Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 243rd episode of the Atlas Society Asks. I'm Jack, CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have Chris Cox, Senior Scholar in Residence at the University of California, Irvine, join me to talk about his new book, Woodrow Wilson, the Light. Withdrawn. Chris, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be with you, Jag.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: So we were chatting just, we're going to get to the book because it's fascinating, but we were chatting just a couple minutes before going live about Ayn Rand. And I was delighted to learn that you were kind of the go to guy for the New York Times and others in the media when it came to articles about Ayn Rand. And you even did a review of her letters. Tell us about that experience. And yes, get that reputation.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: George Will called me and asked me to write the review that the New York Times had asked him to do for the book. And so that got me started with the Times on that. And I think, you know, subsequently the Washington Post and others, because of that book review, which covered, I think, about 500 pages of her personal correspondence.
Because of that, when they were writing articles about Ayn Rand, they would ask members of Congress or Supreme Court justices or whatever, what do you think? And I would be consulted on those things and show up in the press that way.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: And what do you take away as some of the most helpful, important, compelling messages from her novels and how that contrasted with what you found in her private letters?
[00:01:55] Speaker B: Well, you know, as we were speaking about just a moment ago, offline, you know, I'm. Rand is remarkable for a number of reasons, but whatever one thinks of objectivism, and it has obviously fans, including many who were here with us today, and detractors, but I think everyone takes it seriously as something that has persisted for decades and made a big impact. And she made that big impact. And she was a, she. She was a woman who came to America as an immigrant and who, who made her way to the notice of the world here in the United States at a time when women were not expected to do such things. The 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, when she was, you know, really at her prime.
In those years, women were surely breaking barriers left and right, and it was a time of change. But, but she stood out as a woman might today. And, and I think, you know, because my, my book about Woodrow Wilson is really focused on that topic, women coming to the fore during his presidency. That's really what stands out to me. She came to America in 1926, Woodrow Wilson died in 1924. So it really is of a piece.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: Yes. And so I would say for any Ayn Rand fans in our audience, if you really want to understand a little bit more about the times in which Ayn Rand lived and worked, this is a pretty remarkable context when you see the real transformation that was taking place, and also the opposition to women playing a full role in the civic and political life of the country. And she certainly did that in more ways than one. So, Chris, you've had such a remarkable career. Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, Republican Congressman from California when that was still a thing, and of course, chairman of the sec. Now, you've made another evolution as a historian with your extraordinary book, Woodrow Wilson, the Light Withdrawn. Very curious about your process. What kind of research did you do, and how long did it take you to write this book and research it?
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah, you are right to call it an evolution, and it certainly was one whale of a research project. I first began writing this book 15 years ago, after beginning my research even before that. And along the way, I fortunately had the help of some experienced historians and biographers, especially the New York Times bestselling author Walter Starr, a friend of mine. He lives here in Southern California. He's written fabulous biographies of the nation's first chief justice, John Jay, and Lincoln's rivals and cabinet members, Seward, Stanton, and Chase. He's working right now on a presidential biography of William Howard Taft, should come out next year. Amity Slays, whose bestselling history, the New Deal and whose biography of Calvin Coolidge have both been prize winners.
She was another muse, if you will. Even before I started the book, I met with David McCullough, whose books I've always admired and have in some ways modeled, I'd say, both my research and writing on him. His key influence to me was to point out how important the research is to the writing. If you think you want to be a writer, but you're not really turned on by the investigative challenges of research, then you probably shouldn't be attempting to write history. On the other hand, if you realize that you love the process of being an historical detective, of digging into arcane records and uncovering secrets and fascinating gems that amaze you along the way. In other words, if you catch the bug and you're downright passionate about the whole project of research in its own right, then writing history for popular audiences is something you absolutely ought to pursue.
And that was really his main influence for me. And. And so, too, Daniel Boorstin, the esteemed author of so many books. On American history, who I used to have long talks with in his office at the Library of Congress before he passed away. I could go on, but. But I learned the ropes of best practices and historical research mostly from today's authors, the ones who are still living, who volunteered to show me the way. The book, of course, turned out to have over 100 pages of notes and sources, and that's just the portion that Simon and Schuster included. The website lightwithdrawn.com the book's website has 169 pages of the full notes.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Amazing. Amazing. So what drew you to Wilson as your subject? Was it a case of wanting to correct, perhaps, Wilson's undeservedly high ranking among presidential scholars? For example, the Siena College Research Institute's 2018 survey, Wilson lands in at 10th ranking, even far ahead of Ronald Reagan. And after reading your book, that certainly doesn't seem to be just.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Yeah, so what. What drew me initially to this subject was actually Wilson and women's suffrage. I had been interested in women gaining the vote and particularly what took so long, because this was, you know, the second decade of the 20th century before women got the vote. Since I was a law student, the first article that I wrote for the Harvard Law Review was about a Supreme Court case that was the very first to apply the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to sex discrimination, what's now called gender discrimination. That same summer, I had a conversation with my grandmother. I was out here in California. It was in school back east, but I was out here in California working at a law firm for the summer and staying with her. And she was getting on in years. And I thought, well, I ought to learn from her about this. And I said, what was the first presidential election that you voted in? And she looked at me sort of crosswise, and she said, 1920. That's the first time we could vote. And I realized that I'd sort of stepped in it and. And I continued to prod her for what she remembered about the whole thing. Fast forward to those years when I was in Congress, as you mentioned, for 10 of those 17 years, I was in the elected leadership, which meant that I would go back and forth from the House floor to the Speaker's conference room. And when you make that trip, it's a round trip, of course, back and forth. You go through the rotunda of the Capitol, and you pass right by. It's right by the doorway, right before you turn into the Speaker's offices. You pass right by this enormous sculpture of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady. Stanton and Lucretia Mott. I once took out a pencil and paper and did the arithmetic for how many times I walked by that thing. It was thousands of times. And it kept reminding me of this subject that I was so interested in. When I was writing the story, though, Wilson became such a big part of. Of the final act that by the time I'd finished a proposal for the book and gave it to Simon Schuster, they said, make this into a Wilson biography and use him as the framework for telling the story. And that's what I did.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: So at the very least, one might think that Wilson's enduring unrepentant outright racism might have earned him a lower ranking in these surveys of presidential scholars.
But another trait that stood out for me, particularly in your chronicling his early years, was his laziness, for example, his allergy to taking tests, his complete lack of hustle when it came to being a lawyer. Landing only one client. I think his mother. Am I getting this wrong?
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Well, you're certainly right about his. His being a bust as a lawyer. He didn't ever really want to be a lawyer. He only decided to go to law school because he thought that was a way, that was the normal way to become a politician. And he wanted always, ever since college, to be a U.S. senator. He actually made up little business cards for himself that said Woodrow Wilson, Senator from Virginia. Later on, he started his law practice. It was going to be Georgia, where he had grown up.
He was going to be a U.S. senator from Georgia. But. But he hated the law. His heart wasn't in it. So I would say it wasn't so much that he was lazy. It was that he was just constitutionally unable to. To put his shoulder to the wheel on anything that wasn't his personal preference. He only did well in the subjects that he liked, didn't do well in any other subjects in school, and that accounted for why he was never making the honor roll. It accounts for why, you know, he hated law school so much. He wrote a friend a letter and said, it's just law, law, law, as if he expected something else in law school.
And he dropped out of law school in a year.
When he tried to be a lawyer, it was without having a law degree, which you could do in those days. You could just hang out your shingle. And he and another law school classmate attempted to do this without apprenticing with anyone. And he really didn't like the idea of having to go out and hustle business.
Instead, they just talked about politics in the office and literally as you say, his only client was his mother. But what goes even beyond not hustling after things that were sort of work that other people insisted that he do, what also struck me is that he never got even a summer job until he was 28 years old when he finally got his first teaching job. He had never worked for a dollar anywhere. And he wrote during his days as an attempting lawyer that he thought that the whole business of commerce was bad, that the only way to make money was crafts, and he didn't like it. So that's why he became an academic, because you didn't have to mess around with earning a dollar.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Yeah, well, even with becoming an academic, I mean, didn't he get his PhD without having to do his thesis? It just seems like there were all of these cut corners. He didn't complete, you know, his law degree. He didn't actually have that. And then the same way that he got into academia, we talk about the imposter syndrome. I guess I was reading this all along thinking, oh my God, if I was this guy, I would have felt like such a fraud.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: Yeah, he never had that problem. He was always very, very self assured, but, but to such a degree that his detractors call it arrogance. But, but you're right, he, he dropped out of Johns Hopkins when he was supposed to be earning his PhD and he wrote in private letters about why. He said that he had no appetite for, you know, doing the required readings, for taking the necessary courses. He hadn't completed those and he was just going to drop out. He didn't want to take tests and he was done with it and he was good to his word and he did drop out. He also wrote a short book about Congress, about the, the threat that Congress posed in our constitutional system. He thought it was, was a very despotic institution and the Constitution should be corrected and the President should be put more in control of Congress.
We should have a much stronger presidency.
That book got some good attention in the country because it was such a radical idea.
And he later on petitioned Johns Hopkins saying, give me credit for that, as if I wrote a dissertation. The trouble is that when he wrote his book on Congress, it was based on literally no original research. He had never even visited Congress. And so at Johns Hopkins at the time, they had standards about the kind of original research you had to do. And most people who were getting their PhDs, not just at Johns Hopkins, but for example, at European universities where most of the faculty had been trained, including his future boss at Bryn Mawr, those people had to do years and years of research and writing and, and be grilled, you know, by their faculties to get their PhDs. And he got to waive all of that. So his PhD was really a gift. And later on, a friend of his from his student days at Johns Hopkins, who later became the author of the book that was made into the movie Birth of a Nation, got him an honorary law degree from Wake Forest. And he listed LLD Doctor of Laws along with his PhD in all the books that he wrote in all of his official resumes throughout his time at Princeton, even when he was president, even though he never did earn a law degree. So, yeah, he took a lot of shortcuts and, and those benefited him directly in his advancement in his career, both in academia and politics.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: So talk about Wilsonianism, Wilsonian idealism, how it's been interpreted either by presidential scholars or in the popular imagination.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I think Wilsonian idealism is the notion that we can put an end to wars in its most pertinent form.
Wilson believed, he certainly expressed his belief publicly and eloquently that if we had a League of nations, that would be the way that we could literally prevent future wars.
The League of Nations did not work out. In his own time, neither has the United nations been able to prevent wars. So. So in that sense, Wilsonian idealism has been proven empirically, you know, a bridge too far. It. It's not realistic. It is, in fact, idealistic. But the ideal still holds great sway. And it's a potent thought that at least by attempting to work together, the world might be a more peaceful place. And there is some evidence that that's true.
So Wilsonian idealism still has a purchase on the world's imagination.
Wilsonian idealism, however, in his own day, had an underbelly. And it was less attractive because Wilson, running as the peace candidate who kept us out of war and who. Who decided that America was too proud to fight in that sometimes, you know, you're so right, you don't have to show it by force. These were his words at the time.
He knew as a candidate in 1916, because he told his chief of staff, who was then called the White House secretary, he told an editor for a newspaper privately that. That we needed to be in the war, we would be in the war. He just couldn't tell the American people now. And he won that 1916 election by, in the end, winning California. Whichever candidate Hughes was his opponent, the former Supreme Court justice who was his Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes. If Hughes or Wilson had won California all came down to that state. They were counting ballots all week. Then that man would have become President. Wilson won by 3,421 votes, won the state of California, and as. And he did so as the peace candidate. And as a result of that, was returned to office. But within a month of his inauguration, he then asked Congress for a declaration of war. So even Wilson the idealist was, you know, capable of a little more political realism or cynicism, if you will.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: All right, well, I hope that answers your question from. I like numbers. And so, yes, he was planning on declaring war after the election. Couple of others here, because we're getting a lot. And I've got a lot of questions of my own, so if I don't start asking a few of them, our audience is going to revolt. So an m asks on YouTube, was Edith Wilson really making decisions for him once he became incapacitated?
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Yes and no. I think, you know, sometimes the tale of Edith the Svengali or Edith the Rasputin gets carried a little too far. She really didn't have ambition to be the president, to take advantage of her husband's illness and. And throw her own weight around. Her motivation was to protect her husband's health. And she had determined, after consulting with the president's physician, that if he were to resign the presidency, that that would shatter him.
Obviously, that would have been the right decision since he was utterly incapable after that stroke because of both neurological, mental as well as physical damage and paralysis and so on to conduct his duties. But. But she didn't. She ruled that out. She also ruled out, you know, him attending to any difficult business. So she kept business away from him, meaning that the president was not situationally aware. She then tried to refer almost everything to one cabinet department or another, so that the government, you know, was essentially running itself.
But, you know, just in that process, she had to make some decisions about what goes where, you know, and once in a while, she'd show a piece of paper to her husband. When she did that, when she allowed her husband to be involved, the trouble was, A, he was impaired, and B, he was completely situationally unaware because he hadn't seen anybody, wasn't able to keep up with the news that just didn't know what the hell was going on. And so she can definitely be faulted for the decisions that she made, but I don't think that it was hyper ambition, and she wanted to step into his shoes and be the President.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: All right. Wyatt516 asks, did you ever run across a book Freud wrote About Wilson while doing your research? I'm sorry.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Yes, I did. He co authored with a member of Wilson's administration who was over there in Paris at the peace conference. And there's been a. A recent book that's come out in the last year that has sort of exhumed that text and, and used it as the basis for further analysis of Wilson. It's. It's. I believe it's called Madman in the White House.
Freud, of course, was a psychoanalyst. And for any physician from across the ocean who has never met with the patient, you know, any kind of diagnosis is a little bit sketchy. He is an Austrian. Had his reasons to not like Wilson's war policy.
His co author, Bullet, had his own reasons to not like Wilson's policy because he had clashed with Wilson in Paris and on the shipboard on the way over.
So. So that book has always been taken with a little bit of. Of not. I won't say a grain of salt, but. But it's been taken as, you know, written by two people with axes to grind.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: And so. So it's an interesting book and it sheds light on. On Wilson from a psychological perspective because it's written by Sigmund Freud in part. But I think the most interesting features of that book are the parts contributed by Bullet about what he personally witnessed and saw and thought. And it tells you as much about Bullet as it does anybody.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: Interesting. All right, well, getting back for a moment to Wilson's early years growing up in the Confederate South. Strongholds like Georgia, South Carolina. Raised by a father, a Presbyterian minister, minister who defended slavery on theological grounds. Witnessing the violent backlash by neighbors against blacks, newfound freedoms. How did that contribute to Wilson's later views and priorities and policies about race?
[00:23:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say that Wilson's Southern Democratic background was the most profound and enduring influence on his entire life's work, both as an academic and as a politician.
When people think of Woodrow Wilson, they might remember from their high school history textbooks the political cartoons of the day that always featured Wilson as a schoolmaster. We naturally remember him as president of Princeton University and briefly as governor of New Jersey. In other words, a man from the Northeast. But Wilson was a Southerner through and through. Born in Virginia, soon moved to Georgia, where he lived until he was a teenager in his family, then moved to South Carolina, then North Carolina. Four years later, he started college at Davidson in the South. Even then, he was returning to his family home for academic summers. That would stay the case when he went to college later on at. He started Over, I should say. He dropped out of Davidson after his freshman year, repeated his freshman year at the College of New Jersey and stayed there for four years to graduate. Later became known as Princeton. But even then he was going home every summer and for academic breaks, too, to stay with his family in the South. So it really wasn't until he finished law school at the University of Virginia. As I said, he finished by dropping out.
Then he moved to Georgia to attempt to practice law and so on. It wasn't until he got a job in Bryn Mawr, up north above the Mason Dixon line at age 28 that he finally became a Northern domiciliary.
He was influenced in the south by two things, the Civil War and the years of Reconstruction that followed. His family were on the Confederate side. His father was a Confederate officer appointed by Jefferson Davis to be a chaplain in the Confederate Army. He turned his churchyard into an internment camp for Union soldiers. Wilson was the first, excuse me, the very last US President to be raised in a household with enslaved people as servants.
Slavery, he heard his father preach from the pulpit, was something that everyone should cherish because it enriched the superior race.
Wilson wrote about the Civil War and about Reconstruction, which he particularly didn't like because it was a Republican Congress forcing black voting rights onto the true white leaders of the South.
This is what Wilson wrote. He wrote, so we can imagine the influence that the Civil War and Reconstruction had on him growing up in the South. But we don't have to imagine it because he literally later wrote as an historian about this very time and place where he did grow up, reflecting his own experience and, and even as an adult, you know, in his 40s, he was writing about how unwise it was to allow black people to vote and about how unwise it was to have the 15th amendment that allowed this, that forced this, and. And it was the ruin of the south, he believed. So all of this, I think, reflects in what Wilson did eventually when he became president, which was right off the bat to segregate the whole federal workforce.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: Amazing. So talk a little bit about the synthesis between progressivism and white supremacy. One might think that they were odd bed fellows, but as you write, this was not a pairing that was confined to the South.
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Yes. And so a good example of this is Wilson's Cabinet.
Wilson's Cabinet included a lot of Southern white supremacists. And by the way, these days, you call somebody a white supremacist, that is appropriate. It's an insult, rightfully so.
But in those days, at least in Wilson's Cabinet, we, there were men who were very proud to call themselves white supremacists. They wrote about it. A lot of them were newspaper men, editors own newspapers and so on. And they had big white supremacist campaigns.
That was the case with Josephus Daniels, who in North Carolina was responsible for big race riots, very scandalous events in Wilmington that led to the deaths of many, many black residents. You know, chased them out of town, killed many of them and so on. But that's. That's what was going on in Wilson's cabinet. William Jennings Bryan was no Southerner. He's in Wilson's cabinet, he becomes Secretary of State. And William Jennings Bryan, even after the Wilson administration, was still talking about white supremacy.
He was defending the Ku Klux Klan at the Democratic National Convention. When he died, there were cross burnings for him across the country.
And then at one of them, the flaming cross was devoted to William Jennings Bryan, the greatest Klansman of all.
There's no evidence that Brian actually joined the Klan, but he certainly went after Klan votes and clan people all supported him.
So these are, you know, the great progressives of the era.
Carter Glass, another one from Virginia, leader of the progressive movement, as was Daniels. As was. Was Brian. And these progressives seem to have. These particular men seem to have no qualms about being, to put a fine point on it, racists as part of their progressivism. This is also a time when you've got eugenics going on. You get a lot of otherwise smart people buying into that pseudoscience. And so you can see that, you know, what it meant to be progressive was very different than perhaps the way that word is used these days.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: So a couple more questions from the audience. Elation asks, what was the national opinion of Woodrow Wilson after the Colorado coal field war? I'm not aware of that.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's. I'm gonna make that an easier question for me to answer by. By. Because I get this question a lot about, you know, wasn't Wilson supremely popular?
There were many, many scandals and riots and. And financial crises and other things that happened during his presidency that one would think would weigh on him. Why do we have this impression that he was so popular?
Well, he was, and he wasn't popular. He was. He was actually a very divisive figure. People had strong opinions about Woodrow Wilson.
The election of 1916, which I just talked about, his reelect was one of the. Remains one of the closest elections in American history, you know, on a thread, really.
But he was a wartime president, and that wartime occupied the entirety of his second term, essentially, even though we didn't enter the war until 1917, it was a big issue, drove the 1916 election. In the end, he was hugely popular in Europe. And we, perhaps many who are listening or watching this have seen the newsreels of Wilson in Paris, you know, and. And in Italy, in Rome and in London, and meeting with the king and all of this sort of thing, when he went over in an unprecedented way to Europe to be the head of the peace conference, leaving the country for six months at a time when there's essentially no decent transatlantic communication except at undersea cable with Morse code. So he's. He's now cut off from his country, but he's over there and everyone is looking to him. They're draping metals around his neck and so on, as someone who's going to give them the territory that they all wanted to win out of this war. They were all looking for something.
And in advance of his trip over there, a government agency that he created that had an enormous staff of filmmakers and propagandists. Really, it was America's first and only ministry of propaganda. It's been trashed ever since, Called the Committee on Public Information. They did a lot of propaganda, not just for the American war effort, but for Wilson as. As the savior of the world and put it in movie theaters across Europe and so on. So by the time he arrived there, he was not only well known, but sort of godlike in terms of the propaganda that had been produced.
That propaganda effort, by the way, was acknowledged to be an influence in Germany in the 1930s at a time that, you know, I think we were backing away from some of the excesses of what had happened in the Wilson administration.
So he was popular and he wasn't, because people who didn't like the nationalization of so many things during World War I, and then really, the government took over almost all elements of domestic production during World War I. So people revolted against that. That produced the Harding campaign and the return to normalcy that was all about getting us off of a wartime footing and away from the 77% income tax rates and so on.
That election, the 1920 election, which Wilson wanted to be a referendum on his performance and in particular on the League of Nations, turned into the greatest popular vote landslide in history since the very beginning of the republic in the early years when there were almost unanimous presidents, those beat this one. But otherwise, 1920, in, in so called modern terms, was the biggest popular election landslide ever.
Wilson was effectively at the bottom of that landslide to the extent that he wanted to claim credit for his achievements as the Democratic ticket of. Of Cox and Roosevelt, that's Franklin D. Roosevelt went down in flames. So, yeah, I don't know if that's, you know, I don't know how you look at the same guy being louded over there in Europe and, And buried in a landslide in 1920 in the US but all of those are the same man.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Interesting. All right, I really like this question from. I like numbers. And that is, how did Wilson react to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia?
[00:35:20] Speaker B: Well, he reacted almost the same way that he had reacted in Mexico, which is with a very inconsistent policy. We're going to send troops. We're not going to send troops. Very hard to follow what he thought he was doing.
He wanted to do something, but he only was willing to do it in a limited way. But he did eventually send troops to help the white army, and that is not white in racial terms, but in Russian political terms.
And it was essentially ineffective.
So ultimately, the US Withdrew.
[00:36:04] Speaker A: All right. One striking passage in your biography recounts a speech that Wilson made in which he dismissed the first two sentences of the Declaration of Independence, including, quote, that all men are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This seems astonishing to me, since philosophically, the rest of the Declaration flows from this premise. What does it tell you about Wilson's commitment to white supremacy?
[00:36:41] Speaker B: Well, it tells you that Wilson, as a Southern Democrat, which always, to the bitter end, he. He was, in his heart of hearts, was repeating a line that Southern Democrats had been using for decades, going all the way back to before the Civil War to defend slavery. They had a problem, of course, with speaking of idealism. We have Jeffersonian idealism as well as Wilsonian idealism. And the Jeffersonian idealism coming from a man who was himself holding people in bondage.
You know, it has been something that Frederick Douglass and. And everyone has hung their hat on subsequently who has been looking to, you know, the. The ideal as opposed to the actual practice of those days.
And the Founders themselves, of course, in their private correspondence, recognized that their practice of the time was at odds with the ideals that they expressed. So the better reading of. Of the Declaration of Independence is to read what it says.
But Wilson was worried that people would do that, and so he warned them in a speech to the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles, a Democratic club, that they should. They should skip the preamble to the Declaration, that it was the least part of it, pay no attention to those opening words, literally, is what he was saying. And. And that was a. An argument, as I say, been kicking around for a long time. At the same time that that argument was being made by his Democratic predecessors, there were even Democrats who were arguing against it. And in Congress in Wilson's day, while he was thinking about running for president, and then after he was president, Democrats in Congress were saying that people who made that argument were despots and cruel and so on. And always people who had been trying to make sure that women did not have their rights would make such arguments. So it became an issue in the fight for women's votes as well.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: So we've talked. This is a good segue. We've talked about his racism. But another enduring and deeply visceral antipathy is found in his patriarchal views on the role of women in society, which manifest most vividly during his time as a professor at Bryn Mawr, a women's college. One can see how from his first moment on campus, how desperately he wanted to escape what he viewed as the unnatural task of teaching female students academically. What can you tell us about his. His time there?
[00:39:30] Speaker B: Well, he hated it. I mean, it was the only job that he could get because he hadn't completed his PhD. He would have loved to have worked at a men's college. And as soon as he, three years later, found his way out of Bryn Mawr, that's exactly what he did.
And he wrote to a friend, finally, teaching men. Because women, he wrote, had no business involving themselves in politics or even learning about history and government and so on. They were. They were messing in the affairs of men. He said that when he lectured to women on government politics, he was certain that it was that his words were ending their ears and passing through a vacuum. In fact, he said that that teaching women about these subjects was about as appropriate as lecturing to Stonemasons on the evolution of fashion.
So he was, of course, very unhappy to have to report to a woman. The dean of Bryn Mawr, Carrie Thomas, was a suffragist, and she believed that women should compete with men in all aspects of life, that they should participate in all aspects of life.
And. And he was appalled because women's place was in the home. That's, of course, really a canard these days. But.
But that was something that people like Woodrow Wilson said at the time. It wasn't quite as hackneyed. They. They meant it quite seriously. Women have a different role than men, and it is to supplement man's life. As Wilson told his fiance before they were married. His fiancee agreed with him. The women that he chose as his two wives, by the way, were both anti suffragists. They did not want women to vote, as he did not. They were both Southern. They both shared his views on race as well.
[00:41:37] Speaker A: So I chose the word visceral in describing Wilson's patriarchal attitudes, because how else to explain his abetment of the treatment of the sentence sentinels, the silent protesters advocating for women's suffrage, whether the failure to prosecute the violent mobs who attack them, or the fraudulent persecution and prosecution of these women, and of course, the horrific conditions of their imprisonment. So perhaps you can unpack this aspect of his presidency. Was any of it a political calculation pandering to his Southern Democrat base? Or was he actually standing on principle despite the political consequences of a deep seated opposition to women voting?
[00:42:29] Speaker B: No, I would not say that he was pandering.
When John McCain ran for president, he spent part of his campaign, you know, talking about the importance of flying the Confederate flag over the Capitol in Southern states and so on. After the campaign, he confessed he was pandering and he was ashamed of it. There's a difference between that and what Woodrow Wilson did. Because Woodrow Wilson, you know, had a long record of scholarship writing about these very subjects. He believed these things. So he wasn't pandering at all when it came to the treatment of women who disagreed with him, who disagreed with his policy of consistently opposing the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which would have given women across the country the right to vote.
He began by trying to ignore it. But they continued, these silent sentinels, to stand out in front of the White House silently holding up signs that had his own words written on them about democracy. And Wilson made a lot of speeches about democracy, particularly after we entered the war and we were fighting for democracy. And the contrast was too much for the leaders of the National Women's Party and the Congressional Union to bear these. They had been fighting for this very thing themselves. They're half the US Population. And what about us? You know, we are entitled to democracy, not just these people in foreign lands.
Men, perhaps only in foreign lands was what Wilson had in mind. But they had in mind people. And so Wilson, after a while, very short while, really couldn't take it anymore. And he had them locked up. And this was at a time when the District of Columbia government was under the direct control of the President through three presidential appointees who operated as a commission he had chosen. Two of them were his very close friends, journalist friends, who had written flatteringly about him in his campaign and whom he had spent a lot of time talking with. They were co chairs of his inaugural committee and so on. These are people he knew well. So they would go into the White House and meet with him or with his chief of staff, Tumulty, the White House secretary, and get their marching orders about when to make arrests and when not to. And as that policy changed from we're going to tolerate them to, okay, this isn't working, let's arrest them, he then took the next step and said, let's prosecute them as well. There was no crime for which to prosecute them, of course, because they were silently protesting on a public sidewalk. They had a First Amendment right to do so, as their lawyers so advised them. So they. They trumped up these charges of sidewalk obstruction. And in the initial trials, there was photographic evidence produced of an empty sidewalk. There was no obstruction.
If you've ever been on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, it's the same sidewalks, like 40ft wide. It's insane to imagine that that one row of women backed up against the fence was blocking anybody, but that it's a misdemeanor only in any case, and they got sentences up to seven months in prison. And once in prison, they were tortured. And the U.S. marines, which have nothing to do with the District of Columbia government or the Virginia government or anything, but, you know, federal authority at the very time that Occoquan is keeping these people, the women protesters, in isolation and. And physically torturing them in ways that the book lays out.
You've got the Marines nearby trying to stand up forces to send over to Europe, so for the war, because we're already in it. And so they have no interest in responding to, you know, somebody in D.C. that calls up and says, please guard the Occoquan prison so nobody can get in.
But the Marines were used for this purpose, and only the White House could have made that happen.
The Marines kept away from Occoquan, not just reporters or people who might, you know, pry into what was going on behind closed doors. But they wouldn't allow the women to see their lawyers, their families and their doctors. And. And with that kind of protection, then you've got all these atrocities happening inside, including, you know, ultimately. And this is not just at Occoquan. It's also at the District Jail in Washington. Alice Paul is put in a psychiatric ward, and it just gets worse and worse. And the decision to force feed Alice Paul and to have her in the psychiatric ward, you know, was something that Wilson was fully briefed on and personally approved of.
[00:47:29] Speaker A: It's just despicable. So, just digging on this theme a little bit. In terms of his personal relationships with women, the courtship of his two wives, and the intense romantic connection he had with Mary Peck while married to his first wife, Ellen, was this floridly romantic bent a departure from his marginalization of women academically and politically? Or in some ways, was it actually more of the flip side of the same coin?
[00:48:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the latter. The fact that Wilson had ideas about men's and women's proper roles in society is something that, for him at least, was totally separate from whether he enjoyed the company of women or enjoyed romantic relationships with women, because in both cases, he surely did. He was very happy to be around intelligent women. He didn't mind women being intelligent at all. He just didn't like intelligent women that he called blue stockings, who were all huffy about we need the right to vote and we need to be presidents of colleges and we need to be doctors and lawyers and all that sort of thing. That was not something that he liked at all. And he told his second wife when they were engaged that one of the reasons that he admired her is that he couldn't stand a woman politician and he couldn't ever be married to a blue stocking. But Edith, as I mentioned, a Southerner, the Southern accent and. And very attractive woman, and. And agreeing with him on all things about women's roles.
You know, she was great, and he loved her.
[00:49:17] Speaker A: So in your epilogue, you describe how in the three decades after Wilson's death, several glowing biographies came out, culminating in a 1944 Hollywood movie with a budget of nearly a billion dollars in today's currency. And how all of this cemented Wilson's position as a progressive hero. How much of this was less about lionizing Wilson and more about elevating the progressive project more generally.
[00:49:50] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think it's very difficult to disentangle those two things. They're surely related to the extent that people who were Wilson's biographers liked his politics, and almost every one of them did. That, you know, surely influenced things. By the way, most people who spend a dozen years, or however long it takes to produce a serious presidential biography don't write about people they don't like. Richard Nixon's an obvious exception. He drew a lot of press from people who didn't like him. But it's just very hard to spend your years writing about somebody you don't like or admire. And even I, who spent 14 years with Woodrow Wilson, you know, have to say that there are many things about the man that I admire, but, but my book is focused on the parameters of sex and race, and on those two parameters he obviously did not equate himself well. So, so it doesn't come across as very good. But, but I would recommend for people who haven't read anything at all about Woodrow Wilson, that it's fine to read my book, but read it as a compliment to at least one other, you know, full biography of Wilson and see what people are making the case for Woodrow Wilson have to say about him. Because the case for Woodrow Wilson has to ignore all the things that are in my book. And that's why there was space for Woodrow Wilson. The light was drawn.
I would say that Wilson's place, you know, in the rankings is surely being affected by what's coming to light.
Even all the extensive research that I did is not in the main, totally new ground. It's been plowed by academics. It just hasn't made it into the popular. Biographies and academics these days, even post publication of my book, continue to look at Wilson's record in all its respects, foreign policy, national security, domestic policy and so on, through the lens now of his better known views on race and sex and gender.
Those things academics are deciding, you know, influenced his decisions to invade Mexico or invade Haiti or what have you, and not to engaged, you know, in other conflicts that involved countries run by white males who he thought belonged there. His, his antipathy to colonialism was, you know, sort of variable in that, in that sense. But that, that scholarship is, is ongoing. But there's no question that ultimately Wilson's place in the rankings will have to be determined by taking into account more than his record on women's voting rights and his record on race. It's just that, that I think in proper perspective, those things will loom much larger than they have in the past.
[00:52:58] Speaker A: So having spent those 14 years with Woodrow Wilson, if hypothetically you were able to sit down and have dinner with him, what might that conversation be like?
[00:53:09] Speaker B: Well, you know, when you're, when you are reading every letter that somebody's ever written in their lives and reading their diaries and reading all their academic publications and their speeches and so on, my God, the opportunity to sit down with the real living man and hear from him from the horse's mouth, that would be just fantastic. I would love it.
And I'm sure that based on whatever he might bring up by way of conversation, I would have 100 questions for him. It'd be the Most fascinating night of the week for me, for sure.
I suppose what I would want to do, though, in serious, you know, in a serious way to answer your question, would be to say, you know, look, I live in the third decade of the 21st century, and, and here's what's happened since you were around. What does that make you think about the trajectory that you had placed America on? And, you know, since we don't think of things the way you did, do you think you, which side do you think you'd fall on now? Would you just pick the same jersey that you wore then or would you pick something else? And I just love to HEAR what the 21st century version of Woodrow Wilson would sound like.
[00:54:29] Speaker A: I love that. I love that. So given the prodigious amount of research and work that went into this biography, would you say that you are more or less inclined to take on another such project? And if so, any other historical figures that you feel need to have another evaluation? And then, of course, with your remarkable career, as we discussed at the beginning, all of the places that you've been in the Reagan White House and Congress, all of the evolutions that has happened here in California, any chance of a Chris Cox autobiography one day?
[00:55:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, let's start with, you know, what you feel like when you finally, when you're, when your book finally becomes a book and it's not your research project anymore, it now belongs to the world. There's a great sense of relief, a little bit of pride, of course, of authorship, but it's a big change because you've spent all your working days on this project and it's now off into the world on its own.
I think for me, I need at least some period of separation from that because so many things have been put to one side in order for that book to get written.
I really enjoy writing, as I mentioned earlier. I really enjoy the research. I'm pretty sure I don't have another 14 year book project that I should embark on. I'm 72. That's probably not a wise way to choose my writing projects, but I absolutely will enjoy continuing to expand on my career as a writer.
And to the question of what if I were to choose another biography?
You know what, what I might focus on? One man that has fascinated me for, no kidding, like 30 years, is someone that there are probably two people that will listen to this podcast and really ever paid any attention to. His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and he is, if he's known at all, it's as the Person who is not Isaac Newton, who nonetheless simultaneously invented calculus. What we learn in high school is calculus these days. The integral calculus still uses the notation that he developed.
He and Newton had this unbelievable rivalry and, and unfortunately Leibniz died first and Newton sort of promoted himself for the rest of his long years and Leibniz didn't get to recover. But unlike Newton, Leibniz had a whole bunch of other things that he was involved in and he hasn't had a proper biography, but he was, you know, to quote a beer commercial, I think he was probably the most interesting man in the world for all of his inventions, all of the, you know, computer things that he invented and made for the genealogies that he produced for royal families and just on and on the wars that he advised for and against when he was.
It did make a great book, honestly. I hope somebody else writes it. I just pick it up and read it. But, but maybe, maybe that and maybe I will even write historical fiction, if for no other reason than that. Even if you love the research, sometimes when you are doing, you know, honest research for non fiction book, you run into the problem of, you know, three, four, five, six different sources that all recount something differently. And you might take weeks to figure out just, you know, what's the answer to this one question, what really happened? And it might even in the end not have a solution. And you've wasted all that time. If you're writing historical fiction, when you come to those blocks, those roadblocks, you just make it up.
[00:58:40] Speaker A: I love that. Okay, well, so historian and next we'll have novelist. That'll be terrific and something to look forward to. So thank you so much, Chris for this excellent interview. Really a magnificent book and also it's available on Audible, so I highly recommend those in this audience to check it out. And I just want to congratulate everybody in the audience. Such great questions. You're always so smart and, and loyal and I really appreciate you. Of course, if you appreciate what we're doing here at the Atlas Society, not just these weekly podcasts, but our student conferences and our John Galt schools, then please consider supporting us. We are a non profit. You can do that at atlasssociety.com.org forward/donate. So thank you very much again for joining us and I hope that you guys will tune in next week. I'm going to be interviewing Jeffrey Kane. He's an investigative journalist. He's going to be discussing the his book the Perfect Police an undercover odyssey into China's terrifying surveillance dystopia. Of the future. So we'll see you then. Thank you.
