Among the challenges facing the Democratic Party in its climb back from a disastrous 2024 defeat is the fact that, despite being the oldest active political party in the world, it no longer has much of a usable past. In times of crisis, the possession of such a past can be an immense asset, providing a defeated faction with the strength to get up off the mat and get back into the fight. But with the possible exception of FDR, the Democrats’ political greats of previous eras have been banished from the party’s near-empty pantheon. One by one, they have been knocked off their pedestals, and nothing has come along to replace them.
Consider one small but telling indicator. It used to be the case that a major annual Democratic fundraising event in every state was something called the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, usually held in February or March. But most state Democratic parties have abandoned the name, to avoid the embarrassment of being associated with the slaveholding Jefferson and Indian-removing (and slaveholding) Jackson, even if the two were formerly revered as founding figures, and, in Jefferson’s case, had world-spanning importance. The new names are often sheer abstractions: Florida’s annual fundraiser is now called Leadership Blue, while Iowa’s is the Liberty and Justice Celebration, and North Carolina’s is the Unity Dinner.
And then there was Woodrow Wilson—a two-term Progressive, Ph.D.-bearing political-science professor and university president, in 1912 the first Southerner elected to the presidency since the Civil War, and the first Democrat to be elected to two consecutive terms since Jackson. Up until a few years ago, you could find Wilson’s name popping up everywhere: from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and its Woodrow Wilson College, to the Woodrow Wilson Inter-national Center for Scholars in Washington (publisher of the superb Wilson Quarterly and hangout of leading Democrats of a previous day like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Lee Hamilton).
There was the Woodrow Wilson Bridge over the Potomac, the USS Woodrow Wilson ballistic-missile submarine sailing the seven seas, and even the Avenue du Président-Wilson in Paris—a street name that recalls the pinnacle of Wilson’s worldwide fame, when he was greeted in Paris by ecstatic crowds, full of hope that his beneficent presence could bring a lasting peace to a world ravaged by the calamity of the First World War.
Wilson ought therefore to be an excellent candidate for the role of inspirational hero. But the cheering for him stopped a long time ago. His name hasn’t entirely disappeared, not yet, but the aura that once attached to it is fading fast; and Princeton’s decision to remove it from its School of Public and International Affairs and a residential college is a harbinger of the future. And if the treatment of Wilson in Christopher Cox’s new biography, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, has anything to do with it, that fade will only continue, and even accelerate. Wilson comes across in Cox’s book as a thoroughly repellent and dishonest man whose autocratic self-righteousness coexisted with seemly behavior, and who possess-ed views that were cruel and retrograde in the extreme. His attitudes were particularly harsh toward African Americans and women, whose supposedly inferior intellectual and moral endowments he believed rendered them incapable of equal and productive citizenship.
To be sure, Wilson’s fervent commitment to the principles of racial segregation and white supremacy has long been known to historians—although, like the feminists who chose to overlook Bill Clinton’s beastly behavior toward women for the sake of his policies on abortion rights, they often have seemed to conclude that Wilson’s racial views and policies should be overlooked for the sake of his achievement of larger Progressive goals these historians have tended to admire.
Where Cox—a polymathic former 17-year member of Congress who later served as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission—performs an important service is in bringing out the extent of Wilson’s misogyny. That began revealing itself in the future president’s bristling contempt for his students and female colleagues in his years teaching at Bryn Mawr College, and very much included his pattern of weaselly opposition to women’s suffrage, extending even to his abuse of his political power to sideline and imprison some of the leading proponents of what became the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
Previous historians, Cox argues, even when they have treated such details as his views on race and gender, do so “without treating them as central to his presidency.” But there is an even more consequential point to be made here: that Wilson’s autocratic tendencies, and his opposition to the broadening of suffrage to include blacks and women, far from being anomalous, were entirely consistent with the larger Progressive vision.
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Wilson’s ascent in politics, leading to the presidency, was astonishingly rapid. By the time his name was placed in nomination at the 1912 Democratic Party Convention, the erstwhile professor of political science and former president of Princeton University had accumulated exactly two years of political experience as governor of New Jersey. It took 46 ballots for the tyro from Trenton to secure the nomination.
This tall, slender man with the angular face and overbearing manner of a tightly wound schoolmaster did not lack for self-confidence. He had thought and written extensively about American government and was brimming over with ideas for reform. He was convinced that the U.S. Constitution was obsolete and had come to favor something closer to the British parliamentary system, which would draw the executive and legislative branches together more closely and make the president as active in the legislative process as in the execution of the laws. He found the constitutional system of checks and balances to be appallingly inefficient and complained that it confused responsibility for errors and misdeeds. As he puts it in his book Congressional Government, “How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?”
Above all else, he thought that American government should be built on a more fluid and evolving basis, rather than being tied to unchanging rules such as those spelled out in the Constitution. Wilson took his cues from the natural sciences; we no longer lived in the mechanical Newtonian world of the Framers, he asserted, but in an organic Darwinian world of growth and adaptation. Governments arise to address the needs of their particular epoch, and must be free constantly to adapt, just as Darwin had showed that organic life is constantly evolving in response to changes in climate and habitat. “Government does now,” he remarks in his book The State (1898), “whatever experience permits or the times demand.” Even the doctrines of human equality and fundamental natural rights stated in the Declaration of Independence must yield to this counter-doctrine of fluidity: “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” he insisted in a 1907 speech. “We are as free as they were to make and unmake governments.” (That the right to unmake governments was also included in the Declaration seems to have been something he missed.)
Wilson also thought and wrote extensively about the field of “public administration,” a field of study he helped to create. Wilson understood “administration” to mean the actual functioning of government, which he, being a Progressive, wanted to make more efficient. One way of doing so was to insist that “administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” was actually something quite distinct from politics, and ought to be separated from politics. Administration was the sphere of scientific expertise and above the winds of changing opinion. This is at the heart of classic Progressive thinking. In many respects, Wilson is the father of the modern administrative state, which has rendered itself more and more impervious to democratic steering and has worked to free itself of constitutional restraints.
It is worth pointing out that the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson would have recoiled at such a development. And indeed, you might have thought that the Progressive “rule by experts” would be equally unappealing to the American electorate. But the mood of the country in 1912 was favorable to dramatic reforms, and the defection of Theodore Roosevelt to run as a third-party candidate had divided the Republican vote. Wilson was able to slip into the presidency with only 41 percent of the popular vote, but that was enough for a decisive win in the Electoral College.
Once elected, he went on a tear. In a burst of activity, he lowered tariffs and (through his advocacy of the 16th Amendment) helped created a federal income tax. He incepted a central banking system through the Federal Reserve Act, which gave an activist government a key lever that could be used to regulate elements of the national economy, and strengthened the government’s capacity for trust-busting, using the newly strengthened Federal Trade Commission as its institutional home for such activity. It was a dazzling array of legislative and executive accomplishments, to which should be added the ratification in 1913 of the 17th Amendment, which substantially altered the original design of the Constitution in a Progressive direction by establishing that Senators be chosen by the direct election of the people and not by state legislatures. In a year, he had brought into being a new era of American politics.
Or so the standard narrative account of Wilson’s early presidency would have us believe. That narrative continues by embracing Wilson’s grand and principled entrance onto the world stage during and after the First World War as a carrier of advanced ideas and a savior of democracy—an idealistic architect of world peace whose grand achievement of the League of Nations in Paris would be thwarted by lilliputian Republican politicians back at home. It was said Wilson died of a broken heart as America withdrew from the world and embraced the oleaginous Republican Warren G. Harding in his wake, with Harding’s flaccid promise of a return to “normalcy.” The worst thing about Wilson, in this view, was his Presbyterian stubbornness and inflexibility in the pursuit of the good. By this criterion, he should be considered a strong candidate for Democratic Party hero, complete with Wilson Dinners every February.
But this view of Wilson is hard to square with “the man in full,” as seen in Cox’s portrait of his duplicitous and often savage behavior toward those who opposed him, particularly the suffragists and their movement. An especially egregious example was his treatment of Alice Paul, a Quaker who was a leading figure in the effort to adopt a women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution and who was imprisoned for the crime of protesting in front of the White House, allegedly for blocking the area’s sidewalks. Paul (whose story is related in the highly praised 2024 Broadway musical Suffs) was denied visitors, subjected to confinement in the jail’s psychiatric ward, and force-fed with raw eggs when her weight dropped to 60 pounds.
Cox’s book abounds with other such stories of affronts large and small that the suffragists endured during Wilson’s presidency. And yet, in the end, the public effects of their protests forced his hand and he felt compelled to endorse the amendment at long last—and saw to it that it came into effect for the 1920 election. In a candid 1974 interview with American Heritage, Alice Paul remembered Wilson as “always a gentleman,” a “wonder-ful president,” whose personal intervention with the governor of Tennessee had cinched the amendment’s timely ratification. If she credited Wilson in these ways, why couldn’t his biographer have done the same?
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As that last example suggests, Cox can be fairly accused of overplaying the unattractive elements of Wilson’s personality, and, more important, of neglecting other dimensions of his political career, in his eagerness to call out Wilson’s unseemly aspects. For all the book’s very considerable strengths, there is an unbalanced quality to it, in which Wilson’s racism and misogyny are granted an outsize importance, while other aspects of his life, par-ticularly his ideas about government and his profound influence on the shape of American foreign policy, are given too little attention.
The result is less a true biography of Wilson than it is an account of two domestic American civil-rights struggles and how they intersected with Wilson’s public life. One interesting confirmation of this is that among the book’s 41 photographs there are only two of images of Wilson himself—the same number as of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a major figure in the women’s-rights movement, who died in 1902 and played no role in Wilson’s public life. I wonder if a shorter, more focused book, one that declined the temptation to present itself as a biography of the man but instead concentrated on making the case against the man, would have been more effective and instructive.
Such a book would, however, need to give attention to an important aspect of Wilson’s life that Cox’s account misses entirely—an aspect that has become unexpectedly relevant. And that is the question of presidential health and the world’s right to know about it. Until the unprecedented level of deception and denial that has been entailed in propping up the Biden presidency, Exhibit A in this department had been the last 17 months of the Wilson presidency. That was when Wilson’s wife Edith took over what she called a “stewardship” of the presidency as her husband recovered from a massive stroke. The truth about his condition was assiduously kept from the American people.
The problem has arisen before in our history: Lincoln’s acute depression, Chester Arthur’s Bright’s disease, Grover Cleveland’s cancer, and, in the years since Wilson, FDR’s many disabilities, John F. Kennedy’s Addison’s disease, and who knows what else. It is a problem inherent in a system with a strong presidency—a problem that, manifestly, the adoption of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution in 1967 has not solved.
In Wilson’s case, though, we have the added factor that his massively debilitating stroke did not come out of the blue but was part of a lifelong pattern of serious cardiovascular troubles, of susceptibility to high blood pressure, hypertensive vascular changes, and arteriosclerosis over a period of decades, going back at least to the 1890s, and to some extent even to his childhood. These were conditions that he and others around him went to considerable lengths to cover up.
Who knows how much these medical factors affected his judgment, especially in instances such as his bizarre and near-inexplicable resistance to any modifications of the League of Nations Covenant to protect American sovereignty and mollify the domestic opposition to it? It’s very likely that he could have had a satisfactory deal. But he refused to negotiate, and thus condemned the American participation in the League, and ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, to go down in flames.
It is often taken as a revelation of Wilson’s almost pathologically inflexible character that he became so utterly rigid on this issue at this crucial point, when everything he had worked for was on the line. Perhaps so, although the same Woodrow Wilson had been hailed as a masterfully pragmatic politician in the halcyon days of his first term just a half-decade before. It may well have been a sign of advancing illness or impaired mental capacity. We will never know for sure. But the possibility must be considered.
And the answer matters a great deal, in the case of Wilson and in the case of any other president, including the current one and his predecessor/successor. Reflecting in 1923 upon the fateful American decision to enter into the World War I, Winston Churchill wrote the following assessment of Wilson: “He was, in spite of his long academic record and brief governorship, an unknown, an unmeasured quantity to the mighty people who made him their ruler in 1912. Still more was he a mystery to the world at large….the action of the United States with its repercussions on the history of the world depended, during the awful period of Armageddon, upon the workings of this man’s mind and spirit to the exclusion of almost every other factor; and…he played a part in the fate of nations incomparably more direct and personal than any other man.” We can say now, with a fair measure of confidence, and no small measure of trepidation, that Churchill was saying far more than he could possibly have known.
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