WHEN YOU’RE A DEMOCRAT WHO’S LOST THE ECONOMIST…: Woodrow Wilson’s reputation continues to decline.
How will Joe Biden and Donald Trump be remembered a century from now? Presidential legacies change over time. For decades, Woodrow Wilson, America’s president from 1913-21 who died 100 years ago, enjoyed a reputation as an enlightened internationalist. He established the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission; he backed the creation of the League of Nations, a precursor to the UN, and was a staunch advocate for democracy abroad. In 1948 Arthur Schlesinger senior, a historian at Harvard, asked 55 other historians to rank the presidents in order of greatness: Wilson came fourth, behind Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt.
More recently Wilson has been downgraded, with his racism and sexism eclipsing his accomplishments. In 2020 Princeton stripped his name from its public-affairs school; Washington, DC’s biggest high school did the same in 2022. In “Woodrow Wilson”, Christopher Cox, a Republican who served in Congress for eight terms before running the Securities and Exchange Commission, offers a doggedly researched and soberly told story of American progress—and the president who stood in its way.
A Democrat and the first president from the South since the civil war, Wilson opposed constitutional amendments that extended citizenship and voting rights to all, arguing that it “put the negroes upon a footing of civil equality with the whites”. He allowed the white supremacists he chose for his cabinet to resegregate the federal workforce.
Still though, Wilson will always have David Frum: There’s No Defending Woodrow Wilson.
Frum’s article, “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson,” appears in the March 2024 issue of the Atlantic. How perverse a choice is it to write on this now? Consider that the last thing the magazine published was a special issue dedicated to the topic “If Trump Wins,” warning of peril to the American system and the civil liberties of our people from a man who would come to the Oval Office with a dictatorial temperament and contempt for the constraints of our Constitution. Frum himself contributed a screed against the menace of such a president:
If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury. A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. . . . For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.
How terrible to contemplate a president who loathes the Constitution and is bent on permanently subverting it. And worse, imagine one who might win the job without a popular majority at his back, owing to an opposition divided by a third-party challenge:
If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time.
If the nation indeed stands at such a precipice, you and I might think it the worst possible occasion to laud Woodrow Wilson. But you and I are not David Frum.
Yet another thing each of us can be thankful for this week.