4
If Jefferson was an early American prophet of democratism, then Wilson was its messiah. From his time as president of Princeton to his time as president of the United States, Wilson put into practice many of the democratist ideals of which Jefferson only idly dreamed. While Jefferson, with his notion of an “empire of liberty,” may have planted the philosophical seeds of armed intervention in the name of democracy, Wilson put the idea into practice. William McKinley, to be sure, had earlier introduced into U.S. foreign policy an idealism that held America responsible for the freedom and fate of other nations. McKinley first made use of the military to promote democracy abroad, but Wilson normalized the humanitarian cause as reason for military action across the globe. Throughout the nineteenth century preserving the Monroe Doctrine and cultivating America’s image as a democratic leader in the world guided the foreign policy that would later morph into foreign interventionism.1 John Quincy Adams’s famous Fourth of July speech in 1821 represents the kind of exceptionalism myth that compelled belief among many until McKinley:
America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumed the colors and usurped the standards of freedom. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.2
Adams seemed to sense an incipient crusader mentality beneath the myth of American exceptionalism. The Spanish-American War in 1898 revealed that this myth had transformed from one that inspired well-wishing to one bent on liberation by force. In trying to democratize the Philippines and Cuba, America had chosen to ignore Adams’s words and to pursue a new tradition of intervention abroad that would last for the next century and beyond. The Spanish-American War, many scholars argue, began a new and heretical tradition in America that went so far as to alter Americans’ national self-understanding.3 Going to war with Spain in order to support its Cuban colony’s bid for liberation was the start of this new mentality in foreign policy thinking. Americans “accepted imperialism in 1900,” Ralph Henry Gabriel says, and thereafter “enjoyed the mood of the conqueror.”4 In the words of Walter McDougall, Americans “allowed themselves to be swept by a hurricane of militant righteousness into a revolutionary foreign war, determined to slay a dragon and free a damsel in distress.”5
McKinley’s actions in 1898, supported by a public that had been encouraged by sensational accounts of the Cubans’ desire for freedom, undoubtedly played a role in cultivating Wilson’s own belief that the United States might help other nations in their bid for democracy. Unlike McKinley, however, Wilson interpreted the American mission through a theological lens, believing that democracy represented Good in a world-immanent battle against evil.
Wilson envisions history giving way to a new democratic age, characterized by universal peace among peoples and nations. America, Wilson says in a 1912 campaign speech, is the chosen nation, “and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in their paths of liberty.” God presided over America’s birth, and, Wilson says, “I believe that God planted in us the visions of liberty.”6 He taps into the imagination of his listeners in his first inaugural address, echoing this theme of America as chosen nation. Indeed he raises his earlier pronouncements to the level of poetry: “The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one.” Wilson, like so many other democratists, believes that America is unique and ought to be exempt from the political strife and historical woes that have plagued other nations. Instead, America has been blessed by the grace of God and must therefore help to spread its blessings to the rest of the world. For Wilson, America’s is “no mere task of politics” but an eschatological imperative to carry out the divine will.7
Wilson’s conception of the state was greatly influenced by the new and progressive understanding of Christianity being proclaimed in the social gospel.8 At the turn of the twentieth century many liberal Protestant churches professed a progressive political theology that proclaimed the imminent salvation of humanity. This variant of Christian teaching turned away from the traditional focus on the salvation of the individual soul and toward collective salvation through politics. The state, according to the social gospel, would be the vehicle through which society might be saved.
Many of the Rousseauean elements in Wilson’s democratism are refracted through the social gospel movement, which to a great extent shares Rousseau’s philosophical and theological assumptions. “As civilization develops, sin grows corporate,” said Shailer Mathews, dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School from 1908 until 1933 and a prominent spokesperson for the social gospel movement. “We sin socially by violating social rather than individualistic personal relations.”9 Accepting the Enlightenment conception of history and the evolutionary theory of social Darwinism, the social gospel movement rejected the traditional Augustinian distinction between the earthly city and the city of God and put forth a revised version of the Christian faith more compatible with political aspirations to transform “the city of destruction into a City of God.”10 Uniting the political and the theological was for Wilson and the social gospel not a contradiction, as it was for Augustine, but an imperative. With other social gospelers, Wilson even expected that the United States might look like the Kingdom of God on earth.11 In this respect, he was in the theological tradition of Rousseau and Jefferson, viewing Christianity as ultimately compatible, even synonymous, with mundane political aspirations.12 Rousseau, who does not try to rationalize Christianity, as Jefferson does, nonetheless puts forth the idea of a civil religion that is meant to serve much the same function as Jefferson’s and Wilson’s versions of Christianity: to unite the people in the cause of the state.
By this time, “Christian” had become a very elastic term. Wilson and other disciples of this new faith “were animated by a similar drive for innerworldly perfection as the culminating chapter in the organic evolution of human history.”13 Democracy, for Wilson, represents this final chapter in politics. According to Wilson’s philosophy of history, democracy is an advanced stage of historical development, “a form of state life which is possible for a nation only in the adult age of its political development.”14 As the most “mature” form of government, democracy is suited to those of the human race who reflect this maturity.15 Wilson mentions the people’s ability to exert self-control as one precondition, but he also stresses the need for a people to be “homogeneous” in “race and community of thought and purpose.” In this final stage of historical development, a democratic people will act as one body, animated by something akin to the Rousseauean general will. Americans, Wilson says, have “a common vocation” and “a common destiny—not only a ‘spirit of ’76,’ but a sprit for all time.”16
The Nation, at its best, is for Wilson not the product of historical development or a social contract but a living organism, having grown up and developed with the people constituting it. He believes that the state-organism has different functions but is animated by a single spirit, calling to mind the Pauline letter describing the workings of the Holy Spirit in the Church community. But Charles Darwin and Hegel are the inspirations Wilson has in mind, not St. Paul. He compares government to a living being: “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt . . . with a common task and purpose.”17
For Wilson, the democratic state personifies an actual spiritual being and it must be “prepared to act as an organic body,” he says.18 The unified “volition” of the people guides the organic being of the state. Its will is general. The very act of cooperation from the losing minority in democracies is “akin to actual agreement.”19 While he rejects Rousseau’s social contract for being ahistorical, Wilson’s political philosophy nonetheless shares many of its features, especially the fundamental idea of the general will.20 Democracy “is not the rule of the many, but the rule of the whole.”21 Rousseau of course characterizes sovereignty similarly, writing, “For either the will is general or it is not. It is the will of either the people as a whole or of only a part.”22 For Wilson as for Rousseau, the state is a great being that acts upon “a universal compulsory force” moving and arranging each part in accordance with a singular vision.23
At the same time, Wilson, like Rousseau, seems to value the individual. Modern democracy, Wilson asserts, is based upon the establishment of “individual rights as peers of the rights of the state.”24 He condemns socialism and promotes the right of corporations to free enterprise because he believes that “individual initiative” is at the foundation of modern democracy. To understand this apparent tension between Wilson’s organic conception of the state and a seeming competing belief in individualism, it is helpful to keep in mind Rousseau’s philosophy. All citizens unite in the general will, Rousseau says, but each person “nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”25 In much the same way, Wilson believes that “new” modern democracies are of a different order entirely from ancient regimes bearing the name. Modern democracy, Wilson believes, wholly unites its citizens in a common, transcendent cause and yet also preserves individualism. His understanding of democracy, like Rousseau’s, goes far beyond a theory of politics in the ordinary sense.
It would be impossible to conceive of this notion of democracy apart from its transcendent or metaphysical dimension. Its presents a vision of democracy that requires “belief in things unseen.” For Wilson, the sovereignty of the people is mystical rather than real. The people “do not, in any adequate sense of the word, govern,” he says.26 They play very little role in the day-to-day affairs of government, such as policymaking and legislation. It is and always has been the case that the few govern, Wilson writes in “The Modern Democratic State.” Representatives are tasked with discerning and carrying out the national will, not necessarily directly translating the desires of their constituents. “Properly organized democracy is the best govt. of the few.”27 Unlike the framers of the U.S. Constitution, who believed that the art of democratic government requires compromise, negotiation, and some decisions based on political expediency, Wilson believes that the art of democratic government lies in the “persuasive power of dominant minds.”28 Compromise should be a last resort. The difference between the American framers and Wilson on this point illustrates one of the major differences between republicanism and democratism. For a republican of the American founding variety, governing is not about finding a way to elicit or manifest the “spirit” of a people or its general will, but about the practical art of compromise and keeping the peace. Wilson looked to statesmen not as persons with diplomatic skill and an ability to find common ground but as figures who can interpret the spirit of the people, whether or not the people are consciously aware of the vision or idea being attributed to them.
Wilsonian Leadership
Wilson’s political theology of democracy calls for a leader of men capable of nothing less than leading democracy toward its eschatological conclusion, “the universal emancipation and brotherhood of man.”29 Implicit in the belief that a “leader of men” can articulate and guide the “inchoate and vague” Spirit of the Democratic Age is a philosophical anthropology akin to that of Rousseau.30 Unlike many of the American framers, Wilson does not fear popular passions and factions as permanent threats to good government. “Generous emotions,” he believes, can overcome “base purposes” in the modern and enlightened democratic state.31 With the social gospel, Wilson believes that evil is largely a product of social institutions rather than individual sinfulness. A true leader will correct “the wrongs of a system . . . not wrongs which individuals intentionally do—I do not believe there are a great many of those.”32 This understanding of human nature as generally good informs Wilson’s belief that the charismatic leader will not face insurmountable difficulty in guiding the people to their true, highest will. Like the hand of evolution, a leader of men can guide the people to prefer “the firm and progressive popular thought” over “the momentary and whimsical popular mood, the transitory or mistaken popular passion.”33 But this will not be done in the way that, say, Hamilton or Madison assumed, through representatives looking beyond the momentary passions of one concrete situation and toward a concrete resolution, but by looking beyond the concrete altogether and toward the universal, effectively moving beyond politics itself.
Wilson envisions a charismatic leader who, by gaining the trust of the people, can give them direction: “Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him.” The tension between the power of the people as sovereign and the power of the politician as interpreter is a central tension within democratism. For Wilson and other democratists, the people constitute the Spirit of the Age and embody the national will, but only in a metaphysical sense. The actual wants and needs of the people are irrelevant to the task of the political leader. Wilson’s belief that the leader must “rightly interpret the national thought” and then “boldly insist upon it” illustrates well the paradox.34 The people may not understand their true will, and so a legislator must intuit it and demand it on their behalf.
The Role of Rhetoric
Oratory, for Wilson, provides the bridge between the people and the leader. Through rhetoric that captures the imagination, this leader can, like Rousseau’s legislator, “compel without violence and persuade without convincing.”35 The orator ought to make use of “things which find easy entrance into [the people’s] minds and are easily transmitted to the palms of their hands or the ends of their walking-sticks in the shape of applause.”36 Wilson no doubt had in mind the simple, abstract phrases of which so many presidents have made use: “Hope and Change,” “Make America Great Again,” “Build Back Better.” Proclaiming simple and obvious truths, Wilson said, is like “the fierce cut of the sabre” and how “oratorical battles are won.” The rhetorical work of a leader of men is like that of a skilled swordsman: he wins “by the straight and speedy thrusts of speech sent through and through the gross and obvious frame of a subject.”37 Wilson gives the example of the British statesman John Bright, who proclaims “large and obvious” moral principles and whose rhetoric is “purged of all subtlety.”38 Abstract, platitudinous rhetoric is a powerful tool for shaping minds, Wilson believes. Irving Babbitt, Wilson’s contemporary, believed that such abstract rhetoric at the service of grandiose political missions was dangerous. “Words, especially abstract words, have such an important relation to reality because they control the imagination,” Babbitt said, “which in turn determines action and so ‘governs mankind.’ ”39 Wilson senses the power of the imagination to give the substance it desires to empty abstractions. Pleasing words like “liberty” and “peace” can come to mean their opposites when concretely acted upon. Wilson’s war to “make the world safe for democracy” is a salient example. It demonstrates how easy it is to overlook the costs and sometimes gruesome actions involved in pursuing a noble-sounding ideal.
Rhetorical keenness is a trait that Wilson values partly because it concentrates power in one person. “There are men to be moved. How shall he move them?” he asks of his hypothetical leader of men.40 Wilson “loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power,” McDougall says, because he felt that only with great political power could the statesman accomplish a world-historic task.41 Wilson often treated the idea of democratic consent as an administrative hurdle, which had to be overcome by a powerful and visionary leader for the people’s own good. “It is the power which dictates, dominates: the materials yield,” Wilson says, and he believes this is a good thing.42 In his early work Congressional Government (1885), Wilson regrets that the American system seems to preclude the rise of a charismatic leader. Congress is “engaged upon a campaign which has no great cause at its back,” he laments.43 Moreover, congressmen are inept at commanding the public’s attention and mobilizing its will. Wilson envisions a leader unencumbered by the federal system and the need to bargain with the opposition. Instead, this person ought to focus on molding the electorate like “clay.” This would open up new political vistas.44 Something “like genius” is needed for a congressman to create “a universally recognized right to be heard and to create an ever-active desire to hear him whenever he talks.”45 The task of this person, like Rousseau’s legislator, is not to channel the people’s express interests but to encourage them to submit to his interpretation of their will. Wilson’s vast domestic surveillance and censorship programs during the war illustrate the logical outcome of this leadership philosophy. Wilson believed that the “spirit” of the American people must support a great and noble cause such as the war, even if they did not expressly say so.
Wilson’s Vision of Government
When Wilson wrote Congressional Government in 1885 he did not foresee that traditional barriers to the centralization of power, such as the constitutional separation of powers—“the central defect of American politics”—was about to erode under McKinley with the Spanish-American War.46 McKinley demonstrated that a president could greatly expand war powers and consequently other powers too. It turned out not to be a member of Congress who would need to rise up as a charismatic leader. The president could now assume many of the traits that Wilson had hoped to see in a statesman. Wilson had hypothesized in 1879 in Cabinet Government in the United States that “extraordinary crisis or rapid transition and progress” was the way for “a man with all the genius, all the deep and strong patriotism, all the moral vigor, and all the ripeness of knowledge and variety of acquisition” to command a powerful leadership role.47 According to Wilson, crises facilitate the rise of the type of leaders he envisions because “they are peculiarly periods of action” and, it is implied, revolutionary change.48 Through crises such as war, the door can be opened for the expansion of presidential powers and an attendant growth of national power at the expense of the states, as McKinley demonstrated. McKinley proved that a president could indeed pursue something other than the “uninteresting everyday administration” that Wilson so despised. He could embark on a grand national mission.49
In 1908 Wilson observed that the president’s role had changed for the better. No longer just a chief executive, now the president’s “political powers more and more centre and accumulate upon him and are in their very nature personal and inalienable.”50 Given a sense of urgency generated by a real or imagined crisis, the executive can exert “transcendent influence” and move beyond constitutional constraints.51 In Constitutional Government, probably Wilson’s most mature political work, he says that the president now has “the initiative to enforce his views both upon the people and upon congress.”52 Wilson’s desire to see the national government—either through Congress or the president—champion a great cause departs in significant ways from the intention of many of the framers of the U.S. Constitution. For them, the diffusion of power through the federalist system (embodied in the Congress) was designed to prevent ambitious individuals from centralizing power and embarking on national political adventures. Steeped in the classical republican tradition and wary of European entanglement, framers such as Washington, Adams, Madison, and in many respects Jefferson conceived of a very limited role for the national government. The notion of Congress championing a “great cause” would have frightened these men, to say the least.
For Wilson, the U.S. Constitution represents an obstacle to the “altogether modern” democracy he envisages. A well-known political scientist of the twentieth century and a president of the American Political Science Association, James MacGregor Burns, summarizes his own grievance with the American political system by quoting from Wilson’s Congressional Government: “As at present constituted, the federal government lacks strength because its powers are divided, lacks promptness because its authorities are multiplied, lacks wieldiness because its processes are roundabout, lacks efficiency because its responsibility is indistinct and its action without competent direction.”53 Burns with Wilson desired a new sort of democracy that could look past the Constitution as written and even the actual desires of the people when necessary to take swift national action in accordance with a singular vision. This would, of course, mean a greater concentration of power in the president and Congress at the expense of the states. The framework of the Constitution is anathema to this Rousseauean and Wilsonian understanding of democracy. The Constitution’s cumbersome need for bipartisan consensus and its diffusion of power across the states and different branches of government is meant precisely to prevent the type of powerful leader Wilson envisions from emerging. The desire of Rousseau and Wilson to see a legislator or “leader of men” rule for the people as a whole is sustained by the belief that the people are essentially motivated by the same hopes and desires. Such a vision would have seemed to framers such as Madison, Hamilton, and Adams and also many anti-Federalists like fantasy and a recipe for tyranny. Who is to determine the true will of the people? Instead, these framers believed that states and local communities ought to allow many competing and perhaps irreconcilable wills to coexist. This is not a recipe for efficiency or grand, national programs, to be sure, but that was never the intent of the framers.
Education
Wilson looks not only to a charismatic and rhetorically gifted leader to capture the imagination of the people, but also to a system of mass education that would encourage the types of civic beliefs that are compatible with his vision of a “new” democracy. For Wilson as for other democratists, a system of education is indispensable to winning the hearts and minds of the people to a particular view of democracy. For this reason, he was convinced that education must be centralized and overseen nationally. “However uniform might be the methods of instruction” locally, each group would still retain “a distinct local colour, and would be narrowed and minimized by a petty, purblind local application,” Wilson warns.54 Local control over education would permit competing voices and visions, ultimately interfering with the singular national “spirit” that Wilson believed must find expression. For Wilson, as for Rousseau, partial associations and local interests are incompatible with government by the “whole”—the only legitimate type of democratic government. One could imagine that a national leader, however charismatic, would have a difficult time marshaling the people to a national cause if “the people” in reality are a multitudinous body with a plurality of interests and local cultures. If the identities of persons inhere in their local groups, states, and interests rather than in the Nation (or the general will), they might not be inclined to partake in a national cause.55 Uniting public sensibility through centralized, mass education will go a long way, Wilson argues, toward generating the type of national unity that he believes is the necessary vehicle to greatness and democratic liberation. This is why he believes that “higher education should be made an ally of the state.”56
One of the central paradoxes of democratism is the belief that there is no contradiction between democracy and rule by the few. While democratists such as Wilson champion popular sovereignty, they are nonetheless eager to see a chosen few rule in the people’s name, even against the people’s express wishes if the democratists believe they are misguided. Wilson proclaims that the ballot box constitutes the “essence” of democracy, but that the enlightened statesman ought to play a decisive role in the actual direction of democratic government. Education, as well as other measures, will not only enlighten the people to their “true” interests; it also will help the cream rise to the top of the governing class. Even in a democracy, a natural aristocracy of some sort ought to govern, Wilson argues. He disparages the older way of politics, “an affair proper to be conducted only by the few who were instructed for the benefit of the many who were uninstructed.”57 Yet his conviction that an enlightened and able few ought to “mold” the people according to a particular vision suggests that his theory of government has more in common with that of his European forebears than he might like to believe.
Wilson’s Vision of the War
For Wilson and many of the progressive Christian clergy, the Great War represented Armageddon. Good and Evil were battling for the soul of the world. While Wilson’s decision to go to war may have been prompted by practical and strategic considerations, he justified it in terms of a humanitarian intervention in fulfillment of the divine plan. His imagination had long inclined him toward this type of thinking. In his 1912 campaign platform, “The New Freedom,” for example, Wilson proclaims a beatific vision of earthly renewal: “We are going to climb the slow road until it reaches some upland where the air is fresher, where the whole talk of mere politicians is stilled, where men can look in each other’s faces and see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they have to talk about they are willing to talk about in the open and talk about with each other; and whence, looking back over the road, we shall see at last that we have fulfilled our promise to mankind.”58 In his first inaugural address Wilson again echoes this theme: “This is the high enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man’s conscience and vision of the right. . . . We know our task to be no mere task of politics but a task which shall search us through and through.” He asks rhetorically if “we” will be up to the task of interpreting “our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters.”59 Wilson’s “we” seems to implicate the American people as the spokespersons of the world. He concludes his address by exhorting the American people to “muster . . . the forces of humanity. Men’s hearts wait upon us; men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!” It is possible to see American intervention in the war as an expression of Wilson’s secular theology. He seems to have believed that God had in store a great mission for him and for America.
Wilson’s rapturous visions, conveyed with rhetorical flourish in his campaign speeches and inaugural addresses, paradoxically paved the way for America’s entrance into one of the most gruesome and destructive wars in human history. A beautiful and pristine vision wholly discordant with historical reality bids the annihilation of existing, flawed ways. Wilson expressed the well-worn democratist belief that long-term renewal and peace must sometimes be preceded by great destruction.60 The “pacifists” who turned into some of the most vocal advocates of America going to war followed this same logic.
From Peace to War
Wilson’s transition from neutrality to war was in fact a smooth one. Neutrality, at first, seemed to him the best path to the peace negotiations that he hoped would lead to a new world order of democracy. If America remained out of the war and above the fray, it would represent a disinterested party and could exert moral authority over the peace. Wilson, specifically, could dictate the terms. McDougall suggests that Wilson did not “cling to neutrality because it was American tradition, or because he was a pacifist (he was not), or because the American people were almost unanimously in favor of staying out of the war. He did it because he believed that remaining above the battle was the only way that he, Wilson, could exert the moral authority needed to end the war on terms that would make for a lasting peace.”61 To the chagrin and confusion of the European statesmen, Wilson proclaimed a new foreign policy and diplomacy of humanitarianism and abstract moralism. Americans “are trustees for what I venture to say is the greatest heritage that any nation ever had—the love of justice and righteousness and human liberty.”62 Unlike the power politics and balance-of-power foreign policy strategies of the Old World, America would inaugurate a new tradition based on a “community of power.” At the outset of America’s entrance into the war, this was the object Wilson hoped to accomplish in the peace.
As McDougall convincingly argues, Wilson’s behavior preceding his request for a declaration of war suggests ideological rather than strategic motives. America was not, leading up to the war, neutral, as Wilson claimed. Having sold arms and lent money to the Allies totaling $2.3 billion before official entrance into the war, Wilson made the American position clear, despite his lofty request that the American people remain “impartial in thought as well as in action.”63 By 1916, Britain and France were purchasing 40 percent of their war materiel from the United States, and American banks owned millions in Allied war bonds. Wilson pretended that his foreign policy was above material interests and motivated purely by feelings of benevolence, but as McDougall notes, he “consistently served the interests of American cotton and grain exporters, manufacturers, and financiers, who made windfall profits from trade with the Allies.”64
In addition, Wilson chose to ignore British violations of neutral shipping rights. He believed that democratic Britain, like America, stood for principles of right and justice, regardless of what its actions in the concrete might have indicated. Germany, however, was inherently illegitimate and represented not the voice of the German people but of the kaiser alone (despite the fact that, as McDougall points out, Imperial Germany was not strictly autocratic and the kaiser received greater popular support than Wilson did at the time of his election).65 Rodney Carlisle argues that Wilson’s assumptions about Britain’s democratic essence is the reason he overlooked British actions, but not German actions, that harmed Americans. It is also the reason Wilson claimed that a declaration of war against Germany would not violate the principle of just war theory—that action must be proportionate to the cause. As Carlisle points out, “The actual acts of war by Germany against the United States that precipitated the decision had resulted in the deaths of forty-three seamen, of whom exactly thirteen were U.S. citizens.” Only six U.S. merchant marines were killed in the submarine attacks when Wilson’s cabinet recommended that he ask for a declaration of war.66
Concrete foreign policy aims, such as protecting American commercial interests on the high seas or ensuring the right of neutrals, were not at the forefront of Wilson’s mind. McDougall says that Wilson might have sought to deter German belligerency at sea by using the navy to send Germany a message, perhaps even ending the war.67 Germany would not have wished to see America enter the war, and neither American national security nor its national interests were in much danger, except for the financial stake that U.S. firms had in an Allied victory. “Wilson refused to embargo U.S. trade with all belligerents, refused to defend trade with all belligerents by ordering the navy across the ocean and daring either side to shoot first, and refused to instruct American citizens that they sailed on belligerent ships at their own risk,” writes McDougall.68 Instead, like many other democratists, Wilson decided that “right is more precious than peace.”69
Wilson scarcely mentions the specifics of the incidents that precipitated his decision to request a declaration of war, and the few congressmen who did usually had the facts wrong, Carlisle points out. In several cases, members of Congress confused the losses aboard American ships with the losses of American lives aboard ships of foreign registry or with damage to American ships by German surface ships and submarines in 1915 and 1916.70 Wilson’s War Message glosses over the concrete events that would constitute the threats to American national security and instead focuses on the general humanitarian cause. He calls Germany’s actions “warfare against mankind.” America, on the other hand, as “one of the champions of the rights of mankind,” has the unique ability to “prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of [its] own.” To focus on the concrete threats to American national security and national interests would have made the decision to go to war seem grossly out of proportion with the cause. Instead, Wilson focused abstractly on “the vindication of right.”71
On the one hand, Wilson points to Germany’s violation of “neutral rights” (something that is debatable given America’s material involvement in the Allied effort), but on the other hand, he justifies the war in universalist and humanitarian terms. The blurring of national security with the rights of mankind is a theme that persists in democratist foreign policy thinking and foreshadows the neoconservative “hard Wilsonianism” of the twenty-first century. As the final chapter of this book shows, these modern Wilsonians find a great deal of overlap between American “national interest and global responsibility.”72 It is as if the decision to go to war did not lie with American leaders but with destiny. “The status of belligerent” has been thrust upon the United States, Wilson says. “Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.”73 This line of thinking encourages national leaders to put the responsibility for war (and its aftermath) on an abstract duty to vindicate an imagined will of the people, whether at home or abroad. Interestingly, Wilson’s message is not altogether different from that of the German chancellor’s chief advisor, Kurt Riezler, three years earlier: “England’s tragic error might consist of compelling us to rally all our strength, to exploit all our potentialities, to drive us into world-wide problems, to force upon us—against our will—a desire for world domination.”74 Did Wilson similarly desire a single way of life for the globe, one that he would personally oversee?
Civil Liberties and Wilson’s War Propaganda Machine
Once Wilson had decided that “there are no other means of defending our rights” and that America must enter the war, he shows his own need for tremendous power that accompanies his imperative to “make the world safe for democracy.” Total war called for the unflinching support of all. Wilson called for domestic surveillance programs, secret policing of citizens, and censorship of the press, print media, Hollywood, and even the private conversations of ordinary citizens, along with widespread propaganda efforts. He went to great lengths to repress dissent. “[A]uthority to exercise censorship over the press . . . is absolutely necessary to the public safety,” he insisted in defense of a proposed censorship clause of the Espionage Act, which passed (without this clause) in May 1917.75 In June 1918 Congress passed the Sedition Act, which made it illegal to publicize opposition to the war, something that had been in effect de facto since passage of the Espionage Act.76 According to the Sedition Act, those who would “by word or act oppose the cause of the United States” or “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States” were liable to a fine of up to $10,000 and twenty years in prison.77 A provision of the Espionage Act gave the postmaster broad powers of censorship over news and publications, which the Wilson-appointed postmaster general Albert S. Burleson told Congress would be applied to journals that “say that this Government got in the war wrong, that it is in it for the wrong purposes, or . . . [that it] is the tool of Wall Street or the munitions-makers.”78 The Federal Bureau of Investigations put the offending organizations and the intended recipients under surveillance, then extended its surveillance over Americans through the American Protective League, a volunteer organization of citizen spies that “on the basis of hearsay, gossip, and slander” helped the FBI to arrest innocent civilians.79 As Assistant Attorney General John Lord O’Brian said in 1919, the Justice Department had been under “immense pressure” to practice “indiscriminate prosecution” and “wholesale repression” during the war. The victims of these programs were generally ordinary citizens.80
In addition to legislative acts and directives to suppress dissent, Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) in order to create support for the war. According to Geoffrey Stone, “[b]ecause there had been no direct attack on the United States, and no direct threat to America’s national security, the Wilson administration needed to create an ‘outraged public’ to arouse Americans to enlist, contribute money, and make the many other sacrifices war demands.”81 Under the direction of the progressive journalist, public relations expert, and former police commissioner George Creel, CPI produced pamphlets, posters, buttons, news releases, speeches, newspaper editorials, political cartoons, and even films. Alongside harsh legislation, these propaganda efforts created a culture of hysteria, fear, and denunciation during the war years. Wilson’s demand for conformity and loyalty through such instruments as the American Protective League and CPI led to sharp divisions in the country and even violent mobs tarring and feathering, beating, and murdering fellow Americans.82 The statement by Wilson’s attorney general in November 1917 sums up the climate: “May God have mercy on them [dissenters], for they need expect none from an outraged people and an avenging government.”83
Wilson’s War, Europe’s “Peace”
America’s entrance was by no means a foregone conclusion, and while the social gospel and progressive movements contributed to pro-war sentiment, the decision was finally Wilson’s. His efforts to galvanize support and suppress dissent through legislation and a massive propaganda effort suggest that it may not have been the “people’s war,” as he declared it was.84 Wilson also shows that the promise to “redeem the world and make it fit for free men like ourselves to live in,” noble as it sounds, calls for violent means.85 His desire for power is an abiding theme in his writings and actions as president. Distrustful of those outside of his immediate circle of confidants, he exhibited some of the traits of paranoia that characterized Rousseau. Even his closest friend, Colonel House, called Wilson’s “second self,” was unable to exert much influence over the president’s decisions.86 At the war’s end, Wilson insisted on taking personal control of the armistice and the terms of the peace, producing a treaty that the U.S. Senate refused to ratify and whose legacy is the Second World War. Wilson’s inability to compromise was directly connected to his idealism. With a vision in mind of right and justice, he could not allow deviation from the plan that was to bring about the world’s salvation. Despite carefully choosing a peace commission composed of his closest friends and leading the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference himself, he proved unable to control the settlement and accepted the treaty’s notoriously harsh terms.87 Wilson could not convince European leaders to sacrifice their nation’s interests to an abstract notion of Right; the idea of collective security at the heart of the League of Nations was something that, Henry Kissinger says, no European state had ever seen at work or could bring itself to believe in.88 For U.S. senators, an idea that was “tantamount to world government” in which America would act as a global police force strayed too far from the American tradition. While Wilson’s intention had been for public opinion to enforce the League’s covenants, many recognized the danger of such an idealistic endeavor with no counterpart in the history of geopolitics. Col. Maurice Hankey, British cabinet secretary and experienced military man, said that for Britain, the League would “create a sense of security which is wholly fictitious. . . . It will only result in failure and the longer that failure is postponed the more certain it is that this country will have been lulled to sleep. It will put a very strong lever into the hands of the well-meaning idealists who are to be found in almost every government who deprecate expenditure on armaments, and in the course of time it will almost certainly result in this country being caught at a disadvantage.”89 Others predicted that the League would prompt an arms race.
Republican Senate leader Henry Cabot Lodge, along with British and French experts, were wary of the League’s sweeping clauses, the enforcement of which would mean another world war. Lodge and the “Strong Reservationists” shared the belief that the major powers would not actually go to war to enforce the League’s guarantees. Vital national interest would dictate foreign policy as it always had. Yet Lodge and his constituency were still willing to ratify the treaty and “would even accept U.S. membership of the League provided Congress had a right to evaluate each crisis involving the use of American forces.”90 Wilson refused to compromise, certain that “[g]reat reformers . . . have no thought for occasion, no capacity for compromise,” and he refused to accept reservations or revisions.91 He believed that he could take the matter to the people and bypass the obstinate Senate. But his western tour of the United States to sway public opinion in favor of the League did not accomplish its mission and weakened him physically nearly to the point of death.92 Unwilling to compromise even with senators who agreed in large part with the League but wished to see amendments, Wilson allowed the treaty to be defeated.
Yet the failure of the League of Nations in the Senate was overshadowed by the tragic and lasting failure that was the Treaty of Versailles. While the uncompromising terms of the peace greatly damaged Germany’s economy and geopolitical situation, it was the insistence on German war guilt that had perhaps the most devastating long-term consequences. On June 23, the Reich government finally conceded to “the dictated peace” but issued a declaration:
From the latest communication of the Allied and Associated Governments the government of the German Republic has learned with dismay that they are determined to compel Germany by extreme force to accept even those peace conditions that without being of material importance are aimed at depriving the German people of its honour. An act of force does not touch the honour of the German people. After the terrible sufferings of the last years the German people lack the means with which to defend its honour against the outside world. Surrendering to superior force but without retracting its opinion regarding the unheard of injustice of the peace conditions the government of the German republic therefore declares its readiness to accept and sign the peace conditions imposed by the Allied and Associated Governments.93
Chancellor of the Reich Philipp Scheidemann, after first learning the terms of the peace, solemnly said that the Germans were now witnessing “the nadir of Germany’s fate. . . . [W]e stand at the graveside of the German people if all the things described here as peace conditions become contractual facts.”94 The German Foreign Ministry predicted that from the maltreatment of the German people would one day arise a great nationalist movement.95
Wilson’s Romantic Idealism and Democratism
Paul Johnson, reflecting on the words of Winston Churchill, observes, “It is commonplace that men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of avowed malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all the seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless.”96 In 1917 Wilson proclaimed, “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution when every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nations.”97 Did Wilson’s outraged righteousness help to lead America into a war it might have avoided? And did it contribute to a “peace” that preceded another bloody and brutal world war? The limitless, abstract end calls for limitless means. It demands total war.
Wilson’s statement at the conclusion of the war, that “America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world,” could hardly have contrasted more sharply with the grim reality.98 Over 17 million had died and some 20 million were wounded. Large areas of Europe lay in ruins. Those who came of age during the war in France were referred to as the Génération au Feu, “Generation in Flames,” and in the Anglophone world, the Lost Generation. Wilson’s dream of the imminent peace and salvation of the world held such powerful sway over his imagination that it seems to have distorted his interpretation of reality. His imaginative vision did not grant the possibility that peace and democracy might not emerge at the war’s conclusion or that the victory over Germany had been a pyrrhic victory. The romantic lens through which he interpreted these events gave rise to his belief that humanity’s redemption was all but a fait accompli. It did not seem to enter Wilson’s mind that a covenant for world peace drafted by the very actors who had helped stage the carnage might be gruesomely paradoxical.
Wilson’s romantic idealism, evident in both his political writings and actions as president, is a poignant and human illustration of the democratist mindset. Not unlike Rousseau, he claimed to be the mantle-bearer of democracy for the world, but in practice he severely restricted the civil liberties of his own people and did little to contribute to democracy in other nations. Wilson believed that he had been anointed to bring democracy to the world, which manifested as a crusading idealism, a practical outcome of the type of imagination that his contemporary Babbitt calls romantic. This imagination inclines one toward “metaphysical politics,” Babbitt says.99 That is, instead of concrete political goals, it desires a type of heavenly renewal. Often uncompromising, the idyllic imagination clings to a vision of a felicitous future that is supposed “to supervene upon the destruction of the existing order.”100 When given the opportunity, those who are motivated by what Babbitt calls a “sham vision”—a political vision that glorifies abstractions and is untethered from historical possibility—will embark, like Wilson, on political crusades. Dissatisfied with the way things are, the romantic escapes into a “land of chimeras.” “[S]eeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings,” Rousseau writes in his Confessions, “I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.”101 The description of Wilson by one biographer could well have been written of Rousseau:
Wilson was poetic in the romantic, exalted fashion of his time, with all its distinctive marks, its quirks, if you will. He was a man of imagination and creativity, oversensitive, passionate, and lonely in spite of all his social contacts. Above all he was a man who clung ever more tightly to the phantasm of his dreams and even identified himself with it. He found his deepest peace not in reality but in his ideal, which he sought out more and more by going from poem to poem, that is, from speech to speech, approaching the perfect truth of his dream as a poet.102
The romantic desire to escape to a place in which people are, as Rousseau says, “celestial in their virtue and their beauty, and of reliable, tender, and faithful friends such as [are] never found here below,” comforts the dreamer and at the same time makes the dreamer feel noble. This perfect idyllic vision is assumed to be moral and good even if impractical. A look at its results, however, casts doubt on its moral value. Holding out the prospect that humanity can “live in happy freedom, look each other in the eyes as equals, see that no man was put upon, that no people were forced to accept authority which was not of their own choice” is dangerous because it sets up an ideal that is unattainable in reality.103 The farther the dream from really existing conditions, the greater the perceived need to overturn the current order, by any means necessary.
Babbitt identifies two distinct types of imagination: the “moral” or historical imagination and the “romantic” or idyllic imagination. The former values moderation and readily incorporates the facts of history into its imaginings about future possibilities. The latter is often uncompromising, clinging to a vision of a fantastic future. For Babbitt, politics motivated by a “sham vision” inclines toward violent imperialism when given the opportunity. It was no surprise to Babbitt that a romantic visionary like Wilson embarked on a bloody crusade in the name of democracy. Having gone from the president who declared the nation “too proud to fight” to the one who exhorted the nation to “Force, Force to the utmost,” Wilson revealed the bitter truth of the oracle famously attributed to him: “Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. . . . The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fibre of our national life.”104
Wilson believed that he was tasked with nothing less than completing Christ’s work at Calvary. If the world would but heed his counsel, he could help to bestow on humanity “the full right to live and realize the purposes that God had meant them to realize.”105 His secularized theology led him finally to conclude that tremendous violence in the name of noble-sounding ideals is justified. One year after his request for a declaration of war, Wilson proclaims, “Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust. . . . [T]he majesty and might of our concerted power shall fill the thought and utterly defeat the force of those who flout and misprize what we honor and hold dear.”106 The human and material destruction that results from policies motivated by righteous idealism ought to raise serious questions about the real worth of the ideal. Is an abstract ideal such as “making the world safe for democracy” or “ending tyranny,” for example, useful even as a heuristic if it invariably necessitates the use of violence? As it becomes clear that nothing less than revolutionary change can bring about the Promised Land, the idealist feels the need to take increasingly drastic measures. This seems to have been the path that led Wilson to enter the war. His dream of global democracy did not end as he had hoped but instead resulted in death and destruction of enormous proportions in Europe and the loss of over 100,000 Americans. Power in the hands of the political idealist is rarely idle. The trajectory of Wilson’s idealism should not surprise. It follows closely the logic of democratism. Thomas Carlyle said of Jacobin idealism, “Beneath this rose-colored veil of Universal Benevolence [there very often lies] a dreary void, or a dark contentious Hell-on-Earth.”107 It would seem paradoxical to argue that idealism creates an imaginative framework that leads to violence, but many historical examples, including Wilson’s, suggest that a logic of coercion is inherent.