How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

That Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner, would seek to roll back empires made sense. His sympathy for the colonized was no doubt fueled by his anger at how the North had treated what Wilson called its “conquered possessions”—the former Confederate states—after the Civil War. But there was another, darker side to Wilson’s Southern identity. He was not just a son of the South in general, but the son of a Southern pastor who had defended slavery by writing a pamphlet titled Mutual Relation of Masters and Slaves as Taught in the Bible. It was a worldview that Wilson never entirely shook off. As president of Princeton, he stood against admitting black students. As president of the United States, he looked on with approval as his cabinet members segregated large parts of the federal government. Wilson didn’t think of nonwhites as subhuman, as some around him did. But he regarded many of them as “children,” requiring “training” before they could rule themselves. The nightmare scenario, in his mind, was that the children might gain power they weren’t ready to wield. He thought of the former slaves who had risen to political office immediately after the Civil War. It was a time, Wilson wrote, when the “white men of the South” lay “under the negroes’ heels.” This was a catastrophe, a “veritable overthrow of civilization.” As he saw it, the brief participation of African Americans in politics had left a wound “incomparably deeper, incomparably more difficult to undo” than the war itself had.