205. Blots, stains and blemishes

Yesterday in a bookstore I looked at a copy of Jim Newton's new biography of Earl Warren.  The jacket copy - for which the Penguin publicity department, rather than Newton, was presumably responsible - mentioned Warren's enthusiastic support for reviving the 19th-century California custom of persecuting Asians.  (See post 196.)  The jacket copy describes this as "one of the few blemishes on an otherwise progressive record."

The famously "idealistic" Woodrow Wilson was the President who inaugurated segregation in federal employment, and in his 1916 campaign against former Justice Charles Evans Hughes, Wilson's thin victory margin may well have been his appeal to the racist vote (remember than Blacks were generally not allowed to vote, despite the 15th amendment - Wilson counted on that).  

For example, in a campaign speech in St. Louis, our idealistic President accused Republicans of "'colonizing' imported black voters in a fraudulent attempt to pad the electoral rolls."  Less than a year later, by no coincidence, East St. Louis was the site of the first of the anti-Black pogroms of the dreadful 1917-23 period - pogroms that Wilson made no effort to suppress.

It would be nice to believe the "scholarly" Wilson was being cynical in his campaign speeches, but he wasn't: his racism was sincere.  More than that: it was at the very core of his supposed scholarship.  Some of his most grotesquely racist comments, directed against Southern Europeans as well as the more traditional targets, can be found in his multi-volume History of the American People.  (Check out vol. V, pp. 17-22, 44-53, 58-64, 184-187, 212-214; a selection can also be found here at 208-213.) 

Wilson's racism played a significant part in his post-WW I negotiations, when he refused to accept a proposal by the Japanese to include in the League of Nations' covenant an explicit recognition of "the equality of the yellow race," to use the phrasing found in this history of Japanese-American relations.   Wilson's racism gave a clear message to the Japanese of the interwar years: they couldn't expect to share the Pacific peacefully with the United States, and needed to start considering another modus vivendi.

So how do his biographers treat Wilson's racism?  Louis Auchincloss, the chronicler of WASPy law firms, called Wilson's support for segregation a "stain" on his presidency - almost as gauche, one imagines from the wording, as spilling gravy on a linen tablecloth.  Wilson's suppression of political dissent is another "stain."  The current holder of the franchise for scholarly biography of Wilson, Arthur S. Link, calls his subject's record on race a "blot."

Andy Warhol once wrote, or rather spoke into his tape recorder and had some assistant type up:

When I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should.  Pimples are a temporary condition and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like.  Always omit the blemishes - they're not part of the good picture you want.

The Wilson apologists' use of "blot" and "stain," like the Penguin copy-writer's reference to the "blemish" on Earl Warren's record, convey the same idea, but less forthrightly.  They mean to imply that Wilson's and Warren's  attitudes toward race and free speech don't have anything to do with what those men were really like.  The injustices these heroes perpetrated, the sufferings they imposed on so many innocent people, were external to their achievements, mere pimples on the angelic face of public service.

Instead of looking at their concrete accomplishments, the biographers all tell us, we should focus on their intentions, or rather on their public formulations of their intentions.  See?  They said all sorts of noble things.  That's what's essential about them, not what they actually did.