Sublime

But for the Virginia-born Wilson, the New Freedom was for whites only. The first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor, Wilson immediately segregated the government’s workforce.

“Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.”

class privilege,

The Assembly was led by the thirty-seven-year-old Alfred E. Smith, a seven-term veteran from the Lower East Side, son of an Irish mother and an Italian-German father, a vital cog in the Tammany organization who despite an eighth-grade education had demonstrated a political savvy that catapulted him ahead of a legion of better-educated, more seasone

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 jus