Woodrow Wilson, America's most racist president

 

Jeffrey St. Clair

+ The Nobel Peace prize has been rotten since the beginning. Woodrow Wilson won the award in 1919, after breaking his anti-war pledge and sending the US in for the final year of slaughter. On the day of the Armistice, US commanders ordered their forces to continue attacking for four hours after the ceasefire had been signed, resulting in thousands of needless deaths and maimings. Then Wilson went limp at Versailles, going along with Clemenceau and Lloyd George’s punitive terms against Germany that set the stage for the even greater carnage of WW II.

+ It’s probably a toss-up between about 20 of them, but Woodrow Wilson, who fancied himself a progressive, gets my vote as America’s most racist president. In one of his most famous speeches, a speech that is said to’ve brought tears to the eyes of journalists, Wilson, in making a final plea for Congress to approve his League of Nations plan, couldn’t suppress the rancid nature of his xenophobia. He frothed about the grave threat posed by non-Anglo immigrants, who he believed were the animating force behind the radical labor movement. In his 1919 Pueblo speech, Wilson roused himself one last time to the cause of the preserving the US as an Anglo-Saxon country: “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.” A few weeks later the Palmer Raids were unleashed. Using lists compiled by the young J. Edgar Hoover federal agents raided union offices and homes (as well as a couple of Tolstoy reading clubs) across the country, arresting and deporting more than 1,300 foreign-born union members.

+ It’s useful to remember that Mitchell Palmer, the man behind the infamous Palmer Raids, the largest mass arrest and deportation operation in US history (all without warrants by the way) was a Quaker. Not a Nixon Quaker. But a real, practicing, “thee and thou” speaking Quaker…