An advantage of seeing history through people is that people have that magic ingredient of inconsistency.
On 3 February 1870, the US Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. It provided that the right of citizens to vote could not be denied or abridged by the US or by any state on account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude.
The amendment and its two predecessors were the Reconstruction amendments, aimed at ensuring equality for recently emancipated slaves. Of course, there is what is meant and what is said, and the Supreme Court in the 1896 decision of Plessy v Ferguson endorsed racial segregation in what became known as the “separate but equal” view.
The next amendment to the constitution was not ratified until 3 February 1913, providing that Congress could levy an income tax “from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” This was necessary to overcome another Supreme Court decision in 1895. Ironically, the author of the majority opinion in Plessy, Justice Brown, deplored the 1895 result, writing “The decision involves nothing less than the surrender of the taxing power to the moneyed class.”
Soon after the 1913 ratification of the sixteenth amendment, President Woodrow Wilson was able to sign into law the Revenue Act, a profound shift in reliance on federal income from tariff duties to income tax. This in turn was a foundation of his progressive regime.
At the same time, when government service had become a vital element for an emerging black middle class, Wilson resolved to give his cabinet members a discretion to segregate government offices and many did. This, of course, provided offices a pretext to refuse employment on the basis that they lacked facilities for black employees.
Wilson’s international reputation rests on the germ of self-determination founded in the League of Nations. National and not personal self-determination, that is. His acquiescence on the racial equality clause in the face of fierce opposition from Australia and South Africa is generally regarded as an inconsistency arising from a personal racism and an indifference in the face of political reality.
Wilson was a lifelong confederationist. His academic writing from decades before had made clear a view that the duty of Congress was not to change a constitution but to value it and that the legislative anti-slavery lobby was wrongly bound to the former course through misplaced philanthropy.
The result is that while Wilson was a firm believer in a document which began “We the People of the United States…” his belief in confederation led inexorably to the view that people self-recognised as “the People” of a particular state binding themselves to union with other states could sustain a contractual right to deny the status of “People” to other peoples.
In this light, it is hardly surprising that Wilson was able to promote a document cementing an agreement between nations which began “The High Contracting Parties, in order to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security…”
The same views may have meant that Wilson could not have advocated a document signed after the second war, wherein the contractual rights of states are on par with the individual rights of persons:
We the Peoples of the United Nations determined… to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small…
The upshot of Wilson’s Princeton after years of debate has renamed the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
In a complex world, we expect uncertainty. There is a tragic irony in the certainty that questions asked and answered in 1788, in 1919 and in 1945 – what comprises “Nation” and who comprises “People” – must with blood and suffering be asked again and again by new and ever newer generations of nations and of peoples.
Wilson died on 3 February 1924.
