The tony clubhouse reserved for the alumni of Princeton University has erased the name of one of its most notable alumni from its Manhattan dining room, Heat Street reports.
The Woodrow Wilson Room is now “Nassau 1756,” as the Princeton Club no longer acknowledges the life and work of President Woodrow Wilson after being deemed a “white supremacist.”
If you dined at the club over Christmas, you would have have recognized the name. The restaurant was closed during January and February — for renovations — and when it reopened at he end of March, it had been rechristened.
It was the very least that Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson detractors could do.
For more than a year, the Princeton students, faculty and alumni have tried — unsuccessfully so far — to also erase Wilson’s name from the school’s internationally-famous international affairs school.
Wilson’s name was first deleted from the Princeton Club’s website and then literally removed from the restaurant.
Nassau 1756, the new name, is a reference to the year that Princeton moved to its current location.
Wilson, a Democrat, was president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, which included the years of the First World War. He was not only a Princeton alumni but also president of the university for eight years.
But though he brought America into the war, envisioned and campaigned for the League of Nations, and supported liberal economic policies, his record on civil rights does not meet current progressive standards and left-leaning academia has disowned his memory.
Wilson detractors have sought to excise Wilson’s memory from Princeton for years, but the success earlier this year of Yale activists to remove the memory of John C. Calhoun from its Calhoun College emboldened their efforts. Calhoun, though undeniably a huge historical presence in the the Antebellum era, was a slaveholder and the architect of states’ rights.
Wilson was described in a letter to Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber as one in a series of “White supremacists who paved the way for Trump.”
Wilson was undoubtedly a supporter of Jim Crow racial segregation — which he enforced in the White House — and spoke favourably of the Ku Klux Klan.
Princeton’s trustees have so far resisted campus protests to airbrush Wilson from the university’s history, responding to activist demands with the following statement: “The question of Wilson’s legacy has been fully addressed by the trustees and will not be reopened.”
