History

No respect for the Constitution, blacks, or his students

By J. L. Bastiat ⋅ May 16, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

We’ve ended up noting Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism quite a lot around here, lately–as it so richly deserves. One of its many merits is a thorough public dressing-down of Woodrow Wilson, the race-baiting fascist founder of ethnic determinism as a key to foreign policy, and wartime regulation as a key to domestic policy. Ahem. More generally, Woodrow Wilson’s whitewashed (yes) reputation has been taking hit after hit, lately–as he so richly deserves.

“When the great westward migration began everything was modified. . . Beyond the mountains . . . a new nation sprang up. . . . Our continental life is a radically different thing from our life in the old settlements. . . . The formative period of American history . . . did not end in colonial times or on the Atlantic coast . . . nor will it end until we cease to have frontier communities and a young political life just accommodating itself to fixed institutions. . . . Almost all the critical issues of our politics have been made up beyond the mountains.” Woodrow Wilson, “Mr. Goldwin Smith’s ‘Views’ on our Political History,” in Forum, xvI, 495 (December, 1893); but though aware of the new revelation, Wilson failed to name the prophet [i.e., Turner].

So, not only was Woodrow Wilson the most racist of the post-Reconstruction presidents (a man who systematically re-segregated Washington and demoted African American government employees), but he might have been a plagiarist as well.

(Volokh Conspiracy, Was Woodrow Wilson a plagiarist?)

I note in passing that “plagiarism” was a common 19th-C charge, and a commoner crime; but Wilson was working late enough, and definitely was of a piece with American academia enough, to have known better. He may be held to this standard, I think.

May I humbly ask that we realize that “Wilsonian” as applied to Presidents of both parties is not a compliment?