A new paradigm for honoring historical figures: Woodrow Wilson
One of my heroes, deceased local journalist Arnie Ropeik, wrote in his book Mosaic, a compilation of his best columns, that we are “all a mosaic, a portrait of bits and pieces of our lives.” Arnie was a very wise person and I believe we can learn a great deal from these words regarding how we should recognize historic figures who made significant contributions to our nation, but who were tragically flawed.
None of us are perfect. Most of us are proud of some things we accomplished and in retrospect we may also shutter at some of our actions. In deciding who we honor with statues and naming opportunities we should look at the entire panoramic of a person’s life and carefully weigh whether the accomplishments, no matter how noteworthy, are overshadowed by views and/or actions the person held that are fundamentally morally and ethically repugnant.
Using this lens, Princeton University at long last decided that Woodrow Wilson’s name needed to be removed from the highly prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. I used the term “at long last” because six years ago a group of Princeton University students attempted to remove Wilson’s name and erase the legacy of the former university and U.S. president from the Princeton campus because of his segregationist views but they were not able to move the needle.
In spite of a forceful editorial in The New York Times on November 24, 2015 that applauded the protestors and proclaimed that Wilson “was an unapologetic racist whose administration rolled back the gains that African-Americans achieved just after the Civil War, purged black workers from influential jobs and transformed the government into an instrument of white supremacy” the University opted not to change the name of it’s school of Public and International Affairs.
The New York Times editorial went on to indicated that “Wilson, who took office in 1913, inherited a federal government that had been shaped during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when thousands of African-American men and women passed Civil Service examinations or received political appointments that landed them in well-paying, middle-class government jobs in which they sometimes supervised white workers. This was anathema to Wilson, who believed that black Americans were unworthy of full citizenship and admired the Ku Klux Klan for the role it had in terrorizing African-Americans to restrict their political power.”
In announcing the renaming of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, President Christopher L. Eisgruber acknowledged that “the tragic killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Rayshard Brooks” played a role in the University Trustees’ decision to reconsider the naming issue.
President Eisgruber admitted in a very forthright manner that he had changed his view on the renaming. While acknowledging the “complexity” of Wilson’s record, he made it clear that his many achievements did not overshadow his history of blatant racist and segregationist policies which included actively working to prevent Black applicants from matriculating at Princeton. Eisgruber pointed out that Wilson wrote that “It is altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton.”
Eisgruber pointed out that “Wilson’s segregationist policies make him an especially inappropriate namesake for a public policy school. When a university names a school of public policy for a political leader, it is inevitably suggests that the honoree is a model for students who study at the school. This searing moment in American history has made clear that Wilson’s racism disqualifies him for that role. In a nation that continues to struggle with racism, this University and its school of public and international affairs must stand clearly and firmly for equality and justice.”
It is beyond question that Woodrow Wilson was a racist and his name should be stripped from Princeton’s international affairs school. He was, however, a visionary champion of peace and morality in international affairs who sought to promote democracy and was the driving force behind the creation of the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations.
On Jan. 8, 1918, in an address to Congress, Wilson presented a blueprint for world peace to be used for peace negations after World War I. In his Fourteen Points he proposed the removal of economic barriers between nations, the promise of self-determination for national minorities, a reduction in armaments, freedom of the seas and argued that “a general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike” - a League of Nations.
As Arnie Ropeik pointed out, all of our lives are composed of bits and pieces. The Fourteen Points, for which Wilson received the Noble Prize for Peace, was a good piece of Woodrow Wilson’s tragically flawed life. Instead of renaming the school the Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs, I would have rather seen the school renamed, as I suggested back in 2016, the Fourteen Freedoms School of Public and International Affairs with an accompanying plague detailing Woodrow Wilson’s appalling and unrepentant racist view and the destructive segregationist policies he implement.
Irwin Stoolmacher is the President of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofits agencies that serve the truly needy among us.