(Oct. 28) The roots of this nation’s Progressive Movement were racist, repressive, dismissive of the First Amendment and other civil liberties, and hostile to women’s rights to vote or to petition elected officials.
Those are key takeaways, some of them relevant to this year’s election, from a Pulitzer Prize-worthy new history about former President Woodrow Wilson, whose presidency was the apotheosis of the early Progressive Movement’s fierce ambitions. Written by Christopher Cox, a former congressman who served as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 2005 to 2009, the book is elegantly written and monumentally impressive in its research.
While Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, which will be published on Nov. 5, is in some ways a biography, it is less a whole-of-life account than it is a history of Wilson’s racism and even more of his disdainful opposition to women’s suffrage. The stories Cox compiles of the abuse of suffragists are nauseating.
Photo of Christopher Cox
“Hero worship of even the best of presidents is dangerous for democracy,” Cox told me in an Oct. 26 interview. “Sometimes people want to imbue their political champions with virtues they don’t possess. Being clear-eyed about our political leaders, in the end, will help us make better choices. Unfortunately, over the period of more than a century, there has been much hagiography about Woodrow Wilson. This book is meant to be a complement to the many biographies that have previously been written to make it clear that while Wilson is admirable in many respects, he dishonored the ideals of Progressives then and now.”
Cox, a solidly conservative and notably brainiac veteran of the Ronald Reagan White House who always has been a staunch supporter of civil rights, was drawn by his research into realms on which few historians have focused.
Other recent scholarship has highlighted Wilson’s virulent racism, and Cox discusses at length how the president used the White House to host the first major East Coast screening of the pro-Ku Klux Klan epic film Birth of a Nation, based on a novel written by Wilson’s friend and fellow white supremacist Thomas Dixon. The film began with several racist comments from Wilson emblazoned across the screen, to the effect that the whole, supposedly admirable purpose of the Klan was “to protect the Southern country.”
Yet while Cox presents the racism in stark relief, his far more groundbreaking research in this new history is into the deliberate, repeated roadblocks Wilson put in the way of women’s suffrage…. [The full feature is at this link. Read it for some absolutely jaw-dropping accounts of how the suffragists were literally tortured by, essentially, Wilson’s agents.]
