Uncancel Woodrow Wilson
February marks a century since the death of Woodrow Wilson. Of all America’s presidents, none has suffered so rapid and total a reversal of reputation.
Wilson championed—and came to symbolize—progressive reform at home and liberal internationalism abroad. So long as those causes commanded wide support, Wilson’s name resonated with the greats of American history. In our time, however, the American left has subordinated the causes of reform and internationalism to the politics of identity, while the American right has rejected reform and internationalism altogether. Wilson’s standing has been crushed in between.
In 1948, and again in 1962, surveys of American historians rated Wilson fourth among American presidents, lagging behind only Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Wilson’s fellow presidents esteemed him too. Harry Truman wrote, “In many ways, Wilson was the greatest of the greats.” Richard Nixon admired Wilson even more extravagantly. He hung Wilson’s portrait in his Cabinet room, and used as his personal desk an antique that he believed—mistakenly, it turns out—had been used by Wilson.
Arthur S. Link, who edited 69 volumes of Wilson’s papers and wrote five volumes of biography, paid Wilson this tribute: “Aside from St. Paul, Jesus and the great religious prophets, Woodrow Wilson was the most admirable character I’ve ever encountered in history.”
Yet over the past half decade, Wilson’s name has been scrubbed from schools and memorials across the country. Wilson’s own Princeton, which he elevated from mediocrity to greatness in his eight years as university president, has removed his name from its school of public policy and a dormitory. “We have taken this extraordinary step,” the university announced in June 2020, “because we believe that Wilson’s racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school whose scholars, students, and alumni must be firmly committed to combatting the scourge of racism in all its forms.”
These acts of obloquy are endorsed across the spectrum of liberal and progressive opinion. The New York Times editorial board had urged the renaming and damned Wilson as “an unrepentant racist.” In his recent history, American Midnight, the eminent liberal writer Adam Hochschild accuses Wilson of culpability for the unjust imprisonment, illegal abuse, and outright murder of trade unionists and anti-war dissenters. Here at The Atlantic, the historian Timothy Naftali described Wilson as “an awful man who presided over an apartheid system in the nation’s capital.”
[Tim Naftali: The worst president in history]
Unlike other historical figures criticized by American progressives, such as Robert E. Lee and Christopher Columbus, Wilson has found few countervailing defenders among American conservatives. If anything, contemporary conservatives revile Wilson even more than progressives do.
The columnist George Will spices his speeches with a favorite joke about Wilson’s trajectory from the loser in an academic fight at, Jonah Goldberg (then an editor at ) condemned Wilson as “the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.” Glenn Beck regularly fulminated against Wilson on his Fox News show in the early 2010s. Beck called Wilson an “evil SOB” and a “dirtbag racist.” He summed up: “I hate this guy. I don’t even want to show his picture.”
