Woodrow Wilson — scapegoat?

For the past year, a student group called the Black Justice League has festooned the Princeton campus with samples of Wilson’s more egregious quotes, like his comment to an African-American leader that “segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you” and his remark that interracial marriage would “degrade the white nations.” Last month 200 Princeton students walked out of classes to protest the university’s Wilson-worship, and some 15 of them spent a night occupying the office of Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, demanding that Princeton “publicly acknowledge the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson” and take steps to rename Princeton’s prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as well as the student residential complex known as Wilson College.

These events raise two questions in my mind:

1. Since Woodrow Wilson left Princeton in 1910, and since he left the White House in 1921, and since he died in 1924, and since Princeton named its public policy school for him in 1948 — what took them so long?
2. Why did president Eisgruber seem so eager to accommodate these protesters? (As Eisgruber put it to the New York Times, “One of the benefits of having a genuine public discussion, informed by scholarly opinion, about some of these questions is that it can help educate people about problems that go beyond the symbol in our society.”)

Jews and Catholics, too

To answer my first question: Until very recently there were very few African Americans at Princeton to even raise the issue. Princeton didn’t admit its first black student until the 1940s and enrolled only a handful for decades thereafter. For that matter, Princeton didn’t admit women until 1969, so it’s only a matter of time before Princeton women discover Woodrow Wilson’s retrograde opinions of the fair sex as well (he once described women as sources of “intellectual entertainment,” and he opposed women’s suffrage for his first five years in the White House before angry demonstrations forced him to reverse his position).

Similarly, Wilson’s opinions of Jews, Catholics, and Hispanics remain unplumbed because, again, such people were rarely found at Princeton until a generation or so ago. Since Wilson was the son of a Southern Presbyterian minister, I suspect those groups will soon find valid reason to protest as well.

Which brings me to my second question. For Princeton and President Eisgruber, this Woodrow Wilson controversy provides a convenient distraction from the larger underlying issue, which is not Woodrow Wilson’s bigotry but the narrow and exclusionary culture that until recently prevailed at Princeton University itself.

Students with slaves

At its founding in 1746 (as the College of New Jersey), Princeton was a relatively liberal place by 18th-century standards: It began as a Presbyterian seminary for followers of the revivalist George Whitefield, whose “New Light” philosophy had broken away from the more conservative “Old Light” Presbyterian strain. By the time of the American Revolution, Princeton was considered, according to the social historian Nathaniel Burt (himself a resident of Princeton town), “the most heterogeneous, cosmopolitan, liberal of American institutions.” Yet while other seminaries like Harvard and Yale, not to mention the nonsectarian University of Pennsylvania, evolved into more worldly colleges, Princeton largely stood still. In the 19th century, it became (Burt’s words, again), “parochial, reactionary and decadent.”

One explanation, perhaps, is that Princeton was the most Southern of America’s Northern institutions. Wilson (Class of 1879) was merely one of many Virginians who enrolled there. Princeton town’s small black community (which included the great actor and singer Paul Robeson) traces its origins to the descendants of slaves brought to Princeton before the Civil War by college students from the South. Inside Nassau Hall, the oldest building on campus, you will find a monument to Princeton graduates who died in America’s early wars, from the Revolution though the Civil War. It’s a moving testament to their devotion to their country — until you notice that nearly half of Princeton’s Civil War casualties died fighting for the Confederacy. (When Woodrow Wilson coined the motto “Princeton In the Nation’s Service,” he cleverly declined to specify which nation he had in mind.)

Wilson’s blind spot

By 1900, Princeton had cemented its reputation as a “gentleman’s college,” infamous for what Burt calls its “notorious clubbiness, conformism, convention-mindedness, insistence upon appearances. . .the dreadful importance of belonging and being accepted.” In literature (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or The Caine Mutiny, for example), theater (South Pacific), and cinema (Kings Go Forth), Princeton became a shorthand symbol for snobbery and prejudice.

As Princeton’s president from 1902 to 1910, Woodrow Wilson launched its expansion into a full-scale modern university. He lifted educational standards, created academic majors, and introduced the small-group classes, often led by professors, known as precepts. He also worked to curb Princeton’s elitism, trying unsuccessfully to eliminate undergraduate eating clubs, for example. But on matters of race, gender, and ethnicity this otherwise progressive statesman and educator was tone-deaf. Although Harvard, Yale, and Penn began admitting black students after the Civil War, none were admitted at Princeton on Wilson’s watch. “The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no Negro has ever applied,” he explained.

In the White House from 1913 to 1921, similarly, Wilson dragged America into the 20th century with a host of progressive policies and actions. (He was the first U.S. president to nominate a Jew [Louis Brandeis] to the Supreme Court.) Yet he rolled back the gains that blacks had made since Reconstruction, removing black officials from the federal government and overseeing the segregation of rank-and-file workers.

Ted Cruz on Islam

Having belatedly recognized the educational benefits of diversity, Princeton has lately made up for lost time in its admission of minorities. Today its undergraduate student body is about 8 percent black (although its black faculty ratio is only 2 percent). Women comprise about half of its undergrads. Jews, Catholics, Asians, and Hispanics are no longer endangered species on campus, though their ratios still trail behind other Ivy League schools. Not coincidentally, over the past generation Princeton has been repeatedly recognized for offering one of the best undergraduate educations in the world.

Need I add that these advances were bitterly resisted by Princeton alums? The Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a group founded in 1972, decried Princeton’s efforts to admit women and minority students and lobbied instead for admitting men from alumni families. In the group’s magazine, Prospect, one of its founders fondly recalled the days when Princeton was “a body of men, relatively homogenous in backgrounds and interests.” Among its members was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Class of ’72, who graduated with Princeton’s last all-male class. CAP has since disbanded, but its narrow mindset persists. Just last month U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, Princeton ’92, declared that Shariah, the law of Islam, “is an enormous problem” in the United States.

Where did Woodrow Wilson, Samuel Alito, Ted Cruz et al. acquire their prejudices? As the song from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific put it, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” Generations of Princeton students were indeed carefully taught — and on a homogeneous campus, they reinforced each other's biases. Wilson was merely one of them.