Everything Wrong with the Wilson Administration

The chief consequence of the war was to sweep away some mildly autocratic “ancien regimes” while loosing various totalitarian bacilli throughout Europe. All too naturally, even, seemingly, inevitably, emerged communism, followed by fascism and Nazism. The so-​called Great War’s unfinished business was finally settled only by World War II, after consuming as many as 80 million additional lives. Noted Powell, “Far from helping ‘make the world safe for democracy,’ as [Wilson] claimed, he contributed to the rise of some of the most murderous dictators who ever lived. No other US president has had a hand—however unintentional—in so much destruction.”²

The cause of America’s entry into World War I, when stripped of the soaring rhetoric about “the vindication of right, of human right,” and much more, was one man’s megalomania.³ Wilson, far from being the man of peace that he pretended to be when running for reelection in 1916, was determined to reorder the entire globe irrespective of cost. Doing so required that the United States become a warring power. The resulting human carnage was of little concern to Wilson. Historian Walter Karp called Wilson’s approach to the Entente allies “a supplicant currying a belligerent’s favor.”⁴

Consider the cause Wilson adopted. On June 28, 1914, a Serbian terrorist killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Hapsburg throne of Austro-​Hungary. That set in motion two competing, suspicious, and trigger-​happy alliances. Soon “control had been lost and the stone had started rolling,” admitted German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.⁵ Vienna accused Belgrade of complicity in the crime, which in fact was promoted by Serbian military intelligence, and planned an invasion. The Russian Empire came to Serbia’s defense. Imperial Germany sided with its ally, Austro-​Hungary. France backed its treaty partner, the Russian Tsar.

When Berlin’s troops rolled through Belgium to attack France, Great Britain came in against Germany. Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire joined the latter, known as the Central Powers. Romania and Italy backed the Entente. Rome sold its participation to the highest territorial bidder, trading its people’s blood for promises of Austro-​Hungarian lands. Japan similarly took advantage of the opportunity to grab Germany’s Pacific territories and joined the conflict.

Rather than act as firebreaks to war, the contending alliances turned into transmission belts of conflict, turning what Germany’s Otto von Bismarck once warned to be “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” into a global conflagration. Ultimately, some 20 million people died as a result. That horror vindicated George Washington’s advice in his famed Farewell Address that America should remain aloof from Europe’s endless wars: “a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils,” he warned.⁶ Especially when that commitment is to a gaggle of aggressive, militaristic imperial powers.

Despite Wilson’s sanctification of the Entente allies, there was little to choose between the two sides. The many failings of the German-​led Central Powers were highlighted, and exaggerated, by brilliant British propagandists aided by America’s establishment Eastern press. However, no one had clean hands, especially Serbia, which had engaged in an act of state terrorism. Vienna retaliated sharply, rather like the George W. Bush administration in responding to 9/11. Other Entente allies included France, a revanchist state besotted with desire for revenge, Belgium, the most brutal of the colonial powers, Italy, which sold its people’s lives for land, and the Russian Empire, long the great despotism of the east.

America’s only sensible decision was to stay out. By April 1917, Europe had been at war for almost three years. There was no security threat to the US. The Atlantic insulated America from invasion, which no European power imagined attempting. More importantly, none of the combatants had a quarrel with the US other than Great Britain, which imposed an illegal blockade and sought to redirect neutral trade for its own economic benefit. The conflict was horrific, but Americans had no cause to join it. The supposedly high-​minded Wilson chose to sacrifice thousands of his countrymen to fulfill his personal ambition and indulge his vanity.

Born in 1856, Wilson grew up in the South and was probably the most-​virulent racist to sit in the Oval Office since before the Civil War. He served as president of Princeton University, from which he jumped to New Jersey’s statehouse, enlisted by the party bosses to break the GOP’s political stranglehold. Once elected governor, however, he turned against the Democratic establishment and pushed a reformist agenda.

Trenton proved too small to contain his ambitions, especially after the GOP staged a legislative revival. At the 1912 National Democratic Convention, Wilson wooed the progressive forces of William Jennings Bryan and won the nomination on the 46^th ballot. However, that otherwise inauspicious start to the campaign was minor compared to the Republican Party split between establishment regular William Howard Taft and monomaniacal egotist Theodore Roosevelt, which gave Wilson the presidency.

Despite the latter’s professorial mien and rhetorical disguise, he unabashedly sought power. Indeed, Wilson “loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power.”⁷ Certain of his superiority over common folk, Wilson was a progressive’s progressive, frustrated by the Constitution’s constraints on government and presidential powers, which limited his ability to forcibly remake America and its people. He sought to remedy what he saw as a flawed political system, signing into law the imposition of the income tax after the ratification of the 16^th Amendment and the creation of the Federal Reserve System, two steps that greatly strengthened federal power.

His dispassionate pose rested upon a deep foundation of sanctimony. He was, said H.L. Mencken, waiting for “the first vacancy in the Trinity.” France’s Georges Clemenceau said of Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points: “God Almighty has only ten!”⁸ Wilson undoubtedly believed that he was fated to be the world’s representative of humanity.

Unfortunately, his behavior suggested someone who hated people even while professing to love mankind. For instance, Wilson’s soaring vision was primarily for a white nation. Although his reform platform initially garnered support from leading African Americans, his policies were racist and reactionary. When he arrived in Washington, D.C., the federal government was the District’s most significant integrated institution. Not so when he left. Sadly, his “failure to address Jim Crow disenfranchisement, his decision to screen Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915, his dismissal of African American activists, and—most notably—his administration’s active segregation of the federal government, together helped to further cement the systemic racial injustices that defined American life in the 20th century.”⁹ (For these actions alone Wilson’s name, no less than those of Confederate officials, should be stripped from buildings, bridges, and other facilities.¹⁰)

Wilson’s domestic record was deficient in other ways. He paid little attention to the Spanish Flu epidemic, which cost some 675,000 Americans their lives, almost six times the country’s deaths in World War I. This was a strange response, observed Eric Felten: “One would expect a skilled advocate of federal authority to have used every power of his office to confront a scourge that was killing Americans by the hundreds of thousands.”¹¹ In contrast, Wilson did support mandatory sterilization.¹²

Perhaps Wilson’s most grievous crime was his assault on fundamental American liberties. As America’s war-​time leader Wilson asserted the transcendent rights of man while playing petty dictator. He demanded from Congress the power to suppress dissent. There was no greater crime in his mind than to criticize him and his policies.

In December 1915 while America was still at peace Wilson told Congress: “I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.”

Thus, he added, “I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment and feel that in doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-​respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. They are not many, but they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once.”¹³

It soon did. He continued to push Congress to pass repressive new legislation and even penalize criticism of the president, harkening back to the discredited repression of the Democratic-​Republicans during the John Adams administration. Congress responded with the Espionage Act of 1917. Although legislators rejected some of Wilson’s proposals, such as formal press censorship, they punished dissent. Expressions of opposition to or even dissatisfaction with the war led to prosecutions and prison terms under the supposedly great liberal crusader.

Observed Harvard Law Professor Zechariah Chafee: “One by one the right of freedom of speech, the right of assembly, the right to petition, the right to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the right against arbitrary arrest, the right to a fair trial … the principle that guilt is personal, the principle that punishment should bear some proportion to the offense, had been sacrificed and ignored.”¹⁴

In fact, Wilson acted like a typical European tyrant with his administration’s prosecution of Eugene Debs, the socialist leader who ran for president and denounced the conflict as the capitalists’ war. Even after the conflict ended the cruelly vindictive Wilson refused to release Debs, leaving that task to Wilson’s Republican successor, Warren Harding. The contrast between Wilson’s rhetoric and conduct was stunning. Wrote Melvin Urofsky and Paul Finkelman: “the war to make the world safe for democracy triggered the worst invasion of civil liberties” in America’s history, undermining its democracy.¹⁵

Finding the public insufficiently enthralled with fighting on behalf of European colonial powers in the Old World’s destructive war, he and his aides made Uncle Sam the propagandist-​in-​chief. Philip Dynia of Loyola University (New Orleans) observed: “The Wilson administration had been engaging in inflammatory rhetoric to foster and then exacerbate a state of public outrage, necessitated by the absence of any direct German attack on the United States. Wilson established a Committee on Public Information (CPI) that flooded the nation with materials whose dominant theme was a demand for conformity and super-​patriotism. Many communities banned German-​language teaching and German-​language books, and citizens of German descent were often subjects of vigilante action.”

Worst may have been the government’s recruitment of vigilantes, most notably “preparedness clubs” and “Minute Men,” who targeted the slightest deviation from the strictest, purist standard of obedient patriotism. Unsurprisingly, “Fear and repression worked its way into every nook and cranny of ordinary life.”¹⁶

Unfortunately, Wilson’s ambitions did not stop at remaking the US. For instance, he treated the Monroe Doctrine as an affirmative grant of presidential power, entitling Washington to routinely attack and occupy America’s southern neighbors. Despite his rhetorical flights of liberal fancy, he proved to be a more enthusiastic imperialist than his predecessors, readily sending in the military to impose his will: “Wilson’s attempt to help Nicaraguan rebels eventually required him to occupy the country by force in 1914. The same blunder occurred in Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916, when Wilson eventually sent in American troops to occupy the islands.”¹⁷

The Wilson administration’s dealings with Mexico were particularly fractious. There was a coup in 1913, after which he aided the insurgents. Wilson’s willingness to frivolously shed American blood was highlighted by an incident that led to direct military intervention in Mexico. After US sailors on shore leave were seized, “Wilson demanded an apology. He also demanded that Huerta publicly salute the American flag in Mexico, which Huerta naturally refused to do. Wilson responded with force: in April 1914, he sent American Marines to take and occupy Veracruz, Mexico’s primary seaport. Veracruz was taken, but eighteen Americans were killed in the battle.”¹⁸

Indeed, Wilson was looking for an excuse to invade Mexico, despite the opposition of both sides in the ongoing civil war. It took foreign mediation to avoid hostilities. Eventually that dictatorship was overturned, but another attempt at revolution soon followed, which drew in US forces. They clashed with those of the recently established government, and war again was barely avoided. Wilson’s treatment of Mexico said much about him. Wrote Karp: “It was in his Mexican policy that Wilson revealed those singular qualities of character—the self-​ennobling ambition, the contempt for the opinions of others, the bottomless self-deceit—that were to help him drag America into the trenches of France. Wilson’s policy, too, revealed the extraordinary lengths Wilson was determined to go to inflict foreign complications on his unwilling countrymen.”¹⁹

His imperialist mindset was unabashed. On Flag Day in June 1914 Wilson declared that the US flag stood “for the just use of undisputed national power” and “the assertion of the right of one nation to serve the other nations of the world.”²⁰ This was “serve” in an Orwellian sense, meaning to invade, occupy, and rule. (It recalls the Twilight Zone episode entitled “To Serve Man.”²¹)

Wilson’s grandiose geopolitical designs were evident even then, but the stage upon which he operated was much smaller. These Central American and Caribbean misadventures were next to nothing compared to World War I. Although the US had no good reason to join Europe’s continental murderfest, Wilson desired to transform the entire world and that required the US to become a combatant. Otherwise, his extravagantly egotistical schemes for a new global order would be ignored by European leaders. He was precisely the wrong man to have in the White House with Europe aflame.

Of course, Wilson could not be honest and tell Americans that he planned to take them into war and sacrifice their lives to allow him to dictate the future to the rest of the world. To achieve this end, he took Great Britain’s side in the war’s maritime disputes and allowed events to play out, yielding his desired result. As Karp noted: “Wilson had, at one and the same time, to act provocatively toward Germany yet not appear to the general public outrageously provocative, provocative, that is, to the point of betraying a desire for war.”²²

British ships cut the transatlantic cable, allowing London to control news that reached America. Great Britain also employed skilled propaganda agents in America, who used faked atrocity stories to ruin Germany’s reputation (which, tragically, caused reports of even worse crimes a generation later to be initially dismissed by skeptics determined not to be fooled twice). And Wilson ensured that British officials acted with the protection and aid of the US government.

In a barbarous war in which all powers abandoned any sense of humanity, Britain began by violating international law and the rights of neutral nations, most importantly America, while imposing a starvation blockade on Germany. Berlin retaliated with U-​boat warfare, a terrible innovation. When submarines attempted to comply with the dictates of traditional maritime warfare—by surfacing to challenge British merchantman—the latter rammed and sank the subs. As a result, Berlin began destroying British vessels without warning.

Wilson refused to criticize London over its blockade, one of conflict’s most devastating weapons, stating that he would not impede Britain’s prosecution of the war. Despite his pretense of neutrality Wilson made his biases clear: “England is fighting our fight and you may well understand that I shall not, in the present state of the world’s affairs place obstacles in her way when she is fighting for her life, and the life of the world.”²³ Moreover, he surrounded himself with like-​minded thinkers. Observed Karp: “There was only one place in America where the extreme anglophile views of a minute fraction of the American people enjoyed the support of an overwhelming majority—in the upper reaches of the Wilson administration.”²⁴ The one exception was Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who soon would resign in disgust at Wilson’s warlike course.

However, the president took a very different position, best characterized as inane, toward Germany. In his view, US citizens had an absolute right to book passage on British passenger liners—sometime armed merchant vessels designated as reserve cruisers carrying munitions through a war zone. Berlin even ran advertisements warning against travel on British vessels, but Wilson insisted that even one American knowingly boarding a de facto British warship immunized its passage. The most famous case in which London mixed “bullets and babies,” as a frustrated Bryan put it, was the Lusitania. It was torpedoed on May 7, 1915; it sank because of the secondary explosion of the munitions it was carrying. Recognizing that Wilson was determined for war, Bryan resigned the following month.

In an attempt to forestall US intervention, Berlin backed away from unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson won reelection as the man who kept America out of war. But he pushed military “preparedness” and was frustrated by his inability to impose his will on the combatants from afar. As the conflict dragged on and hundreds of thousands of men died on both sides in fruitless trench warfare on the Western Front, Germany finally decided to return Britain’s favor by trying to starve the island nation into submission. In January 1917 Berlin unleashed unrestricted submarine warfare. (Wilson also professed outrage over the Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany proposed an alliance with Mexico if war came. However, far from being an act of treachery, Berlin’s offer was a sensible, if unrealistic, conditional defensive move to counter Wilson’s active moves toward war.)

On February 3 Wilson broke diplomatic relations with Germany but held off on formal entry into the conflict, fearing that he lacked sufficient public support. On April 2 he requested that Congress declare war, employing what would in the future be known as the Big Lie, claiming that “the recent course of the Imperial German Government [was] in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States.”²⁵ Of course, Berlin’s maritime conduct was nothing of the sort: Wilson’s eloquence disguised subtle but calculated dishonesty. Indeed, he expressed shock that a government “that had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations” would engage in submarine warfare, conveniently ignoring Great Britain’s illegal blockade which ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of noncombatants. On April 6 the House followed the Senate in voting for war and propelled America into the Europeans’ foolish imperial conflict.

Although critical for the allied victory, Washington’s entry was a disaster for the US, and ultimately for Europe and the rest of the world. Few Americans other than Wilson benefited, except eastern banks which funded Britain’s war and ambitious military commanders who sacrificed their soldiers’ lives in search of career advancement until the very last minute before the armistice took effect.²⁶

Europe also lost by winning. With the collapse of Russia’s Tsarist government in April and Soviet revolution in November, Germany was able to shift troops to the west and make one last attempt at victory. But that effort failed. Without America’s involvement, stalemate and a compromise peace loomed likely as the exhausted powers faltered—the French military mutinied while Austro-​Hungary teetered on the edge of collapse and German morale plummeted. All combatants were desperate to halt the killing and recover economically.

“What if?” is impossible to answer, of course, but Powell suggested: “The best the Germans might have hoped for would have been to annex Belgium and northwestern France, where much of World War I had been fought, as well as territories gained from Austria-​Hungary and western Russia.”²⁷ Such an enlarged empire would not have been easy to preserve, especially with Germany desperate to recover economically.

The Western Front was not Wilson’s last military intervention in Europe. There also was Russia, about which the president knew little. Observed Powell: “Apparently Wilson, who fancied himself a champion of democracy, didn’t ask how the Russian people were affected by the war.”²⁸ Unable to vote the Tsar out of office, they overthrew the monarchy. And the revolutionary Bolshevik government answered the Russian people’s prayers by ending their country’s involvement in the war—to the horror of the other allied belligerents, which counted on the Tsarist regime to continue providing abundant human fodder for combat.

Wilson then joined the British and French in a quixotic mission to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war. US forces served in northern Russia in 1918 and 1919, and in Siberia from 1918 to 1920, collectively losing more than 400 men on a mission little known and for purposes barely understood. It was a foolish, doomed mission that understandably engendered enduring hostility in Moscow. Wilson indicated that he believed the mission was a mistake, but he felt compelled to back his Entente partners on a project “upon which they so much set their hearts.”²⁹ That all amounts to another persuasive argument against America’s involvement in the war.

The infusion of US aid and troops put the Entente over the top. Thus, Wilson gained what he assumed to be his heaven-​sent opportunity to dictate a glorious peace to the earth’s 1.8 billion people. His efforts ended up a disaster. Despite having purported to speak with great eloquence and elocution for all humankind, he engaged in no preparation to design the new world. Observed John Maynard Keynes, who attended the Versailles peace conference years before penning his famous economic text: “the President had thought out nothing; when it came to practice his ideas were nebulous and incomplete. He had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of the life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House.”³⁰ This not only encouraged but necessitated that Wilson’s European partners take the lead, to his great disadvantage.

The Versailles peace treaty wantonly violated his famed 14 Points as fellow allied leaders plundered the losing powers, traded subject populations as casino chips, drew borders as if filling a coloring book, laughed at foreigners seeking equal treatment, and trashed principle after cherished principle whenever to their advantage, which was almost always. Wilson’s overweening hubris—highlighted by stunning ignorance of the lands of which he disposed, arrogant refusal to seek advice, and delusional belief that he spoke for humankind—left him vulnerable to deft British and French manipulation.

They brilliantly used the president’s idealistic vision to suit their selfish ends. Indeed, during Wilson’s absence in early 1919 his colleagues “decided to take the League of Nations hostage. Throughout the spring, each of them would present a different ransom note. The first one, appropriately, would be French in origin.”³¹ All they had to do was indicate doubt about his sacred League and fevered concessions would come forth from Wilson.

The pact was neither conciliatory nor Carthaginian, leaving a confused hash incapable of digestion. Either extreme might have worked, but not the mid-​point, harsh enough to antagonize the defeated and ineffective enough to sap the will of the victorious. As a result, few countries would or could keep the resulting peace.

The Versailles Treaty spawned a gaggle of weak ethnically based states, known as Saisonstaaten, or “states for a season,” such as Czechoslovakia, which were dependent on the allies. Although nominally a victor, carried across the finish line by its partners-​in-​crime, Italy was dissatisfied at not gaining more territorial loot. After British Prime minister Lloyd George promised to squeeze Germany for reparations “until the pips squeak,”³² the British government grew embarrassed by its handiwork and sought to weaken the treaty’s terms. France feared facing a revanchist Germany as well as acting without London. The supreme allied commander, Ferdinand Foch, presciently predicted: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”³³

Wilson’s ego ravaged and confidence shattered, he “returned to America, mentally unhinged, morally bankrupt, and politically weak.”³⁴ Even before his stroke he grew more irrational and irascible, separated from reality and opposed to any compromise with the US Senate. When Wilson sought to win popular support for his egotistical illusions embodied in the Versailles Treaty, he failed. By then Americans had emerged from their militaristic-​nationalistic trance. Few wanted to be guarantors of Anglo-​French dominance, the overriding objective of the treaty. The Senate rejected the pact; a separate U.S.-German Peace Treaty was signed in 1921, by his successor.

The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia a few months after America’s entry into the war in 1917, creating the first communist nation after a lengthy and bitter civil war. In 1921 German army veteran Adolf Hitler took over a small nationalist party, which eventually pushed all others aside. A year later, Italy’s Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts staged the famous march that put his fascists in power.

World War II followed naturally, if not quite inevitably.

Germany felt no stake in maintaining a settlement that its people derided as the “Diktat.” From this emerged the myth that the German military had been defeated by the “Dolchstoss,” or stab-​in-​the-​back at home. Politics in the Weimar Republic radicalized, leading to attempted street putsches, assassinations of left-​wing politicians, extremist bids for power, street violence between communists and Nazis, and ultimately Hitler’s rise. Proving the dependability of the Germans, Berlin began its journey to the lowest rungs of Hades with the invasion of Poland precisely 20 years after the Versailles conference, as Foch predicted. The German people did not emerge from their hideous ideological phantasma until their nation was ruined, their cities were bombed, and their countryside was occupied.

Wilson died before seeing the ill consequences of his decisions. Indeed, he barely survived the war, suffering a debilitating stroke that left his wife effectively governing the country by disguising his enfeebled condition.

His grandiose ambitions in ruins, he still wanted to run for a third term, even though he could not manage a Cabinet meeting, let alone a campaign speech. Early in 1920 he penned some thoughts for a third inaugural address, and those around him played along: “No one, however, would tell the President that his candidacy was an utter impossibility.”³⁵ The Democratic Party convention finally acted to make a conversation unnecessary. Wilson’s fantasy came to naught as even his own party had tired of him. So had the American people, who awarded a landslide to the lackluster Warren Harding, whose most important qualification was not being Woodrow Wilson. The latter died in 1924, his geopolitical handiwork beginning to implode.

Woodrow Wilson typically wins a “near great” rating from historians, but for what? As president he was a racist who rolled back civil rights protections and eviscerated civil liberties. His aggressively imperialistic foreign policy brutalized America’s neighbors. His foolish determination to make Washington the deciding power in Europe’s terrible and unnecessary killfest cost thousands of American lives and ultimately made possible the far more devastating World War II.

Judged by impact, his record is one of America’s worst presidents, if not the worst. And his impact persists. Historian Thomas J. Knock cited “the enduring relevance” of Wilson’s vision, in which “he remains unique among presidents of the American Century.”³⁶ Unfortunately. As we have tragically seen with the continuing dissolution of the post-​World War I boundaries drawn by the victors, truly the “triumph of Wilson and the war party struck the American Republic a blow from which it has never recovered.”³⁷