No president has fallen from Olympus as far and as fast as Woodrow Wilson. Ranked approximately sixth in the 1990s and 2000s, he has slipped to about fifteenth today in polls by historians. Princeton University has stripped his name from its prestigious School of Public and International Affairs. Democratic politicians usually omit him from their pantheon of heroes. The decisive factor in Wilson’s dramatic fall is the contemporary liberal emphasis on race and cultural issues rather than economic ones. To many liberal historians—who dominate the field—Wilson’s grievous record on race eclipses his once-celebrated Progressive economics.

Christopher Cox is no liberal, but a former Republican member of Congress and Chairman of the SEC. Nevertheless, his new book Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn may knock Wilson down a few more pegs. It is not so much a biography as a beautifully written brief against Wilson’s entire career. Cox provides ample evidence to back up the charges of racism, but he also shows that Wilson was no friend of women’s rights either, blocking the national suffrage movement and even permitting the imprisonment of suffragettes in extremely harsh conditions. He also argues that Wilson, the only president with a doctorate, was not much more than an intellectual mediocrity, who was elected and reelected president because of some lucky breaks.

Cox’s treatment is particularly comprehensive on Wilson’s shocking and entrenched racism. As a raconteur, Wilson was openly bigoted, constantly making fun of black people and mocking their speech. As a historian, Wilson was an apologist for slavery, stating that it was “not so darked as portrayed.” And as a eugenicist, he opposed programs to aid them, saying that “ to feed them was to increase their numbers.”

While the Democratic party opposed civil rights to satisfy Southern Democrats within its coalition, as a politician Wilson went beyond what was necessary to keep the partisan peace. Most notoriously, he segregated the civil service, although Grover Cleveland—the only other Democrat to hold the White House in the era of Republican dominance after the Civil War—had not seen the need to do so. He screened the racist, even if for his time cinematically brilliant, Birth of a Nation, at the White House and did so even after it had become the subject of national protest. Thomas Dixon, the author of The Clansman, a book that celebrates the Ku Klux Klan and on which the movie was based, was Wilson’s personal friend. And the president was even quoted in the movie, saying, “In the villages, the negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the use of authority, except its insolences.”

But Cox doesn’t stop with listing Wilson’s noxious views. He makes the more provocative argument that Wilson became the Democratic nominee precisely because of those views of race and immigrants. After Wilson became governor of New Jersey, Hearst newspapers relentlessly exposed these prejudices—but these attacks backfired and turned out to be advantageous in the 1912 Democratic convention. While Kentuckian Champ Clark, the Speaker of the US House, led Wilson on the early ballots, he could not command the requisite two-thirds majority which “served as de facto veto” for the Southern Democrats. When William Jennings Bryan defected from Clark, Wilson, a safer bet for segregationists, became the nominee. He then won the presidency in a race where the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt. 

The bigotries exposed in The Light Withdrawn do not end with race, however—Wilson’s record of gender discrimination is also abysmal. As a former politician himself, Cox is enormously skillful in showing how Wilson tried to delay a federal amendment allowing women to vote while not offending its supporters. He had a politician’s way of claiming his hands were tied at convenient times. For instance, Wilson said that because the Democratic party platform had not endorsed the amendment, he could not speak in its favor. Of course, he had done nothing to promote such a plank in the platform. He also had the politician’s gift of strategic ambiguity, saying he had no “quarrel” with female suffrage which allowed him to seem well-disposed toward suffrage and yet withhold his support for a constitutional amendment in favor of allowing that matter to be decided by the states. This kind of feint was important, because Wilson did not want to alienate women in the states in which they did vote. It was so successful that despite his position on a suffrage amendment he may have owed his very narrow victory in 1916 over Charles Evans Hughes to women’s vote in the West who liked his claim—soon to be disproven—that he would keep America out of war.

Cox also shows how Wilson benefited from the kind of split that bedevils political movements—in this case between the more radical National Woman’s Party (NWP) and the more moderate National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Wilson favored and lavished attention on the leaders of the latter, because of its greater amenability to state-by-state enfranchisement of women. This piecemeal approach coincided with Wilson’s political interest, because a national amendment raised the issue of race, as it, on its face, would add black women voters to the rolls, much to the chagrin of Southern segregationists on whom the Democratic party depended. And when the NWP, which favored the federal constitutional amendment, engaged in protests at the time of the World War, Wilson’s administration imprisoned them and portrayed them as unpatriotic. 

While the force of Cox’s indictment of Wilson is powerful, it can sometimes obscure how Wilson was a figure of his day. It is certainly true that Wilson’s racism had personal causes, reflecting his Southern upbringing and worsened by his general superciliousness to those he regarded as inferior. But Wilson’s lack of sympathy for civil rights was not just a personal flaw—it reflected deep currents in twentieth-century progressivism as surprising as this may seem to us now. For instance, many progressives, including Wilson, were influenced by Social Darwinism, which applied theories of natural selection and evolution to human society. Thus, Wilson was not an atypical progressive in his enthusiasm for eugenics. His rival Teddy Roosevelt was even more blunt: “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their own kind.”

Progressives also believed that societies evolved through stages of progress, and that some races were seen as more advanced and capable of self-government than others. They believed that centralized power, composed of educated and morally upright leaders, should guide society toward betterment. They thought that those with the most education and experience in administration, namely white men, would naturally provide this sound leadership. Thus, there is an intellectual context to Wilson’s opposition to suffrage that Cox might have developed more. While these arguments are rightly regarded as unsound now, they fill out our understanding of Wilson as a man of his times rather than uniquely villainous.

Second, Cox may underestimate some of Wilson’s strengths as both a thinker and a politician, however flawed we may find his ideas. To be sure, as Cox observes, his doctoral thesis was thin even by the standards of his day—a study of Congress without citing congressional hearings or the Congressional Record. Wilson was also more an importer of European notions than an original theorist. Yet he remains an important and cited figure in the development of the American administrative state, and his ideas still serve as a model of progressive thought, especially because he adopted Hegel’s view of the state as an organic whole with its own will and purpose, transcending individual interests. This perspective informed his belief in a strong, centralized government capable of guiding society toward progress.

Like Hegel, Wilson argued for a merit-based administrative system staffed by trained professionals who would embody the state’s collective will. He believed these experts would bring efficiency to government, implementing policy effectively and in accordance with the public interest. Donald Trump’s interest in creating “Schedule F” bureaucrats—more dependent on the president and reflecting a more politicized reconciliation of pluralist interests—constitutes an effort to repudiate Wilson’s ideal of a civil service insulated from direct political control.

Moreover, Wilson was one of the few presidents who had a developed constitutional philosophy. He applied a kind of evolutionary progressivism to argue for what we now know as “living constitutionalism.” Wilson and other progressives of his time viewed society and its institutions as evolving organisms that needed to adapt to changing circumstances. They therefore believed in applying new interpretations of constitutional principles to meet the needs of contemporary challenges, as species adapt to their environment over time. Wilson, a graduate of Princeton did the most work of any president to call into question the work of James Madison, the other presidential graduate of Princeton, who had a more mechanistic view of constitutionalism that accorded with the Newtonian universe of his time.

Thus, I would be inclined to give the devil more his due than Cox does in his otherwise powerful book. Our era rightly repudiates Wilson’s racism and sexism and yet one of our great political parties remains enthralled by his administrative and constitutional vision. Despite his plummet in the presidential polls and disavowal by present Democrats, Wilson’s legacy still roils our politics—eclipsing in influence presidents whose moral standing far exceeds his own.