Started because were at 9 00. But im going to do this. Im going to read you a paragraph, just in case any of you wandered in without actually checking your program or the door, and you can guess what that paragraph what this panel is about. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than the peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples and shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when america is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other. As you may have surmised, in case you didnt already know, this is a panel on Woodrow Wilsons legacies. A panel put together by the society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era. We hope to spark a lively conversation. Should you wish to continue this conversation or any other, please do join us for the reception that is occurring this evening from 5 00 to 7 00 on the fourth floor balcony k. So im going to turn to introductions. Im adrian lynn smith. I am a historian at duke university. Im going to introduce the panel in the sort of order of presentation which is the order of the program. We have first mary rinda, professor and chair of the History Department at Mount Holyoke where she was also the founding chair of the gender studies department. A scholar of north american imperial formations, histories of racism and a cull and cultural history, among other things, shes the offer of taking haiti, military occupation in the culture of u. S. Imperialism, 1915 to 1940. She is currently working on a book entitled entangled in the things of this world, mary mayan, the promise of sovereignty and the course of empire. Next we have samuel schafer, associate dean of the faculty in history and athletics at st. Aubons school where he teaches history and coaches football. He holds a b. A. From the university of North Carolina which turns out is good at both history and 59 lathletics. And a ph. D in history from yale where people tend to be smug, but for other reasons. Not you, of course, sam, and excepting others at this table. Where he wrote a dissertation entitled new south nation, Woodrow Wilsons generation and the return of the south 18801920. Next up, eric yelling, associate professor of history and american studies at the university of richmond where hes won awards for teaching and for faculty mentoring. Professor yellen is the author of racism in the nations service, government workers and the color line in Woodrow Wilsons america. Hes currently developing a new project that considers political the political and social perceptions of the Social Security administration after world war ii. Id like to point out that we have very good teaching represented on this panel, which when we consider how to get our work out to a public, is of course one of the first lines of doing so. We also have two other presenters who are well versed in speaking to both scholars and publics. Julian zeletzer, professor of history and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Coeditor of Princeton University presss politics and society in 20th Century America series and authors newspapers articles and columns related to politics in the United States, including two recent books, the fierce urgency of now, lyndon johnson, congress and the battle for the great society, and a volume called media nation, the political history of news in modern america. And finally, and featured actually in that edited volume, is david greenberg, professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University new brunswick. He is a frequent commentator on the National News media on contemporary politic and pub welcome affairs, specializing in american political and cultural history. His recent book, republic of spin, an insider history of the american presidency, examines the rise of the white house spin machine from the progressive era to the present, and the debates that americans have waged over its implications for democracy. So, please join me in expressing our enthusiasm and excitement for them. [ applause ] thank you so much, and welcome. I come to you from the 1830s and 40s and return happily to this moment of the early 20th century to which i will return. I made my way back to that earlier moment because i have been thinking and wanting to be able to understand better something about the complexity of sovereignty and the connections between notions of sovereignty that bear on the ways we think of the self in the society and political system, and sovereignty of nations. Ive been interested in moments when someone stands up and says, it is possible to do more than weve done. It is possible to extend sovereignty farther, very much in the way that Woodrow Wilson did. But how, in the course of making that attempt, these moves toward sovereignty end up with great frequency recapitulating the relations of power and the exclusions that have been in place. And i am pleased to be here having us think about Woodrow Wilson and his legacies in this moment when it is so important for us to be understanding and thinking maybe freshly about liberalism, what it is, what it has been, what its uses in power are, what its limits are, and how we go forward with that in this particular moment. I am going to begin us with some words from Woodrow Wilson in his campaign of 1912. I came to this, in part, thinking lets look at how we bring together some of the questions about the international context, questions about immigration, and thinking about Woodrow Wilson, what he had to say about immigration in particular. And how that comes together with his story of the history of the United States. So one of the statements that really stood out to me in looking back over the record of his policy and comments in this, looking back on the history of the United States in 1912 in wilmington, delaware. Wilson stated, it has been the privilege and the pride of america to settle her own affairs without drawing a single tear or a single drop of blood from mankind. Now, he said that in 1912. He of course did not yet know what he was headed into and the ways in which he would put to use the United States marines in haiti and elsewhere. But to my mind this statement of a kind of purity of america, a kind of innocent origin of the nation that has been maintained, is central to one of the problems that we need to take up in relation to wilson. The idea of a purity that needs to be maintained and of a nation that is uniquely devoted to carrying forward the program of liberty without violence. In the same year, a little bit earlier, he, in thinking about how the United States had come together from the peoples of europe, and somewhat embroiled in difficulty because of statements he had made about immigration earlier, he was called on to clarify the record. Looking back again at the history of the United States, he stated that the United States had set itself to task of setting up an asylum for the world. We have carried in our minds, he said, those men who first set foot upon america, those little bands who came to make a foothold in the wilderness, because the great teaming nations they had left behind had forgotten what human liberty was. So we set up an asylum. For whom . For the world. We are the trustees of the confidence of mankind in liberty. If we do not redeem that trust, we are then most to be pitied for and this is what really stood out here the more glorious your dreams, the more contemptible your failure. I dont think the point, at least for me, is to render contempt here, but for us to look at the relationship between the grand dreams that Woodrow Wilson set forth and the ways in which his understanding of sovereignty, his understanding of the kind of self that would make possible an american nation, an american project, brought with it certain very clear limitations and allowed, and even fostered, kinds of violence that he himself imagined himself to be free of, and imagined the nation to be free of. The more glorious your dreams, the more contemptible your failure. Also in that same campaign, and again addressing immigration, said the word american does not express a race. It expresses a body of men pressing forward to the achievements of the human race. Its an intellectual venture to be an american. Youve got to have a mind that can adjust itself to many kinds of processes to be an american. And here, of course, he was railing against the phenomenon of the hyphenated american. Dont call yourself a hungarianamerican, a polishamerican, an italianamerican. Call yourself an american. If you are too invested in the particularity of your identity and your place, you will miss the project that we are in, which is to recognize that the interests of any must be the interests of every man. And i understand that in saying that, he was partly railing against the radicalism that sought, in his view, to foment interests and class interests that would be the undoing of the nation. But i think it is a very interesting idea for us to consider that notion that interests are if they are the interests of any, the interests of all, an ideal that he set out in the process of rejecting that notion of hyphenated americanism. So it has been pointed out that wilson went some distance toward insisting on a kind of pluralism that made up america, that america wasnt a racial essence of an anglo saxon heritage, though, of course, he hailed that h that as essential. He assimilated our diverse riches into the project of achieving what it is for humankind to address. Of course, in the process, he rejected the notion that certain peoples could be assimilated into that project, and was pushed in the course of this campaign to come out and make a statement very, very clearly opposing asian immigration, opposing citizenship of japanese and chinese people, calling to the idea that these were peoples who were incapable of being assimilated to the nation. And whats more, whose presence stood in the face of and called on the government to undertake its role to protect americans and workers from unfair competition. And in doing so, to hold to the ideal of the nation. He said that am i at time . Oh, my ill say one or two more things. And this is a quote. Oriental coollyism will give us another race problem to solve and surely, we have had our lesson. So, i thought i would be saying a bit more but what i want to emphasize here, in some of the work on wilson i think there is an interesting discussion about his shortcomings. Was he too invested in honor . Was he too stubborn, and so forth. I think actually these become important questions when we ask about the ways that his individual character was actually linked with a much broader cultural disposition and question that his suborness, for example, on the issue of race, on segregation, on the place of africanamericans, that his stubbornness on a variety of questions got in the way of his achieving the full vision he had has been laid out. But might that point us to some of the ways that the vision itself held a kind of arrogance about the project of america that needs to be interrogated in relation to international policy, in relation to immigration, and so much more. I will leave it there. Thats a start to the conversation. Thank you. [ applause ] thats fascinating to think about wilson and americanism, what it means to be american at this point in time, i think. Our panel was asked to think about and it emerged out of the controversies over the past year or two over wilson and his legacy in places like prince son. We were asked to consider the good and the bad, to draw connections between them and to discuss some of the recent scholarship on wilson. Im going to try to do a number of those things and to start broad, then end up narrow, then hopefully ask some questions at the end. Starting with the notion of the word legacy, legacy technically is a gift or bequeath, something in your will which implies intentionality. I think wilson was very intentional about a lot of what he did. I think it is also worth thinking about some of his unintentional legacies, things we see now that he might not have seen then. Our question here is what is this gift or will wilson has bequeathed us intentionally, or, more broadly, unintentionally. No short, and not to go over too much of most what of us already know from what we heard when we were 16, then in college, and so on. Wilson is, without a doubt, one of the most significant domestic and significant president s the United States has ever had. Domestically his new freedom, legislation that he championed and tariff and antitrust legislation and child labor act and the clean antitrust act and Federal Reserve, all of these things are significant domestic achievements. His progressive ideology, hooking up on what Theodore Roosevelt had done and bringing that to a National Stage. His action as a president being the first president to go and speak before Congress Since john adams, and going to Congress Many times more than any other president , i think since even and working with congress in that sense and in many ways sort of laying the groundwork for other socalled activist president s like roosevelt and lyndon johnson. Internationally of course, his leadership of the United States before and during its entry into world war i. Then of course his legacy with his wilsonianism and his vision of post war world. And as scholars have pointed out more recently, along with his good, there was also bad. Right . And adrian and eric in particular have pointed out some of the darker side that went hand in hand with these great achievements of wilsons, the segregation of the departments that happened under his watch, the exporting of racial imperialism that mary talks about. And so that has come to light. Its been around for a while, but more and more in the public eye recently. I would like to take a few minutes to talk i think about a related legacy of wilson that can speak to both the good and the bad. Thats a legacy in the lens of thinking about Woodrow Wilson as a southerner, which i think gives us another lens on to him, on to his administration, and also on to his legacies. So in a sense, thinking about how understanding his roots might better help us understand what his legacies are and how those two arent separated in many ways, how the good and the bad shouldnt be separated. So of course, wilson as a southerner has, among historians, long been a topic of conversation, is he southern, is he american, arthur link wrote about the southerner as american, the american as the southerner. There is always this question. So yes, Woodrow Wilson left the south inknow, yes, woodrow wils tried to get rid of his accent. Yes, during his campaign, he worried that many southerns may see him as too radical and seeing his cabinet too southern. His constitutional thinking was much broader of the theory. At the same time, he spent his formative years, first two decades of his life in the civil war of the reconstruction south. He told southerner of the south of one place of the world where he does not need to be explained anything. He married a southerners and he surrounded himself with southerners and half of his cabin members were born in the south. His cam nbinet members who were closest to him in his administration and almost the whole time, they were southerners. Woodrow wilson carries with him of a world view thats shaped in the civil world reconstruction south. It was changed and shifted. I would like to give three spoe specific examples of how being a white southerners shape his legacy. First of all is his election. Three course of the nation voted for progressive candidates between roosevelt and wilson and eugene. But, americans at the time also acknowledged that the election of 1912 was a moment of national reunion. There were headlines, the new york tribunes said the induction of wilson Summit National ties. There were articles how the south were back with us. In the article it talks about this was a great thing of democracy, how a region of 50 years before have been in arms of the country, these are the great things of democracy, it can observe the civil war. Wilson also acknowledges this, i would believe that my selection as president by the people of the United States means the final obliteration of everything that defined the great sections of this country. Yes, instrument of reunion. It is a symbolic legacy and it had meaning to him and people of the time. Same time, his election did not just represent the union, it was a restoration of the south. It has great power of the federal government and disproportion power and the south is back in that and the time in the south, there are dozens of articles talking of the south being in the saddle. What this means so wilson points cabinet members born in the south and also for the first time in many years of both houses in congress were held by the Democratic Party which had a d disproportion part of southern leadership. This is leading us to the second point of the domestic effect of southern add minuministration o new freedom. Obviously, most obviously as m