History is most clearly observed through the rearview mirror. Leaders can more accurately be judged by the impact of their speeches, actions or inaction, beliefs and accomplishments – not by eulogies but after an adequate amount of time has passed for a more objective assessment.
Yesterday’s lauded heroes may have legitimately earned the accolades of contemporaries. Others are seen like the “Great and Mighty Oz” when Toto pulled back the curtain: revealed as vainglorious hucksters or deeply flawed, arrogant men whose self-interests overshadowed their achievements.
Reconsidering presidents is particularly fraught when intensive studies reveal unwelcome truths, as is the case with the 28th president of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Was the man simply a product of his time as some prominent historians have contended or has a repugnant darker nature been at long last revealed?
Presidents such as Warren G. Harding, reviled for an illicit love affair, and Ulysses S. Grant, former commander of the Union Army who presided over the radical Southern Reconstruction, have been more positively reassessed with their reputations restored and acknowledgment made for their dedication to duty, progressive reforms and noteworthy deeds.
In marked contrast, on June 27, 2020, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber made this announcement about former faculty member and university president Woodrow Wilson: “The board of trustees concludes that Wilson’s racist views and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for the School of Public and International Affairs and residential college.”
A legacy re-examined
Christopher Cox’s incisive, scholarly biography, “Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn,” was 15 years in the making with vast far-reaching research conducted firsthand in 18 notable libraries as well as in-depth reading in multiple archival collections. He perused contemporaneous accounts in more than 23 major newspapers as well as additional books, periodicals, journals, manuscripts and correspondence including a thorough examination of Wilson’s own publications. The endnotes citing resource materials, footnotes, bibliography and a well-annotated index add more than 100 pages in small font to an already densely packed detail-rich volume.
This fine book provides a rigorous reassessment of Wilson revealing the shocking extent of his deep-seated racism, opposition to women’s suffrage as well as an unshakeable patriarchal mindset encompassing white male superiority, unbridled ambition, an autocratic manner and a stubborn unwillingness to compromise. Woe betide any associate, friend, confidante or cabinet member who dared to disagree as they would be permanently outcast, as many discovered to their dismay.
Bipartisanship was unknown as it was left to his staff to communicate with Republican politicians or persons he disdained, including his vice president, Thomas Riley Marshall. He failed to consult or temporarily cede his office to Marshall during the six months he was in France helping to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles or later when he was paralyzed on one side and unable to communicate after suffering a severe stroke.
A dubious academic legacy
Wilson was an eloquent speaker and fluent writer who freely propounded personal opinions based on minimal substantiation or research. Praised as being the only president to have earned a Ph.D., this, too, is documented as having been dubiously granted through successful networking with friends at Johns Hopkins University.
His book, “Congressional Government,” a weak comparison of the workings of government and the American and English Constitutions (which he held as being superior), was written and published to generate income during his lackluster studies in Baltimore. He failed to meet with legislators or even visit Congress, the Library of Congress or the National Archives in nearby Washington, D.C., to research it. However, this publication would suffice in lieu of a dissertation, “defended” in a one-hour conversation with his allies, and the promised Ph.D. was promptly bestowed.
In stunning contrast to this slipshod methodology, Martha Carey Thomas, the second president of the recently established Bryn Mawr College, through diligent study earned a doctorate in linguistics, summa cum laude, from the University of Zurich in Switzerland. This degree was awarded after rigorous course work and the completion of a highly regarded dissertation defended in writing and by an oral examination conducted in German over a three-day period. Thomas was a feminist and suffragist who set high academic standards at the women’s liberal arts and future Ivy League Seven Sisters College Bryn Mawr. She was responsible for launching Wilson’s career as an academician by providing the then 28-year-old with his very first employment as professor of history and government.
With parental financial support received until he was 31, he had found it unnecessary to secure employment in any capacity aside from submitting polemical magazine articles to publications where he had friends. He rarely attended classes and dropped out of law school at the University of Virginia, which proved no obstacle for setting up a law office with a friend in Georgia. Wilson soon abandoned that profession as his sole client was his mother who required a simple power-of-attorney to be drawn up. Later, honorary degrees were listed behind his name on title pages exactly as if they had been earned.
Unwilling to teach women
He detested teaching female students, disliked Thomas and never credited her for the opportunity she had provided. He disdainfully quit abruptly, breaking his teaching contract after three years, at the start of the fall semester, when offered a position at the Methodist men’s college, Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., in 1888. Among other disagreeable statements in his immediate letter of resignation, he wrote “I would rather not teach women at all.”
The new position was a steppingstone to his goal of landing a newly chaired professorship at the College of New Jersey, where he was a member of the undergraduate class of 1879. He spent considerable time courting the college president, Francis L. Patton, to get the job. He ultimately proved to be a popular, inspiring instructor with his all-male students. In 1890, Wilson joined the university as professor of history, political economics and jurisprudence with an annual salary of $3,000 (in excess of $100,000 in 2024 dollars), housing and a teaching requirement of merely four hours per week. This provided him ample time to write, which augmented his income as he continued to form alliances.
In 1902, elected unanimously by faculty and the trustees, Wilson became the first president of Princeton not to have been a Presbyterian clergyman.
He held this position until he was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910. Serving without distinction from Jan. 17, 1911, to March 1, 1913, he focused his efforts instead on campaigning to be the Democratic Party candidate for president. The incumbent, William Howard Taft, and his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, split the Republican Party votes, effectively handing the Democrat Wilson the presidency.
Early in his first term, Wilson implemented the income tax. Although narrowly securing a second term under the campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” a mere three weeks later he led the United States into World War I. The Selective Service Act was swiftly passed on May 18, 1917; approximately 60% of the nearly 5 million Americans who served in the armed forces had been drafted. Wartime food rationing was also instituted.
Institutionalized racism
In 1956 in an article in The Nation, W.E.B. Du Bois reflected: “With the accession of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1913, there opened for the American Negro a period of cruelty, discrimination and wholesale murder.” Post-inauguration, the Virginia-born Wilson immediately institutionalized racial segregation in federal civil service including offices, restrooms, water fountains and employee lunchrooms with policy violators facing arrest. Widespread demotions, dead-end jobs and now justified firings became the norm. Jim Crow laws were legislated to enforce segregation both locally and across the South. In short order, he set back 50 years of progressive reforms with these measures that harken back to a familial history that regarded these repressions as completely justified.
The Wilson and Woodrow families had become slave owners after moving south. The Rev. Joseph Ruggles Wilson broke from the traditional Presbyterian Church at the beginning of the Civil War, taking an active part in the formation of a new denomination called the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. Part of the grounds of his large Augusta, Ga., parish was used to house Union POWs before they were transferred to the notorious Andersonville prison.
Associations with white supremacy
The phrase “A man is known by the company he keeps” is attributed to Aesop. Wilson associated with two German colleagues at Johns Hopkins University who praised and taught male Aryan superiority as well as supporting Eugenics. Notably, his fellow classmate and best friend was white supremacist Thomas F. Dixon Jr., later a Baptist minister, lawyer, politician and prolific best-selling author. His hugely popular trilogy consisted of “The Leopard’s Spots,” “The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan” and “The Traitor.” First staged as a Broadway play, “The Clansman” is better known as Hollywood’s first blockbuster film “The Birth of a Nation,” filmed by D.W. Griffith starring his favorite leading lady Lillian Gish and a large cast of well-known actors.
Technically innovative, it was divisively controversial for its promulgation of racist ideology and is widely recognized for its role in the resurgence of the increasingly violent Ku Klux Klan, which then spread beyond the boundaries of the southern states. Dixon dedicated his novel “The Southerner” to “our first Southern-born president since Lincoln, my friend and collegemate Woodrow Wilson.” The president is credited with the writing of many of the intertitles displayed on screen in “The Birth of a Nation.”
It was the first film shown in the White House at a gala event held in the East Room on Feb. 18, 1915, with the author and filmmaker present among invited guests dressed in formal attire. They shared strong beliefs in the sovereignty of states’ rights, racial purity and white superiority and abhorred the idea of citizenship and suffrage for African Americans as granted in amendments 14 and 15 five decades earlier.
Apropos to this study, in examining the five volumes, Wise edition 1931, of Wilson’s “History of the American People,” this reader discovered with dismay extracts most relevant. In Vol. 5, Chapter 1 titled “Reconstruction,” its pages of hate-filled rhetoric included opinions such as these: “Slaves were better off enslaved than free, they are an inferior, childlike race of helpless creatures.” Wilson went on to describe the KKK as a “fraternal organization”; the Kuklos or the Circle with “secrets and mystery at the heart of the pranks they planned … the delightful discovery of the thrill of awesome fear.”
One shudders to read further: “It threw the negroes into a very ecstasy of panic to see those sheeted ‘Ku Klux’ move near them in the shrouded night; and their comic fear stimulated the lads who excited it to many an extravagant prank and mummery.” The chapter continues in a similar vein for 114 pages. Wilson earned considerable royalties from the sale of these “textbooks” taught in the finest universities in the land.
A President of Leisure and Comfort
Woodrow Wilson was a man devoted to creature comforts and leisure. As President of the United States, he saw no reason to disrupt his personal schedule for official duties. During his two terms in office, he played over 1200 rounds of golf. Following breakfast, he played 9 holes daily and 18 on weekends, using red balls to play when it snowed. Lunch was generally followed by a nap, then long afternoon drives in his chauffeur driven Pierce Arrow. It was back to the White House for dinner unless he and Edith were dining out with movies screened in the East Room and two theater nights weekly.
He reserved Tuesday and Friday afternoons for brief meetings with cabinet members or key staff. Weekends were often spent cruising on the presidential yacht, The Mayflower, or as a guest of an influential friend with orders not to be disturbed. Occasionally he would briefly address a joint session of Congress; he never spoke directly to Republicans and rarely held press conferences; there were only two in 1916.
The suffragists whose headquarters were across Lafayette Square from the White House were under surveillance with perhaps the earliest wiretaps on their phones. Beatings, arrests on trumped-up charges followed by incarceration in barbaric conditions at rat and roach-infested Occoquan Workhouse in rural Virginia were common with prisoners held for ever-increasing sentences and hunger strikers were force-fed.
Propaganda and control
One might ask, “How did Woodrow Wilson get away with this indifference to duty and shameful abuses of power?” Radio and television did not yet exist. Newspapers were king and they were effectively controlled by his creation the Committee on Public Information, a vast propaganda bureau charged with reviewing publications and providing government-written and approved content. Newspaper moguls such as William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and Adolph Ochs fell in with the party line in a manner that would have made Nazi Germany’s Joseph Goebbels envious. There were a few naysayers such as H.L. Mencken but they were in the minority.
An essential addition to academic curricula
University of California-Irvine senior scholar in residence Christopher Cox has written the definitive modern biographical assessment of the 28th president of the United States. Woodrow Wilson, “The Light Withdrawn.” It is certain to attract a wide readership among the general population of readers interested in American and presidential history.
Additionally, this major work should be included as an essential textbook in the curriculum for college and university upperclassmen and graduate courses in a wide variety of majors including history, government, political science, women’s studies and Black history. After a century of fawning veneration, it is truly an eye-opener sadly revealing cracks in a veneer carefully concealed by a veritable army of acolytes, sycophants and a well-controlled publicity machine. The evidence is undeniable. If you only read one work of historical biography this year, make it this one.
“Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn” by Christopher Cox. (Simon & Schuster, 640 pages, $34.99)
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