PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: David Frum Announces Misguided Quest to Rehabilitate the Reputation of One of America’s Worst Presidents.
Next Saturday, February 3, marks 100 years since the death of President Woodrow Wilson. No US president has suffered such a calamitous collapse in reputation from peak to now. In the issue of the Atlantic that ships Monday, I argue the case for uncancelling Wilson.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) January 27, 2024
I dunno — Woodrow Wilson sounds like a pretty awful fella based on what I’ve read in the past:
Wilson was also the most disdainful racist to hold the presidency since Andrew Johnson in the 1860s. Wilson’s administration sought to remove black Americans from all but the most menial federal employment. Those who could not be removed were required to work in spaces screened from public view and to use segregated lunchrooms and toilets. When a black newspaper editor led a delegation to Washington to protest the introduction of Southern Jim Crow into the national government, Wilson — a slaveholder’s son — retorted that segregation “was not humiliating, but a benefit” to black people.
Wilson led the United States into the First World War in April 1917, justifying his decision in characteristically idealistic language: “to make the world safe for democracy.” Only five months before, he had won reelection on an antiwar platform: “he kept us out of war.”
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Yet these same admirers also quietly came to see Wilson as the very model of how not to be president: as a dogmatist, a chatterbox, and, ultimately, a loser. When it came their turn to decide issues of war and peace, they praised Wilson — then did just the opposite. That seems likely to be the lasting verdict of history, too.
—“Mystery Man,” David Frum, Newsweek, March 11th, 2013.
Related: The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson. “I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.”