University of Chicago Professor Geoffrey R. Stone comes to Woodrow Wilson's defense in
The Huffington Post:
As President, Wilson oversaw the passage of a range of progressive legislation previously unparalleled in American history. Among the bills he signed into law were the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Adamson Act, which for the first time imposed a maximum eight-hour day for railroad workers, and the Keating-Owen Act, which (before it was held unconstitutional by the-then-very-conservative Supreme Court) curtailed child labor. Samuel Gompers, the most visible labor leader of the time, described Wilson's achievements as a "Magna Carta" for the rights of the workingman.
There's more:
More to the point of the current controversy at Princeton, Wilson also ordered the segregation of federal government offices, and his War Department drafted hundreds of thousands of African-Americans into the army, gave them equal pay with whites, but -- in accord with military policy from the Civil War through the Second World War -- assigned them to all-black units with white officers. When a delegation of African-Americans protested this policy, Wilson told them that "segregation is not a humiliation" and ought not "to be so regarded by you gentlemen."
Like his suppression of dissent during the war, Wilson's support of racial segregation was deplorable. But it is important to understand that at the time such segregation was legal, was consistent with the views of most Americans, and was part of the public policy in many, perhaps most, states in the nation. Indeed, in some quarters such segregation was even considered a "progressive" reform insofar as it limited the opportunities for interracial disputes that could trigger white violence.
What the good Professor is shy about admitting was an important part of being a progressive (between 1900 and 1940) was believing in
eugenics. Those who believed in laissez-faire didn't believe in big government run by PH.D's from Johns Hopkins.
