American POTUS Woodrow Wilson The Moralist with Patricia O'Toole

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Transcript

squadcaster-4125_1_09-04-2024_150354: 0:24

Welcome to American POTUS. I'm your host, Alan Lowe. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm very pleased to welcome on this episode, Patricia O'Toole, a former professor in the school of arts at Columbia university and author of several highly regarded books. Now Patty's going to join us again in a month or so to talk about one of those books titled when trumpets call Theodore Roosevelt after the white house. But today we'll talk about another of her books, one about a rival of Teddy Roosevelt, and this one is titled The Moralist, Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made. Patty, thanks so much for joining us on American POTUS.

squadcaster-181a_1_09-04-2024_150354: 1:00

Thanks for having me.

squadcaster-4125_1_09-04-2024_150354: 1:01

So excited to talk with you. I loved this book. Woodrow Wilson to me is such a fascinating character, and I love learning so much more about him let's start as you do in his youth and talk about the things you said contributed to what you called his lifelong preoccupation with morality. What were those factors

squadcaster-181a_1_09-04-2024_150354: 1:20

the, the largest one is the fact that his father was a Presbyterian minister, and there were lots of other Presbyterian ministers on both sides of his family. So he grew up in a household that's saturated with the Ten Commandments and do unto others and doing the right thing. I, I think that was the overall formative. Influence and he's interested as, as a young man in philosophy and ethics. You know, what constitutes good, what constitutes evil? He was a deeply religious man, but not in a kind of showoffy way. And the version of Presbyterianism that he was brought up in was a kind of mix. It wasn't wildly fundamentalist. It might seem a bit that way to us now. But his father, for example, found it easy. In 1859, when the origin of species comes along to incorporate the idea of evolution as part of God's plan, he saw scientific truth as part of the larger truth and God's plan for the universe. So in that sense, he was keeping up with the intellectual currents of the time when many other religious leaders were headed in the other direction defending, The idea that we were not descended from monkeys. You know, that was the famous thing in Tennessee, right? The scopes trial. So, there's a sense of morality. There's a sense of judiciousness. There's a sense of fairness. Didn't include everything or everyone, but it's there...

squadcaster-4125_1_09-04-2024_150354: 2:48

now, I'm going to skip over a lot, and I know our listeners, they need to read the moral list, so I'm going to skip pretty quickly to the adult Woodrow, and I've always been intrigued by his remarkably quick rise, really, from being a university president to governor to president. So, what factors contributed to that meteoric rise in a short time? And also, if you could comment, I think in the book, you talk about some of the negative things that may have resulted from rising up that quickly.

squadcaster-181a_1_09-04-2024_150354: 3:14

It really was meteoric. He's a professor for a long time at Princeton, and then he becomes president of Princeton, and he does that for seven years and people are unhappy when it gets toward the end of the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. They feel like the country has gone, despite the talk of progressivism, that there's a tilt, away from, um. Progressivism. And then there's a sense, too, that, progressivism had gone too far. So both things are in play because, Wilson, uh, followed in Roosevelt's footsteps in the idea that The, uh, the federal government as the umpire on the economic field that it was the only institution that they could think of that was big enough to counter the big weight of the huge industrial corporations that had come along. So. That observation about the power of these behemoth companies in combination with the sense that they should not be able to operate unregulated triggered a lot of the fundamental aspects of creating the modern economic society with the government as the umpire on the field.

squadcaster-4125_1_09-04-2024_150354: 4:26

So, so what about Wilson's personality or his way of approaching these issues? Lent him such credibility that he was able to rise so quickly from again from being university president to almost the next day. It feels like being president of the United States.

squadcaster-181a_1_09-04-2024_150354: 4:44

Yes, there was only a two year interval between, when he And when he became president, that is meteoric especially coming from the academy, which is kind of a sheltered place. He, he got lucky in one respect. In 1912, he was a candidate without any political baggage because he's so new to the scene. And he's a fresh face. He was the very best speaker. of his generation. He was a phenomenal orator. He could express himself, even though he's an egghead, he could express himself in ways that the common man could understand. He, he's dignified, he's clean, he's tall, he's well dressed. And he made a dazzling impression when he was a speaker. And that is how most campaign messages got out, you know? So you had to get on the train and ride the train thousands of miles during your campaign. And he was really, really good at it.

squadcaster-4125_1_09-04-2024_150354: 5:41

Better than Theodore Roosevelt.

squadcaster-181a_1_09-04-2024_150354: 5:43

Yes, yes, because he had trained his voice. He, he loved the theater and he learned to speak in a way that didn't make it seem that he was shouting. Whereas most political speakers, they were shouting and they sounded like it. But he could do it the way the actors did it, which is by breathing from deep in his throat. Diaphragm, and he's gradually raising his voice as he goes, but people don't realize it. So he doesn't sound bombastic. He sounds really elegant.

squadcaster-4125_1_09-04-2024_150354: 6:13

You spoke about the government is a referee and his approach to progressivism. He called this program, the New Freedom. Can you give us maybe a couple of specifics of what he proposed and what he enacted or tried to enact as part of that agenda?

squadcaster-181a_1_09-04-2024_150354: 6:27

Yes, he was very successful with his ideas. He had a whole big pile of ideas randomly put down, you know, like if you and I were trying to reinvent the world, and we're putting all our best Our ideas together. We might not know how to formulate them into policy positions. We might need help with that. And he realized he did need help with that. And the person he went to was Louis D. Brandeis, who had been very successful as an antitrust lawyer, phenomenally successful. And Brandeis had written a book called Other People's Money. And it was basically about how tycoons were able to borrow a lot of money. Um, and, make tons and tons of money more and pay back their loans. And his idea was that small people were being hurt by this. They weren't getting the same kind of terms. And that the playing field had to be leveled. So, um, Wilson asked Brandeis, I forget how they met, if he would just go over his ideas and help him synthesize, create this new freedom package. So what they came up with, and amazingly, Wilson was able to enact in the new freedom, was, A new antitrust act that would, the previous one, it was hard actually for business to figure out what was going to be a monopoly and what wasn't. So they wanted a better set of ground rules so that people who are building the company would be able to take, these laws into effect. The United States didn't yet have a central bank like the major European countries had, and without a central bank, you run into these bank panics from time to time, and there had been a few big ones. So, the Federal Reserve was created out of this. The modern income tax was another thing they had in mind before, The modern income tax, the way the government got revenue, most of his revenue was from tariffs and these tariffs had been enacted when American industry was young and needed protection from the bigger manufacturers of Europe. And so that was kind of a. A decent idea for getting your industrial base up and running. But what happened over time was that these companies just needed ever and ever thicker blankets of protection and the people who paid for that were the people who bought these goods because they were buying American goods that were much more expensive than their European equivalents. They were artificially, artificially Expensive because the European goods coming in had this big tax on them. And the modern income tax, we would have loved living under this income tax because the top rate was like 7 percent and something like a third of the people didn't have to pay anything at all. And then, you know, it was grading up from maybe 3 percent to 7%. And that was after you made something like 500, 000, which in 1916, when this, this Took full effect would have been, I don't know, 5 million now, something like that, at least. So all of these ideas, he hammered out with Brandeis and proposes them and got them all through. And the, one of the really interesting things about them is they're all still there. You know, the Fed is still there. Oh, the federal trade commission, which was about preventing fraud and deception, and unfair business practices that was created then still has a major function to fulfill. So the Fed, the federal trade commission, the new antitrust act and the modern income tax, that was the new freedom. It was all these economic measures.

squadcaster-4125_1_09-04-2024_150354: 10:14

A lot of things, as you say, still underpin our economy and our society today. Pretty amazing. So I was intrigued throughout the book you talk about Wilson sending troops here and there and you note that even before World War one no other president Sent troops abroad as often as Woodrow Wilson So, how did those actions conform with his views of morality and foreign policy decision making

squadcaster-181a_1_09-04-2024_150354: 10:38

It's, it's interesting. Historians now sometimes use the term to describe this as humanitarian interventionism, you know, that we think we're going to do a good deed, and it might be a good deed for the people of that country. Or in some cases, there were a lot of threats that didn't lead to occupations, but what they were about was the European bankers would lend huge amounts of money to these, uh, Small countries that couldn't repay the debt. And then gunboats would be off Venezuela or, or some other place and usually, central or South America. So to prevent a war, we were there trying to straighten this out. And the way we would straighten it out would be, we would take over the customs house. So all the revenues coming in a major portion of them would be, dedicated to paying back these loans. So. That was a big part of it. And then when the Mexican revolution began, um, started in 1910. So it's before Wilson's president. And it was the first major revolution of the 20th century and it went on for a long time. And we thought that we could go down there. A lot of the, the revolting was being carried on by people like Pancho Villa, all these different factional revolutionary bands. And there was a lot of terrorism and there was, some going across the border to steal cattle or terrorize people who lived on the border. So it did involve the United States. So, Wilson sent troops headed by I think he was a major then, major Pershing, down to Mexico to hunt for Pancho Villa. And they spent two years trying to find him. They never found him. And then in the background, World War I is kind of thrumming away. And they just decided to come home. That's how they ended that intervention?

squadcaster-4125_1_09-04-2024_150354: 12:34

Let's turn for a moment to the first ladies and Ellen Wilson. What was Ellen Wilson's background? How would you describe their relationship? And then what led to her death? She died pretty early on in 1914 in the White House.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 12:49

Well, she was a fine young Southern woman, lots of ministers in the family. So that was a comfortable thing for her and for Woodrow. She was more educated than most women of the time. She didn't go to. but she went to a, uh, it was called a female seminary in Ohio. It was like a junior college. It was two years of education beyond high school. Love to read, devoted, homemaker. She loved cooking and taking care of the house. And, they had three children, quite young, three girls. And, She was diagnosed with this disease, Bright's disease, kidney disease that would be treatable now, but wasn't then. And it came on her about the time he was running for president in 1912. She began being very, very tired and everyone was attributing that to how hard she'd had to work to prepare for this new life. And she just kind of faded once they got to the White House. She did some nice things. The White House decor was kind of heavy with big thick drapes and that kind of thing. She lightened things up a lot. She was a painter, quite a good painter. And she put like white and it was kind of white and blue on the interior when she got done with it. She also designed the rose garden that was there pretty much in the form that she created until JFK began using it for photo ops and outdoor announcements. Then it was changed somewhat for video purposes. And devoted to her husband. Their love letters are quite remarkable. I don't know if there's a volume of them, but they're really very loving and his are. They're not steamy, but they're, he's clearly, he clearly adored her and her physical self. And she died, in August 1914, just as World War I is beginning in Europe, and he was devastated. There was a family service in the White House. And then the body was buried in Georgia in her family's plot. And he went on the train down there and the body is also on the train. And he sat with it, stayed up the whole train trip, you know, more than 24 hours. Just absolutely devastated. And he comes back to the white house. And one of the first things he does, he had to escape to something, I guess, is to think up a peace plan for this war in Europe, how it, how it might be settled. And it actually involved an idea like the League of Nations, which he was the champion of later on.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 15:34

So after that terrible loss, how did he meet Edith? And we're going to talk about the kind of the post stroke time later, but how would you define her role as first lady when she first married Woodrow?

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 15:48

Well, he met, Edith about nine months after Ellen died, and many people thought that was It's way too early for him to be thinking about another partner in life. So it was kept very quiet. It was early 1915 when they met and he assumed, pretty soon into their relationship because of things that were happening, strains he was having with Congress about, neutrality, for example, the question of whether we should enter the war or not. He assumed he would not be reelected in 1916. So their original plan was to wait until someone else was elected in 1916 and then go off and get married and live happily ever after somewhere other than the white house. But he was reelected and their romance came out in the fall of 1915, so they were married in December of 1915, which was like a year and four months or so after Ellen died. And, uh, as a, first lady, she would, I think, remind you most of, uh, Nancy Reagan in her, complete adoration of and support of her husband, the president. First ladies did not yet have big public roles the way they came to after Eleanor Roosevelt was first lady. So she was mostly concerned with things in the house and, and with being his Constant companion.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 17:18

I see. Well, we'll return to Edith a bit later. Let's talk now about the war. What led Wilson to ask Congress for that declaration of war finally against Germany, a war he had tried to avoid for so long?

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 17:34

He really didn't want the United States to have to be involved. He saw what was happening in Europe as basically a dynastic quarrel among the Royal families of Europe, and he was a foe of imperialism and they were, these powers were imperialists and he just thought it was a war for more power. more territory and you didn't want anything to do with it. But as a neutral power, we didn't get to stay really neutral for a long time. I mean, it was very quickly clear that American businesses were happier selling to the allies um, the Entente powers, I should say. And Lending money to them. So I think in the end, we maybe finance 2 percent of the Germans war, that side of the war and the rest of the money went

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 18:29

Mm

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 18:30

primarily in

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 18:31

hmm.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 18:32

the allies. So neutral by policy, but not really. In fact, then there was an incident there was a telegram the Zimmerman telegram that the Germans sent to their ambassador in Mexico. And it was a proposal that Mexico throw in its lot with Germany and with Japan and attack the United States. That was the idea. And that was the content of the telegram. There's some question about whether the Germans were bluffing as a way of luring the United States into the war. And their thought was if they're busy with their war effort, they're not going to be able to do anything else. They'll never come into the war anyway, but they won't be helping the allies anymore and they'll be having to help themselves. So it was to weaken the United States. In terms of, the arms they were producing and everything they were sending to the allies. That was in late March of, 1917 when that happened. And Wilson decided that was the moment that the United States could no longer take this because there had been a number of submarine attacks on ships carrying American passengers civilians. For and he just didn't see how that wouldn't, you know, if he passed on this Zimmerman telegram thing, there was going to be another submarine incident and it might be some gigantic thing. Like the

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 20:06

hmm.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 20:07

Lusitania, uh, which was a British ship and earlier in the war and 1, 200 people died and he wanted to avoid that. So then we're off in the war.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 20:18

And he took some grief for not responding with a declaration after Lusitania and those other things. Is that right?

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 20:24

Yes, with all these things, it's like, well, what was he thinking? Why didn't he seize the moment? And one reason he didn't is that he worried. The population of the United States at that point, a third of it was either immigrants or children of immigrants, and he was afraid that if he took one side, that all the people who had come from countries on the other side Would be so angry, and he would never get the country unified, if we had to go to war. So, he wanted to stay out of it, and the other reason was, he imagined that because the United States was fairly powerful, it could be the one, if it stayed out of the war, it could be the one to broker the peace. And he wanted, that's a role he very much wanted, he made several offers to mediate an end to the war.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 21:12

So the 14 points, we've heard of those. What was so revolutionary about those? They really revolutionized American foreign policy. Can you outline? they were so important.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 21:25

The biggest thing was that he saw a role for international governance and not really a body that would eliminate national governments, but that if you had an international organization, the League of Nations was his term for it, that was in charge of maintaining the peace of the world. And then if you had peace and stability. You could introduce democratic ideals, and he was trying to democratize the world, really. And the phrase, make the world safe for democracy comes out of this era. And the reason he valued democracy more than any other form of government was, in terms of international relations, was that democracies didn't go to war against each other. So he thought the more countries you have that are democratic, the less likelihood there would be of another big war.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 22:21

I see. But in the war we went, for multiple reasons, and you note that FDR later praised Wilson for the way he conducted the war effort, saying he did it, quote, from the top down, unquote, what were Wilson's main steps in getting the nation ready for that war? And specifically the troops. Oh,

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 22:41

was a little slow. You know, the first big shipment of troops goes in June of 1917. And, at that point, people are thinking the war might go on till 1920. And it ended, in November, 1918. The first troops aren't actually in the field till, later in 1917. And their first big engagements happened in the spring of 1918. There was a joke, the American soldiers wore uniforms. That said AEF for American Expeditionary Force. And the joke is that an American soldier meets an English soldier and the English soldier says, what does AEF stand for? And the American soldier says, after England failed. And the response of, the English soldier was, no, it's after everything was finished.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 23:41

my goodness. Yeah.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 23:42

Yeah. So that was, that was the attitude about it. But it actually turns out that they poured two million men into Europe very quickly, and the Europeans were so tired. They'd been fighting since 1914, so two million fresh troops was a huge contribution to ending the war so quickly. And in terms of preparing them, Wilson, people came to him beforehand and said, you know, we have to get ready. We have a really small army. Our army was the same size as Montenegro's, the regular army, way, way down there. So that was a huge buildup. It required a draft. And there were still people around who remember the civil war drafts, not fondly. So it was a big task to do this and the Southerners didn't want anything. There was a racial component to this. They didn't want their sons having to fight next to black troops. So the troops were all segregated. And there was not a lot of support. For the war beyond the East Coast, really it was the elite of the East Coast, basically, who saw the importance of this war or I should say, considered this war important that the fate of the world really hung on, on this war. So there were doctors who when we were neutral, wanted to go to Europe because they could visit the German doctors in the field and the French doctors in the field and see what modern battlefield medicine was like, just in case they wanted to do this as a matter of preparedness so that they would be prepared. They wanted to go in 1916 and Wilson wouldn't let them go because he said that will send the signal that we're preparing for war and we are decidedly not preparing for war. So it's a very mixed picture until finally you get the declaration and then everything is moving at very high speed to get the troops over there, trained and over there.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 25:39

And he takes some still very controversial measures during that war. Censorship, jailing of some opponents. How did he justify those actions?

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 25:48

In his mind it was about this is how you get unity. You have to suppress dissent. And people did come to him and speak to him about it's going too far. And in a couple of instances, he let people off the hook, people who were going to be prosecuted for this. But mostly so many papers were shut. There were thousands of ethnic newspapers in the United States. At that point, a lot of people didn't speak English. So there was this whole thriving, you know, couple hundred languages, probably. In New York City, there would have been 20 ethnic newspapers in different languages, and the rule came down that, okay, you can keep publishing your newspaper, but you have to produce each issue in English as well as in whatever your language is, so that we can check it and make sure you're not doing anything subversive. Well, that was enough to just put most of these newspapers out of business. Um,

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 26:45

What

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 26:46

the famous, Dissenter who got put in prison was Eugene Debs, who was the head of the Socialist Party, who basically gave a speech that could be taken to mean, do not, answer your call from the draft board. And he was a socialist and the socialists were at that point opposed to all wars, so he was speaking his conscience and ended up in prison. Ran from prison for president in 1920.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 27:17

about, you've mentioned a couple of times the League of Nations, obviously so associated with Woodrow Wilson. We know you talked about how you came back from, Ellen's death and, started writing down some of those ideas. Where did that come from in his mind, and, and why did he focus on it so much at Versailles? We know now the detriment of other parts of that treaty.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 27:41

He really thought that it was the fundamental to peace. That if you had this, if you had an institution, a global institution, that could address the global problem of a global, potential global war, that that was the greatest contribution a person could make to the peace of the world. And if you don't have peace, you don't have stability. And that in addition to all the people who might be killed, there's the whole question of people not wanting to make business investments, for example, because they don't know who's going to win or when there might be peace. Um, we're seeing, I mean, it's part of the devastation of Ukraine, right? That, uh, it's very hard to say what the future will be.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 28:26

Could anything have saved the treaty in the Senate? We know famously it did not pass the Senate. Uh, could anything have saved it in the form it was in?

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 28:34

Yes, if Wilson had been willing to compromise, and he wouldn't, and there are various thoughts about why he wouldn't. One of them was that he had actually extracted a number of concessions from the British and the French, getting them to lower their demands for reparations, for example, their financial demands, they were in such a vengeful mood and he was trying to ameliorate that and, he doesn't get enough credit for the things that he did claw back from them. So when he came home, he felt he had asked them to sacrifice a lot and he didn't want to take anything else. He didn't want the Senate to take anything else away from them. Also, when he went to Europe and people said, you know, you really should take some Republicans with you because we've never done anything like this before, and it would be good to have it be a bipartisan thing. And his thought was, his ace in the hole was, the United States Senate has never failed to ratify a treaty that the president wanted ratified. So it's not going to happen this time because it's never happened in the past. But what had changed is that at exactly the moment the war is ending in November, we have midterm elections. And Wilson has had majorities in both houses of Congress for six years. And all of a sudden they both flip. So he didn't have that team on his side and they had supported him. They had given him every big thing he wanted during the war. And now, they weren't going to help him anymore. They said they thought the league of nations as he conceived it was. really vague and sweeping and they also thought it would involve the United States in Every war that came up in Europe and he thought no no No, if there's a war over in Eastern Europe, they're not going to ask for American troops. They're going to ask for troops from other parts of Europe to come. And, but there was nothing, that was an assumption on his part. So there were loose things and he wouldn't accept the reservations to the treaty. So it failed. They voted on it three times. Senator Lodge, who was steering all of this in the Senate, was no fan of Woodrow Wilson, but he gave him three shots in the Senate to get it through, and in the end they couldn't come up with a two thirds majority that they needed to get it passed.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 30:58

We know during the campaign for that treaty, Wilson suffered a severe stroke in So can you summarize the effects of that stroke on the president? How badly was he incapacitated? Hm, Mm

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 31:12

His left side was completely paralyzed. Um, and so much so that it was months before he could sit in a chair and then he couldn't sit in a chair unless there were arms on both sides. He did learn. to walk with effort. He had some kind of state of the art for the day, physical therapy. And it was very difficult in those days to know how quickly a person would recover from a stroke. There was no imaging equipment, you know, so you couldn't really see the extent of the damage in the brain. You could peer into someone's eyes. and see what had happened to the optic nerves. But it was not like today where they would have a much better. Grip on that. And he couldn't think straight. Anymore. He couldn't concentrate. He couldn't read. He could be read to for short periods. So there's a cover up. This is the biggest cover up that had ever happened in the White House up to that point. And the cover up is being carried out by Mrs. Wilson and Wilson's doctor, Carrie Grayson. And Wilson's chief aide, Joe Tumulty. And they're not exactly, they're lying in the sense that they're not admitting how, badly off Wilson is and how he really can't be president. He's too disabled to be president anymore. But they're putting out all these chipper bulletins, you know, like today the president walked across the room on his own steam kind of thing. And when, uh, the stroke happened in October. 1919. So he's, he's president, till March of 1921, 17 months. We had a disabled president that had never happened before. And every once in a while, Grayson would try to talk to him about, wouldn't it be better for you if you resigned? And Wilson was just, he got this idea that not only was he not going to resign, he was going to run for president again in 1920.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 33:19

That was shocking to me in your book, I didn't realize that part, it's this disconnect with the reality of his

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 33:25

Yeah.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 33:28

So let's turn for a moment, often when we talk about Woodrow Wilson today, you'll hear criticisms leveled at him for his views on race. How would you characterize those views and his actions toward African Americans? Thanks.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 33:43

This is the serious stain on his historical reputation. The Southerners in Congress, in the House and the Senate. Did not like the expansion of federal power that the new freedoms entailed, you know, the Fed being in charge of the economy, basically, and the income tax being a national thing instead of states that had income taxes, and they just did not like that. And they saw that as the. beginning of a movement that would ultimately end segregation and Jim Crow in the South. So when he's talking about these new freedom things, they want to sign from him that he's not going to interfere with segregation in the South.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 34:27

Mm hmm. Mm

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 34:29

what they wanted was for him to segregate the civil service where blacks and whites had worked harmoniously together for decades. And he was willing to do this. He thought it was more important to get the new freedom set up and running that the benefits of that would be larger than the detriment to black people that was involved in segregating the civil service and the civil service was one of the few ways. that blacks could get ahead, in the United States in that era, if you could get a civil service job from mailman on up you had a stable life. Um, and so the government was admired for that, you know, go to Washington, get one of those jobs and, you know, You, you won't have the kind of economic worries you have when you're farming and you don't know if the crops are going to come in or when you're trying to get a job and you can't get one because of racial discrimination. So it was a huge, huge setback and, that's always been known. Historians have always written about that, but it became a big deal in about, 2015 when some students at Princeton, actually, Discovered this, you know, that their hero, this guy whose statue, some black students, here's Woodrow Wilson, his name's on buildings at Princeton. Nice, memorials to him here and there. And yet, he was a really bad guy in terms of race in their view. And that prompted the biggest discussion we'd had about Wilson and race in a long, long time.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 36:06

Mm hmm. So, with that, and all the other things we discussed and that you discussed in The Moralist, would you say his legacy is today?

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 36:16

It's pretty tremendous. I was thinking about, uh, you know, they weren't talking about climate change back in the day, right?

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 36:23

Right, right.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 36:24

But he was in his way an environmentalist in terms of protecting public lands and natural resources. Theodore Roosevelt was the champion of that earlier on, and he thought that was important. He also created the National Park Service. To manage these beautiful parks, and systematize the management of it, because it was just kind of helter skelter before that, um, there were managers of the parks, but it wasn't coordinated into a national management of, of them. And I think if he were around, he would see the climate change crisis. As a perfect example of something for international cooperation as he saw war is a global problem. Therefore, you need a global solution, and I think he would see climate change the same way in terms of, women, he was late in supporting women's suffrage, and I think it was because he thought it would fail, if it came to a national vote in some way, it wouldn't pass. But by 1918, he's had enough conversations with women. There's already suffrage in about a dozen states. And the case for taking it national made sense to him. Finally, he saw it as, connected with other things that were better done by the national government than the state governments. So he had something like 50 meetings with suffrage organizations, and he spoke at one of their conventions even before this. So he had to work his way toward what he thought was the right moment to throw the full weight of the presidency behind it. But if he hadn't done that, I'm not sure that there would have been the suffrage amendment, in terms of his legacy, well, we've touched on this briefly the Federal Trade Commission, the Fed, the modern income tax, these things are still there. That's not true of a lot of government programs that start. So that's huge. And the idea of national regulation, I mean, he was a great expander of that and we can argue. about the extent of it. Is it too much? Is it too little? Are the laws we have well enforced? But the idea of some sort of national regulation is largely accepted.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 38:45

Very good. A fascinating man. A really fascinating book. Patty, what's next for you?

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 38:51

I'm still back in this era. I'm writing a book about Theodore Roosevelt, a second one. That's about him as president. My other book was about after his presidency. And if I could call it what I wanted to call it, it would be called Theodore Roosevelt and the somewhat progressive era. Because, because it was progressive for, uh, white men and not for women and not for people of color.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 39:22

Well, we look forward to that. I look forward to talking with you soon about when trumpets call. And again, thank you for joining us today for a really wonderful discussion. I enjoyed it so much.

squadcaster-181a_2_09-04-2024_152259: 39:32

I did too. Thank you, Ellen.

squadcaster-4125_2_09-04-2024_152259: 39:35

I encourage our listeners to check out The Moralist. I know you'll enjoy what is a superb history of a complicated man, a complicated leader. Thanks for joining us today and please consider supporting our work. American POTUS is a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to promoting a broad understanding of the history of the presidency and the presidents. Please check out our website at AmericanPOTUS. org. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time on American POTUS.