14 Woodrow Wilson’s Revolution Within the Form Richard M. Gamble

Declaring that “Woodrow Wilson was not a revolutionary,” University of Virginia President E.A. Alderman defended the Wilsonian legacy before a joint session of Congress convened specially on December 15, 1924, to hear the late president eulogized. Seeing himself somewhat in the role of Pericles praising the Athenian war dead, Alderman elevated his friend and fellow academic into the Progressives’ eclectic Pantheon to join Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. He marveled, he said, at the “revolutionary transformation” that in so few years had taken Wilson from schoolteacher to president—a feat matched only by Lincoln’s own meteoric and seemingly inexplicable rise to power. Typical of the Progressive spirit that persisted into the 1920s, Alderman praised Wilson for having redefined America as a “servant, a minister, a friend . . . among the nations” and for establishing his foreign policy on the principle of “service to humanity” rather than on selfish national interests. Indeed, Wilson had summoned America “to a crusade, not to a war.”[1]

There was nothing startling or original in Alderman’s claims; they merely echoed the definition of the war and of American destiny that Wilson himself had labored to infuse into the American soul. Wilson had never tired of referring to America as the servant-nation, chosen to bring light and liberty and peace to all the world. Consistent with the habit of mind of the nineteenth-century Romantic nationalists he so admired, Wilson deified the American state and its historical mission, applying to the United States the attributes of Christ and his atoning work—the promise and hope of the Incarnation secularized and fulfilled.[2] Alderman’s tribute recognized Wilson as the one who promised to make all things new. His Fourteen Points, for example, were intended to found “a new order and a new life” and held out the promise of “a new earth arising out of horror but ennobled by the sacrifice of millions.”[3]

Despite this promise of a world transformed, however, Alderman pleaded that Wilson could not properly be classified as a revolutionary because, after all, he had devoted so much of his energy and imagination to building up institutions, such as the League of Nations, instead of “breaking up” institutions as a true revolutionary would do.[4] Nevertheless, Alderman closed his eulogy by likening Wilson to Martin Luther, to the English Puritan John Milton, and to the Romantic nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini—each of them either a religious or political revolutionary.[5]

To be sure, not all contemporary Americans joined in this panegyric to Wilson. In contrast to Alderman’s Periclean praise of Wilson, essayist H.L. Mencken and the Old-Right poet Robinson Jeffers offered a scathing assessment of the fallen war president. With characteristic deadpan, Mencken referred to the president as the “late Messiah” and the “deceased Moses.” Rather than praise Wilson’s rhetorical skill, he lamented Wilson’s remarkable finesse at “reducing all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones.” And what troubled Mencken most was that the American people had taken this man and his words so seriously.[6] The anti-imperialist Jeffers, in a poem dated the month of Wilson’s death, wrote of the president’s “huge delusion” that “the God of the stars needed [his] help.”[7]

After a distinguished career as a college professor, president of Princeton, and one-term reform governor of New Jersey, Wilson was elected president in 1912, the first Democrat to occupy the White House since Grover Cleveland nearly two decades before. But Wilson’s vision of the role and scope of government differed markedly from that of the minimal-state, anti-imperialist Cleveland. “There has been a change of government,” Wilson announced in 1913 in the opening sentence of his First Inaugural. Government, he promised, would now “be put at the service of humanity.”[8] Having preached the “New Freedom” in his campaign, his slate of successful reform legislation in his first term alone included the Underwood Tariff (1913), the Federal Reserve System (1913), the Federal Trade Commission (1914), the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), and the Federal Farm Loan Act (1916). In the war emergency of his second term, moreover, he nationalized the railroads and the merchant marine and expanded the use of the new income tax beyond what even the most pessimistic Cassandra had predicted possible in the hands of an imperial president.

As Murray Rothbard observed in his essay “War as Fulfillment,” World War I provided the opportunity that Progressives like Wilson needed to remold the American economy and mind, taking the nation decisively toward a command economy—what the Germans were then referring to in their mobilization effort as war socialism. The editors of the New Republic, close associates of Wilson’s, boasted during the war that “We revolutionized our society.”[9] Indeed, Wilson and the Democratic Congress dramatically expanded the government’s powers in wartime, including military conscription (under the euphemism of “selective service”), and silenced their critics on the Left and the Right with selective enforcement of the Espionage and Sedition acts. The irony of this war to “make the world safe for democracy” in light of these violations of American freedoms and at the expense of the Constitution did not escape courageous critics.

Rothbard traced the Progressives’ wartime agenda to the post-millennial pietist impulse “to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.”[10] Rothbard was correct to see this link to the theological presuppositions then guiding the Social Gospel clergy and their political and academic allies as they built the modern interventionist state. But in Wilson’s case the effort to create heaven on earth fits into the larger theological problem of political gnosticism identified by Eric Voegelin.[11] Wilson typifies the profile of the gnostic prophet. Gnosticism, in Voegelin’s use of the word, is the modern attempt to infuse mundane, secular human history with the transcendent mission of the kingdom of God. The gnostic prophet is a leader, a saint, convinced of his own divine commissioning, who claims to know with utter certainty the direction and resolution of history, the inexorable movement of human affairs toward apocalyptic fulfillment. The gnostic prophet promises emancipation from the constraints of the past, the abolition of war and oppression, and the coming of universal and everlasting peace, justice, and righteousness.[12] The gnostics, Voegelin wrote, “will not leave the transfiguration of the world to the grace of God beyond history but will do the work of God himself, right here and now, in history.”[13] They take into their own hands the remaking of the world. Moreover, they tend to divide the world into two camps—light and dark—and to interpret all political disagreements and wars as absolute struggles between the kingdom of God and the forces of Satan. Ordinary war becomes the Last Judgment, every battle becomes Armageddon.

Wilson was not the first of America’s gnostic prophets. Abraham Lincoln’s gnosticism, for example, is evident throughout his speeches. Citing the Gettysburg Address in particular, M.E. Bradford called Lincoln’s rhetorical strategy a “rhetoric for continuing revolution.”[14] This phrase applies equally well to Wilson, the heir of Lincoln’s secularized revolutionary Puritanism. Wilson betrayed the same destructive tendency to use language to wage an ideological war of revolutionary implications. Wilson was a gnostic revolutionary at the most elemental level in that he wished to repeal the past by waging war against the institutions of the past, especially monarchy, multinational empires, and balance-of-power diplomacy.

Wilson’s gnostic temperament was evident before the U.S. entered the war in 1917 and even before the outbreak of the European war itself in 1914. In the 1912 presidential campaign, for example, Wilson explained his internationalist creed: “I believe that God planted in us the visions of liberty . . . that we are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”[15] And in his first term, Wilson showed his faith by his works, intervening militarily in Mexico (1914), Haiti (1915), and the Dominican Republic (1916). His wartime speeches, such as his extravagantly praised “Peace Without Victory” address (January 22, 1917), the War Message (April 2, 1917), and the Fourteen Points (January 8, 1918), ache with millennial expectancy of the “final war” and the last crusade and burn with hyper-spiritualized, gnostic longings to escape from history, materiality, and contingency. Wilson distorted a rather conventional war, fought for conventional territorial and dynastic objectives, into something unrecognizable, into an apocalyptic transformation of human nature and reality.

One speech in particular reveals Wilson’s temperament. On Independence Day 1918, just over a year after America’s entry into the war and four months before the guns fell silent with the Armistice, Wilson addressed a gathering of the diplomatic corps at George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon.[16] In the shadow of the architect of America’s tradition of nonintervention and neutrality, Wilson performed the alchemy of his “rhetoric for continuing revolution.” Clothed, like Lincoln, with the authority of the Fathers, Wilson’s words, whether consciously or not, echoed the very language of the Gettysburg Address. Like Lincoln, he sought to interpret for his hearers the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the true intention of the Fathers within the context of the present war—namely, to interpret intervention not as a betrayal of America’s traditions but as the inevitable fulfillment and universalization of those inherited principles. Washington and the other Founders, according to Wilson, had turned their back on the past and had looked ahead to the whole wide world: “A great promise that was meant for all mankind,” Wilson explained, “was here given plan and reality.” It was the duty of those present at Mount Vernon

to conceive anew the purposes that must set men free. . . . It has been left for us to see to it that it shall be understood that they [the Founders] spoke and acted, not for a single people only, but for all mankind. We are in this war to fulfill the promise of their vision; having achieved our own liberty we are to strive for the liberties of every other people as well.[17]

Throughout this July fourth oration, Wilson’s totalist mind was at work, expressing the unconstrained modern worldview that leads so easily to total war. “The past and the present are in deadly grapple,” he continued. America was fighting for the “final” settlement; “There can be no compromise.” As a minimal condition of peace, he promised, there must be “the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly, and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world.” Furthermore, a league of nations was required to “check every invasion of right.” And, remarkably, he claimed that the Founders themselves would have approved of these universal principles. Moreover, in the past century the British themselves had witnessed the very revolutionary democratic principles that they had once opposed liberate their own peoples. But the work was not over, Wilson continued; “I stand here now to speak . . . of the spread of this revolt, this liberation, to the great stage of the world itself!” These were Wilson’s revolutionary principles; “deathless,” he called them, “and of the very stuff of triumph!”[18]

Unfortunately, Wilson did not confine his revolutionary principles to rhetoric. What the noted historian Christopher Dawson concluded about Cromwell’s revolutionary army during the English civil wars was also true of Wilson. He worked for nothing less than the “translation of the conception of the Holy Community from an ecclesiastical ideal to a principle of revolutionary political action”—or, in Wilson’s case, the translation of the ideal of the Holy Community also into a principle of revolutionary foreign policy.[19] Wilson’s redemptive impulse to save the Old World is the high-water mark of Progressive imperialism, even though he claimed to be the sworn enemy of empire. The American mission was defined no longer simply in terms of offering an example to Europe of liberty and successful self-government, but now as a divine calling to liberate Europe itself from its past, its institutions, its imperialism, and its system of alliances. As the “trustees of liberty,” Americans had to wage war on behalf of others.[20] Wilson transformed the worthy principle of liberty for us into the limitless and bloody promise of liberty for all. And he aimed this policy at Central Europe with devastating and lasting consequences.

By his own admission, Wilson waged war from 1917 to 1918 not primarily out of fear for American security or to defend U.S. interests or honor, but rather out of a sense of mission and service to humanity in obedience to a divine appointment to destroy German autocracy in the name of democracy and peace, to end multinational empires in the name of self-determination for all peoples, and to transcend balance-of-power politics in the name of benevolence and brotherhood. With the advice of his closest unofficial adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson consistently differentiated between the German people and their government in order to undermine the legitimacy of the German monarchy. As historian Lloyd Ambrosius noted, in 1917 Colonel House “recommended an appeal to the German people against their government, for ‘Imperial Germany should be broken down within as well as from without.’”[21] But Wilson needed little inspiration or encouragement from House. In his War Message of April 2, 1917, and then in a Flag Day speech the following June, Wilson had already claimed that the American people entered the war as “the sincere friends of the German people.”[22] With this sort of sophistry, he was able to claim that he was waging war not against the people of Germany but only against their system of autocratic government. He delegitimized the German government as alien to its people, as a despotic master that had enslaved its own people. On August 11, 1917, Wilson spoke of being “anxious to see that [the German people] have their glad emancipation” from the German imperial ideology “imposed upon them.” “We are fighting a thing, not a people,” he reasoned. And the war against this “thing” knew no limits: “we intend,” he said, “to see to it that no other people suffers a like limitation and subordination.”[23]

The key point here, and a point directly relevant to our own troubled times, is that Wilson waged ideological warfare against a form of government and not just against its behavior. Wilson tried to defeat Germany from the inside out. As the antistatist essayist Randolph Bourne (who coined the phrase, “War is the health of the State”) wrote concerning one of Wilson’s speeches against the German government, it “implies that America is ready to pour out endless blood and treasure, not to the end of a negotiated peace, but to the utter crushing of the Central Powers, to their dismemberment and political annihilation.”[24] This strategy was crucial to Wilson’s revolutionary democratism and has become a defining feature of the ongoing Wilsonianism of the White House. The peace and freedom of the world, he had said in his war message, was threatened by “the existence of the autocratic governments,” unaccountable as they were to “the will of their people.”[25] Wilson clearly was at war with a system of government and at war to export another system of government in its place.

Wilson implemented this policy toward Germany in two key ways. First, by refusing to accept a mediated settlement once the U.S. entered the war, and, second, by working to dismember the Central Powers’ multinational empires. When Pope Benedict XV proposed a negotiated end to the war in the summer of 1917, Wilson declined his offer, noting that compromise was unimaginable when the free peoples were fighting against a vast, secret conspiracy to take over the world. Wilson refused to negotiate with the German imperial government, claiming that their word could not be trusted and that no covenant could be entered into with them.[26] As Germany faced imminent defeat in the autumn of 1918, Wilson forced a political revolution as a precondition of negotiations and peace.

In hindsight, it seems clear that a constitutional monarchy in Germany would have been a more responsible alternative to the forced creation of a republic. As historian John Lukacs concluded: “That this kind of ideological democratism was disastrous should be obvious in retrospect. Had the Kaiser abdicated in favor of his son and of a constitutional monarchy, Adolf Hitler may have remained unknown to the world.”[27] Unfortunately, clear thinking about the consequences of America’s entry into the Great War seems impossible. It has become unassailable orthodoxy, especially among neo-Conservatives, that it was the U.S. withdrawal from Europe after 1918—invariably demonized as a “retreat” or “lapse” into isolationism—and the U.S. refusal to join the League of Nations that opened the way for Hitler and precipitated World War II. But it is more historically demonstrable that America’s entry into Europe in 1917 and Wilson’s revolutionary “People’s War,” as he once called it, are the main culprits. Wilson sowed the seeds of World War II by guaranteeing political instability and creating a power vacuum in the heart of Europe.

Under Wilson’s leadership, furthermore, the United States entered the European war not only to defeat the abstraction of “autocracy,” but also to end multinational empires. Originally disclaiming any such intention, Wilson worked systematically to dismantle the empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turks, while simultaneously defending the virtues of the progressive, “enlightened” imperialism of Britain and the U.S. Despite his reputation then and since as an anti-imperialist, Wilson was not opposed to empire in principle; he was not opposed to what could be called the “redemptive imperialism” of world service, but only to the retrograde, predatory variety practiced by Germany.[28] Wilson outlined his vision of the new world order in his well-received Fourteen Points Speech.[29] As prejudicial as these points were to the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, they did form the basis for an armistice in 1918, but they were accepted in desperation by defeated empires unwilling to trust their fate to vengeful European victors and not because they saw any wisdom in Wilson’s ideological crusade.

The revolutionary implications of the Fourteen Points were well understood at the time—even by the American press. The New York Tribune, for example, responding the day after the speech, called Wilson’s Fourteen Points “a second Emancipation Proclamation.” “As Lincoln freed the slaves of the South half a century ago,” the editors wrote, drawing the Progressives’ inevitable analogy, “Mr. Wilson now pledges his country to fight for the liberation of the Belgian and the Pole, the Serb and the Rumanian.”[30] The Fourteen Points were a direct effort to rearrange Europe, marking an unprecedented entry of the U.S. into European affairs and a further departure from America’s traditional foreign policy of nonentanglement and nonintervention. For Wilson to claim repeatedly that he was fulfilling the intentions of the Founders was tragically absurd.

Among the Fourteen Points was Wilson’s guarantee of government by the consent of the governed, or self-determination for all peoples—to his mind a universalization of the Declaration of Independence. Wilson used recognition of the nationalist aspirations of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as means to defeat the Austro-Hungarian Empire from within. He recognized a de facto Czech-Slovak government in 1918—before the Armistice—as a cobelligerent against Germany and Austria-Hungary and insisted on Yugoslavia’s “destiny” and rightful place among the “family of nations.”[31] Near the war’s end, he refused the Austrian monarchy’s offer of “autonomy” for these two regions “and instead demanded their full independence.”[32] The process of carving up eastern Europe did not begin with the postwar negotiations and settlements at Versailles. Wilson first used self-determination as a weapon of war, not as an instrument of peace. For these reasons, H.L. Mencken called the Fourteen Points’ ideal of self-determination “hypocritical” and “a deliberate and successful device to divide and conquer” the German people.[33]

Historians who excuse Wilson’s rhetorical excess and the impracticality of his millennial schemes tend to appeal to his idealism. But Wilson was dangerous precisely because of his idealism. In this regard, University of Virginia President Alderman said more than he realized in his eulogy when he observed that Wilson was “a master and in some sense a slave of ideas and ideals.”[34] The tragedy for America’s subsequent history is that Wilson enslaved his country to those same ideas and ideals. Such delusions led inevitably to the “perpetual war for perpetual peace” that Charles Beard prophetically warned about. Wilson provoked revolution in Europe, but, more important, he completed a revolution in America—a revolution in how we understand ourselves and our responsibility to the rest of the world.

The problem of Wilsonianism persists, and its dangers are not abstract. There are those who intend to see Wilsonian democratism revitalized in the post-cold war world. Neoconservative pundits in particular continue to dream under the spell of Wilson’s gnostic theology of empire, conjuring with the magic words “democracy,” “destiny,” and “mission.” Joshua Muravchik, in Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny, calls upon the United States to continue its crusade for global democracy now that the cold war is over.[35] His proposal is frightening enough, but his reasoning is more alarming. He explains that America was founded on an “idea,” that she has to be true to that idea, and that such fidelity means democratizing the world. If Americans don’t crusade for global democracy then they are “selfish”—the worst epithet from the Progressive lexicon. Tony Smith’s America’s Mission, while a much more substantial and sophisticated work than Muravchik’s, also advocates a renewal of America’s global democratic mission primarily on the basis of national security and American interests, in the vain hope that a democratic world will be a world at peace and therefore a world safer for America.[36]

While loudly trumpeting the supposed blessings of America’s mission, the proponents of Wilsonianism offer no serious consideration of what this crusade for global democracy has done and will do domestically to America’s own free institutions. What are the costs of “exporting democracy”? What are the costs to America, or any nation for that matter, of pursuing a divine mission and serving as the Christ among nations? As critics of empire have been asking for the past century, what does this ideological imperialism do to the size of our government, to the burden of taxation, to the power of the presidency, to our own tradition of self-government, to our free-market economy, and to the moral character of our people? These are the questions William Graham Sumner and other anti-imperialists had the courage to ask in 1898 when it still seemed possible to prevent America’s plunge into empire. These are the questions we must have the courage to ask again. We must reevaluate Wilson’s place in the American Pantheon and recognize, in John Lukacs’ words, that Wilson, not Lenin, “turned out to be the real revolutionary.” [37]

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[1] Edwin Anderson Alderman, Woodrow Wilson: Memorial Address (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925), pp. 39 and 41.

[2] See, for example, Wilson’s praise of Giuseppe Mazzini in remarks he made in Genoa, Italy, on January 5, 1919. Arthur S. Link, et al., eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), vol. 53, pp. 614–15.

[3] Alderman, Woodrow Wilson, p. 44.

[4] Ibid., p. 53.

[5] Ibid., p. 79.

[6] H.L. Mencken, “The Archangel Woodrow,” in A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 248–51.

[7] Robinson Jeffers, “Woodrow Wilson,” in Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 35–36.

[8]Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 27, pp. 148, 150.

[9] Quoted in Murray N. Rothbard, “War As Fulfillment,” in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, John V. Denson, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1997), p. 229.

[10] Ibid., p. 203.

[11] See esp. Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

[12] Ibid., p. 121.

[13] Ibid., p. 147.

[14] M.E. Bradford, “Lincoln, the Declaration, and Secular Puritanism: A Rhetoric for Continuing Revolution,” in A Better Guide Than Reason: Federalists and Anti-Federalists (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), pp. 185–203.

[15] May 26, 1912, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 24, p. 443.

[16] Ibid., vol. 48, pp. 514–17.

[17] Ibid., p. 515.

[18] Ibid., pp. 516, 517.

[19] Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), p. 49.

[20] Address to the officers of the Atlantic Fleet, August 11, 1917, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 43, p. 429.

[21] Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1991), p. 101.

[22] The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 41, p. 526. In his Flag Day speech in 1917, Wilson said that “we are not the enemies of the German people. . . . They are themselves in the grip of the same sinister power that has now at last stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood from us.” The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 42, p. 500.

[23] Address to the officers of the Atlantic Fleet, ibid., vol. 43, p. 429, (emphasis added).

[24] Quoted in Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft, p. 103.

[25] April 2, 1917, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 41, p. 523.

[26] August 27, 1917, ibid., vol. 44, pp. 57–59.

[27] John Lukacs, Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984), p. 226.

[28] A prime example of Wilson’s defense of benevolent, humane imperialism is included near the end of his speech to a plenary session of the Paris Peace Conference on February 14, 1919, the speech he used to present the League Covenant. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 55, p. 177. See also Wilson’s vision of an empire of “service” in his speech to the U.S. Senate on July 10, 1919, ibid., vol. 51, pp. 435–36.

[29] Address to a joint session of Congress, January 8, 1918, ibid., vol. 45, pp. 534–39.

[30] Reprinted in John Randolph Bolling, ed., The Chronology of Woodrow Wilson (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927), pp. 9–11.

[31] Wilson’s reply to a note from Austria-Hungary, October 7, 1918. Excerpted in Bolling, et al., eds. Chronology of Woodrow Wilson, pp. 117–18.

[32] Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 436.

[33]Prejudices: Fourth Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), p. 202.

[34] Alderman, Woodrow Wilson, p. 48.

[35] Paperback, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1992).

[36] Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

[37] Lukacs, Outgrowing Democracy, p. 223.