{"id":9711,"date":"2015-11-24T19:52:19","date_gmt":"2015-11-25T01:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=9711"},"modified":"2015-11-24T19:52:19","modified_gmt":"2015-11-25T01:52:19","slug":"political-correctness-goes-to-war-on-american-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2015\/11\/24\/political-correctness-goes-to-war-on-american-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Political Correctness Goes to War on American History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"WW\"<\/p>\n

\n

“Where will the impulse to purge the past of its sins end? Should Washington, DC, named after a slave owner, adopt a new title? Should the Jefferson memorial be torn down?”<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

-Jacob Heilbrunn<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

George Orwell once remarked that Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union was a place yesterday\u2019s weather could be changed by decree. America, it seems, is not wholly immune to this totalitarian impulse either. It increasingly manifests itself in political correctness, a phenomenon that is flourishing at elite American universities. Make no mistake: the authoritarian implications of this movement, as Jonathan Chait points out in <\/a>New York<\/em><\/a> magazine<\/a>, should not be pooh-poohed. Quite the contrary. The tribunes of political correctness, Chait notes, \u201c are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/em> is thus featuring a story<\/a> on a plot against Woodrow Wilson\u2014or, to put it more precisely, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. A student group called the Black Justice League is demanding that Princeton University, which Wilson molded in his image first as professor, then as the school\u2019s president, acknowledge \u201cthe racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson\u201d and move to strip his name from both the public policy school and the residential college. For good measure, these student radicals want Princeton to institute courses on \u201cthe history of marginalized peoples\u201d as well as \u201ccultural competency training.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilson, a great Progressive hero, the would-be spreader of democracy and freedom around the globe, was indeed a racist\u2014a nasty disposition that he happened to share with a number of his contemporaries. In Wilson\u2019s case, he imbibed much of his worldview from his father, the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Southern Democrat who staunchly defended slavery on biblical grounds. One of his sermons, the great historian Arthur S. Link wrote, \u201cwas so fervid in defense of that institution that his congregation ordered it printed.\u201d For the father, the son, W. Barksdale Maynard notes in his superb biography of Woodrow Wilson, was supposed to be a Southern hero who would redeem America: a \u201crhetoric of national salvation would run through much of Wilson\u2019s life, along with a note of triumphant conquest and even a little revenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, Link is careful to note that Woodrow Wilson\u2019s attitudes were in advance of some of his southern coevals: \u201cAs early as 1881, we find Wilson writing hopefully about the development of a class of sturdy, independent Negro landowners in the South, advocating compulsory education for Negroes who did not want to go to school, and applauding independent Negro political action.\u201d As president, Wilson, who viewed blacks as \u201can ignorant and inferior race,\u201d reinstituted the segregation of the federal workforce, a shameful mark on his record that has frequently been written about.<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at \u00a0National Interest<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Where will the impulse to purge the past of its sins end? Should Washington, DC, named after a slave owner, adopt a new title? Should the Jefferson memorial be torn down?” -Jacob Heilbrunn   George Orwell once remarked that Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union was a place yesterday\u2019s weather could be changed by decree. America, it seems,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[475,1247,1860],"tags":[2438,3109,3110,3111],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9711"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}