Monday, June 29, 2015

Remembering President Wilson's Purge of Black Federal Workers



President Woodrow Wilson - Democrat, progressive - Princeton history professor, envisioned the League of Nations as a means to world peace.  That is his principal image among Americans.  But there is another side: racist.  The Virginian segregated the Army, purged African Americans from federal jobs.  Josh Marshall has the story. - gwc

Remembering President Wilson's Purge of Black Federal Workers

by Josh Marshall

The 1912 presidential election featured not only a historic fissure in the Republican party, it also featured two candidates associated with the Progressive Movement, Wilson and renegade Republican and former President Theodore Roosevelt running on the Progressive Party ticket. Wilson is known and still honored as a Progressive reformer on the domestic front and his foreign policy is still referenced as the embodiment of idealistic foreign policy engagement, putting democracy rather than realpolitik at the center of policy formulation. Yet to say that Wilson was a disappointment on civil rights is a colossal understatement.

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