A provocatively titled opinion piece about a former United States president known to have racist views has triggered a backlash from social media users after The Atlantic published a story titled “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson” as Black History Month gets underway.
David Frum, an author and writer for The Atlantic, starts off his Feb. 2 article by stating that Wilson, “despised as a racist by today’s left and a tyrant by today’s right…championed a set of values that our politics sorely lack.”
Frum further writes in support of the 28th president, who died in February 1924, pointing out that Wilson’s fellow presidents, such as Harry Truman and Richard Nixon, held him in high regard.
‘“Truman wrote, ‘In many ways, Wilson was the greatest of the greats,’” according to The Atlantic’s article.
While not denying Wilson’s bigotries, Frum gave the former president credit for championing progressive reform in the U.S. and liberal internationalism in other countries, according to the piece.
“Wilson was the first American president to perceive and explain how American power could anchor the peace of a future democratic world,” Frum also wrote, referring to Wilson as “the founder and definer of American world leadership.”
However, several users of X, formerly Twitter, denounced the piece and held different views of the former president, whose administration history remembers for having failed to address Jim Crow disenfranchisement, dismissing Black activists like W.E.B. Du Bois and segregating the federal government, according to The Woodrow Wilson House.
In response to Frum’s post sharing the controversial opinion piece, one X user referred to Wilson as “the second-worst president in U.S. history” as well as “racist, technocratic, and open hater of the Constitution.”
Frum notes in his opinion piece that Wilson’s name has been removed from memorials and schools across the U.S., including his own alma mater, Princeton University.
The Atlantic writer says in the article that he doesn’t intend to “acquit Wilson” or minimize his actions but that his point is to “minimize those charges by blaming the times, rather than him.”
“His ideas and ideals still undergird American foreign policy at its most generous and successful. His words still reverberate more than a century later,” Frum wrote.
Les Breeding, a legislative researcher and activist, posted on X: “Wilson screened ‘Birth of a Nation’ at the White House. Say less.”
“Birth of a Nation” is a 1915 film released by American film director D. W. Griffith that focused on the Reconstruction period and painted a picture of formerly enslaved people as a vengeful group that joined white Republican southerners and northern-born Republicans who migrated south in plunder and oppressing the former Confederacy “until respectable white southerners rose up and restored order,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History summarized.
The controversial propaganda film, originally called “The Clansman,” is known to portray racist depictions of Black people. Wilson is said to have praised the film.
“This is what happens when you relegate the Black people to an afterthought,” shared author, professor, and historian Dr. Blair LM Kelley on X regarding The Atlantic’s article.
“Wilson wasn’t loud, but he was certainly one of the most draconian segregationists ever to serve as POTUS. His administration …forced a Black federal employee to work inside a cage. A cage,” Kelley wrote.
“People forget that segregation was part and parcel of progressive thought. It was organized and policy-driven racial violence,” she continued.
