Wilson, Past and Present

The neoconservatives turned Woodrow Wilson into something he was not. In truth, Obama is more like him than Bush ever was.

The minute I stop changing my mind as President, with the change of all the circumstances in the world, I will be a back number.” These are not the words of the Woodrow Wilson most of us know: unflinching idealist, narrow moralist, stubborn racist. But as John Milton Cooper Jr. demonstrates in his biography of the 28th president, they are words to take seriously if we want to understand the ideas, achievements, errors, and impact of a man whose story is too often treated as old news, even as his foreign policy legacy is taken up by liberals and conservatives alike today.

Indeed, Woodrow Wilson should relegate most previous efforts to back-number status themselves. Debate over Wilson’s practical fidelity to his creed will persist, but his ideal of statesmanship as informed adjustment rather than rigid resistance to change, and his genuine commitment to it, will be harder to dispute after reading Cooper’s deeply researched book. Moreover, the appeal of Wilson’s pragmatic idealism in his day, and its divergence from the so-called “Wilsonian” policies pursued and proscribed by ideologues ever since, will interest anyone pondering a new president’s efforts to shift American policy–and political culture–in a more deliberative, even humble, yet fundamentally idealistic direction.

Cooper presents Wilson as a flawed character, marred further by prejudices common to his era, while reminding readers of his timeless virtues and accomplishments. In short, he treats Wilson as both human being and great man. Not everyone will grant that Cooper succeeds; even historians may balk at Cooper’s comfort with contradictions, especially those of a man many in the academy and beyond see as a racist, imperialist, and enemy of civil liberties.

Such contradictions too often cloud our understanding of Wilson, encouraging many liberals to repudiate his legacy in toto. Historians have rightly castigated him for his apathy toward racial injustice and impatience with the civil rights leaders who complained. They have justly condemned the violations of civil liberties his administration committed during wartime. Yet as president of Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, and president of the United States, Wilson spearheaded reforms that awed contemporaries with their boldness and inspired even avant-garde progressives with their egalitarian implications.

True, Wilson sometimes described himself as conservative. But Wilson’s understanding of conservatism bears little relation to modern conceptions. To him, it meant eschewing theory and taking experience–past, present, and most important, social–as one’s guide for responding to change. Essentially, it meant pragmatism. When, in 1910, his gubernatorial rival promised never to ignore “constitutional limitations” in serving the people’s needs, Wilson retorted that he would be “an unconstitutional Governor” who would do just that if circumstances demanded it. Three years later, he inaugurated his presidency by promising tariff reform, progressive taxation, expanded credit, and several other measures designed, as Cooper puts it, “to bring justice and protection to ordinary citizens” struggling with rapid economic change–and in 18 marathon months he pushed nearly all of them through Congress.

Wilson’s attitudes toward the outside world can seem as contradictory as his domestic views. He is remembered both as an imperialist and prophet of international democracy. At the turn of the last century, Wilson did embrace imperialism as a means of uplifting other peoples while enhancing America’s power, and Cooper cites Wilson’s early Latin-American policies as evidence that “a bit of the imperialist was lurking within this new Democratic president.” Yet Cooper refuses to assume that deep-seated prejudice toward nonwhite peoples persisted to shape Wilson’s later foreign policy. There is too much evidence it did not. After a hubristic intervention in Mexico in April 1914, Wilson spent three years resisting pressure for a full-scale invasion of the revolution-torn country, even when cross-border chaos threatened Americans and his presidency. His early mistakes there convinced him the Mexicans were not political children wanting a teacher. Indeed, he remarked in August 1914, “There were no conceivable circumstances” justifying outside attempts to direct “a revolution as profound as that which occurred in France.” For the rest of Wilson’s presidency, that same attitude informed his policies toward other peoples struggling for self-government, and he interfered with those struggles, regretfully, only when it seemed necessary to prevent more damaging interference from other quarters.

As for racial matters at home, Wilson rarely spoke of them. Too many other matters, vastly more important to him and most white Americans, occupied him. Certainly Wilson sometimes exhibited racial prejudice. But he also sometimes expressed empathy for blacks, and in rare instances acted, timidly, upon it–as when during the war he vehemently (but belatedly) condemned lynching. Either way, he left few clues to his mind, except that it was generally elsewhere. On civil liberties, too, Wilson remains, in Cooper’s words, “a mystery.” The best one can glean from his papers is that he feared but respected the power of popular passions, gambled on his ability to direct them to constructive ends in wartime, and was either distracted from or incapable of that task amidst the others war presented.

Despite these challenges, evidence of Wilson’s democratic instincts litters Cooper’s pages. The figure that emerges expended far more energy pursuing ideals modern liberals can embrace than clinging to prejudices they must abhor. Those various ideals were subsumed under a single, paramount ideal: perfecting self-government. Yet Wilson’s particular conceptions of his ideals, and how to realize them, changed over time, reflecting the very meaning of self-government as he understood it: the power and responsibility of communities to adapt cooperatively to change. In short, Wilson was an oxymoron in modern political discourse: a pragmatic idealist.

• 1
• 2
• 3

Post a Comment

Name

Email

Comments (you may use HTML tags for style)

Verification

Note: Several minutes will pass while the system is processing and posting your comment. Do not resubmit during this time or your comment will post multiple times.