Professor in Politics

Some readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD may have seen Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1944 film, Wilson. A cinematic apotheosis that reflected Woodrow Wilson’s status as the patron saint of the Democratic party, the movie portrayed a great and earnest president ambushed by vindictive partisans in his fight for a lasting peace underpinned by American membership in the League of Nations. Its implicit thesis was that World War II had been made inevitable almost single-handedly by Wilson’s chief antagonist, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

In general, professional historians, living in a liberal Democratic world, have treated Woodrow Wilson admiringly, but with considerably more nuance. John Milton Cooper Jr., a historian of great distinction, author of several books set in the Wilson era, and an alumnus of Wilson’s cherished Princeton, has given us a landmark one-volume biography squarely in this tradition.

Cooper’s Wilson was a young man from the secessionist South who found success and recognition by moving north, working tirelessly, and establishing himself as a leading public intellectual. Born into a family of prominent Presbyterian ministers, he took little interest in covenant theology and wore his Christianity lightly.

Pursuing a scholarly career as one of the founders of the emerging discipline of political science, he became a charismatic professor, and a widely read author of works on American history and politics. A Democrat by heritage, he might pay ritual tribute to Thomas Jefferson, but he harbored considerably more admiration for the centralizing modernity of Alexander Hamilton and its corollary of a strong national government spearheaded by a vigorous presidency.

Few American statesmen have been so consumed by big ideas. “I have no patience for the tedious toil of what is known as ‘research,'” he told his first wife. “I have a passion for interpreting great thoughts to the world.” Wilson was profoundly affected by emerging currents of evolutionary thought, pragmatism, and critical realism. His political philosophy melded the organic conservatism of Edmund Burke with the cautious liberalism of Walter Bagehot. His first, and best, book, Congressional Government (1885), depicted a rudderless national regime run by congressional committee chairmen answerable to neither party leaders nor a neutered presidency.

As president of Princeton (1902-1910) Wilson attempted to remake what had been a mediocre college for the sons of the wealthy into a world-class undergraduate institution built around the tutorial system of Oxford and Cambridge. Revolutionary in impact and conservative in conceptualization, this vision ran head-on against the emerging conception of the modern university as primarily a venue for graduate and professional education.

He successfully initiated the tutorial system, but in the struggle that followed over the salience of graduate education, he accepted no compromise and broke off friendships with colleagues who sought a middle ground. As was the case later in his political career, a meritorious policy preference became a rigid moral principle. Facing defeat, he resigned and moved into political life. Cooper tells us that Wilson’s obstinacy was justified, but also that he had successfully initiated the transformation of Princeton into a great undergraduate college. Yet had he not also displayed a character trait that led him, having secured at least half a loaf, to embrace defeat rather than declare victory?

Never a cloistered academic, Wilson had not shied away from public issues. Before accepting an opportunity to run for governor of New Jersey in 1910 at the age of 53, he was a vocal critic of the populist radicalism personified in the Democratic party by William Jennings Bryan, but he also was an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential activism and poised to move in the direction of progressive reform.

As chief executive of New Jersey (1911-12), Wilson saw himself as the one authentic voice of the people. Assuming party leadership and acting in the mode of a British prime minister, he used both persuasion and patronage to achieve his objectives. Aligning himself with progressives of both parties, he marginalized the machine that had elected him, then secured an impressive array of legislation for direct democracy (primary elections, initiative, referendum, and recall), corporate regulation, consumer protection, and worker rights. By the beginning of 1912, having held public office for little more than a year, he was a leading Democratic candidate for the presidency. After a bruising primary campaign, he won the nomination at the national convention on the 46th ballot.

The ensuing three-cornered campaign of 1912 (William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson) was in the main a contest between Wilson and Progressive party candidate Roosevelt. Both men favored progressive social programs. TR talked corporate regulation and distinguished between good and bad trusts; Wilson stressed trust-busting and opportunity for “the man on the make.” The great progressive journalist William Allen White dismissed the dialogue as tweedledum, tweedledee.

Cooper argues insightfully that there were real differences, but that they involved attitude more than policies and reflected personal biographies. Roosevelt, the product of a patrician background, feared upheaval from the lower orders and sought to impose upon the nation “a vision of transcendent national interest that would inspire people to put aside selfish, parochial interests.” Wilson, a striver from the middle class, preached “a vision of constant renewal from below in which people would rise by dint of effort and ability.” Roosevelt had the edge in charisma. Wilson had the advantage of a united party and won the election.

His first term as president was one of triumphal progressivism: a meaningful tariff reduction, a federal income tax, establishment of the Federal Reserve system, the Clayton Antitrust Act, creation of the Federal Trade Commission, broad federal programs to aid hard-pressed farmers, a model workmen’s compensation act for federal employees, the eight-hour day for railway workers, the epochal appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Far exceeding Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive achievements, these programs laid the basis for his narrow reelection in 1916 by a coalition of farmers and unionized labor that seemed to anticipate Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal political mobilization of 1936.

The “Wilson coalition” proved evanescent largely because of the disruptions of World War I. Here one wishes Cooper had done a bit more with the ethnic politics of the war, especially the widespread resentment among Irish-Americans–the prime constituencies of big-city Democratic machines–over Wilson’s perceived tilt toward Great Britain and disregard of British heavy-handedness in Ireland.

Wilson had been elected to be a domestic reformer, but the war became the touchstone issue of his administration. He had thought seriously about presidential power in the conduct of international relations, but neither he nor his first secretary of state, Bryan, had any practical experience in the field. His efforts to control the course of the Mexican Revolution throughout his first term were hamfisted and ineffective. His attempts to deal with the European cataclysm that erupted in 1914 would have strained the most skilled of diplomatists. Nonetheless, he essentially ran the foreign relations issues of neutrality and war from the White House.

The Allied nations, primarily Britain and France, deluged the United States with war orders, increasingly financed by loans floated by U.S. banking firms; the result was an economic boom that facilitated Wilson’s 1916 reelection. The Central Powers, primarily Germany, cut off from American trade by British mastery of the Atlantic, responded with submarine sinkings of merchant ships and other vessels carrying goods to their enemies.

The weight of American popular opinion pretty clearly favored the Allies, but a substantial minority, primarily of Irish and German descent, wanted the Central Powers to win. As the war in Europe degenerated into unimaginable carnage, most Americans, whatever their preferences, simply wanted to stay out of it. Pacifist sentiment was especially strong among Bryanite Southern and Western Democrats. Yet British and French democracy contrasted vividly with German authoritarianism, and the United States had become financially invested in an Allied victory. Worse yet, German submarines took American lives, most notably 128 in the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania. Germany even undertook a campaign of strategic sabotage within the United States.

Cooper clearly and fully traces Wilson’s reluctant road to war with Germany, his domestic leadership in the conflict, his plans for a lasting peace, and his final defeat. But although he knows as much about these events as any living historian, he gives us little of the detached analysis that characterizes earlier portions of the book. Viewing the world largely through Wilson’s eyes, he does not address the vital -question of whether the president possessed a realist’s sense of hard national interests or was governed by legalistic and moralistic principles that just happened to come down in favor of the Allies.

There were, after all, hard-headed arguments to be made for coming to the aid of Britain and France. Both countries shared basic democratic values with the United States; both were satisfied empires with no serious designs on the Western Hemisphere. Germany, on the other hand, was a militaristic oligarchy masquerading as a representative government; it had clear ambitions for influence in Mexico and South America.

Even so, what was the sense of arguing that submarines, a new weapon of naval warfare, should observe outmoded rules of visit-and-search, provide for the safety of noncombatants, and only then sink enemy merchant or passenger ships? Why not simply state a policy that Americans traveled on such vessels at their own risk?

In the event, Wilson requested a declaration of war only after Germany had effectively declared war on all American shipping. He united the nation behind the conflict. The aftermath was less happy. American military strength provided a narrow margin of victory to the teetering Allies. The costs to the United States in blood and treasure were relatively small compared with those of the warring Europeans; still, they were substantial. The repression, regimentation, and economic toll of waging war were then succeeded by a chaotic postwar boom and bust.

Against this difficult backdrop, Wilson attempted to dictate a just peace. His program was based on Victorian liberal principles: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, dismantlement of economic barriers, general reductions in armaments, an “absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,” a general realignment of national boundaries to comply with geographical clusters of ethnicity, and “a general association of nations .  .  . for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

At the beginning of December 1918–about a month after a war-weary people had returned control of Congress to the Republicans–Wilson sailed for Europe to lead the American delegation to the Paris peace conference. The story is familiar. His European counterparts wanted a vengeful peace that would exact retribution from Germany, cared little for vaporous principles, and obtained a document that laid the groundwork for another war. Wilson did achieve his goal of a League of Nations, the covenant of which was written into the treaty, signed at the Palace of Versailles on June 28, 1919.

Many historians today argue that the Treaty of Versailles was not an -egregious application of victors’ justice, that it redrew the map of Central Europe as fairly as possible, and that it did not in itself doom the interwar European economy to inflation and depression. Be that as it may, Wilson was most concerned with the League of Nations, which he saw as a guarantor of peace for the foreseeable future and compensation for whatever shortcomings existed elsewhere in the document.

Was Wilson, at bottom, a pragmatic realist who saw the League as a practical means of maintaining U.S. engagement with the larger world? Or a hopeless idealist who assumed that an association of nations would provide the means for reconciliation of international disputes and raise the force necessary to deter the occasional outlaw state? The author leaves us hanging on that one. Cooper insists that Wilson never saw himself as a messiah, but he depicts a president who pursued his objective with a fervent sense of mission that admitted of no compromise. An America that has witnessed more than a half-century of a United Nations with full U.S. membership must find Wilson’s dream incomprehensible.

The opposition, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was both partisan and personal. As Senate Republican leader, Lodge had no interest in a Democratic diplomatic triumph; moreover, he and Wilson long had heartily detested each other. (It doubtless did not help that both men were holders of Ph.D. degrees.) Still, rather than lead a frontal attack on the treaty, Lodge attached “reservations” to it. More than a political tactic, the Lodge reservations reflected the qualms of a classical realist who understood that nations were motivated by perceptions of self-interest, that power relationships were the driving force in international politics, and that international systems could not be frozen in time.

The leaders of Britain and France understood this viewpoint and were willing to accept the treaty with the Lodge reservations. Wilson’s argument, in the end, thus was not just with Lodge but also with David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau. His attempt to rally public opinion with a cross-country speaking tour ended with a physical breakdown that made him an invalid president during a time of tumultuous postwar transition, and all but guaranteed a Republican victory in 1920. He left the presidency in March 1921 still an unwell man; three years later he died, a martyr in the eyes of liberal Democrats.

One wishes that Cooper had presented us with more authorial judgment on this last disastrous phase of his subject’s career. What he has done is to present us with a very well-crafted, sympathetic portrait of a statesman of great talents and large frailties. This likely will be the definitive Wilson biography for a generation.

Alonzo L. Hamby, biographer of Harry Truman and the author, most recently, of For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s, teaches history at Ohio University.