Woodrow Wilson.
Great scholar.
Great idealist.
Woodrow Wilson.
Racist and off the charts hypocrite!
The first movie ever shown at the White House was during Woodrow Wilson's presidency and
it was a film called Birth of a Nation.
It was about the origins of the KKK and it presented them as heroes, saving the South
against the evil North.
We tend to think that 100 years ago America was much more racist and this sort of thing
was regarded as acceptable, and it's true!
America was a lot more racist, but even so this film and book were enormously controversial
at the time.
The NAACP tried to get the film banned, but this is the movie that Wilson chose to show
at the White House, and it was perfectly in line with his ideology of both white nationalism
and internationally, white supremacy.
The screening of that movie is just emblematic of much larger problems in the Wilson administration,
including the reintroduction of segregation into government offices in Washington.
There's an idea we have that after the Civil War but before the Civil Rights era things
were bad for African Americans consistently, but it wasn't consistent.
Things got better after the Civil War, there was an attempt at integration especially among
the radical Republicans in the North and in the federal government itself.
It was Wilson who one of the first things he did once he got into the White House is
to say "we are reintroducing segregation."
Many of these African American citizens who had jobs, who were educated, who were doing
hard work, were demoted or even fired without cause.
Wilson regarded as outrageous that a white woman would have to share a desk, for example,
with a black man at work.
And we're talking about things like separate bathrooms by race, separate cafeterias, screened
off workspaces, we even have an incident involving one black employee, a clerk, who due to the
nature of his work could not be segregated, so he had to have a cage built around him
in order to keep him separate from the other workers.
1914 his first term, the federal government required that if you were taking a civil service
exam or you were applying for a job, now you had to include a photograph.
I wonder what that photograph was used for?
And by the way we're not talking about views that Wilson held a long time ago and then
he grew while he was in office and became better.
No, while he was in office he implemented what he had always believed.
And in fact in a meeting with a civil rights leader at the end of 1914, he just came right
out and said it to the man's face.
"Segregation is not a humiliation" he said, "but a benefit and ought to be so regarded
by you gentlemen."
So it's not even that he was racist, but grudgingly accepted black support that he regarded as
inferior, he said, "if the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought
to correct it."
And he was still making excuses for slavery 50 years after it ended.
He said, "the domestic slaves, and almost all who were much under the master's eye,
were happy and well cared for."
When he was president of Princeton University he was asked if he would ever allow African
Americans to become students, he said, "the whole temper and tradition of the place are
such that no Negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems unlikely that the question will
ever assume practical form."
And it's not just black people he's denigrating, he also has plenty to say about Asians.
He says, " In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration I stand for the national
policy of exclusion...
We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian
race...
Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve, and surely we have had our
lesson."
And it's not just denigrating black people, it's not just denigrating Asian people, it's
also whites.
The wrong kind of whites.
He was complaining about immigrants from Italy, Hungary, and Poland, and said "it's as if
the countries of the South of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid
and hapless elements of their population."
Tom, you're Italian aren't you?
I most certainly am not.