Fired for “Calhoun views”: 19th Century cancel culture and Woodrow Wilson’s relationship to a quintessential southerner

In 1886 a young Woodrow Wilson, then a professor at Bryn Mawr College, struck up a conversation with a fellow professor from Indiana University. He poked around asking questions about Indiana University because, as he explained, his friend Richard Heath Dabney was going to be taking a position as a professor of history there. Wilson later told Dabney about the results: “He said, amongst many things that were irrelevant to my purpose, this, which was extremely relevant, that your predecessor, Newkirk, had been turned out because he often spoke before he thought and, thus speaking, had let drop ‘Calhoun views’ on the Constitution. In a word, you have gotten into a chair whose incumbent is expected to present, not the scientific truth with reference to our Constitutional history, whether that truth be on the side of Webster or of Calhoun in the great historical argument, but ‘Yankee sentiments’—sentiments agreeable to that eminent body of scholars, the Grand Army of the Republic. It’s a shame; but I hope that the reality isn’t half as bad as these bits of rumor.”

This forgotten episode invites a conversation on how Wilson’s own thinking was shaped by southern intellectual traditions, an inheritance that some modern Wilson scholars have recently tended to downplay. It also beckons an examination of Calhoun’s influence on Wilson, and could even suggest that a 19th century “cancel culture,” to use a modern term, may possibly have influenced his later partial embrace of northern thinking on some issues.

In my March 17 post, “The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson’s racism,” I rebutted Ronald J. Pestritto’s statement that Wilson’s attitude toward African Americans was “mostly attributable” to the historicist nature of his philosophy, which is to say mainly the influence of Hegel and other Germans. In making his case that Wilson's racism had roots somewhere other than in his southern origins, however, Pestritto also makes another argument: That Wilson was “no southern partisan,” and “did not, in fact, subscribe to the ‘southern’ position on most political questions.” Among the reasons he comes to this conclusion is that Wilson declined to call the southern statesman John C. Calhoun a “Great American” when he wrote his “Calendar of Great Americans.” In two books Pestritto says Wilson described Calhoun as “reactionary and ‘provincial.’” This is less than half accurate: Wilson never uses the word “reactionary” to describe Calhoun, which is why Pestritto doesn’t put it in quotation marks. Wilson did use the word “provincial,” but Pestritto neglects to mention that he called him a “great provincial.” He was not insulting Calhoun or his provincialism, he was merely pointing out that Calhoun’s purpose was not national. “The strength displayed,” Wilson wrote, “the intellectual power and address, abundantly entitle him to be called great; but his purpose was not national. It regarded but a section of the country, and marked him—again be it said with all respect—a great provincial.”

In reality, Wilson had a more complex intellectual relationship with John C. Calhoun than Pestritto implies, and though the young Wilson may not have fully realized it, not a few “Calhoun views” of his own. The future president seems to have been greatly influenced by admirers of Calhoun, including his own father, and a closer look at the facts backs up my argument that his southern roots were more impactful on his racism and his thinking than is admitted by some scholars. 

Calhoun, a major figure in 19th Century politics, is perhaps dimly remembered by many today. Here's the basics: Calhoun was the seventh vice president, under John Quincy Adams. After that he was a consequential senator from South Carolina, from 1845 to 1850, as well as Secretary of State for both Polk and Tyler. He is probably best remembered as a supporter of slavery, and as a constitutional theorist with a view of state’s rights that set up the country for a civil war a decade after his death. His views were heavily influential on the secession of the South in 1860. When Woodrow Wilson talks about “Calhoun views,” he is mainly talking about a view of the Constitution that emphasizes the sovereignty of the states, and when he talks about the “great historical debate” he is perhaps talking about a pro-Union view versus a state’s rights perspective.

What follows below is a brief catalog of “Calhoun views” enumerated in a great book review by Allan C. Guelzo titled “American Heretic, American Burke.” The review, of Robert Elder’s Calhoun: American Heretic, appeared in The New Criterion in February 2021. All of these views have been attributed to the young Wilson when he was a scholar of government and derided by Pestritto and conservative colleagues as Hegelian.

Guelzo says Calhoun’s political theory was built around three key views:

“First, his repudiation of the Declaration of Independence and the natural-law principles it embodies. Calhoun went straight to the root of American political self-understanding by insisting that the Declaration of Independence, by taking inalienable natural rights as its fundamental premise, was an enormous mistake. ‘There had never been a proposition of such dangerous import, or which had been so misunderstood, or been productive of so much evil’ as the notion that ‘certain inalienable rights’ had been conveyed to anyone, much less life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness …

“Second, his advocacy of white racial supremacy. Nothing was more obvious to Calhoun but that Africans were far, far below the bar of such political privileges. “I appeal to facts,” he declared in an 1837 speech. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually” as it has under American slavery …

“Third, his romantic glorification of historical process. Not only were the Declaration and natural law wrong, they were also historically irrelevant. ‘If we trace it back,’ Calhoun declared before the Senate in 1848, ‘we shall find the proposition’ about equality ‘expressed in the Declaration of Independence’ had been ‘inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity.’ The real origins of the Revolution were evolutionary, as British colonists used, developed, and asserted traditional English liberties … It stood to reason, then, that historical process would not stand still, either, but continue to reveal itself in new developments, in different places, among the relations of different peoples. The Constitution contained more than one ‘case of mission,’ and relied on ‘slow and successive experience’ for ‘correction and adaptation.’ It was only to be expected that ‘preservation is perpetual creation.’ Calhoun was, in that sense, the first living constitutionalist.”

Here are Wilson’s views on these three points: 

First, Wilson also derided the Declaration of Independence’s theory of natural rights. He once counseled that if one was to understand the Declaration of Independence, one should skip the preface, which establishes the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual,” Wilson wrote in 1908, “and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle. The rights of man are easy to discourse of … but they are infinitely hard to put into practice. Such theories are never “law.” … Only that is “law which can be executed, and the rights of man are singularly difficult to execute.”

Second, Wilson has been described, however fairly, as a white supremacist. When Trygve Throntveit made an argument in his book Power Without Victory (2017) that Wilson was racist but not a white supremacist, he was excoriated in not one but two different book reviews on a single web site, for the latter argument. Splitting hairs on the extent of Wilson’s racism has not been a popular position in recent years. 

Third, the first person to use the term “living constitution,” if Wikipedia and Pestritto are to be believed, was Wilson himself. The thesis of Pestritto’s book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (2005) is that Wilson had a “historicist” point of view that history is evolutionary and government through history is a “work-in-progress” therefore requiring “continual adjustment to historical circumstances as it tried to fulfill the broad democratic vision of the founders,” as Pestritto writes. This he contrasts with his own view, that the founders did not understand themselves that way, “as Wilson well knew. This is why much of his scholarship is devoted to a reinterpretation and critique of both the political theory of the founding.” The founders, Pestritto says, had a “fixed view of the US Constitution’s meaning” and did not expect its meaning to evolve. That interpretation of the founders contradicts Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it,” but that’s a debate for another post on this blog. 

All three of these views have also been described as Hegelian. The first point of view is not described by Pestritto as Hegelian, but it is by Jean Yarbrough in her book Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition (2014). Not everyone agrees Hegel held this view. In the case of the second view, while Pestritto does not say Hegel is a “white supremacist,” he makes the case that Hegel, like Calhoun and Wilson, saw slavery as a positive development for African Americans, and saw history as progressing through the advance of superior races.

One of Pestritto’s college professors, Harry Jaffa, goes so far as to suggest that Calhoun was actually directly influenced by Hegel. This view is rejected by Nathan Sheely in his paper “Jaffa’s Critique of Calhoun and the Conservative Civil War Over the Civil War”:

“Although there are a number of compelling correspondences between Calhoun and Hegel, as with his comparison of Calhoun and Rousseau, Jaffa can be faulted for appearing to suggest that there was direct influence, and for insisting so stridently that Calhoun was, in fact, a Hegelian. Jaffa seems to ignore profound methodological and substantive differences in their political theories and the lack of any documented connection between Calhoun and Hegelian thought. This does not mean, however, that the comparison is fruitless, nor that the resemblances in their thought are merely superficial. By demonstrating that Calhoun and Hegel share a similarly progressive view of history, and that elements of their view of the nature of government overlap, Jaffa certainly raises doubts about the extent to which Calhoun can be viewed as the answer to the modern progressive movement. The fact that Calhoun’s thought shares as many similarities as it does to a German philosophy that deeply influenced the early progressive movement should certainly give conservatives seeking to champion Calhoun pause.”

Sheely points out that Calhoun was widely read and admired by German political scientists. But the reverse — that Calhoun and his followers in the South read Hegel and other Germans — does not appear to be the case.

In any case, Wilson doesn’t appear to have gotten these “Calhoun views” directly from Calhoun. The Wilson papers don’t show any evidence that he read Calhoun’s books. His source on the southern statesman was a (derogatory) biography by H. Van Holst titled John C. Calhoun that does not explicate the points described above, though it does include in its bibliography Calhoun’s posthumously released books Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, which do include the above arguments. 

This raises the question: To what extent did his father and other southerners in Wilson’s life pass on these views to the future president? Clement Eaton, in his in book Freedom of Thought in the Old South (1940) charts how hugely influential Calhoun was in the South and identifies him as a major influence on a stage of southern thinking in which Jefferson’s natural law views become de-popularized in the South. Wilson likely picked up his resistance to the inalienable rights section of the Declaration of Independence that way. And on states rights, his father was also likely influential. Wilson’s dad Joseph Ruggles Wilson wrote about his agreement with Calhoun on state’s rights. The following is from a letter Wilson’s dad wrote him about a paper a classmate of Woodrow’s wrote about Congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, a contemporary of Calhoun’s. In it Joseph Ruggles Wilson specifically mentions Calhoun:

“Why, the boy mistakes R[andolph]’s chief glory for his principal shame – ie, his view of the federative feature in the constitution, which he predicted would become the all-in-all of its entire face, which recent events are rapidly showing to be already the fact--& in this prescience (shared by Calhoun) it was that his advocacy of State’s rights was grounded—a kind of rights which, if subverted, will leave us a prey to every political danger – will be a shearing of the republic of its locks and leave it in the lap of some anarchical Deliliah for a destructive enemy to bind. These rights are all, or nearly all, that render our gov’t peculiar. These gone, it becomes like any other republic which has been both the surprise and the contempt of history. And yet, [the classmate’s essay] speaks of R[andolph]'s adherence to the doctrine of State’s rights as ‘merely an extension of egotism. The whole tone of the piece is away from my taste.”

The word “peculiar” in this letter is a clear reference to Calhoun’s famous description of slavery as “the peculiar institution.” 

It would be easy to argue that Wilson did not inherit his dad’s view of state’s rights, but in his early years he clearly did. Woodrow writes like a state’s rights advocate in the margins of a biography of (once again) John Randolph by Henry Adams in 1882, saying “Strange that the best interpretation of State’s Rights should come from an Adams!”

By 1893 in his book Division and Reunion, about the Civil War, Wilson was making a tortured argument against state’s rights that betrayed his “Calhoun views” despite its conclusion. As Pestritto writes in his book America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism (2021), “for Wilson, it was the southerners who were the constitutional originalists … The forces of state’s rights and secession, as Wilson understood them, represented the founders’ constitution as it was originally intended to be.” But then, Pestritto says, he praises Abraham Lincoln for treating the Constitution as a living document that is intended for evolution, and opts for a pro-Union view. Pestritto argues this means Wilson was “no southern partisan.” 

The way Wilson constructs his argument, however, strikes me as though he had felt pressure to choose the northern side of the debate – almost as though, in other words, he was afraid of being “cancelled” (censored) for his Calhoun views. In any case, Calhoun’s thinking was pervasive in the South when Wilson grew up, and if we seek an explanation for these particular views showing up in Wilson’s thinking before he began to read the Germans, an explanation including Calhoun’s influence in the South seems much more likely than one that excludes it.