Possible news flash!!! Mizzou Communications Professor Melissa Click is moonlighting as Media Adviser to the oracles at Smith College. When student oracles at Smith asked Click how best to avoid negative coverage and a media backlash, Click opined :"…hire some muscle. Failing that, cry out loud." :-j
Woodrow Wilson also reinstituted the segregation of the Federal government which had been integrated since the end of the Civil War and publicly approvingly screened the Pro-KKK D.W. Griffith’s “A Birth of A Nation” in the White House during his Presidency. Incidentally, Griffith was a classmate of Wilson’s at JHU.
In that respect, Wilson actually played an active part in turning back the clock in the areas of racial equality and treatment of African-Americans and in so doing, ignored and changed the moral standards prevailing in the Federal government before his presidency.
Woodrow Wilson is my least favorite president, because of the Palmer Raids as well as his active racism. But it would be absurd for Princeton to disclaim him - he is a foundational figure for that institution.
I posed the question. I do think they have low levels of critical thinking skills. They think that history is black and white (no pun intended) when history, like people, is mostly shades of gray. There are no perfect people, no perfect historical figures.
Yes, Washington freed his slaves, the only one of the founders to do so. But he had no offspring to look out for. He died wealthy while several others of the founders died impoverished and in debt and for that reason could not free their slaves by law. Their creditors took them.
Yes, Woodrow Wilson was a racist and a eugenicist. So was Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood.
On the other hand, Woodrow Wilson loved and treated his two wives well. What about those well known presidents who have treated their wives poorly and used women as sex objects? Are they to be publicly shunned as well and have their names removed from all public places?
Perhaps the protesting students were never taught history or perhaps they are closed minded or maybe they only think what they are told to think. Or they choose their historical targets to promote another agenda.
The lack of diversity seems to be in the professors and instructors, and I mean diversity of thought. Or maybe their knowledge of history is quite shallow.
Quite right, Cobrat. No denying that Wilson was a stone cold segregationist. Not surprising for a white man who grew up under reconstruction in rural and impoverished western Virginia. And D.W. Griffith was no cupcake either. His sympathy for Leo Frank did not extend to Black Americans and their anti-lynching crusade.
I think ‘critical thinking’ is a pretty meaningless label anyways.
As a former classicist, I have some pretty stringent and discipline-specific ideas about what thinking that is critical should look like. I have yet to see a program that advertised itself as ‘fostering critical thinking’ - including undergraduate broad liberal arts programs - that came close to qualifying.
I think we have to be careful about labeling people who look at the same information we do and come to a different conclusion than we would stupid.
I don’t think it’s particularly radical to call people who are snapping in approval of chiseling off Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s walls stupid.
Regardless of the fact that it’s an extreme position, and one I would not support by any stretch of the imagination, when posters start making quips about affirmative action and assuming the protesters are lacking in grey matter it only supports the position of those who feel racism is alive and well on college campuses.
Many ideas sounded radical in the beginning. People close to my age may remember how widely Ed Begley Jr. was mocked for his environmental activism. His hybrid car and passion for recycling were taken as evidence he was a radical looney. Now every suburban mom is driving a Prius and separating her cardboard from her plastics.
We should all be careful about taking extreme positions and failing to listen to each other. We may one day find ourselves on the wrong side of history.
However. Wilson’s parents were slaveowners and his father, a staunch defender of slavery in the antebellum period who served as a chaplain in the Confederate Army and was an instigator of the split-off of the Southern branch of the Presbyterian Church in 1861 due to differences with their northern counterparts.
All these factors plus the fact Wilson was old enough to remember Lincoln being elected and concerns it raised in his pro-slavery parents, meeting Robert E. Lee in person, and absorbed southern White resentment over the Confederacy’s defeat and reconstruction…including the liberation of slaves and shudder…even having Black troops garrisoning towns as part of the Federal military occupational part of Reconstruction and Black congressmen elected as politicians in several southern states.
As with many southern Whites, Wilson was influenced by resentment from his father and similarly minded southern White neighbors over how their once idealized happy antebellum world has become utterly destroyed and the presence of Blacks…including some former slaves in the Federal occupation forces and in prominent political positions once reserved strictly for southern Whites.
Thus, it’s no surprise that once he became President, he not only resegregated the Federal government and armed forces along with approvingly screening the Pro-KKK D.W. Griffith’s “A Birth of A Nation”…but also ignored, treated them rudely, and argued that if anything, Blacks protesting his resegregation efforts should be “grateful”.
Robert E. Lee was apposed to slavery and freed the family’s slaves when he inherited the,.
Robert E. Lee didn’t free the slaves of his own accord. His doing so was in complying with the wishes of his uncle’s will while acting in the role as executor of his estate:
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/06/robert_e_lee_owned_slaves_and.html
His actions also indicated as with Thomas Jefferson a serious internal conflict between a personal belief that slavery was wrong and his/his family’s economic self-interest. For instance, he waited until after the financial state of the estate was on much more firmer ground before he carried out that part of his uncle’s will.
He also owned slaves in his own right well into the 1850’s.
No doubt Wilson was a “confederate,” so to speak and would not have been elected President if he was Governor of Georgia or Virginia, rather than New Jersey.
I don’t think so, @TomSrOfBoston . He never owned any slaves. He was executor of an estate that did.
This slippery slope has no end.
For instance, Cornelius Vanderbilt owned a plantation with slaves.
http://www.allvoices.com/article/15292690
Should Vanderbilt University consider changing its name in order to avoid offending black students?
Robert E. Lee also rationalized the institution of slavery and its effects on the enslaved Black population in the same letter where he decried the evils of slavery according to this:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/making-sense-of-robert-e-lee-85017563/?no-ist=&page=2
^ that last sentence is amazing. Whatever we choose to do is rightful as it is ordered by God above. Great way to rationalize pretty much anything.
Wilson did not realize what “The Birth of a Nation” was about until he saw the screening. I believe an acquaintance of his made it and asked for the screening, and Wilson was offended by it. This happens to be described in “Dead Wake”, which I just finished reading. There is a false quote attributed to him about the movie making it sound like he favored it, but it was actually a quote manufactured by the movie maker. There is a letter from Wilson in his presidential papers stating his disapproval of the movie, too.
Incidentally, that quote is from the very same letter with another paragraph many Lost Causers use to emphasize his opposition to slavery while excluding the latter quote which makes his position much more complex and dubious.
Saw this quote on the Robert E. Lee Wikipedia from a 1934 biography on him by Douglas S. Freeman which adds to the complexity and dubiousness:
As for whether it’s right for Princeton’s students to call for his name to be scrubbed from the names of schools/buildings, that’s really up to them and the college community to decide.
However, those calling for his name to be scrubbed do have a fair point in questioning his legacy as it’s not only his racism, but his actions in acting upon it while President of the US…including turning back the clock of progress regarding racial equality by resegregating the Federal government.