When a flying wedge of Black Lives Matter activists called the Black Justice League invaded and occupied the president’s office at Princeton University in late November, they issued the standard list of nonnegotiable demands. And as might be expected, Princeton’s president Christopher L. Eisgruber soon issued a groveling response—in effect, conceding to the league’s intimidating tactics. Far be it from The Scrapbook to advise Princeton University on its governance, but one of the demands intrigued us: that Princeton acknowledge the “racist legacy” of Woodrow Wilson (Class of 1879) and, among other things, remove Wilson’s name from the 67-year-old Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and any other places where it may appear on campus, as well as murals and portraits containing his image.
This is not the place to debate the historical legacy of Woodrow Wilson, which (as with any political figure) is decidedly mixed. But The Scrapbook would venture to say that such instances of Maoism on American campuses only reinforce the impression that the goals and aims of Black Lives Matter and similar radical movements, are not to advance free speech and broaden intellectual inquiry but to shut down intellectual inquiry and suppress free speech. Too bad, in a way, that Wilson’s great biographer, the left-wing Princeton historian Arthur S. Link (1920-1998), died too soon to witness this fascinating sequence of events.
Woodrow Wilson, of course, was one of the most important presidents in American history, was certainly the most important president in the history of Princeton (1902-1910)—and an inspiration to generations of political progressives, including most of his Democratic successors in the White House. That he has been honored on the campus of his alma mater is hardly surprising; nor is it surprising that Wilson, like any human being, was far from perfect.
So readers can imagine The Scrapbook’s disappointment when the engines of the American press revved up to describe and explain this story. In the Washington Post, Princeton student Mary Hui informed her readers that “discussion about the legacy of the nation’s 28th president . . . had long gone without much public scrutiny”—which may be true of the Hui household, but will come as a surprise to most students of American history. And the New York Times, in its patented bumptious manner, fully endorsed the demand to transform Wilson into a nonperson on the Princeton campus, publishing a blustering editorial about the “unrepentant . . . unapologetic racist” who led the country between 1913 and 1921.
As The Scrapbook always says, the Times is entitled to its opinions—even if the expression of those opinions is embarrassing. But it was a strange assertion to be made just an inch or two below the printed name of Adolph S. Ochs on the Times editorial page. Ochs, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was the owner and publisher of the New York Times between 1896 and his death in 1935 and patriarch of the clan that still controls the company. He was also the son of a secessionist and Confederate sympathizer—according to the Times‘s own worshipful obituary—and “had a whole-hearted admiration for Woodrow Wilson.”
That same extended tribute to the Times elder statesman includes a poignant, and instructive, anecdote. While still in Tennessee, Ochs was visited by the small-town Ohio editor and newspaper proprietor Warren G. Harding—Woodrow Wilson’s successor in the White House—who “had some idea of starting a Republican paper in Chattanooga. This notion was promptly dropped when Mr. Ochs pointed out to him that the only Republicans in Chattanooga were colored people, few of whom in those days could read.”
