Representative Christopher Cox, author of Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn, and Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago join moderator Jeffrey Rosen to discuss Woodrow Wilson’s constitutional and historical legacy. They explore Wilson’s illiberal record in the defining constitutional battles of his time, focusing his opposition to women’s suffrage, free speech, and racial equality.
This conversation was originally streamed live as part of the NCC’s America’s Town Hall program series on November 25, 2024.
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This episode was produced by Lana Ulrich, Tanaya Tauber, Samson Mostashari, and Bill Pollock. It was engineered by Kevin Kilbourne and Bill Pollock. Research was provided by Samson Mostashari, Cooper Smith, Gyuha Lee, Matthew Spero, and Yara Daraiseh.
Participants
Christopher Cox is a political historian and senior scholar in residence at the University of California, Irvine, a Life Trustee of the University of Southern California, chair of the Rhodes Scholarship selection committee for Southern California and the Pacific, and a member of several nonprofit and for-profit boards. Between two decades as a practicing lawyer, he served as chair of the Homeland Security Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and senior associate counsel to the president. He is the author of Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn.
Geoffrey Stone is the is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, where he joined the faculty in 1973. He is the author of many books on constitutional law, including Roe v. Dobbs: The Past, Present and Future of a Constitutional Right to Abortion; National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press; The Free Speech Century; Top Secret: When Our Government Keeps Us in the Dark; Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, and Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era. He an editor of the Supreme Court Review and has also written amicus briefs for constitutional scholars in a number of Supreme Court cases.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Rosen is also a professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. His most recent book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.
Additional Resources
- Christopher Cox, Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn (2024)
- Geoffrey Stone, “Woodrow Wilson, Princeton University, and the Battles We Choose to Fight,” Huffington Post (Nov. 21, 2015)
- Geoffrey Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (2004)
- Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918
- Committee on Public Information, Free Speech Center (2009; updated 2024)
- The First Amendment, National Constitution Center exhibit
- Susan B. Anthony Amendment, National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House
- Justice Brandeis, Oyez
Excerpt from Interview: Geoffrey Stone discusses how Wilson's administration suppressed dissent during WWI, using the Espionage and Sedition Acts to convict over 2,000 individuals, undermining free speech and the First Amendment.
Geoffrey Stone: Well, Wilson had no tolerance for dissent. Disloyalty, he said, was not a subject on which there was room for debate. In the 1916 election, he bragged that he had kept us out of World War I, and that was something he was very proud of. But as Germany began to sink US ships headed to England and France because they were bringing supplies that helped England and France in the war, Wilson decided that we should enter the war. And this was not a very popular decision. Many Americans thought that we had no interest in the war, other than enabling capitalists to make money by selling goods and other products to England and France. Recognizing that there was lots of opposition to the war and the draft, Wilson was determined to suppress all dissent. And along those lines, in 1917, he proposed the Espionage Act, which, as drafted by his administration, would have made it a crime for any American to criticize the war or the draft, period. Congress, though, refused to go that far, and they did enact the act, but limited to prohibiting any person to willfully attempt to cause insubordination or refusal to be drafted.
Thus, mere criticism of the war or the draft was not intended to be unlawful under the statute, despite Wilson's desire to make it unlawful. Unless the government could prove that the defendant specifically intended to cause violation of the law by others. Wilson was furious at Congress's decision not to go as far as he wanted. And most federal judges ultimately interpreted the Espionage Act as making it a crime for any person to criticize the war or the draft, if the person could reasonably have known that the speech might have had that unintended consequence.
This was ultimately what Wilson wanted the law to do, but Congress didn't refuse to do it. But nonetheless, most federal judges chose to interpret the act much more broadly than it was written. A few judges, though, refused to embrace that understanding of the act and required proof of either specific intent on the part of the defendants to cause others to violate the law, either by refusing induction into the military, or by illegally opposing the war, or if they expressly incited violation. The best example of this was Judge Learned Hand, a federal district court judge, who in the famous Masters case, overturned or refused to convict the editors of the Masters magazine, a highly popular and somewhat radical left-wing magazine at the time, which was critical of the war and the draft.
And Hand interpreted the statute as saying that only if you could prove that the defendant had specifically intended or at least or even specifically advocated unlawful conduct, that they could be prosecuted, and therefore he refused to allow the conviction. That was overturned on appeal, and Hand's career suffered seriously as a result of that. But during the war, more than 2,000 individuals were convicted, first under the Espionage Act, and then under the Sedition Act of 1918, which Wilson insisted on adopting despite what the courts of appeals had done, to expressly prohibit anyone from criticizing the war and the draft. So any ambiguity that was then in place through decisions like Hand's were now eliminated by this new statute adopted by Congress.
So as I said, more than 2,000 people were convicted under these laws, often sentenced to prison terms of 10 years or more, and if they were not US citizens, they were often removed from the United States and sent back to their original countries. A classic example of these prosecutions was Eugene Debs. Debs was the head of the Socialist Party of the United States. He ran for president in 1912 and received over a million votes. He was widely known throughout the nation. He'd given a speech in which he basically was positive about an individual who was in prison, not very far away from having criticized the war, and for giving that speech, Debs was prosecuted under the Wilson administration and convicted and sentenced to prison.
Basically, Wilson brought about the worst suppression of free speech in American history. And after the war, I mean after Wilson's death, the government finally acknowledging the injustice of Wilson's actions eventually released all persons who'd been convicted from prison. But this was fundamentally a horrible violation of our nation's commitment to free speech and of our First Amendment.
Excerpt from Interview: Christopher Cox discusses Wilson's opposition to women's suffrage and his racial views, stemming from his Southern upbringing, belief in white male superiority, and support for Jim Crow as essential to Democratic Party control.
Christopher Cox: Yes, so let's begin with the fact that Woodrow Wilson's views were formed first as a man of the South. He was born in Virginia, moved early on with his family, of course, he was one year old, and moved to Georgia, where he stayed until he was 13, then they moved to South Carolina, then they moved to North Carolina. He didn't really leave the South because he always returned during academic breaks to his family until he was 28 years old. So his formative years were all spent in the South. He was very fond of his father. His father was a Confederate officer who had served as a chaplain. He was a Presbyterian minister who preached that God had a plan, and slavery was part of that divine plan, and that it was good for both the enslaved and the masters.
Wilson wrote about this while he was at Princeton, and you mentioned that he was passionate. He was dispassionate in all of his expressions. So his passion was within. He was very circumspect in the way he spoke and wrote things. It's been observed that he didn't evangelize in favor of racism, he just practiced it. And so perhaps it's appropriate to say that he was passionate. But with women's voting rights, for example, he tried not to talk about it. He was trying to avoid the subject because the status quo was something he was happy with. He didn't want to upset it. And the fundamental reason that he didn't want the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, a federal constitutional amendment, was its Section 2 pattern on the 15th Amendment, which Southern white men hated, and that gave Congress the power to enforce it through appropriate legislation.
They had vivid memories of Reconstruction and Grant sending troops. By the way Wilson had these very same memories. His hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, was the locus of Grant's Justice Department prosecutions of all of the leading Klansmen, and that lasted for over a year in the center of town. These were all sources of Wilson family resentment, and he carried this through his life. But ultimately, the reason for, if we wanna call it passion, I suppose we can, but the reason for his continued opposition of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was his tolerance and I think support for Jim Crow in the South, because that was the pillar on which Democratic Party control rested.
He was very comfortable with white men running everything. He believed that they were superior, and he wrote about this. It's worth pointing out that in his textbook, The State, which he wrote at the beginning of his academic career, he classified all the world's governments according to race, and he put Aryans at the top. He had absorbed this at Johns Hopkins, where he was taught by German-trained professors. Aryans were at the top. The Semitic peoples came below, and below that came primitives and savages who were not worth studying because they were the lowest on the evolutionary scale.
And with that wave of the hand, he wrote off most of Asia, Russia, and so on. He had a very racialized view of the world and of history. So that more than anything, I think, ties together Wilson's reasons for the positions that he took on women voting. It's worth mentioning that early in his life and career, he was also very traditional like a Southern white male. Women should be in the home. They should not leave the home. That would ruin family life. They should be responsible for religion in the home, and so on. That was women's special calling.
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