[Valin]

Oh Yes I'd love to have a "dialogue" about race with the democrats. Please don't throw me in that briar patch.

[Illbay]

"The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South."

"The White Savage Revisited: Rebel Fantasies of the Postbellum South on Free Republic".

[Illbay]

Look, you and others need to face it: The conservative pundits cannot grapple with the Democrats on this issue.

When I saw the Lott interview on BET I just about puked.

Then, a couple of days later, I saw a "debate" between a black conservative and a black Leftist on Hannity and Colmes, and the black conservative plus Sean Hannity got their *sses kicked.

I don't know why it is, but the conservative punditry just FREEZES as soon as this subject comes up. They end up looking like fools, and the Lefties as smug "I told you so" superiors.

Why this is, I don't know. I like to think I could do better, but those who I presume are more accomplished than I with discourse and debate just fade away on the wind as soon as this topic comes up.

[aculeus]

"If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me," he told The New York Times in 1914, "they ought to correct it."

I'm certain The New York Times, in the interest of fairness, will soon publish a long review of Wilson's outrageously racist administration.

(/sarcasm)

[aristeides]

And many of the personnel and policies of the FDR administration (including FDR himself) were taken out of the Wilson administration. In many ways, the New Deal was Wilsonism restored.

[rdf]

Thanks for the excellent post.

We bring up Wilson's segregationist actions in our high school textbook at the Declaration Foundation. When I was researching the post Reconstruction period I was amazed to find out how bad Wilson had been, and angry that it had not been part of my education decades ago.

Again, thanks for the post.

Richard F.

President, Declaration Foundation

[aspiring.hillbilly]

...for all the racist history of the demoncrats,,,you would think present day africanamericans would know better and not overwhelmingly vote for them en mass,,, but NOOOO,,,, theres a lesson in that somewheres...

[x]

Thanks for this piece of lost American history. The New Deal generation of American historians wanted to see US history as a simple story of good and evil. In fact, good and evil and right and wrong are much more mixed together in life and history. Those who pushed for greater democracy or freedom or equality have sometimes been led by the same expansive logic to support territorial expansion, foreign adventures, more government control over people's lives, or greater exploitation of domestic underclasses.

In many ways Thurmond represented a continuation of Wilson and FDR. Strange as it may seem now, Thurmond, while definitely a segregationist, was regarded as a liberal when he first entered politics.

[nicollo]

Great thread!

[Sabertooth]

Wilson appears to have perceived his presidency as an opportunity to correct history, and to restore white Americans to unambiguous supremacy. That is apparently the reason he embraced the poisonous message of D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation; it offered a congenial narrative.

Griffith's notorious film portrays the overthrow of debasing black rule in the Reconstructionist South by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The film's black characters (most of them white actors in blackface) are either servile or savages; Klan members are represented as both heroic and romantic. The movie was based primarily on The Clansman, a novel written by Thomas Dixon in 1905. Not only was Dixon a personal friend of Wilson's, he had been pushing for a Wilson presidency for years, and Wilson regarded himself as being in Dixon's debt.

Wilson discharged that debt by helping Dixon and Griffith publicize their movie. He arranged for preview screenings for his cabinet, for Congress, and for the Supreme Court, and he gave Dixon and Griffith an endorsement they could exploit. "It is like writing history with lightning," Wilson said of this KKK celebration, "and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The first half of Wilson's endorsement is still affixed to prints of the film that are screened for film students studying Griffith's advances in editing.