Students, faculty members, and alumni are rightly questioning whether Woodrow Wilson’s name should represent a residential college and school of public policy at Princeton.
As a historian at the university, I’m agnostic on the naming issue, but I’m wholeheartedly for debating the matter. If we’re going to discuss Wilson’s legacy, however, let’s do so in a comprehensive, global way.
While asking how we should gauge the man who curbed child labor but also imposed a more-systematic segregation, let’s deprovincialize the debate. How also to appraise the figure who advanced internationalism, but under patronizing, racist, Western-dominated terms? If we don’t widen the discussion, we will miss an opportunity to consider America’s place in global affairs.
The decision to tear Wilson’s name off the walls is not, after all, just a matter of what we think about the past; it’s about the present. One bombastic reaction to the Paris attacks is to retreat to Fortress America, rejecting Syrian refugees. And even as President Obama seeks global cooperation on mitigating climate change, Congress concocts ways to undermine his reformist position. Clearly, whether to withdraw from or engage with the world remains a charged and present American quandary. Debating Wilson’s world raises questions about American conceptions of humanitarianism and the terms of global cooperation more generally.
That we remain entangled in a century-old dispute about peace and democracy in the Middle East is partly Wilson’s doing.
Consider a few examples, which I’ve found open undergraduates’ eyes in a world-history survey course I teach. Wilson was a professor of jurisprudence and political economy at Princeton in the 1890s. He gave an oration in 1896 on “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” which, on the eve of the war against Spain in 1898, became the university’s slogan. (A century later it was embellished with “in the Service of All Nations” to denote the university’s own global turn.)
At the time, Wilson worried about how overseas expansion and meddling — “empire” was the word of the day — might affect the health of the republic. Washington should not turn Spanish possessions into American colonies, he said, for that would corrupt the American constitutional fabric. Instead, the liberated tropics should be prepared for self-government. That was the theory, anyway: an early version of nation-building from without. When “anti-imperialists” came under assault by the pro-war camp, Wilson was an outspoken defender of the right to dissent.
On the presidential-campaign trail, in 1912, Wilson burnished his progressive credentials by lambasting how President William Howard Taft’s administration had turned international relations over to moneymen. “Dollar diplomacy” was President Theodore Roosevelt’s label, but it was Wilson who highlighted its malodorous implications. To Wilson, meddling in China and Cuba to help bankers like J.P. Morgan was an example of how the self-interest of a few could hijack public purpose. True to that thinking, one of Wilson’s first moves was to withdraw government backing for American businesses operating in the Caribbean and China.
Yet Wilson also believed in a muscular Christianity and in Anglo-American superiority. Those attitudes were tested when he became president, even before the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914. He sent troops to pacify Cuba; and Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua became sites of prolonged American occupations. It took years to extricate the Marines from botched nation-building. Most notoriously, Wilson got entangled in the Mexican Revolution, which led to military expeditions to favor a pro-American regime. They backfired, and Wilson’s military aggression south of the border left a legacy of anti-American sentiments that remain to this day.
Some might approve of the nation-building urge; preventing atrocity or promoting stability is better than watching from the sidelines. It is liberal internationalism in a nutshell. But as Wilson soon found out, moralistic humanitarianism could create sticky problems. In 1916 he signed the Jones Act, which finally declared Washington’s intent to let the Philippines go free. America would cease being an occupying power. The problem was, Filipinos had to display their readiness — by American measures — for self-government, and it would take another three decades for the “transition” to play out. (To be fair, Filipino nationalists worried that a hasty American pullout might lure Japanese expansionists, so there was foot-dragging all around.)
A year later, Puerto Rico got its own version of the Jones Act, the Jones-Shafroth Act, which gave islanders citizenship (and made them conscriptable for war). But the mentoring model also left the United States with the power to overturn any legislation and stripped Puerto Rico of control over economic, immigration, communications, and defense policies. The island has hovered in limbo ever since.
Where we see Wilson’s legacies on display most explicitly today is in the Middle East. His was by no means the only vision to remap the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But the plan inscribed in Wilson’s Fourteen Points — which outlined America’s moral and political purpose for entering World War I and its vision for a postwar world — had profound worldwide repercussions. It projected American ideals of self-determination and the cultural conditions of citizenship onto a global canvas.
For those living under the yoke of old European empires, the document was greeted as a liberating charter. It was immediately translated into many languages and printed widely. It also framed the world’s first great experiment in global government and cooperation, under the League of Nations. For good reason, Wilson is seen as the founder of liberal internationalism.
But as the terms of the Paris Peace Conference got hammered out, in 1919, it was clear that the exalted principles of liberty would reach only those who were deemed ready and capable of exercising them. That creed was applied within the United States, which is why we focus so much on Wilson’s segregationism at home. But it was spread worldwide. Under Wilson, Washington went into the business of exporting both freedom and its limits, a package deal that still inspires both global paradigms and resentments today.
For those who were not yet ready for freedom, it was best to remain colonial subjects or wards of a system of so-called Mandates created by the League of Nations. These included the former semi-autonomous provinces of the Ottoman Empire, like Palestine, Iraq, and Syria. Once hopeful that Wilson’s principles of liberty applied to them, locals in Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Damascus were soon embittered that the new rights had not been extended beyond the circle of white Europeans to indigenous leaders and literati. Susan Pedersen’s recent book The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015) describes well how Mandate paternalism became a new guise for empire.
The resulting bitterness endures: That we remain entangled in a century-old dispute about peace and democracy in the Middle East is partly Wilson’s doing. Those histories of hopes and disappointments need to be on the table as we debate not just Woodrow Wilson but America’s place in the world.
Should Wilson’s name be torn from buildings? I’m open to persuasion either way. Wilson bashers can find plenty of evidence of his wrongdoing abroad to support the prosecution. His supporters can do the same for the defense. Going global with Wilson enables us to be clearer about the fundamental question: How do we memorialize mixed legacies like Wilson’s? When society’s values change, should we swap out names and symbols? When yesterday’s sinners are trumped by today’s saints, what happens when those saints become tomorrow’s sinners? And what to do with the memory of the sin if it’s no longer publicly there to remind and to discuss?
Maybe we should regularly review and cleanse our emblems. Then again, they represent opportunities to acknowledge limits and ambiguity. Either way, let’s not cherry-pick our history.
