Woodrow Wilson

The Light Withdrawn

De: Christopher Cox

Narrado por: Jonathan Davis

A timely reassessment of Woodrow Wilson and his role in the long national struggle for racial equality and women’s voting rights.

More than a century after he dominated American politics, Woodrow Wilson still fascinates. With panoramic sweep, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn reassesses his life and his role in the movements for racial equality and women’s suffrage. The Wilson that emerges is a man superbly unsuited to the moment when he ascended to the presidency in 1912, as the struggle for women’s voting rights in America reached the tipping point.

The first southern Democrat to occupy the White House since the Civil War era brought with him to Washington like-minded men who quickly set to work segregating the federal government. Wilson’s own sympathy for Jim Crow and states’ rights animated his years-long hostility to the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which promised universal suffrage backed by federal enforcement. Women demonstrating for voting rights found themselves demonized in government propaganda, beaten and starved while illegally imprisoned, and even confined to the insane asylum.

When, in the twilight of his second term, two-thirds of Congress stood on the threshold of passing the Anthony Amendment, Wilson abruptly switched his position. But in sympathy with like-minded southern Democrats, he acquiesced in a “race rider” that would protect Jim Crow. The heroes responsible for the eventual success of the unadulterated Anthony Amendment are brought to life by Christopher Cox, an author steeped in the ways of Washington and political power. This is a brilliant, carefully researched work that puts you at the center of one of the greatest advances in the history of American democracy.

©2024 Christopher Cox (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio

This is a women suffrage book, with Wilson as a side note.

Don’t waste your time if you want to learn about Wilson. This is a women’s suffrage book with Wilson in it as a side note

An Unbalanced Hatchet Job

Don’t waste your time with this Christopher Cox biography, which is an unbalanced, preachy hatchet job on a great but flawed man of his times.

Cox feigns shock and indignation -- as does the breathless narrator -- about the fact that Wilson had attitudes about race and women’s suffrage which were common and unexceptionable at that time. Such attitudes were of course by and large held by the Founding Fathers, many of whom owned slaves, and shared -- publicly or otherwise -- with most Presidents thereafter, let alone a large cohort of the American people. Racism is still present loud and clear in US Presidents and the American public, and misogyny is not far behind.

Wilson's myriad significant achievements, including trust busting.legislation, the progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank system, labor protections, and more, not to mention decisive leadership and victory in WW I and a commitment to international peace, human rights and self-determination of all nations, however small, shaped the US's role domestically and in the world for generations. The latter international commitments post-WW I foundered on the Republican rocks of isolationism, manned chiefly by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge whose hatred for Wilson knew no bounds. Lodge's fanatical opposition to co-operative international peace and the League of Nations was a contributing factor towards rampant isolationism which led in part to WW II, as Wilson correctly feared it would.

Instead of Christopher Cox's unworthy tract, read "Wilson" (2013) by A. Scott Berg, which is a balanced and nuanced account of a great President, warts and all.