Frum invokes Judge Learned Hand on self-doubt to build case for 'uncanceling' Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson, 1912
Library of Congress

In the March Atlantic David Frum pleaded for the "uncanceling" of Woodrow Wilson and gave a shout out to the great Judge Learned Hand.

Frum exhibited his usual eloquence in pleading for understanding that people are complicated and we ought not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Wilsonianism has guided American foreign policy for a century and has done a lot of good in the world, Frum argued persuasively. One cannot pretend away that legacy in an eagerness to embrace the admittedly ample evidence of Wilson's racism and bigotry.

We ought be wary as well, Frum observed, that right and left both are eager to "cancel" Wilson. The left for his racism, of course. The anti-regulatory right, meanwhile, sees Wilson as a forefather of both globalism and the administrative state. Besides his vision for what would become the United Nations, Wilson signed the Federal Trade Commission Act into law in 1914. With the Chevron doctrine presently withering in the Supreme Court, lefties, be careful what you're canceling.

An aside on the subject of left and right: The Economist published a fabulous opinion piece last week that's a balm for classical liberals such as myself who have been rendered ideologically homeless by the ironic Republican embrace of "the state [as] savior." (Every American libertarian, by which I mean most Americans, should read it, so it's unfortunate that it's paywalled.)

In the course of his reasoned plea, Frum further observed:

We live now in a more polarized time [than Wilson's], one of ideological extremes on both left and right. Learned Hand, a celebrated federal judge of Wilson’s era, praised "the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." Our contemporaries have exorcised that spirit. We are very sure that we are right. We have little tolerance for anyone who seems in any degree wrong.

Hear, hear. The line comes from Hand's famous "Spirit of Liberty" speech in 1944. Read more at Judicature.

Torts students know Learned Hand for his also famous formula to describe rational choice as a weighing of burdens against the risk of loss. Hand was prolific, and his subtle influences can be traced through many fields of American law in the 20th century. Indeed, see The Atlantic in 1961.

Just yesterday, as it happens, I was talking after class with a 1L Torts student about the imperative that legal education empower a student to challenge one's own assumptions. I know what you're thinking, but it was she who made the point. "We should question ourselves," she said. "We should never stop questioning."

Wise woman.

Speaking of wise women, hat tip @ my wife for spying The Economist item.

Incidentally, the cover story of the March Atlantic concerns police response to mass shooting events, focusing on, but definitely not limited to, the Deputy Scot Peterson matter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. In June 2023, Peterson was acquitted on all charges after a trial in which authorities alleged felony child neglect and criminal negligence. In January 2024, a Florida court denied a defense motion to dismiss civil suits by 17 families against Peterson, clearing the matter for trial.

Frum's article is Uncancel Woodrow Wilson, The Atlantic, Mar. 2024 (online Feb. 2, 2024) (subscription).

Attorney Scaturro talks monument metrics

Grant monument in Chicago (image CC BY-SA 3.0)

Attorney Frank Scaturro has written an in-depth, four-part-essay series on monument destruction for Emerging Civil War, a platform "for sharing original scholarship related to the American Civil War."  Here is part one, and here are links to all four parts.

Scaturro is president of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association and is working on a book about "New York City’s largely forgotten sites from the founding era."  I quoted Scaturro writing about Grant's civil rights record here on the blog back in November.  I put a couple of my own coins in the monument meter in October.

Grant group investigates curious reappearance of US President in Guinea-Bissau island 'ghost town'

From GMA newsletter, vol. XVI, no. 1, fall 2020, at 4, my photo at right.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the short, strange life of statues in Guinea-Bissau, and, in particular, the strange-upon-strange birth, disappearance, and re-creation of a statue of U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant in an abandoned park in the "ghost town" of Bolama Island.

In March, I reported that, since going missing mysteriously in 2007, the Grant statue "was recovered in pieces, and authorities ultimately restored him."

Not quite so.

Grant Monument Association (GMA) President Frank J. Scaturro (Twitter), by day an attorney and historian who is vice-president and senior counsel at the Judicial Crisis Network, noticed that my March photo of the statue did not look like the original.

Your intrepid blogger visits the cane rum distillery in Quinhámel,

Guinea-Bissau, in March. (RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Scaturro and the GMA dug into the mystery of the statue's reappearance in the middle of the barren park that was once Guinea-Bissau's glorious "Praça Ulysses S. Grant."  (As to why there is a monument to a U.S. President at all on this West African island, see my March post.)  The pieces of the original statue never have been recovered.

A March 2018 photo shows a still empty pedestal.

(Helena Maria Pestana CC BY-SA 4.0)

The latest GMA newsletter (vol. XVI, no. 1, fall 2020) explains how the present likeness of Grant came to be in 2018:

This occurred at the initiative of then-Governor Quintino Rodrigues Bone. Approximately 100,000 CFA francs (roughly U.S. $180) were spent from the local government fund to obtain supplies for the work—a harness, cement, gravel, and colorless paint. With these materials, a local artist, Luizinho (Zinho) Ká, constructed a cement statue. He did not receive any compensation for his work.

....

According to the State Department, there is local interest in replacing the cement statue with a new bronze replica of the destroyed statue, but no funding to do so.

My dispatch from Guinea-Bissau came just before the cancel-culture toppling of monuments across the United States.  Sadly, the fall 2020 GMA newsletter also reported the vandalism and toppling of a Grant bust in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in June.

Scaturro said, "It is ironic that a monument to Grant was restored in Guinea-Bissau soon before another was torn down in San Francisco. Americans who do not respect our heritage can learn a lesson from the people of Guinea-Bissau."

Anyone can join the New York-based Grant Monument Association or visit the General Grant National Memorial in New York (check for covid updates).  Scaturro wrote in a statement on Grant's civil rights record:

As the principal author of Union victory during the Civil War, Grant was the principal enforcer of the Emancipation Proclamation.  As president, he secured laws that enforced the recently ratified 13th and 14th Amendments and acted decisively to ensure the ratification of a 15th Amendment that would ban racial discrimination in voting. His achievements included five enforcement acts, the creation of the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which desegregated various modes of public accommodations and transportation. Grant repeatedly employed military intervention to enforce Reconstruction and crushed the 19th-century Ku Klux Klan. Among America’s top leaders, from military commanders to presidents, none has a more sweeping record on civil rights.

The GMA hosts periodic programs of interest to the public and historians.  On November 19, at 7 p.m. US EST, the GMA will host an online colloquy, "A discussion of the partnership between General Ulysses S. Grant & General William T. Sherman," featuring General David Petraeus and Ulysses S. Grant Association Executive Director John Marszalek.  GMA members receive registration information.