Woodrow Wilson

Thursday

Hannah Moore

Why German-origin Americans keep quiet about their culinary contributions

Irish Americans are arguably the most ostentatious in their national celebrations. It is hard to imagine any other group getting a day off work and spending it turning the Chicago River green. I wrote of my own Irish pride in these pages last year. March 17 was the highlight of our social calendar. My grandfather inaugurated our city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, which still runs in Great Falls, Montana, today. Montana — especially Butte — is famous for its Irish population, which makes up 15 percent of residents. But there is a significantly larger ethnic group in Montana, whose traces of national pride are almost imperceptible. According to a US Census Bureau survey in 2020, 24 percent of Montanans claim German ancestry.

German

Monday

Bill Kauffman

The controversy of Daylight Savings Time

Batavia, New York I bear no ill will against golfers — I triple-bogey easy holes and miss gimme putts with the worst of them — but President Trump’s demand that we eliminate Daylight Saving Time (DST) is a double eagle out of the blue, especially as Trump had earlier advocated a move to year-round DST. Although Benjamin Franklin is often credited as its progenitor, the real father of Daylight Saving Time, according to Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward, was the golfing British architect William Willett, who deplored “the waste of daylight.” The British Royal Astronomer dismissed Willett’s idea with the counterproposal that “between the months of October and March the thermometer should be put up ten degrees.

daylight

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

An introduction to presidential grave-hunting

Where better to talk about dead presidents than over beer and wings at Jim's Saloon in East Pembroke, New York, three days before Millard Fillmore’s birthday? Across the table from me is Pat Weissend, a convivial bank manager and former museum director who has visited the gravesites of all thirty-nine dead presidents and all but two of the forty-three dead vice presidents of the United States. (The hard-to-get veeps are Walter Mondale, whose ashes have yet to be interred under the cold hard Minnesota ground, and Nelson Rockefeller, whose private and inaccessible burial spot is the Holy Grail of the grave-hunting community.

presidents

Wednesday

Charles Lipson

The effort to keep Trump off the ballot has been a century in the making

What happens now that the Colorado Supreme Court has kicked Donald Trump off the primary ballot? The first thing, apparently, is similar lawsuits in other “blue” states. Those will continue despite the Wednesday decision by the Michigan Supreme Court that Trump’s name can remain.   Nearly all the commentary has been devoted to the legal reasons for these rulings and their political implications. But it is important to consider the effort to exclude Trump in a wider context, one that goes beyond his personality, polarizing candidacy and events of January 6.  That wider frame is a century-long progressive effort to reframe the way America is governed and to loosen the constitutional barriers to those changes.

trump ballot

Sunday

Casey Chalk

The reviled Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson can’t seem to catch a break. Since Princeton University’s 2020 decision to remove the name of the former president (both of the United States and the university) from its school of Public and International Affairs for his “racist thinking and policies,” other academic institutions have followed suit. An elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, decided in May to drop his name because of Wilson’s “racist values.” Another school in San Leandro, California, made the same decision, as has a high school in our nation’s capital. There’s more than a little irony here. Wilson, racist though he was, was also a leading champion of the progressive, globalist worldview shared by our technocratic elites.

woodrow wilson

Friday

Bill Kauffman

The women who argued against their right to vote

Batavia, New York To think I almost let 2020 slip by without recognizing the centenary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed women the right to vote in all (then) 48 states of the union. Shame on me! This is a matter of Upstate New York regional pride — and confusion — on several counts. The 1848 ‘Declaration of Rights and Sentiments’, a rewrite of the Declaration of Independence along feminist lines, was drafted in Seneca Falls (the village generally thought to be the model for Bedford Falls in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life). The suffragist avatar Susan B. Anthony spent her adulthood in Rochester.

vote 19th amendment

Sunday

Solveig Lucia Gold

It’s not about Woodrow Wilson. It’s about indoctrination

On November 18, 2015, a group of Princeton University undergraduates calling themselves the Black Justice League, or BJL, invaded historic Nassau Hall and occupied President Christopher Eisgruber’s office overnight, refusing to leave until Eisgruber had agreed to, and signed off on, their list of ‘demands’. Most famously, they demanded the purging of Woodrow Wilson’s name from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and from one of the residential colleges, Wilson College. At the time, Eisgruber promised to form committees to discuss the students’ demands; skillfully sidestepping the controversy. Today, however, nearly five years later, Eisgruber has announced that Wilson’s name is coming down.

woodrow wilson