Edward Tenner: Glenn Beck, Woodrow Wilson, and Liberalism
[Edward Tenner is a historian of technology and culture. He was a founding advisor of Smithsonian's Lemelson Center and holds a Ph.D in European history.]
The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is bemused by Glenn Beck's fixation on the abiding evil influence of Woodrow Wilson, which he links to Beck's defiance of the convention against comparing political opponents to Nazis. (I suspect that if the taboo has eroded for Beck and others it's because it's hard to call people communist sympathizers any more, but that's another issue. And anyway, Beck and the Right didn't start the metaphor.)
I actually think Glenn Beck is right to be fascinated by Wilson. I am, too. But I can't agree that Wilson is still a liberal hero who needs to be unmasked. Au contraire, Wilson is a much-beleaguered figure among liberals and libertarians, who regard him -- rightly -- as a racist even by the standards of his time. Screening Birth of a Nation in the White House was typical, as Charles Paul Freund has observed in Reason. And at the Congress of Versailles in 1919, Wilson helped the British delegation block a Japanese proposal for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations Covenant....
Beck is only the latest in a series of what my friend the sociologist Gary Fine calls reputational entrepreneurs. Reality is always more complex than the high and low points of the record. In my own reading of Wilson's works and contemporaries' comments, I've found a side of Wilson that -- before his presidency -- led many African American voters to support him. At a time when religious bias was still rampant, Wilson appointed Princeton's first Jewish and Roman Catholic professors....In this sense there is more of Woodrow Wilson in the Tea Party movement than its leaders would like to acknowledge.
Read entire article at The Atlantic
The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is bemused by Glenn Beck's fixation on the abiding evil influence of Woodrow Wilson, which he links to Beck's defiance of the convention against comparing political opponents to Nazis. (I suspect that if the taboo has eroded for Beck and others it's because it's hard to call people communist sympathizers any more, but that's another issue. And anyway, Beck and the Right didn't start the metaphor.)
I actually think Glenn Beck is right to be fascinated by Wilson. I am, too. But I can't agree that Wilson is still a liberal hero who needs to be unmasked. Au contraire, Wilson is a much-beleaguered figure among liberals and libertarians, who regard him -- rightly -- as a racist even by the standards of his time. Screening Birth of a Nation in the White House was typical, as Charles Paul Freund has observed in Reason. And at the Congress of Versailles in 1919, Wilson helped the British delegation block a Japanese proposal for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations Covenant....
Beck is only the latest in a series of what my friend the sociologist Gary Fine calls reputational entrepreneurs. Reality is always more complex than the high and low points of the record. In my own reading of Wilson's works and contemporaries' comments, I've found a side of Wilson that -- before his presidency -- led many African American voters to support him. At a time when religious bias was still rampant, Wilson appointed Princeton's first Jewish and Roman Catholic professors....In this sense there is more of Woodrow Wilson in the Tea Party movement than its leaders would like to acknowledge.