To “read” Glenn Beck or to watch him perspire is to learn the depths of his contempt for Woodrow Wilson, in his mind the ancestor of Obamaism. It prompted Chris Hayes to tweet months ago: “there’s a weird, v powerful meme these days on the right that lefties worship Woodrow Wilson.” After years of silence two significant biographies have emerged since 2010: John Milton Cooper’s Woodrow Wilson: A Biography and now A. Scott Berg’s Wilson. We need more.
Until the New Deal and Great Society, the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson constitute the zenith of Progressivism, but more than FDR and TR the governor of New Jersey and president of Princeton University commanded the fractious Democratic Party with a sureness of purpose that would be the envy of modern presidents. With the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the Underwood Tariff reducing import rates to decent levels, the federal income tax (declared unconstitutional in 1895 by the Supreme Court), a child labor law, and his support albeit reluctant for women’s suffrage, Wilson’s first term might be the most constitutionally significant in American history. Years spent writing about the federal system taught Wilson to regard the presidency as a parliamentarian using every level of power to bind his party to his will. He wrote elegant prose — the last president, indeed, to write his own major speeches, pecked away on his typewriter. By all accounts he was most persuasive on the stump too. Had he abdicated the party leadership and let a hack lose the presidency to Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, we might accept the Wilson administration on his admirers’ terms: as world historic as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln’s.
One might. One might. But time will not relent, as Wallace Stevens wrote. Devoted to the high-mindedness of Wilson’s estimation of himself, A. Scott Berg writes a narrative in which the milestones stick out like berries in a rum cake but ignores serious consideration of Wilson’s paradoxes and — let me say it — monstrosities. To study Woodrow Wilson is to set aside once and for all time the value of intentions. There wasn’t a principle the man was not willing to discard, rewrite, or talk over in his pursuit of power. A sick man, prone to violent headaches that were the symptoms of a blood and thyroid condition, he let ambition turn him into a drooling, paralyzed crackpot burning with resentments. Persuaded by the Democratic machine in New Jersey to run for governor after a crusade to rid Princeton of social clubs led to his embarrassment, he promptly turned on it with astounding speed. On the presidential campaign — he was barely governor a few months before the tick-tock of his ambition kept him from realizing the remainder of his impressive progressive agenda — a passage from the fifth (!) volume of his History of the American People, published in 1902, praised Chinese immigration at the expense of the Polish and Italians who settled on the East coast. “Wilson explained the context of his remarks to those who petitioned him and asked his publishers if he might rewrite one or two passages for future printings of the book,” Berg writes. “No immigrant movement ever took hold.”
Pause over this incident, one I hadn’t read about before. By itself harmless, in context an example of Wilson’s egregiousness. Hurrying to place Wilson in the White House after the the only significant three-way presidential race in American history, Berg takes no breath as he whizzes past the legislative achievements to chronicle Wilson’s courtship of his second wife, to which he devotes ten consecutive pages, and more in the aggregate. The importance of Edith Wilson to twentieth century constitutional history cannot be stressed enough, as I’ll reveal later. Berg, the author of biographies on Katherine Hepburn and Maxwell Perkins, lacks the patience and skill and interest to dissect those achievements. He lacks judgment. For better or worse, biographers in the twenty-first century live in a market altered by Robert A. Caro, and a personage the size of Woodrow Wilson, whose enemies included windbags like Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, deserves a biographer up to the shades, convex sides, and peculiarities of these people. Cooper’s 2010 biography, by contrast, traces the calibrations of Wilson’s thought as the influence of Louis Brandeis came to bear; a chapter unraveling the (minor) differences between Wilson’s New Freedom and Roosevelt’s New Nationalism flows like a stimulating college lecture. Readers wouldn’t know the importance of Brandeis to Wilson until the Jew-baiting that poisoned his Supreme Court nomination in 1916; to Berg, the nomination of Brandeis is a reminder of Wilson’s courage in nominating a Jew whom scions of the American bar like William Howard Taft and Elihu Root opposed, period (months before Cooper’s tome the most comprehensive biography of Brandeis emerged — a hell of a companion piece). Given reason to hope in 1912, enough blacks voted for Wilson to expect guarantees against lynching. As a thank you, he ordered the Cabinet to purge blacks from the federal payroll. When challenged about segregation, he wrote, “It is as far as possible from being a movement against the Negroes. I think if you were here on the ground you would see, as I seem to see, that it is distinctly to the advantage of the colored people themselves.”
Berg’s fealty to Wilson gets repulsive when the submarine activity in the Atlantic compels the president to issue the series of commands that will culminate in the declaration of war delivered to a supine Congress in the spring of 1917. “Whether one agreed with the President or not,” Berg writes about Wilson’s campaigning during the 1918 midterm elections, he “offered a profile in courage.” Reach for the smelling salts. In high school I was taught taught that a heartbroken Wilson got the United States into World War I to make The World Safe For Democracy, a euphemism for ridding Belgium of the Hun. What we’re not told about is what an insufferable prig this man was, what a maladroit reader of men and nations he continued to be, even after a protracted battle with Mexican guerrillas should have demonstrated the folly of U.S. meddling in things about which it knew little. I am indebted to Walter Karp and his essential 1979 The Politics of War, a scabrous and depressing account of how William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson manipulated the public and Congress with appeals to jingoism and America’s destiny.
Reading Cooper and Berg, I am not convinced that Wilson wanted war as early as 1915, but the essential fact remains: we declared war on the Central Powers for the sake of a neutrality that we did not ourselves observe. By insisting on the rights of neutrals to sail on belligerent ships, Wilson showed up his own diplomacy as facile and self-serving. It was also meretricious. Despite German apologies and reparations and the acquiescence to demands that would shame a lesser power than the German Empire, Wilson’s bias towards the Allies resulted in maneuvering towards placing his enemies in such a position that war became inevitable. Karp:
Passengers on ships are commonly regarded as being under the jurisdiction of the flag under which they sail. They are also regarded as incurring the risks of their location. Sailing under a British flag was about to become dangerous, but the American government was under no obligation to reduce that danger. It could declare, either tacitly or openly, that Americans who chose to sail under a belligerent’s flag did so at their own personal peril.
War demanded the disobedience of a few thousand Americans whose putatively neutral government allowed them to travel on belligerent, i.e. English, ships. We are not taught these facts in school. This is why we went to war. Whereupon the Allies were guaranteed victory. Thus, the Allies, David T. Wright acidly writes, “disdainfully ignoring Wilson’s comical efforts to act as leader, were able to impose horrific terms upon the Germans in the Treaty of Versailles.” What these terms led to in fifteen years the world would soon learn.
One of the felicitous developments to emerge after Edward Snowden’s purloining of NSA documents is the renewed interest in the Espionage Act of 1917, under which Thomas Drake was charged in 2010 and Chelsea Manning a few months ago. This heinous and anti-constitutional legislation criminalized the procurement of information with the intent “to interfere with he operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies when the United States is at war.” It empowered the postmaster general to impound or refuse to mail publications that he deemed a violation of the act. In France boring to death the likes of Clemanceau and David Lloyd George, Wilson let Attorney General Mitchell Palmer handle what became known as the Red raids, the enforcement of which led to the promotion of a young humorless man named J. Edgar Hoover, thus showing the execrable taint of Wilsonism on generations of American public life; but the president still offered nuggets like this: “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.” Only a man of Woodrow Wilson’s exalted conception of himself could use this language. Even George W. Bush held his fire.
The ignominy into which Wilson, wracked by a series of strokes, fell so disgusted the country that it turned on Wilsonism and his precious League of Nations. In 1920 Warren Harding won by the largest plurality of any presidential candidate to date. The man who was cheered by millions in Europe – the man they called “Weeel-son” – watched with his one mobile eye as Edith and his sycophant of a doctor established what was in essence a regency. So cowed were Cabinet members by the great man that none invoked the Constitution and sought to remove him from office. He accepted the resignation of the hapless Robert Lansing as secretary of state after years of treating him as a well paid clerk. In the waning days of his administration he denied a pardon to onetime presidential rival and socialist Eugene V. Debs, serving a twenty year sentence for violating the Espionage Act (Ernest Freeberg’s Democracy’s Prisoner is essential reading). “Suppose every man in America had taken the same position Debs did,” Wilson said. “We would have lost the war and America would have been destroyed.”
Wilson was not one to ever forget a perceived blow to his divine right. We must look to Richard Nixon to find another man with Wilson’s talent for self-delusion and megalomania. Nixon at least looked like a crook. Wilson was a hit with the ladies, was highly libidinous, and could spin noble phrases by the yard. Chicanery abroad demands a noble carapace.
Humanizing The Vacuum 