Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated for a return to the White House in eleven days. Trump, who has never won a majority of the popular vote (yes, he won a plurality in 2024) joins Bill Clinton and Woodrow Wilson as two US Presidents with that “honor” if you will. 

Ironically enough, a masterful biography of Woodrow Wilson ( Woodrow Wilson, The Light Withdrawn ) hit the stores on election day itself – it’s a history many on the social-conservative right might call “revisionist” and “woke” if it were not written by one of their own, in fact one of the former leaders of GOP nationally- Christopher Cox who was a Congressman from California and a member of the GOP leadership, the first House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, and George W. Bush’s chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

So when this biography hit the shelves last year, I was curious but really didn’t want to buy it. I don’t buy books by Newt Gingrich, Brian Kilmeade or Bill O’Reilly, why should I buy this? But then I thought, Cox was always someone who was an intellectual conservative and pure free market guy – he wasn’t a race baiter or misogynist as far as I know. My dislike of him was down to policy differences but I did even in the 1990’s think he was the “smartest” of the GOP leaders. As someone who has evolved in my own views on Wilson, I thought, why not read it. It was a decision I’ll never regret. 

Cox’s biography should rightly turn the academic scholarship about Wilson on its head. Unlike the glowing portraits of Wilson we have seen, most notably in the 1944 biopic Wilson, starring Alexander Knox, Cox puts Wilson’s views about race, the Confederacy and Reconstruction front and center in discussing his childhood, academic development and early professional career. Cox paints a very clear picture that Wilson’s primary motivation was to avenge the south in whatever manner he could.

Eventually Cox makes his way to the subject of women’s suffrage which along with race dominates the book’s narrative about Wilson’s public career from his Presidency of Princeton onward. Viewing much of Wilson’s discriminatory behavior through the lens of women’s suffrage is brilliant on Cox’s part and an issue that never really becomes a key component of analysis of Wilson. 

His research is top notch, even evaluating Wilson’s direct impacts on the votes of specific members of Congress. Of special note for us here in Florida is the extensive discussions of Wilson’s relationships with Florida Senators Park Trammell and Duncan U. Fletcher- two conservative segregationist Democrats, whose concern about women’s suffrage was centered around “states rights” and the possibility of black women voting!!! 

The book also shows how Wilson’s drift from democracy to authoritarian meant he jailed activists opposed to him – ironically people we’d mostly consider on the left today. The drift toward authoritarianism also contributed to the failure of the Treaty of Versailles’ ratification in the Senate. 

I’m not going to spoil the narrative other than to say I really enjoyed the book – and it shows the traditional conservative approach to subjects of race and gender are totally different than what we might find from the GOP elected officials of this day and age. But beyond that, and probably more importantly, Cox’s research shows how petty, shallow and vain Wilson really was – that is something we’ve known for some time but it’s often been glossed over quite deliberately by liberal historians who have some fondness for him- probably because he was an Ivy League man. 

I highly recommend this book.