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Southerner?
Mar. 29th, 2014 12:40 pmI've finally started reading The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ. I'm only a few pages in, but just hit an assertion which, though defensible, seems wrong to me. Discussing the run-up to Johnson's 1960 Presidential bid, Caro says that no Southerner had been elected President in over a century. A footnote points to Zachary Taylor, elected 1848, and notes that Andrew Johnson was not elected to the office. But.
What about Woodrow Wilson? It's true that Wilson was a New Jersey resident when he was elected President, but he was born in Virginia and spent his childhood and a good chunk of his young adulthood in the South. To say that he was not a Southerner by virtue of his residency is rather like calling Richard Nixon a New Yorker rather than a Californian. Nor was Wilson merely a Southerner-by-birth; the retrogression in civil rights during his administration is notorious, as is his liking for D. W. Griffith's great but evil film "The Birth of a Nation".
I like and respect Caro's work, but he's using a specious technicality to make a rhetorical point.
What about Woodrow Wilson? It's true that Wilson was a New Jersey resident when he was elected President, but he was born in Virginia and spent his childhood and a good chunk of his young adulthood in the South. To say that he was not a Southerner by virtue of his residency is rather like calling Richard Nixon a New Yorker rather than a Californian. Nor was Wilson merely a Southerner-by-birth; the retrogression in civil rights during his administration is notorious, as is his liking for D. W. Griffith's great but evil film "The Birth of a Nation".
I like and respect Caro's work, but he's using a specious technicality to make a rhetorical point.
