With regard to how historians view his record, Woodrow Wilson is arguably one of the more conflicting presidents in American history. Wilson, known for pursuing a lasting peace in the wake of World War I, was also a fervent segregationist and steadily opposed a constitutional amendment to grant women the right to vote. Wilson’s legacy has arguably gone through more scrutiny in recent decades because of his past and rather light career accomplishments prior to entering politics. Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn by Christopher Cox focuses on Wilson’s career crossed with the women’s suffrage movement and race relations.
Cox’s biography of Wilson is fair - criticizing him for his racial (er, racist) policies on segregating the federal workforce after several administrations of desegregation. Cox also notes how Wilson’s presidency was very much the result of infighting within Republican circles - in 1912 with the breakaway Bull Moose campaign of Teddy Roosevelt which split Republican votes into two camps, and in 1916 in California, a state that Wilson won by just over 3,000 votes and, had the party been more unified, may have swung the balance of the election to Charles Evans Hughes. Through Wilson’s political career, Cox weaves in the story of the women’s suffrage movement and how the Democratic party fought amongst itself over giving women the right to vote. That right was granted through the 19th Amendment, ultimately ratified in 1920.
Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn also dives into Wilson’s push for the League of Nations and how his health had deteriorated as a result of his strenuous work in the Paris Peace Conference post-World War I. In Cox’s book, the reader sees Wilson as a conflicting, somewhat controlling persona who vastly changed the relationship of the Presidency and Congress but also set back the country dramatically on race relations and slow-footed the implementation of women’s voting rights.
MY RATING: 4
