There have been some people questioning Woodrow
Wilson's legacy lately, which is a reasonable thing to do. There has also been
some resistance because you can't judge people in history by present day
standards, and then they drag in Jefferson and Washington having slaves.
I do see the point of reserving some judgment on
historical figures because we are supposed to be more advanced now, though some
people really make you wonder. It still doesn't necessarily apply to Wilson in the same way it
applies to Washington and Jefferson. Washington and Jefferson probably were
pretty much in line with the common thinking of their day; Wilson was setting things
back.
Wilson took integrated government departments and started segregating them
again. He applauded a racist film as "history written in lightning" -
it wasn't history and as a professor he should have known better. He had to
work at not knowing better. Wilson was behind his times.
Knowing that in the early days of the American
colonies that Africans came as indentured servants who earned their freedom and
got land and worshipped in integrated churches might be a reason to justify
questioning Washington and Jefferson, but I am thinking of something else
today.
In Philadelphia we toured
Constitution Hall, but we also went through the Eastern State Penitentiary, an
old prison. It was built on the "Pennsylvania system" or
"separate system", kind of like prison-wide solitary confinement.
That took me back to Port Arthur in Tasmania. My understanding was that they only followed the separate system for
the first year of imprisonment and then the convict would be transferred into
the general population. What I remember most clearly though was that many of
the convicts developed mental illness from the solitary confinement, and it
still has the worst psychic energy of the entire site. If you are going to be
affected by bad vibes anywhere, it will be there.
At Eastern it was driven home more that this was
really seen as a humane way of treating the prisoners. The people who planned
it out had really good intentions, but it wasn't effective there either. You
can cause a lot of damage without meaning it.
It makes me wonder. Before I learned about Wilson's racism I was
inclined to think of him as trying to do good, with his participation in the talks
after World War I and trying to set up the League of Nations at least showing an
interest in world peace. Maybe he thought Birth of a Nation was just
really well made and saw the potential of film for history. (No.)
The League of Nations fell apart and the way they resolved WWI really set the stage for WWII. That's
not all on Wilson, but this was a man who was actively working to oppress a people that
had already faced centuries of oppression. I'm sure he didn't think of himself
as evil, but what he was doing was evil. How could that man be an effective
force for peace?
I want to bring up two more things. One is a quote
from W.E.B. DuBois' Niagra Movement speech from 1905:
"We are not more lawless than the white race,
we are more often arrested, convicted, and mobbed."
Still true, and some people are only starting to
believe it because of video footage, but it has been true all along. More
interesting is that if you look at the rest of the speech, they are asking for
suffrage and education for everyone.
It is worth reading the full speech, but now I want
to go back a few decades before that, with this summary of Reconstruction from
Albion W. Tourgee:
"[They] instituted a public school system in a
realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot box and the
jury box to thousands of White men who had been barred from them by a lack of
earthly possessions. They introduced home rule in the South. They abolished the
whipping post, the branding iron, the stock and other barbarous forms of
punishment which had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies
from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were
extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all that time no
man's rights of person were invaded under forms of law."
That benefited everyone, including the poor whites.
In fact, these projects disproportionately helped the poor whites, because they
were able to keep using them when Jim Crow pushed the African Americans out.
Then they needed to do it all over again, and they
kept doing it. There are still people fighting it, once more rolling back voting
rights, pulling money away from schools, and everything that has been done
before.
There are a lot of things that could be said that
would be relevant, but I'm just going to go back to DuBois' speech, because
this is important, and it's true.
"Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States."
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