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The Light Withdrawn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 With panoramic sweep, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn reassesses his life and his role in the movements for racial equality and women’s suffrage.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

A Needed Biography

This is an excellent addition to Wilson scholarship. This biography is narrow in scope but goes into great depth to study WW's attitudes and policies concerning women's suffrage and the movement for women's equality in general. Because of this focus, the author also reveals Wilson's thinking on race and universal male suffrage. I am a history buff so I am aware of WW's deep and intense opposition to voting rights and social equality for women and Black men. But Cox's work does a great job of revealing to readers just how that opposition shaped Wilson's life, his times, and American history.

A very Detailed and Pedantic Biography

Although I learned a lot about a rather underhanded, sexist, and racist President (sound familiar today?), the book was so dry and laden with details that I found it hard to follow at times. There were other moments I just lost interest. However, it was worth learning the reality behind Wilson.

Clarifies an important. In American history.

For a long while, Woodrow Wilson Was listed by default as one of America’s greatest presidents. More recently, the fact that he was a racist has become more widely recognized. Cox”s book does more than shed light on this view. It documents the disturbingly depth of Wilson’s bigotry, his influence on the passing of the Espionage Act and and the willingness to exercise it’s authority to violate the first amendment to a terrifying degree, particularly against those activist advocating women’s suffrage.

Wilson’s two faced repulsiveness on civil rights and suffrage.

T. Woodrow Wilson was an unabashed bigot hidden behind a thin veneer of obfuscation. This book is very well put together, written with attention to detail and spells out the hypocrisy behind a man who should never have been president, except for dirty party politics and a national campaign that split to Republican vote between Taft and Roosevelt. Everyone should read this book.

Long Overdue Takedown of Wilson, but...

Less a biography of Wilson than a history of the suffrage movement and race relations in the United States tied to Wilson's life story. Wilson continually damns himself out of his own mouth, and Cox revels in the revelations. However, there is so much material here to support his thesis that it makes his forays into hyperbole unnecessary and unwarranted. For example, he makes much of one of Wilson's classes at Bryn Mawr consisting in one case of only 7 students, and another of only one. Sounds awful, but he leaves out the key fact that, at the time, Bryn Mawr had a total of 42 students.

The other big flaw is that he never makes clear how Wilson became a national figure. The first part of the book paints a picture of a vain, lazy, racist narcissist who lives off his parents and never completes a school. Yet, suddenly people are throwing PhDs at him, he's President of Princeton, and he has such a national profile he is being suggested as a presidential candidate. Cox is so busy tearing Wilson down, he never adequately explains how he rose to prominence. I felt the desire to denigrate him was so great, it left out much that would help us understand the man and the times.

Woodrow Wilson was a horrible President

The truth about Wilson who opposed voting for anyone except white males. The real story.

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.

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