Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, by Christopher Cox (Simon & Schuster, 640 pp., $30.99)
In Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, Christopher Cox describes uber-progressive Woodrow Wilson as “superbly unsuited” for the twilight of the Progressive era that witnessed the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment establishing women’s suffrage.
“All of us who are Woodrow Wilson’s heirs owe it to ourselves to remember the man in full, stripping away the hero worship and absorbing the difficult lessons from his legacy on matters of race, sex, and civil liberties, while paying ‘the reverence of old days to his dead fame,” writes Cox, a former congressman and chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, now a scholar in residence at the University of California, Irvine.
Cox ironically quotes here and in the subtitle from “Ichabod” (roughly translated from Hebrew as “inglorious”), a John Greenleaf Whittier poem inspired by abolitionist sentiments about the mourning of a leader fallen from grace. During the tumult following the death of George Floyd, unknown vandals defaced a statue of Whittier in the California city bearing his name with a “F--- Slave Owners” message. That 2020’s statuary murderers went after an abolitionist poet, but mostly left Woodrow Wilson alone, speaks to the historical ignorance of those who use spray paint as a pen; it also helps account for the author’s motivation for writing this book. True, Princeton has removed Wilson’s name from its school of public affairs, but the bridge over the Potomac, the rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, and much else remains in his honor. How did Wilson, whose racist statements made it into Birth of a Nation as epigrams, survive this great purge, while the mob sacked the likenesses of such diverse figures as Ulysses Grant, Frank Rizzo, Frederick Douglass, and Theodore Roosevelt?
Even more than his racism, Wilson’s sexism provides fodder for Cox’s 500-page takedown. Cox explores how Wilson’s personal conduct foreshadowed his use of his public office. At Bryn Mawr, despite flimsy qualifications, Wilson from a subordinate position condescended in his dealings with Dean Martha Carey Thomas and generally dreaded (the feeling was mutual) teaching female students. Later, he stepped out on his first wife with Mary Hulbert; later still, he would sic the Secret Service on Hulbert when, as president, he became a widower and opted to marry another woman.
Contrary to the claims of some historians, Wilson cringed at women participating in the political process. “He Kept Us Out of Suffrage,” joked his feminist critics. He kept many of them in jail. These critics included Alice Paul, who served a brutal term in confinement for protesting in front of the White House. The charge involved not protesting but blocking the area’s broad sidewalks. When it came to the civil rights of women and the civil liberties of everyone, Wilson wanted to look as though he did the right thing, without always doing the right thing.
Cox writes of Wilson asking an appointee about the conditions at the D.C. Jail. “Immediately after receiving the president’s inquiry, [W. Gwynn] Gardiner had arranged for a psychiatrist to examine [Alice Paul]: the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane, Dr. William White. He was, Gardiner reported to Wilson, ‘the head of the profession for this purpose.’ Gardiner revealed that he had sought not only the psychiatrist’s advice, but his ‘cooperation.’” Paul had criticized the nation’s leader, and then wound up under psychiatric care—a pattern that repeated elsewhere during the last century.
At times, the feds did not allow visitors for Paul and several fellow suffragists. Her weight plummeted into the double-digits during a hunger strike protesting the bleak conditions behind bars, so federal officials force-fed her. Cox writes that “physicians of the time almost uniformly refused to [install a feeding tube in through a nostril] on rational patients who objected. That is why the commissioners needed the ‘cooperation’ of Dr. White, the psychiatrist. And that is why Alice Paul and Rose Winslow were now in the psychopathic ward, being treated for unsoundness of mind.” Wilson’s federal government presided over all this.
The protests eventually forced the president to come out vocally in favor of the suffrage amendment. Cox emphasizes that Republicans supported suffrage by more than the two-thirds necessary, while Wilson’s party barely eked out support from a majority of its congressional delegation. The amendment passed both houses of Congress in 1919 and became part of the Constitution the following year.
Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn is a compelling, well-researched, and long overdue reassessment of the 28th president. Cox draws a convincing portrait of Wilson as a chauvinist on matters of race and sex. In making a case against his subject, though, the author at times makes a case against himself. He notes that Wilson appointed William Jennings Bryan, who admired “uber-racist Stephen Douglas,” that Wilson’s “hero worship of [Robert E.] Lee continued undiminished four decades later,” and that Wilson embraced the German system of higher education, which Cox depicts as promoting an “ideology of racial superiority that . . . would metastasize into the Third Reich’s religion of Aryanism.” Wilson’s concrete record seems damning enough without six-degrees-of-separation logic and indulging in the same presentism that animates the dullards who spray-painted slogans on John Greenleaf Whittier’s statue.
Cox provides glances, here and there, of what shocked Americans in 1919. His treatment of the Creel Committee censoring the press, the administration’s seizure of the railroads, and Wilson’s transforming the Secret Service from a counterfeiting-enforcement outfit to a presidential plaything that spied on political enemies and former lovers will leave readers wanting more. He fixates on racism and sexism. Less on the latter and more on the former probably would have improved this book.
Woodrow Wilson survived the death of his wife, a stroke, and the Great War. His reputation will not survive a read of Christopher Cox’s biography.
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