“The President is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can be.”
—Woodrow Wilson
Wilson was the last president to grow up in a household with slaves
Wilson was the first and only Ph.D. to serve as president, and was, until Barack Obama, our only president who had been a college professor
Wilson openly criticized the Constitution and disdained the American founding
Woodrow Wilson is usually counted among America’s greatest or near-greatest presidents, but he should be regarded as one of America’s worst.
Wilson’s conventional reputation chiefly reflects the “opportunity” for “greatness” afforded to presidents who happen to preside in times of large events (especially wars), and the prevailing bias of historians who prefer presidents of “vision” who expand the size of the presidency and the scope of government. In the absence of World War I, Wilson would likely be remembered as a domestic reformer who brought us the federal income tax and the direct election of senators through the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments (though both constitutional amendments had been proposed before Wilson took office), the Federal Reserve Bank, and the ill-conceived Federal Trade Commission—hardly a legacy many Americans admire. He might not have won re-election in 1916; as it was, Wilson barely won reelection on the slogan “he kept us out of war.”
Even that accomplishment didn’t last long. America entered World War I in 1917, and although Wilson did preside over a war effort that helped end the fighting on the European battlefield, he bequeathed to American political thought a doctrine—“Wilsonian idealism,” sometimes just called “Wilsoniansm”—that has inspired the interventionist wings of both political parties. But Wilson’s reputation for big-hearted “idealism” is at odds with many of his actions in office, which can support the judgment that he comes closer to deserving the title of “dictator” than any other president. His political ideology continues to inform the so-called “Progressives” of today, though most contemporary “Progressives” do not even know it.
“Wilson’s private model for political behavior suffered first of all from his lack of joy, his protective diffidence that built a wall between him and other men . . . . He never knew the kind of fellowship that eased the burden of both Roosevelts’ days; he never had their saving sense of humor. . . . Without a sense of playfulness in men, the President denied a place to playfulness in politics, insulated himself from the lessons taught by fun, choked off that flood of fondness Americans display for leaders who evoke it.”
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Morton Blum of Yale University
It is hard to count Wilson as a successful president, let alone a great one. His chief aim coming out of World War I, American participation in the League of Nations, utterly failed to win political support in the United States and was ultimately voted down by the U.S. Senate—largely through Wilson’s own fault. He dealt with Congress in a contemptuous and high-handed manner and refused reasonable compromises that might have secured his object. A president who had treated Congress with more respect or had more political skill, like Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, would have been able to accommodate the nation’s well-founded reservations about foreign entanglements. But instead of trying to persuade, Wilson attempted to bully the Senate into submitting to his will. He refused to budge when his closest advisers urged him to accommodate Senate sentiment in favor of modifying the League of Nations treaty, despite the fact that our European allies declared themselves willing to permit U.S. participation in the League with the reservations and conditions Republicans were demanding. Wilson broke off one of his closest friendships with his top aide, Edward House, and forced the resignation of his unsympathetic secretary of state, Robert Lansing. John Morton Blum observed, “Even Wilson’s intimates were shocked by his display of peevishness. After the episode [of Lansing’s firing], as his secretary sorrowfully told him, he had very few friends left.”
Felled by a serious stroke during a speaking tour in 1919, Wilson barely presided over the nation at all for a year and a half of his administration. If the Twenty-fifth Amendment, adopted in 1967 in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination to deal with vice presidential succession and presidential disability, had been in place in 1919, it would likely have been invoked to declare Wilson “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” and Vice President Thomas Marshall would have become president. Instead, Wilson’s second wife, Edith Wilson, essentially functioned as the nation’s un-elected president for an astonishing eighteen months. Today this would be intolerable, and probably grounds for impeachment.
Wilson is the only president, and maybe the only human being in history, who contemplated writing up a formal “constitution” for his first marriage, setting out the rights and duties, and separation of powers, between husband and wife: “I’ll draw up a Constitution in true legal form, and then we can make by-laws at our leisure as they become necessary.”
Must’ve been a fun guy.
Some historians make out Wilson to be a conservative of sorts, in part because of his Presbyterian faith and Christian rhetoric, but also because he was a vicious racist and segregationist who supported states’ rights and opposed child labor laws. Wilson screened the infamous movie Birth of a Nation, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, in the White House, and recommended that it be widely viewed. He supported legislation Southern Democrats sponsored to make interracial marriage illegal in the District of Columbia, and he reintroduced segregation into many parts of the federal government, including the Post Office and the military. When blacks objected, Wilson said, “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” But Wilson’s racial views were based on liberal ground—Darwinian evolution—and his attachment to states’ rights did not arise from any constitutional scruples about federalism, but out of convenience: states’ rights were a bulwark against national legislation that Republicans were sponsoring to break down Southern discrimination against blacks.
Wilson’s voluminous record offers something for everyone if you look long enough. For example, in his annual message to Congress in 1919, Wilson wrote something that today’s liberals surely ignore when they look back to Wilson: “The Congress might well consider whether the higher rates of income and profits tax can in peacetimes be effectively productive of revenue, and whether they may not, on the contrary, be destructive of business activity and productive of waste and inefficiency. There is a point at which in peace times high rates of income and profits taxes destroy energy, remove the incentive to new enterprise, encourage extravagant expenditures and produce industrial stagnation with consequent unemployment and other attendant evils.”
And more than any other single figure, Wilson is responsible for turning the Democratic Party into a big-government party bent on centralizing power in Washington, D.C., and hostile to a free market economy. In addition, he was the most interventionist president in history: besides taking the country into World War I, he also employed American troops in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and Panama—though often with little to show for it.
Although Wilson often cloaked his views in conservative or traditional-sounding rhetoric, underneath he was an adherent of a distinctly untraditional, not to say un-American, political philosophy. Historians who are incompetent, lazy, or uninterested in political ideas have ignored Wilson’s political philosophy and thus misunderstood and misrepresented Wilson to generations of American students and citizens. They do have the excuse that Wilson’s thought often appears contradictory or paradoxical. Wilson is certainly confusing and hard to follow on many key points—mainly because he uses traditional American political ideas in an idiosyncratic way (often opposite to the way they were originally meant and still are understood by most Americans). He also appears to have changed his mind on some issues as time passed. Thus Wilson can be understood as America’s first “modern” president, and even as America’s first “post-modern” president. He is certainly the closest model for the presidency of Barack Obama and for today’s “Progressives.”
If not “great” in the older and more meaningful sense of the term, Wilson was among the most consequential presidents in our history, though not in a good way. He was the principal architect of the modern “heroic” presidency—even more so than his great rival Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson’s ambition transcended Theodore Roosevelt’s merely personal egotism, and ironically prepared the way for the second Roosevelt—Franklin. Wilson is more responsible than any other political figure for changing how many Americans came to think about the Constitution, in large part because he was the first American president to repudiate the American founding and to hold the Constitution in disdain. Wilson compared the American people’s reverence for the Constitution to the old doctrine of the divine right of kings: “The divine right of kings never ran a more preposterous course than did this unquestioned prerogative of the Constitution to receive universal homage.” Madison had written in the Federalist Papers that the people’s “reverence” for the Constitution was one of the chief objects of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, because “without [reverence] the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.” But Wilson criticized the American people’s “blind worship” of the Constitution, and doubted whether the nation could survive shackled by the limits imposed upon government power by the Founders. In 1876, on the occasion of the nation’s centennial, Wilson wrote, “The American Republic will in my opinion never celebrate another Centennial. At least under the present Constitution and laws.”
Wilson thought the political philosophy of the American founding, especially Thomas Jefferson’s language about individual rights in the Declaration of Independence, derived from John Locke and other English sources, was obsolete and should be discarded. He believed the logic of the Constitution, the thought of its Framers including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, was equally defective and should be replaced. While Wilson was originally enamored of the British constitutional tradition, and especially the thought of Edmund Burke and the great British constitutional historian Walter Bagehot, in time he turned to German philosophy. For the Anglo-American tradition of the Founders, Wilson wanted to substitute the state-worshipping ideas of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—and the evolutionary doctrines of Charles Darwin.
Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism by Ronald J. Pestritto (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
As the only academic ever to become president (he was a professor and then president of Princeton University before becoming governor of New Jersey in 1910), Wilson is the only president to have written a series of comprehensive books about American government. His complete writings comprise sixty-nine volumes, but his four principal books are Congressional Government, published in 1885; The State, in 1889; Constitutional Government, in 1908; and The New Freedom, in 1913. These books are not always consistent, and, like Karl Marx’s voluminous writings, they lend themselves to conflicting interpretations. But, while Wilson’s views evolved over time, certain central themes emerge to explain his view of the presidency and his stubborn conduct in office.
Four key ideas underlie Wilson’s subversion of America’s Constitution. They are his philosophy of Progress; his novel understanding of individual liberty; his then-idiosyncratic view of the role of the president; and his views on the nature of modern bureaucratic government. All four have become cornerstones of modern American liberalism.
Wilson’s general philosophy of history colored his views of human nature, individual freedom, and the role of government. Wilson believed in Progress with a capital “P,” that is, the idea that human history was unfolding in a specific direction. This was not a brand new concept, but the Progressive political philosophy of Wilson was very different from the traditional Christian understanding of the redemptive course of human history culminating in the next world, rather than this one. For Wilson and the Progressives, “Progress” replaced Divine Providence in the American story. Before Wilson, most presidents had made reference to Divine Providence in their inaugural addresses and other major speeches. In Wilson’s view, government—or the State, with a capital “S”—would be the agent of Progress; indeed, for Progressives, the State not only takes the place of God in human affairs; it is godlike in its attributes.
Wilson took his cues on this subject from Georg W. F. Hegel, the German philosopher perhaps more responsible than any other for modern state-worship and moral relativism. (Hegel was the main inspiration for Karl Marx, as well as Wilson.) Hegel, who was often obscure and hard to understand, put this aspect of his teaching very plainly: “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before. . . .” The Holy Roman Emperor would hardly have made such a claim. After Hegel, modern liberalism can be said to have gone from overthrowing the Divine Right of Kings to embracing the Divine Right of the State. Wilson admitted that he “wore out a German dictionary while writing” The State. It is ironic that Wilson would end up taking the United States to war against Germany when he was doing his best to reshape the American political scene in the image of German philosophy of history and politics.
Darwinism was the other great influence on Wilson’s mature thought, and it explains his racism (or at least it gave it scientific justification; Wilson was the last president to grow up in a house with slaves). Wilson believed that there were superior and inferior races. The superior races are those with the modern spirit: “Other races have developed so much more slowly, and accomplished so much less.”
Wilson’s combination of Hegelian ideas of “Progress” and Darwinian ideas of the mutability of human nature explain why he came to regard the Constitution with contempt, especially the principle of the separation of powers between the branches that deliberately limited government power and speed of action. In his first major book, Congressional Government, Wilson called the separation of powers a “grievous mistake” and “folly.” He repeatedly criticized separation of powers, and the Constitution, for not conforming to Darwinian realities:
Woodrow Wilson was the father of “the living Constitution.”
The government of the United States was constructed upon the Whig theory of political dynamics, which was a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory of the universe. In our own day, whenever we discuss the structure or development of anything, whether in nature or in society, we consciously or unconsciously follow Mr. Darwin. . . . The trouble with the [Newtonian] theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.
“All that Progressives ask or desire is permission . . . to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”
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Woodrow Wilson
Wilson went on to add: “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and survive. . . . You cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms.”
Wilson went as far as to argue that if the Founders were somehow brought back to life in his time, they would readily see the defects of their handiwork—a thoroughly condescending view of great men who believed, with good reason, that they had built a permanent foundation for America’s future. So complete was Wilson’s rejection of the American Founding that he even argued that Thomas Jefferson’s thought was “thoroughly. . .un-American.” He said the same thing about James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.
Wilson wanted radical changes to the Constitution, but he knew that, as a practical matter, it was difficult to amend. So with the exception of an early proposal for an amendment to allow members of Congress to serve in the president’s Cabinet (a prohibition he called “the most obvious error” of the Constitution), Wilson never proposed rewriting the Constitution by amendments. Instead, he found in his Hegelian-Darwinian philosophy a perfect answer: simply reinterpret the Constitution as an organic, evolving document. Wilson openly called for “wresting the Constitution to strange and as yet unimagined uses.” He explicitly scorned the original intent of the Founders and rejected the original meaning of the Constitution as the standard for how we should understand and interpret it: “As the life of the nation changes so must the interpretation of the document which contains it change, by a nice adjustment, determined, not by the original intent of those who drew the paper, but by the exigencies and the new aspects of life itself” [emphasis added]. Who would make this “nice adjustment”? The Supreme Court. Wilson legitimized the Supreme Court in its now familiar role as interpreter of “the living Constitution.” Thanks to Wilson, the Supreme Court now acts as a roving constitutional convention, revising the Constitution for the convenience of government power: “The explicitly granted powers of the Constitution are what they always were; but the powers drawn from it by implication have grown and multiplied beyond all expectation, and each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day” [emphasis added].
Wilson’s Progressivism explains his contempt for the Constitution as written. The political philosophy of America’s Founders was based the idea that human nature has permanent characteristics; they saw limited government as the only means of harmonizing the good and bad aspects of human nature. On the one hand, the Founders recognized the natural desire and capacity for liberty and self-government. On the other hand, they also recognized the equally natural attributes of human selfishness and self-interest. They knew that the accumulation of too much political power had all too often led to tyranny or oppressive government. Hence the Constitution’s emphasis on limited and enumerated powers, and the separation of powers—all to prevent the government from threatening the liberty and well-being of the people.
But under the influence of Darwin, Wilson and other Progressives no longer believed in a fixed human nature. They thought that evolution and “Progress” would deliver constant improvement in human affairs and even in human nature. So they saw no reason that political institutions should be bound any longer by the Founders’ idea that flawed human nature prescribed limits to government power. Although Wilson and the Progressives did not share the same outlook as Marxist socialists and other revolutionary utopians, they did believe that human nature was susceptible to improvement—perhaps even infinite improvement and ultimately perfection—under the guidance of the modern State and enlightened leaders such as Wilson. Government power—the State—was no longer something to be feared; it should rather be expanded and celebrated.
“Synthesis, not antagonism, is the whole art of power, the whole art of government. I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.”
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Woodrow Wilson
Wilson utterly rejected the concept of liberty that was central to America’s founding. For the Founders, preserving individual freedom required limiting the power of government. Wilson had the exact opposite view. He embraced a novel understanding of freedom that required government to have a larger scope of action to promote it. This is why Wilson made the title of his 1912 campaign book The New Freedom. He wrote of “mature freedom”—by which he meant the positive fulfillment of individuals rather than just the absence of outside restraint. Wilson even used some very contemporary-sounding language to describe his new understanding of freedom, such as “self-liberation” and “man’s ability to make more of himself and to make more out of nature” (which really means escaping from nature). Here can be found the beginning of the distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Wilson contrasted the two in The New Freedom, decades before the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin popularized the distinction: “Freedom today is something more than being left alone. The program of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely.”
While this understanding of freedom may be opaque, it has a clear political implication: for individuals to realize their “mature” freedom, the government needs to be more powerful to help them find that positive fulfillment. In practice, “mature freedom” means that the government will exercise more power to regulate private activities, and command more private resources. It will exercise power in a way that necessarily brings it into conflict with the “inalienable rights” of the Declaration of Independence. So Wilson’s Progressivism rejects the philosophy of natural rights that underlies Jefferson’s Declaration.
Wilson wrote that “a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual,” and said, “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface,” by which Wilson meant exactly that portion that speaks of man’s “inalienable rights” descending from “the laws of nature and nature’s God.” The Founders believed that individual rights were universal rights, self-evident and sure to be acknowledged by “a candid world.” Wilson argued, in contrast, “There is no universal law, but for each nation a law of its own which bears evident marks of having been developed along with its national character, which mirrors the special life of the particular people whose political and social judgments it embodies” [emphasis added]. This is moral relativism in a remarkably pure form.
“Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence.”
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Woodrow Wilson
The object of Wilson and other Progressives was to justify their intervention into and control of more and more spheres of private life and private enterprise. Wilson’s attack on Jefferson’s ideas of liberty included this revealing formula: “You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible. . . . But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”
Wilson turned the idea of individual freedom inside-out, and in the process introduced a vast confusion into American politics. Franklin Roosevelt’s “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” and the entitlement culture that was fostered by Lyndon Johnson would have been impossible without Woodrow Wilson. There is a straight line from Wilson’s way of looking at freedom to today’s common impulse to regard any need or demand as a fundamental “human right.” Thus many Americans believe that they have the right to health care, to housing, or to a job—“rights” that require that the government force one citizen to give resources to another. The Founders’ “liberty” was freedom from just the kind of government tyranny that would be necessary to enforce this novel kind of “right.”
The Founders intended the president to be the chief magistrate whose main function was to administer the laws and run the government, but Wilson thought the president should be an active visionary. In Wilson’s view, the president should become the active Leader—with a capital “L”—in our political life, guiding the Progress of the people according to his farsighted ideas of where we should be going. The modern president, Wilson wrote, should be “a man who understands his own day and the needs of the country, and who has the personality and the initiative to enforce his views both upon the people and upon Congress.” Wilson makes it crystal clear here that his view of the balance of power between legislative and executive branches is the exact reverse of that of the Founders, who thought Congress would play the leading role in expressing American popular opinion and shaping the direction of the nation. But it is important to recognize that here Wilson is going beyond merely reversing the places of the executive and legislative branches in our government. More than just responding to public opinion, Wilson wanted the president to shape it: “A president whom [the country] trusts cannot only lead it, but shape it to his own views.”
“A little group of willful men reflecting no opinion but their own have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible [by voting down his proposed legislation].”
These and other passages from Wilson’s theoretical writings prefigured the arrogant stubbornness that marked his presidency and his poor relations with Congress. In “Leaders of Men,” the essay that most fully laid out his theory of leadership, Wilson wrote, “Leadership does not always wear the harness of compromise. . . . Resistance is left to the minority, and such as will not be convinced are crushed.” This sounds awfully close to what liberals today, such as Paul Krugman, decry as “eliminationist rhetoric.” (It turns out that this passage in Wilson’s essay is taken almost verbatim from Hegel’s Philosophy of History, where Hegel celebrates the leader “so mighty in form” that he will “crush to pieces many an object in his path.”) Throughout “Leaders of Men” and other writings, Wilson envisions the modern president as a leader who not only sees the future, but sees it as his duty to force the pace toward that future. The president should use his “persuasion and conviction—the control of other minds by a strange personal influence and power.”
Some of Wilson’s writings about political leadership ought to send chills down the spine of anyone who reflects on the bitter history of such “leaders” (“führer” is German for “leader”) in the twentieth century: “Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader. . . . A [true leader] uses the masses like [tools]. He must inflame their passions with little heed for the facts. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.”
Or this:
A nation is led by a man who . . . speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice.
In his first inaugural address in 1913, Wilson made it clear that he intended to put his leadership theory into practice, declaring that with his election, “At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. . . . We know our task is to be no mere task of politics, but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action” [emphasis added].
Woodrow Wilson was an early proponent of what we now call “the modern administrative state.” In Progressive ideology, political questions could be considered “solved,” and most or all issues facing government were administrative in character, best consigned to expert elites not subject to direct political pressure—or accountability to the public. That administrative bureaucracies would be insulated from elections and unaccountable to the American public was a feature, rather than a bug, in Wilson’s view.
Wilson was utterly unconcerned with the possibility that concentrated, centralized administrative power could be abused. He dismissed the possibility “of a domineering, illiberal officialdom” because he believed in the superior wisdom and virtue of the elites that would be selected for administrative government as he conceived it. One of the most chilling, menacing, and ultimately preposterous passages in all of Wilson’s writings explains, “If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly, I can borrow his way of sharpening the knife without borrowing his probable intent to commit murder with it; and so, if I see a monarchist dyed in the wool managing a public bureau well, I can learn his business methods without changing one of my republican spots.” It is only a short step from this moral blindness to admiring Mussolini because “he made the trains run on time.”
Wilson and his Progressive heirs are unconcerned with the concentration of centralized power in Washington. They are willing to take on a paternal role, seeing themselves as superior to the American people. Wilson went so far as to say, “If I saw my way to it as a practical politician, I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance.”
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg (Doubleday, 2008).
For these reasons columnist Jonah Goldberg calls Wilson the American inventor of “statolatry”—that is, idolatry of the State. Goldberg goes so far as to name Wilson America’s first (and so far only) fascist dictator; if this label seems extreme, it is worth noting the discomfort Wilson causes even to moderate liberal historians who have been willing to assess Wilson’s actions and policies honestly. In his short biography of Wilson, historian John Morton Blum casts a jaundiced eye on the World War I “campaign of propaganda without precedent in American history,” conducted by Wilson’s Committee on Public Information under George Creel. The Committee not only disseminated pro-war propaganda but imposed censorship on American media. At Wilson’s urging, Congress passed a Sedition Act that allowed him to punish dissenting opinion about the war on the grounds that dissent amounted to direct “sabotage” of the war effort. Of the more than 1,500 arrests under this act, only ten were for actual sabotage. “Perhaps more than any other factor,” Blum writes, “this shocking record stimulated among men of good will an incipient disenchantment with Wilson. . . . The President turned his back on civil liberties not because he loved them less but because he loved his vision of eventual peace much more. . . . Did the conduct of government override the privacy and decency democracy demanded? No matter—there was coming a great day.” In other words, the end justifies the means.
Wilson’s political philosophy goes a long way toward explaining why he was the most arrogant president ever, and it also explains much about the ideas of so-called “Progressives” today, especially their view that they are on “the side of history.” Progressives are necessarily hostile to any person or idea (such as the Tea Party today) that does not submit to their “enlightened” will. Unfortunately, Wilson’s ideas have inspired modern presidents of both parties, but especially left-liberal presidents such as FDR and Obama.
In keeping with his view of the president as the larger-than-life “Leader” of the nation, superseding Congress as the motive force in American public life, Wilson introduced the practice of delivering the annual state of the union message in person to a joint session of Congress (rather than by letter)—a practice that has by now grown into a high-profile televised ritual in which presidents are expected to produce a laundry list of new things for government to do (and spend money on). Beyond this bit of political theater, Wilson held Congress in contempt, especially insofar as it behaved as the Founders intended, as a co-equal branch of government rather than supinely following Wilson’s lead.
Wilson’s Progress-with-capital-P “idealism” influenced his understanding of foreign policy and colored his view of the use of American military force. Wilson was the first president to describe himself as the “leader of the free world,” a description that made sense during the Cold War, but which was highly presumptuous at the time of World War I. Wilson upended the view, taken by every prior president, that America goes to war to defend its self-interest. As President John Quincy Adams famously put it in 1821, America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” But when Wilson sent troops into Mexico with the aim of deposing the revolutionary government, he explained that he wanted to “teach the South American republics to elect good men!” to advance the world toward “those great heights where there shines unobstructed the light of the justice of God.” And most famously Wilson described American participation in World War I in Europe as a crusade “to end all wars” and “to make the world safe for democracy.” Neither purpose, of course, comprised any of the aims of the principal European belligerents, and the Allied victory achieved with American help not surprisingly failed to accomplish either goal. In fact, it has often been argued that the redrawing of the map of Europe in line with Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” and the Treaty of Versailles made a Second World War all but inevitable.
Wilson’s Progressive idealism and his contempt for Congress contributed to the greatest failure of his presidency, on the League of Nations, which was rejected by the Senate. Wilson’s party went down to disaster in the 1920 election chiefly because of his arrogance. Despite the bitter ending to his presidency, Wilson changed the nature of the office and the course of the nation. He provided the model that many modern presidents, of both parties, have followed, especially the president who matches him mostly closely in philosophy and ill-temper—our current professor-president, Barack Obama.
“The most important decision undertaken by anyone anywhere in the 20th century was where to locate the Princeton graduate school. Woodrow Wilson wanted it down on the main campus, about which he was probably right. . . . Dean West, his rival, wanted it up where it is. Wilson lost, and had one of his not uncharacteristic tantrums, quit Princeton, went into politics, and ruined the 20th century.”
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Columnist (and Princeton alumnus) George F. Will
For someone of Wilson’s extremely radical views about the Constitution, his Supreme Court appointments were an odd mix. His first appointment was James C. McReynolds, a conservative Democrat who had served in Theodore Roosevelt’s Justice Department before Wilson picked him for attorney general. McReynolds surprised no one when he settled in as one of the most conservative justices on the Court for his twenty-seven years on the bench. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court expresses the conventional liberal wisdom that McReynolds “was a staunch conservative . . . opposed to the growing social and economic regulatory power of government and believed that the Constitution fairly committed the nation to a policy of laissez faire capitalism.” McReynolds was one of the justices who voted to strike down many of Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal measures including the National Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and he dissented in the 1937 decision that upheld the constitutionality of Social Security, agreeing with the nineteenth-century President Pierce that “I can not find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States.” The high point of McReynolds’ resistance to the tide of the New Deal came when the Court upheld the repudiation of gold contracts in a series of cases in 1935, which amounted to a de facto default on sovereign obligations. McReynolds, in dissent, was so incensed that he proclaimed from the bench, “This is Nero at his worst. The Constitution is gone!”
McReynolds was probably the last consistently conservative Supreme Court justice a Democratic president ever nominated. Certainly Louis Brandeis, Wilson’s other major appointment to the Court, was more in tune with his constitutional philosophy. Brandeis was a practitioner of liberal result-oriented jurisprudence, having been a pioneer of what was then called “sociological jurisprudence.” He was known for what came to be called the “Brandeis brief,” that is, arguments to the Court that emphasize social conditions rather than precedents and principles of law. In other words, Brandeis pulled on the heartstrings of judges, often with success. But this “success” comes at the cost of turning judges into legislators.
Wilson’s third appointment to the Court, John H. Clarke, was a liberal in the Brandeis mode, but Clarke only served a short time and left no lasting legacy in legal thought or in the Court’s history.
The McReynolds appointment notwithstanding, between Wilson’s direct attack on the constitutional philosophy of the Framers and his appointment of Brandeis and Clarke, he deserves an F grade.