When a Progressive is illiberal

When I studied American history in high school and college Woodrow Wilson was taught as one of the great Progressive Presidents. Opinions have changed. Blaska's blog pointed me to a review of a biography of Wilson. Quoting from that review:

The Wilson depicted by Mr. Cox didn’t simply hold conventional views on race and sex that later generations would find offensive. He was deeply committed to the doctrine of white racial superiority and had unyielding contempt for the intellectual abilities of women. He was also, according to this assiduously researched biography, inveterately dishonest, hopelessly pretentious, cruel to the women he professed to love, heartless in the face of human suffering, humorless except when doing bad imitations of Southern blacks, indifferent to constitutional constraints, and utterly third-rate as a thinker and scholar. His chief merits, in Mr. Cox’s account, were an ability to say just enough to assure interlocutors of his good intentions without committing himself to any course of action, and an ability to look and sound—as we would say—presidential. ....

Wilson took a dim view of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Throughout his life he preferred Britain’s parliamentary system, in which the party in power does what it wants with few restraints, to America’s system of checks and balances. In 1911, as the governor of New Jersey, Wilson delivered a speech in which he asserted that the opening phrases of the Declaration—that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”—were mere rhetorical flourishes, not to be taken seriously. ....

At the president’s April 1913 cabinet meeting, Postmaster General Albert Burleson suggested that the time had come to introduce segregation “in all Departments of the Government.” This, Burleson said, would be “best for the negro.” The president agreed, and soon restrooms and dining halls throughout Washington were labeled “white” and “colored”; black officials at Treasury and elsewhere—appointed by Wilson’s Republican predecessor, William Howard Taft—found themselves demoted or their positions eliminated. ....

That Wilson has largely escaped vilification by liberal historians is no doubt a consequence of the Progressive-era reforms accomplished during his eight years in office (1913-21): the creation of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission; the passage of the income tax and child-labor laws. Wilson’s leading role in the founding of the League of Nations during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919-20 has earned him the approbation of liberal internationalists and other advocates of transnational governance.

The usually unstated view seems to be that Wilson’s white supremacy and disdain for women were departures from his progressive outlook. ....

Was there a contradiction, though? At the core of progressivism, both in its original form and in the present day, is the belief that most people lack the wisdom to govern themselves and require a class of educated elites to organize society according to a shifting set of ideals. Wilson’s warped ideas on race and sex weren’t departures from progressivism but variant expressions of it. .... (more)

From Birth of a Nation, a film that gloried the KKK, and that Wilson had shown in the White House

 Barton Swaim, "Woodrow Wilson Review: Liberty Limited," The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 8, 2024.