Speaker 1: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the
Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge.
As always, you can email the show at radio at
the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fbr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and
of course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is former Republican Congressman and SEC Chairman
Christopher Cox, author of the book Woodrow Wilson The Light Withdrawn.
It is a compelling look at the darker instincts and
beliefs of the twenty eighth president, a man in many ways,
mister Cox may argue was superbly unsuited to the moment.
Welcome to the Federalist.
Speaker 2: Radio Hours, Sir, it's a pleasure to talk to you. Well,
it's a pleasure to join you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is a very interesting book in very interesting times.
I think it's good to look back more than one
hundred years at where this in a lot of ways,
and we'll get into some other issues, but where this
government is today in large part because of Woodrow Wilson,
who was a big government president, was he not?
Speaker 2: Yes. I would say that our world today is influenced
by Woodrow Wilson in many ways, not just governmentally, but
societally and socially. One of the things that the book,
of course, is centrally focused on, is the dramatic ending,
successful ending to the seventy plus year struggle for women
getting the vote. Woodrow Wilson stood a thwart that for
his entire career until the bitter end. He was opposed
to the Susan b Anthony then because of his views
on race. He did not want black women to vote,
and the kinds of steps that he took using government power,
for example, to segregate the federal workforce, had very long
running consequences. That was something that was brand new after
fifty years of integrated federal workforce that we introduced. Now
these malignant policies, and you know, we're still dealing obviously
with conflict because of racial discrimination and so on in
our society. So Woodrow Wilson is influencial in ways that
go well beyond you know, for example, the construction of
the administrative state.
Speaker 1: Indeed, Thomas would Row Wilson, of course, And that's a
question I guess I'd like to get off right off
the top. Why would Row? Why not Thomas Wilson.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Interesting, he adopted what had been a family surname
and was his middle name as his first name right
about the time that he was seriously entering into what
he thought would be a political career, and he believed
that Woodrow sounded more serious, sounded more dignified. He had
been known not as Thomas but as Tommy for his
entire life up to that point, including through college, and
so it was his step into serious adult maturity, I think.
Speaker 1: Well, as for as Wisconsin native, I can tell you
there's nothing wrong with Tommy, given the success of Tommy Thompson.
But those were different times, of course as well. And
Woodrow Wilson began his political career kind of as a
late bloomer. I mean, he was in academia for a
long time. Obviously, at one point the president of Princeton
who then made I don't know it was a somewhat
surprising run for New Jersey governor. But to the point
of your book, to the core of your book, he
was the first Democrat elected since the Civil War first
Southern I should not say Democrats, first Southern Democrat elected
since the Civil War. How much did his Southern upbringing
post ante Bellum inform the kinds of his beliefs and
the kinds of policies that he would bring to his presidency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've started off with a very important question in
understanding Woodrow Wilson, because Wilson's Southern Democratic background was the
most profounded and during influence on his entire life's work.
And that's true, I'd say, both as an academic and
as a politician. You know, it's interesting when people think
of Woodrow Wilson, they often recall, at least I do,
from high school and history, American history, political cartoons of
that day that featured Wilson as a schoolmaster, And we
naturally remember him as president of Princeton University and briefly
governor of New Jersey, as you've just alluded to, in
other words, a man from the northeast. But Wilson was
in fact a Southerner through and through. He was born
in Virginia, he soon moved his family moved to Georgia,
where he lived until he was a teenager. He and
his family then moved to South Carolina and four years
after that to North Carolina. He started college in South
Carolina at Davidson before he moved north to the College
of New Jersey. But even then he returned to his
family home in the South for the academic summers. When
he graduated from college, he made a brief but very
unsuccessful attempt at law school, and that was also in
the South, at the University of Virginia. After that he
moved back to Georgia, where he met his future wife.
So even when eventually he started graduate school at Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore, that was just south of the Mason
Dixon line. So here he is a man in his
late twenties and by the way, moving back home with
his parents in North Carolina whenever there was an academic break.
So it really wasn't until he got his first paying
job when he was twenty eight years old, as a
teacher at Brnmar College outside of Philadelphia, that he actually
moved his domicile to the North.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because you know, this is a Southern gentleman.
I believe he grew up with a very religious background,
you know, faith based family father who worked in the
trade if you will. And you know, and again very
much shaped by Southern ideas, Southern values at the time.
And let's be honest and contextual here. He was a
person of his times, like so many others. And you know,
we have seen over the last few decades in this country,
in particular, you know, a complete vilification of people who
had a mindset that obviously is much different than our
day and age and society. But Woodrow Wilson took those
notions of racism and true white supremacy to the nth degree,
did he not.
Speaker 2: He was more than a man of his time. And
I think you're right to use that terminology because we
do have to discard presentism when we are looking back
more than a century. We don't want to judge people
by the norms and the morays and the experiences we've
had in our own time, but rather view them in
their own context. And so in this book, what you
will find is Woodrow Wilson compared to his peers, judged
by his peers, some obviously completely supportive of what he
was doing, others highly critical. There was great debate about
these issues in his time, and he was really in
the vanguard in terms of national politics of reimposing very
race views on the federal government. His upbringing in the
South coincided precisely with the Civil War and the years
of reconstruction that followed. His family were very much on
the Confederate side. His father was a Presbyterian minister who
preached to his segregated congregation that slavery was part of
God's plan and that benefited black men and women and children.
Slavery was something everyone should cherish, because he said it
enriched the superior race of the Wilson family were waited
upon by enslaved black servants. So Woodrow Wilson is the
last American president to have grown up with enslaved people
in his own household. In the run up to the
Civil War, his father broke with the Presbyterian Church because
it had condemned slavery as a sin, and he was
a leader in the breakaway Presbyterian Church, which they called
the Presbyterian Church and the Confederate States of America, and
that new Church Holy embraced slavery. When the war came,
Wilson's father was a military chaplain with the rank of
officer in the Confederate Army, volunteered in a Confederate Home
defense unit, the Silver Grays. He turned the church into
a hospital for Confederate soldiers, built a stockade around the churchyard,
and that became a pow prison yard for Union soldiers.
So fast forward through all of these years to the
years of Reconstruction and the Republican Congresses in the North
imposing military rule on the South and allowing black men
to vote. You know, Wilson grew up in South Carolina
with black leaders in the state legislature and so on,
and he was horrified by all of this. So he
was mayorated, as it were, in this culture of revulsion
against domineering Republican Congress that had waged war against the
South and then forced black voters on the white male
leaders of the South. He kept these views until really
until his death. He wrote about these things in this
way while he was an academic at Princeton all the
way through his presidency, and he took these views with
him to the White House. And that I think is
really important understanding Woodrow Wilson that he was a Democrat
first and foremost because of race.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting and I want to get to that
political mark as well. In modern day times. Because it's
interesting and we'll get to this in a moment, but
it's interesting that demic rats don't like to talk much
about Woodrow Wilson these days for some reason. I think
the reasons are clear you just laid out. Was he
not also a proponent of the shameful and disdainful eugenics
concepts of that time among certain populations of scientists so
called Well, Wilson.
Speaker 2: Was chiefly a proponent of what today we view very
dimly as scientific racism. He wrote a book called The State,
which was a survey of the world's governments. It was
meant to be a college textbook, and in it he
begins by classifying all the world's governments according to race,
and he places at the top of his racial hierarchy
the Aryans. The Arians were superior in every respect. Below
them came the Semitic peoples. Below them came the savages
that we don't need to study. And he included Asians
in this bucket. Wow, And the governments are not worthy
of study. It's the Arians who are strong and masterful
and superior, and they're the ones we should.
Speaker 1: Study, sir. That I hate to interrupt you with that
that sounds very familiar to what this world unfortunately experienced
a few decades after Woodrow Wilson was in political power.
Speaker 2: There's no question that there's a direct lineage of this
European based scientific racism, if you will. It was something
that was very popular in European universities, including or perhaps
especially in German universities where Woodrow Wilson's professors at Johns
Hopkins were trained. And of course we know how this
metastasized within Germany itself within the space of a few decades.
But to your point about eugenics, if you pick up
min kof which is always a scary thing to do,
and read what Adolf Hitler wrote before his rise to power.
Much of what he talked about, besides, you know, the
main point, which is that the Jewish people were responsible
for so many bad things, was a eugenics solution to
these things. People who were less fit needed to be
dealt with in fairly extreme ways. Eugenicism of eugenics was
something that started out as what everyone thought was benign.
It was very popular, particularly among academic elites. The presidents
of major universities throughout the Northeast all seemed to get
in involved with eugenics. We have Oliver Wendell Holmes, of course,
who notoriously endorsed the concept as a Supreme Court justice,
and incidentally, two of the justices who voted with him
in that notorious case in which he said three generations
of imbeciles is enough and supported forced sterilization the tools
of eugenics. Of two of the justices who voted for
that were appointed by Woodrow Wilson. One of them.
Speaker 1: Brandeis amazing and again a marker of the times, fortunately
in so many cases. But it is interesting to me
to note that he was a Democrat in the middle
of the progressive movement led by a lot of Republicans
at that time. I think of Lafollic from Wisconsin. Of
course immediately comes to mind, Well Roosevelt, Yeah, sure, sure,
so it was quite an island there. So how did
Woodrow Wilson, this uh one term New Jersey governor Princeton elite,
rise to the station of candidate for president, Democrat candidate
for president and then ultimately President of the United States
in the progressive movement time period in America.
Speaker 2: He had some interesting contacts that he had made and
nurtured throughout his years at the College of New Jersey,
which later became Princeton University, of which eventually he was
the president. He wrote some books that were commercially very successful.
They weren't great works of scholarship, but they made him
a lot of money through royalties. And his publisher at
Harper and Brothers, George Harvey, who went by the honorific
Colonel George Harvey, was very fond of this university president
and decided that he should be a man in politics,
perhaps senator from New Jersey, perhaps even president, and he
started promoting Woodrow Wilson as a potential president or as
the ideal president, even before Wilson made any move himself
to go into politics. It gathered a lot of attention
and put Wilson on the map, so that when eventually
he made the leap from academia to politics, something that
he had always wanted to do. As I said earlier,
when he was first getting out of college, he decided
he wanted to be a US senator. The time, he
thought he'd be a senator from Virginia. But this is
a man who always wanted to be an elected Politics
was his career, ultimate career ambition. So when Things got
tough for him at Princeton when he got in a
very serious contest with the Board of Trustees and lost
vote of confidence, effectively from the board. He got out
of dodge, you know, one step ahead of the sheriff,
made the leap into politics. His friend George Harvey had
arranged with the New Jersey Democratic bosses to get him
the nomination, and at a convention in Trenton, where nobody
had met the man, he became the nominee for governor.
And this came after a string of Republican victories. The
Democrats were quite desperate. The progressive movement was peaking at
the time, and part of progressivism was to clean up
the corruption in politics. So here was a man all
the other Democrats that they had at hand, who had
no record, and that meant also that he was never
involved in political deals and was free of corruption. As
he entered politics, he could also adopt as his platform.
In that year of nineteen ten, the issues to azure
he could become the perfect candidate that was riding the
crust of this wave, and it required Wilson to drop
several of the views that he'd held because he was
not a classic progressive. When he entered politics, he critical
of labor unions, critical of the initiative and the referendum
and so on. And while those were issues in his campaign,
he overcame them. It turned out nineteen ten was a
Democratic year nationwide in New Jersey as well. And timing
is everything, and so here he is. He's now governor
of New Jersey, and George Harvey's pressing him for President
of the United States. And you know, that's another tale
that hangs there. But he ends up getting the Democratic nomination.
And then how fortunate to have as his two opponents
for president you not one, but two Republican presidents, feat
Or Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Roosevelt of course, bolted
the Republican Convention after losing the Taft started the Bull
Moose Party. And so the Republicans end up in nineteen
twelve getting a majority of the popular vote combined the
two of them, and Wilson skates into the White House
with forty two percent of the vote.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you would think that would be a daunting list
of opponents, and it was, but it worked in Wilson's favor.
Of course. How remarkable past really is prologue, because you're
talking about what was going on at the time, not
just in New Jersey but elsewhere. You know, the bosses
would meet and they would decide who the candidate was
going to be. It was about as an anti or
about as anti Democratic as you can possibly imagine. And
of course, fast forward one hundred plus years and we
have the same thing basically going on in the Democrat
Party following Joe Biden's decision to step down. And remarkable,
isn't it how things the more things change, the more
they stay the same.
Speaker 2: We can always learn from reading our American history. When
I worked in the White House in the Reagan administration,
occasionally issues would come up that would seem to be novel,
and then I'd realized I worked for an organization that
was two centuries plus old, and I could go into
the White House library and look up, you know, when
something like this happened before, and find an approach to
deal with it. So truly, nothing new under the sun.
And that's especially true when it comes to politics, because
you know, politics is not manufacturing. Don't make anything, it's
just human interaction, and ultimately, human beings have some very
predictable traits and there are different kinds of personalities, but
only so many. And when you mix and match in
that way, you're going to get repetitive patterns, and we
always do.
Speaker 3: Indeed, now the Hollywood liberals are obsessed about looting. The
Watch Dout on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every
day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and the
economy and how it affects your wallet. Some of the
Hollywood elites have threatened to shoot people who loot their property.
Where were they during the George Floyd riots? Celine Dion
didn't mind looting during Hurricane Katrina because it wasn't her stuff.
Whether it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street,
it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 1: Be informed.
Speaker 3: Check out the Watch Dot on Wall Street podcast with
Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Our guest today is former Republican Congressmen and SEC chairman
former chairman Christopher Cox, author of the book Woodrow Wilson
The Light Withdrawn. It's a very interesting look at the
real Woodrow Wilson, not the idealized one, of course, that
has fallen out of fashion over the last decade. Or
so in this country. But there was a time would
Rowe Wilson was seen as, you know, the icon, one
of the icons of the Democratic Party in this country.
Not so much so more because of the things that
Christopher Cox lays out in his book. I want to
get back to that in just a moment, but I
would be remiss if we didn't get into the president
who kept us out of war. You know, this was
a time of great turmoil globally, the expanding idea of globalism,
and as you point out in your book, would Row
Wilson was nothing if not eventually a globalist, but he
did campaign on the idea that America needed to stay
put and stay out of the business of constant European squabbles.
That changed, though.
Speaker 2: It certainly did. He won election in nineteen sixteen unmistakably
for the reason that he was the peace candidate, and
yet within weeks of his inauguration he asked Congress for
a declaration of war against Germany. It was quite a turnabout,
and it was also a turnabout in Wilson himself. He
became much more stern, much more intolerant of dissent. He
very notoriously cracked down on the civil liberties of Americans
in a way that stands out in sharp relief against
the whole century that followed. He was really beyond the
limits of the Constitution in depriving people of their rights.
Some of these people, actually many of them were war
protesters who came to Washington. They had supported Wilson. They
came to the capital to protest after his turnabout, And
of course the turnabout was in response to events, but
those events actually had been relating well before the election,
and so there was a great deal of loss of
faith among his supporters. They wanted to march in the streets,
they wanted to hold up signs and that sort of thing.
And immediately Wilson clamped down. The same thing with the draft.
We hadn't had a draft since the Civil War. Wilson,
the historian, knew about the draft riots, and so there
was going to be absolutely no protest about the draft either.
And he controlled the DC government at the time. We
didn't have home rule in Washington. Then. He had a
couple of appointees on the three member commission that officially
ran the city that were his journalist friends and supporters,
and they were in intimate contact and at all times
in making these decisions about no demonstrations whatsoever in the city,
no protests, and so on. And it got worse as
the war went on, and it got worse for women
protesting for the right to vote in the same way.
And of course we all know how they were all
thrown jail and very brutally treated there.
Speaker 1: Yes, indeed, and you know, you think about that time period,
and again I hastened back to the point passed his prologue.
The more things changed, the more they stay the same.
With the sort of censorship that would Row Wilson engaged
in and his administration engaged in. We've seen a lot
of that, of course in this country, at an alarming
rate over the last four years. So taking a page
perhaps the Biden administration from the Woodrow Wilson administration, let
us delve into the move toward the nineteenth Amendment, the
Anthony Amendment, named after Susan B. Anthony, of course, who
for years fought for the franchise for women to vote.
As you noted at the outset of our conversation, Woodrow
Wilson was dead set against all of that. Despite this
this strong wave that had been pushing and pushing on politics.
Why did he resist? How was he able to resist
for so long?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the movement for women having the vote, it has
its roots at the very beginning of American in seventeen
seventy six, and in fact, in New Jersey where Wilson
was later governor. You know, women voted at first. That
right was later taken away legislatively, but it was very expressed,
and they used the words he or she in the law.
So this history and to dates would row Wilson by many,
many decades, long before he arrived on the scene. Really
for a full country, Americans had been working for women's
property rights, marital and family rights, and voting rights, and
by the middle of the nineteenth century, when Woodrow Wilson
was born, they were already having considerable success. It was
after the Civil War, and this is the formative time
for Wilson in his youth growing up in the South.
As we were discussing after the Civil War, Republicans in
Congress drafted the Reconstruction Amendments, and women's voting rights were
seriously considered for inclusion in both the fourteenth and the
fifteenth Amendments, and there were alternatives to those amendments as
they were finally approved, that were very expressed about women
having the right to vote. This was all debated at
the time, and at the same time Union generals appointed
by Grant that were running the territories of the West
moved for women's voting rights in those territories, and that
actually happened.
Speaker 1: So the first women voting in.
Speaker 2: America in in modern times I mentioned the earlier times
were in Wyoming and then in Utah. And this happened
during Reconstruction. It was something that Wilson wrote about in
his histories, that is to say, Reconstruction, but he absolutely
turned away from writing about women's voting rights only the
fact that black men were being allowed to vote, and
that was the thing that he really cared about. So
he stood athwart the Ante Amendment because it was going
to federalize enforcement and it would have again seen, just
as he had seen during Reconstruction, interference with white Southern
male rule and specifically credit rule in the South under
Jim Crow. That was his basis for opposing the Anti Amendment.
The Anti Amendment, of course, had its origins in this
Reconstruction period as well.
Speaker 1: And he was particularly against He was against the right
for women to vote, but he was particularly against black
women voting. I think you've laid that out, but a
further explanation of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Wilson did not have a constant view when
it came to women in the way that he did
when it came to race. His views on women's proper
role and whether they should be permitted in active civic
roles outside the home and so on changed over his
life as the society around him changed. So when he
was governor of New Jersey, he said he was absolute
opposed to women voting. And that's a position that he'd
held throughout his life to that point. But during his
time in the White House, as stayed after state was
granting women the right to vote, that became an untenable
political position, and so he changed and his new position
was states rights. He said that he was up to
the states to decide this. That of course left the
South untouched because the Jim Crow states were never going
to do it, and that satisfied him. What he most
did not want to see was more black voters, or
black voting at all, that Jim Crow might otherwise prevent.
So that's where he ended up his final position and
here we're racing to the truly interesting story at the
end of the book about how even after the House
of Representative voted by two thirds for the Anthony Amendment,
and then it goes to the Senate and Wilson makes
a speech to the Senate in support of the Antony Amendment,
so seemingly now he's on board. At the very end
after that, when the Anthony Amendment failed by two votes
in the Senate, he got on board with Southern senators'
plans to get rid of that federal enforcement piece, to
rewrite the Anthony Amendment that's been introduced in Congress year
after year after year after year, going all the way
back to the nineteenth century. And he's going to change
this venerable language so that the Jim Crow states get
to be in charge, and that way they could have
only white women voting. And that almost made it through
in the Lame Duck when Democrats had their last gasp
at control in the Congress, having lost it in the
nineteen eighteen midterm elections. It's a very forty thing for
posterity that that effort failed, but wood Row Wilson was
on board with it.
Speaker 1: It was like the bargain of the Hayes election, you know,
to get basically Reconstruction out of the South, to get
enforcement of the federal laws and the constitutional amendments that
you know was changing the country everywhere at the South,
and you had this sort of arrangement that was hoping
to keep the elements of Jim Crow in the Deep
South is for as long as possible, to the exclusion
of women voting. Once again, this is all, as you noted,
very steeped in the traditions the Moreys of wood Row
Wilson growing up in the South.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really does all tie back to reconstruction. When
the fourteenth Amendment was being considered by a Joint House
Senate committee, the coach, the House co chair was Sattis Stevens,
a big abolitionist. They produced a first draft that included
men and women in its protections for voting rights. So
Fattias Stevens is someone who Wilson wrote about said that
he was not a committed abolitionist really, but he was
just wanted to make sure that Republicans could rule over Democrats.
He was a partisan. And so when he said the
same thing about Charles Sumner and about other obviously very
committed abolitionists in the Congress. He was very cynical about it.
So then we, you know, fast forward to not very fast, say,
eighteen sixty eight, and we have Samuel Palmeroy of Kansas
and George Julian of Indiana entered seeing the first constitutional
amendments dedicated solely to women's suffrage. These two men are Republicans,
and another reason to not like Republicans, because they're constantly
trying to expand towards what Wilson derisively termed as universal suffrage.
He wanted only the elites to vote, only people who were,
in his view, worthy of it, but certainly not what
he called ignorant negroes. So then we have what later
became the Susan B. Anthony Amendment by name, but in
terms of the text, the very words that now are
in the Constitution that was first introduced in eighteen seventy
eight by Susan B. Anthony's good friend, Aaron Sargent, a
Republican senator from California. So for a long time this
was Republicans versus Democrats, North versus South. You know, black
people voting or women having rights versus white male supremacy,
and Wilson was on the latter side.
Speaker 1: As a historical footnote and an aside, Thaddeus Stevens had
arguably the worst hair piece of any congressman in the
history of this country. And while we speak of that,
you served some time in Congress, can you mention the
worst hair pieces you have seen in that fail that.
Speaker 2: I was going to go immediately to Jim Traffickan, right, Yes,
of course, the legendary Ohio member who had some trouble.
Speaker 1: With the law and some trouble with the hair accouterment
as well. Thank you for.
Speaker 2: I was about to say, this is a clear example
of where we have to discard our presentism and not
judge people buy her standards. Yes, they were their dental hygiene, Oh.
Speaker 1: Sure, the hygiene in general, it was.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: It was a much different time. Let's let's just say
there wasn't a lot of deodorance going around back in
those days. Yes, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2: But then when you mentioned Jim Traffickan, all of a sudden,
we're in the twenteenth century, so maybe it is a presentism.
Speaker 1: We're getting close. Anyway, We're getting a lot closer. Uh,
back to the suffrage issue. Isn't it amazing that widow
Wilson had such powerful women in his life? His mother,
two wives, and my my, one of my closing questions
will be about his second wife and just how powerful
she became. But these are powerful women in his life,
and yet he carried this idea that women should not
have the right to vote.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And of course Edith Wilson has been in the
news of late because you know, she presided over a
situation in which her husband was mentally and physically impaired
and incapacitated.
Speaker 1: Yes, and.
Speaker 2: Covered it up, you know, through extensive efforts and raised
questions about who's really running the government. Entire books had
been written about this subject, and it really is fascinating
to speculate about maybe Edith was the first woman president,
or maybe she was the machi Avlian first lady who
secretly manipulated the federal government while her husband was incapacitated,
or even you know, a female Rasputin who convinced the
helpless invalid to agree to her plans for the country.
I think I think all of that is overmuch. Edith
Wilson can be criticized for other things which I can
go into but I would absolve her of being a
power hungry, illegitimate president of in the shadows. I say
this because that's not what she did. First and foremost,
she was concerned about her husband's health, and so what
she did was keep work away from him. Her great
sin was keeping the truth away from the American people.
And Wilson's great sin, even in his impaired circumstances, was
not recognizing that he should have stepped down. Of course,
the reality of what had happened to Wilson was far
worse than anyone in Washington, let alone the rest of
the country could imagine. Immediately after his major stroke in
October nineteen nineteen, anyone who just looked at him could
tell something was terribly wrong. His left arm and leg
were paralyzed, the left side of his face drooped. He
suffered from acute digestive problems that indicated the stroke extended
to his central nervous system. The damage from it, the
weakness and the muscles on the left side of his
tongue is jaw, and his parents made it difficult to
swallow and therefore interfered with his speech. He had had
an earlier stroke that degraded. The vision in his right eye.
Now the vision in his left eye was impaired. So
here he is. He's got double vision, frequent dizzy spells.
He can no longer read, he can't sit in a
chair to eat, he can't sign his name, his memory
is faulty. You know. Faced with all of this, Edith
decides to cover it all up and pretend that the
president's just fine, and she got the White House physician
to be her ally on this.
Speaker 1: Again, the past is present in many ways, and that's
exactly what you're talking about. You know, the discussions about
Joe Biden's president, Joe Biden's cognitive state and his fitness
to serve. We didn't have, and I think that there
is evidence to suggest exactly what you talked about, that
Edith Wilson was very much concerned about the health of
her husband. She was not necessarily fully acting as president,
although there were some incidents in that time where you
think that's really not the business of the first lady,
but she did cover it up. That's different from what
we've experienced, in my personal opinion, over the last four
years in this country, where we had a inex you know,
a White House staff, aided and abedded by I believe
in accomplice media that covered this up. What do you
what do you think of the I think the understandable
comparisons between what ro Wilson and Joe Biden in terms
of their time, their ladder time in office.
Speaker 2: Yeah, many people have drawn, you know, in print, in
our eds and analytical pieces, parallels between the Wilson situation
and the Biden situation. But there are some obvious, big differences.
One is the relative transparency of the presidency today. So
Joe Biden, you know, couldn't hide for four months without
ever being seen in a photograph, but Wilson was able
to remain in seclusion in that way for over four months.
We also have to keep in mind I went through
all of the details of Wilson's physical inability to function,
as well as you know, his mental capacity, including memory
being tom finished. But you know, I did that because
that was much more extreme than anything that even yet
has happened to Joe Biden. And as he gets older,
so the Wilson thing is made even more extreme when
you consider to me the truly remarkable fact that he
had been absent from America physically for six months before
all of this. He decided after World War One that
he was going to go to Europe and he spent
a full six months Europe and transit back and forth
by ship at a time when there was, you know,
almost no communication across the Atlantic except for Morse Code,
and so you know, he had no idea what was
going on in America and he lost touch with the
country he was supposed to be in charge of. His
cabinet could barely reach him. He didn't understand contextually what
was happening of no situational awareness about the country's problems,
which were major at the time, runaway inflation, of labor problems,
race riots, all these things happening at home. To mention
the Anthony Amendment, which is at the tipping point, and
everybody's demanding the president's help and he's not providing it.
So the country had no president for half a year
before all of this, and then Wilson gets knocked out
of commission for the balance of his presidency all the
way through nineteen twenty. That's really extraordinary. Yeah, it absolutely is.
Speaker 1: You want to talk about an absentee landlord that is
yet right there, although there are plenty of Americans, and
I can understand their point of view on this. I
share it to a great degree that we've had a
president missing in action over the last four years in
this country. That's a conversation perhaps for a later time.
You've been very generous with your time. Final question I
have for you is, after all that you've explained, you've
laid out in your book, your extensive research, what is
Woodrow Wilson's ultimate legacy.
Speaker 2: You know, in the intervening century, he has been variously
heralded as a progressive hero vilified as a racist who
kept black men out of Princeton when he was president,
and then as president of United States, segregated the federal workforce.
I'd say that to twenty first century minds, those two
characterizations are inconsistent. One can't be a progressive hero in
our minds today and a white supremacist at the same time.
But while that's true today, it was not true in
Wilson's time. It's taken many decades for historians and academics
to square this circle and in the process discover who
was the real Woodrow Wilson. For the first fifty years
or so, Wilson's racism wasn't even discussed, let alone his
long standing opposition to women voting and especially to the
Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It was nineteen fifty eight before
Arthur Walworth, who wrote a two volume Pulitzer Prize winning biography,
even broach these topics, and then just and in the
nineteen nineties of the modern biographies treated race and gender seriously,
but they weren't considered central to his presidency. So I
think what has emerged is not yet in the popular consciousness.
It's only been in academia that the entirety of Wilson's
record in domestic and foreign policies being re evaluated in
light of his prejudices, and that scholarship is providing a
new view of Wilson's international and domestic record that's shot
through with racial bias. So my takeaway from what was
fourteen years of research on this book is that that
was especially true when it came to women's voting rights.
It was the leading domestic policy issue that had reached
a tipping point by the time Wilson arrived in Washington.
He opposed the Susan B. Anthony Endment because it would
bring with it federal enforcement of voting rights everywhere in America,
including the Jim Crow States, where black citizens were largely
prevented from voting. So this is a way for us
to understand the Wilson presidency in not just a new light,
because all of these things were there all along, but
in a more fulsome light, a more complete picture. I
just closed by saying, there was a Gallop poll taken
at the beginning of the twenty first century, and it had
asked the American public to name the most important event
of the twentieth century. Sixty one sixty six percent chose
women getting the right to vote, So, you know, two
thirds ahead of landing a man on the moon, fall
of the Union, World War One, even in the Great Depression.
Only World War Two ranked higher. And yet this has
not been part of the Wilson story until now. It's
it's been more than a lacuna. It's a gaping hole.
And as it turns out, I'd say that aspect of
the Wilson story is the most interesting.
Speaker 1: I agree, and that is why we didn't get into
what has so long been, you know, the narrative legacy
of Woodrow Wilson, and that is his quest for lasting
peace through the League of Nations. But some of what
you just talked about is a guy who was so fixated,
so obsessed with this notion of the League of Nations,
his League of Nations, that he absolutely because he was
in Europe for so long and so disconnected from what
was going on in his own country. You know, there
was growing distakee for that at all because of what
America and the world just had gone through with the
Great War, so to speak. They didn't want any more
of that, and so that created his obsession, created an
absolute see change in American government, in leadership. But I
think you're absolutely right. The legacy that is really coming
out about Woodrow Wilson is a his massive expansion of
the federal government and the control of the federal government
in the lives of Americans, but also how he viewed
certain Americans and how those policies reflected truly anti progressive
the small p notion of American politics. Fascinating individual, certainly fast,
sinating book, and a great conversation. I really do appreciate
your time today, sir well.
Speaker 2: And I really appreciate the discussion. This is for me,
of course, the most interesting topic in the world. Having
spent so much time in having the book out there now,
and I hope listeners have a chance to enjoy it themselves.
Speaker 1: They can find it just about anywhere. Thanks to my
guest today, former Republican Congressman SEC former Chairman Christopher Cox,
author of the book Woodrow Wilson, The Light Withdrawn. You've
been listening to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of
freedom and anxious for the fray.