Christopher Cox, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, (NY: Simon & Shuster, 2024), ISBN 978-1-6680-1078-5
This new biography of Woodrow Wilson gets its subtitle from the first line of the John Greenleaf Whittier poem “Ichabod.”
So Fallen! So lost!
The light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The Glory from his
gray hairs gone
Forevermore!
Biographies of presidents typically emphasize their time in office and the political events they pursue, but this biography concentrates on racial and gender discrimination during Woodrow Wilson’s life and how he addressed them before and after he became president The book covers 495 pages with the narrative partitioned into four parts. Part I begins with a summary discussion of the early crusade against slavery and women’s suffrage movement before turning to Wilson’s 1856 birth, early life, education, a brief year practicing law, marriage and accepting faculty posts teaching at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan University, and Princeton University; he accepted the Princeton Board’s offer to be their president in June 1902.
Other Wilson biographies write extensively of his legislative record: the Federal Reserve Act, Clayton Antitrust Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, and progressive income tax, but none of that appears in this Cox biography. Instead, the narrative through the book emphasizes the documented record of Wilson’s personal relations with family and friends and with university scholars and politicians, both his supporters and detractors. Beginning with his academic years he published books of history and politics in 1885, 1889, 1893, 1897, and 1902. Cox scoured these works and Wilson’s other writing, archival letters, relationships, and associations. The narrative returns repeatedly to the published record of his racial views and his decades long opposition to woman’s suffrage.
The chapters of Part I offer a sampling of Woodrow Wilson’s views during Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow south. He predicts the right to vote without regard to race would “make the ‘disintegration of southern society’ and the ‘irretrievable’ alienation of ‘the white men of the South,’ its ‘real leaders.’” In his History of the American People he explained “It is ‘the mere instinct of self-preservation’ that forced ‘the white men of the South’ to do everything within their power to restore white supremacy ‘by means fair or foul.’” Wilson’s apologizes for the Ku Klux Klan admitting “the Klansmen ‘took the law into their own hands,’ but undertook ‘by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot.’” He concluded the Klan was “really ‘for the mere pleasure of association, for private amusement.’” Cox provides a thorough narrative of his discomfort and unlikely appointment to teach at Bryn Mawr, a women’s college. Bryn Mawr documents an early episode of a long trail of evidence documenting Wilson’s refusal to accept women as equals.
Part II offers a discussion of him as Princeton President, elected Governor of New Jersey and first term as president. His years in politics forced him to take positions and make decisions on race and woman’s suffrage rather than write or ventilate about them. Cox quotes Wilson as telling his gubernatorial campaign manager he was “definitely and irreconcilably opposed to woman suffrage” and that “woman’s place was in the home.” His writing and documented decisions find him opposed to admitting black men to Princeton, opposing unions, opposing immigrants and purging the federal government of black employees while arranging to have the racist film “Birth of a Nation” shown at the White House.
Available evidence permits Cox to give readers an idea of Wilson in his personal life. Hundreds of letters survive to and from his two wives, Ellen Axxon and Edith Galt, and a third relationship with Mary Peck Hulbert. In letters to Ellen, he wrote “Marriage alone was a woman’s ‘essential condition’ for the performance of her ‘proper duties.’” Readers learn Wilson leaves on vacations without Ellen such as one to Bermuda where he meets Mary Peck and starts an indeterminate relationship of eight years documented with 700 letters. We learn of the personal Wilson, a man of “immutable routines,” who enjoys taking afternoon drives and plays golf as part of his daily schedule, finishing 1,200 rounds of golf as president.
Part III, entitled Holding Back the Tide, covers December 1916 to December 1917, a period that energized the Women’s suffrage movement with intensified political pressure to secure national voting rights. Cox covers their campaign thoroughly. Readers meet many women, the groups they organize and the protest marches and demonstrations they conduct. During this period, Wilson reversed his pledge to keep America out of WWI. He prevailed on Congress to declare war to make the world “Safe for Democracy” while simultaneously demanding to silence opposition to American entry into WWI in a well-documented campaign of repression and censorship. During this period the war became an excuse for Wilson to repress and censor woman demonstrating for voting rights. Cox narrates Wilson’s deliberate use of arrest, intimidation and violence to end street protest that included periods of physical abuse in jails and forced feeding of hunger strikers.
Part IV has the remaining years of his second term. By this time women had the right to vote in 13 states, including New York, increasing the political risk to Democratic party opponents of voting. Then Republicans took over the House and Senate in the November 1918 election. When WWI ended November 11, Wilson insisted on going to Paris to negotiate the peace treaty and establish a League of Nations instead of staying home to confront domestics turmoil, especially passing a federal budget, inflation and violent race riots. Cox tells the remaining story of Wilson maneuvering within his administration and his posturing in the House and Senate in the political fight to secure voting rights for woman. Cox gives details of the Congressional debate and final votes in June 1919. Tennessee became the last state to ratify the Susan B. Anthony Amendment that finally became part of the U.S. Constitution August 18, 1920. The narrative ends here, or rather just stops.
Over many years I have read
dozens of biographies of Presidents including Woodrow Wilson. None I know of leave
out so much of their political record to focus on the man and the ethical
principles that drive their decisions and their conduct as this biography. Any
illusion that Woodrow Wilson was a confident, accepting and fair-minded
gentleman disappears in this Cox biography. The glory from his gray hairs gone.
Forevermore!
