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Woodrow Wilson a Complicated Legacy

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Woodrow Wilson a Complicated Legacy Woodrow Wilson A complicated legacy EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The start of my research about Woodrow Wilson this week took me to the place where he died. It's a large townhome in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington D.C., and it's preserved just like it was when he lived there. Its marble entryway is the same. Its rooms. The chiming grandfather clock on the staircase. The Victrola on the landing. It's where Wilson spent the last few years of his life after leaving the White House. For a long time, the main legacy of Wilson's -- you know, the kind of thing that ends up on history exam -- had to do with his leadership during World War I. In particular, you probably remember phrases like the 14 Points and the League of Nations and you hear things like: ROBERT ENHOLM: At the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson really strode onto the world stage on behalf of the United States and, arguably, the world hasn't been the same since. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So that's Robert Enholm, who's the executive director of the Woodrow Wilson House, and he led me on a tour through its rooms and through Woodrow Wilson's legacy. But his job is getting a lot more complicated today because there's another part of Wilson's life and presidency that's starting to overshadow, more and more, Wilson's ideas of global peace and American diplomacy -- and that's Wilson's racism. PRINCETON STUDENTS CHANTING Those are the chants of Princeton students back in the fall when they were protesting Wilson's history of racism and calling for his name to come off campus buildings there. For example, there's the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Now, for decades, Wilson has been most remembered for his efforts on working-class rights and global human rights. But people today are looking around the country before us -- the racial tensions, the shootings of unarmed black men, the inequality that still colors America. And they're Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 starting to point fingers at presidents like Wilson, who led this country during a time in the early 20th century when the rights of African-Americans that had been gained in the Civil War and through Reconstruction were actually being taken away. I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post and this is the 27th episode of “Presidential.” PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC So, part of my plan for this episode had been to talk to my colleague Wesley Lowery, who's one of our main reporters at The Washington Post covering race relations. And he was going to walk us through how early 20th century America sowed seeds for a lot of the very raw racial challenges and injustice and inequality that we're still seeing today. Well, in proof of how violently present many of these problems still are, Wesley had to cancel. All week, he's been covering the shootings of Philando Castile in Minnesota, Alton Sterling in Louisiana, the police officers in Dallas. Still, I feel like we have to start the episode about Woodrow Wilson here -- with racism and with the current controversies over his legacy. But there's, of course, so much to cover about this figure. Like all presidents, and like all humans, some of it is good. Some of it is bad. And so, I'm going to try, in the bit of time that I have here, to cover as much of it as possible, but with a focus on rights -- African-American rights, women's rights, human rights, workers rights. So, we're going to come back later in the episode to Woodrow Wilson's home in Washington, D.C. and walk through it a bit more. But first, I want to share with you my conversation with the historian and biographer John Milton Cooper. So here's the little bit of backstory about Wilson. He was born in Staunton, Virginia in 1856, meaning that he was a young boy during the Civil War. And his father was a Presbyterian minister who moved the family around the South -- from Virginia, to Georgia, the Carolinas. His father was actually one of the religious leaders in the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America. So, most people would look at this -- or most people do look at this -- history of Wilson's, his childhood, and they point to it as the explanation for his racism. But John Milton Cooper says it's not quite as simple as that. JOHN MILTON COOPER: He was a Southerner, right? Well, technically, sure. Of course, b orn in the South. Raised there. The problem was: He wasn't much of a Southerner. His family was not from the South. They had moved there from Ohio just a few years before he was born and, in fact, his mother was born in England from a Scottish family. He's the only president between Andrew Jackson and Barack Obama to have a foreign-born parent. And he's the only president since Andrew Jackson that had no American-born grandparents. So, this is not a man with deep roots in the South or in America, for that matter. He got out of the South just about as soon as he could. He was 18 when he went off to college at Princeton and, except for studying law in Charlottesville and then practicing law in Atlanta -- a total of about four years -- that's the only time he ever lived in the South as an adult. And those were unhappy years, too. He did not like the study or the practice of law. He got out of the law Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 and got out of the South about as soon as he could. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Wilson left and went to Johns Hopkins for graduate school. He got his Ph.D. in political science and history. And his Ph.D. dissertation topic was pretty revealing. It was a critique of Congress's dominance in American politics, and it was Wilson's case for why the presidency should really be the stronger branch of government. Wilson's basically going to put that theory he mapped out into practice when he becomes president. But first, before being president of the United States, Wilson was a professor. He was also the author of numerous books, including a five-volume history of the United States and a biography of George Washington. And he eventually became president of Princeton University. So, at Princeton, in this administrative role, we start to see some of Wilson's views. One thing he does is he tries to get rid of the exclusive social clubs on campus because of their elitism. But he also, while he's president there, makes comments about how he doesn't really support the idea of African-Americans applying to the school. JOHN MILTON COOPER: Wilson’s racial views were much more like a white Northerner of his time, rather than a white Southerner. And the distinction is not that he or white Northerners weren't racist. They certainly were. I mean, to be a white person in this country at that time almost always meant being a racist of some kind. But the question is what kind and how much? And the difference is white Northerners, they regarded race as a pesky problem -- a kind of a distraction, something that they really would rather not think about. That's not true for white Southerners. Race is absolutely central. Well, Wilson's a Northerner at this period. And, for the most part, I mean, what's happening is the white North -- and you can tell from those kind of attitudes -- has pretty much, I think, abandoned the South. LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: After Wilson is president of Princeton, he becomes governor of New Jersey. And then he very quickly ends up the Democratic nominee for president. So, this is in 1912 -- the 1912 election when William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican Party. And that's what allowed Wilson, who was running as a progressive Democrat, to win the presidency. He comes into office in 1913. So, what are some of the ways that Wilson's racism showed itself? Well, one, is not a policy one. It's more of a personal one. It gets mentioned, though, quite a bit these days, which is that Wilson attended a screening -- a special screening at the White House -- of the film 'The Birth of a Nation,' which was a movie glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. And the movie was actually based on a novel that Wilson's friend wrote. After this movie comes out in the U.S., riots break out across cities in America, the NAACP tries to get the film banned and the movie also became a major recruiting tool for the KKK, which, over the course of the next several years of Wilson's presidency, grew by millions of members. In terms of policy, though, one of the main ways that racism manifests itself in Wilson's administration is that he supported segregating workers in the federal government. JOHN MILTON COOPER: This was a case of -- he didn't initiate that himself. When he came in, a number of his cabinet members were from the South, and they were saying, 'Mr.
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