This Day in Presidential History (Wilson Takes Nation Into War)

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.

Both Wilson and Bush might have won their wars but lost the peace. Just as Bush toppled Saddam Hussein, Wilson helped rid the world of Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. And, just as Bush found himself in a guerrilla war that required years more of sacrifice and terror (and whose outcome, as of this writing, is still uncertain), so Wilson, for all his visions of a new order, left the world rudderless as a new, more fearful menace – an obscure, Austrian-born corporal obsessed with ridding the world of Jews and others he deemed "not worthy of life" – waited, like the beast the President knew so well from the Book of Revelation, for his chance at power in Munich