The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson's racism

For decades the conventional wisdom among Woodrow Wilson scholars was that his infamous racism towards African Americans was the product of his being a child of the American South – a simple enough argument and seemingly obvious. However, more recently a strange counterargument keeps emerging in the literature: He was racist, but his racism did not stem from his origins in the American South. This is a harder case to make and has been used to inaccurately diminish his reputation for racism.  

Perhaps the first expression of this counterargument was made by the preeminent Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link in a 1970 paper entitled “Woodrow Wilson: The American as Southerner.” Link began his career as a skeptic about President Wilson, but in his last days went so far as to name Wilson as the most impressive person he’d ever read about besides Jesus and St. Paul. This may explain why Link appears to have gone from arguing the conventional wisdom early in his career to innovating the counterargument. “The earlier writings of Link tend to rely heavily on the assumption that Wilson’s racial views were grounded in his southern heritage,” writes Ronald J. Pestritto in a footnote in his monograph Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism. “Yet Link’s later scholarship on this issue—no doubt having benefitted from his working on the multivolume collection of Wilson’s papers—shows a much greater appreciation for how much Wilson departed from the traditional southern worldview.” He cites “The American as Southerner” and goes on to note that “Link does in this essay, however, give Wilson more credit for a favorable view of the black race than I believe is warranted by the evidence.” This is so true it’s worth going into detail about Link’s essay, which we shall do shortly.

In 2008 historian Gary Gerstle added his voice to the counterargument in an essay in John Milton Cooper’s anthology Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson. “Much has been written about Wilson's racial attitudes,” Gerstle wrote. “One popular school of thought, associated with Arthur S. Link, grounds his racism in his white southern heritage. In this view, virtually no white southerners of Wilson's time were prepared to regard blacks as their equals, with the same claims as whites on the promise of American life—liberty, equality, and opportunity … However, we cannot understand Woodrow entirely in terms of his residence in and experience of the South.” Gerstle's arguments are not without merit: The Wilson family "had strong northern roots." Even Woodrow's father, a Presbyterian minister who preached for slavery from the southern pulpit, lived in Ohio for 29 years before heading south to Virginia. Wilson also had six uncles who lived in the north. Gerstle admits we know very little about his attitudes towards the northern family, which means he said little about them in his papers. And he makes a solid argument that Wilson's philosophy in his youth mixed an identification with the South with some sympathy for certain Northern ideals. ("Because I love the south," Wilson said, "I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy ... Even the damnable cruelty and folly of Reconstruction was to be preferred to helpless independence.") It is true that Wilson's southern origins can be caricatured, but that does not mean his racism doesn't emanate primarily from his sympathy with the South.

Pestritto shares Gerstle’s thesis, as the former points out in a review of Gerstle's essay and the book it appears in, in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He restates Gerstle's thesis even more directly before rebutting him with his less sound reasoning for the same argument: “While Gerstle is very much correct to reject the tired notion that Wilson's reprehensible views on race came from his origins in America's South, he doesn't quite put his finger on the fact that Wilson's racism was, in large part, a product of his German historicism, where human progress takes place by way of the rise and fall of particular peoples or races.”

Rebutting Pestritto

This idea that Wilson’s racism came from his Hegelianism seems easy to rebut: he wrote racist things before he read Hegel as a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University. Actually it’s harder on those grounds to rebut than one might think, because his statements on race and slavery as a young man were few and far between. That might be because his mother actively urged him to hide his views from his Northern friends, or as she called them, “your Radical companions” (the capital letter implying they are Radical Republicans who supported the rights of African Americans): 

 
“My darling son,
I have been thinking more than usual, even, about you the last few days. The fear that you may be provoked beyond endurance, during these anxious days, by those Radical companions of yours, has crept into my heart. I know your self-control – or I would be miserable – but it is so hard to bear their ignorant thrusts quietly – and yet that is the only thing to be done – for ones own self respects sake. I trust you have been brave enough to disregard their insolence. Tommy dear don’t talk about knocking any body down – no matter what they do or say – or rather don’t think of doing such a thing. Such people are beneath your notice. Besides they don’t mean anything personal—strange as it may seem …

God bless you my darling …
               Your own mother.”

The picture history provides of Wilson’s youth is, however, clearly not that of someone who only began to believe in racial discrimination only after 1883, when he began reading Hegel and other Germans in the PhD program at Johns Hopkins. Two years before that, he more than once described African Americans as an “ignorant and inferior” race and from his undergraduate days at Princeton in the 1870s vehemently opposed the vote for blacks. In February of 1881 he made notes in the margins of a document saying that southerners did not dread the Republican Party but opposed it “because the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.” A few days later he used the same phrase (“ignorant and inferior race”) publicly in a newspaper article titled “Stray thoughts from the South.” As an undergraduate at Princeton University, in his diary in June of 1876, he wrote, “Universal suffrage is at the foundation of every evil in this country!” Later at Princeton he refused to participate in a debate on universal suffrage because he didn’t want to argue the affirmative even though he ordinarily accepted the academic debate style wherein the affirmative and negative positions on each topic are assigned regardless of the students' own political perspectives.

In fact, one of Wilson’s southern relatives saw him as more southern than their neighbors. Margaret Axson Elliott, the younger sister of Wilson’s first wife Ellen Axson Wilson, begins her book My Aunt Louisa and Woodrow Wilson by explaining the similarities between those two figures: “They were children of Presbyterian ministers, who had moved South and had become more southern than the Southerners.” This is quite a different description of Woodrow than Pestritto and other biographers, who tend to seize upon his having come from northern stock as a reason to interpret Wilson as somehow less southern than other southerners, and often therefore as less bigoted toward African Americans.

In his book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism Pestritto says Wilson’s “views on race” are “mostly attributable” to the “historicist nature of his political philosophy.” The book’s few short paragraphs on the subject of race begin with that thesis sentence, and then back it up with quotes from The State, a book Wilson wrote after starting at Johns Hopkins. (He would later cite as evidence that Wilson was heavily influenced by Hegel, who used the phrase “the State” often, the fact “that the title of the book is The State, for Pete’s sake.”) Pestritto notes that “In The State, Wilson explained that certain races had been ‘progressive,’ and that all governments must have had their historical foundations in the beginnings of these ‘progressive races.’” 

Perhaps Pestritto is right to argue that this is influenced by German historicists. And he’s not wrong to cite the book as evidence of Wilson’s racism. In it, Wilson lists a handful of “races” whose governments are worth studying. He then dismisses the others as unnecessary to study, not merely in the scope of his book but at all. “To know other systems which are defeated or dead,” he says, “would aid only indirectly towards an understanding of those which are alive and triumphant.” As Pestritto notes, “he traced the roots of modern government to the development of three races in particular: Aryan, Semitic and Turanian.” Pestritto does not mention that Wilson then effectively rules out the Semitic and Turnaian as worthy of only a secondary place, leaving only the Aryan as primarily worthy of study:

“Even Semitic institutions, indeed, must occupy only a secondary place in such inquiries. The main stocks of modern European forms of government are Aryan. The institutional history of Semitic or Turanian peoples is hardly part of the history of European governments: it is only analogous to it in many of the earlier stages of development.”

But as I’ve shown, Wilson’s racism precedes The State. It also precedes a later work that Pestritto cites next, which was written after 1890. Moreover, Pestritto cites Hegel – and only Hegel – as the source of the racism in those documents.

A look through the 69-volume Wilson papers (which Pestritto cited in a 2019 article in American Mind as the source of his suspicion that Hegel was a big influence) shows only a handful references to Hegel, and the evidence that he has read any Hegel begins after his Hopkins career in 1883. It is true that there is one reference to Hegel in a document Wilson wrote in 1876, a so-called “Index Rerum” that consists of quotations from books Wilson has read. But the reference is made in passing by an encyclopedia entry on Aristotle, not from any first-hand reading in German literature. It reads, “It is acknowledged by Kant and (Hegel), the two most profound thinkers of Germany, that from the time of Aristotle to their own age logic had made no progress.” The strange parenthetical is in Link’s Wilson Papers and is unexplained anywhere in the book. Perhaps Wilson’s handwriting was hard to read in that spot. But after that, Hegel disappears until 1883.

It doesn’t take more than 15 minutes to find and read all the other references to Hegel in the copious writings Wilson produced in and after his Hopkins years. First, there are his notes on Hegel from an 1884 lecture on Herbert Spencer at Johns Hopkins. (“There is a lot of truth in this view,” Wilson adjudges Hegel’s ideas from the lecture.) Second, in an 1885 letter to his then-fiancee, Ellen Axson, Wilson refers to “Hegel’s beautiful conception, that [men and women] can find their true selves only in the love and devotion of family life.” Third, in a lengthy essay on “The Study of Administration” Wilson briefly quotes Hegel as saying that the philosophy of any time is “nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought.” Fourth, in a “working bibliography” that covers all of Wilson’s work from 1883 to 1890, Wilson cites a single book by Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, as translated by J. Sibree. In 1892 he wrote another “Bibliography of Law” that included another single work of Hegel’s, this time in German, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. That’s it until a little joke someone else told mentioning Hegel in 1908, and then a poignant anecdote from a cousin of Wilson’s about his now late wife Ellen, among a collection of memories sent to Wilson less than a month into his period of mourning, in which Ellen is remembered as saying “I had always supposed I was not intelligent enough to read Kant and Hegel. But they were quite comprehensible.” That covers all of the references to Hegel in the Wilson Papers.

So while Pestritto makes a nice case that Hegel and the Germans may have influenced Wilson’s thought, it hardly amounts to evidence that his racism against African Americans, which apparently started at an early age, is “mostly attributable” to the “historicist” nature of his philosophy, meaning his Hegelian and German influences. While it is true that Pestritto allows that “to attribute Wilson’s historical thinking to Hegel is not to suggest that Wilson absorbed all of his argument directly from the German thinker,” in the short section on race he offers no other thinkers but Hegel. Wilson never referenced Hegel’s theory of race.

Rebutting Link

Link’s essay “The American as Southerner” deserves a close look here, as he is the foremost Wilson scholar, the editor of the monumental Woodrow Wilson Papers, and as it goes so far as to argue the South barely impacted Wilson. “That southern birth, rearing, and partial education left slight marks on Wilson in his maturity can be seen when we apply a few necessarily crude tests of southernness to his thinking about certain issues during the period 1883-1895,” Link wrote. The second of these issues covers what Link calls Wilson’s “attitudes toward the Negro”: “Wilson,” Link writes, “is supposed to have been a southerner most markedly in his attitudes toward the Negro. However, if he was a southerner in this regard, he belonged to that tiny minority who were in advance even of the groups whom Guion Griffis Johnson has called progressionists and paternalists.” 

This is a somewhat audacious assertion on Link's part. The obscure book Link cites with an essay by Johnson is edited by a former college professor of his, Fletcher Green, who in fact first inspired Link to look into Wilson as a subject of research. I was unable to find any reference in the cited essay to “progressionists,” but it does refer to “those who accepted the theory of progress through education.” When one reads Johnson’s essay one sees that Wilson’s views were not that far ahead of what Link says Johnson calls the “progressionists.” Link seems to imply Wilson is ahead of the paternalists and progressionists because Wilson advocated mandatory education for black people. But Johnson specifically says this view was common not just in 1883 when Wilson was writing but before the period of Reconstruction as well:

“No American writer of the period who tried seriously to analyze the race problem failed to find some comfort in the hope of education. The extent of hope usually depended upon the writer’s concept of the theory of progress, and the theory of progress was itself undergoing a vast change at the very time that equalitarianism was being incorporated into the federal constitution. The hypothesis of progression from a lower to a higher state was expressed first by the moral philosophers and then by the natural scientists. From this position it was but a step to the application of the theory to all plant and animal life including man.”

Meanwhile, what Johnson calls the “paternalists” also favor education, which in no way makes them enlightened about African Americans. Thus Wilson’s view in 1881 is not necessarily more advanced than that of the paternalists, but in some ways actually behind many of them, as he continued to oppose the amendments that granted suffrage to black men and these “paternalist” laws attempted to enforce them. It is true that the article proffers examples of attitudes toward African Americans that are less advanced than Wilson’s, but they are in general not the paternalists or the progress advocates Link calls “progressionists”, contrary to Link’s claim.

Returning to Link’s essay “The American as Southerner,” he writes: “As early as 1881 we find Wilson writing hopefully about the development of a class of sturdy, independent Negro landowners in the South, advocating compulsory education for Negroes who did not want to go to school, and applauding independent Negro political action.”

 But the essay that Link is referring to from 1881 is the one we've earlier cited as referring to African Americans as an ignorant and inferior race:

“Under such circumstances the choice of the white voters was quickly and naturally made. The alternatives presented to them were, to be ruled by an ignorant and an inferior race, or to band themselves in a political union not to be broken til the danger had passed. They determined … never to suffer themselves to be ruled by another race in every respect so unlike themselves; and in that resolve they cannot be, they should not be, shaken.”

Wilson quotes with explicit admiration “the Hon. AHH Stuart, of Virginia”: “The Southern people are, he says, opposed to ‘ignorant suffrage, entirely irrespective of race or color.’ They do not object to the votes of the negroes ‘because they are negroes—because their faces are dark …We object to their votes because their minds are dark—because they are ignorant, uneducated and incompetent to form an enlightened opinion on any of the public questions which they may be called on to decide at the polls.’” This position does not show much growth from his earlier remark that universal suffrage is the root of all evil. 

Link goes on to claim that “Whatever youthful doubts Wilson may have had about the wisdom of the Fifteenth Amendment and of universal male suffrage were clearly gone by the time, 1885, that he wrote his first general treatise on democratic government.” But that treatise, which Link identifies in the footnotes as the essay “Modern Democratic State,” contains another classic Wilson swipe at universal suffrage: “Not mere universal suffrage constitutes democracy. Universal suffrage may confirm a coup d’etat which destroys liberty.” How Link managed to read this essay as endorsing universal suffrage is a mystery.

Link’s essay also made a particularly strange argument about a dramatic episode in his young life, an argument Wilson’s father got into with a college professor with whose family the future president went on to have an antagonistic relationship for decades. First, Link makes the sound point that Wilson chose a northern college when he first had the chance to pick. Then, strangely, he brings up the argument between Wilson’s dad and his professor:

“More impressive is the evidence that we have about Wilson's undergraduate convictions, interests, and reactions. He could dismiss Professor Henry Clay Cameron, a professional southerner, in his diary with the contemptuous re mark that the professor of Greek at Princeton was a "jackass on the southern question."'

That Link finds this evidence even "more impressive" is surprising as he completely misinterprets the whole incident. Wilson doesn’t actually call him “a jackass on the southern question.” Wilson says “We met Professor Cameron in the hall of the hotel and father had quite a discussion with the jackass (emphasis Wilson’s) on the southern question.” In context this clearly implies that “on the southern question” modifies “had quite a discussion with the jackass,” not that Cameron was a jackass on the southern question. Wilson goes on to say that Cameron “is one of the kind of men who have rent the country and are the curse of the South. He is one of those who says that he was born in the South and knows all about it when they know less than a two-year-old baby. Such men are a scandal to leaders, as Macaulay said of Croker.”

Link presents this as evidence that Wilson was taking the northern position in an argument with a “professional southerner.” But we can tell from Link's own Wilson papers that Cameron made a pro-Republican speech after the 1876 presidential election. And we learn from a newer book by an expert on Princeton (William Barksdale Maynard’s 2008 Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency) that Professor Henry Clay Cameron was not a proslavery southern partisan but a Radical Republican, an advocate for the total and complete abolition of slavery; the virtual opposite of Wilson’s father’s position. Cameron's own letters at Princeton University make it clear that he supported Republican President Benjamin Harrison, and offer no evidence he was ever a southerner, let alone a professional one. 

What is the southern question? From the World Biography of US Presidents:

“The southern question, as Republicans were apt to refer to it, actually had two distinct components: Could the black people be protected in the enjoyment of the economic, legal and political rights they had won as a consequence of the Civil War, and could the Republican party prevent the South from being made over into a Democratic monolith? Few, if any, Republicans believed the two components could be separated.”

Maynard’s vivid account of the incident places the blame for the argument on Wilson’s father. He writes that Wilson as a young man at Princeton “yawned at the famous Princeton scientists," and that “His condescension toward all these professors owed much to Joseph [Ruggles Wilson], who quarreled publicly with Professor Cameron over Reconstruction politics in the hallway of the University Hotel and who had long ago convinced Tommy that true self-improvement comes from hard solitary work, not classrooms.”

What side did Wilson and his father take in the debate on the “southern question”?  Wilson didn't put his views in ink until years later, but when he did he argued that southerners would be open to voting for Republicans if they would only give up the fight for African Americans' rights. 

Thus Link's attempt to impress us with Wilson's relative lack of racism fails each time he brings it up. And Wilson's racism is very specifically rooted in his southern roots, at least before 1883. That Wilson stayed on the wrong side of the race question is established elsewhere. Gerstle for instance notes that the president was heard telling jokes about African Americans as late as 1919, on the way to the Paris peace talks.