The Regressive Era 

In February 1915, President Woodrow Wilson hosted the first screening of a motion picture at the White House. It was a gala affair, and VIPs clad in formal evening wear gathered together in the East Room, where President Abraham Lincoln had once laid in state. The movie, Birth of a Nation, an incendiary film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, had opened in Los Angeles two weeks before, where it was met with both critical acclaim and scathing public protest. 

The movie was not a random Hollywood selection. Rather, the film was based on an equally inflammatory best-selling novel, The Clansman, written by one of Wilson’s oldest and most intimate friends, Thomas Dixon. And Wilson didn’t merely endorse the movie—his own academic writings as a scholar of American history had provided the film (and book’s) historical framework. One intertitle card that accompanied the silent film quoted Wilson’s description of Reconstruction in his History of the American People as a misbegotten scheme to “put the white south under the heel of the black south.” As white-sheeted Klansmen gathered on the screen, a second intertitle quoted Wilson’s celebration of the rise of white supremacy: “At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” 

Wilson was delighted by Birth of a Nation, and discussed with the director, D. W. Griffith, how the administration might use the new medium of motion pictures to sway public opinion. He volunteered to assist Griffith in future historical projects. Only months later, after Griffith and Dixon had publicly touted the White House’s implicit approval and after the movie sparked protests throughout the Northeast and Midwest (even while setting box office records that would persist for 25 years), did Wilson, under pressure from his aides, implausibly claim to have been “entirely unaware of the character” of the film. 

Today, Birth of a Nation is widely credited for normalizing the Klan and rekindling its long-dormant membership, and the White House event is often cited as a stain on the Wilson administration. But as Christopher Cox demonstrates in his deeply researched, important new biography, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, this event was neither an aberration in Wilson’s life nor simply a reflection of the casual racism typical of the time. Rather, Cox argues, white supremacist ideology and the related theme of the protection of white womanhood were central to Wilson’s life’s work, both in academia and in public office. Among contemporary scholars, the implicit racism of Wilson’s administration is widely acknowledged, but Cox’s biography is richly detailed and provides an array of shocking examples that might be new to armchair historians.

In recent years, cancel culture has come for Woodrow Wilson, with activists citing his academic writings and federal policies implemented during his presidency as evidence of overt racism. In 2020, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, Princeton—where Wilson served as a professor and university president—removed his name from a residential college and from its school of policy and international affairs. Monmouth University also removed Wilson’s name from a marquee building, and in 2022, Washington, D.C., renamed Woodrow Wilson Senior High School, the city’s largest public high school, Jackson-Reed. 

While biographers have often lauded Wilson as a liberal hero and the first modern president, Cox argues that Wilson had more connective tissue with the Confederate past than with the future. Cox assembles a convincing body of evidence that Wilson was committed to white supremacy as a matter of public policy.

Cox’s biography offers a scholarly justification for this denouncement of the 28th president and a vigorous counterargument to the generations of Wilson biographers who unequivocally celebrated their subject as a liberal hero. While such biographers have often lauded Wilson as the first modern president, Cox argues that Wilson had more connective tissue with the Confederate past than with the future. Examining Wilson primarily through the lens of racial equality and gender, Cox assembles a convincing body of evidence that Wilson was committed to white supremacy as a matter of public policy manifest not just in his racial politics but also in his hostility toward women’s suffrage. As Cox—a Republican who served as a U.S. congressman from California for 17 years—writes, “As the first southern Democrat to occupy the White House since the Civil War era, he was superbly unsuited for the moment.” 

The Light Withdrawn is an important, long-overdue complement to the existing literature. But the hefty volume is a narrow study of the 28th president, with a particular focus on Wilson’s lifelong opposition to racial equality, and how this ideology affected the federal campaign for women’s suffrage, which forms the book’s narrative heart. 

In 1948, the venerated historian Arthur Schlesinger listed Wilson among the six greatest presidents of American history. Like Schlesinger, most Wilson biographers have pointed to their subject’s many progressive reforms, ranging from the creation of a progressive income tax to the birth of government agencies such as the National Park Service, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Trade Commission. Wilson burnished his legacy as an eloquent champion of democratic ideals during World War I and as an architect of the League of Nations, which established the principle of collective security among allies that has guided American foreign policy for a century. 

Cox treats Wilson’s many achievements—and, in particular, domestic policies—as peripheral to his main narrative, and the imbalance takes some of the force out of the book. A biographer’s responsibility, after all, is to paint as complete a portrait of their subject as possible, and a more ambitious biography would concern itself with the moral tension in Wilson’s legacy. Detailing his achievements would not serve to mitigate Wilson’s racism, but would provide a more robust, fulsome accounting of his profound influence on the 20th century. 

Born in Virginia in 1856, Wilson carried the racial prejudices of his southern upbringing for his whole life. His father was a former Confederate officer, and Wilson’s childhood home was staffed by enslaved people. Wilson spent his formative teenage years in South Carolina during Reconstruction, which shaped his worldview. 

As a professor, first at Bryn Mawr—where he expressed open contempt for the women’s college’s formidable president, Martha Carey Thomas—and then at Princeton, Wilson wrote textbooks on U.S. history and government that reflected his commitment to white supremacy. In his textbook The State, for example, Wilson constructed a racial hierarchy with Aryans at the top, and “primitive” and “savage” races, comprising most of the world’s population, at the bottom. He disparaged eastern European immigrants, describing them as “shiftless,” and supported the exclusion of immigrants from China and Japan. In the classroom, he asserted that slavery “had done more for the negro in two hundred and fifty years than African freedom had done since the building of the pyramids.” In his early writings, Wilson described universal suffrage as “the foundation of every evil in this country.” On campus, Wilson was well known for his exaggerated imitations of Black dialect and his racial jokes.

When he became president of Princeton in 1902, Wilson put his ideology into practice, squashing discussions of racial integration and musing that it would be “extremely unlikely” that admissions of Black students would “ever assume a practical form.” A 1910 research report comparing 14 elite universities noted that Princeton alone refused to admit Black students; the school was also strikingly anti-Semitic. “Harvard’s ideal is diversity,” the researcher pointedly concluded, while “the aim of Princeton is homogeneity.” 

Wilson entered politics the same year, winning his race for the New Jersey governorship, which served as a stepping-stone to the presidency. Wilson was elected president in 1912 in a fluke election, thanks to Theodore Roosevelt, whose third-party candidacy split the Republican vote. Nominated at a contested convention on the 46th ballot, Wilson was a compromise candidate for a Democratic Party divided between its northern and southern leadership and all but shut out of presidential politics since the Civil War. 

Wilson brought his racial politics with him to Washington. Within weeks of his inauguration, his cabinet began implementing Jim Crow policies in the previously integrated federal government. Segregation soon marked the entire federal civil service, with separate office spaces, cafeterias, and bathrooms designated by race. Wilson replaced senior Black appointees hired by the Taft administration with white men. When challenged, Wilson defended the segregation of the civil service as in “the best interests of both races in order to overcome friction.” Wilson’s actions cast a long shadow: The federal government remained segregated until 1948.

Wilson’s fraught relationship with the women’s suffrage movement comprises much of The Light Withdrawn’s central narrative. Cox offers a rarely told, behind-the-scenes account of the fight from the perspective of both lawmakers and suffragists. 

Wilson assumed the presidency in 1913, just as the movement was reaching critical momentum. Most histories depict him as a lukewarm proponent of suffrage, unwilling to expend much political capital on the issue, but an eventual convert and essential advocate. Still, Cox argues that Wilson deserves little credit for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Rather, the president spent years trying to foil suffragists’ demands, first by ignoring them, then by censoring them, and finally by denying protesters’ civil liberties. Wilson ultimately supported women’s suffrage when doing so was politically expedient and the passage of the amendment became inevitable late in his presidency.

Until Wilson reached office, women’s suffrage had been an issue left to the states. Although a proposal for a constitutional amendment had been submitted to Congress each session since 1878, it had never received serious consideration. A bipartisan anti-suffrage coalition in Congress and throughout the country had long opposed the women’s vote because of traditional beliefs in feminine purity and the ideology of separate spheres. Wilson shared these beliefs, musing that if women were granted the vote, “it is the home that will be disastrously affected.” 

But Wilson’s opposition to women’s suffrage for most of his presidency rested on more than idealized gender roles. Like many southerners, his opposition was deeply entangled with white supremacy. 

For decades, white southerners had successfully limited Black male suffrage, relying on Jim Crow laws that restricted voting and mandated whites-only primary elections, which effectively blocked the power of Black men’s votes. But the so-called Susan B. Anthony amendment would guarantee suffrage to all citizens, including Black women, and the right would be enforceable by the federal government. White southerners considered this an existential threat. It would be “absolutely intolerable,” a Tennessee congressman asserted, “to double the number of ignorant voters by giving the colored woman the right to vote.”

Wilson understood that a race-based argument against women’s suffrage was unpalatable for a national audience. He was remarkably successful in evading the subject, even as the proposal for a constitutional amendment to guarantee women’s suffrage became the nation’s most contentious domestic issue. Year after year, he declined to mention it in his annual address to Congress. When pushed, Wilson continued to argue that the decision should remain with the states, even as he confided to the suffragist Harriot Stanton Blatch that the states’ rights argument was simply a facade. “Dismiss from your minds the idea that my party or I are concerned about states’ rights,” Wilson told her. “It is the negro question, Mrs. Blatch, that keeps my party from doing as you wish.” Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he encouraged Democrats in Congress to do what they could to block what would become the Nineteenth Amendment, and privately supported altering its language to allow states the right to control enforcement, effectively permitting racial voting restrictions.

Wilson’s opposition to women’s suffrage for most of his presidency rested on more than idealized gender roles. Like many southerners, his opposition was deeply entangled with white supremacy. As he confided to the suffragist Harriot Stanton Blatch, “It is the negro question, Mrs. Blatch, that keeps my party from doing as you wish.”

The suffragists were a perennial thorn in Wilson’s side. In 1916, Alice Paul’s militant National Woman’s Party urged already enfranchised women to vote Wilson and his party out of office, as punishment for failing to support the cause. In January 1917, after he won reelection by a whisker, the party began a campaign of quiet protest, with “silent sentinels” picketing at the gates of the White House. The protests, which continued for a year and a half, involved thousands of suffragists and initially attracted much press attention. Embarrassed by the picketers’ lingering presence, Wilson intervened, suppressing press coverage and, after the U.S. entered World War I, directing the wartime propaganda bureau to label the protests as unpatriotic. He ordered surveillance of suffrage leaders, and condoned police harassment of the pickets. 

Chillingly, Wilson was complicit in the arrest of hundreds of protesters on the trumped-up charge of obstructing the sidewalk. Suffragists were sentenced up to seven months in squalid prisons and workhouses, where they were denied adequate food and water, legal representation, and communication with their families. When some protesters began a hunger strike, prison guards—under Wilson’s direction—commenced force feedings, while Wilson directed the head of his propaganda agency to deny maltreatment of the prisoners and to assert that “the treatment of the women picketers has been grossly exaggerated and distorted.”

During the war, Wilson issued an executive order permitting government officials to restrict international travel to anyone deemed a threat to public safety; at the war’s conclusion, the administration extended the ban to deny passports to virtually all Black applicants, along with members of the National Woman’s Party.

Because Wilson’s domestic and international achievements fall outside the central narrative of The Light Withdrawn, the results feel curiously reductive. Conveying the full breadth of Wilson’s achievements wouldn’t balance the moral scales, but they are nonetheless fundamental to his complicated, contradictory, often infuriating story. Which is also, of course, the history of the United States.

Suffragists and civil rights leaders pointed to the hypocrisy of Wilson’s soaring rhetoric extolling American democracy while denying its fruits to all Americans. At the conclusion of the war, one suffragist decried Wilson’s lofty evangelism for democratic ideals. “While President Wilson has sailed away to Europe to obtain democracy for the world,” she bemoaned, “American women, after six years, know how hollow his words are.” 

Cox notes in his introduction that more than 2,000 English-language books have been written about Woodrow Wilson, but until Arthur Walworth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning two-volume study in 1958, not one had mentioned either the women’s suffrage movement or the racial segregation of the federal government. Wilson’s exalted status as a progressive titan was seldom challenged before the public reckoning of recent years. By thoroughly excavating the president’s racial and gender ideology, Cox’s book is an important contribution to the scholarship. But it has limits, too, as a corrective. 

The Light Withdrawn does not ignore Wilson’s formidable achievements altogether-indeed, Cox praises Wilson in his introduction as “enormously consequential” for a progressive laundry list ranging from the progressive income tax to the Clayton Antitrust Act. He explains that Wilson was not simply a reactionary and takes pains to show how political alignments in Wilson’s day didn’t fit neatly into contemporary categories. Today, left-leaning economic policies often go hand in hand with calls for racial equality, but in the early 20th century, white supremacy was consistent with—even foundational to—white southern progressivism. Like other progressives, Wilson was concerned with ridding government of corruption, breaking up concentrations of financial and corporate power, and empowering democracy through political reform—even as he introduced racial segregation into the civil service. 

But because Wilson’s domestic and international achievements fall outside the central narrative of The Light Withdrawn, the results feel curiously reductive, as if Wilson’s life and role in history can be distilled to his white supremacy and sexism. Conveying the full breadth of Wilson’s achievements wouldn’t balance the moral scales, but they are nonetheless fundamental to his complicated, contradictory, often infuriating story. Which is also, of course, the history of the United States. As a result, Cox’s biography feels both politically charged and incomplete, even as more traditional biographies, which venerate Wilson but ignore his racism, likewise fall short. 

Despite his damning narrative, Cox labels Wilson merely a disappointment—both to suffragists and to civil rights leaders who had trusted in his democratic ideals, and to contemporary students of history disenchanted by the president’s many shortcomings. Cox points to lesser-known historical figures like Alice Paul, the civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter, the presidential appointee and confidant Dudley Field Malone, and Representative Frank Mondell, as the true heroes in the realization of women’s suffrage. 

The author shows considerable restraint in his conclusions about Wilson. Cox writes, “As the poet Whittier teaches, all of us who are Woodrow Wilson’s heirs owe it to ourselves to remember the man in full, and to ‘pay the reverence of old days to his dead fame.’ ” Cox’s thoughtful, deeply researched biography goes a long way toward stripping away the hero worship; perhaps the next biographer will build on this scholarship to offer the more comprehensive treatment this complex historical figure merits, and readers deserve.

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