PROFESSOR-PRESIDENT

The Baltimore Sun

As the 150th anniversary of Woodrow Wilson's birth was recently observed, the college professor who was educated in Baltimore and eventually became U.S. president seems more important - and more controversial - than ever.

Current events often bring up comparisons to Wilson's years in the White House (1913-1921). Bush's narrow election victory in 2004? It was the closest for any incumbent since Wilson's in 1916. Problems with Mexico? Wilson sent troops to protect the border against Pancho Villa. Debates about how to stop the genocide in Darfur? Wilson failed to prevent the Armenian genocide.

Wilson had the most important foreign policy idea of modern times: that the United States ought to spread democracy around the world.

"Wilsonianism" remains contentious today: Is it noble idealism or reckless meddling? "For a president who lived almost 100 years ago to have his ideas still being debated is remarkable," says Steven David, professor of international relations at the Johns Hopkins University. "People aren't talking about Hooverism."

America entered World War I because Wilson decided it should, and later he traveled to Paris for the 1919 Peace Conference - where, among other things, the nation of Iraq was carved out of the Ottoman Empire, with Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites thrown together. In a 2005 book, Jim Powell blames Wilson's decision to meddle in the European war for the eventual rise of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler and the deaths of millions. This is too sweeping, but historians agree that Wilson's policy of interventionism shaped key events of the 20th century and beyond.

For generations, critics have equated Wilsonianism with reckless idealism, as opposed to pragmatic "realism." "There are few epithets more damning in American politics than 'Wilsonian'," says the foreign policy expert Max Boot. "It carries connotations of purblind self-righteousness, of senseless moralizing, of good intentions gone awry."

Did invading Iraq in 2003 and attempting to build a democracy there make George W. Bush a Wilsonian? In his second inaugural address Bush said, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Some remembered Wilson's call "to make the world safe for democracy."

But Bush staffers seem uncomfortable with the label. "I can't tell you," deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz once said, "how much I resent being called a Wilsonian."

The Bush presidency has triggered what Steven David calls a "debate about what Wilsonianism means and whether Iraq is an example of failed Wilsonianism." There is no escaping the historical parallels - "We're all Wilsonians now," the columnist Jonah Goldberg recently mused.

One thing is sure. His legacy still matters. In Baltimore and beyond, the college professor who became a president casts a long shadow through history.

As historians debate Wilson's legacy, they agree that Baltimore played a key role in his rise to fame and power.

The only American president ever to hold a doctorate, Wilson began his professional training in Baltimore in 1883, when he was 26. He studied history and political science as a graduate student at the new Johns Hopkins University, the first university in America that stressed research.

Wilson found Baltimore a "delightfully provincial town." He rented a little room at 909 McCulloh St., close to where Hopkins then stood. Mount Vernon Place was a short stroll to the east. At the "noble" Peabody Library he did research for what became his most important book, Congressional Government. Glancing up from his papers, Wilson made note of the Baltimoreans who came through the door: schoolgirls, "grimy mechanics," "grave gentlemen" and dandies in kid gloves.

In his free time, Wilson visited the Walters Art Gallery and attended the theater. For two hours every day he walked the streets for exercise. On Charles Street the young bachelor "saw more pretty women than I could count." He sang in the Unitarian Church choir and the Hopkins Glee Club. For Maryland's 250th anniversary celebration, the Glee Club learned an unfamiliar song, "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Baltimore's Francis Scott Key. Wilson, a tenor, was responsible for singing the "telling high note" at the end. Years later, President Wilson would remember the song fondly and propose it as a national anthem.

Virginia-born, Wilson planned to teach college somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line and "grow up with the New South." But his career took him north, to Princeton University in New Jersey. In the 1890s, Hopkins invited him back each spring to give courses on governmental administration, where his dynamic teaching influenced many students. One was Frederick Jackson Turner, later a famous historian of the American West. Turner called Professor Wilson "homely, solemn, young, glum, but with that fire in his face and eye."

By 1896, Woodrow Wilson's annual Johns Hopkins lectures had become popular with the public and were covered by the local newspapers. His message of reform for city governments was timely, for the Republican Baltimore City Council had just grabbed the power to make all appointments, a throwback to the old, corrupt "spoils system." Four thousand citizens rallied at the Music Hall demanding change. Among the speakers was Woodrow Wilson, who gained wide attention for the first time. He said, "I can speak of myself as a Baltimorean, I think, for I spent several years in this city." A fellow speaker was the police commissioner of New York City, Wilson's future political rival Theodore Roosevelt.

Jump ahead to 1912, when the Democratic National Convention was held in Baltimore's 5th Regiment Armory, not far from McCulloh Street where Wilson had lived as a student. To the cheering crowd, a speaker called Wilson - now governor of New Jersey- "the ultimate Democrat, the genius of liberty and the very incarnation of progress."

After 46 grueling ballots, the Massachusetts votes were thrown to Wilson by John F. Kennedy's grandfather, John J. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. Then the final results were announced to the nation by telegraph and 50 "long distance telephones": Wilson was the Democratic candidate for president, facing off against conservative Republican William Howard Taft and Progressive Theodore Roosevelt.

Taft and Roosevelt split the Republican vote that November, putting Wilson in the White House, the start of one of the most challenging and controversial presidencies ever.

Biographer John Milton Cooper Jr. points to Wilson's successes. The domestic program Wilson pushed though in his first 18 months in office - including the Federal Reserve System and the income tax - amounted to a "truly staggering program of major legislation," Cooper told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington last October. Cooper calls Wilson "one of the three great legislative presidents of the twentieth century," along with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.

By contrast, Wilson's civil-rights record was poor. Wilson had grown up in Georgia and South Carolina and absorbed the attitudes of white Southerners of the Reconstruction period. He bitterly resented the "negro rule" imposed on the South after the Civil War by a Republican Congress. All his life he treated Republicans with partisan scorn and viewed African-Americans with scant sympathy. The first Southern president since before the Civil War, Wilson appointed many Southerners to his Cabinet, and they attempted to segregate the federal work force, over furious protests from black leaders nationwide.

As the singer Paul Robeson put it, Woodrow Wilson was an "advocate of democracy for the world and Jim Crow for America!"

Last October's symposium at the Woodrow Wilson Center examined, in part, what a moderator labeled "the dark side of Wilson's record." Vanderbilt University professor Gary Gerstle called Wilson "one of the giants of American history" but a "man "deeply racist in his thought and politics and apparently comfortable with being so." Among other things, Gerstle points to a racial epithet Wilson used in telling a joke to a group of Princeton alumni in Baltimore in 1903.

In 1915 Wilson viewed a special White House screening of The Birth of a Nation, a movie that lauded the Ku Klux Klan. Another Baltimore connection: It was Thomas Dixon, Wilson's former Johns Hopkins classmate, who urged him to watch the film, which was based on Dixon's 1905 novel, The Clansman.

Later Wilson praised the film as "terribly true" and "like writing history with lightning" - or did he? He never said these things, biographer Arthur S. Link concluded, adding that Dixon took sneaky advantage of Wilson to gain a tacit seal of approval from the White House.

But Wilson's great mistake, many argue, was failing to condemn the film publicly and call for an end to racial violence. "He endorsed in a very quiet way the lynching of black people in praising Birth of a Nation," says Raymond Winbush, director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University. "If I was asked who was the most racist president of the 20th century, hands down it would be Woodrow Wilson for me."

Barksdale Maynard, a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University, is writing a biography of Woodrow Wilson.

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