At last, Woodrow Wilson's reputation gets the dismantling it richly deserves

Nov. 26—Arguments about past presidents shape the nation's present understanding of itself, and hence its unfolding future. In recent years, biographies by nonacademics have rescued some presidents from progressive academia's indifference or condescension: John Adams (rescued by David McCullough), Ulysses S. Grant (by Ron Chernow), Calvin Coolidge (by Amity Shlaes). The rehabilitation of those presidents' reputations have been acts of justice, as is Christopher Cox's destruction of Woodrow Wilson's place in progressivism's pantheon.

In "Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn," Cox, former congressman and former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, demonstrates that the 28th president was the nation's nastiest. Without belaboring the point, Cox presents an Everest of evidence that Wilson's progressivism smoothly melded with his authoritarianism and oceanic capacity for contempt.

His books featured ostentatious initials: "Woodrow Wilson Ph.D., LL.D." But he wrote no doctoral dissertation for his 18-month PhD. He dropped out of law school; his doctorate of law was honorary. But because of those initials, and because he vaulted in three years from Princeton University's presidency to New Jersey's governorship to the U.S. presidency, and because he authored books, he is remembered as a scholar in politics. Actually, he was an intellectual manqué using academia as a springboard into politics.

His books were thin gruel, often laced with scabrous racism. His first, "Congressional Government," contained only 52 citations, but he got it counted as a doctoral dissertation. He wrote it while a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, yet only once visited the U.S. Capitol 37 miles away. "I have no patience for the tedious toil of 'research.'"

"I hate the place," he said of Bryn Mawr, a women's college that provided his first faculty job. He thought teaching women was pointless.

Cox ignores the well-plowed ground of Wilson's domestic achievements — the progressive income tax, the Federal Reserve, etc. Instead, Cox braids Wilson's aggressive White male supremacy and hostility toward women's suffrage. His was a life defined by disdaining.

For postgraduate education, Johns Hopkins recruited German-trained faculty steeped in that nation's statism and belief in the racial superiority of Teutonic people. Wilson's Johns Hopkins classmate and lifelong friend Thomas Dixon wrote the novel that became the silent movie "The Birth of a Nation." Wilson made this celebration of the Ku Klux Klan the first movie shown in the White House. During the movie, the screen showed quotes from Wilson's "History of the American People," such as: "In the villages the negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences." And: "At last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan ... to protect the Southern country" and Southerners' "Aryan birthright."

Wilson's White House gala — guests in evening dress — gave "The Birth of a Nation" a presidential imprimatur. The movie, which became a national sensation, normalized the Klan (it soon had about 5 million members) and helped to revive lynching.

Although the term "fascism" is more frequently bandied than defined, it fits Wilson's amalgam of racism (he meticulously resegregated the federal workforce), statism, and wartime censorship and prosecutions. Dissent was "disloyalty" deserving "a firm hand of stern repression." Benito Mussolini: "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Wilson: "I am perfectly sure that the state has got to control everything that everybody needs and uses."

Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to "mobilize the mind of America." The committee soon had more than 150,000 employees disseminating propaganda, monitoring publications and providing them with government-written content. The committee was echoed in the Biden administration's pressuring of social media to suppress what it considered dis- or misinformation.

Cox provides a stunning chronicle of Wilson's complacent, even gleeful, acceptance of police and mob brutality, often in front of the White House, against suffragists. And of the torture — no milder word will suffice — of the women incarcerated in stomach-turning squalor, at the mercy of sadists. "Appropriate," Wilson said. An appropriate judgment from the man who dismissed as empty verbiage the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.

Historian C. Vann Woodward, author of "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," said White male supremacy was the crux of Southern progressivism. Wilson's political career demonstrated that it was not discordant with national progressivism's belief that a superior few should control the benighted many.

John Greenleaf Whittier, disillusioned by Daniel Webster's support of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, wrote of him:

"So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn/ Which once he wore!"

True, too, of Wilson.

Reach George Will at georgewill@washpost.com.