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https://www.chronicle.com/article/be...eg_wall_signup
The following interview of biographer A. Scott Berg offers an interesting perspective on "presentism," or how to view and honor historic individuals through a modern lens. Berg is both a Woodrow Wilson biographer and a Princeton University trustee. He had a ringside seat this summer when the Princeton Board of Trustees decided to remove Wilson's name from two important university institutions. This was not an easy decision for the Princeton board, because as President of Princeton University, Wilson had arguably launched Princeton onto a path towards greatness. He along with James Madison are the only two Princeton alumni who became President, and he is the only Princetonian to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Woodrow Wilson as President of Princeton University was instrumental to elevating the university to the ranks of great global universities. He repurposed the university into "the nation's service," and hired the first faculty members who were Jewish and Catholic. Wilson toughened academic standards, emphasized research, instituted academic departments and initiated Princeton's famed precept system. Wilson failed in efforts to diminish the social influence of the university's exclusive "eating clubs" (fraternities with a difference), but his goal has been increasingly realized many decades later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodro...ton_University
Woodrow Wilson subsequently became President and won a Nobel Peace Prize. As President, Wilson oversaw the creation of much of the modern U.S. economic system (including the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve System), led the nation through World War I, and was the intellectual father of both the League of Nations and therefore the United Nations.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/about-w...on%20in%201902.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodro...3%E2%88%921921)
Prior to this year, one of the nation's leading schools of public and international affairs at Princeton was named after Wilson, as was a residential college. This summer, after years of consideration, Princeton's Board of Trustees decided to remove Wilson's name from these institutions, greatly because of Wilson's effective resegregation of the federal government and his inherent racism.
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/pr...sidents-racism
With this context, this interview of biographer A. Scott Berg, both a Princeton trustee and a leading biographer of Wilson, discusses the renaming decision of the Princeton Board of Trustees from an historian's perspective. In Berg's case, his perspective is enhanced by ongoing work on a biographer of legendary Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who earlier in his career as founder and executive director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund argued several of the most imporant Civil Rights cases before the Supreme Court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Scott_Berg
Berg's discussion of "presentism" in the following interview has great relevance to modern American debates over other historical legacies, from that of Christopher Columbus to statues of Confederate leaders.
<<Did you agree with the decision to remove Wilson’s name?
Yes. For me, the decision was complicated and correct. History keeps evolving, and so must institutions if they wish to remain vibrant and relevant. Nobody understood that better than Wilson himself, who jolted Princeton when he hired its first Jewish and Catholic faculty members and fought to rid the campus of its exclusivity by challenging the club system. It was that very crusade to diversify and democratize Princeton that captured national attention and catapulted him from academia to the White House in just two years.
Are you concerned that the focus on Wilson’s racism will erase recognition of his positive achievements?
I’m concerned that it might — because time tends to shrink significant events and people to bullet points and thumbnails; and I would hate to see one of the most idealistic figures in history — and Princeton’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner — reduced to a one-word epithet.
Biographers also confront “presentism” — the tendency to apply contemporary values while interpreting the past. In the case of Wilson, long ranked among our greatest presidents, increased focus on racism has demoted him in the last few decades. That particular reassessment is long overdue, though it should be examined with a wide lens. When Wilson ran for president in 1912, avowed members of the Ku Klux Klan proudly served in the Senate and “separate but equal” was the law of the land. After 13 years of research, I found Wilson to be a centrist on race matters. But today, his allowing Jim Crow back into the federal offices — which quickly permeated most of American society and remained for half a century — has become a hallmark of his administration and rendered him an extremist. Wilson’s got to own that resegregation, and people of every successive era must reckon the extent to which that should define the rest of his predominantly progressive career.>>
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/ho...ographers-view
A famous biography of Lyndon Johnson is Eric Goldman's, "The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson." Such a titled book clearly could be written about Wilson for those who respect his accomplishments as President.
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/about-w...on%20in%201902.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodro...3%E2%88%921921)
Berg in an earlier interview after the publication of his Wilson biography in 2013 explains how Wilson ironically is vilified by many right wing opponents of "big government." Yet it's possible to see how Wilson would appeal to today's progressives, apart from his racist views and resistance to women's suffrage.
<<Many right-wing critics further object to his imposing the federal government into our lives. Wilson thought there were basic inequities in this country, primarily economic, that needed to be addressed. During his first few years in office, he muscled everything from the Federal Reserve Act to the Clayton Antitrust Act and the
Adamson Act with its eight-hour workday through the Congress. The federal government expanded into areas of the economy in which it had not intruded before, a presence Wilson thought the country needed in order to prosper. With so much wealth in the hands of so few that the average American did not have a fair chance to compete, he wanted to level the playing field.
That theme of wanting to equalize opportunities recurs in Wilson’s life — whether it protected the student who wasn’t accepted into Princeton’s most exclusive eating clubs or the Western farmer trying to function in a nation controlled by Eastern industrialists or small nations trying to survive in an emerging world economy. Sadly, his thinking seldom included African-Americans.>>
https://paw.princeton.edu/article/qa...ow-wilson-1879
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