ON JANUARY 8, 1918, Woodrow Wilson used an address before a joint session of Congress to unveil his Fourteen Points, the list of American war aims that has come to be seen as the definitive statement of Wilsonianism. Though he would refine these original Fourteen Points over the next eighteen months, his January speech to Congress set out an independent course for U.S. war aims and outlined one of the most liberal programs for a postwar settlement on either side of the Atlantic. Eight of the Fourteen Points dealt with specific issues, mainly territorial, such as where the proper borders of Poland, Belgium, and France should lie. But the other six outlined a remarkably progressive vision for the future of world politics. With little specificity, Wilson outlined six principles that placed mutual dependence and reciprocity—Christianity’s Golden Rule, which also happened to form the heart of Social Gospel progressivism—at the heart of international relations: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas (an abiding American concern since the Quasi War with France and War of 1812 with Britain), free trade, disarmament, national self-determination, and a league of nations. The Fourteen Points represented Wilson’s vision for permanent peace; some said they were hopelessly idealistic, their messenger irredeemably arrogant. “The good Lord Himself required only ten points,” complained French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. “Wilson has fourteen.”1
Fittingly, the Fourteen Points received ecstatic support from the American churches. It represented the perfect combination of right and might that underpinned the Christian concept of a progressive crusade. And it seemed to mark the culmination of millennial hopes of a new world. “The world that existed before the War has disappeared forever,” declared Wilson’s friend John Mott. “For the world it is a new birth, a great day of God such as comes only once in 100 or 1000 years.” Shailer Mathews agreed, arguing that it was now “beyond belief” that the world “will ever revert permanently to conditions as they were before 1914.” Most appealing was the notion that this, finally, was a plan to end all war. Christianity had led the way in abolishing slavery a half century earlier, Harry Emerson Fosdick pointed out, so why not war? The Great War was this generation’s stern test, its Civil War. Just as many abolitionists had abandoned pacifism and nonresistance, by 1917–18 most liberal clergy believed that war was the only answer to tyranny and injustice. Argued Mathews, “non-resistance to evil might sometimes be the greatest of crimes.” The churches’ task, the FCC argued, was “to quicken the spirit of America in support of the President’s policies in prosecuting the war for Democracy, International Justice, and a League of Nations.” This was not a peace movement but “emphatically a war campaign.”2
To the ecumenical mind, collective security and international organization seemed to offer the best means of ensuring permanent peace. Independent of Wilson, ecumenists had been promoting this same vision of a permanent peace for years. Recall the antebellum evangelical peace societies’ dream of a “Congress of Nations” and a “League of Universal Brotherhood”; in 1911, Frederick Lynch called for the creation of a “United Nations of the World.” Recall also their support throughout the nineteenth century for permanent international arbitration panels that would resolve disputes before they led to war. Such visions of institutionalized global cooperation had become central to the American Christian worldview. So it is little wonder that Christian figures turned to the biblical concept of “the brotherhood of man” as a way out of the European war. Indeed, Andrew Carnegie had spent millions in setting up Church Peace Union for this very purpose. “Surely,” Carnegie wrote in his New Year’s greeting card for 1915,
after an armistice is established between the nations now unfortunately at war, the majority of enlightened people in all civilized lands will realize that permanent world peace would be Earth’s greatest blessing and is entirely practicable through a union of a very few powerful nations pledged to maintain it, and inviting all other civilized lands to become members thereof, each nation contributing to the cost of such union in proportion to its population and wealth.
In this way, wrote Carnegie, the “Brotherhood of Man would then have arrived, and life on this Earth flash forth glimpses of Heaven.”3
Carnegie’s plea was not unusual, for the concept of a managed peace along cooperative lines flowed naturally, inevitably, out of the ecumenical project. Groups such as Church Peace Union and the World Alliance for the Promotion of International Friendship through the Churches were established to build global links and foster a spirit of transnational cooperation and integration that would lead to peace. This was a variant of the liberal worldview, best described as ecumenical internationalism, that stemmed from concerns about globalization and interdependence, biblical ethics, and traditional Christian peace advocacy. In 1915, the YMCA leader D. Willard Lyon proposed a peace settlement established on “the law of cooperation” and a “federation of the world” guided by Christianity’s ideals and “universal values.” Such a settlement, he claimed, was the “Christian equivalent of war.” A year later, the World Alliance called for a “New Internationalism” to be founded after the war on the principle of “the equal right of all nations and races, small and great, to share in the world’s resources” under the watchful eye of “a family of nations—an international brotherhood” that would manage the new peaceful, equitable order.4
Calls for some form of a league of nations accelerated in 1917, when it became clear that the United States would hold the initiative in any peace conference and that Wilson was sympathetic to a permanent postwar international organization. This was the ecumenists’ moment, when secular groups sympathetic to a Wilsonian basis for peace were still coming to terms with its meaning, and they did not hesitate to seize it. In the ecumenical mind, if the Christian faith was universal, if the gospel was universal, and if the church was universal, then the ultimate sin was what one ecumenist condemned as “isolation and exclusiveness.” Cooperation through integration was something of an article of faith for Social Gospelers. Washington Gladden had warned of the “errors of individualism,” while Walter Rauschenbusch encouraged “the cooperative principle” because it facilitated communication, prevented misunderstanding, and reduced tension and conflict. So it was no surprise that liberal Protestant clergy would view barriers to recognition of a common humanity, such as state sovereignty and racism, as the root of all evil, and the sanctification of a transnational society based on reciprocal obligation as the source of an endless, postmillennial peace. The spread of a global society of brotherhood, declared the Home Missions Board of the Presbyterian Church, was an “incomparable missionary opportunity” for the “world’s greatest Republic [and] Christian democracy.” Other denominations, such as the Episcopalians, made similar declarations of Wilsonian intent, while a minister with the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society hailed the president’s plan for peace as the moment marking the “birth of [a] world consciousness.” Even ecumenical clergy in the Jim Crow South argued that racial integration and international organization were both necessary and mutually supportive.5
When Wilson himself announced his own Wilsonian vision with his January 1918 Fourteen Points address, and when he baptized the League of Nations as the vehicle for its success in a major speech in New York in September, mainline ecumenical clergy mobilized en masse in support. To them, the League represented “the political expression of the Kingdom of God on earth.” The reformation of the world could now begin in earnest. From this new world order, the reformation of America could also begin. Despite the wartime fervor, liberal internationalist clergy warned that even though the United States had been chosen to lead, Americans were not free from sin. Thus the “world must not only be made safe for America,” Reverend Robert Denison preached even before Wilson’s September speech, “democracy must also be made sure and complete in America. We must go on and perfect a League of Nations,” but Americans must also eliminate the injustices within their own society.6
As the largest and broadest of the ecumenical organizations, the Federal Council of Churches and Church Peace Union led the way in promoting the application of ecumenism to world politics. From the very beginning of the war in Europe, they envisioned cooperation and mutual dependence as the pillars of peace. Ironically, in August 1914 they had teamed up to sponsor a peace conference in Konstanz, Germany, near the Swiss border. While en route from Paris, delegates were roused from the train and told they could not continue because the Germans had torn up the railroad tracks and closed the border with France. The Americans made it to Konstanz eventually, but just as Europe was beginning its agonizing descent into the depths of an unusually hellish war. Powerless to stop the spread of war, the FCC and Church Peace Union delegates relocated to London and devoted themselves to the promotion of an ecumenical peace settlement once the fighting stopped. Their first step was both audacious and characteristically bureaucratic: they set up yet another organization, the World Alliance. Little did they know that the war would last another four years.7
The FCC and Church Peace Union, either individually or in tandem, promoted ecumenical solutions for the duration of the war and through the subsequent debate over the terms of peace. Their only real difference was whether peace should take precedence over justice: the FCC accommodated itself to the demands of preparedness, while Church Peace Union steadfastly remained committed to peace advocacy until the United States entered the war. Yet as ecumenists and as internationalists, they both argued that it was essential that human relations—be they economic, social, or diplomatic—be organized along the principle, in the words of Reverend Linley Gordon of the World Alliance, that “general human interests should take precedence over special national interests, and a nation no less than an individual must recognize that it lives as a member of a larger whole.” This principle represented the crucible of peace, and for the remainder of the war the ecumenical groups made the League their top priority.8
Crucially, ecumenists saw international peace and religious peace as two sides of the same coin. Nations needed to adopt cooperative, collective security, but churches needed to practice what they preached by continuing to further the ecumenical project. Such was the intensity of wartime ecumenism that U.S. intervention in turn stimulated further initiatives for church union as a natural complement to efforts to spur international peace through collective security. If Christians did not lead, they reasoned, the world would not follow. In the mission field, this meant supporting another tenet of the Wilsonian creed, national self-determination. In Korea, for example, American Protestant missionaries were instrumental in encouraging nationalists to press Wilson to support Korean independence from Japan.9
Even pious captains of industry saw no conflict between the gospel of wealth at home and the Social Gospel abroad. Carnegie had done much to promote both causes, and ecumenists hailed him as someone who could create the “United Churches of the World.” Carnegie was joined by his fellow captain of industry, John D. Rockefeller Jr. A devout Baptist and avid philanthropist, Rockefeller supported the League and pushed for greater church unity as the two best means to preserve lasting peace. Invoking scripture and the Christian aim of a “Brotherhood of Men and Nations” in a wartime speech in Denver, Rockefeller declared that modern technology and communications meant that “No longer can any man live to himself alone, nor any nation. The world has become a unit.” Just as the “peace and prosperity of any nation depend upon the happiness and the welfare of all of the people in that nation,” so the “peace and prosperity of the world are dependent upon the happiness and welfare of all the nations of the world. And no force will be so powerful in conserving universal peace and good will after the war is over as the spirit of Brotherhood among men and nations.” With stage one of his plan on track, Rockefeller then donated funds to establish the Interchurch World Movement in 1919. In matters of faith and diplomacy, Rockefeller’s golden capitalist touch let him down: American participation in both the League of Nations and the Interchurch World Movement failed. Later, no less committed to ecumenism, the Rockefellers stopped donating money directly to the Baptist church and pledged to give only to nondenominational, interdenominational, or ecumenical groups.10
Christian liberal internationalists enhanced the Wilsonian creed by adding further provisions. They all agreed that open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, free trade, and collective security were worthwhile endeavors and indispensable to peace, but they supplemented Wilsonianism’s democratic thrust with religious liberty. This was a peculiarly American preoccupation and had little resonance elsewhere, particularly in Europe where an established church was not only the norm but thought to be essential to social stability. Wilson was committed to religious liberty nonetheless and did what he could to promote it in Paris. In the Council of Four at the Paris conference, it was he who pressed—and personally drafted clauses—for the guarantee of religious liberty in the newly independent nations to be created from the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. Wilson, for example, insisted that Poland be compelled by treaty to respect the freedoms of conscience and worship, a move designed to protect Poland’s beleaguered Jewish minority.11
Wilson’s allies on both ends of the theological spectrum were even more assertive. On behalf of American missionaries, Mott implored Wilson to include a commitment to religious liberty in the terms of any peace treaty. The Southern Baptist Convention, at this stage deeply internationalist despite its theological conservatism, placed the First Amendment’s nonestablishment and free exercise clauses above all other freedoms and urged their worldwide application. The Federal Council of Churches urged the framers of the League Charter to protect religious liberty as a “fundamental feature … of vital democracy and essential to the peace of the world.” Unitarian layman and former president William Howard Taft, founder of the League to Enforce Peace and the leading Republican advocate for the League of Nations, went a step further, arguing that the essence of the League meant it would automatically protest violations of religious liberty even if religion had not been explicitly codified. To Americans, there were few if any principles as valuable as the freedoms of conscience and worship, from which all other human rights flowed.12
IT WAS NO ACCIDENT that the mainline churches and Wilson expressed the same millennial visions of a postwar peace based on collective security and world federation. As his aide Ray Stannard Baker commented to Wilson after the war, the churches represented by the FCC “are the sincerest supporters of your principles,” and the president thanked them for their support. Wilson did not turn to the clergy for advice or guidance on the Fourteen Points. His trusted adviser Colonel Edward House and the Inquiry, a confidential team of journalists and scholars who served as special advisers on postwar order, helped give shape to Wilson’s scattered images of a just peace. But the churches were not unimportant, and Wilson did not turn to them because he did not need to; he was so thoroughly steeped in mainline Protestant theology, so familiar with the premises of the Social Gospel, that it would have been surprising had his foreign policy resembled anything else. Wilsonianism was essentially an expression of Christian reformism, of the global application of progressive Christianity, not because of a conscious vision but simply because Wilson could not escape who he was.13
Throughout his life, Woodrow Wilson was a devoted Presbyterian. He was the son, nephew, and grandson of Presbyterian ministers on both sides of his family, and he took his spiritual heritage very seriously. In particular, Wilson used Calvinism as a prism through which to perceive the secular world. His belief in the comforting dictates of providence and the guiding hand of God was especially strong and would not have been out of place had he lived among the first generation of Puritans in Massachusetts Bay. “There is a spirit that rules us,” he declared on the stump during his first run for the presidency in 1912. “If I did not believe in Providence I would feel like a man going blindfolded through a haphazard world.” Wilson marveled at those “small,” futile people who would “intrigue against Providence. How God must laugh!” Or as he told a confidant during the Senate fight over the Treaty of Versailles: “If I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad, but my faith in God holds me to the belief that He is in some way working out His own plans through human perversities and mistakes.” Another vestige of his Calvinism was his belief that the United States was the chosen nation. “I believe that God presided over the inception of this nation,” he boasted during the 1912 presidential election campaign. “I believe that God planted in us the visions of liberty” and “that we are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.”14
Presbyterianism, learned at the feet of his father, impressed upon Wilson other ideas that had political as well as religious meaning. Perhaps the most important was covenant theology, a central tenet of the Presbyterian Church, especially the Scottish strain that guided the faith of both sides of his family. According to covenant theology, God had made a compact, a covenant, with his people. In return for their obedient faith, God would protect them and forgive their sins. This had particular resonance for American political thought, in which Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence had based the right to self-determination upon the idea that ruler and ruled were bound by a contract, and that George III had violated his end of the contract by ruling arbitrarily and tyrannically. The Scottish Covenanters of the 1630s, whom Wilson considered his intellectual and spiritual ancestors, grounded their faith and politics in the idea of God’s covenant, which motivated both their Presbyterianism and challenge to the English crown. Covenant theology informed Wilson’s thinking on history, law, education, and politics, and it followed him when he became a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, a professor at Princeton, and president of the United States.15
From his religious background, Wilson also developed a sharply defined appreciation of right and wrong, good and evil. Covenant theology left no room for ambiguity or moral relativism: a person either obeyed God’s law or did not. To Wilson, recalled Secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston, “God was an immanent presence. He was with Him in the White House, and if he could discern what He wanted, he gave no heed to what anybody else or everybody else wanted or thought.” Wilson possessed a clarity of moral vision that struck observers, particularly foreigners, as unusually dogmatic and inflexible. Most often, others used religious metaphors when describing him. Constantin Dumba, the Austrian ambassador to Washington, found Wilson to be “doctrinaire.” To Sir Cecil Spring Rice, the British ambassador, Wilson was a “hardened saint.” The economist John Maynard Keynes, a member of the British delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, shrewdly likened Wilson to “a Nonconformist minister, perhaps a Presbyterian. His thought and his temperament were essentially theological not intellectual.” Keynes worried most of all that Wilson’s “theological temperament” sometimes “became dangerous” because it was so dogmatic. Harold Nicolson, another member of the British delegation, viewed Wilson as “a prophet.” David Lloyd George, the British prime minister who should have been Wilson’s natural ally in Paris, later wrote that the president “regarded himself as a missionary whose function it was to rescue the poor European heathen from their age-long worship of false and fiery gods.” “I can get on with you,” Clemenceau confided to one of Wilson’s advisers. “You are practical … but talking to Wilson is something like talking to Jesus Christ!” Saint, minister, prophet, missionary, messiah—Wilson’s contemporaries were certainly not agnostic about his manner, bearing, and temperament.16
For Wilson, religion formed the basis for politics: from religious liberty flowed political liberty, and from religious justice flowed political justice. This is not to say that he sought to impose a particular religious vision or belief upon the nation. He had no pretensions of being a theologian or making a contribution to religious thought. As one of his biographers notes, Wilson’s “religious concerns were preeminently moral, not theological, in character; the Christian life was merely the task of acting out God’s certain commands in a world of good and evil.” But like Washington, Madison, and Lincoln before him, Wilson saw in religious faith the basic requirements for democratic citizenship, patriotism, and political responsibility. As a Christian republican, he believed that only God and Christ could claim the right of divine rule; people owed them their allegiance, and thus could only rule one another through accountable, democratic procedures. A denial of this belief was what made materialist political systems, such as communism, so undemocratic. “Some men make themselves the centre of the universe instead of making God the centre,” Wilson told his secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, which gave them the “wrong outlook upon the world.” On another occasion, President Wilson told a Fourth of July audience that the “way to success in this great country” was “to show that you are not afraid of anybody except God and His final verdict. If I did not believe that, I would not believe in democracy. If I did not believe that, I would not believe that people can govern themselves.”17
Also very much in the tradition of Jefferson and Madison, Wilson saw religion as a vital source of liberty because it was the wellspring of individual thought and conscience. Religious faith provided “each man a magistracy over himself by insisting upon his personal, individual responsibility to God.” A former student from Princeton spoke of Wilson’s lectures on political freedom, in which the Scottish Covenanters had a starring role. “It was here that freedom of conscience took root,” the student recalled. It was “a steppingstone by which the past made its way into a future of wider justice.”18
A final element to Wilson’s civil religion, particularly after his adoption of progressivism, was the importance of religion to the spread of progress and the protection of justice. To be sure, his Southern Presbyterian heritage, with its instinctive separating of church from state, had always kept him somewhat at odds with the Social Gospel. The “object of the church as an organization [is] the salvation of souls” and “only indirectly the purification of Society,” he wrote in 1900. Despite an exposure to Social Gospel teachings as an undergraduate at Princeton, and despite having many mainline Protestant friends who discovered their calling in social reform, Wilson found the political activism of religious ministers distasteful and unappealing. As he explained to his friend John Mott, “I have had the fear in recent years that the ministers of our churches, by becoming involved in all sorts of social activities … have too much diverted their attention from the effectual preaching of the Word.” The “danger” was that “individual churches will become great philanthropic societies instead of being what it seems to me they ought to be, organizations from which go forth the spiritual stimulation which should guide all philanthropic effort.” But religion, with its prophetic insights and timeless moral precepts, was essential to a healthy society. Thus while Wilson found the preaching of politics distasteful, he was also an enthusiastic supporter of Protestant missions as agents of civilization and faith through progressive change. And of course, most crucially of all, Wilson himself was not a preacher. As a politician, unlike a minister, he was free to use faith as a guide to the implementation of political solutions to social problems. Thus while he could not strictly be considered a Social Gospeler, in a looser sense he shared many of their aims. To Wilson, the Christian religion was a progressive force, and he was, through and through, a Protestant reformer. “No doubt Christianity came into the world to save the world,” he proclaimed in 1909. “We are privileged to live in the midst of many manifestations of the great service that Christianity does to society, to the world that now is.”19
Politically and theologically, then, Wilson was an ecumenical internationalist. Moreover, from his devoutly Protestant background and contacts with mainline religious leaders, especially in the Presbyterian Church and within various branches of the missionary enterprise, he was already familiar with the principles of the ecumenical movement. Indeed, stemming from his Presbyterian-influenced affinity for order, organization, and governance, his theology was nearly identical to the ecumenists’. Moreover, Wilson was no stranger to ecumenical councils, and he had worked with and supported the Federal Council in its infancy. While president of Princeton University, he had given a speech on aspects of religious cooperation at the FCC’s founding convention in New York. “Cooperation is the vital principle of social life; not organization merely,” he declared in another speech to the FCC on “the translation of doctrine into life.” “But if the object of the organization is to afford a mechanism by which the whole community can cooperatively use its life, then there is a great deal in it.” From his many offers of “spiritual mediation” before 1917 to his vision for a League of Nations afterward, Wilson’s diplomacy was steeped in the ideas of ecumenical internationalism.20
Most important, perhaps, the League of Nations and a codified set of principles such as the Fourteen Points fit naturally into the very basics of Wilson’s religious and political philosophy. His historical heroes, the Scottish Covenanters, had staked their claims to just authority and as protectors of liberty upon the notion of a compact—a written contract—between ruler and ruled. God, infallible and almighty, was unique in that only he could break the compact; only he was above reproach. Yet because he was wise and loving, God would reward the faithful with blessings on earth and everlasting life after death. Such compacts were always written down—be it the Bible or the Constitution, the Ten Commandments or the Fourteen Points—so that all knew their place, role, and obligations. For Wilson, the Bible was “the Magna Charta of the human soul,” and thus the foundation of democracy. Written compacts were supremely important because they prevented arbitrary rule, circumvented monopoly power, and undermined secret diplomacy.21
This was not an exclusively religious concept, of course, as the work of political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke attests. But for Wilson, it had a crucially important historical and religious component, one that strengthened his faith that the League of Nations and Fourteen Points would be the means to end war forever. According to Jan Smuts, a South African delegate in Paris who was one of the original architects of the League, it was Wilson who personally insisted on the term “covenant.” So it was no coincidence that Wilson often invoked the Covenanters when promoting the League. “The stern Covenanter tradition that is behind me sends many an echo down through the years,” he said in London in December 1918. “I wish that it were possible for us to do something like some of my very stern ancestors did, for among my ancestors are those very determined persons who were known as the Covenanters,” he remarked a few days later to an audience in Manchester. “I wish we could … enter into a great league and covenant, declaring ourselves, first of all, friends of mankind and uniting ourselves together for the maintenance and the triumph of right.” It was no coincidence that the League’s founding rules and principles would not be recorded in a charter, or a constitution, but a covenant. Indeed, neither was it a coincidence that the League would be headquartered in Geneva, the birthplace of Calvinism and the seat of Reformed Protestantism.22
MAINLINE PROTESTANTS MAY have dominated postwar planning, but Catholics and Jews supported the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations for reasons of their own. Both Catholics and Jews favored internationalist solutions to the problems of world politics, and both had Wilsonian idealists and philosophers of international relations within their ranks. Advocates of social thought represented the majority of those Catholics who thought seriously about the postwar order. Father John Ryan was the Catholic internationalists’ leader, but he was not alone. “There is no longer any dream of a nation at peace,” wrote Father William J. Kerby, a Catholic socialist. “There is vision now only of the world at peace.” Similarly, Moses Baroway, a young Jewish nationalist with the American Zionist Medical Unit in Palestine, expressed the Wilsonianism typical of American Jews. From Jerusalem, now in British hands, Baroway wrote his family in New York of his hope that an “international program that spells orderly living for a long time to come” would happen as a result of the Fourteen Points, especially the League of Nations. This was also the cause Brandeis and Wise supported.23
But other, more particular concerns motivated Catholics and Jews as well, and it was no coincidence that Baroway penned his letter while visiting Palestine. For Catholic and Jew alike, national self-determination promised an end to imperial subjugation abroad. For Catholics, it was sure to mean Irish home rule and freedom from the British—most Irish Catholics insisted that Ireland would be the standard by which Wilsonianism would be judged—though some worried that the League’s protections of national sovereignty might also be a way for the British to maintain their domination of Ireland. It was, William Cardinal O’Connell declared to the Irish County Clubs of Boston, “to God and America that Ireland must look for the vindication of all that her dead have died for. American intervention promises to help small nations. Be Irish and doubly be Americans.” Stephen Wise concurred, and wrote Wilson a week after the declaration of war to urge the president to issue another declaration, in the name of oppressed peoples everywhere, for Irish home rule. Not all Irish progressives and internationalists were also Wilsonians—Irish Catholic labor unions, for example, argued that the League of Nations would simply be beholden to the same monied powers that had kept Ireland under Britain’s thumb—but on the whole most saw Wilson as the best means to achieve independence.24
Though it was left unsaid, Rabbi Wise obviously had other causes in mind besides a free Ireland. For Jews, the League of Nations was sure to lead to a Zionist homeland in Palestine. Once an almost exclusively European endeavor, Zionism was becoming increasingly popular, and as a result assertive, in the United States. The Federation of American Zionists was founded in 1897, but it remained small and ineffectual until the war. In 1914, Louis D. Brandeis was elected president of the Federation. A Supreme Court judge and brilliant legal mind, Brandeis was also close to the president who nominated him to the Court, Woodrow Wilson. Because Brandeis’s immigrant connection to Europe was many years past—his parents fled Bohemia in 1848 and eventually settled in Kentucky, where he was raised—he possessed a thoroughly American identity that instantly infused Zionism with patriotic credibility in the United States. And beyond—when Balfour traveled to the United States, the man he wanted to confer with most was not Wilson, but Brandeis.25
But Wilson himself was also sympathetic to Zionism, for political but above all moral reasons. He shared the Progressive vision that Brandeis had for the “social and political laboratory” that was to be the Jewish home in Palestine. He also saw in anti-Semitism an ominous political bellwether of tyranny and oppression. In voicing his support for Zionism in Paris, Wilson told Lloyd George and Clemenceau that he “not only had a friendly feeling towards the Jews” but that “it was perfectly clear that one of the most dangerous elements of ferment arose from the treatment of Jews.” Furthermore, the Inquiry recommended “religious determination” in the former Ottoman Empire instead of national or ethnic self-determination. In an August 1918 letter to Wise, Wilson endorsed the Balfour Declaration. This did not resolve the issue, of course, which Wilson would discover in Paris, where his support for Zionism unnerved Secretary of State Robert Lansing and other American peace commissioners. But for now, American Zionists were among the most devoted of Wilsonianism’s disciples. For Brandeis, Wise, and others, the war was not only America’s, but Israel’s.26
AFTER SUCCESSFULLY HOLDING their lines against a German offensive and launching a vigorous attack of their own in the summer of 1918, the war officially ended on November 11. Fearful of losing ground and opening the way for war to devour their own country, the Germans sued for peace directly to Wilson, for a settlement based upon the Fourteen Points. In December, Wilson traveled to Paris for the peace conference the world had been anticipating for the past four years. Wilson’s overseas journey was unprecedented for a sitting president, but his ambitions were unprecedented as well, and he dared not leave his cabinet secretaries and assistants in the hands of cynical, experienced European diplomats. Ecstatic throngs greeted Wilson in Europe, where he was hailed by the public as a messiah more than a president. Back home, the Protestant churches continued their crusade to move “From World War to World Brotherhood.”27
Protestants were not the only Wilsonians on crusade. American Zionists joined other Jewish nationalists from Europe to present their case directly to Wilson and the victorious great powers. Louis Brandeis, Stephen Wise, and Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law School and another future Supreme Court justice, sailed across the Atlantic in search of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. First they had to stop in France, where they queued with other nationalist leaders—the young Vietnamese nationalist Ho Chi Minh, the professorial Czechs Thomas Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, the august Arab King Faisal, and the patrician Greek statesman Eleftherios Venizelos—who sought a hearing on their freedom. To Brandeis, the peace conference was “the most auspicious moment in [the] history of [the] Zionist Movement.” Thanks to Balfour and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the British had already staked their claim to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Wilson was sympathetic—after all, the twelfth of the Fourteen Points called for the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire—and the Inquiry had looked upon Zionist plans favorably. “To think that I,” Wilson exulted to Wise, “a son of the manse, should be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people!” Wilson was also sympathetic to the Armenians, another unhappy Christian people living under Turkish Muslim rule, and supported the idea of an independent Armenia in eastern Turkey.28
Yet in the end, they all failed. Armenians could not win an independent state of their own, and neither could Zionist Jews—at least, not yet. The United States had not declared war against Turkey and had no troops anywhere in the Middle East—and thus had no leverage. Irish Catholics did eventually gain their autonomy, but this came in spite of great power politics, not because of it, and they resented Wilson’s reluctance to pressure Britain to apply national self-determination to Ireland. Most important of all, Wilson and the ecumenical internationalists could not convince the United States Senate to abandon the unilateralist diplomatic tradition. Permanent peace would have to wait if it meant entering into permanent alliances. The Senate voted against the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, ending any hopes of America leading the world in a League of Nations toward the millennium of unending peace.29
While Protestants, modernist and fundamentalist, had been mostly united against Germany during the war, they were deeply divided over the potential terms of the peace. Theologically liberal ecumenists favored integration and the erasure of individual sovereignties, be they denominational or national, in pursuit of a greater good. To conservatives, however, ecumenism in religion and collective security in geopolitics were tantamount to blasphemy. This difference cut to the heart of the modernistfundamentalist dispute, for fundamentalists decried the compromises that modernists were willing to make in the name of social justice and harmony. These might be worthy goals, conservatives agreed, but they were not necessarily reflections of the true religion. The very label fundamentalist, coined and worn with pride by conservatives themselves, perfectly conveyed the importance they attached to remaining faithful to the original essence of the Christian faith as outlined in the Bible—hence their belief in biblical literalism and hostility to evolution. “We will never get together on minimums of faith but only on maximums of faith,” warned Baptist pastor John Roach Straton in words that could have served as the fundamentalist creed. This was not a theology comfortable with compromise, religious, political, or diplomatic. In religion, conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists attacked ecumenical initiatives, especially the Federal Council and Rockefeller’s Interchurch World Movement, as watered-down versions of Christianity. The FCC “united on a social creed instead of a religious one” that “would make a praiseworthy platform for a political party” but was “quite inadequate” for a church body, accused fundamentalist author John Horsh. Unless a religious institution “stands for the fundamentals of the Christian faith … it does not sustain a distinctly Christian character.” Instead, “modern religious unionism stands for ignoring every fundamental of the Christian faith.” Because modernism lacked purity, it also lacked spirituality and the relevance it sought.30
Fundamentalists easily transferred this aversion to compromise on core principles from theology to foreign policy, and from the Federal Council to the League of Nations. Sensitive to the preservation of traditional morals and identity, conservatives cherished denominational autonomy. As society’s nonconformists and self-appointed guardians of heritage, they feared government regulation of religion and fiercely defended the separation of church and state. Their opposition to the Social Gospel stemmed from this raw anti-statism, even though many fundamentalists sympathized with the social reformist intentions of liberal clergy. Similarly, while many conservatives also favored the promotion of democracy after the war, they did not want the United States to be subservient to a cooperative international organization—analogous to an ecumenical organization—such as the League of Nations. They wanted to preserve America’s autonomy in the world system. As Wilson was putting the finishing touches on the peace settlement in Paris, James M. Gray of the Moody Bible Institute was attacking the League of Nations by linking it to the Interchurch World Movement. Reuben Torrey went further, equating the League with the socialist internationalism of the Industrial Workers of the World. Ignoring their own strictures against mixing religion and politics, Gray, Torrey, and other leading fundamentalists mounted a national campaign against Senate ratification of the League. Collective security under the aegis of an international organization, Gray charged, would be “national suicide.”31
Ever conscious of purity as well as identity and autonomy, fundamentalists also objected to joining a League in which the United States would be recognized as the moral and political equal of other nations. Membership in an international organization would require Americans to participate as partners of nations that were Catholic or Muslim. What good was such an organization? And what could it ever hope to accomplish? “How,” demanded an indignant Arno Gaebelein, a leading Methodist fundamentalist, “can God bless these nations, who continue in idolatries, who defy His laws? Can He bless professing Christian nations, banded together in pact with heathen nations?” J. C. Massee, a Baptist preacher and fundamentalist insurgent who led the attack on modernism in the Northern Baptist Convention, denounced the League as the very worst sort of ecumenism, “a deliberate effort to dethrone God in the earth …. We who are a professedly Christian nation are about to enter a league of nations, and into an international alliance, with nations that are altogether pagan.” Americans would incur the wrath of God, Massee warned, because, as Christians, the Bible explicitly put them “under obligation to foreswear any alliance with a pagan nation.” Mirrored across the South and Midwest, and in the booming churches of urban fundamentalism in Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York, such concerns helped severely erode popular support for the League.32
Perhaps Wilson should have listened to the reservations of the most prominent conservative American Protestant at the Paris peace conference, a man who also happened to be his secretary of state. In 1915, Wilson rid himself of one fundamentalist Presbyterian secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, only to appoint another, Robert Lansing. But despite their shared Presbyterianism and dour personalities, Wilson and Lansing did not get along. A specialist in international law with a suitably pedantic mind, Lansing agreed with Wilson that some sort of new world order had to emerge from the ashes of war. And in theory, he thought a league of nations could work. But the League Wilson envisioned made no allowances for traditional American diplomatic doctrine, especially the Monroe Doctrine, or even the Constitution. From a very early point, Lansing feared that a treaty containing the League would never pass through the Senate intact. Not coincidentally, Lansing was also a quasi-fundamentalist Presbyterian: not active enough in religious politics to earn himself a label, but nonetheless a firm believer in biblical inerrancy, miracles, and the virgin birth of Christ in addition to being an avid reader of scripture. Like most conservative Protestants, Lansing did not like to deviate from the written word. Nor was he comfortable with watering down the essence of identity, be it denominational or national, in pursuit of a common objective. He thought the League could work only if it consisted of like-minded democracies, a concern shared by many other evangelicals and fundamentalists. Lansing pressed his concerns in Paris, but Wilson ignored him, and in early 1920 the two parted ways.33
By that time, Wilson’s dream of world peace had ended. The Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles, and with it the League of Nations. The Wilsonian creed would have to wait until another world war, more terrible than the first, had vindicated its prophecy.