So, what do you think about the presidential election of ’16? Actually, there have been three elections in ’16, the first being in 1816 when James Monroe was elected POTUS. And then in the election of 2016 you know who was elected for four tumultuous years.
In
between, in the election 105 years ago on Nov. 7, 1916, Woodrow Wilson was elected
for a second term as POTUS. Thus, for four more challenging years the U.S. was
to be led by a complex man.
The
Making of Pres. Wilson
Thomas
Woodrow Wilson, called Tommy until adulthood, was born in 1856 in Staunton,
Virginia, where his father was pastor of the Presbyterian church in that small
(under 4,000 residents) northeast Virginia town where the Wilson Presidential
Library and Museum is now located.
Tommy
became a well-educated man, graduating in 1879 from the
College of New Jersey (which became Princeton University in 1896) and then earning
a Ph.D. in political science and history at Johns Hopkins University in 1886.
Wilson served as president of Princeton
U. from 1902 to 1910, then in November 1910 he was elected governor of New
Jersey with about 54% of the vote. He resigned as governor as of March 1, 1913,
after being elected POTUS.
In the
presidential election of 1912, Wilson defeated the incumbent, Republican William
Howard Taft, former president Theodore Roosevelt, who came in second running
for the Progressive Party, and Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate who
received 6% of the popular vote.
The Positives
and Negatives of Pres. Wilson
According to this
American history website, “Wilson brought a brilliant intellect, strong
moral convictions, and a passion for reform to his two terms as president.”
Commendably, Wilson had a strong belief in
peace and international cooperation. Consistent with that belief, he appointed William
Jennings Bryan, a pacifist, as his Secretary of State at the beginning of his
first term.
President Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916 under the slogan “He has kept us out of war”—and he was narrowly elected to a second term.
Ironically, the following month after his
March 1917 inauguration, the complex Wilson addressed Congress and emphasized
the need for the U.S. to enter the war in Europe. Among other things, he said U.S.
participation in the “Great War” was necessary “to make the world safe for
democracy.”
In January 1918, though, Wilson proposed a 14-point peace
plan, the last point being the creation of the League of Nations—and for
that proposal he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1919.
In spite of this and other very positive
aspects of Wilson’s presidency, there were negatives as well—the main one being
his well-documented racism, which was seen during his years as the president of
Princeton U. as well as after he entered the White House.
Because of Wilson’s obvious racism, in June 2020
the Princeton University board of trustees decided to delete Wilson’s name from
the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
The trustees stated that Wilson’s "racist
thinking and policies” made him “an inappropriate namesake for a school or
college whose scholars, students, and alumni must stand firmly against racism
in all its forms."
The Point
As perhaps can be said about every human
being, Woodrow Wilson was a complex person. As indicated above, there are ample
reasons to admire him—and certainly many more could have been included.**
There are also sufficient reasons to find
fault with him, although most are minor compared to his unfortunate
racism.
What was true of Woodrow Wilson is true of
everyone. Human beings are complex; everyone is a mixture of good and bad
traits, ideas, and actions. Thus, perhaps no one deserves to be put on a
pedestal and publicly honored in perpetuity.
_____
** For helpful information about key, and mostly
positive, events from Wilson’s election in 1912 until the end of his presidency
in 1921, click on this link.
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Leroy, you have a knack for posing thorny questions. On the matter of President Wilson, it is galling, certainly, to contemplate his high-mindedness and lofty vision for the future of the nations at the same time as we must cringe at his inbred, that is to say, culturally-derived and nurtured racism. None could escape its influence in his time, as now, but one could, er, should find ways to recognize and overcome it. Short of finding entrance to some truly gospel-enlightened and alternative community of belief and practice, I'm not sure even a bright person such as Wilson could have done that. Many of the brightest did not, though many others did, and a few to a high degree.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how the historians on the Princeton faculty affected this decision--were they for, against, or divided? I can imagine any of the three finding some justification. Or were faculty truly in on the decision? It's just that with Wilson, much as with the slaveholding Founders or other high leaders, we do have people with high visions and hopes, and thankfully with a practical mindset. Wilson was an idealist who truly believed peace and cooperation between nations was attainable, and for that we got (though the dominant US culture did not want it) the League of Nations and its inspiration for the more successful covenant of the United Nations (also much opposed and reviled in some camps from the start). Sadly, he could have done little to transform the congenital racist conscience of the USA, even if he had been fully aware of its encumbering effects in his own worldview, especially as a leader in a nation where people suffered so much under it, even during his terms of office.
I am reminded that Progressives of his era (Taft was high-minded but at peril against the Congress) had high ideals and goals yet often failed--William Jennings Bryan, a good man, had evangelical fire for reform but mixed his successes and failures with a racist predisposition as well. Racism was, and is, endemic to us, and we dare not ignore it, if only to preserve our own souls and that of the nation.
Just now I am perusing Walter Brueggemann's THE PROPHETIC IMAGINATION (40th Anniv. Ed.) in which he contrasts the superdominant influence of the "Royal Consciousness" versus the prophetic, imaginative "Alternative Consciousness" available to us through the biblical prophets, especially in the histories (Kings and Samuel) and in the classical writing prophets, especially Jeremiah, also, well, Jesus of Nazareth. I wish I had internalized Brueggemann's thesis when it was new, because he (intentionally) throws light not only on a powerful interpretive concept for biblical understanding, but leads the reader to re-examine our present socio-cultural condition from the perspective of the God who is definitively at liberty and who scorns human attempts to dominate God or others.
As to President Wilson, Princeton's decision, and our own considerations, I am reminded of the idea that willful oblation of the past tends to distort the present and occludes the future and any hope we may have for the future. It is in the nature of the "royal (dominant-power) consciousness to suppress openness, truth, criticism, and historical thinking. An "eternal now" as Brueggemann put it is potentially and often is on the doorstep of hell. Oh, that we would cancel our fears, face history, and converse more kindly, with care for each other about present realities and a hopeful future.
Thanks, Dr. Summers, for your lengthy, thoughtful comments. It was especially meaningful to hear from you as you are a historian.
DeleteYour point is well taken that Wilson's racism was not at all unusual for his day--and, sadly, it is still endemic today.
Thanks, too, to your reference to Brueggemann and to his book "The Prophetic Imagination," which I read for the first time in 2018. I posted a blog article about him and that book in March of that year (see the link below). I certainly enjoyed hearing him speak in April 2018 and chatting with him briefly--but I am a bit jealous of him: he is five years older than I but was far more active then (and probably now) than I am able to be.
https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2018/03/in-appreciation-of-walter-brueggemann.html
This year I have added three people whose first name is Jerry to my Thinking Friend mailing list. One is Dr. Jerry Jumper, who posted the above comments; he is a retired history professor who now lives in his home state of Tennessee. A second Jerry is Dr. Jerry Warmath, a seminary friend from the early 1960s, who now lives in North Carolina. Here are comments from the latter Jerry, who wrote early this morning:
ReplyDelete"I have often wondered about Wilson's racism. Ever puzzled about Princeton's using his name for it's SPIA when I went to Princeton Seminary for continuing ed several summers.
"Remember Pascal?
"'What a Chimera is man.
What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbicile worm; a depository of truth and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.'
"Also, '... everyone carries a shadow....' --Carl Jung
"Thanks for a thoughtful blog, Leroy."
Thanks, Jerry; it was good to hear from you again. And thanks for mentioning Pascal and his powerful statement. Perhaps he was one of the thinkers who best understood and articulated both the greatness and the baseness of human beings.
DeleteOh that men and women of good will could shape our times, rather than our times shaping us. All of us, all of us, are to some extent shaped by our times. But some of us also shape our times. Think of Abraham Lincoln, a monumental character in the move toward racial equality. Yet he could not imagine that Negros should ever vote!
ReplyDeleteCharles Kiker posting anonymously for technical reasons.
Thanks for your pertinent comments, Charles. -- And for technical reasons that perhaps neither you nor I understand, your name did appear as the contributor.
DeleteInteresting summary of Wilson's public career. Your conclusions are sound, or so it seems to me. Clearly, for Wilson to have been so racist as late as that is inexcusable. It's interesting that he was so fully connected to Princeton U. As you know, Princeton Seminary at that time was a hot bed of fundamentalist reaction against modernism, seen most vividly in the writing of several Princeton stalwarts at that time and most publicly in William Jennings Bryan taking on the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey trial in, I think, 1925. Do you happen to know whether Wilson ever involved himself in that raging fundamentalist attack on modernist thinkers at the time? It also makes me even more interested in the correlation between fundamentalism/evangelicalism and white racist throughout our history.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, Anton, and for linking it to Princeton Theological Seminary. I was certainly aware of the fundamentalism of Princeton Seminary in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and in my book "Fed Up with Fundamentalism," I mention some of the fundamentalist leaders who were faculty members at there. But Princeton Seminary and Princeton University seem to be two completely separate institutions, although both were founded by the Presbyterian Church. When Wilson was president of PU, another man was president of PTS, and I assume that Wilson would have had no direct involvement with the professors or theological disputes at the latter. I don't know what Wilson would have thought about Bryan's involvement in the Scopes Trial of 1925, but he (Wilson) died in 1924, so he never knew about his old Secretary of State being the fundamentalist spokesman at that trial.
DeleteHere are brief comments from Thinking Friend Glenn Hinson in Kentucky:
ReplyDelete"A good point, Leroy. We can say the same about nations like the United States."
My parents told me that their parents (my grandparents) voted for Wilson because "he kept us out of the war." If I remember correctly, it was the first time they voted. They came from an Amish background that considered voting "too worldly." They must have felt betrayed when Wilson changed his position on the war.
ReplyDeleteLeroy has pointed out to me that my grandmothers could not have voted in 1916. So I have replied as follows: You have a point. I guess it was only my grandfathers who could have voted. I'm sure my grandmothers expressed their opinions regarding who to vote for, and whether to vote.
Delete