Pun Salad

The author of this Woodrow Wilson biography, Christopher Cox, went literary with his subtitle; it's from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem "Ichabod", which (it says here) was intended as an attack on Daniel Webster, and his advocacy of the Fugitive Slave Law. And (further) "Ichabod" means "inglorious" in Hebrew. I did not know that!

I would have gone with something more concrete subtitle-wise: maybe "Raging Racist, Sexist Scumbag".

Cox had a long career in politics, including a 17-year stint as a GOP CongressCritter from California. His Wikipedia page goes into the details, mentioning his successful 1980 appearance on the game show Password Plus, but not, as I type, his authorship of this book.

A major theme of the book is Wilson's reluctance to support women's suffrage. He offered a number of excuses for his opposition; later, when that opposition became politically unpopular, he offered excuses for keeping his support merely tepid. But it seems that he was simply disdainful of the ladies intruding on a male bastion of power and privilege.

There are a number of "the more things change…" moments here. For example, there was a massive pro-suffrage demonstration the day before Wilson's 1913 inauguration. Which recalled this and (of course) this.

Another major theme was his undimmed, virulent, apparently lifelong, racism. He was a child of the Confederacy, despised Reconstruction, and was a big fan of the KKK. He was a good buddy of Thomas Dixon, author of (most notably) The Clansman, a novel that formed the basis of the classic pro-Klan silent movie The Birth of a Nation. Which featured Wilson quotes in intertitles. And was the first movie ever screened at the White House.

But the suffrage struggle takes center stage in Cox's telling. Unfortunately, to the exclusion of (in my opinion) matters of equal or greater importance. Cox goes into great detail on the trampling of the suffragists' civil liberties, which (among other things) involved sending off lady protestors to a rural Virginia prison/workhouse/hellhole for daring to unfurl banners in front of the White House.

But this was just one example of Wilson's suppression of dissent. For example, Eugene Debs goes unmentioned here except for being one of the presidential candidates in 1912. Reader, the Wilson Administration had him jailed for making rabble-rousing speeches.

Also unmentioned by Cox (unless I missed something): the infamous Palmer Raids; the mass deportation of left-wingers, including Emma Goldman.

Other topics are mentioned, but woefully unexplored. Wilson's re-election campaign in 1916 pictured him as a peacenik: "He kept us out of war", while his GOP opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, was pictured as a warmonger. This, while Wilson privately acknowledged that, yeah, we were gonna get into the war. And we did; Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany only a month after his 1917 inauguration.

World War I was also the excuse for Wilson to assume control of large swaths of the domestic economy. The Federal income tax was barely out of diapers; originally aimed at "the rich", the brackets multiplied, raised, and were unindexed for inflation, which raged. Price controls generated scarcity.

And Wilson demanded, and got, the power to deny any person to depart the US.

So, in short, this book is a very good resource if you want to know (roughly) everything about the campaign for the (eventual) 19th Amendment, and Wilson's interactions with that campaign. Beyond that, you might want to get some supplementary texts.