The Case Against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton (NYT)

New York Times ^ | November 24, 2015 | By The Editorial Board

[Brad from Tennessee]

Student protesters at Princeton performed a valuable public service last week when they demanded that the administration acknowledge the toxic legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as university president and New Jersey governor before being elected to the White House. He was an unapologetic racist whose administration rolled back the gains that African-Americans achieved just after the Civil War, purged black workers from influential jobs and transformed the government into an instrument of white supremacy.

The protesters’ top goal — convincing the university to rename the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the residential complex known as Wilson College — has drawn heavy fire from traditionalists. But the fact that racist policies enacted during Wilson’s presidency are still felt in the country today makes it imperative that the university’s board of trustees not be bound by the forces of the status quo.

Wilson, who took office in 1913, inherited a federal government that had been shaped during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when thousands of African-American men and women passed Civil Service examinations or received political appointments that landed them in well-paying, middle-class government jobs in which they sometimes supervised white workers. This was anathema to Wilson, who believed that black Americans were unworthy of full citizenship and admired the Ku Klux Klan for the role it had in terrorizing African-Americans to restrict their political power.

As the historian Eric Yellin shows in “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” Wilson stocked his government with segregationists who shared his point of view. The man he chose for the postal department, which had the most black employees nationally, had campaigned on the promise that the Democratic Party could be counted on to keep black people out of its own ranks. . .

[Brad from Tennessee]

Why don't they just exhume his corpse and put it on trial?

[agere_contra]

Wow, some Liberals stumbled across the truth about their own party.

[Catmom]

Wasn’t Wilson a college professor and father of the idea in America that government is the answer to life’s problems?

[Eagles6]

"The man he chose for the postal department, which had the most black employees nationally, had campaigned on the promise that the Democratic Party could be counted on to keep black people out of its own ranks and out of the government affairs of the Southern states. "

Wait...what?

[Arthur McGowan]

The buildings and institutions with Wilson’s name on them should be renamed for the various Republican Presidents who proposed Civil Rights acts between the Civil War and 1960.

Andrew Johnson, Grant, Harding, Eisenhower. I might have missed some.

[Pelham]

Andrew Johnson was a War Democrat.

He ran with Lincoln on the National Union Party ticket in 1864.

[rawcatslyentist]

Wasn’t he the one that sold our currency system to the illuminati? He sure let them put their mark on it!

[immadashell]

Yep, one of dem dere Dimocrats.

[cripplecreek]

Liberals trying to clean their history.

[Arthur McGowan]

Well, that’s Republican enough.

[Soul of the South]

Once Princeton folds, the name of Wilson will be expunged from other public buildings and monuments as quickly as the Confederate flag has been removed in the a South. Next we will see an intense and highly organized campaign to remove Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and any other Confederate leader from the nations memory. Obama’s name will be the neficiary of many of these erasures as he I’ll be out of office and the campaign to ensure his legacy will begin in earnest, not unlike the crusade to name everything for John Kennedy after the assassination.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and all of the othe slaveholding founding fathers will be next in the campaign to purify the nation and erase its racist past. How many years will it be before the faces change on our coins and currency and the contract is issued to remove the slaveholders from Mt Rushmore? Ten years, five years, two years? Who will stand up and say enough of this? Or will the young generation be content to enjoy its sexual freedoms and technology gadgets while the tyrants reshape our collective memory and impose the secular religion of political correctness defined by the elites?

We as a society can and should agree the institution and legacy of slavery is a horrific and incompatible with the ideals of Liberty on which the nation was founded. It should continue to be condemned by all today and in the future. However if the price of atoning for slavery is to replace the ideal of individual liberty with a notion of justice and equity imposed by an all powerful state we will have exchanged the memory of the plantation for the chains of another master.

Woodrow Wilson, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson and George Washinton are long dead and will feel no pain if their names are erased forever from our buildings, monuments, and books. The children of those who celebrate the lighting of the match to burn the books will live with consequences of belonging to a society where the concept of inalienable rights is also expunged and the few privileges of citizenship, including the term of one’s life on earth, is forever defined and redefined by the constantly changing needs of the central authority.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Nice essay, SOTS. To summarize, “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”

[SES1066]

Once again the New York Times amply demonstrates it’s bias by not even hinting that the time frame specified (post Civil War) was almost exclusively GOP Presidents, 35 of 43 years! I discount the Andrew Johnson term as the immediate post-CW was more a time of readjustment and he had his own problems with the Impeachment effort!

[samtheman]

He was one of yours, NYT. Your progressive forefathers worshipped him.

[Fai Mao]

You missed Nixon, Ford and Regan

Nixon got a lot of Civil Rights legislation passed and Ford signed a landmark education bill

Under Regan unemployment for young blacks fell to historically low levels

[Brad from Tennessee]

[He was one of yours, NYT. Your progressive forefathers worshipped him.]

New York Times endorsed Woodrow Wilson for president in 1912 and 1916. Apparently they agreed with his racist views.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/new_york_times_endorsements.php

[Theodore R.]

So true, but people who once believed in the Almighty, now graciously yield to the “central authority”, as you aptly call it.

[Tallguy]

"But the fact that racist policies enacted during Wilson's presidency are still felt in the country today makes it imperative that the university's board of trustees not be bound by the forces of the status quo." To what are these idiots referring... specifically? This is exactly what the radicals in BLM want -- to create a public perception that institutionalized racism exists in today's America. It doesn't. It resides instead in the minds of a few individual and groups seeking leverage over the rest of us. Groups like "Black Lives Matter".

I don't abide the expunging of presidents from history because of how they are regarded in the present-times. If I think that Woodrow Wilson was a bad president that is my opinion and his memory should serve as a warning. I mean after all which president or public figure is 'safe' from this kind of treatment? Can the Kennedy School at Harvard be far behind?

[Don@VB]

How do we get Lee’s father, Richard Lee, and uncle, Francis Lee’s name off the Declaration of independence??