I don’t understand how Woodrow Wilson is ranked high on the list of presidents. From what I understand, Wilson was known to be wildly racist, and his highly anticipated “League of Nations” ended up failing. The problem is that it seems people rank him high because he tried to be peaceful, but that really doesn’t make sense, because the “League of Nations” ultimately failed. While he did establish the federal reserve, but I don’t feel like that is enough to warrant such a high score compared to the other 43 presidents. Are my reasons justified, or is there more to the history that I have missed?
It's been pointed out before, but it should be said again. Those rankings you see are not particularly useful ways to think about the Presidents in them. It's easy to get bogged down in pointless arguments, like whether John Polk should outrank Grover Cleveland because he got Texas into the United States.
But Wilson still gets pretty high marks. His League of Nation failed, true, but it failed because the US was still isolationist and wouldn't join it. Indeed, it's possible to argue that if the US had joined the League and it had acted with unified power and purpose, Hitler might have had a harder time amassing power. The next time around, it was called the United Nations, and it worked much better. So, most people would say now that, in trying to create the League of N. , Wilson had the right idea. Wilson also had done a good job of managing the US ' part in WWI, staying out for as long as possible, but acting as a strong ally to Britain and France when it was time to go in. And Wilson continued the progressive domestic policies of Roosevelt: he set up a Federal Reserve Bank to strengthen the banking system, and he created the income tax, finally actually taxing people based on what they earned, as opposed to just imposing tariffs. In many ways, Wilson put the US on a course to be a world leader, and made its government more modern.
But then, yes, there's Wilson the Southerner, the Virginia Aristocrat. He favored segregation. At a time when lynching in the South had become an epidemic, he only denounced it. His view of the Civil War was that it had been a costly dispute that was now past and the South and the North had reached an amicable working relationship. He was a racist, like many Southerners- but like many white Northerners as well. Generally historians try not to have a presentist bias: to not judge people solely by what we would expect of them now, and in 1918, Wilson's views on race were, sadly, quite typical for white Americans. What makes Wilson's case awkward is that in so many other ways he was a forward-thinking modernizing President, with lofty goals and far-reaching ideas, so his racism rankles. Even the otherwise lack-luster Calvin Coolidge would manage to do more.