Episode 12: Woodrow Wilson Part II

Season 1

Dec 10

Show Notes

Overview:

Today’s episode is all about Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States and arguably the most consequential. Note, I did not say one of the greats. They aren’t holding a spot on Mt. Rushmore for him. Certainly not lately, as the national reckoning over race during 2020 has landed hard on Wilson, whose reputation has been sullied by the widespread realization that he might just vie for the unenviable title of most racist president of all. That’s a hard list to evaluate, especially given that numerous antebellum presidents owned people of other races, but as our friend Jon Meacham said in an earlier episode when discussing Andrew Johnson, if you are in the discussion for most racist president ever, well that’s a list you’d rather not be on. Wilson has not fared particularly well as our country rethinks its racial past, and has featured prominently in our national discussion about how to live with the harsh truths of the past in our own present day.

But back to Wilson himself. In large measure the racial reckoning and reconsideration of his presidency derives from his importance. A progressive, he expanded the federal government’s role in managing the economy and protecting individual citizens, especially in the workplace and in the marketplace. Woodrow Wilson also proved as influential as a president as any, especially in the realm of foreign affairs and the president’s ability to wage war. We don’t ask of subsequent presidents if they are Wilsonian or not in their approach to the world. We ask how Wilsonian are they.

So who was this guy? Born in 1856 into a religious family, he was raised a Southerner through and through. Indeed, he recalled that one of his first memories of childhood was of watching soldiers, Union Soldiers, march through Georgia as an occupying army. Educated initially by his father, a Presbyterian Minister, he went North for his education, to the College of New Jersey, known by its current name as Princeton University.

Like so many of our previous presidents, Wilson initially studied and even briefly practiced law, but never liked it much. Instead, he was drawn to the world of ideas, enrolling at Johns Hopkins University for a PhD in history and political science, and embarking upon an academic career. He taught to much acclaim at Bryan Mawr, Wesleyan, and then ultimately Princeton, whose presidency he took up in 1902.

He also authored perhaps the most widely-used political science textbooks of his day. Meaning if you went to school around the turn of the 20th century, his version of history was most likely what you read, and what you were tested on. Ironically his most critical insight into the inner workings of American government was that its major flaw was the presidency. He thought a parliamentary system more efficient and effective, especially if a ruling coalition was in turn led by a powerful ruler. Like himself.

Politics, obviously, was his bailiwick, and he took the leap into the arena in 1910 when he ran on as the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor of his state. Two year later he was in the White House, having gone from Princeton to the Presidency in less time than it would have taken most of his students to complete a master’s degree. We’ve already covered the critical election of 1912 in previous episodes, and once in office Wilson set out a progressive agenda with gusto. His “new freedom” gave Americans tariff reform, a national income tax, the Federal Reserve System, and more.

But he’s not remembered for that, but for what happened next. World War I broke out in 1914. Drawn into the war by commercial contracts, loans to the belligerents—the allies in particular—and ultimately the threat of German submarine warfare, by 1917 he discarded his initial policy of neutrality for war. “God helping her,” he told he congress, “she can do no other.”

Wilson wasn’t satisfied with just winning the war. He wanted to end war altogether. Americans must fight to make the world safe for democracy, he said, and fight in particular for his 14 points, which included a new world order based upon free trade, national sovereignty, and most important of all, a League of Nations. The 14 points crystalized American thinking towards the world, though his critics liked to say, “God himself only had ten.”

And…it almost worked. Almost. Geopolitical acrimony overseas, and political anger at home, coupled to thwart Wilson’s effort to have the United States join the League of Nations, and crippled by a series of debilitating strokes while in office, he left the presidency in 1921 a broken man. When Republicans campaigned in 1920 on a “return to normalcy,” they meant, a world that largest existed before Wilson came to power. There was a major pandemic in 1918 and 1919 as well?

All of these moments of dramatic diplomacy and grand strategy existed during what can only be called a period of racial regression at home, especially for African-Americans. Wilson barred Black Americans from federal civil service jobs, and even barred them from socially attending the White House, while his Democratic allies in the South further enshrined Jim Crow into law throughout the former confederacy. No one wondered if reconstruction was still ongoing by Wilson’s day. It was dead and gone.

There is so much to discuss about this fascinating man. So much indeed, that we’ve decided to break our discussion into two episodes. In Part I, we released an episode following our regular format, which offered a pretty critical view of Wilson’s history on race.

In this episode, we are talking to Professor Thomas Knock, perhaps the preeminent Wilson scholar about Wilson’s life, legacy, and presidency. To be sure, it’s a more complimentary portrayal, but given that Knock has spent so much time thinking about Wilson and how to commemorate this complicated man, we wanted to share the conversation in its entirety.

Dr. Thomas Knock

Ph.D. Princeton University, 1982
M.A. Princeton University, 1979
M.A. Boston College, 1975
B.A. Miami University, 1973

Awards and Service

Perrine Phi Beta Kappa Prize, 2014
Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor, 2009-2011
Editorial Board, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 1999 - present
Board of Trustees, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, 1998 - present
"M" Award, SMU, 1998
Charles Warren Fellow, Harvard University, 1995-96
Willis Tate Award, SMU, 1995
Warren F. Kuehl Prize and SMU Godbey Series Author’s Award for To End All Wars, 1993
Grants, National Endowment for the Humanities, 1986-87
American Philosophical Society, 1985

Books and Essays

To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order, Oxford University Press, 1992; Princeton University Press, paperback, 1995

“Come Home, America: The Story of George McGovern,” in Vietnam and the American Political Tradition, ed. Randall Woods Cambridge University Press, 2003

The United States, World War I, and the Paris Peace Settlement, 1914-1920 in American Foreign Relations since 1600, A Guide to the Literature, ed. Robert L. Beisner, ABC Clio and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2003

The Rise of a Prairie Statesman: The Life and Times of George McGovern (Princeton University Press, 2016)

In his book, To End All Wars, he re-interprets the saga of the League of Nations and, therein, asks, “What is internationalism?” or, put another way, “What is Wilsonianism?”, a term that continues to host an astonishing variety of definitions. Contrary to decades of historiography, he makes the case that most of the eague’s Republican opponents were not isolationists, and that the struggle over American membership settled upon two competing conceptions of internationalism, “progressive internationalism” and “conservative internationalism,” that is, over what form the internationalism was to take.

Knock also argues that the contention between progressive and conservative internationalists was compounded by their conflicting respective visions of the future of American society at home. For instance, conservative Republicans bitterly castigated Wilson and the Democrats for their progressive legislation, such as the eight-hour day for the nation’s railroad workers, federal restrictions on child labor, and three income tax bills that placed four-fifths of the burden on corporations and wealthy individuals.

As for the League, Wilson strove to establish procedures for the arbitration of international disputes, reductions in armaments, restrictions on unilateral interventions, and collective security. Thus, he was willing to consign some measure of national sovereignty to an international authority. Conservative internationalists in the Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, countered with fourteen reservations intended to avert any diminution of American sovereignty. A two-thirds-majority for either version proved unattainable, and the treaty went unratified. The “Lodge Reservations,” Knock suggests, ultimately cut the pattern for America’s approach to international organization for the rest of the century—and beyond.

Work in Progress

Knock is currently writing a biography of Senator George McGovern, a former historian, the leading critic of America’s war in Vietnam, and the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. Parts of this story, set in the era of Cold War liberalism, contain elements of the Wilsonian narrative. For McGovern preferred “the peacekeeping actions of the United Nations over freewheeling unilateralist interventionism” and proposed instead a foreign policy, at once internationalist and non-interventionist, as well as a resumption of the domestic reform movement, which had been brought to a standstill by the Vietnam War.

Ironically, his campaign theme, “Come Home, America,” opened him up to the charge that he was a “neo-isolationist.” Yet, his was a search for practical alternatives to the cumulative perversions of containment, grounded in his faith in the possibilities for national redemption through authentic internationalism, education and intercultural exchange, and humanitarian endeavor.

Call to Action

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If you haven’t already, be sure to go back and listen to Woodrow Wilson: Part I.