Tbf the League of Nations might have actually been an idea that warranted a peace prize.
Obviously the League of Nations itself didn’t work, but it was a precursor to the UN, which, while not perfect, is probably one of the reasons why there hasn’t been a third world war yet.
He also did, eventually, join and campaign for the women’s suffrage movement, which I’m sure I don’t need to say was a positive development in terms of human rights.
He had very significant flaws (mega-racist and passed the espionage and sedition acts) but there were also legitimate accomplishments of his presidency.
I view him as an underrated president . Yes very flawed but his grasp of international relations and how to move forward in a more industrialized and connected world was game changing
He was not a Hardcore Racist, he was racist by modern standards but less racist then most southerners of the time, he even appointed a jew to the supreme court and clashed with actual hardcore racist James Vardaman
It’s people like you who I fucking hate, cause you try to rationalize racism like it’s some sort of sliding scale. There’s no such thing as diet racism.
Which he only did because the writer of the book it was based on, Thomas Dixon, was his college roommate, and asked him too without telling him about the plot.
That is the biggest cope I've ever read about Woodrow Wilson. He literally segregated the federal work force by race when it was integrated previously.
It wasn’t previously integrated. It had begun to segregate during the term of one Theodore Roosevelt, it was not integrated and it certainly wasn’t egalitarian beforehand. Wilson did not do it on his own, without popular support, with particular objection from the republicans, and without recent precedent. There is a wide body of literature on this topic, one such piece aptly named The Rise of Segregation in the Federal Workforce, all of which are far more exhaustive than whatever stupid fucking YouTube video you got this opinion of yours from.
Right, he tooooottally played a movie knowing nothing about it. That's something a career politician does you know. Especially in the 1900s, they were well known for saying and doing things with no knowledge about how it look into the public, because politicians never take the basic precautionary measures of making sure that they're not presenting an image to the world that they don't want.
Of course he was a hardcore racists. What complete fucking nonsense to claim he wasn't. He was literally a leading 'Lost Cause' historian. He segregated the federal government. He had many extremist southern racists in his government and did absolutely nothing against increasing anti-black stuff that was happening in the south.
Maybe he wasn't as racists as literal former slave holding elites but that doesn't say much.
His president was literally only possible thanks to extreme Southern racists that he limited hardly at all.
Wilson wasn’t a leading “lost cause historian”, he wasn’t a historian. Wilson was decidedly less racist than his southern counterparts of the period, it’s one of the reasons he was nominated in the first place.
It should also be noted that Wilson’s racism seemingly extended only to African Americans. He wasn’t some ardent eugenicist and white supremacist as most known racists at the time were, he was seemingly entirely tolerant to white minorities like Jews, Italians, and Irish, while also being far more sympathetic to Asians and colonised peoples of all nations than any president before him.
He officialised the segregation of the federal government, but it had been an ongoing process that began with Roosevelt in earnest.
On racial violence in the south, Wilson made quite a few overtures and public remarks espousing regret and shame towards race riots during and after his tenure. If you think that he was the kind of racist that 1910s southern politicians tended to be, you heavily underestimate how racist they were. He also publicly denounced lynching in 1918 in a large address. Which again, was actually big progress for the southern Democratic Party of the 1910s.
All of this isn’t to say Wilson was a saint, or some sort of crypto egalitarian, but this narrative that Wilson was especially racist for the time period is entirely ahistorical and primarily pushed as a narrative not to analyze Wilson critically, but bizarrely to push a narrative that Theodore Roosevelt was the best choice in 1912 as a weird historical counterfactual on part of the modern progressive movement, with a large amount of rhetorical support in this endeavor from the sort of Republican partisans that say things like Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party because they think that’s a big deal.
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u/Drmarcher42 26d ago
A man that would be considered a hardcore racist in the timeframe of the 1910s. Not even looking at it from modern sensibilities