So here’s a quick quiz: Who said, “I have to tell you: I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me.” Was it a Princeton student during last week’s sit-in demanding the removal of Wilson’s name from university buildings? Nope. It was conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck, who routinely rants against the former Princeton and U.S. president.
As Beck correctly emphasizes, Wilson was a key architect of modern American government. But that fact was missing from last week’s protests, which focused only upon Wilson’s miserable record on race. Nor was there any acknowledgment of the federal government’s historic role in assisting America’s poor and dispossessed, including minorities. As Wilson’s own example reminds us, the government’s commitment to racial equality has been highly uneven. But federal protections and benefits have served as important bulwarks of human dignity and decency in the United States, for all of us. And Wilson deserves a good deal of the credit for that.
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