Was Woodrow Wilson considered to be a "Dixiecrat" during his Presidency?

[darklordoftech]

When Woodrow Wilson was President, was he seen as "southern" or was he just seen as a generic Democrat?

[Lincoln Republican]

Woodrow Wilson was actually a Bourbon Democrat.

[The Mikado]

He was never really seen as Southern, despite where he grew up. He was a Ph.D. and the head of Princeton University and the Governor of New Jersey.

[Bismarck]

No. Other than the overt racism there wasn’t much southern influence in his political thinking.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Yes, and Lincoln was shot by Booth, because of Jim Crow laws, being at risk after the Civil War.  And Woodrow Wilson was a Dixiecrat during the time of Jim Crow.  FDR elevated the Democratic party.

[America's Sweetheart ❤/𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖞 𝖂𝖆𝖗𝖗𝖎𝖔𝖗]

CNN Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley has described Donald Trump as the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson.

Douglas Brinkley is a very widely respected historian.

So you can draw the conclusion that Woodrow Wilson was indeed racist in many respects.

Being a racist Democrat doesn't equal being a Dixiecrat, though.

[Lincoln Republican]

CNN guest Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley has described Donald Trump as the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson.

Douglas Brinkley is a very widely respected historian.

And Brinkley suggested that Trump may be even worse.

So you can draw the conclusion that Woodrow Wilson was indeed racist in many respects.

[smoltchanov]

CNN guest Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley has described Donald Trump as the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson.

Douglas Brinkley is a very widely respected historian.

And Brinkley suggested that Trump may be even worse.

So you can draw the conclusion that Woodrow Wilson was indeed racist in many respects.

Well, almost all Dixiecrats were racists, but not vice versa.

[Orser67]

I read John Milton Cooper's 2009 "Woodrow Wilson: A Biography" a few months ago. According to Cooper, Wilson:

1)Was seen as sort of a bridge between the North and South, having grown up in Virginia and having spent much of his adult life in NJ. Wilson did use his Southern heritage to appeal to Southern delegates to the 1912 Democratic National Convention, but he wasn't "the Southern candidate."

2)Wasn't more racist than the average Northern voter (which is still pretty racist by today's standards). The racism of his administration was caused largely by the presence of racist Southerners in the Cabinet. Wilson actually won the support of some black leaders (like W.E.B. DuBois) in the 1912 presidential election, though they became pretty unhappy with his administration.

3)Was a Bourbon Democrat earlier in his life, but had established himself as a member of the progressive wing of the party by the time he ran for governor. This actually is somewhat irrelevant to the Dixiecrat thing, as the South had a mix of progressive and conservative Democrats.

[RINO Tom]

^ Thank you for some actual knowledge in this thread.

[Kleine Scheiße]

It’s notable that Princeton has actually always had a bit of a Southern character. Princeton is where the Southern and, well, most other non-New England intellectuals ended up well into at least the 1940s.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

"Dixiecrat" wasn't really a term by that time.

Orser67' answer is spot on.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Speaking of the Southern Democrats, the interesting thing many of them more or less adhered to progressive political thought of the day, as especially evident when the New Deal came around. Later figurehead of the Conservative Coalition, Richard B. Russell, was among the strongest New Deal supporters until he and his allies break with Roosevelt ca. 1937 (while still supporting developments from the first New Deal). Some prominent Southern Democrats remained firm New Dealers even then, notably William Bankhead or Lister Hill. Blatant reactionaries like "Cotton Ed" Smith, who wanted the South to remain a cotton-dominated, rural economy forever and ever, were pretty much a minority. TIME magazine nicely owned Smith by describing him as a man who had "taxed neither his brain nor the voters with a new issue", as well as nicknaming him a "conscientious objector to the 20th Century." Very fitting. He was so reactioary the people of South Carolina almost rejected him in 1938, but FDR unwittingly saved Smith by getting involved. Cotton Ed was then primaries in 1944.

"Conservative" and "Progressive" Southern Democrats were of course largely united when it came to race relations, whether by real conviction of opportunism. I can think, however, of some individuals that were more or less in favor of integration/voting rights. Most notably Alabama's Jim Folsom, who openly sought to make an alliance between working class whites and newly enfranchised Blacks to oppose economic and political elites of the South (remember, thousands of poor whites were effectively denied voting rights under Jim Crow as well). Claude Pepper would be another example of somebody more "liberal" on race relations.

[Mr. Smith]

Speaking of the Southern Democrats, the interesting thing many of them more or less adhered to progressive political thought of the day, as especially evident when the New Deal came around. Later figurehead of the Conservative Coalition, Richard B. Russell, was among the strongest New Deal supporters until he and his allies break with Roosevelt ca. 1937 (while still supporting developments from the first New Deal). Some prominent Southern Democrats remained firm New Dealers even then, notably William Bankhead or Lister Hill. Blatant reactionaries like "Cotton Ed" Smith, who wanted the South to remain a cotton-dominated, rural economy forever and ever, were pretty much a minority. TIME magazine nicely owned Smith by describing him as a man who had "taxed neither his brain nor the voters with a new issue", as well as nicknaming him a "conscientious objector to the 20th Century." Very fitting. He was so reactioary the people of South Carolina almost rejected him in 1938, but FDR unwittingly saved Smith by getting involved. Cotton Ed was then primaries in 1944.

"Conservative" and "Progressive" Southern Democrats were of course largely united when it came to race relations, whether by real conviction of opportunism. I can think, however, of some individuals that were more or less in favor of integration/voting rights. Most notably Alabama's Jim Folsom, who openly sought to make an alliance between working class whites and newly enfranchised Blacks to oppose economic and political elites of the South (remember, thousands of poor whites were effectively denied voting rights under Jim Crow as well). Claude Pepper would be another example of somebody more "liberal" on race relations.

Oscar Underwood and Huey Long are worth a mention as bit exceptional regarding race relations.

[RINO Tom]

Speaking of the Southern Democrats, the interesting thing many of them more or less adhered to progressive political thought of the day, as especially evident when the New Deal came around. Later figurehead of the Conservative Coalition, Richard B. Russell, was among the strongest New Deal supporters until he and his allies break with Roosevelt ca. 1937 (while still supporting developments from the first New Deal). Some prominent Southern Democrats remained firm New Dealers even then, notably William Bankhead or Lister Hill. Blatant reactionaries like "Cotton Ed" Smith, who wanted the South to remain a cotton-dominated, rural economy forever and ever, were pretty much a minority. TIME magazine nicely owned Smith by describing him as a man who had "taxed neither his brain nor the voters with a new issue", as well as nicknaming him a "conscientious objector to the 20th Century." Very fitting. He was so reactioary the people of South Carolina almost rejected him in 1938, but FDR unwittingly saved Smith by getting involved. Cotton Ed was then primaries in 1944.

"Conservative" and "Progressive" Southern Democrats were of course largely united when it came to race relations, whether by real conviction of opportunism. I can think, however, of some individuals that were more or less in favor of integration/voting rights. Most notably Alabama's Jim Folsom, who openly sought to make an alliance between working class whites and newly enfranchised Blacks to oppose economic and political elites of the South (remember, thousands of poor whites were effectively denied voting rights under Jim Crow as well). Claude Pepper would be another example of somebody more "liberal" on race relations.

Don't ask me the finer details because I have no idea, but I remember reading an article one time that said that the first couple Congress' of FDR's first two terms had Southern Democrats having notably more "liberal" voting records on the New Deal and economic bills in general than their Northern Democratic counterparts and, obviously, Republicans.  I think once it became clear that Black voters were going to be a key bloc going forward and that they were clearly benefiting from the New Deal, that is when you saw a lot of Southern Democrats defect.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Speaking of the Southern Democrats, the interesting thing many of them more or less adhered to progressive political thought of the day, as especially evident when the New Deal came around. Later figurehead of the Conservative Coalition, Richard B. Russell, was among the strongest New Deal supporters until he and his allies break with Roosevelt ca. 1937 (while still supporting developments from the first New Deal). Some prominent Southern Democrats remained firm New Dealers even then, notably William Bankhead or Lister Hill. Blatant reactionaries like "Cotton Ed" Smith, who wanted the South to remain a cotton-dominated, rural economy forever and ever, were pretty much a minority. TIME magazine nicely owned Smith by describing him as a man who had "taxed neither his brain nor the voters with a new issue", as well as nicknaming him a "conscientious objector to the 20th Century." Very fitting. He was so reactionary the people of South Carolina almost rejected him in 1938, but FDR unwittingly saved Smith by getting involved. Cotton Ed was then primaries in 1944.

"Conservative" and "Progressive" Southern Democrats were of course largely united when it came to race relations, whether by real conviction of opportunism. I can think, however, of some individuals that were more or less in favor of integration/voting rights. Most notably Alabama's Jim Folsom, who openly sought to make an alliance between working class whites and newly enfranchised Blacks to oppose economic and political elites of the South (remember, thousands of poor whites were effectively denied voting rights under Jim Crow as well). Claude Pepper would be another example of somebody more "liberal" on race relations.

Oscar Underwood and Huey Long are worth a mention as bit exceptional regarding race relations.

Well, Long was exceptional even for a early New Deal era Southern Democrat in more than this sense.

I know Underwood was staunchly anti-KKK, but being anti-KKK alone was hardly a paragon of being more enlightened regarding race relations. In many Southern states (Alabama being a notable example) the Klan was embroiled in a power-struggle with the old economic and political elites. Hugo Black and Bibb Graves joined the Klan in order to gain support against more "establishment" candidates. Meanwhile, Bibb's successor (as well as predecessor), Benjamin Meek Miller was solidly anti-KKK, going so far as to actually enforce certain measures against it, but at the same time was in the "old mules" pocket. The "old mules" had their own means of keeping the Black down, and these were frequently as nasty as what the Klan did, but without white sheets.

[smoltchanov]

Speaking of the Southern Democrats, the interesting thing many of them more or less adhered to progressive political thought of the day, as especially evident when the New Deal came around. Later figurehead of the Conservative Coalition, Richard B. Russell, was among the strongest New Deal supporters until he and his allies break with Roosevelt ca. 1937 (while still supporting developments from the first New Deal). Some prominent Southern Democrats remained firm New Dealers even then, notably William Bankhead or Lister Hill. Blatant reactionaries like "Cotton Ed" Smith, who wanted the South to remain a cotton-dominated, rural economy forever and ever, were pretty much a minority. TIME magazine nicely owned Smith by describing him as a man who had "taxed neither his brain nor the voters with a new issue", as well as nicknaming him a "conscientious objector to the 20th Century." Very fitting. He was so reactioary the people of South Carolina almost rejected him in 1938, but FDR unwittingly saved Smith by getting involved. Cotton Ed was then primaries in 1944.

"Conservative" and "Progressive" Southern Democrats were of course largely united when it came to race relations, whether by real conviction of opportunism. I can think, however, of some individuals that were more or less in favor of integration/voting rights. Most notably Alabama's Jim Folsom, who openly sought to make an alliance between working class whites and newly enfranchised Blacks to oppose economic and political elites of the South (remember, thousands of poor whites were effectively denied voting rights under Jim Crow as well). Claude Pepper would be another example of somebody more "liberal" on race relations.

Don't ask me the finer details because I have no idea, but I remember reading an article one time that said that the first couple Congress' of FDR's first two terms had Southern Democrats having notably more "liberal" voting records on the New Deal and economic bills in general than their Northern Democratic counterparts and, obviously, Republicans.  I think once it became clear that Black voters were going to be a key bloc going forward and that they were clearly benefiting from the New Deal, that is when you saw a lot of Southern Democrats defect.

Absolutely. Until at least FDR's attempt at Supreme Court packing he had almost complete support in the South (there were few exceptons, like Terrell in Texas in 1933-34, but - a few one), frequently more so then among Democrats elsewhere. But when it became clear, that, if everything continues, the whites will need to share power with Blacks in the South - everything changed. For 80-90% of whites there this idea was anathema...