The harder they come...the fall of Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Robert Smalls - former slave, war hero, Congressman,

Excise Revue Collector - appointed by President mcKinley,

fired by Woodrow Wilson

The harder they come...the fall of Thomas Woodrow Wilson

 Princeton University’s Trustees, spurred by the recent wave of protests over the killings of African Americans by police and others, has voted to remove the name of Woodrow Wilson from the University’s eminent School of Public and International Affairs.  It is a stunning fall from grace - but merited.  Fittingly his family home in Columbia, S.C. is now home to the Museum of Reconstruction - a movement for racial equality which he despised.

 Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia but it is New Jersey with which his name is most closely associated.  A graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), his doctoral dissertation Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics compared our Presidential system to England’s parliamentary one.  As a teacher at Princeton he rose quickly to its presidency.  In 1910 he was elected Governor of New Jersey as an unexpectedly progressive Democrat.  As President he led the United States in World War I, and played a key role in the visionary but failed League of Nations.  He nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court.  What then is not to like?  A lot, we can now recognize.

 When Wilson became President of the United States only the last embers of post Civil War Reconstruction flickered.  But Wilson doused them.  He segregated the federal civil service.  As Gordon Davis has recounted regarding the  harm done to his grandfather, He ordered the discharge of African Americans who held discretionary positions in the United States government and sharply reduced the number of African American federal employees.  Notoriously Wilson helped promote the grossly racist film portrayal of post-civil war Reconstruction - Birth of a Nation.  He hosted a screening of the movie at the White House and praised the director D.W. Griffith - a friend.  The Supreme Court also hosted a screening of the movie.  Chief Justice Edward White was impressed, noting that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan lionized in the movie - initially titled The Clansman.

 Wilson’s contempt for Constitutional rights extended to the Department of Justice.  His Attorneys General were James Clark McReynolds and A. Mitchell Palmer  who prosecuted railway union and Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs for his opposition to WWI. Palmer is best remembered for the post-war Red Scare sweeps led by J. Edgar Hoover and known as the Palmer raids.  McReynolds was elevated to the Supreme Court where in Butler v. Perry, Sheriff of Columbia County he rejected a Thirteenth Amendment defense. The Court upheld the Florida conviction of a Black man for failure to provide two days per year of statutorily mandated unpaid labor on county roads.

 It is important that the citizenry know Wilson’s history but even the facts recited above may seem remote or appropriately balanced against Wilson’s merits.  Such considerations delayed Princeton’s actions after it began review of the Wilson School’s name in 2015.  The upsurge of calls for overcoming our long history of racism, made plain to Princeton the need to drop Wilson’s name.  The question now is what to name the school.

 Wilson embraced the Jim Crow laws which flourished with the defeat of Reconstruction - a little known period for most people. But it was then that doctrines like state action stunted the implementation of the post civil war Amendments and the Enforcement civil rights Acts of 1866 and 1875.  Those laws broadly proscribed racial discrimination even by private actors.  They were crippled by the landmark cases of Cruikshank, Slaughterhouse, the Civil Rights Cases, and Plessy v. Ferguson.  Instead of Wilson who embraced them we should be lionizing Reconstruction leaders.    

 One such hero of Reconstruction, Robert Smalls discharged from a Presidential post by Woodrow Wilson, as Georgetown law professor Aderson Francois recently recounted in The New Republic.  Smalls first gained fame when as a slave pilot of the Confederate gunship The Planter he gained freedom by delivering the ship to the United States Navy which had blockaded Charleston.  After a long post-war fight he was awarded less than half the prize he was owed for delivery of the enemy ship to the Union.  The prize money enabled Smalls to purchase the plantation of his father who had owned him.  His story and the tragedy of Reconstruction is told in NYU law professor Peggy Cooper Davis's article Introducing Robert Smalls.

Smalls rose to the rank of captain in the Union Army, served five terms in the United States Congress, voted for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and achieved the rank of General in the South Carolina militia.  President William McKinley in 1889 appointed Smalls Excise Collector at the port of Beaufort, S.C.  He served until dismissed by Woodrow Wilson.  Perhaps Princeton should name its public policy school for Robert Smalls.  That would be fit teaching opportunity for today’s students and teachers.

 - GWC

July 10, 2020