Woodrow Wilson

December 28 was Thomas Woodrow Wilson’s birthday.

He is remembered as a scholar-president.  An architect of the modern state.  A man of ideals.  His face is carved into institutions.  His name hangs over schools, treaties, buildings, ideas.

But anniversaries are not for comfort.  They are for inventory.

Wilson’s legacy is not simply what he accomplished.  It is what he normalized.

He did not invent segregation, but he imported it into the federal government and gave it executive blessing.  He did not discover the Lost Cause, but he made it academically respectable and politically useful.  He did not create censorship, but he taught the modern state how to practice it efficiently, at scale, with legal language and moral urgency.

He spoke of democracy abroad while discriminating at home.

He promised self-determination while denying it to millions.

He told a nation that freedom must sometimes be suspended to save itself, and our nation listened.

That argument has never really left us.

We can admire Wilson’s intelligence.

We can acknowledge his influence.

We cannot excuse the damage.

History does not ask us to choose between complexity and judgment. It demands both.

So on this day, when the calendar says we should remember him, we do.

Not as a marble figure.  Not as a simplified hero.  But as he was: brilliant, ambitious, illiberal, and dangerous in the ways that only brilliant men with good intentions and unchecked authority ever are.

The poem begins with his name.

And then it tells the rest.

Woodrow Wilson

WOODROW WILSON

Taught the nation to worship “experts,” then ruled by them.

Historian who bent the past until it excused his present.

Order, he said, must be imposed, even if freedom paid the price.

Man of peace who jailed dissenters and called it patriotism.

Architect of modern bureaucracy and modern surveillance.

Segregationist who carried the Confederacy into the White House.

Wrote the Lost Cause into the national story.

Oppression, he made policy.

Office doors closed to Black Americans under his command.

Desks separated, dignity dismissed.

Race hierarchy enforced by executive hand.

Obedience demanded, dissent punished.

Watchfulness became the state’s habit.

War promised democracy, delivered repression.

Intellectual who feared the people.

Liberty treated as a condition, not a right.

Speech criminalized in the name of order.

Opinions turned into evidence.

Nation instructed that this was progress.

By: Greg McNeilly