Episode 11: Woodrow Wilson Part I

A full transcript of this episode can be found here.

Show Notes

Overview:

Today’s episode is all about Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States and arguably the most consequential. Note, I did not say one of the greats. They aren’t holding a spot on Mt. Rushmore for him. Certainly not lately, as the national reckoning over race during 2020 has landed hard on Wilson, whose reputation has been sullied by the widespread realization that he might just vie for the unenviable title of most racist president of all. That’s a hard list to evaluate, especially given that numerous antebellum presidents owned people of other races, but as our friend Jon Meacham said in an earlier episode when discussing Andrew Johnson, if you are in the discussion for most racist president ever, well that’s a list you’d rather not be on.

Wilson has not fared particularly well as our country rethinks its racial past, and has featured prominently in our national discussion about how to live with the harsh truths of the past in our own present day.

But back to Wilson himself. In large measure the racial reckoning and reconsideration of his presidency derives from his importance. A progressive, he expanded the federal government’s role in managing the economy and protecting individual citizens, especially in the workplace and in the marketplace. Woodrow Wilson also proved as influential as a president as any, especially in the realm of foreign affairs and the president’s ability to wage war. We don’t ask of subsequent presidents if they are Wilsonian or not in their approach to the world. We ask how Wilsonian are they.

So who was this guy? Born in 1856 into a religious family, he was raised a Southerner through and through. Indeed, he recalled that one of his first memories of childhood was of watching soldiers, Union Soldiers, march through Georgia as an occupying army. Educated initially by his father, a Presbyterian Minister, he went North for his education, to the College of New Jersey, known by its current name as Princeton University.

Like so many of our previous presidents, Wilson initially studied and even briefly practiced law, but never liked it much. Instead, he was drawn to the world of ideas, enrolling at Johns Hopkins University for a PhD in history and political science, and embarking upon an academic career. He taught to much acclaim at Bryan Mawr, Wesleyan, and then ultimately Princeton, whose presidency he took up in 1902.

He also authored perhaps the most widely-used political science textbooks of his day. Meaning if you went to school around the turn of the 20th century, his version of history was most likely what you read, and what you were tested on. Ironically his most critical insight into the inner workings of American government was that its major flaw was the presidency. He thought a parliamentary system more efficient and effective, especially if a ruling coalition was in turn led by a powerful ruler. Like himself.

Politics, obviously, was his bailiwick, and he took the leap into the arena in 1910 when he ran on as the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor of his state. Two year later he was in the White House, having gone from Princeton to the Presidency in less time than it would have taken most of his students to complete a master’s degree. We’ve already covered the critical election of 1912 in previous episodes, and once in office Wilson set out a progressive agenda with gusto. His “new freedom” gave Americans tariff reform, a national income tax, the Federal Reserve System, and more.

But he’s not remembered for that, but for what happened next. World War I broke out in 1914. Drawn into the war by commercial contracts, loans to the belligerents—the allies in particular—and ultimately the threat of German submarine warfare, by 1917 he discarded his initial policy of neutrality for war. “God helping her,” he told he congress, “she can do no other.”

Wilson wasn’t satisfied with just winning the war. He wanted to end war altogether. Americans must fight to make the world safe for democracy, he said, and fight in particular for his 14 points, which included a new world order based upon free trade, national sovereignty, and most important of all, a League of Nations. The 14 points crystalized American thinking towards the world, though his critics liked to say, “God himself only had ten.”

And…it almost worked. Almost. Geopolitical acrimony overseas, and political anger at home, coupled to thwart Wilson’s effort to have the United States join the League of Nations, and crippled by a series of debilitating strokes while in office, he left the presidency in 1921 a broken man. When Republicans campaigned in 1920 on a “return to normalcy,” they meant, a world that largest existed before Wilson came to power. There was a major pandemic in 1918 and 1919 as well?

All of these moments of dramatic diplomacy and grand strategy existed during what can only be called a period of racial regression at home, especially for African-Americans. Wilson barred Black Americans from federal civil service jobs, and even barred them from socially attending the White House, while his Democratic allies in the South further enshrined Jim Crow into law throughout the former confederacy. No one wondered if reconstruction was still ongoing by Wilson’s day. It was dead and gone.

There is so much to discuss about this fascinating man. So much indeed, that we’ve decided to break our discussion into two episodes. Part I, this episode, follows our regular format, and offers a pretty critical view of Wilson’s history on race. Read more about Part II.

First things first. Today we are learning from two brilliant scholars about this complicated man and presidency. Together our scholars illuminated two points:

First, that one can’t just look at American racial policy, and Wilson in particular, in black-white term—Wilson’s presidency invites us to consider questions of race in India, Africa, China, Japan and beyond;
And second, that yes you can, at least in so far as the U.S. Army’s attitudes and policies were designed to wage and win a war for democracy yes, but precisely, for whom?

Guest One: Dr. Paul Behringer

Behringer RZ.jpg — **Paul Welch Behringer** will join the Center for Presidential History in August 2020. His current project is a history of the U.S. and Japanese intervention in the Russian Civil War. It examines the connections among violence, perception, and military intervention, and explores the Russian Civil War’s impact on U.S.-Soviet-Japanese relations and international politics in Northeast Asia. It also demonstrates how the local experiences of military and diplomatic officials affect high-level diplomacy and policy making.

Paul received his PhD from American University in Washington, D.C., in summer 2020. From 2018 to 2020, he was an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. In 2017–2018, he received a Fulbright student research award and American Councils (Title VIII) funding to conduct research in Vladivostok and Moscow. In summer 2016, he was a Silas Palmer Fellow at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. In addition to funding from American University, his work has been supported by conference travel grants from the World History Association and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Paul has published articles in The International History Review and Russian History. He holds a master's degree in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree in History and East Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Guest Two: Adriane Lentz-Smith

Adriane Lentz-Smith is associate professor of history and African & African American studies at Duke University where she teaches courses on Black Lives, the Black Freedom Struggle, and history in fiction and fact. The author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard, 2009), Lentz-Smith researches and writes about African Americans’ entanglements with U.S. power in the long twentieth century. Her current project traces the devastating aftermath of one young man’s encounter with the police in 1980s San Diego to explore how state violence and white supremacy reconstituted each other in response to the civil rights gains of the 1960s.

Lentz-Smith works to bring scholars into conversation with broad publics. She serves as an OAH Distinguished Lecturer, and her work has been featured in the documentaries The Jazz Ambassadors and The Great War, as well as in an exhibition for the Library of Congress and on various podcasts and radio programs. Through Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, she hosts the discussion series, “The Ethics of Now,” which brings authors, journalists, policy makers, and scholars to Durham to discuss matters of pressing importance to the North Carolina community and beyond. Lentz-Smith holds a BA in history from Harvard-Radcliffe and a PhD in history from Yale University. She lives in Durham, North Carolina with her family.

Selected Publications

Lentz-Smith, Adriane. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy.” In Rethinking Grand Strategy, edited by Elizabeth Borgwardt, Christopher McKnight Nichols, and Andrew Preston. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021. Forthcoming.

Lentz-Smith, Adriane. “’The Laws Have Hurt Me:’ Violence, Violation, and Black Women’s Struggles for Civil Rights.” Southern Cultures 26, no. 3 (Fall 2020). Forthcoming.
Lentz-Smith, Adriane, and Brooke Blower. “The Visitor’s Corner with Sia Sanneh and Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.” Modern American History 1, no. 3 (November 2018): 391-97.
Lentz-Smith, Adriane. “Passports to Adventure: African Americans and the U.S. Security Project.” American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (September 2016): 537-43.
Lentz-Smith, Adriane. Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Call to Action:

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Be sure to listen to Woodrow Wilson Part II as well!

Show Notes

Call to Action:

Further Readings

Episode 12: Woodrow Wilson Part II

Episode 10: William Howard Taft