For most of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson was a progressive icon. America’s 28th president was widely regarded by the left for pioneering reforms he enacted over the course of his tumultuous two terms in office. But recently Wilson’s star has lost its luster. In his new book, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, Christopher Cox explains why.
Long a controversial figure, Wilson was one of the most consequential men to ever occupy the Oval Office. On the domestic front, he ushered in measures that vastly expanded the federal government’s power, many of which served as a stepping stone for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal two decades later. His “legislative legacy,” Cox notes, “continues to shape American life in the 21st century.” The progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Park Service, and a bevy of other laws and regulations, were enacted during his presidency.
Wilson was also the president who presided over America’s entry onto the global stage, serving as commander in chief during World War I and then presiding over the peace negotiations that followed. “Few Americans,” Cox observes, “had a more enduring influence on their nation’s history.”
But Wilson left office a shattered man, crippled by a series of strokes and dejected at the Senate’s rejection of his cherished vision of a League of Nations. Prone to both soaring oratory and moralizing, Wilson had warned the Senate that failure to support the league would “break the heart of the world.” He died less than four years after exiting the White House, a few years shy of 70. “I am a broken piece of machinery,” he uttered in his final moments.
Another global conflagration served to revive Wilson’s reputation. As a result of World War II, Wilson was portrayed as a tragic visionary whose belief in international institutions was ahead of his time. Beginning in the 1940s, presidential historians began to rank Wilson as a “great” or “near great” president. Presidents as ideologically diverse as Harry Truman and Richard Nixon spoke of Wilson as a fallen hero.
Yet reverence for Wilson has diminished in recent years. In 2020, Princeton University removed Wilson’s name from its prestigious school of public affairs, citing his “racist thinking.” The removal was a big deal. Wilson had been president of Princeton before ascending to the New Jersey governorship and then the presidency. Indeed, Wilson’s occupation as an “academic” and a “thinker” were implicit reasons behind the progressive left’s love affair with the man. Wilson neatly embodied the left’s obsession with rule by an “expert class”—those who knew what was best for the ignorant and unwashed masses. That Wilson supported progressive taxation, internationalism, and fierce regulation of business was but icing on the cake.
But as Christopher Cox reveals, the real Wilson was often a reactionary.
Wilson’s career has been the subject of thousands of books. But Cox’s work is the first accessible account of Wilson’s battle against another key issue that came to the fore during his presidency: enfranchisement. Simply put: Wilson didn’t believe that either women or African Americans were qualified to vote. For reasons of political expediency, he would, at times, try to mask this fact. But, as Cox demonstrates, Wilson had beliefs that were retrograde at best.
“It was in many ways unfortunate,” writes Cox, “that Wilson, whose early writings at Princeton declared universal suffrage to be ‘the foundation of every evil in this country,’ came to occupy the White House just as the national movement for women’s suffrage approached a tipping point.” Wilson “was superbly unsuited for the moment.”
Wilson was the first Southerner to be elected to the presidency after the Civil War. And he was the son of an unreconstructed supporter of the Confederacy and slavery—a man who literally defended enslaving humans from his pulpit and who remained unapologetic about doing so until his dying day.
Some of Wilson’s more admiring biographers, like the historian John Milton Cooper and the writer A. Scott Berg, have, if unintentionally, minimized the impact that Wilson’s upbringing had on his ideological development. Both have noted Wilson’s prejudices. But too often Wilson’s views have been presented with the implicit apologia that they were common “for his time” and for “someone of his background.” Yet, it can’t be denied that with Wilson at the helm, civil rights took a giant leap backwards.
Indeed, thanks to Cox’s efforts, it will be supremely difficult for future historians to put a positive spin on Wilson’s troubling legacy of disenfranchisement. When Wilson came to Washington, he brought his beliefs with him. And tragically they were soon reflected in policies that impacted millions of Americans. Wilson appointed a whole host of unrepentant racists to important positions, even elevating several to the cabinet. He segregated the federal workforce—and, as Cox documents, he prioritized doing so. Wilson supported Jim Crow and measures aimed at making African Americans second-class citizens. He was even “complicit in a last-ditch attempt to rewrite the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to protect” these racist measures. It was under Woodrow Wilson that the Ku Klux Klan was reborn, inspired by a series of Klan-worshipping novels by Thomas Dixon, a longtime friend of the president.
Wilson fought enfranchisement tooth and nail. The man who wanted to make the world safe for democracy actively worked to prevent his fellow Americans from voting. And he wasn’t above using underhanded methods to do so.
William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’s secretary of state and a three-time Democratic nominee for president, privately observed that Wilson “is an autocrat by training. He has been dealing as a master with schoolboys all his life, until now he has reached a point where he cannot meet anybody on the basis of equality.”
Those who opposed Wilson often suffered his wrath. The president sanctioned the brutal treatment of women fighting for their right to vote and was, at best, cold and aloof to those with dissenting views. Cox documents how Wilson’s Treasury and Justice Departments were used to spy on his opponents and critics—including former advisers like Dudley Field Malone, a key campaign aide who broke with Wilson over his opposition to suffrage.
Cox has done his research, mining the archives and in the process coming up with new material that has gone overlooked by other Wilson biographers. And much of it presents the academic turned politician in a very unflattering light.
Great presidents demonstrate the ability to learn and grow in office. In Woodrow Wilson, the nation was burdened with a man whose certainty was often matched only by his bigotry.
When the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader, famously quoted Victor Hugo: “There is no force so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” The heroes of Cox’s tale are the activists, everyday people, and members of Congress who, with herculean efforts, fought against the obstruction of the nation’s most powerful man and in so doing enabled a new birth of freedom.
Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn
by Christopher Cox
Simon and Schuster, 640 pp., $34.99
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
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