Woodrow Wilson: A Legacy Reexamined with Christopher Cox

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1:27Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:02Anyways, let's get to it.

2:11This week, I spoke with Christopher Cox to talk about his new book on President Woodrow Wilson, a leader who helped shape modern America in ways we're still feeling today. From his unprecedented rise from academia to the White House to expanding presidential power, creating the Federal Reserve and pushing for the League of Nations. Wilson left a lasting mark, but his legacy is complicated, especially when it comes to race and gender. Chris unpacks Wilson's impact, his contradictions, and what his leadership can teach us today. Let's get into it.

3:00So joining us now on Open Book is Christopher Cox. He is a scholar, lawyer. He's the former chair of the Homeland Security Committee. Of course, he was chairman and commissioner of the SEC during the Bush administration. The book's title is Woodrow Wilson, The Light Withdrawn. And I have read a couple of Wilson books, including Scott Berg's book, Chris. I thought this was the most insightful of the three that I've read. And so congratulations on the book. And for people that really don't know Woodrow Wilson, Woodrow Wilson lives. Does he not, Mr. Cox? Woodrow Wilson is still with us today, 100 plus years later.

3:40Am I right or wrong? I think that's absolutely spot on. His two terms from 1913 to 1920 were an incredibly important period in the history of the country and the history of the world. But his presidency is influential still today for two reasons, what he himself did with the power he had and what was happening in the world around him. If you want to understand World War II or the Cold War that followed, and today's ongoing wars in the Middle East, and the running debate over America's chosen role as global superpower, all of these things of the Wilson years of the Fountainhead. And of course, the book gets into things such as how Jim Crow erupted in the 20th century, long after Reconstruction, requires studying the Wilson years.

4:21Yeah. Sort of a little bit of a stain on his legacy. But I want to go back to you for a second, because I find your career fascinating, if you don't mind. I have followed your career. I'm on Wall Street now for 35 years, less my fiasco with Trump. And you've always been a steady hand, Mr. Cox. You've always been somebody that people look to and say, okay, if he was in charge of the SEC, the right thing is going to get done. Talk a little bit about your career for a second and why you decided to write this book. So what did you do prior to the SEC, Chris, and why did you decide to write the book?

4:53Immediately prior, I served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 17 years, nine terms, and in the middle of the ninth, that's when I was appointed to the SEC. My time in Congress really is one of the reasons that I was so interested in writing about women's suffrage and Woodrow Wilson the way I have in this book, because the passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, really over the longstanding objections of Woodrow Wilson was a great triumph for the institution of Congress. And the way that women got the vote, and even more importantly, why it took so darn long, was something that had interested me all the way back in law school.

5:38It was the very first subject I wrote on at the Harvard Law Review. There had been a recent Supreme Court case, the very first, to decide that the 14th Amendment's equal protection guarantee applied to sex discrimination, what we now called gender discrimination. And that same summer, when I was still a law student, I had a conversation with my grandmother and I asked her, what was the first presidential election you voted in? And she looked at me sort of crosswise. She said, 1920, that was the first time we could vote. And I realized that there was a little bit of ignorance in my understanding of this.

6:15But more to the point, I realized I was sitting next to somebody who I'd grown up with, known all my life, an adult who for a significant part of her lifetime was by law prevented from being an American citizen. How could this take so long in the 20th century? And so that really inspired me throughout my working career to explore this. And when I had time to do it in greater depth after I retired from law practice a dozen years after leaving government, this book was the result. So this is a fascinating man. He's a brilliant man. He's a man of letters. He's an academic. He's a researcher. He's incredibly thoughtful.

6:57He's a great writer. He's a globalist. He's an idealist, but he's also a racist. And he's also a little bit of a misogynist. Obviously, he didn't want the women to vote. Some of it's related to his background, And some of it's actually related to him himself, which you write beautifully about. So tell us about this man, Woodrow Wilson and his rise to power. And Teddy Roosevelt's involved with this as well, right? I mean, Teddy Roosevelt's involved with this man's rise to power as well. There's no question. And the two of them were friends before they were frenemies and then enemies. The rise of Woodrow Wilson was meteoric.

7:37His move from academia to politics having taken place in just a two-year period. He went from being president of Princeton University in 1910 to winning the presidential election in 1912. He was elected governor of New Jersey in 1910, served half a term before making the leap to the White House. That really was unprecedented in American history. He was a supernova. And how did this come about? It came about because Woodrow Wilson had devoted himself to building a public persona over a period of many years. He had published books that were aimed at an academic audience, but at a popular audience.

8:22Harper & Brothers published them. And the editor, the owner of Harper and Brothers, sponsored him effectively and publicized him through Harper's Weekly, through other publications that that group controlled. So that well before he actually made the leap to politics, he had a base. And he was also advantaged by being a Southerner. Southerners had been kept out of politics since the Civil War. Southern Democrats were very much chafing at the bit to get back into power. And he was a man of the South. He had been born in Virginia, raised in Georgia, then moved to South Carolina and then North Carolina, attempted to practice law unsuccessfully in Georgia following that.

9:08Really didn't become a northern domiciliary until he was 28 years old. He had moved back with his parents during academic breaks throughout all the time that He was studying at the College of New Jersey and at Johns Hopkins. And so Wilson being a Southerner made him very attractive in the 1912 Democratic National Convention when the Southerners were exercising their implicit veto over who the Democratic nominee was. That was something in the Democratic Convention rules that dated back to slavery time, giving the Southerners a veto. you needed two thirds. And so the man who had gotten the majority on dozens of successive ballots, the Speaker of the House, Champ Clark, found himself just cast adrift as they looked for a compromise candidate.

10:02And here's this man who had been governor of New Jersey, had been president of a New Jersey university, was known to people in the Northeast. It wasn't their favorite, but he was not objectionable. He was a known quantity and people in the South claimed them as his own. So he was the perfect compromise candidate. And in the general election that year, he has the great fortune of facing off against not one, but two Republican presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, as you mentioned, who bolted the Republican convention that year after just narrowly losing out on the nomination to the incumbent William Howard Taft.

10:34So we've got both Taft and Roosevelt on the ballot. Wilson skates into the White House with 42 % of the vote when the two Republicans take a majority of the popular vote. And there he is. So quite a remarkable move from academia and relative obscurity to President of the United States. So I have a theory. I think you more or less synthesize this theory in your book. Hear me out for a second. I'd like you to react to this. So Wilson has a view of the world. He has America in this benevolent position. A couple of things he does on his watch. We have the income tax introduction, which strengthens the federal government.

11:13We have the Federal Reserve, a couple of failed central banks prior to that, but now we have the Federal Reserve, which gets off under his watch as well. And so these are two things that have been with us now for a hundred plus years, which is, in my mind, is larger than life, the American government in terms of its scale and power. But then he also appoints a gentleman by the name of Franklin Roosevelt, who becomes the assistant secretary of the Navy under Wilson. And obviously, he goes on to win the Second World War, just almost wins the Second World War prior to his death, etc. But I guess, I guess, tell me about Wilson the visionary.

11:51And tell me about Wilson's puzzle piece in the American century, Chris. So Wilson the visionary brings to mind, for most people, Wilson and the League of Nations. That was his ultimate Shangri-La, if you will. It's what he chased throughout his second term as president. It was his ambition as the result of the peace in World War I. And it was a failure in the sense that he could not get the United States, his own country, to sign on to it. He ultimately really killed his own creation because being very stubborn at the end, and this is after his stroke, which really did influence his personality.

12:40And he was natively stubborn, but became much more so as a result of the terrible calamity that he suffered medically. So in this more than characteristic stubbornness at the end of his second term, he instructs Democrats in the Senate against the advice of his supporters and leaders of the Senate Democrats to reject any compromise with Republicans who were then in the majority and to vote down the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations Charter with any reservations whatsoever. He didn't want any reservations to the treaty. And that is the reason that Democrats who supported the treaty, following his wishes, voted against it.

13:28The United States could have been a founding member of the League of Nations. The treaty would have been approved by the Senate. But Wilson ultimately destroyed his own creation. So it's part of the Wilson legend, if you will, the Wilson story that, you know, not only did he suffer physically this tragic end to his presidency that left him a shadow of his former self, but he lost the one thing, the one vision that he had for America and the world. He believed that the League of Nations, where it properly established, would prevent all future wars. And he predicted we would have war without it.

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15:15only. So us not being, the United States not being in the League of Nations, contributed to the rise of fascism, contributed to the rise of the Second World War? What's your opinion of that? Well, I think the connection is a little more subtle. Remember Wilson's 14 points, which were the rest of his vision. The 14th point was the League of Nations. But peace without victory was one of his themes. He did not want an oppressive peace. And that is what he was trying to sell to the Europeans. The Europeans, of course, this was not their first War. And their wars were for territory and they had colonies, they were imperialists.

15:57And so, you know, ultimately what shook out was a settlement very much like all the previous settlements of European wars. Wilson stood his ground about halfway through the proceedings in Paris, but ultimately decided to put all of his eggs in the League of Nations basket. And those with whom he was negotiating understood that what they had to do was make a concession to Wilson on the league, and in return, they could get the scrap of territory that they were after or the particular spoils that the 14 points would otherwise have outlawed. And the treaty, as a result, was oppressive. It was plenty of fodder for a guy writing from his prison cell who created Mein Kampf really around the Versailles Treaty and around his unremitting racism and anti-Semitism.

16:56But that oppressive nature of the Versailles Treaty, which did give rise to World War II, no question had its origins in Wilson's preference for negotiating for the League of Nations. You know, one of the things that struck me about the book was Wilson, he wanted more presidential power. I guess most presidents do, right? It was, you know, we often talk about Nixon having an imperial presidency, but he wanted to expand the powers of the executive branch. Tell us a little bit how he did that. And then if you don't mind, compare that to today's contemporary presidency, whether it's President Biden or President Trump, how are they flexing and using presidential power that's different, let's say, than what the founders had originally intended?

17:41So Wilson came to his early views about the structure of the American government and the relative roles of the president and presidency, Congress and the judiciary. When he was a senior at the College of New Jersey. He wrote a paper, a not very long paper and almost no original research whatsoever. He had never visited Congress before he wrote about it. But he wrote this paper called Cabinet Government. And in it, he proposed a much more powerful presidency, a presidency that would borrow from the parliamentary system in the UK by giving the president the power to appoint chairs of committees in Congress to control the introduction of legislation and to be a participant himself in legislation, and even to rule out other means of the passage of legislation.

18:42So the president would really control this. The reason that Wilson came up with this idea is that he was bridling under the oppressive Republican Congresses who had forced black voters on the South. He wrote about this as a student. He wrote about it as an academic for decades afterward. He wrote about it all the way through his presidency of Princeton. The white men of the South were the natural leaders, and forcing the rule of black people on the white men of the South humiliated them and destroyed Southern civilization. He wrote virtually those words repeatedly. If Andrew Johnson's vetoes of Reconstruction, which Wilson did not like, had been sustained, then there would have been no Reconstruction.

19:38So it was the domineering Republican Congress and the weak, not that Andrew Johnson he thought was weak, but the weak position that Andrew Johnson had that he was trying to correct. He later then expanded on this in a book called Constitutional Government. And it was a theme of his, you know, throughout his academic time. I think that he backed off this rather demurely years later after his brief time as New Jersey governor, and when he entered the White House for this reason. His arrival in Washington, D.C. coincided with Southern Democrats taking control of virtually everything in Washington.

20:21And so there was no longer any need for the significant structural changes that he was talking about. So he stopped preaching that idea explicitly. But as you say, he never gave up on the idea of really an imperial presidency, one in which the legislature is subservient to the president. He treated Congress that way. He refused to call them into session when Republicans took over. And back then you could do that for more than a year. So he prevented Congress from operating at a time after World War I when there were many, many things that needed to be taken care of. But he refused to call them into session.

20:59He would show up, you know, virtually unannounced, tell Congress, I'm going to be there in a few hours to come and address them. You know, did not give even the courtesy a little bit of a dance notice. He really thought of Congress as his vassal. And that high-handed approach to Congress ultimately became an exploding cigar for him when he lost his majorities in the House and in the Senate towards the end of his presidency. So to compare that to today, we are the heirs to all of this. And we've had an accretion of presidential power over the 20th and first three decades now of the 21st century through statute.

21:42When I worked in the White House Counsel's Office as a lawyer for President Reagan, you're essentially practicing constitutional law. And when people ask questions, can the president do this? Can the president do that? You start with the specific enumerated powers in the Constitution. But you know that if you're looking for presidential power these days, you go beyond the Constitution to the statute books. Because if it's not expressly delegated to the president, then the only other possibility is that Congress used its power to give the president this authority. And these authorities have really accumulated over the decades so that even if a new president, you know, following President Trump or following President Biden were to take office and have a very different attitude and wanted to put, you know, Humpty Dumpty back together again, let's say, it would be very difficult because there is so much that lays at the president's feet.

22:40It's difficult to ignore for any president. So let's talk about, I mean, I'm going to say something I want you to either disagree or agree with me. I see him as the father of the American century. I see him as the precursor to what ultimately happens after the Second World War. Am I right about that or am I wrong about that? Well, I think you're right about that in more ways than just international relations and war and peace, because his legacy on race, on sex discrimination and so on, also is with us. It is the reason that we hear people today talking about systemic racism. The systemic part was government regulation, government laws, government expressed discrimination.

23:26And Woodrow Wilson was an outlier. He came after 50 years of improvement after the Civil War and segregated the federal government. He stood athwart the Susan B. Anthony Amendment for most of his time as president for one specific reason, and that is he did not want federal enforcement of black women's voting rights in Jim Crow states where democratic control depended on their ability to have white people vote. So only. And he actually expressed this in a private meeting with Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter, as it happened, who recorded it. She was a lifelong Democrat who had been in a quarter to meeting with Wilson, along with three other Democratic women in the 1916 election, just before Election Day.

24:17Wilson was explaining to them the politics of women's suffrage. He thought he had a friendly democratic group. And he said, Mrs. Blatch, her name was Harriet Stanton Blatch, let me assure you that states' rights, which had been the reason he'd been giving for opposing the Anthony Amendment and its federal enforcement, states' rights is not the reason that I and my party oppose this. It is the Negro question. That is why we oppose it. And he pointed out that in two states, Black voters had a majority. And this, of course, was intolerable. And that is why we could not have the Anthony Amendment.

24:55The birth of a nation fiasco, of course, is popularly well known, although the many details of it are not, which I explore in the book. His relationship with the author of the book on which the movie was based on, his relationship with D.W. Griffith, and so on, runs much more deep than people have acknowledged and that Wilson himself publicly acknowledged. But that legacy, you know, gave rise to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. And, you know, we have been trying to untangle ourselves from this for quite some time. So, you know, Wilson's presence is felt everywhere, I'd say, even today. Yeah, I mean, that was a striking part of the book.

25:38So I'm going to say a couple of things I want you to react, okay? If you look at the, you mentioned Ronald Reagan. We have approximately 4 % of the world's population, 25 % of the world's output in terms of the GDP. And so when we sit here over the last 40 years, we've managed to maintain that. I'm going to take the position, some of that is related to the architecture that Woodrow Wilson set up during his administration. The federal income tax certainly expanded the power of the United States and power of the American military, power of the American government to stabilize our economy. The Federal Reserve started under Wilson.

26:20I mean, there's controversy around the Federal Reserve. Some people don't like it. Other people do like it. But, you know, I'll take the position that we actually needed it. And it's helped to further the reserve currency status of the United States, our Federal Reserve. Am I right about this or am I missing something, sir? Well, so the income tax obviously is the flip side of the tariff. And while you can't give Wilson entire credit for the income tax because the 16th Amendment preceded his presidency, you do give him and the Congress that came to Washington with him credit for enacting the first legislation to implement the 16th Amendment.

27:03But you have to give Wilson, I think, full credit for wanting to substitute an income tax for the tariff. And the tariff, you know, to that point in American history had been the source of many different kinds of problems and would become the source of further problems when Smoot-Hawley passed after Wilson. And so Wilson's lifelong opposition as a Southern, because that was a classic Southern Democratic position to oppose tariffs, which were really to benefit northern manufacturers. But he brought that with him to Washington. It was the first thing that he did in his first administration. The first address that he made to Congress was about the tariff and currency reform.