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BOOK
REVIEW
Wilsonian
idealism reconsidered
Woodrow Wilson
(Profiles in Power series) by John
Thompson
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
 Historian Robert Tucker once remarked,
"Wilsonianism is a many-splendored thing." It has been
attributed to as widely divergent figures as Jawaharlal
Nehru of India, former US presidents Ronald Reagan and
Harry Truman as well as South African statesman Nelson
Mandela. Those who cling to standard liberal
representations of Wilsonian idealism recoil at
reactionary and realist politicians being termed
Wilsonian, but revisionists often make the point that
Woodrow Wilson was not a drifting dreamer but a
practitioner of "higher realism" who rejected imposition
of one powerful nation's will on other great people.
Some have seen Wilson's presidential policies as
stemming from deep Christian values of the US South,
while others label him "evangelist of American political
economy", whose main aim was a liberal capitalist world
order that the United States could dominate. If
political scientist Hans Morgenthau lambasted Wilson's
"utopianism, legalism and sentimentalism", many of the
president's contemporaries were staggered by his
opportunism, sacrificing "any opinion at any moment for
his own benefit and going back on it the next moment if
he thought it would be profitable".
Who was the
real Woodrow Wilson? Historian John Thompson's biography
of the man who was briefly the most famous leader of the
world draws on newly released archives and presents a
more rounded view of his personality and philosophy. The
author unearths little-known facets of Wilson's
leadership style and belief system to present a balanced
picture of the US president who fatefully ushered his
hitherto isolated country into the maelstrom of world
politics.
Born in 1856 to a family of
Presbyterian ministers, Wilson grew up sharing the
general Southern middle-class racist attitudes premised
on white superiority. Though deeply religious, Wilson's
thinking in matters of the world was entirely secular.
He "did not see politics as primarily an arena for the
realization of Christian values". As a law student in
Virginia and Princeton, he practiced elocution with
great passion "to get a mastery of correct and elegant
expression for the future" (p 20). He was intensely
ambitious and unusually focused, citing "the latent
politician within me" to give up law practice for
studying history and political science at Johns Hopkins
University in 1883.
Wilson's early publications
decried "despotism" of congressional committees and the
decline of presidential prerogatives. He shared the
general dissatisfaction with the then state of US
government by harping that it offered few positions of
"commanding authority for men of real ability". The US
"congressional government" was inferior in Wilson's eyes
to British "cabinet government", since the latter had a
single center of authority. He idolized British
conservative Edmund Burke for his "hostility to abstract
reasoning in politics" and "profoundly practical and
utilitarian gospel of expediency" (p
34).
Contrary to pious pretense, Wilson stressed
the limitations of public opinion in democracy and
attached himself to a heroic conception of leadership
that rejected the "Rousseauite view of popular
sovereignty" (a reference to 18th-century Swiss-French
philosopher, author and political theorist Jean Jacques
Rousseau). Simultaneously, he held that leaders must
always be conscious of the need to develop public
support for their positions and stay in tune with the
thoughts and feelings of the majority.
In 1902,
Wilson was appointed president of Princeton University,
a pedestal he utilized to deliver addresses on national
politics and enter the Democratic Party ranks. As early
as 1906, Wilson was mentioned as a possible candidate
for the US presidency. Among his achievements at
Princeton was an overhaul of the undergraduate course of
study by reconciling and coordinating the ideas of
others. Controversies surrounding location of the campus
of the graduate college gave him a new political
identity as a fighter against the power of aristocracy
and social privilege. Big-business infelicities had been
subject to growing agitation in the country and Wilson
caught the pulse of the times by adopting the rhetoric
of attacking exclusive social claques.
In 1910,
Wilson ran for governor of New Jersey state and won
handsomely. "Whereas in the mid-1900s his targets had
been populists, radical theorists and nostrums of
socialists, by 1912 he was warning of the 'pervasive
power of the great interests which now dominate our
development'" (p 52). Encouraged by the reception to his
speeches denouncing "machine politics" and plutocracy,
Wilson set up campaign headquarters for the 1912
Democratic presidential nomination. Though embarrassed
for his volte face from conservative to
"progressive Democrat", Wilson managed to get nominated
by a two-thirds majority. Riding on a wave of antitrust
legislation, Wilson defeated Theodore Roosevelt (who
stood as a Progressive Party candidate) and Republican
William Taft to reach the pinnacle.
President
Wilson immediately backtracked on left-leaning electoral
promises. He chose conservative cabinet members and
reassured Wall Street against victimization. Black
leaders were disappointed when the Wilson administration
began segregating federal employees by race. On the
other side of the balance sheet, Wilson greatly reduced
the level of import duties, passed a banking-sector
regulatory act and checked unfair trade practices. "His
positions on policy issues are explained by pragmatic
considerations than by any ideological conviction" (p
77).
In foreign affairs, Wilson gloated at his
"power to control them absolutely" (contrasted to the
1880s and 1890s). He displayed a variety of sometimes
conflicting impulses, arguing that the United States had
"not an errand of conquest, but an errand of service",
but also that there was "no more glorious way to die
than in battle" (p 79). In the American hemisphere,
Wilson insisted on maintaining US hegemony. US military
force was inserted to effect regime change in Nicaragua
and take direct control of Haiti and Santo Domingo. In
1914, Wilson prepared for a full naval blockade of
Mexico and the occupation of Tampico and Veracruz, only
to hold back in the end saying there were "no
conceivable circumstances for us to direct by force the
internal processes of what is a profound revolution" (p
87). Widespread approval of Wilson's early neutral
non-involvement stance in World War I was one of the
factors that aided his re-election in 1916.
The
years 1915 and 1916 were watershed ones in US foreign
policy. German U-boat submarines torpedoed merchant
ships. The Lusitania sinking killed 128 Americans.
Wilson skillfully placed himself on the middle ground
between the belligerent reaction of Roosevelt and the
pacifism of his secretary of state, William Bryan. He
demanded that the German government pay reparations and
prevent recurrence of attacks on civilian liners, but
rebuffed calls for entering the war. Yet the regular
army and National Guard were enlarged and a big
shipbuilding program was authorized.
In 1916,
Wilson committed the United States to participation in a
postwar League of Nations, spurred by desire to bring an
early end to the war. The promise of full US
participation in an international organization to keep
peace and security of all countries was a carrot to
war-weary Europeans to look for an armistice. Wilson's
rhetoric flourished through calls for "a new and more
wholesome diplomacy", condemnation of power politics and
stress on "inviolable rights of peoples and of mankind".
He claimed to be "speaking for the silent mass of
mankind everywhere who have as yet had not place or
opportunity to speak their real hearts out" (p
134).
Germany's decision to launch full-scale
submarine war on commercial shipping and the failure of
"armed neutrality" soon led Wilson to declare the US at
war, but this monumental decision was justified as
necessary so that he "would have a hand at the peace
table". US entry into World War I produced an
interesting change in Wilson's conception of the League
of Nations. Reversing earlier talk of universal
membership, he pronounced that "either all governments
must become democratic or some would be excluded". This
was intended to minimize disagreements with European
allies who were loath to allow Germany and its friends
membership of the league. Wilson's "national
self-determination principle" was also watered down in
early 1918 to exclude subjects of the French and British
empires from autonomous development.
On the eve
of the Paris Peace Conference, Allied governments
conceded the importance of Wilson's ideas, but with
German power irretrievably broken, there was no
effective challenge to a punitive peace. Wilson
shouldered millennial expectations when he arrived in
Europe for a six-month diplomatic roulette in December
1918 but, in reality, the cards he held to forge a just
peace were not as formidable as he and his well-wishers
presumed. He could not negotiate any reduction in Allied
debts in return for going soft on Germany as the US
Congress controlled the purse strings. Wilson's trump
card of a separate peace with Germany was too risky to
be implemented and a resurgent right wing, represented
by David Lloyd George in Britain, Georges Clemenceau in
France and Benito Mussolini in Italy, was keen on
vengeance.
Wilson's visceral attachment to the
league was exploited by the British, who saw cooperation
in carving an international organization as "something
for which we could hope to secure concessions in return"
(p 197). Wilson acquiesced on an executive council in
the league with permanent members from the Great Powers
(segued into the United Nations Security Council) and
rotating representation from "middle" and "minor"
states. Territorial changes tied to self-determination
were dropped on Allied insistence that this would
destabilize Eastern Europe. Wilson vehemently opposed
grabbing of German colonies by Allied states, but he had
to condone the league's new mandate systems that were
"little more than fig leaves for annexation" (p 202).
While Wilson was yielding on principles in
Paris, the Republican-majority Congress was railing
against the league for its "restrictions on America's
independence of action". Political difficulties at home,
spearheaded by Henry Cabot Lodge's vigorous anti-league
movement, lowered Wilson's prestige in Europe and
allowed Clemenceau's accusation that Wilson was
"pro-German". Wilson's intransigent stand against
Italian claims to territory on the Dalmatian coast posed
the danger that Rome would opt out of the league.
Sensing a slippery slope, Japan announced that if it
were not granted Chinese Shantung, it, too, would
boycott the league. The overall result of inter-Allied
bickering and Wilson's declining influence was a
shockingly harsh Treaty of Versailles for Germany, the
vehicle for Adolf Hitler's rise.
Back home,
Wilson's fight to secure Senate approval for the treaty
lasted months and ended in bitter failure. Republicans
were bent on reasserting Congressional pressures after
wartime exercise of extraordinary presidential powers.
Wilson went on a countrywide public speaking spree to
garner support and made some memorable speeches. "Dare
we reject the league and break the heart of the world?"
he queried. The league, he asserted, "is the only
possible guarantee against war, a 98 percent insurance
... if America goes back upon mankind, mankind has no
other place to turn ... either we are going to guarantee
civilization or we are going to abandon it" (p 229).
Sentiments in the country and in Senate were, however,
not conducive to international commitment by the US, and
Wilson's league proposal failed to get the mandatory
two-thirds ratification.
In the 1920
presidential election, Wilson became "as unpopular as he
had once been popular", the Senate loss ringing as a
personal defeat for the president. Republicans targeted
ethnic community vote banks that Wilson had offended,
particularly German, Italian and Irish Americans. The
results were a massive repudiation of Wilson, who quit
office totally broken-hearted, the 1920 Nobel Peace
Prize award notwithstanding.
Woodrow Wilson was
a product of his time and background, a practical
politician who did several bargains in his career. He
was never a stickler for a moral if it redounded to his
political growth. Had he gazed into the crystal ball and
glimpsed the anti-league wave in the 1920 poll, he would
most certainly have accepted amendments to the peace
treaty. Wilson's was a classic case of the maxim that
politics is the art of the possible. The ultimate
message from John Thompson's exegesis is that
considerable discretion must be employed in usage of the
word "Wilsonian".
Woodrow Wilson,
(Profiles in Power series) by John Thompson.
Pearson Education Limited, New York, 2002. ISBN:
0-582-24737-3. Price: US$15.95, 265 pages.
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