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How willUNDC’TV Your browser does not support the element.By Christopher Cox. Joe Biden and Donald Trump be remembered a century from now? Presidential legacies change over time. For decades, Woodrow Wilson, America’s president from 1913-21 who died 100 years ago, enjoyed a reputation as an enlightened internationalist. He established the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission; he backed the creation of the League of Nations, a precursor to the , and was a staunch advocate for democracy abroad. In 1948 Arthur Schlesinger senior, a historian at Harvard, asked 55 other historians to rank the presidents in order of greatness: Wilson came fourth, behind Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt.More recently Wilson has been downgraded, with his racism and sexism eclipsing his accomplishments. In 2020 Princeton stripped his name from its public-affairs school; Washington, s biggest high school did the same in 2022. In “Woodrow Wilson”, Christopher Cox, a Republican who served in Congress for eight terms before running the Securities and Exchange Commission, offers a doggedly researched and soberly told story of American progress—and the president who stood in its way.A Democrat and the first president from the South since the civil war, Wilson opposed constitutional amendments that extended citizenship and voting rights to all, arguing that it “put the negroes upon a footing of civil equality with the whites”. He allowed the white supremacists he chose for his cabinet to resegregate the federal workforce.Prickly and arrogant, Wilson was also hostile to women voting. Two weeks after assuming office Wilson held his first meeting with suffrage activists; he ended it peremptorily after ten minutes. A more confrontational meeting a year later ended similarly: Wilson stormed out after being asked a question, telling the assembled women, “I cannot permit myself to be cross-examined.”His response stemmed in part from his character: he hated being challenged or questioned, especially by those he considered inferior. While teaching at Bryn Mawr, a women’s college, he wrote that teaching women history and politics was “about as appropriate and profitable as would be lecturing to stonemasons on the evolution of fashion”. Later, as governor of New Jersey, he revealed he was “strongly against” women’s suffrage, because of “the social changes it would involve”. As president, he framed suffrage as a question for states rather than the federal government. When he assumed office, women could vote in only nine states. From 1914-17, another eight states, including New York, extended to women the right to vote. But as activists grew bolder, Wilson’s government grew more repressive. Pro-Wilson newspapers called for curtailing free speech during wartime. Mobs assaulted suffrage demonstrators (often with police complicity), and judges imposed lengthy sentences for the dubious crime of “obstructing traffic”. Wilson may not have directed these crackdowns, but he did not stop them.Eventually, however, the tension between supporting democracy abroad and denying it at home grew too great, and in late 1918 Wilson tepidly endorsed what would become the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. After Congress’s approval, it went into effect in time for the election in 1920, which Republicans won handily, due in part to the influx of female voters. Wilson’s presidency is a reminder of Congress’s essential role as a change-maker. It is where “so many of the nation’s important victories have been won”, writes Mr Cox.Years later, noting the zeal with which American women picked up their ballots, he wrote to a colleague, “I shall be very much disappointed in them [if] they have forgotten that they are chiefly indebted to me for the suffrage.” It was he who was being forgetful: Wilson had been an opponent only until that stance became politically untenable.
