Woodrow Wilson Previewing his forthcoming biography, A. Scott Berg’s New York Times’ opinion piece—“Wilson to Obama: March Forth!”—lauded a few weeks ago the hundredth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. In Berg’s view, “the Princeton schoolmaster” (as Wilson was sometimes called by both friends and foes) was a model and validation for subsequent presidents using “the bully pulpit” (that phrase was Theodore Roosevelt’s) to move America in a “progressive” direction. Wilson was revered, then and now, by many Jews for nominating Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court and for giving his unofficial blessing, if not official endorsement, to the Balfour Declaration. Brandeis—“the People’s Lawyer”—was a great champion of civil liberties and social welfare, though less so of the civil rights of African Americans. He signed on to majority opinions in Supreme Court decisions that chipped away at segregation (such as Buchanan v. Warley [1917] against “racial zoning”), but did not use his Supreme Court seat to denounce Jim Crow. Even so, Brandeis—through his use of surrogates like Felix Frankfurter and the influence of his “social science jurisprudence” on subsequent Supreme Court decisions—helped shape the NAACP into the legal instrument that ultimately brought triumphed in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In this era of “critical legal studies,” it is not surprising that Brandeis himself is receiving severe scrutiny for alleged “passivity” and “systematic evasion” of black rights—as Christopher A. Bracey puts it in a 2012 Legal Research Paper for the George Washington University Law School. Bracey has a point—Brandeis was certainly not an engaged racial liberal like Joel and Arthur Spingarn (presidents of the NAACP) or Louis Marshall (president of the American Jewish Committee)—but, in my view, his debunking of Brandeis is somewhat overdrawn and anachronistic. Brandeis’ 1916 confirmation to the Supreme Court was held up for three months, less by anti-Semitism, than by fears he might vote to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Brandeis encouraged Harvard’s handful of African American law students to take cases for the NAACP and made financial contributions to Howard University Law School—small gestures by today’s standards, but significant at the time. He also cofounded the civil rights-oriented American Jewish Congress. It is of value to look at the shared context yet the contrasting stance of Brandeis and Wilson during what one African American historian Rayford Logan characterized “the nadir of American race relations.” On the one hand, in contrast to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., no one seems to have been able to uncover a racist word or unkind treatment of individual African Americans in Brandeis’ work and life. On the other hand, Woodrow Wilson—and this is entirely left out in Berg’s puff piece in the Times—was an arch-segregationist. (Hollywood’s 1944 biopic, Wilson—slick partisan presidential year campaign year agitprop—glossed over the same racist history.) Both Kentucky-born Brandeis and Virginia-born Wilson were products of the post-Civil War South. The difference was that Brandeis came from a family of Jewish Forty Eighters with antislavery convictions (he changed his middle name from “David” to “Dembitz” to honor his uncle, a Lincoln delegate the 1860 Republican Convention), while Wilson grew up in a family with Confederate sympathies (his father, a Civil War chaplain, had helped organize the Presbyterian Church of the Confederate States of America) that continued to color his racial attitudes even after his transition to a career at Princeton as history professor and university president and as New Jersey’s governor. Promising W.E.B. DuBois and other African American progressives in 1912 that he would give their cause sympathetic consideration, Wilson betrayed them by allowing his Secretary of Treasury, Albert S. Burleson, and his Secretary of Treasury and son-in-law William G. McAdoo, to segregate their departments, including Jim Crow toilets. When indignant African American journalist, William Monroe Trotter, came to the White House in 1914 to protest, Wilson had him thrown out. The next year, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, based on the racist novel by Wilson’s college chum Thomas Dixon, Jr., was screened at the White House, after which Wilson reportedly raved that it was like “history written with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” (The quote was used for three months to publicize the film, before the White House distanced itself.) In 1918, Wilson, at long last, gave a patriotic speech against lynching, condemning it primarily as an embarrassment to America’s wartime objectives. In 1919, a skeptical William Monroe Trotter, over the objections of the State Department, followed Wilson to Paris, where Trotter attempted to employ the Paris Peace Conference in order to use all the “talk of democracy and self-determination . . . [to] provide a stage to tell the world about the plight of blacks in the United States”—as well as the colonial peoples in Africa and Asia. Trotter’s lobbying campaign produced more frustration than fulfillment. More generally, Erez Manela’s excellent book, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007), shows just how much like pulling teeth were anti-colonial leaders attempts to get Wilson to give a consistent, colorblind application of his international principles to Egypt, India, China, or Korea. From Wilson to Obama, and in the case of both presidents and Supreme Court justices, liberal rhetoric may inspire, but it’s no substitute for consistent action—and no justification for hagiography.