Woodrow Wilson: USA

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Introduction: Dear ghosts …

Colorado is American heartland. High, semi-arid, landlocked, tucked between the great plains and the Continental Divide that runs down the middle of the Rocky Mountains, neither ‘North’ nor ‘South’ – the ‘Centennial State’ did not join the Union until a decade after the Civil War – Colorado retains a reputation for political independence, a folk-memory, perhaps, of the state’s previous existence as a free Territory, self-determining and relatively unorganised. On 25 September 1919, a man came to the small south-eastern Colorado city of Pueblo, trying to save an idea.

The idea in its purest form was peace, but it was typical of a man still routinely and misleadingly described as an idealist, condemned by his enemies as a naïve and dangerous utopian, and still casually dismissed by history as a failure, that he should be more concerned to defend the form and practical structure of his idea than the idea itself. In Pueblo, Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States, made his last public attempt to demonstrate that these things were inseparable and inextricable, and to convince the American people to accept in undiluted and uncompromised form both the Treaty of Versailles, which had brought to an end the Great War in Europe, and a great international League of Nations as a guarantor of future peace. It is one of the great ironies of history that having expended extraordinary effort on both the treaty, of which he was a major architect, and the idea of a League – his name is indissolubly linked to the latter, though the first proposal came from an English statesman – and having sacrificed health and political standing at home to an insistence that they be adopted together and whole, he should repeatedly instruct his Democratic supporters in the Senate to vote against them both and deny acceptance of the Paris peace settlement and American entry into the League of Nations the two-thirds majority they needed for ratification.

The irony was widely perceived, then and since. In 1945, at the end of a second world conflict widely accepted as an inevitable extension of the first and a bloody confirmation of the misjudgements of the Paris Peace Conference and the disastrous consequences of American failure to ratify the treaty and join the League, the historian Thomas A Bailey published a book entitled Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal. The title alone gives little indication who is doing the betraying or what is being betrayed, but a line from the book jumps out: ‘With his own sickly hands, Wilson slew his own brain child.’¹ In 1919, a satirical cartoonist had anticipated the same metaphor, depicting a sombrely clad Wilson – always caricatured in clerical black – rocking a stillborn infant in a tiny coffin-cradle, while the British and French prime ministers David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, fellow-architects of the Treaty, lurk ambiguously in the background.

Successive waves of revisionist historiography since his death in 1924 have attempted to vilify or rehabilitate Wilson, in terms that are either politically crude or psychologically hyper-subtle. Born in the same year as Sigmund Freud, it was Wilson’s ambiguous fate to be the first living political leader to be profiled (albeit at a distance) by the founder of psycho­analysis, in collusion with William C Bullitt, a Wilson aide at the Peace Conference who resigned over what he considered the severity of the terms being imposed on Germany.² Bullitt – whose name alone suggests potential for analysis in the circumstances – was one of many who felt that Wilson was betraying his own principles and promises. That is a perception that goes to the heart of the paradox, for Woodrow Wilson, whose politics altered the course of the 20th century and who almost single-handedly shaped the ‘new world order’, is an infinitely more subtle, more intellectually nuanced, more ruthless leader than the usual textbook versions suggest. At some level, Wilson does seem susceptible to reductionist explanations; one comparative biography casts him opposite Theodore Roosevelt as The Warrior and the Priest.³ Some part of that is due to a remarkable and often overlooked foreshortening of the chronology. Wilson spent only nine years in national politics and only three on an international stage, and if his career seems given over to the promulgation of one Big Idea, that idea – and the apparatus that came with it – only occupied him for a tiny proportion of a life that very nearly reached its biblical span. To be sure, his actions – and in almost equal measure his refusals to act – during the period are of incalculable significance, but to concentrate on them entirely is to lose a vital context.

In the same way, to concentrate on Wilson’s health and psychology, both of which have been analysed in unprecedented detail, is to miss a point as well. His background as a Presbyterian ‘son of the manse’ was an important shaping influence on his subsequent career, but the specific nature of that influence remains unclear, as does the impact of his mother’s hypochondriasis, which he seems to have inherited. Some have seen this emerging even in his speeches, where health – of the nation, of the individual, of democracy – is a recurring metaphor, and the metaphor in turn reinforces the image of Wilson as an unworldly valetudinarian. It is clear that he suffered significant, and by no means psychosomatic, illness throughout his life, and that his digestive ailments and series of small but successively disabling strokes did occasionally affect his judgement and ability to function on occasions. Equally, it is clear that specific emotional crises – notably the death of his first wife and engagement to his second – coincided with and in some way coloured his reaction to major events: as Europe slid into the war that now seems to define Wilson’s political life, Ellen Axson Wilson was dying of Bright’s disease; bracketing the critical period that saw the sinking of the Falaba, the Lusitania and the Arabic and the loss of 177 American lives to German torpedoes was Wilson’s courtship of and eventual acceptance by Edith Bolling Galt. Though Wilson had a remarkable ability when required to bleach his public presentation of any purely private emotion – it was a more reticent time, in any case – there can be no doubt that these events changed his behaviour at the time.

However, as with any easy generalisation about Wilson, his ‘obsession’ with health is a backwards extrapolation from the knowledge that he suffered from several real ailments as well as imaginary ones, and to that extent is more apparent than actual. His health problems in young manhood may point to episodes of nervous prostration or to an early onset of hypertension, and the professorial or clerical figure Wilson cut in later years, with prominent false teeth and small eyeglasses did not suggest a man of action. On the other hand, Wilson was an enthusiastic baseball fan who had played centre field while at Davidson College in North Carolina and helped manage the varsity team at Princeton, though he was unable to win a playing place there. He became the first president officially to throw out the first ball at the World Series. The Wilsons had taken walking and cycling holidays in the Lake District and when the presidency restricted his physical freedom, he became an enthusiastic, if high-handicap, golfer; there is even a story that Secret Service agents painted some of his golf balls black so that he could play in snow in the White House grounds. Wilson may even have been addicted to exercise, a condition which affects many fit men and women who are subsequently pushed into sedentary lifestyles. When he was unable to take brisk walks, Wilson seems to have suffered non-specific ailments. In Paris, when he was locked in long and arduous negotiation over the shape and direction of the post-war world, his doctor and fellow-delegates forced him to exercise in front of an open window merely in order to get back some natural colour and appearance of vitality. He enjoyed fast cars, particularly convertibles, and liked the company of women; his libido seems to have been perfectly normal – he and Ellen Wilson had three daughters in four years. Despite Freud’s and Bullitt’s attempt to construct an Oedipal pathology, there seems to have been little abnormal in Wilson’s family relationships, though he did continue to depend to an unusual, if not aberrant, extent on the close loyalty of his wife, secretary and a few political friends rather an extended circle. Nothing that points to a weakly or unduly neurotic personality, and indeed Clemenceau compared him favourably in terms of determination and stubbornness to General Pershing, commander of the American forces in Europe. Perverse though it inevitably sounds, no one fought more fiercely for peace than Woodrow Wilson, abandoning his principle of ‘peace without victory’ almost as soon as the US entered the war, leaving its prosecution entirely to the generals (a situation unique in modern American history), and conducting his foreign policy with a belligerence that puzzled his future associates in battle (Britain and France were never formal US allies, as in the Second World War) and so alarmed the near-pacifist William Jennings Bryan that he resigned as Secretary of State.

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN (1860–1925)

Though twice defeated for the presidency, William Jennings Bryan remained an iconic figure within the Democratic Party and an orator whose appeal was more visceral and less intellectual than Wilson’s. Bryan’s instinctive populism led him to be dubbed ‘the Great Commoner’ and he had his finest political moment with the famous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in which he attacked the gold standard as an instrument of East Coast plutocracy.

    Though his stance was effectively pacifist – leading to his resignation when Wilson responded robustly after the Lusitania sinking – Bryan did enlist during the 1898 Spanish-American war, though he did not see actual combat. He stood again for the presidency in 1900, and is believed to be the model for the Cowardly Lion in L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

    After defeat in the polls by William McKinley, Bryan became a tireless lecturer on the Chatauqua adult education circuit, mostly speaking on religious issues, promulgating the ideas of the Social Gospel and advocating peace. Such was his influence within the Democratic Party and in the agrarian Midwest that Wilson appointed him Secretary of State in 1912. Like Theodore Roosevelt but in apparent opposition to his own anti-war stance, Bryan petitioned the President direct to be conscripted after America did join the war, but he, too, was turned down.

    In later years, he became active in Prohibition and temperance politics and waged a fierce campaign against Darwinist ideas. In the last weeks of his life, he argued the case for what would become known as creationism in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee, where his antagonist was the very distinguished Clarence Darrow. Bryan seemed to collude in a directed verdict of guilty against the state of Tennessee, where the teaching of evolutionary theory had been forbidden, but his hope that the result might be over-ruled in a higher court was disappointed. Though his oratory was still powerful, Bryan’s views seemed, in 1925, to be out of keeping with the spirit of the times. He died in his sleep just a few days after the Scopes trial ended.

It is striking how often in his speeches of the time, the great prophet of peace spoke of war, and of winning. Other aspects of his public presentation merit a second look, as well. Looked at more closely, Wilson’s language does not so much reflect an obsessive concern with physical health as a metaphor for social wellness as a tendency – and this is a powerful clue to his political philosophy – to see all social processes as in some way organic and evolutionary rather than absolute and fixed. Physical health, disease, cure, morbidity were only sub-sets – and relatively minor ones – of a rhetorical apparatus that saw all measures as having the equivalent of life: being born (hence the grim appropriateness of Bailey’s image of a ‘Supreme Infanticide’, the infant League smothered in its crib), growth, maturity, strength, wisdom, gradual or more sudden senescence. The ‘body politic’ had a near-literal significance for Wilson.

Other aspects of Wilson’s reputation are less contentious or less easily warped. It is widely accepted that he was America’s most academic – if not necessarily her most brilliant – leader, but it is important to understand that Wilson’s contribution to academia was largely administrative rather than intellectual. His books are mostly plain and empirical, rather than flights of speculation. If he is commonly thought to be an idealist, that is because he had an uncommon brilliance with words, a rhetorician of rare skill, rather than because he subordinated ‘realism’ to ideals. A recent commentator opens his account ‘Woodrow Wilson was a man of words’, but is obliged to follow up with ‘His actions weren’t insignificant’, in which the double negative is a fudge: the implication is that, as H W Brands makes clear in the opening line of his study, ‘The Word’ was paramount.⁴

There is a clue in this, which few historians seem willing to take up. Wilson seems complex, perhaps contradictory, psychologically volatile, arguably inconsistent in his opinions and positions largely because we have so much of his writing. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson constitute a remarkable 69 volumes, their compilation and editing overseen until his death by the doyen of Wilson studies, Arthur S Link.⁵ Unlike other modern presidents and most modern politicians, Wilson composed his own speeches, usually bashed out on a hard-used portable typewriter – in an age when most secretarial work was undertaken by professional stenographers, Wilson was unusually proficient at shorthand and was using a Calligraph typewriter as early as 1883 – but the papers also include the myriad drafts, memos, position papers, letters and aides-memoires which catch him in the act of thinking. He was a writer before he was a politician and knew that the most effective way to test an idea is to put it into words rather than into action. His policy over the war, his dream of a League, his overlooked domestic reforms – Wilson intuited that his administration marked an effective end to the Progressive era in American politics and legislated accordingly when he had a Democratic Congress to legislate for him – were all subject to the same process of successive drafting, revision, abandonment and re-writing that a more literary writer might use. A Dutch historian, Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt characterised Wilson as a ‘poet’, which is both right and wrong.⁶ His intellectual career was, indeed, a search for the perfect cadence, a fitness between message and form, but to see Wilson in this way is to see him from a European perspective. No American President – with the minor exception of Theodore Roosevelt – had left the United States during his administration. No-one subsequently ever stayed away so long. Even Franklin D Roosevelt’s month-long journey to Yalta does not come close to the six months plus that Wilson stayed in Europe; between early December 1918 and early July 1919, he spent only two weeks in America, and then on unavoidable business. The situation might have sparked a small constitutional crisis. There was even a discussion as to whether Thomas R Marshall (how many non-specialists even remember the name of Wilson’s vice-president?) should take over the Executive pro tem. Even more remarkably, though, when the president condemned by his opponents as an absentee or at best as a ‘peripatetic’ leader did return, he seemed no more minded to stay in Washington. The last, desperate campaign to bring the United States under the Treaty and into the League took him through the West and Midwest bringing him at last to Pueblo. To see him there is to see him in the only context he can be fully understood, not among the world’s diplomats in Paris, but on the very American soil he had eschewed for half a