April 2, 1917—He had won re-election as President only
four months before on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” but now Woodrow Wilson, angered by Germany’s
resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and a diplomat's maneuvering to induce Mexico to reclaim parts of the Southwest by siding with them in any upcoming conflict, urged Congress to declare war on the
European nation.
Wilson’s war message followed 2½ years in which he faced
sustained calls for intervention in the remorseless First World War. The savagery of these partisan attacks (former
President Theodore Roosevelt derided the example the administration was setting
by “sitting idle, uttering cheap platitudes, and picking up their trade”) has
been echoed this primary season as GOP Presidential candidates have assailed
Barack Obama as an appeaser for his refusal to assume a more threatening posture
against Iran. (You might think the GOP would be chastened about our possible involvement in another Mideast war after two of them in the last decade--but you'd be wrong!)
In that respect, Obama might find himself relating
to Wilson, another former college professor with a reputation for eloquence.
You’d also have trouble deciding which Democratic Nobel Peace Prize winner was
the one who urged a “moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment
befitting our character and our motives as a nation.” (For the record, those
were Wilson’s words.) Likewise, Obama’s attempt to act in concert with other
countries (given the unfortunate tag by an anonymous aide, in reference to his
policy toward Libya, of “leading from behind”) paralleled Wilson’s call for “the
utmost practicable cooperation in counsel and action with the governments now
at war with Germany.”
In delivering the war message—considered by Wilson
biographer John Milton Cooper Jr. to be “the greatest Presidential speech since
Lincoln’s second inaugural address”—Wilson stood at a hinge in American
diplomatic history. To be sure, it nodded in the direction of precedent by
doing what seems quaint today: asking Congress to exercise its own constitutional
power to declare war. (No American President since Harry Truman has made a
formal request for a war declaration, even though at least 85,000 Americans
have died in armed conflict back to 1950.)
But it broke with, if not decisively ended, the “great
rule” of George Washington’s Farewell Address: to avoid taking part in the conflicts of other countries.
Moreover, it thrust to the forefront of American foreign policy the principle
of human rights.
In a sense, Wilson almost had to resort to this. Many Americans questioned what vital
interests of the United States were being violated by Germany and its allies.
Wilson, then, had to state America’s “object” in waging war as “to vindicate
the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish
and autocratic power.” Or, in the speech’s most ringing phrase: “The world must
be made safe for democracy.”
Twice over the last half-dozen years, in visits to Wilson’s birthplace and childhood home in Staunton, Va., I was struck by the similarities between the progressive
Democratic and the conservative Republican who occupied the White House only a few years ago. Yes, Wilson might have more in common with George W. Bush than with Obama.
At first glance, it might seem flabbergasting to
compare a liberal Democrat -- the only President ever to achieve a Ph. D. and
the last President to write all his own speeches -- with a conservative
Republican – the only President to earn an MBA, and one known for such
contributions to the English language as, "Is our children learning?"
Moreover, Bush spoke of a “crusade” against terror (a usage that, opponents
charged, provided rhetorical red meat to Islamic jihadists), while failing to
persuade Americans public to consume the quantities of energy that made them so
vulnerable to Mideast oil disruptions; Wilson, on the other hand, led a crusade
– the first American total war fought on foreign soil, involving the entire
republic, calling on the mighty reserves of American industry and public
opinion.
But both Wilson and George W. Bush were surprisingly
similar. Both were born in the South, were heavily influenced by their fathers,
were forgiven by their wives for missteps prior to their runs for office,
served as governors before securing the Oval Office, won a first Presidential
election in a multi-candidate race and a second one against a stiff opponent.
In particular, both displayed an evangelical fervor that found its counterpart
in their public lives – what admirers saw as unswerving devotion to principle
and what detractors lamented as willful stubbornness.
Oddly enough, the two men followed a similar policy
trajectory at the opening of their administrations, focusing on domestic
(especially fiscal) affairs before giving way, under the pressure of crises, to
what they are remembered for today: their wartime leadership. In his first year, Wilson instituted the Federal
Reserve, tariff reform and the income tax. Bush, on the other hand, won sharp
tax cuts in his first year.
Consider the two men's attitude toward religion. George W.
Bush has been mocked for saying in a debate that Jesus Christ was his favorite
political philosopher, and for creating what Kevin Phillips has called an
"American Theocracy." But Bush did not deviate much from the
mainstream of American rhetoric. (Witness John F. Kennedy's inaugural address:
"the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the
hand of God.") Wilson went much further, in the direction of policy and
administration, than Bush – or, indeed, almost any other President – ever
dreamed.
Wilson also laid the foundation for the
Anglo-American alliance that Bush used in the War on Terror. With an
English-born mother, Wilson's sympathies already tended toward Britain, and his
constitutional theories and heroes (especially William Gladstone) cemented his
Anglophilia. Though the notion of a "special relationship" between
the two nations was popularized by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in
World War II, it was Wilson who ended more than a century of British-American
tensions by joining the side of its transatlantic parent in World War I.
Americans today recall the near-unanimous
declaration of war in 1917, but often forget the contentious period preceding
it. As with the Iraq war, public opinion shifted decisively in favor of military
force due to disasters whose origins became murky over time. Iraq’s role in
spawning terror – specifically, whether it aided Al-Qaeda – became a central
issue following 9/11. In 1915, the submarine sinking of the British passenger
liner Lusitania with 128 Americans aboard, hardened U.S. opinion against
Germany at the time, yet some have questioned in the years since whether the
ship was as innocent a target as claimed, since it possessed a quantity of
small arms.
In Wilson's time, as in ours, foreign operatives in
the U.S. were plotting acts of terror – or, in the parlance of the early 20th
century, "sabotage." In July 1916, one year before war was officially
declared between the two countries, German saboteurs blew up a munitions pier
on Black Tom Island in Jersey City, though a legal commission did not find
Germany legally responsible for the accident until 1939. In 1919, 36 packages addressed to America's most prominent capitalists and government
officials – all bearing a Gimbels Brothers return address – were found to
contain bombs. Not long after that began America's first "Red Scare"
-- not the one whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy but by Wilson's
Attorney-General, A. Mitchell Palmer, and carried out by a young staffer in
Palmer's Justice Department, J. Edgar Hoover.
In response to terror, Wilson and Bush reacted – and, like nearly all their predecessors and successors in the Oval Office during wartime, sometimes overreacted. The Patriot Act and Guantanomo Bay outraged civil libertarians. But, in speed and comprehensiveness, the Bush administration's actions were surpassed by Wilson's. During the latter's second term, Congress passed the Espionage Act, the Trading With the Enemy Act, and the Sedition Act. Most startlingly, Wilson prosecuted labor leader and Socialist President candidate Eugene V. Debs for opposing the war, jailing him for the remainder of his term even after the crisis passed and Debs' health deteriorated rapidly.
The outcome of World War I – an economically
depressed Europe that became prey for dictatorships – brought into question
whether American intervention was wise. But Wilson's resort to arms, just like
Bush's, was eased by a foreign autocrat's folly. Saddam Hussein's longtime
refusal to allow free, unimpeded inspection of his country for weapons of mass
destruction (at a time when he wanted but no longer had access to them)
provided Bush with an excuse to invade. Likewise, given Wilson's initial reluctance
to join the side of Britain and France in World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm handed
British intelligence a major victory when he had his foreign minister send the
so-called "Zimmermann Telegram," promising the government of Mexico
that, by joining the Triple Entente, it would regain lands lost to the U.S. 70
years before in the Mexican War.
The Nature of Character
But if policy alone were the only determinant of a
President's legacy, then James Buchanan would occupy the same lofty perch in
our history as Abraham Lincoln, another President who said the South had no
legal right to secede. On this score, the intellectually shallow George W. Bush
possesses the same character trait as the professorial Woodrow Wilson:
determination that, at its worst, shades into inflexibility.
To his credit, Bush demonstrated loyalty to staff,
even in the face of adversity. In other ways, however, his refusal to adjust to
altered circumstances led to needless complications in the War on Terror,
especially by repeatedly refusing to sack Donald Rumsfeld after it became
abundantly clear that the Secretary of Defense had underestimated the strength
of the Iraqi resistance and the number of U.S. troops required to subdue it.
If possible, Wilson's obstinacy was more ingrained
and more disastrous than Bush's. Part of it traced back to his Calvinist roots:
“Your thorough Presbyterian,” he once said, “is not subject to the ordinary
laws of life, is of too stubborn a fiber, too unrelaxing a purpose, to suffer
mere inconvenience to bring defeat.” This is a virtual forecast for the hubris
that would undo his greatest achievements.
Just as important, the dyslexic boy who climbed to the top of academe by developing a near-photographic memory became a President who believed he could bend men and events with his fervent words and force of will. Wilson's initial success as President of Princeton abruptly ended when he unsuccessfully tried to destroy the school's social-club structure. "The truth is no invalid!" he burst out at the height of his frustration – a distinctly self-righteous, and odd, outburst from someone who had just experienced a minor stroke that left him blind in one eye.
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