Wilson’s National and International Legacies

My high school classmate, Paul Mickey (Princeton ’71) referred me to this interview when I sent him my comments about Wilson based on my reading of Colin Woodard’s Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. Woodard is unforgiving in his assessment, even unearthing the racist underpinnings of Wilson’s framework for the League of Nations. I believe his research and conclusions are sound. I am appending here some of what I wrote. I grew up thinking very highly of Wilson, in part because I admired his grandson, Dean Francis Sayre of the Washington National Cathedral, and in part because I knew absolutely nothing at that time about his racism. My words are pretty strong, but I am more than willing to hear opposing views, especially an outline of what historians consider his positive achievements.

Colin Woodard’s Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood (2020) is an eye-opening masterpiece of clarity and will peel the blinders off the eyes of readers who have been deceived by various revisionist versions of American history that downplay the horrors of racism and sectionalism that continue to divide our nation. I grew up as a choirboy at the Washington National Cathedral, where then Dean Sayre’s grandfather, President Woodrow Wilson, is interred in a place of honor near the southwest corner of the nave. Four bays to the east of his sarcophagus were a pair of stained glass windows honoring the “heroes” of the Confederacy, including a depiction of Robert E. Lee astride his white stallion, proudly holding aloft a Confederate flag. At the time, none of us realized what that window symbolized, but a few years ago, bowing to public pressure, the Cathedral removed it and eventually replaced it with windows depicting and honoring the struggle for freedom and equality of non-whites in America. I doubt that my appeals to the current dean of the Cathedral had much to do with the choice of this theme, but I am a little bit proud that I was able to catch his ear and make the suggestion in person.

However, had I known at the time what a virulent racist President Wilson was — how he turned back the clock on 50 years of peaceful integration of the federal government, how he cheered and promoted Griffith’s trope-laden movie of racist revisionism, The Birth of a Nation, with a private viewing in the White House, how he framed the entire concept of his League of Nations as an enunciation and enactment of white supremacy at a global level, how he criminalized dissent during World War I, among other atrocities — I would have asked Dean Hollerith to go beyond replacing the Confederate stained glass windows and suggested that Wilson’s marble sarcophagus be draped in black.