FR. MC MANUS ON PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON

Posted By: March 29, 2013

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

IRISH ECHO

MAY 21, 2007

Dear Editor,

I am a big fan of Edward T. O’Donnell’s column, ” Hibernian Chronicle”, which I read religiously.
His May 16 column, “President slams ‘hyphenated Americans'” was of special interest because it dealt with the attitude of Woodrow Wilson (who was President from March 4, 1913 to March 3, 1921) to the Irish Cause and it’s Irish-American supporters.
Wilson — indulging in his own bigotry and pandering to the No Nothings of the times — reprimanded Irish-Americans for being “Irish-American” and not just “American”, thereby implying that they had divided loyalties. That, of course, was the Big Lie. Irish-Americans, quite rightly, wanted the United Stated to adapt a fair and honorable foreign policy on justice and freedom in Ireland, with and end to English rule oppression.

Wilson, for all his talk about “national self-determination” refused to apply that principle to Ireland. He was an Anglophile, which is okay. But why was he anti-Irish? His bigotry was classically demonstrated by the way he treated Hanna Sheehy Skeffington in the white House on January 11, 1918. (Hanna’s pacifist husband, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, although he was not involved in the Easter Rising of 1916, had been executed without a trial by a British firing squad). When Hanna reminded President Wilson of his own Irish ancestry, he snapped back, ” Scotch-Irish, Madam!”

So why was President Wilson anti-Irish? The simple answer was because he had a racist/sectarian/segregationist mindset and consequently and logically he was anti-Black, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. (All three go hand-in-hand, as is illustrated by the fact that those three groups were historically the targets of the KKK).
Wilson dismissed a number of Black federal employees, replacing them with Whites and further segregated the Federal workplace, stating, ” I do approve of the segregation that is being attempted in several of the departmentsŠ” And, most notoriously of all, on March 21, 1915 Wilson put on a special screening in the White House of Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith and based on the novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon. The movie distorted history ,glorified the KKK and denigrated and demeaned African-Americans. Instead of denouncing that racist and vicious propaganda, President Wilson waxed lyrically about it: ” It is like writing history with lightening, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true”.
Is it, therefore, any surprise that President Wilson would support British policy in Ireland that was based on racist English superiority and Protestant supremacy? He was simply being true to his own perverted beliefs.

Father Sean Mc Manus
President
Irish National Caucus
P.O. Box 15128
Capitol Hill
Washington, D.C. 20003-0849
202-544-0568