Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdraw by Christopher Cox
Woodrow Wilson is chiefly remembered for a controversial idea, the championing of “American values” in other countries by force if necessary. “Making the world safe for democracy,” he called it. He tried but failed to convince the U.S. Senate to admit the U.S. into the League of Nations, the forerunner of the UN. He also facilitated the National Parks System, clamped down on corporate monopolies, instigated the progressive income tax and established the Federal Reserve.
A shadow side was always evident in the numerous historical accounts of his presidency, including overweening arrogance and the suggestion of racism. After all, he organized the first film screening in the White House and his choice for movie night?—D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), a depiction of the Ku Klux Klan as heroic warriors for White Anglo-Saxon America. The author of a new examination of Wilson’s life, Christopher Cox, doubles down on the president’s taste in film and finds that his selection was no fluke. Turns out Wilson was a long-time friend of novelist Thomas Dixon, whose potboilers were the source for The Birth of a Nation, the film that inspired the rebirth of the Klan in the 20thth century.
Moreover, Wilson’s work as an historian, his profession before entering politics, was an apology for the Confederacy, a defense of slavery and steeped in the false racial science of his day. Cox, UC, Irvine’s scholar in residence, finds that Wilson wrote of the superiority of the “Aryan race,” denigrated the potential of women and worried that America’s entry into World War I would encourage “the yellow races” to rise against the white empires. Draconian restrictions on constitutional freedoms were imposed after the U.S. entered the war, with Wilson vowing to deal with “disloyalty” with “the firm hand of repression.”
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Wilson and his First Lady, Edith Galt, were the children of slave owners and they seldom advanced beyond the ideas of their upbringing. Wilson appeared smug and pedantic in many prior accounts. Cox paints him as nasty and pedantic as well, petty and ugly minded. He seemed better suited for academia than politics but always hankered for high office and was well served by a gift for resounding phrases.
The text of Light Withdrawn is a valuable addition to a clearer understanding of America’s past. Only one complaint, and it’s a memo to Simon & Schuster’s art department: Why did you colorize the black and white photos (color won’t sell more copies) and stick an American flag pin on Wilson’s lapel? It was Richard Nixon who started the fashion for U.S presidents to sport flag lapel pins.
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