Woodrow Wilson's Revolution Within the Form

0:00My name is Richard Gamble and I'm from Palm Beach Atlantic College in beautiful West Palm Beach, Florida. Woodrow Wilson was not a revolutionist. With this emphatic denial, University of Virginia president, E.A. Alderman, defended the legacy of the late president before a joint session of Congress, convened especially to hear this eulogy. ology. Alderman addressed Congress on December 15, 1924, several months after Wilson's death. Seeing himself somewhat in the role of Pericles praising the Athenian war dead, Alderman elevated his friend and fellow academic into the American pantheon to join Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. He marveled at the quote, revolutionary transformation that in so few years had taken Wilson from school teacher to president, a feat matched only by Lincoln's own meteoric and seemingly inexplicable rise to power.

1:06Typical of the progressive spirit of the age, Dr. Alderman praised Wilson for having redefined America as the servant among nations and for establishing his foreign policy on service to humanity rather than on selfish national interests. Wilson had summoned America, he said, to a crusade, not to a war. There was really nothing startling in Alderman's claims. This was the very definition of the war and of the American destiny that Wilson himself had worked so hard to infuse into the American mind. Wilson had never tired of referring to America as the servant nation, chosen to bring light and Liberty and Peace to All the World. Like the late 19th century romantic nationalists he so admired, Wilson divinized the American state and its mission to the world, applying to the United States all the divine attributes of the nature of Christ and His atoning work, the promise and the hope of the incarnation secularized and fulfilled. Alderman's tribute Alderman recognized Wilson as the one who promised to make all things new. His 14 points,

2:26for example, were intended to found, quote, a new order and a new life, for the president had caught a glimpse of the new earth. Nevertheless, Alderman pleaded that Wilson could not properly be classified as a revolutionary, because after all, he devoted so much of his energy and and imagination to building up institutions, such as the League of Nations, and not to breaking up institutions as a true revolutionary would do. And yet, despite his protest that Wilson was no revolutionary, Alderman closed his eulogy by likening Wilson to Martin Luther, to the English Puritans John Milton and John Hampton, and to the romantic nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, each of them either a religious or political revolutionary.

3:19To be sure, not all Americans shared this glowing assessment of Wilson at the time of his death. 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. He lamented that Wilson's remarkable rhetorical skill in, quote, reducing all the difficulties of the hour to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, often with theological overtones.

4:06And what troubled Mencken most was that the American people had taken this man and his words so seriously. The controversial Jeffers in a poem dated the month of Wilson's death wrote of the president's huge delusion that, quote, the god of the stars needed his help. After a distinguished career as a college professor, As president of Princeton University and one-term governor of New Jersey, Wilson was elected president in 1912, the first Democrat to hold that office since Grover Cleveland, but Wilson proved to be a chief magistrate with a very different vision of the role and scope of government from that of the minimal state anti-imperialist Cleveland. There has been a change of government, Wilson announced in the opening sentence of his first inaugural.

5:01The government he promised would now be, quote, put at the service of humanity. Having preached the new freedom in his campaign, his slate of successful reform legislation in his first term alone included the Underwood Tariff, the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Farm Loan Act. In the war emergency of his second term, 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, the First World War provided the opportunity that the progressives needed to remold the American economy and the American in mind, taking the nation decisively toward a command economy, what the Germans were then referring to in their own context as war socialism. The editors of the New Republic, close associates of Wilson's, boasted during the war that, quote, we revolutionized America.

6:17Indeed, Wilson and the Democratic Congress dramatically expanded the government's powers in War Time, including military conscription under the euphemism selective service and silence their critics on the left and the right with 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 did not escape courageous critics. Rothbard traced the Progressive's wartime agenda to the post-millennialist, pietist impulse, quote, to make America and eventually the world holy and thereby to bring about the kingdom of God on earth. 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 which built the modern interventionist state.

7:21But in Wilson's case, the effort to create heaven on earth fits into the broader theological problem of political Gnosticism, identified by Eric Vogelin. Wilson typifies the profile of the Gnostic prophet. Gnosticism, in Vogelin'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 calling, who claims to know with utter certainty the direction 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.

8:21The Gnostics, Vogelin wrote, quote, 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. They take into their own hands the remaking of the world. Moreover, they Where 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. In their hands, ordinary war becomes the last judgment and every battle becomes Armageddon. Wilson was not the first of America's Gnostic prophets, nor the last, unfortunately.

9:11Abraham Lincoln's Gnosticism, for example, is evident throughout his speeches. The late Mel Bradford called Lincoln's rhetorical strategy in speeches such as the Gettysburg Address a rhetoric for continuing revolution. This phrase applies equally well to Wilson, the heir of Lincoln's secularized revolutionary puritanism. We discern in Wilson 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, to wage war against the institutions of the past, especially against monarchy, multinational empires and balance of power diplomacy.

10:02Wilson's gnostic temperament was evident before the United States entered the war in 1917 and even before the outbreak of the European War itself in 1914. In the 1912 campaign, for example, Wilson carefully explained his internationalist creed. I believe that God planted in us 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. And in his first term, Wilson showed his faith by his works, intervening militarily in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, and the Dominican Republic in 1916.

10:53his wartime speeches such as his extravagantly praised peace without victory address, the war message and the 14 points ache with millennial expectancy of the final war and the last crusade 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, a speech generally overlooked by historians, illustrates Wilson's temperament.

11:41On a warm Independence Day, 1918, just over a year after America's entry into the war and four months before the armistice, Wilson addressed the diplomatic corps assembled at George Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon. In the shadow of the architect of America's tradition of non-intervention and neutrality, Wilson performed the alchemy of his rhetoric for continuing revolution. Clothed like Lincoln in 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 intention of the fathers, within the context of the present war, to interpret intervention into the European war, that is, not as a betrayal of America's traditions, but as their inevitable fulfillment. Washington and the other founders, according to Wilson, had turned their back on the past and had looked ahead to the whole wide world. Quote, a great promise that was was meant for all mankind was here given plan and reality it was the duty of those present 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

13:28Having achieved our own liberty, we are to strive for the liberties of every other people as well. We see in this speech Wilson's totalist mind at work, a 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 said, there must be, quote, now listen to this, the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly, and of its single choice, disturb the peace of the world.

14:20Furthermore, a League of Nations was required to quote, check every invasion of right. And remarkably, he claimed that the founders themselves would have approved of these principles. In fact, over the past century, the British had come to see the revolution as leading toward the liberation of their own people. 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.

15:09Unfortunately, Wilson did not confine his revolutionary principles to simply rhetoric. What the historian Christopher Dawson concluded about Cromwell's Revolutionary Army during the English Civil Wars was true of Wilson. He worked for nothing less than, in Dawson's words applied to Cromwell, quote, the translation of the conception of the Holy Community from an ecclesiastical ideal to a principle of revolutionary political action. Or, we could say, in Wilson's case, also its translation into a principle of revolutionary foreign policy. It was Wilson himself, after all, who claimed, quote, what America touches, she makes holy.

15:59Wilson's redemptive impulse to save the old world is the high watermark of progressive imperialism, even though he claimed to be the sworn enemy of empire. The American mission was no longer to be simply an example to Europe, but to free Europe from its own past, from its institutions, its imperialism and its system of alliances. As the trustee of liberty, as the servant nation, America had to wage war on behalf of others. The worthy principle of liberty for us had somehow become in Wilson's hands the limitless promise of liberty for all.

16:45And he took aim against Central Europe with devastating consequences. Wilson waged war from 1917 to 1918, not primarily to defend U.S. interests or honor, But 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 in the name of brotherhood. With the advice of his closest unofficial advisor, Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson consistently distinguished between the German people and their government in order to undermine the German monarchy. As historian Lloyd Ambrosius, a realist historian, notes, in 1917, House, quote, recommended an appeal to the German people against their government.

17:36For, in House's words, imperial Germany should be broken down within, as well as from without. But Wilson needed little encouragement from House or other advisors. In his war message of April 2, 1917, and then in a Flag Day speech in June, Wilson had already claimed that the American people entered the war as, quote, the sincere friends of the German people. With this sort of sophistry, he claimed he was waging war not against the people of Germany, of Germany, but against their system of autocratic government. He delegitimized the German government as alien to its own people, as a despotic master that had enslaved its people.

18:27On August 11th, 1917, Wilson spoke of being, quote, 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 said. And his war against this thing knew no limits. We intend, he said, to see to it that no other people suffers a like humiliation and subordination. The key point here, and a point directly relevant to our own time, 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.

19:16As the anti-statist essayist Randolph Bourne, the man who coined the phrase, war is the health of the state, as he wrote concerning one of Wilson's speeches against the German government, quote, 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." This strategy was crucial to Wilson's revolutionary democratism and the defining feature of the continuing Wilsonianism of the White House down to our own time. The peace and freedom of the world, he had said in his war message, was threatened by the existence of autocratic governments, unaccountable as they were to the will of the people.

20:10Wilson clearly was at war with a system of government and at war to export another system of government to take its place. Now, Wilson implemented this policy toward Germany in at least two ways. First, by refusing to accept a mediated settlement once the United States entered the war, and secondly, by working to dismember the Central Powers' multinational empires. When the Pope proposed a negotiated end to the war in the summer of 1917, Wilson refused, Wilson refused, noting that compromise was unimaginable when the free peoples were fighting against a vast secret conspiracy to take over the world.

20:57Wilson refused to negotiate with the German imperial government, claiming that their word could not be trusted and that therefore no covenant could be entered into with them. When Germany faced imminent defeat in the autumn of 1918, Wilson forced a political revolution in Germany as a precondition of negotiations and peace. It seems clear now that a constitutional monarchy in Germany would have been a more responsible alternative to the forced creation of a republic. As historian John Lukash writes, quote, that this kind of ideological democratism was disastrous should be obvious in retrospect.

21:44Had the Kaiser abdicated in favor of his son and of a constitutional monarchy, Adolf Hitler may have remained unknown to the world, end quote. Unfortunately, clear thinking about the consequences of America's entry into the Great War seems impossible. It is unassailable orthodoxy these days, especially among neoconservatives, that it was the US withdrawal from Europe after 1918, invariably demonized as a retreat or as a 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 entrance into Europe in 1917 and Wilson's revolutionary People's War, as he once called it, are the main culprits.

22:39Wilson sowed the seeds of World War II by guaranteeing political instability and 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, and Turks, while simultaneously defending the progressive, enlightened imperialism of Britain and the United States. Despite his reputation then and since as an anti-imperialist, Wilson was not opposed to empire in principle.

23:25He was not opposed to what we could call redemptive imperialism, but only the retrograde, predatory variety. Wilson outlined his vision of the New World Order in his well-received 14-point speech. As prejudicial as these points were to the central powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, they did form a 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 14 points were well understood at the time, even by the American press.

24:14The New York Tribune, for example, called Wilson's 14-point speech, quote, a second emancipation proclamation, as the editors continued. As Lincoln freed the slaves of the South half a century ago, Mr. Wilson now pledges his country to fight for the liberation of the Belgian and the Pole, the Serb and the Romanian. The 14 points were a direct effort to rearrange Europe, marking an unprecedented entry of the United States into European affairs and a further departure from America's traditional foreign policy of non-entanglement and non-intervention. For Wilson to claim repeatedly that he was fulfilling the intention of the founders was absurd.

25:02One of Wilson's 14 points was the guarantee of government by the consent of the governed, or self-determination of all peoples, a sort of universalization of the Declaration of Independence, as it were. Wilson used recognition of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as means to defeat the Austro-Hungarian Empire from within. Wilson recognized the Czech Slovak government in 1918 before the armistice as a co-belligerent against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The process of carving up Eastern Europe did not begin with the post-war settlements at Versailles. Self-determination in Wilson's hands was first used as a weapon of war and not an instrument of peace.

25:50There were other, more radical Gnostic voices in 1917 and 1918, of course. Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised heaven on earth by other revolutionary means. But again, as historian John Lukash argues, Wilson has proven to be the more influential revolutionary. Quote, Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin were contemporaries who died ten days apart. It was the idea of the former, not of the latter, national self-determination and not proletarian revolution that turned out to be the principal factor in the history of the rest of the century. Now, historians who excuse the excesses of Wilson's visionary rhetoric and the impracticality of his millennial schemes tend to do so on the basis that he was an idealist.

26:43But Wilson was dangerous precisely because of his idealism. University of Virginia President Alderman had said more than he realized in his eulogy when he observed that Wilson was, quote, a master and in some sense a slave of ideas and ideals. The tragedy for America's subsequent history is that Wilson made this republic a slave of those same ideas and ideals. Such delusions lead inevitably to the perpetual war for perpetual peace that Charles Beard warned about. Wilson provoked revolution in Europe, but more importantly, he provoked revolution in America. A revolution in how we understand ourselves and our responsibility to the rest of the world.

27:36Now, as you know, the problem of Wilsonianism persists, and its dangers are not abstract. There are those who intend to see Wilsonian democratism re-emerge 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. Shall I name names? 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. Tony Smith, America's Mission, While a much more substantial and sophisticated work than Moravchik's also advocates a renewal of America's democratic mission primarily on the basis of national security and the vain hope that a democratic world will be a world at peace and therefore a world safer for America.

28:41But the proponents of Wilsonianism offer no 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 of America pursuing a divine mission? 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 self-government, to our own free market? What does it do to the meaning of words? What does it do to the moral character of our people?

29:28These are the questions that 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 in 1998. Now next February, mark your calendars, marks the 75th anniversary of the deaths of both Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin. The time for eulogies is long past. But the last time I checked, Lenin's body and Wilson's legacy remained unburied. It is time to bury both.