Woodrow Wilson, White Supremacy, and the Palmer Raids
When most of us recall Woodrow Wilson from high school civics, I suspect that we think mainly of the bespectacled academic who championed the League of Nations after the first World War. Wilson’s vision for the League is that it would support his cause of “making the world safe for democracy,” and would both safeguard peace and international cooperation and embody democratic and equalitarian principles. He asserted that the League would create a world in which “every voice can be heard, and every voice can have its effect.”
The League was never approved by the United States Senate, although Wilson did receive the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
Life, alas, is complicated. Wilson’s lofty vision for democracy in the international order belied his unprecedented expansion of the powers of the presidency and the federal government a home, to the detriment of people of color and political opponents.
Born shortly before the Civil War, Wilson graduated from Princeton and briefly attended law school before charting a course in academic life. He received a PhD in History and Government from Johns Hopkins in 1886 (the only president to hold a PhD; George McGovern had a PhD in History from Northwestern but lost the 1972 election in a landslide to Richard Nixon). After short stints at other colleges, Wilson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1890, where he developed a reputation as an expert in constitutional law and later served as president.
Wilson served for two years as governor of New Jersey and won the 1912 presidential election with 42 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race with incumbent William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.
In his academic life, Wilson was a prolific writer, and much of our understanding of his views and assumptions comes from published work like his 5-volume History of the American People. (An intriguing recent development has been the examination of a collection of his students’ lecture notes that have been held by the Princeton University archives.)
Emerging from these sources and Wilson’s tenure as president is a legacy of white supremacy.
His 1912 campaign promised a commitment to opening “gates of opportunity for all” and to justice being done for black people “in every matter.” His philosophy of government moved him in the opposite direction. He believed that society was best served by “efficiency,” meaning that leaders should have the responsibility and power to create conditions where people contentedly followed their prescribed roles. Working against efficiency was “chaos” and “friction.” When the smooth functioning of prescribed roles was challenged, he believed, the resulting turmoil would work to everyone’s disadvantage.
When a black student sought admission to Princeton during Wilson’s presidency, Wilson announced that it would be “inadvisable.” The resulting chaos would undermine the experience of this student and of white students, and the applicant should seek education elsewhere.
Extending the logic of interracial chaos, Wilson as president presided over a significant resegregation of the federal workforce. People of color held 11 percent of federal jobs in 1907, but the proportion was eroded during the Wilson administration as office holders were denied promotions and moved to less-skilled roles.
Wilson also supported the resurgence of the Ku Klux Clan, which had been largely eliminated during the Grant administration. Although he rejected Klan violence, he spoke admirably about the role of the Klan in maintaining the ordered regulation of life in the Jim Crow South.
Similarly, he detested the spate of lynchings in his era but did nothing to prevent them.
Emblematic of Wilson’s white supremacist values was the screening at the White House of the 1915 D. W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation. The film depicts African Americans in stereotyped, racist roles ranging from happy slaves to monstrous sexual predators, and glorifies the Ku Klux Clan, violence, and lynching as means to suppress black entitlement and equality.
- - - - - -
The First World War brought new elements to the Wilson administration’s campaigns of repression. With the United States entering the war in 1917, the federal government targeted German Americans, antiwar activists, left-leaning journalists, and labor organizers by stifling speech and orchestrating mass arrests.
Growing anti-German sentiment prompted vigilantism against people with German ancestry or surnames (with many people Anglicizing their names as a result). Conscientious objectors and men seeking to avoid the draft were sought out, with raids in New York in 1918 rounding up 60,000 men, among whom fewer than 200 were genuine draft evaders.
The labor movement, which had been especially engaged with activism and strikes in preceding years, was conveniently defined as being insufficiently supportive of the war effort and was particularly targeted. Wilson’s postmaster general, Albert Burleson, banned socialist and labor material from the mails or impeded their distribution for technical postal violations. Offices of the Industrial Workers of the World… the IWW, the Wobblies… were raided and destroyed, with members arrested, convicted and imprisoned. In 1917, over a thousand copper workers in Bisbee, Arizona who had gone on strike were rounded up, herded into boxcars, and transported to a holding facility in New Mexico.
The legal underpinnings of these actions were provided by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The Espionage Act made virtually any expression of opposition to the war… “false reports or false statements…” a criminal offense. The Sedition Act (if you have read the John Adams blog, this will sound familiar) went further, declaring that any “words or speeches… or scurrilous libels… against the Government of the Unite States…” would be a crime. In these two years, over 1000 people were convicted under these two acts, with most going to prison.
Nor did the end of the war stop these abuses. The Russian Revolution spurred campaigns to frame “communism” as a widespread and profoundly threatening movement that was antithetical to American values. Aided by newly developed surveillance technology like telephone tapping, the suppression of communism was presented as a pretext for further disempowering organized labor and political opposition.
The most notable expression of post-war repression was the Palmer Raids. A. Mitchell Palmer had been appointed as Attorney General in 1919. The immediate post-war period was marked by continuing labor strife, civil unrest, and an anarchist movement that was responsible for terrorist bombings. Palmer was charged with addressing these threats.
The initial Palmer raids took place in November 1919. Working with local police, Department of Justice agents arrested several hundred people suspected of being radicals in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities. While many were released after questioning (having been found not to have committed crimes), a portion remained incarcerated for several months and many were subject to inhumane treatment and beatings.
Palmer then partnered with an eager, early-career J. Edgar Hoover, who compiled a list of 60,000 suspected radicals and agitators who would be the focus of more extensive raids in early January 1920. On January 2, agents in 30 cities arrested several thousand people, most without warrants. Like the earlier raids, many remained in jails without due process several months after the fact.
An upwardly mobile opportunist, Palmer announced his candidacy for president in March. He and Hoover then marshalled substantial resources to respond to what they projected would be massive communist upheaval on May Day. When May 1 passed without incident, Palmer’s credibility was substantially deflated, and a report from the precursor of the ACLU later that month documented his abuses and brought an end to the raids that bear his name.
J. Edgar Hoover, however, was appointed head of the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 and continued a program of surveillance and suppression of suspected dissidents for the next 37 years.
And now, in December 2024, Donald Trump’s nominee as FBI director, conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, is committed to use the office for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of government workers and to secure retribution against journalists and other of Trump’s opponents.
Main sources, for your interest:
Brettschneider C (2024). Presidents and the People: Five Leaders who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend It. New York, W. W. Norton.
Hochschild A (2022). American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. New York: Mariner Books.
Hochschild A (2018). Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
MacWilliams MC (2020). On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Taking a break from the blog installments during the holidays. NEXT blog installment… some stories of resistance, and words of hope in these historical accounts, on January 6.
When most of us recall Woodrow Wilson from high school civics, I suspect that we think mainly of the bespectacled academic who championed the League of Nations after the first World War. Wilson’s vision for the League is that it would support his cause of “making the world safe for democracy,” and would both safeguard peace and international cooperation and embody democratic and equalitarian principles. He asserted that the League would create a world in which “every voice can be heard, and every voice can have its effect.”
The League was never approved by the United States Senate, although Wilson did receive the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
Life, alas, is complicated. Wilson’s lofty vision for democracy in the international order belied his unprecedented expansion of the powers of the presidency and the federal government a home, to the detriment of people of color and political opponents.
Born shortly before the Civil War, Wilson graduated from Princeton and briefly attended law school before charting a course in academic life. He received a PhD in History and Government from Johns Hopkins in 1886 (the only president to hold a PhD; George McGovern had a PhD in History from Northwestern but lost the 1972 election in a landslide to Richard Nixon). After short stints at other colleges, Wilson joined the faculty at Princeton in 1890, where he developed a reputation as an expert in constitutional law and later served as president.
Wilson served for two years as governor of New Jersey and won the 1912 presidential election with 42 percent of the popular vote in a three-way race with incumbent William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.
In his academic life, Wilson was a prolific writer, and much of our understanding of his views and assumptions comes from published work like his 5-volume History of the American People. (An intriguing recent development has been the examination of a collection of his students’ lecture notes that have been held by the Princeton University archives.)
Emerging from these sources and Wilson’s tenure as president is a legacy of white supremacy.
His 1912 campaign promised a commitment to opening “gates of opportunity for all” and to justice being done for black people “in every matter.” His philosophy of government moved him in the opposite direction. He believed that society was best served by “efficiency,” meaning that leaders should have the responsibility and power to create conditions where people contentedly followed their prescribed roles. Working against efficiency was “chaos” and “friction.” When the smooth functioning of prescribed roles was challenged, he believed, the resulting turmoil would work to everyone’s disadvantage.
When a black student sought admission to Princeton during Wilson’s presidency, Wilson announced that it would be “inadvisable.” The resulting chaos would undermine the experience of this student and of white students, and the applicant should seek education elsewhere.
Extending the logic of interracial chaos, Wilson as president presided over a significant resegregation of the federal workforce. People of color held 11 percent of federal jobs in 1907, but the proportion was eroded during the Wilson administration as office holders were denied promotions and moved to less-skilled roles.
Wilson also supported the resurgence of the Ku Klux Clan, which had been largely eliminated during the Grant administration. Although he rejected Klan violence, he spoke admirably about the role of the Klan in maintaining the ordered regulation of life in the Jim Crow South.
Similarly, he detested the spate of lynchings in his era but did nothing to prevent them.
Emblematic of Wilson’s white supremacist values was the screening at the White House of the 1915 D. W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation. The film depicts African Americans in stereotyped, racist roles ranging from happy slaves to monstrous sexual predators, and glorifies the Ku Klux Clan, violence, and lynching as means to suppress black entitlement and equality.
- - - - - -
The First World War brought new elements to the Wilson administration’s campaigns of repression. With the United States entering the war in 1917, the federal government targeted German Americans, antiwar activists, left-leaning journalists, and labor organizers by stifling speech and orchestrating mass arrests.
Growing anti-German sentiment prompted vigilantism against people with German ancestry or surnames (with many people Anglicizing their names as a result). Conscientious objectors and men seeking to avoid the draft were sought out, with raids in New York in 1918 rounding up 60,000 men, among whom fewer than 200 were genuine draft evaders.
The labor movement, which had been especially engaged with activism and strikes in preceding years, was conveniently defined as being insufficiently supportive of the war effort and was particularly targeted. Wilson’s postmaster general, Albert Burleson, banned socialist and labor material from the mails or impeded their distribution for technical postal violations. Offices of the Industrial Workers of the World… the IWW, the Wobblies… were raided and destroyed, with members arrested, convicted and imprisoned. In 1917, over a thousand copper workers in Bisbee, Arizona who had gone on strike were rounded up, herded into boxcars, and transported to a holding facility in New Mexico.
The legal underpinnings of these actions were provided by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The Espionage Act made virtually any expression of opposition to the war… “false reports or false statements…” a criminal offense. The Sedition Act (if you have read the John Adams blog, this will sound familiar) went further, declaring that any “words or speeches… or scurrilous libels… against the Government of the Unite States…” would be a crime. In these two years, over 1000 people were convicted under these two acts, with most going to prison.
Nor did the end of the war stop these abuses. The Russian Revolution spurred campaigns to frame “communism” as a widespread and profoundly threatening movement that was antithetical to American values. Aided by newly developed surveillance technology like telephone tapping, the suppression of communism was presented as a pretext for further disempowering organized labor and political opposition.
The most notable expression of post-war repression was the Palmer Raids. A. Mitchell Palmer had been appointed as Attorney General in 1919. The immediate post-war period was marked by continuing labor strife, civil unrest, and an anarchist movement that was responsible for terrorist bombings. Palmer was charged with addressing these threats.
The initial Palmer raids took place in November 1919. Working with local police, Department of Justice agents arrested several hundred people suspected of being radicals in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities. While many were released after questioning (having been found not to have committed crimes), a portion remained incarcerated for several months and many were subject to inhumane treatment and beatings.
Palmer then partnered with an eager, early-career J. Edgar Hoover, who compiled a list of 60,000 suspected radicals and agitators who would be the focus of more extensive raids in early January 1920. On January 2, agents in 30 cities arrested several thousand people, most without warrants. Like the earlier raids, many remained in jails without due process several months after the fact.
An upwardly mobile opportunist, Palmer announced his candidacy for president in March. He and Hoover then marshalled substantial resources to respond to what they projected would be massive communist upheaval on May Day. When May 1 passed without incident, Palmer’s credibility was substantially deflated, and a report from the precursor of the ACLU later that month documented his abuses and brought an end to the raids that bear his name.
J. Edgar Hoover, however, was appointed head of the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 and continued a program of surveillance and suppression of suspected dissidents for the next 37 years.
And now, in December 2024, Donald Trump’s nominee as FBI director, conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, is committed to use the office for a “comprehensive housecleaning” of government workers and to secure retribution against journalists and other of Trump’s opponents.
Main sources, for your interest:
Brettschneider C (2024). Presidents and the People: Five Leaders who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens who Fought to Defend It. New York, W. W. Norton.
Hochschild A (2022). American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. New York: Mariner Books.
Hochschild A (2018). Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
MacWilliams MC (2020). On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Taking a break from the blog installments during the holidays. NEXT blog installment… some stories of resistance, and words of hope in these historical accounts, on January 6.