Avi K,
I have often written that the Progressive Movement in the early 20th century had a strong racist component to it. Wilson was just the most obvious manifestation. Wilson was indeed a vile racist although of the gentile aristocratic variety. Ironically, his widow, descended from some of the earliest settlers of Virginia, would be classified as Black by Virginia law in 1924 because she was a ninth generation descendant of Pocahontas, making her 1/512 American Indian. That was the “one drop” rule. Wilson gets credit for appointing Brandeis (a LaFollette Progressive Republican) to the Supreme Court and for vetoing a racist immigraiton law, but he also appointed James McReynolds to the Supreme Court and as you said segregating the civil service. Wilson was a rasha who did some good things for Jews. (There are numerous other examples in history: Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell come to mind immediately.)
But Wilson was not unique. The great accomplishment of the Progressive reformers who took over the state government of Virginia in 1901 was to institute a poll tax in order to disenfranchise black voters (and poor whites as well). Most Americans have never heard of Andrew Jackson Montague but he was the Progressive Governor who led this effort. Another big leader in this effort was the Progressive newspaperman Carter Glass, who would later become famous as the father of the Federal Reserve system and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, two major Progressive accomplishments. Virginia’s poll tax had been around since 1619. but had only been linked to voting in 1876. A miracle occurred in 1882 when a multiracial political party took control of state government and repealed that linik but the Progressives restored that link in 1902. Texas did the same at about that time, in another Progressive reform. But Montague and Glass made peace with the racist political machine they had overturned and each served decades in Congress (Glass in both houses) with the machine’s approval.
Republicans were no better. Starting about 1890, leaders of the party made systematic attempts to purge Blacks from any and all leadership roles in the Party all over the South. William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover, who ironically were not personally racist and were also associated with progressive causes, were leaders in this effort. While the 1920 Republican Platform opposed lynching (and the Progressive Republican Governor of Kentucky managed to get a strong anti-lynching law through the legislature and even ordered the National Guard to open fire on a lynch mob), Calvin Coolidge openly sought KKK votes, two Republican KKK members were elected Governors (Indiana and Colorado). By 1936 they realized that they had alienated their most loyal voters and did a 180 degree turn; from then until 1960 the Republican Party was better on Civil Rights than the Democratic Party but Black voters never returned.