Nov 24, 2015 4 min read

If some tribunes of the most hypersensitive forms of political correctness had their way, Washington & Jefferson College would probably just be renamed “College.”

After all, George Washington was a slaveholder, and Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder who seems to have sired several children with one of those slaves. Therefore, their names and entire legacies must be cast into history’s dustbin with extreme prejudice.

Along those same lines, there are some students at Princeton University right now who would like to erase Woodrow Wilson’s name from that institution as expeditiously as the Iraqis who ripped down the Saddam Hussein statues after the U.S. invasion in 2003. They argue that Wilson, who was president of Princeton before becoming governor of New Jersey and the 28th president of the United States, was an unreconstructed racist who, among other things, spearheaded the segregation of federal offices and rolled back progress African Americans had been making in the 1910s. They say Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs should be renamed, along with Wilson College, an undergraduate residential college. Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said their demands are being taken into consideration.

They do have their facts right, no question about that. A son of the South born in Virginia and raised in Georgia during the Civil War and its aftermath, Wilson had kind things to say about the Ku Klux Klan, slammed Reconstruction and described freed slaves as “vagrants, looking for pleasure and gratuitous fortune,” and said the suppression of African Americans in the decades after the Civil War as “the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites, the responsible class…”

But, by the same token, Wilson appointed Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, the first time a Jew served on the court, and he did so over no small amount of opposition. He fought for the right of women to vote and battled hard to launch the League of Nations, a United Nation precursor. The progressive income tax was instituted while he was in the White House, as was the Federal Reserve Board.

Few would dispute that Wilson, who was also an alumnus of Princeton, left a substantial mark on the United States. To somehow erase Wilson from the campus, and from our history, because of views that now seem hopelessly retrograde would set a horrible precedent and set the stage for further purgings of historic figures who don’t meet current standards of rectitude or “correctness.”

The list of those who would be shown the door would be long. There are many buildings and roads across America named for John F. Kennedy, including an elementary school in Washington. That would be the same John F. Kennedy who was a notorious philanderer. Should Kennedy’s name be scrubbed from everything that bears his name? What about Franklin Roosevelt, who authorized the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II? Or Roosevelt’s cousin, Theodore, who played footsie with eugenicists and wrote that society “has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.”

Simply put, you’d have to engage in a long, hard and ultimately fruitless search to find anyone in our history who is perfect. They were not demigods, but human beings who achieved important things, but also came with their own set of biases, blind spots, virtues and vices.

As James Livingston, a professor of history at Rutgers University, wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “What goes missing from current debates about, say, Wilson is the humility of retrospect – the capacity to recognize the possible limits of your ideas against the obvious failings of those who didn’t have the benefit of your education.”