Woodrow Wilson: Modern thinking not very kind to his ranking as US president

This degree of unanimity suggests a level of seriousness and confers credibility upon such exercises.

Abraham Lincoln is usually considered the greatest president because of his leadership during the American Civil War, the preservation of the Union and his eloquence, as evidenced by the Gettysburg Address.

In the past Woodrow Wilson, who died 100 years ago on February 3 1924, usually featured as one of the six greatest American presidents and certainly in any list of the top 10.

His niche in history was long secure as the president who led the United States into the Great War in 1917 and as the leading exponent of the League of Nations at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Wilson was the first American president to have a vision of America leading a world community of nations. As the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1919, he keeps company with Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and Barack Obama in 2009.

Recently much of the shine of Woodrow Wilson’s two-term presidency has been tarnished. In 2000 Wilson was rated the sixth greatest president but by 2009 he had dropped to the ninth. In 2017 his standing had dropped further to the 11th and in 2021 it had dropped again to the 13th.

Despite being a reforming president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910 and the college’s only Nobel Peace laureate, in 2020 Princeton’s Board of Trustees voted to remove his name from the School of Public and International Affairs and the residential college named after him.

The board offered the following rationale for its decision: ‘We have taken this extraordinary step because we believe that Wilson’s racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school whose scholars, students, and alumni must be firmly committed to combating the scourge of racism in all its forms.’

Born in Virginia, Wilson was raised there and in Georgia and South Carolina. His parents were deeply committed to slavery and the Confederacy. His passionate identification with the Southern cause was a major component of his worldview.

Although a liberal, a progressive and an opponent of privilege, by no stretch of the imagination could his views on race be seriously regarded as either liberal or progressive even a century ago.

He subscribed to the ‘Lost Cause’ interpretation of history which seeks to present the Confederacy (and even slavery) in the best possible light.

At Princeton, Wilson actively discouraged the admission of African-American students.

During his presidency, ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915), a film sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, was the first motion picture to be screened in the White House.

Despite his election promises, he was insensitive to African-American feelings and aspirations. He was responsible for a return to greater segregation within the federal bureaucracy and a huge reduction in the opportunities for employment and promotion open to African-Americans.

His record on civil liberties during the First World War leaves much to be desired too. The Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 criminalised virtually any opposition to the war.

Wilson failed to deliver on his promise that the United States would demonstrate that the nation had no quarrel with the German people, only with the German government.

German-Americans constituted 10.5% of the population of the United States in 1900 and were the largest minority linguistic community in the country. In 1894 there had been 98 German-language daily newspapers published in the USA. After the US declaration of war German language and culture was demonised. The German language was banned (by local ordinances) in many schools and areas of public life. In two states it became illegal to speak German in public. The number of German language periodicals published in the USA fell by a half. Symphony orchestras even refused to perform Brahms and Beethoven.

Another area where Wilson has been found wanting was his lack of enthusiasm for female enfranchisement. The earliest formal demand for equal political rights for women was made by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848. Yet, in 1911 Wilson, genuinely liberal and progressive in so many contexts, was still opposing women’s suffrage on the grounds that women lacked the public experience necessary to be good voters.

Evidence of how women voters behaved in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Washington and California and other states (where women had been given the vote) may have helped change his mind but slowly.

As late as 1917 he provoked a backlash by cracking down on suffrage campaigners, imprisoning ‘earnest young college graduates’ and ‘silver-haired grandmas … many from distinguished families’.

He belatedly declared in favour of a constitutional amendment enshrining votes for women in January 1918. The Nineteenth Amendment giving women the vote came into effect in August 1920.

Wilson’s military interventions in Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti also attract criticism. Although well intentioned, they largely proved unsuccessful. Perhaps if these ventures had been rather more successful, they would attract less criticism.

If we choose to evaluate presidents solely through a ‘woke lens’ to the exclusion of all else, it is inevitable that Wilson’s reputation and ratings will decline.

Like stocks and shares, presidential reputations go up and go down. If Wilson’s stock is falling, the reputation of President Grant, another Ulster-Scot, is rising – in large measure due to Ron Chernow’s sweeping reappraisal which was published in 2017. Chernow is particularly impressed by Grant’s prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan and his determination to uphold the civil rights of African-Americans. (Frederick Douglass described Grant as ‘the vigilant, firm, impartial and wise protector of my race.’)

Grant’s creation of the first civil service commission and his appointment of cabinet reformers, who prosecuted the corrupt Whiskey Ring, also meet with Chernow’s approval.