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.
Public symbols like statues and state flags embody symbolism that changes over time based on the public narrative that develops over time. It also has to do with power, as we see in cases of authoritarian regimes that create huge monuments to the leader of the moment. In the end, all of them wind up like Percy Shelley's famous Ozymandias:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Or, as John Maynard Keynes also famously put it, in the long run, we are all dead.
But if we crank our time range down from millennia to a century or two or a couple of decades, we get to the span in which public icons have some contemporary emotional and ideological meaning.
But, obviously, not every historical figure or event has equal meaning. In the United States, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Second World War loom large in the national collective memory. Wars and revolutions generally play prominent roles in national symbolism in because they represent significant collective turning points that help us to break up history into understandable chunks. In our world of sovereign national states, national symbolism matters to people.
Civil War symbolism in the US has been more contentious than most, largely because of the continuing, toxic role that white racism against black people has always played in the US. The symbolism of the American Revolution didn't have the same enduring divisive role, because there was never huge constituency aiming to reverse the substance of the US becoming its own independent country, the Hartford Convention (1814-15) being the last gasp of such sentiments as any kind of political force.
Confederate symbolism has been a live topic of political contention since essentially the day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. The infamous public Confederate monuments, as we've recently been reminded, were used in the post-Civil War era to be symbols and advertisements for Southern continuing white resistance to equal rights for blacks citizens, although that clinical phrasing doesn't come close to capturing the brutality, cruelty, and just plain meanness of Southern US apartheid.
Arguing over the meaning of the Civil War isn't restricted to public monuments or the names of military bases. It's also been an intensive subject of contention in professional history, and has attracted an huge amount of interest in amateur history and popular culture. Including movies, of course. What to Know When Watching Gone With the WindTurner Classic Movies 06/26/2020:
The Confederate symbolism is pervasive enough and has been around long enough that everyone in America basically knows that the symbolism is about white racism and white supremacy, both of which are poison for democracy and the rule of law. Of course, it's part of white supremacist narratives to deny that it is about race. But essentially no one of voting age actually takes that seriously.
Building different narratives around other issues is more difficult, because the shared understanding of the symbols is rarely so clear as with the celebration of the Confederacy. Also, the Confederate States of America was also explicitly treason to the United States. The enemy soldiers Confederate generals and their armies were killing soldiers of the United States Army. The contradiction between celebrating the violence and treason of the Confederacy and the idolatry of the US military that is practiced primarily by present-day conservatives is so painfully obvious.
Most other historical periods in the US just don't have symbolism as intense and widely understood in common ways. And that's the context for discussions over what other historical symbols should be newly contested.
Woodrow Wilson has come in for condign attention, for instance:
I don't ever recall having been a particular fan of Woodrow Wilson. So I don't particularly care how many buildings or streets may be name after him.
But I also doubt that the renaming has much resonance for most other people, either. When it comes to university buildings, very few of them are named after respected historical figures or innovative scientists are star professors from decades past. They're name after rich people who made large donations to the universitiy. So talking Wilson's name off a college building is a fundraising opportunity. The Planet Princeton article above notes, "The university had already planned to close Wilson College and retire its name after opening two new residential colleges currently under construction."
Wilson is known for being the President during the First World War. And he is also known as a tragic figure who tried unsuccessfully to get an isolationist-minded Senate to join the League of Nations. He also had a progressive-leaning economic policy by the standards of the time. I tend to take a generally dim view of Wilson's Presidency. The Versailles Treaty that produced the League of Nations was on the whole a bad treaty, that did a great deal to lay the ground for a second world war. The "Spanish flu" pandemic may have a direct effect on Wilson's performance in the negotiations, as Steve Coll discusses in Woodrow Wilson's Case of the Flu, and How Pademics Change HistoryNew Yorker 04/17/2020
Sigmund Freud and American diplomat William Bullitt did a joint biography of Wilson that was first published in 1967, Thomas Woodrow Wilson A Psychological Study, that expressed their shared dim view of the late President. (Ben Yagoda, What Drove Sigmund Freud to Write a Scandalous Biography of Woodrow Wilson?Smithsonian Magazine Sept 2018) Their book focuses on Wilson's tendency to dogmatic moralism, which arguably inclined to poor decisions in regard to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, an issue in which Bullitt in his diplomatic role had been intensely involved at the time.
Wilson's racism, as described by Dick Lehr in the article linked above, was also real.
Yet Wilson stood in American politics and diplomacy for the importance of international law, however poorly his attempt to integrate his concepts into his negotiations with the victorious diplomats of the British and French Empires may have been. But his general commitment to international law particularly influenced Franklin Roosevelt and the diplomatic worldviews of the architects of the post-Second World War order. Wilson's anti-imperialist ideas also had a significant influence on the ideas and aspirations of independence leaders in countries held as colonies. (Joshua Keating, The Accidental Anti-ImperialistSlate 06/30/2020)
So, despite being an unreconstructed Southern racist and and despite his failure to effectively push through his position in the Versailles negotiations, Wilson's actual subsequent influence developed in ways that he might not have expected or entirely approved. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and its Wilson Quarterly are good sources for establishment-minded but center-left analysis of foreign policy issues.
In other words, in contrast to the defined and long-standing nature of Confederate symbolism, the symbolism of Woodrow Wilson doesn't have the contemporary ideological intensity that Confederate symbolism has in American politics. I doubt there are many people who much care whether Princeton clears up a couple of Wilson-designated items so that donors can buy the building names for themselves.
