Potus Geeks Book Review: Woodrow Wilson-The Light Withdrawn by Christopher Cox
For years after his death, many historians portrayed Woodrow Wilson as some sort of great statesman and as one of the greatest Presidents in history. But in recent years a more honest accounting of Wilson's presidency has been presented and we now see Wilson for who he truly was: a horribly racist, misogynist whose stubbornness and oversized ego set the country back in its march towards equality and stifled its conscience. Christopher Cox is one historian who shows us who the real Woodrow Wilson was, using Wilson's own words, as well as those from the diaries of his closest advisors, in his recently published work entitled Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn.
Woodrow Wilson was the first President born in one of the former Confederate states since Andrew Johnson. He was a white supremacist who saw formerly enslaved black persons as inferior in every way and mocked them for their dialect and belittled them in many other ways while disingenuously seeking their vote. He rewrote history to glorify the Ku Klux Klan and, along with his friend Thomas Dixon, played a huge role in enabling the Klan's revival. Wilson excused racial violence and even the murder of black persons, blaming these victims themselves for their fate.
Wilson also was staunchly opposed to suffrage for women, despite taking credit when a Constitutional amendment supporting it finally came about during his presidency after a long and tenacious battle. Wilson enabled the jailing and inhumane treatment of peaceful protesters who were calling for the vote for women. He did nothing as the capital police looked the other way while peaceful female protesters were met with cruel violence from government workers and members of the US armed forces. It was on Wilson's watch that one of the greatest travesties of justice occurred as many of these protesters (known as "silent sentinels") were jailed for offences that they had not committed (such as blocking the 45 foot sidewalk in front of the White House by standing by the fence with their picket signs) and sentenced to hard labor in the most inhumane prison conditions.
While this book traces Wilson's life from cradle to grave, it is especially about his dealing with (or more often ignoring of) the fight for women's suffrage that the author focuses on. In tandem with Wilson's life and presidency, Christopher Cox chronicles the story of the fight for women's suffrage, introducing the reader to the many courageous leaders in this field, both female and male, and of the split within the organizations seeking to bring about suffrage, a split based on racially-motivated grounds. Cox has an intricate understanding of the mechanics of the fight for suffrage as well as the politics of the issue, especially as it occurred amidst the backdrop of a war that Wilson had campaigned on a promise of staying out of.
Cox is a powerful writer, with the capability to evoke a sense of outrage in the reader as he details the struggles for equality that Woodrow Wilson was so determined to impede. This is the best book on Presidential history of 2024 so far, one that is powerful for its ability to set history straight and to expose a huge reason why the fight for equality was set back and impaired in the era of Jim Crow by an egotistical and small-minded President who stubbornly kept his feet planted on the wrong side of history. This book is highly recommended for anyone with a strong interest in Presidential history and a strong sense of justice to match it.