The Unseen Truth, page 44
58. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “My First Impressions of Woodrow Wilson,” Journal of Negro History 58, no. 4 (1973): 453. Wilson’s book The State was translated into other languages and adopted by many universities. See Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President, ed. Mark R. DiNunzio (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
59. Clifford is the maternal great-granduncle of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
60. As Herbert Aptheker wrote, “regrettably, neither version of A Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1983), edited by R. W. Logan and M. R. Winston list anything on Murray, who merits extended biographical notice.” Herbert Aptheker, “Introduction,” in Writings in Periodicals Edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, Selections from the Horizon, comp. and ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1985), viii. Also see Anita Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray: First Biography of a Forgotten Pioneer for Civil Justice (Fort Washington, MD: HLE Publishing, 2006).
61. Albert Biome, “Emancipation and the Freed,” The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), esp. 156–157; Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray; Patricia Hills, “ ‘History Must Restore What Slavery Took Away’: Freeman H. M. Murray, Double Consciousness, and the Historiography of African American Art History,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, ed. Eddie Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2019), 3–15; Richard J. Powell, “Freeman Henry Morris Murray” (Review of Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture), Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (2013): 646–649; Steven Nelson, “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: Race, Representation, and the Beginnings of an African American History of Art,” in Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2002), 297–308; James Smalls, “Freeman Murray and the Art of Social Justice,” in Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom, ed. Claire Parfait, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, and Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (New York: Routledge, 2017), 131–142.
62. Clipping from The Washington Herald, February 28, 1916. In “Writings by Freeman, Organizational Affiliation, Printed Materials, 74–2,” folder: “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture—Announcement flyer,” Freeman H. M. Murray Papers (hereafter FHMMP), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.
63. Patricia Hills notes that Murray was interested in what was “absent,” while Nelson notes that Murray was focused on “representational silences.” See Hills, “History Must Restore,” 9; Nelson, “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture,” 284.
64. Clipping by Murray, “The Cynic Says: Jim Crow,” n.d. in Writings by Freeman, Organizational Affiliation, Printed Materials, 74-2, Newspaper Columns, folder 27, FHMMP.
65. Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 37; Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 8.
66. Kobena Mercer, James Van Der Zee (London: Phaidon, 2003), n.p.; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Foreword,” in Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, ed. Allon Schoener (New York: New Press, 1995); Bridget R. Cooks, “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on my Mind (1969),” American Studies 48, no. 1 (2007): 5–39; Emilie Boone, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).
67. Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York: New Press, 2007), 5; Mark Sealy, Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019), 5; Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 23.
68. Foucault declared the need for writing a “History of the Detail” in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hegel uses detail to distinguish between aesthetic conventions and periods, (i.e., Symbolism, Classicism, and Romanticism) in his Lectures on Aesthetics. Also see Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 3, 23.
69. Womack, Matter of Black Living, 8.
70. Womack, Matter of Black Living, 23.
71. Womack, Matter of Black Living, 215.
72. Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray, 174–175; Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, November 8, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP; “City News in Brief,” Washington Post, November 8, 1913, 2; Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 145.
73. Hackley-Lambert, F. H. M. Murray, 174–175, 178; Francis J. Grimké, Excerpts from a Thanksgiving Sermon, Delivered November 26, 1914, and Two Letters Addressed to Hon. Woodrow Wilson, President of the U.S. (Washington, DC: R.L. Pendleton, 1914).
74. Kenneth O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 17 (Autumn 1997): 118; Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 3, 502; Weiss, “Negro and the New Freedom,” 62; Josephus Daniels, The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913–1921, ed. E. David Cronon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 234, 32.
75. “Address of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, to all the Churches of Jesus Christ throughout the Earth,” adopted in Augusta, Georgia, December 1861, Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010944332.
76. Patricia O’Toole, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 368–369. As Erez Manela notes, Wilson’s negation of Japan’s request for a “racial equality” amendment in the League of Nations Covenant was not a straightforward example of his own racism. See Manela, “ ‘People of Many Races’: The World beyond Europe in the Wilsonian Imagination,” in Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson: the American Dilemma of Race and Democracy, ed. John Milton Cooper and Thomas Knock (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 193; Kristofer Allerfeldt, “Wilsonian Pragmatism? Woodrow Wilson, Japanese Immigration, and the Paris Peace Conference,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 15 (September 2004): 545–572; Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equity: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 2009).
77. To my knowledge, a significant exception here, though it is not a biography, is Manela’s scholarship in “People of Many Races.”
78. Arthur S. Link quoted by the journal’s editors in O’Reilly, “The Jim Crow Policies of Woodrow Wilson,” 120.
79. Woodrow Wilson, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” Atlantic Monthly (January 1901): 11; Woodrow Wilson, History of the American People, vol. 5 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), 46–52.
80. Wilson, “Reconstruction,” 6.
81. Manela notes Wilson’s use of oblique language in the context of his international discussions, using terms such as “enlightened” and “modern” as proxy, and in his discussions on the military invasion of Haiti where he never mentions race. See Manela, “People of Many Races,” 187–188, 200.
82. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 3 (New York: Bedminster, 1968), 973–974.
83. Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 2 (July 1887): 197–222, esp. 162.
84. R. R. Thompson to Alain Locke, July 15, 1917, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC. See Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 289.
85. “Mr. Trotter and Mr. Wilson” (A conversation between William Monroe Trotter and Woodrow Wilson), The Crisis 9, no. 3 (January 1915): 119.
86. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 162.
87. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 164–165.
88. Woodrow Wilson to Ellen Axson, October 30, 1883, PWW, vol. 2, 501–502.
89. Ray Stannard Baker Diary, entry for March 32, 1919, PWW, vol. 56, 491. Wilson’s professorial habits while governing in the White House are well documented, but his own comments offer the most color. He told Democratic senator Henry Ashurst of Arizona, in a tense moment in negotiations with the German government over their agreement to the Fourteen Points, “I am willing if I can serve the country to go into a cellar and read poetry the remainder of my life.” Henry F. Ashurst diary, entry for October 14, 1918, PWW, vol. 51, 339–340.
90. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 203. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 162.
91. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 198, 217.
92. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 210, italics are Wilson’s.
93. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 202, 204, 209–210.
94. Wilson, “Study of Administration,” 206–207.
95. The closest I have seen a scholar come is Benjamin Slomski, who does not analyze that text but is among the scholars who suggests that “Darwinian arguments were present” in Wilson’s administrative policy. Slomski writes, “It is possible that Wilson’s administrative thought is unrelated to his racism, but it is also possible that Wilson understood his administrative theory and his racism to be part of an organic whole.” See Benjamin Slomski, “Darwin and American Public Administration: Woodrow Wilson’s Darwinian Argument for Administration,” Politics and Life Sciences 41, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 105–113, quotation on 109.
96. See Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Politics,” in An Old Master and Other Political Essays (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 55.
97. Wilson, “The Study of Politics,” 53–54.
98. Wilson, “The Study of Politics,” 56.
99. Woodrow Wilson: Essential Writings and Speeches of the Scholar-President, ed. Mario R. DiNunzio (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 7–8.
100. Joseph R. Wilson to Woodrow Wilson, December 22, 1879, PWW, vol. 1, 589. For more on Wilson’s personal relationships, Patrick Weil argues that the psychobiography of Wilson, co-authored by William C. Bullitt and Sigmund Freud, warrants more careful analysis than the dismissals it initially received when published in 1966; see Weil, Madman in the White House. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking Adult, 2014), 335. This use of the term “mere literature” has come up in art historical scholarship in the context of modernism in the early twentieth century, without reference to this political context, so divorced is the study of the history of segregation from the study of visual culture of the period. See Lauren Kroiz’s discussion of Alfred Stieglitz’s break from American realism by calling its painting “mere literature.” Lauren Kroiz, Composite Modernism: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 4; Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 67.
101. Woodrow Wilson, Mere Literature and Other Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 18; “President Woodrow Wilson of Princeton,” The World’s Work 19, no. 6 (April 1910): 12762–12763. Wilson was not alone in his focus on this term the “constructive imagination.” In 1903, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot featured the term in his well-attended Presidential Address of the National Education Association in Boston, defining it as one of the four characteristics of the “New Definition of the Cultivated Man.” Eliot saw the fourth and final skill of the “cultivated man” as the “training of the constructive imagination,” which “implies the creation or building of a new thing.” He likened this to the work of a sculptor and painter, but also to those working in the realm “of science, the investigator” placing Darwin, Pasteur, Dante, and Shakespeare in the same breath. The usage pattern of the term “constructive imagination,” using the American History Newspapers Database, shows that it appears between 1850 and 1919 in the United States, peaks in use between 1910 and 1919, then declines in 1920, slipping out of usage altogether by the middle of the twentieth century. The term is commonly used to describe the creative faculty of mind. See examples, including, “The Limitation of the Constructive Imagination,” Daily Picayune, October 5, 1890, 12; and “Reminiscences of Prof. Tyndall. Herbert Spencer’s Analysis of the Life and Character and Achievements of hist Friends,” St. Louis Republic, November 2, 1894, 32.
102. Review of Mere Literature (author unknown), New York Times, January 9, 1897; PWW, vol. 10, 99–101.
103. Wilson, “Address on the Nature of History,” PWW, vol. 15, 476, 485.
104. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (New York: Penguin, 2019), xx.
105. Jennifer Raab, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 7, 84–85; “Cotopaxi,” Harper’s Weekly 7 (April 4, 1863): 210.
106. Raab, Frederic Church, 2, 5.
107. Raab, Frederic Church, 19; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), 16–17.
108. Joseph Ruggles Wilson to Wilson, PWW, vol. 8, 276.
109. Ellen Axson had gone to study in New York City at the Art Students League when George de Forest Brush and Thomas Eakins were teaching, right after her engagement to Wilson, which frustrated him. He would pursue his graduate work in political science at Johns Hopkins. Ellen Axson Wilson, Kevin Grogan, Cary Wilkins, Amy Kurtz Lansing, and Erick Montgomery, First Lady Ellen Axson and Her Circle (Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 2013), ix.
110. Wilson to Ellen Axson, December 22, 1883, PWW, vol. 2, 597; and Wilson to Ellen Axon, July 16, 1883, PWW, vol. 2, 389.
111. Ellen Axson to Wilson, February 10, 1885, PWW, vol. 4, 234; and Ellen Axson to Wilson, December 11, 1884, PWW, vol. 3, 533.
112. Wilson to Ellen Axson, December 12, 1884, PWW, vol. 3, 534–535.
113. James T. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917–1919 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939), vii–ix, 4, 7, 16, 62, 74, 166.
114. Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 12–13.
115. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 12, 1914, 108, CHP.
116. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 13, 1914, 108, CHP.
117. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 13, 1914, 108, CHP.
118. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 121.
119. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 16, 1914, 110, CHP.
120. Womack, Matter of Black Living, 12–13; Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), esp. chapter 1, “Saving the Nation: The Racial Data Revolution and the Negro Problem.”
121. Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 19–20.
122. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 9, 1914, 100, CHP.
123. J. E. Ralph to Charles Hamlin, included in Charles S. Hamlin Diary, March 7, 1914, 99, CHP. Also see Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 120.
124. Charles S. Hamlin Diary, November 9, 1913, 95, CHP.
125. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 120.
126. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 121.
127. Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, DC: Ransdell, 1940), 297–298. In 1953, Terrell began the process of desegregating the nation’s capital, and at the end of her life, she helped lead a case that went to the Supreme Court. The case focused on Thompson’s Restaurant, which had refused to serve the committee she chaired, the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws (19).
128. Terrell, Colored Woman, 298.
129. Edward Christopher Williams, When Washington Was in Vogue: A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Amistad, 2003), 48. Also see “Threat to Use Vitriol,” Washington Evening Star, February 4, 1915, 14.
130. Swan M. Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, October 22, 1913, box 5, folder 2, KBFP.
131. Charles S. Hamlin to Archibald Grimké, June 16, 1914, box 39–25, folder 499, Archibald Grimké Collection (AGC), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.
132. US Congress, House Select Committee on Reform in the Civil Service, Hearing on Segregation of Clerks and Employees in the Civil Service, 63rd Congress, 2nd Session, March 6, 1914 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 20–21; Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 156.
