Woodrow Wilson, segregation, and naming Army bases for Confederate generals

Michel Paradis gives us a sketch of Woodrow Wilson as segregationist and promotor of Lost Cause idolatry in The Lost Cause’s Long Legacy: Why does the U.S. Army name its bases after generals it defeated? The Atlantic 06/26/2020:

As president, Wilson imposed Jim Crow–style segregation on the federal civil service and the Navy, which had been integrated for the previous century, and when he hosted the first-ever screening of a feature film in the White House, the honor went to The Birth of a Nation. An adaptation of the Thomas Dixon Jr. novel The Clansman, the film brought the myth of the Lost Cause to the silver screen in a racist paean to the defeat of Reconstruction through the terrorist violence of the KKK.

Woodrow Wilson, looking very white and a bit Dracula-ish

This is one of several reasons that I generally find Woodrow Wilson an unsympathetic character. He did pass reforms to limit abuses by corporations. And his ideas on international law were tremendously influential in shaping the United Nations and today's international structure. Anticolonial leaders like Gandhi and many more were inspired by his ideas on national independence, even though he had little interest in seeing them applied outside of Europe.

But he was also a rigid moralist, which badly distorted his view of other countries. And his morality obviously did not include a meaningful notion of racial equality. He's remembered as kind of a tragic hero because the Versailles Treaty with his Fourteen Points idea was rejected by the Senate and he suffered a crippling stroke while campaigning for it. But the truth is that Versailles, and the other treaties at the end of World War I, were a mess, and did a lot to bring on World War II. Hungary to this day still has (far-fetched) notions of taking parts of Slovakia, Rumania, and Serbia that they lost then. Part of the problem was that Wilson fell seriously ill with the Spanish flu when he was in Paris for the peace conference and never got his normal focus on the negotiations back. Pandemics cause all kinds of problems.

The article focuses on how Wilson used Confederate symbolism to recruit Southern men to the US Army for the First World War:

The peculiarity of naming Army bases after Confederate generals did not go unnoticed at the time. A pointed op-ed in e Cleveland Gazette lamented, “Since 1861 to 1865, the South has won back all that it lost in that memorable struggle except its slaves.” And e Boston Globe reported the announcement of the new bases with a raised eyebrow: “In the list of names announced tonight, Lee, Gordon, Beauregard, and Wheeler take their places beside Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Meade and more than a score of others who fought for the Union.”

The Lost Cause had won. Fort Bragg and Fort Benning were established the following year. Then, in the mobilization for the Second World War, new Army bases built in the states of the former Confederacy were christened with the names of Confederate generals — including Fort A. P. Hill, Fort Hood, Fort Pickett, Fort Polk, and Fort Rucker.