Recently, different groups of students have argued for and against removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs and Wilson College. One side has argued that Wilson’s legacy is corrupted by his personal racism and the racist policies he implemented while President of the United States. The other side has argued that the University cannot remove Wilson simply because he is flawed; otherwise, they claim, we would need to erase the representation of scores of other similarly flawed historical figures who accomplished great things. If Princeton is to have an inclusive campus, however, the university must empathize with those students who bear the long-term social and economic costs of Wilson’s racist policies and who feel marginalized by the celebration of a president who actively oppressed their ancestors.
Many of the historical figures we celebrate are flawed, a point that has become somewhat of a cliched defense for Wilson supporters, who believe that removing Wilson, as Geoffrey Stone says, “invites an endless array of similar claims” for removing other historical figures. Indeed, we should not stop celebrating an individual whom we would otherwise praise simply because they held beliefs contrary to our own present day ideals; we should not focus on the views they personally held or what they did in their personal lives. Rather, the correct way to evaluate these historical figures is to appraise the lasting social, political, and economic effects of their actions. If an individual’s actions produced lasting social and political harm, like Wilson’s did for African-Americans in the twentieth century, that individual’s legacy is not worth preserving.
Some figures are so flawed that many people believe they must not be honored or celebrated in any way. For example, owing to his brutal suppression and slaughter of Native Americans, certain universities in the U.S. have stripped Christopher Columbus’ name from campus celebrations of the traditional holiday, giving way to “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” In an even more extreme case of rejected legacies, nowhere in German cities will you find a monument or memorial dedicated to Nazi-affiliated historical figures. People refuse to honor these figures not because of their flawed personal beliefs, but because of their actions and the horrendous consequences of their actions for historically oppressed groups.
In contrast, if an individual, despite harboring flawed beliefs, enacts policies that create positive and lasting historical effects, their legacy should be honored. Consider the example of Abraham Lincoln. In 1858, while debating his political rival Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln expressed his belief that blacks and whites should not be equal and spoke against racial intermarriage: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” These words were uttered by the very same Lincoln who would later go on to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and make the abolition of slavery one of the foremost ends of the American Civil War. Lincoln, partly because of his inconsistent opinions on race and slavery, has earned a vigorously contested legacy—as early as 1875, Frederick Douglass called him “preeminently the white man’s President.” Yet, contrary to Douglass and others’ views, Lincoln’s deeds ultimately produced a positive political and social change for black Americans and the United States as a whole by bringing an end to slavery. For these reasons, the American public should and generally does view Lincoln positively in light of the lasting good perpetuated by his actions.
Similarly, we should judge Thomas Jefferson in light of his anti-slavery policies rather than his personal ownership of slaves. Though William & Mary students have recently challenged their university’s celebration of his legacy, Jefferson played a critical role in prefiguring the end of slavery in the U.S. by outlawing the import of slaves. In this way, Jefferson helped restrict the extent of slavery and facilitated its eventual demise; his own ownership of slaves and personal affair with his slave Sally Hemings, as horrible as they were, did not affect the larger status of slaves in the nation. While Jefferson could have allied with the growing abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth century and done more to eliminate slavery outright, we still cannot ignore the fact that his decision to end the international slave trade to the U.S. brought about a positive historical change.
In the current debate on campus regarding the celebration of Wilson’s legacy, the reality is that, for black citizens of the United States, he was no Lincoln or Jefferson. If we judge Wilson not by his flawed beliefs (which were similar to Lincoln’s views from half a century earlier) but by his political actions and the effects they produced, we must condemn him as a president who reinforced racial inequality in the U.S. and worsened the social and economic status of African-Americans. Whatever you make of his legacy as a pioneer of idealism in international relations and a leader of the Progressive movement, his decision to actively segregate a previously integrated federal government stands at the end of a long line of policies that only impaired efforts to advance the cause of racial equality in the U.S. and exacerbated the suffering of black Americans.
When black students and their allies at Princeton condemn Wilson and demand the removal of his name from university buildings, they do so less because they are offended by the racist views he personally held and more because their families were the victims of the racist policies he implemented. Those who defend Wilson do so because they fail to understand this and lack empathy for a people whose ancestors have suffered and who continue to suffer as a result of the lasting consequences of his segregationist policies. Defending Wilson thus serves nothing but to counteract efforts to make Princeton’s campus more inclusive of the university’s African-American students.
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