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While Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, which will be published on Nov. 5, is in some ways a biography, it is less a whole-of-life account than it is a history of Wilson’s racism and even more of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.
“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, even after the movement finally became a winningly popular national cause. As Cox shows, even when what became the Constitution’s 19th Amendment, giving women nationwide the right to vote, was on the verge of success, Wilson engineered a last-minute attempt to change its wording in a way that would protect the South’s repressive Jim Crow regimes. This threw a wrench into the works of both women’s suffrage and black advancement. Fortunately, Wilson’s effort to change the amendment eventually failed. When it passed, Wilson suddenly announced a change of heart so he could claim credit for a reform he had spent decades fighting.
What may be sickening for readers is to learn of the abuses tacitly condoned by Wilson, which were meted out against suffragists who dared to hold up signs outside the White House. Again and again, suffragists taking up very small portions of the broad Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk, leaving ample room for pedestrian passage, were roughed up by Navy reservists, arrested, and sent to prisons as brutal as a Soviet gulag.
The most common message on the signs was simply a reference to a prior comment from Wilson himself: “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” Those arrested after holding the signs weren’t breaching the public peace but were, rather, wives and daughters of prominent elected officials, journalists, and Cabinet members simply exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. They were tried before an anti-suffrage judge and were repeatedly were sentenced to months of confinement at a prison workhouse in Occoquan, Virginia. They were kept in vomitous conditions there, but Wilson obstinately refused to intervene on the women’s behalf when he was told about them.
“Conditions at Occoquan were scandalous,” Cox wrote. “Worms in the soup and bread, blankets that were washed only once a year, no toothbrushes, filthy water, open latrines without toilet paper, no soap in the washrooms — all of this was taken for granted. … Prisoners suffered from infection, disease, and malnutrition.”
A doctor who visited reported that the “miserable ventilation of the cells” where “the women are kept in solitary confinement” left the air nearly unbreathable. “Better conditions for promoting tuberculosis could not be found,” he said. A prison matron, fired for attempting to help the suffragists, provided an affidavit attesting that “prisoners are punished by being put on bread or water, or be being beaten. … One girl was beaten until the blood had to be scrubbed from her clothing and from the floor.”
And so on, in graphic detail, including a report of a journalist placed in solitary confinement “for eleven days in the same clothing [while] she was denied soap or water for basic hygiene, deprived of food except bread and small amounts of dirty water to sip from a leaky cup, and provided with only a bucket for her excrement.”
While this appalling, inhumane treatment of suffragists was a barbaric violation of basic human decency, it was far from the only violation of civil rights imposed by Wilson. He appointed “journalist” George Creel to lead a Committee on Public Information that tried during World War I, often successfully, to repress news media reports critical of the administration.
Beginning even before his college days, Wilson had been openly hostile to the Constitution. His first major published article, written while he was a student at Princeton University, argued that “universal suffrage is a constant element of weakness” and that by failing to limit voting rights to elites, Congress, as designed by the Constitution, was “dangerous.” He proposed “that the leaders of Congress report to the executive” rather than exercise independent judgment, while “the president’s cabinet members would sit in Congress and take the place of congressional committees, controlling the introduction of legislation.”
Wilson pushed these themes for decades. As late as 1908, four years before being elected president, he published a collection of essays arguing that checks on executive power were a great weakness of the American political system. He wrote that presidents, free to write laws without congressional approval, should be “the guide of the nation.”
In the last decades of the 1800s, as the progressive flagship publication The Nation applauded the spread of Jim Crow laws so “the negro will disappear from the field of national politics,” Wilson railed against the fact that “a mere act of Congress” could undo “the determination of the Saxon race of the South that the negro shall never again rule over them.”
In sum, Wilson’s detestation of a popularly elected Congress and his promotion of rule by elites were intertwined with his determination to deny rights to black people. Even apart from his white supremacism, though, he kept writing attacks on the Constitution’s separation of powers. Likewise, he believed that rights identified in the Constitution should bow to the needs of the state. As he took the nation into war, he openly said he intended to treat “disloyalty” with “a firm hand of stern repression.”
To that end, he created Creel’s Committee on Public Information and gave it a staff of an astonishing 150,000 ex-journalists, filmmakers, and politicians to promote Wilson’s messages while pressuring news outlets to censor those that took a contrary view. With the passage of the Espionage Act, purveyors of newspapers or any other news media that published “any information that promoted the enemy’s success” faced a 30-year prison sentence or even the death penalty.
Wilson knew censorship violated this country’s norms, so he tried to disguise it. In an executive order, he approved a proposal that Creel described thus: “The suppressive features of the work [of Creel’s massive agency] must be so overlaid by the publicity policy that they will go unregarded and unresented.”
In our Saturday interview, Cox said his new book, 12 years in the making, was not intended as a commentary on this year’s elections. But it takes no leap of logic to recognize the dangers from both of today’s presidential candidates who mimic Wilson’s benighted ideas and policies.
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“Today there are everywhere threats to civil liberties — certainly throughout the world that Wilson aimed to make ‘safe for democracy,’ but here in America as well,” Cox told me.
Admirably, even amid all the repression, dedicated reformers succeeded in using the tools of republican government to gain the vote for women. In the end, Cox’s book is less a biography of Wilson than it is a tribute to the women and men who persevered to expand civic agency and human rights. No matter what the results of next week’s elections, all of us should do likewise.
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