Imperialism Benign And Bespectacled.
Woodrow Wilson was an important President in the world-historical sense, and, as the reader knows, this is the sense which interests me the most.
Born to parents of Scottish descent, his father was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, which fact is credited for his characteristic piousness and academism. Another of the names given to him was that of an idealist, which he never denied, but instead, capitalized on. "Sometimes people call me an idealist," he said about himself (in his Address at Sioux Falls, on September 8th, 1919). "Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world."
To be sure, this attitude of “draping himself in the American flag” was a particular trait of his, throughout all his life, for which his political opponent Teddy Roosevelt, not without a reason, called him a rhetorician and an able hypocrite. "Wilson is a very adroit and able (but not forceful) hypocrite," he wrote in a 1916 letter, and in a speech given in the same year, he thus elaborated on his criticism: "He has made our statesmanship a thing of empty elocution. He has covered his fear of standing for the right behind a veil of rhetorical phrases. He has wrapped the true heart of the nation in a spangled shroud of rhetoric."
Some other notable criticisms of him include the famous passage in Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, iii, 1920: "It was harder to de-bamboozle this old Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him, for the former involved his belief in and respect for himself."
The famous American journalist and rather notorious Soviet sympathizer (“I’ve seen the future and it works”) Lincoln Steffens gave Wilson a very interesting, although rather pretentious, characterization: "He is the most perfect example we have produced of the culture, which has failed and is dying out." (From a letter written in 1919.) I disagree with the concluding portion of this assessment, as the special brand of idealism Wilson represented is very much alive, if not altogether well, in modern America, with its pro-democracy thrust. There is another word for the Wilsonian brand of idealism, which is imperialism, in its American manifestation.
This is exactly as I see Woodrow Wilson, that is, as the epitome of a glorified version of American imperial chauvinism, exemplified by his presumptuous words "The world must be made safe for democracy," from his Address to Congress, on April 2nd, 1917. There is far more than idealism in these words, and to explain this, I am turning now to one particular, highly reputable person, whom I intend to be quoting quite frequently in the future, but on this very first occasion, just to state my disagreement with him. Bertrand Russell makes a brief comment on Wilson, citing Hobbes, in his discussion of Hobbesian covenant (The History of Western Philosophy, p. 551). “'Covenants without the sword are but words.' (President Wilson unfortunately forgot this.)" I am not impressed with Russell’s comment here, as I believe that in President Wilson’s case, the issue is not simply his “forgetfulness” (I realize that Russell must be using this word sarcastically, but, seeing that he does not go farther than this, I am holding him to it!), but his distinctly American imperial arrogance, recently resurfacing in the principles of foreign policy, conducted by President George W. Bush toward all countries against whom he had not gone to war. Ironically, another loud bell is rung here when we compare the neoconservative use of the word “freedom” with the Wilsonian concept of “new freedom.” Here is how this concept is explained in the Concise Dictionary of American History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1962: I am deliberately preferring older editions of such reference works, as being untainted by all sorts of questionable modern reinterpretations.)---
“New Freedom is a term generally accepted as descriptive of the political and economic philosophy underlying the domestic policies of President Wilson at the opening of his first administration. The more significant utterances of Wilson in the campaign of 1912 were published under the above title early in 1913. They constituted an earnest plea for a more humanitarian spirit in government and business, political reforms that would restore government to the people and break the power of selfish and privileged minorities. The growth of corporate power had, he argued, rendered obsolete many traditional concepts of American democracy. Government must have not merely a negative, but a positive, program and use its power 'to cheer and inspirit our people with the sure prospects of social justice and due reward, with the vision of the open gates of opportunity for all.'”
In my rendition of the famous but unattributable phrase: The road to hell is littered with good intentions. It is very ironic that instead of developing this Wilsonian concept of New Freedom along the naturally implied socialist lines (the bigger government imposing humanitarian fairness on the society which it governs), the evolution of this concept led the way, even in Wilson’s time, to the American government trying to impose these principles not on its own society, but on the rest of the world. Hence, here, in Wilson’s New Freedom already, we can find the noxious seeds of modern American neoconservatism, with its imperial prescription for the New American Twenty-First Century. Well, President Woodrow Wilson’s imperial prescription was, presumably, for the New American Twentieth Century, and we know how the rest of that century had turned out…
Woodrow Wilson And The Great War.
President Wilson was known as a peace-loving man, and during the first four-plus years of his Presidency, including three years of World War I, he would be living up to his reputation. But then things changed.
As with everything else in history, there have been great misconceptions about exactly how America entered the Great War in Europe and why. The name of the British ocean liner the Lusitania is unfalteringly brought up whenever the main reason of President Wilson’s abandonment of his nation’s neutrality pledge is given by a host of lightweight American historians, yet surely the connection between the two events is hard to find, and even harder to acknowledge.
It is true that on May 7, 1915, the ill-fated British ship was indeed sunk by a German torpedo and among at least 1200 passengers killed were 128 Americans. But it is also true that almost two years would pass before the United States would finally declare a war on Germany. Two years is long enough a stretch, to cast doubt on the feasibility of any such connection.
The fact is that the Americans didn’t want to join the European war, and the Germans did not want it either, as the German Embassy in Washington kept buying paid advertisements in American newspapers, advising the public to avoid sailing on British ships in the Atlantic. Those who would not heed this warning, did so at their own peril, as the Lusitania incident clearly demonstrated.
The British claimed that the Lusitania had been a strictly civilian ship, and its sinking was an act of German barbarism. The Germans insisted that the ship had carried significant military cargo (using the passengers as what today we call a human shield) and was thus a legitimate target. Indeed, it was later found out that there was a large store of war munitions carried by the Lusitania, and it was as a result of their explosion when hit by a German torpedo, that the ship sank.
President Wilson reacted to the sinking of the Lusitania by demanding reparations from Germany for every dead American passenger, plus a pledge not to sink passenger ships. Germany paid the reparations and did not mind making the required pledge, as long as it was understood that the sunk ship had clearly been used for militarily purposes by the British. It was clear to any objective mind that the last thing Germany wanted in this affair was a war with the United States, and the reverse had to be true as well. But there were not too many objective minds regarding the war at that time. Lusitania or no Lusitania, there were those who were bent on joining the war no matter what and those who were bent on staying out of it no matter what. Our old never-say-die friend William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State in Wilson’s administration, was a war hawk and resigned from his post in protest over his boss’s inadequate reaction. The President himself, however, appeared sufficiently satisfied with the German response to his demarche. Moreover, during his successful reelection campaign the next year, his trump card slogan was “He Kept Us out of War.” It all changed after that, soon after the start of Wilson’s second term, and here is how the popular historian Kenneth C. Davis explains the change.---
"The stated reasons for America’s involvement were freedom of the seas and the preservation of democracy. But neither side in this war had a monopoly on illegal naval warfare. Nor was the democratic ideology so powerful among America’s allies that Wilson thought he should fight to maintain it as far back as 1914.
In his favor Wilson tried admirably to restrain both sides and mediate a peace. But as in almost every other war America has fought, powerful forces in industry, banking and commerce cynically thought that war was healthy. And if the world was going to be divvied up after the fighting was over, America might as well get its fair share of the spoils."
Ironically, the victorious end of the Great War did not bring much wanted satisfaction for President Wilson. His cherished brainchild, The League of Nations, although temporarily imposed on Europe, was snubbed by the United States Senate which refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Soon thereafter in September 1919 Wilson suffered a stroke, which was carefully concealed from the American public. Although several staged pictures and even live appearances of him were produced, his condition was unquestionably debilitating and would later become the principal case for arguing and adopting the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, dealing with the question of orderly succession whenever the President or Vice President becomes unable to perform his functions.
The Red Scare.
Before Joseph Raymond McCarthy, was Alexander Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General of the United States in the Woodrow Wilson Administration. The infamous “red scare,” which lasted for several decades, starts with him.
Let us remember that it was the time of the rise of Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism which were both somehow fused together into the “red” specter of Marx’s and Lenin’s Communism. In fact, it was mostly the Bolshevik victory in Russia, which was beginning to generate a considerable domestic Communist following, boisterously publicized by a host of European Comintern agitators and their local sympathizers. A lot of Americans felt extremely uncomfortable with this particular Zeitgeist.
Ironically, Palmer was by no means a paragon of Conservative Republicanism. A Quaker and a Democrat, he found himself on the progressive wing of his party. When the newly elected President Wilson offered him the post of Secretary of War, Palmer declined, citing his pacifist Quaker beliefs. The post of Attorney General was much more to his liking, and although it was offered to him rather belatedly, in 1919, he was most happy to accept it.
One of Palmer’s first acts in office was the release of some 10,000 German aliens taken into US government custody during the Great War. On other occasions he showed such reluctance to go after the radicals that he was questioned by the US Senate as to the reasons of his inactivity.
It all changed when radical danger struck close to Palmer’s own home. Following a series of assassination attempts against him and his family, Palmer became a different man. The hard-hitting series of effective anti-Radical raids he conducted in November 1919 and January 1920 became known as the Palmer Raids. Thousands of suspects were arrested and tagged for deportation. However only five hundred were in fact deported, as the United States Department of Labor, officially responsible for these deportations, protested against Palmer’s zealous and visibly biased pursuit of his new anti-Radical agenda, and dismissed most of his cases. At the end of the short-lived frenzy, just like it would be in Joe McCarthy’s case, the Congress and the President both sharply rebuked Palmer, and the public and the press blamed him for… the ineffectiveness of his own witch hunt.
His zeal thus having been checked, Palmer ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for President in 1920. Then rather surprisingly he mellowed again. In the last days of the Wilson Administration he asked the President to pardon one of the most conspicuous and ideologically dangerous American radicals to date: the jailed leader of the Socialist Party of America, one of the greatest admirers of Lenin and of Bolshevism, Eugene Debs. But this time it was the ailing Wilson’s turn to get tough, for an understandable reason, and Palmer’s bizarre, almost random petition was denied…
Strange times, strange people, strange actions! But, you know, they were somehow better than what we are having today. Then, one could certainly disagree with the things that were done, but at least they made some sense. Today, nothing does.
Woodrow Wilson was an important President in the world-historical sense, and, as the reader knows, this is the sense which interests me the most.
Born to parents of Scottish descent, his father was a Presbyterian minister, and his mother was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, which fact is credited for his characteristic piousness and academism. Another of the names given to him was that of an idealist, which he never denied, but instead, capitalized on. "Sometimes people call me an idealist," he said about himself (in his Address at Sioux Falls, on September 8th, 1919). "Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world."
To be sure, this attitude of “draping himself in the American flag” was a particular trait of his, throughout all his life, for which his political opponent Teddy Roosevelt, not without a reason, called him a rhetorician and an able hypocrite. "Wilson is a very adroit and able (but not forceful) hypocrite," he wrote in a 1916 letter, and in a speech given in the same year, he thus elaborated on his criticism: "He has made our statesmanship a thing of empty elocution. He has covered his fear of standing for the right behind a veil of rhetorical phrases. He has wrapped the true heart of the nation in a spangled shroud of rhetoric."
Some other notable criticisms of him include the famous passage in Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, iii, 1920: "It was harder to de-bamboozle this old Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him, for the former involved his belief in and respect for himself."
The famous American journalist and rather notorious Soviet sympathizer (“I’ve seen the future and it works”) Lincoln Steffens gave Wilson a very interesting, although rather pretentious, characterization: "He is the most perfect example we have produced of the culture, which has failed and is dying out." (From a letter written in 1919.) I disagree with the concluding portion of this assessment, as the special brand of idealism Wilson represented is very much alive, if not altogether well, in modern America, with its pro-democracy thrust. There is another word for the Wilsonian brand of idealism, which is imperialism, in its American manifestation.
This is exactly as I see Woodrow Wilson, that is, as the epitome of a glorified version of American imperial chauvinism, exemplified by his presumptuous words "The world must be made safe for democracy," from his Address to Congress, on April 2nd, 1917. There is far more than idealism in these words, and to explain this, I am turning now to one particular, highly reputable person, whom I intend to be quoting quite frequently in the future, but on this very first occasion, just to state my disagreement with him. Bertrand Russell makes a brief comment on Wilson, citing Hobbes, in his discussion of Hobbesian covenant (The History of Western Philosophy, p. 551). “'Covenants without the sword are but words.' (President Wilson unfortunately forgot this.)" I am not impressed with Russell’s comment here, as I believe that in President Wilson’s case, the issue is not simply his “forgetfulness” (I realize that Russell must be using this word sarcastically, but, seeing that he does not go farther than this, I am holding him to it!), but his distinctly American imperial arrogance, recently resurfacing in the principles of foreign policy, conducted by President George W. Bush toward all countries against whom he had not gone to war. Ironically, another loud bell is rung here when we compare the neoconservative use of the word “freedom” with the Wilsonian concept of “new freedom.” Here is how this concept is explained in the Concise Dictionary of American History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1962: I am deliberately preferring older editions of such reference works, as being untainted by all sorts of questionable modern reinterpretations.)---
“New Freedom is a term generally accepted as descriptive of the political and economic philosophy underlying the domestic policies of President Wilson at the opening of his first administration. The more significant utterances of Wilson in the campaign of 1912 were published under the above title early in 1913. They constituted an earnest plea for a more humanitarian spirit in government and business, political reforms that would restore government to the people and break the power of selfish and privileged minorities. The growth of corporate power had, he argued, rendered obsolete many traditional concepts of American democracy. Government must have not merely a negative, but a positive, program and use its power 'to cheer and inspirit our people with the sure prospects of social justice and due reward, with the vision of the open gates of opportunity for all.'”
In my rendition of the famous but unattributable phrase: The road to hell is littered with good intentions. It is very ironic that instead of developing this Wilsonian concept of New Freedom along the naturally implied socialist lines (the bigger government imposing humanitarian fairness on the society which it governs), the evolution of this concept led the way, even in Wilson’s time, to the American government trying to impose these principles not on its own society, but on the rest of the world. Hence, here, in Wilson’s New Freedom already, we can find the noxious seeds of modern American neoconservatism, with its imperial prescription for the New American Twenty-First Century. Well, President Woodrow Wilson’s imperial prescription was, presumably, for the New American Twentieth Century, and we know how the rest of that century had turned out…
Woodrow Wilson And The Great War.
President Wilson was known as a peace-loving man, and during the first four-plus years of his Presidency, including three years of World War I, he would be living up to his reputation. But then things changed.
As with everything else in history, there have been great misconceptions about exactly how America entered the Great War in Europe and why. The name of the British ocean liner the Lusitania is unfalteringly brought up whenever the main reason of President Wilson’s abandonment of his nation’s neutrality pledge is given by a host of lightweight American historians, yet surely the connection between the two events is hard to find, and even harder to acknowledge.
It is true that on May 7, 1915, the ill-fated British ship was indeed sunk by a German torpedo and among at least 1200 passengers killed were 128 Americans. But it is also true that almost two years would pass before the United States would finally declare a war on Germany. Two years is long enough a stretch, to cast doubt on the feasibility of any such connection.
The fact is that the Americans didn’t want to join the European war, and the Germans did not want it either, as the German Embassy in Washington kept buying paid advertisements in American newspapers, advising the public to avoid sailing on British ships in the Atlantic. Those who would not heed this warning, did so at their own peril, as the Lusitania incident clearly demonstrated.
The British claimed that the Lusitania had been a strictly civilian ship, and its sinking was an act of German barbarism. The Germans insisted that the ship had carried significant military cargo (using the passengers as what today we call a human shield) and was thus a legitimate target. Indeed, it was later found out that there was a large store of war munitions carried by the Lusitania, and it was as a result of their explosion when hit by a German torpedo, that the ship sank.
President Wilson reacted to the sinking of the Lusitania by demanding reparations from Germany for every dead American passenger, plus a pledge not to sink passenger ships. Germany paid the reparations and did not mind making the required pledge, as long as it was understood that the sunk ship had clearly been used for militarily purposes by the British. It was clear to any objective mind that the last thing Germany wanted in this affair was a war with the United States, and the reverse had to be true as well. But there were not too many objective minds regarding the war at that time. Lusitania or no Lusitania, there were those who were bent on joining the war no matter what and those who were bent on staying out of it no matter what. Our old never-say-die friend William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State in Wilson’s administration, was a war hawk and resigned from his post in protest over his boss’s inadequate reaction. The President himself, however, appeared sufficiently satisfied with the German response to his demarche. Moreover, during his successful reelection campaign the next year, his trump card slogan was “He Kept Us out of War.” It all changed after that, soon after the start of Wilson’s second term, and here is how the popular historian Kenneth C. Davis explains the change.---
"The stated reasons for America’s involvement were freedom of the seas and the preservation of democracy. But neither side in this war had a monopoly on illegal naval warfare. Nor was the democratic ideology so powerful among America’s allies that Wilson thought he should fight to maintain it as far back as 1914.
In his favor Wilson tried admirably to restrain both sides and mediate a peace. But as in almost every other war America has fought, powerful forces in industry, banking and commerce cynically thought that war was healthy. And if the world was going to be divvied up after the fighting was over, America might as well get its fair share of the spoils."
Ironically, the victorious end of the Great War did not bring much wanted satisfaction for President Wilson. His cherished brainchild, The League of Nations, although temporarily imposed on Europe, was snubbed by the United States Senate which refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Soon thereafter in September 1919 Wilson suffered a stroke, which was carefully concealed from the American public. Although several staged pictures and even live appearances of him were produced, his condition was unquestionably debilitating and would later become the principal case for arguing and adopting the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, dealing with the question of orderly succession whenever the President or Vice President becomes unable to perform his functions.
The Red Scare.
Before Joseph Raymond McCarthy, was Alexander Mitchell Palmer, Attorney General of the United States in the Woodrow Wilson Administration. The infamous “red scare,” which lasted for several decades, starts with him.
Let us remember that it was the time of the rise of Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism which were both somehow fused together into the “red” specter of Marx’s and Lenin’s Communism. In fact, it was mostly the Bolshevik victory in Russia, which was beginning to generate a considerable domestic Communist following, boisterously publicized by a host of European Comintern agitators and their local sympathizers. A lot of Americans felt extremely uncomfortable with this particular Zeitgeist.
Ironically, Palmer was by no means a paragon of Conservative Republicanism. A Quaker and a Democrat, he found himself on the progressive wing of his party. When the newly elected President Wilson offered him the post of Secretary of War, Palmer declined, citing his pacifist Quaker beliefs. The post of Attorney General was much more to his liking, and although it was offered to him rather belatedly, in 1919, he was most happy to accept it.
One of Palmer’s first acts in office was the release of some 10,000 German aliens taken into US government custody during the Great War. On other occasions he showed such reluctance to go after the radicals that he was questioned by the US Senate as to the reasons of his inactivity.
It all changed when radical danger struck close to Palmer’s own home. Following a series of assassination attempts against him and his family, Palmer became a different man. The hard-hitting series of effective anti-Radical raids he conducted in November 1919 and January 1920 became known as the Palmer Raids. Thousands of suspects were arrested and tagged for deportation. However only five hundred were in fact deported, as the United States Department of Labor, officially responsible for these deportations, protested against Palmer’s zealous and visibly biased pursuit of his new anti-Radical agenda, and dismissed most of his cases. At the end of the short-lived frenzy, just like it would be in Joe McCarthy’s case, the Congress and the President both sharply rebuked Palmer, and the public and the press blamed him for… the ineffectiveness of his own witch hunt.
His zeal thus having been checked, Palmer ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for President in 1920. Then rather surprisingly he mellowed again. In the last days of the Wilson Administration he asked the President to pardon one of the most conspicuous and ideologically dangerous American radicals to date: the jailed leader of the Socialist Party of America, one of the greatest admirers of Lenin and of Bolshevism, Eugene Debs. But this time it was the ailing Wilson’s turn to get tough, for an understandable reason, and Palmer’s bizarre, almost random petition was denied…
Strange times, strange people, strange actions! But, you know, they were somehow better than what we are having today. Then, one could certainly disagree with the things that were done, but at least they made some sense. Today, nothing does.
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