Wrestling with Woodrow Wilson’s complicated legacy
At best, Wilson was a gradualist on advancing racial equality — a glacial gradualist, more likely, as were most white Southerners of that period
So, Portsmouth doesn’t want Woodrow Wilson in the picture anymore. He’s a racist and banished from the kingdom.
Well, so it goes. Wilson High School becomes Manor High School. Go Manor!
Only, you sort of wish for a little nuance, some measured reflection on all this, that perhaps the name “Wilson” would come down and the listing of a new Manor class would go up. Call it “Wilson Basics: A study of a contradictory, confounding, complex American leader.”
You would absolutely get into all the shortcomings and deficiencies, the foibles and mistakes. You would drill down on Wilson’s racial views and might even discuss the geographic, cultural setting from whence such views were derived from, i.e. Staunton, Virginia.
Staunton, by the way, is worth taking in these days, even if you avoid Wilson and the museum abutting his birthplace. Nearly every Beverley Street storefront is filled with commercial activity or, at least, was prior the COVID onslaught. The town looks great.
Wilson’s birthplace — he entered this world in 1856 — occupies a former Presbyterian manse near the east end of Beverley, where Coalter Street climbs along a ridge toward Mary Baldwin University. It’s a hilly town, like Lynchburg, which adds to its considerable charm.
The Wilson abode no longer gets labeled a “birthplace” anymore, rather the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. I go by occasionally, just to root around and see what’s new. It’s modest by modern presidential library standards.
Portsmouth, obviously, would make it even more modest.
The Wilson Library is not oblivious to present thinking and now declares that the “mission of the institution is to promote an understanding of the life and times of President Woodrow Wilson, his impact on the world, and his relevance today and for the future.
“To that end, the staff of the museum and library present educational programs, curate exhibits, maintain archives, and guide tours of the former Presbyterian manse in which he was born. We make no excuses for Woodrow Wilson’s racist beliefs,” the library says.
Really, who would? There’s no serious dispute over Wilson’s mentality. A prominent and recent biographer, Scott Berg, writes that while Wilson was largely in-step with his countrymen, his “thoughts, words, and actions were, nonetheless, racist.”
At best, Wilson was a gradualist on advancing racial equality — a glacial gradualist, more likely, as were most white Southerners of that period.
“We learn from our past,” the Wilson Library declares, beseechingly. “The beliefs and actions of past presidents are particularly fertile areas of study by historians and the general public. This study should be encouraged because the knowledge gained can help us all better address issues that face us today and that will face us in the future.”
That seems fair and reasonable. A Democrat, Wilson won the presidency in 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft spit the Republican vote. A marvelous treatment of Wilson, penned in 1930 (later enlarged upon) by historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steel Commager, said this:
Born an aristocrat, bred a conservative, trained a Hamiltonian, he became the greatest leader of the plain people since Lincoln, and a Democrat who articulated the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy to the conditions of the day.
Wilson was, in the context of his time, a progressive reformer, a liberal. He wrote extensively on democracy, politics, and the problems of statesmanship and ascended to the presidency of Princeton University and the governorship of New Jersey.
Princeton, for its part, yanked Wilson’s name off its public school, based on a rationale not dissimilar to Portsmouth’s.
Wilson often spoke about possibilities, urging his countrymen to embrace the “this new age of right and opportunity” as they “sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one.”
Wilson was a preacher’s son who married a preacher’s daughter and, unsurprisingly, preached himself.
You can imagine that Wilson, had he showed up the other night in Portsmouth, might have sold the school board members on himself. They might have listened and said, well, you’re still a sorry soul, but you do get the music of democracy right.
Maybe.
Past critiques of Wilson have turned on his moralistic approach to international engagement. Being “Wilsonian” had meaning and may explain why, 20 years ago, historian Ronald Steele wrote that “history has been kind to Wilson and unforgiving of his opponents.”
That seems less certain these days.
After writing editorials for the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot in the 1980s, Gordon C. Morse wrote speeches for
Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, then spent nearly three decades working on behalf of corporate and philanthropic organizations, including PepsiCo, CSX, Tribune Co. and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Dominion Energy. His email address is gordonmorse@ msn.com.