Like, I suppose, a lot of conservatives, I have mixed feelings about the campaign to take Woodrow Wilson’s name off of buildings and programs that currently bear it at Princeton University. (I write about it, and political correctness, in the new NR.) Reading some of the defenses of Wilson, though, tends to make me more inclined to side with the protesters.
Take, for example, liberal historian David Greenberg’s defense of Wilson’s record on race from what he regards as simple-minded criticism. Greenberg notes, first, that Wilson was at heart a Northern progressive rather than a Southern reactionary—which is no defense at all for those of us who do not consider being progressive a virtue. Indeed, this argument takes away from Wilson any defense rooted in his upbringing in the Jim Crow South. (Julian Zelizer, meanwhile, tries to have it both ways: Wilson’s upbringing excuses his racial views, while his progressivism on other matters shows how admirably he transcended that upbringing.) Greenberg next points out that the Democratic party that Wilson led relied politically on the South. But politicians who take unjust actions almost always have comprehensible political motives for doing so. That fact is not normally used to render those actions immune to moral judgment. Nor, I suspect, would Greenberg apply this defense to conservative politicians who took actions he considers unjust: He would not excuse those actions because after all their conservative supporters favored them.
A Liberal's Weak Defense of Woodrow Wilson