Thread: The Case Against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton

The Case Against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NOV. 24, 2015

Student protesters at Princeton performed a valuable public service last week when they demanded that the administration acknowledge the toxic legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as university president and New Jersey governor before being elected to the White House. He 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 protesters’ top goal — convincing the university to rename the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the residential complex known as Wilson College — has drawn heavy fire from traditionalists. But the fact that racist policies enacted during Wilson’s presidency are still felt in the country today makes it imperative that the university’s board of trustees not be bound by the forces of the status quo.

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.

As the historian Eric Yellin shows in “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” Wilson stocked his government with segregationists who shared his point of view. The man he chose for the postal department, which had the most black employees nationally, had campaigned on the promise that the Democratic Party could be counted on to keep black people out of its own ranks and out of the government affairs of the Southern states. In this way, the administration set about segregating the work force, driving out highly placed black employees and shunting the rest into lower-paying jobs.

For John Abraham Davis, a black midlevel manager in the Government Printing Office with 30 years’ experience, the change came almost overnight. Just months after Wilson was sworn in, Davis was demoted to a succession of menial jobs and ended up as a messenger making half his original salary. As his grandson, Gordon Davis, wrote on the Op-Ed page on Tuesday: “By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man. He died in 1928.”

The steady attrition of black white-collar workers like Davis from the federal work force went far deeper than the customary turnover when one party succeeds the other in government. It was a premeditated attempt to impoverish and disempower a small but growing class of black middle-class professionals. This subversion was not limited to Washington. In a few short years, Mr. Yellin writes, the Wilson administration had established federal discrimination as a national norm.

None of this mattered in 1948 when Princeton honored Wilson by giving his name to what is now called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Black Americans were still viewed as nonpersons in the eyes of the state, and even the most strident bigots were held up to public adulation. This is certainly not the case today.

The overwhelming weight of the evidence argues for rescinding the honor that the university bestowed decades ago on an unrepentant racist.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/op...eton.html?_r=0

I would love to see the school renamed. Not only was Woodrow Wilson a racist, he was the worst type of globalist. As President, he pushed through the tariff reductions that began the free trade treason swindle, putting Americans out of work by importing foreign made products with low tariffs and passing the income tax on Americans to make up for the lost revenue, the beginning of the disaster we now have with federal income based taxation, both by law and amending the US Constitution to make it permanent.

Once he had his mandatory income tax, alas, he pushed through the Federal Reserve Act, that created the Federal Reserve banking system we now have. He did all of this in 1 year, 1913. The man was so obsessed with ensuring the ultimate demise of our country and people, he called a Special Session of Congress to push through the income tax act early enough in the year so there would be time to pass and ratify the 16th Amendment and then push through the Federal Reserve Act before Congress recessed. All in less than 12 months.

He was a miserable, disgusting, loathsome person for which nothing should be named.

I wish the students of Princeton well in their goal and hope they succeed to rename the school.