Wilsonian Revision

Friday, November 1, 2024

Wilsonian Revision

Jonah Goldberg had a particularly good conversation about Woodrow Wilson with Christopher Cox, author of a new book on the 28th president. Fans of Goldberg’s The Remnant podcast and frequent readers of his alike will know how Jonah feels about Wilson: that he was unduly praised for his presidency, which contained quite stunning levels of racist policy, frequently overlooked because of Wilson’s reputation as a champion of progressivism.

Cox, who is a former eight-term congressman from California and former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has published a new biography of President Wilson covering the long-time darling of progressivism and his war against women’s suffrage.

The Remnant podcast episode, released earlier this week, explores a lot of surprising elements of the Wilson story, including his notorious obstinacy, which sometimes worked against him. Although often enough, with help from adoring supporters and collaborators in the media of his era, Wilson was able to set back the causes of egalitarianism in tremendous ways regarding anti-Black and anti-women policies, as was his aim. He was not a believer in the proposition that “all men are created equal” or that women could have a role in society that was anything but subservient to men.

The book is titled Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, and it is scheduled for official release on November 5, according to the Goodreads page on the book. The link contains a handful of detailed, pre-publication reviews.

Probably one of the most surprising items from the interview was in regard to the Wilson administration’s propaganda office, the Committee on Public Information, established by executive order to support America’s involvement in the Great War. This was one of the largest such offices in a modern democratic state, and in some ways later served as a model and inspiration for the likes of Adolph Hitler’s government in Germany. As Cox and Goldberg discuss, the lasting effects of the office’s propaganda work kept a shine on Wilson’s star for the next half century.

In the context of our present-day partisan tribal affiliations, there is another aspect of Woodrow Wilson’s era that looks vaguely familiar. Wilson’s racist worldview shaped him as he was growing up in the post-Reconstruction South. He believed profoundly that the outcome of Civil War and the Reconstruction were illegitimate, and he spent his whole career trying to overturn them.

His racism was a poison that infected everything he did. His virulent anti-Republican sentiments overwhelmed his every action, since he so detested the party of Lincoln for freeing the slaves and giving them citizens’ rights in the South. As they discuss, Wilson might even have supported suffrage if it had only applied to white women.

To me, the discussion of Wilson’s formative past brought to mind the bitter hostility among our two political parties today. The profound political divide in the decades after the Civil War were just as angry and profound as anything we’re witnessing now, although today’s disputes seem much shallower in comparison.