Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn
Christoher Cox (Simon & Schuster, $46.00, 615 pages)
Former Congressman Christopher Cox has written a critical biography of Woodrow Wilson, who served as president from 1913-1921 and remains, as Cox says in his introduction, “enormously consequential.” Cox outlines Wilson’s energetic presidency which sought to have government’s tentacles reach every corner of the nation but he does not dwell on some of his most famous and lasting achievements – “the progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Park Service, the Clayton Anti-trust Act – or his enormous failures such as his American foreign policy idealism and the League of Nations, neither of which made the world a safer place. Rather Cox is more interested in how Wilson actively — though sometimes subtly and sometimes behind the scenes but other times less so — opposed the growing movements to give women the vote and to break down racial barriers in government institutions.
It is startling to read how The Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the Ku Klux Klan, was the first movie ever shown in the White House (by Wilson) but also that during the movie, the screen showed racist quotes and praise for the Klan from Wilson’s History of the American People. Cox also delves into the scholarship of Wilson, who went from President of Princeton university to Governor of New Jersey to President of the United States in a mere three years. Wilson never earned his PhD and Cox said had Wilson been more attentive to what was happening in the committee rooms of Congress when he wrote his dissertation Congressional Government the future president might have learned a thing or two about how the machinery of government works. Instead, Wilson found the niceties of the Constitution an inconvenient brake on his ambitions to reshape the American economy and polity. This popular history is a useful tonic to the often hagiographic biographies that many of Cox’s predecessors have written.
