Woodrow Wilson, the Regressive Progressive

Suffragettes protest outside Woodrow Wilson’s White House, 1917

(Library of Congress)

By Isaac Oberman

This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.

Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn

by Christopher Cox (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

When prompted to provide five words to describe President Woodrow Wilson, ChatGPT made sure to highlight Wilson as “idealistic,” “progressive,” and “determined.” Many biographers paint Wilson in a similarly positive light, presenting him as a leader who showed undying care for America and its citizens.

Christopher Cox’s Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn offers a much different picture. This sweeping narrative demonstrates that Wilson, while definitely determined, was anything but idealistic and progressive.

Cox interweaves the story of Wilson’s life with that of the movements for women’s suffrage and racial equality. The book explores overlooked aspects of Wilson’s career, from his time in academia to his White House tenure. In illuminating Wilson’s shadows, Cox presents a fuller picture of a much-misunderstood figure.

SON OF THE SOUTH

Born in 1856, Woodrow Wilson was a “son of the South,” Cox writes. When Wilson was a boy, his family owned slaves. The Wilson manse included “a detached two-story wing that served as slave quarters,” Cox writes.

Three months before the Civil War began, Wilson’s father, a Presbyterian minister, delivered a sermon on slavery that he soon published. In it, he called slavery an institution to “cherish” because it enriched the “superior race” while also “saving a lower race.”

The younger Wilson absorbed his father’s teachings on race and slavery. In the 1893 book Division and Reunion, Wilson dismissed critics who said the South had been built on “systematic iniquity” and “willful sin.” The professor claimed that southerners’ “lives were honorable, their relations with their slaves humane, their responsibility for the existence of slavery among them remote.” Cox notes that a decade later, as president of Princeton University, Wilson said, “Slavery itself was not so dark a thing as it was painted.” And in his History of the American People, Wilson insisted that “the great mass of the negro people” had been better off under slavery, for “they had been shielded” from the “rough buffets of freedom.”

Cox thus traces the origin and development of Wilson’s radically bigoted views, helping us understand how the president could defend Jim Crow and oversee the resegregation of the federal workforce.

“SINGULARLY ILL-ADAPTED TO TEACHING WOMEN”

Wilson likewise absorbed his father’s views on the role of women. Reverend Wilson expressed these views “with the same religious zeal that he brought to his defense of slavery,” Cox writes. In one published sermon, the reverend said that woman must submit to man given her “physically weak nature.” Women belonged in the home, Reverend Wilson claimed, and must stay “away from the rush and storm of life.”

In 1884, Woodrow Wilson attended a session of the Women’s Congress in Baltimore. He did so “for sport,” Cox writes—that is, for the purpose of ridiculing the assemblage. In a letter to his wife, Wilson described the “chilled, scandalized feeling that always comes over me when I see and hear women speak in public.” Cox notes that Wilson found the very idea of a Women’s Congress absurd. The future president told his wife that he “drew a good deal of whimsical delight” from the “remarkable spectacle.”

As an academic, Wilson carried “barely disguised disdain for women scholars,” Cox writes. Yet he owed his academic career to one such scholar: M. Carey Thomas, who hired him to teach at a new women’s college, Bryn Mawr. Despite his condescending attitude toward female scholars and students, Wilson could hardly afford to be choosy. He had dropped out of law school and then quit the practice of law after a short time. What’s more, Cox shows, Johns Hopkins University granted Wilson his PhD even though the young scholar “had never completed the formal requirements.” The trustees at Bryn Mawr resisted hiring Wilson, but Thomas fought for him.

Teaching at Bryn Mawr did not dim Wilson’s condescension toward women. He privately said that teaching women history and politics proved “about as appropriate and profitable as…lecturing to stonemasons on the history of fashion.” One student, Lucy Maynard Salmon—who would become a prominent historian—observed that Wilson was “singularly ill-adapted to teaching women.” The professor, Salmon said, “always assumed that they were intellectually different from men and that, therefore, they would not interest him.” Cox observes that Wilson “frequently clashed” with his boss, Thomas, “who found his attitude to women degrading.”

Wilson skipped out on the women’s college at the first opportunity. Offered a chance to teach men at Wesleyan, he “immediately broke his teaching contract without notice, deserting both school and students just two months before Bryn Mawr’s fall classes were to begin.”

Wilson’s racism contributed to his opposition to a women’s suffrage amendment.

THE FIGHT AGAINST WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE—AND FOR JIM CROW

Wilson’s racism and his views on women came together during his presidency. Cox makes a convincing case that Wilson’s racist views and support for Jim Crow “contributed to his opposition to the Susan B. Anthony Amendment through most of his two presidential terms.” Named for the nineteenth-century women’s rights activist, the Anthony Amendment would grant women the right to vote.

“It was in many ways unfortunate,” Cox writes, “that Wilson, whose early writings at Princeton declared universal suffrage to be ‘the foundation of every evil in this country,’ came to occupy the White House just as the national movement for women’s suffrage approached a tipping point.” Cox shows how Wilson opposed giving women the vote until late in his White House tenure. When the president finally dropped his opposition to the Anthony Amendment, he did so only by backing an “adulterated” version—one that would protect Jim Crow.

The heroes of Cox’s narrative are those who ensured that the Constitution’s Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women’s suffrage without the “race rider” that Wilson and other southern Democrats fought to enshrine. Cox brings to life figures such as Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress; the leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Woman’s Party (NWP); and the protesters whom one anti-suffrage politician dismissed as “iron-jawed angels.”

These women showcased true bravery, suffering beatings, mob attacks, and physical and psychological torture in prison to achieve their basic right: the right to an equal vote.

Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn is an accessible read that provides a much-needed reassessment of President Wilson. Cox’s brilliant telling of the fight for women’s suffrage also reminds us how to stand firm for the rights our country is built upon.

Isaac Oberman is a junior at Yale, where he participates in the Buckley Institute’s Lux et Veritas Leadership Program. He previously served as the Coolidge Foundation’s Buckley Media and Public Policy Intern.

This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.