Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn

Christopher Cox examines Woodrow Wilson's life and presidency, with particular focus on his opposition to racial equality and women's voting rights. More than a century after his death, Wilson's contradictions remain significant to American politics. Wilson became the 28th president in 1912, just as the struggle for women's voting rights reached a critical moment. As the first southern Democrat to occupy the White House since the Civil War era, he brought allies to Washington who segregated the federal government. Wilson's sympathy for Jim Crow and states' rights shaped his decades-long hostility to the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which would have guaranteed universal suffrage with federal enforcement. Women demonstrating for voting rights faced government propaganda, physical violence, starvation during illegal imprisonment, and confinement to asylums. Late in his second term, when two-thirds of Congress approached passing the Anthony Amendment, Wilson reversed his position. However, aligned with southern Democrats, he supported a plan to modify the amendment to preserve Jim Crow voting restrictions on Black women. Cox chronicles the activists who secured passage of the unaltered Anthony Amendment, presenting this history of one of American democracy's major advances.