him to consider any such
move[11]
— meaning that Wilson was afraid he would lose the support of the increasingly
reactionary southern elements in Congress, enjoying their first real power
since the Civil War.[12]
Wilson’s actions are not free of the suspicion that they may have been taken in
revenge for black support of Roosevelt, whose stand on race relations was
considered radical, even revolutionary, by many.
Wilson favored
segregation.[13]
His biographers and admirers gloss over Wilson’s racism by claiming that he
prevented the reactionaries from implementing some of their “cruder demands.”[14]
The fact remains, however, that he permitted the implementation of segregation
in the federal service as official policy.[15]
Formal Jim Crow
replaced the unofficial segregation that Republican administrations had been
trying, with varying degrees of success, to bring to an end.[16]
Workers who objected were fired.[17]
Black Americans
had gradually been evolving socially and politically from non-persons to what
was admittedly less than first class citizenship. Under Wilson, however, black
Americans were cemented into second class status.
 |
| Wilson's view of black Americans' proper place. |
The Collector of
Internal Revenue in Georgia summed up the administration’s policy succinctly: “There
are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place is in the
cornfield.”[18]
The attitude of the entire country seemed changed. Government appeared to have
turned into a force for imposing predetermined social change and eliminating
opportunity, that is, transformed from a servant into the master.
Nowhere was this
more evident than in the growing public expression of attitudes about race.
Many had, admittedly, held such views privately, and they had continued to
simmer under the surface. They had, however, been considered anti-American as
well as in poor taste, especially with the Civil War still in living memory.
This was now
changed. Faith in discredited racial theories replaced reason based on America’s
founding principles.[19]
A case in point, many critics consider D.W. Griffith’s dramatization of the
overtly racist but bestselling novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (1864-1946), The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the
Ku Klux Klan (1905) as Griffith’s best (or, at least, best known) film, Birth of a Nation (1915).[20]
A title card in
the film attributes a quote to Wilson: “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. — Woodrow Wilson.” It is alleged that when Wilson attended a special
screening of the film at the White House on March 21, 1915,[21]
he said, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that
it is all so terribly true.”[22]
That same year in
England John Maynard Keynes published an early formulation of his elitist
economic theories, based on the elitist theories of Walter Bagehot.[23]
The next year in America, Monsignor John A. Ryan, a strong supporter of Wilson (as he would be of FDR), published the book he
considered his masterpiece: Distributive
Justice,[24]
a blueprint for expansion of State power and control of the economy ostensibly
based on Catholic social teaching as presented by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum . . . which called for limiting the role of the State.[25]
#30#
[1]
Actually a confusion between populists and progressives.
[2]
Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive
Era, op. cit., 10.
[3] Ibid., 31.
[4] Ibid., 31-32.
[5] Ibid., 32.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid., 63.
[9] Ibid., 64.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid., 64-65.
[16] Ibid., 65. Roosevelt believed that the
traditional Republican position on race relations was mostly talk, terming it
hypocritical, and only marginally better than that of the Democrats, which he
termed “brutal.” Theodore Roosevelt, “The Progressives and the Colored Man,” The Outlook, August 24, 1912, Social Justice and Popular Rule, op. cit.,
300-305.
[17]
Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive
Era, op. cit., 65.
[18] Ibid.
[19]
Cf. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, speech in
Rochester, New York, July 4, 1852.
[20]
Allegedly in an effort to make amends for Birth
of a Nation, Griffith filmed Intolerance:
Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916). While considered a cinematic
masterpiece, the film never attained the popularity of Birth of a Nation. The racial philosophy of the film is also found
in Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy, echoes of which appear as well in other
Griffith films, e.g. his
dramatization of The Sorrows of Satan
(1926) from the novel by the bizarre “Marie Corelli” (not her real name).
[21]
Some sources give February 18, 1915 as the date, and claim that Wilson showed
it regularly to Congressional audiences to gain support for instituting
official segregation.
[22]
This quote has not been verified, but many authorities accept it as authentic.
[24] John
A. Ryan, Distributive Justice. New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1916.
[25] Rerum Novarum, § 7.
