by David Milne
Wilson’s religion and political value system directly informed his early views on foreign policy. Whereas Mahan had written little on the merits of democracy, and viewed the Anglophone world as politically and economically unique, Wilson’s reading of the Enlightenment philosophes at Princeton led him to view elected government as the ideal polity and to further believe that all nations could benefit from the economic, political, social, and cultural advantages that accompanied democracy’s embrace. His inclusive Universalist Presbyterianism, furthermore, led him to believe that all people held the potential to assume the attributes that Wilson conceded, at that stage, Anglo-Saxons possessed in greater quantity than other ethnicities. Time and patience were essential if political transformations were to endure.
Wilson was similar to Mahan in that he reviled slavery but was steeped in the casual racism prevalent in that era. Those of African descent faced the longest journey to cognitive and political maturity, Wilson believed, although he criticized those who deployed flawed scientific measures such as cranial measurements to rationalize a racial pecking order. He was opposed to woman suffrage, believing that the vitality of the family would be undermined if women were granted the right to vote. By today’s standards Wilson appears reactionary. But in late-nineteenth-century America, his Universalism—his belief expressed later that “when properly directed, there is no people not fitted for self-government”—placed him near the vanguard of liberal, progressive thought.20 Wilson’s taciturnity made him a difficult man to read, but the value system that informed his life work was infused with positivity. Where Mahan was largely pessimistic on the future course of international relations, Wilson was more optimistic—a Kant to Mahan’s Hobbes—and he believed that all people, given time and encouragement, were heading toward the same prosperous and peaceable destination.
Wilson’s geopolitical Universalism was one of the factors that led him to break with fellow Democrats and offer wholehearted support for war with Spain in 1898. Wilson believed that defeating Spain and assuming control of the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii was the surest way to prevent Germany and Russia from projecting their power into the Pacific—an identifiably Mahanian rationale. He also followed Mahan and Senator Albert J. Beveridge in identifying a clear economic justification for expanding American power abroad: trade follows colonial acquisition and would be greatly facilitated by the acquisition of geographically dispersed coaling stations and deep-water harbors.
But Wilson differed with Mahan in offering a grander reason for holding on to the Philippines in the medium term, believing that America possessed a special duty to lead hitherto blighted nations toward democracy and prosperity; catalyzing this dynamic was an end in itself. While Britain was a political exemplar and beacon of stability, the people of the United States, as Wilson described them, were something more: “custodians of the spirit of righteousness, of the spirit of equal-handed justice, of the spirit of hope which believes in the perfectibility of the law with the perfectibility of human life itself.”21 Fulfilling America’s potential required more than perfecting the nation itself and persuading by example. The United States alone could spearhead the diffusion of freedom, prosperity, and democracy that in time would render armed conflict anachronistic. Wilson joked that the “beauty about a Scotch-Irishman is that he not only thinks he is right, but knows he is right. And I have not departed from the faith of my ancestors.”22 On the imperative that America owed the world its leadership, his belief was absolute.
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Wilson graduated from Princeton with no clear sense of how to fulfill the political ambitions he had acquired in college. Prodded in the direction of law by his father, Wilson enrolled at the University of Virginia, but he quickly came to view law as uncongenial. While Wilson had necessarily engaged himself in rote learning to overcome his early learning difficulties, Princeton had broadened his intellectual horizons, leading him to revel in the creative impulse, particularly in the fields of literature and history. “I wish now to record the confession that I am most terribly bored by the noble study of law sometimes,” Wilson wrote to a friend in 1879. “I think that it is the want of variety that disgusts me … When one has nothing but Law, served in all its dryness, set before him from one week’s end to another, for month after month and for quarter after quarter, he tires of this uniformity of diet.”23 Wilson dropped out of law school after eighteen months but, in that less professionalized era, still managed to establish himself as one half of an Atlanta law firm, Renick and Wilson, where the practicalities of being a lawyer bored him just as much as the process of mastering the subject. A concerned Joseph Wilson warned his increasingly disenchanted son to “stick to the law and its prospects be they ever so depressing or disgusting.” He worried that Woodrow, as he now preferred to be called, would give up a lucrative profession to pursue a “mere literary career.”24 But his entreaties were to no avail; Wilson had no desire to persist in a job he disliked for pecuniary advantage alone. He abandoned the security of law and decided instead to pursue an academic career, concluding that “a professorship was the only feasible place for me.”25
Wilson commenced his doctoral studies in political science in 1883 at Johns Hopkins, the first university in the United States to cite research as its founding purpose, and an institution widely regarded as possessing the finest Ph.D. program in the nation. It was the process of thinking and writing, not the teaching element, that propelled Wilson toward this path. In this respect he conformed to the German research ideal that privileged the production of fresh knowledge over the education of undergraduates—a task in which anyone with enthusiasm and a relevant bachelor’s degree could engage. But in other respects he diverged from the Teutonic veneration of narrow professionalization. Like Mahan, Wilson was determined to reach a general audience, not just write scholarly monographs with small print runs and paltry royalties. He was similarly unenthusiastic about the rigors of archival research. To his wife, Ellen, Wilson confided in 1884 that “I want to write books which will be read by the great host who don’t wear spectacles—whose eyes are young and unlearned!”26 He believed his scholarship could serve a pedagogical function and secure him a national reputation as a compelling and relevant thinker, while his lectures would allow him to further hone his rhetorical skills. Wilson viewed an academic career as the best available path open to him, but it was always pursued with a view to becoming a politician—to make history, not to write it, as the cliché goes.
With remarkable speed and purpose, Wilson began researching and writing his Ph.D. as a book, turning the conventional way of establishing a scholarly reputation on its head. He began writing in January 1884, finished the manuscript in September, and the book was accepted quickly and published by Houghton Mifflin in January 1885. That just one year elapsed between Wilson first putting pen to paper and the book appearing might suggest a facile, error-strewn effort. But Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics was a substantial piece of scholarship for a writer of any age, let alone a second-year graduate student with a history of dyslexia. The book was reviewed to acclaim and retains its status today as a seminal work of American political analysis, although its lack of primary sources remains a major shortcoming in a research culture still dominated by the Germanic ideal. One reviewer gushed that the book represented “the best critical writing on the American constitution which has appeared since the ‘Federalist’ papers.”27 It propelled Wilson toward a successful academic career.
With analytical verve, Congressional Government developed many of the core assumptions that informed his earlier article on the merits of cabinet government. The crux of Wilson’s argument, as described by the historian John A. Thompson, is that “American government suffered in many ways from a lack of a clear and responsible center of authority like the British cabinet.”28 To remedy deficiencies in the Constitution, Wilson believed that aspects of the British system had to be imported, although his argument was not as prescriptive as that presented in h
is earlier article. “I have abandoned the evangelical for the exegetical—so to speak,” Wilson informed a friend.29 Through his survey of the U.S. political system, Wilson identified the Founding Fathers’ sectional compromise that created the pivotal system of “checks and balances” as the greatest impediment to effective government. He compared the three branches of American government unfavorably with the British parliamentary system, which privileged action and accountability over the requirement that executive energy be dampened through countervailing power bases. The world had become too complex for America’s unwieldy political system to navigate—it had to be rationalized and rendered more efficient. To achieve this goal, as the historian John G. Gunnell writes, Wilson believed that “the social scientist, like the statesman, was to play a crucial role.”30
While Wilson spends comparatively little time discussing foreign policy in the book, he elaborated on this critical executive function in a follow-up work, Constitutional Government in the United States, in a revealing passage that portended later political setbacks:
The initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely. The President cannot control a treaty with a foreign power without the consent of the Senate, but he may guide every step of diplomacy, and to guide diplomacy is to determine what treaties must be made, if the faith and prestige of the government are to be maintained. He need disclose no step of negotiation until it is complete, and when in any critical matter it is completed the government is virtually committed. Whatever its disinclination, the Senate may feel itself committed also.31
Streamlining and expediting the process of government was the political reform close to Wilson’s heart, and Congressional Government accomplished his central aim in reaching out to the general reader and establishing a national reputation. Yet with that goal achieved, Wilson never again wrote a book or article that might be deemed intellectually pathbreaking. He wanted to look after his wife and three daughters in some style and recognized that he possessed the literary gifts to do so. He followed up his scholarly debut with the five-volume A History of the American People, which Wilson described frankly as a “high-class pot boiler.”32 Other minor works followed, which sank without academic trace but attracted a loyal following beyond the university. Wilson, like Mahan, drew a substantial amount of his income from frequent royalty checks, happily oblivious of the opprobrium of Humboldtian research scholars.
Congressional Government set Wilson on a swift rise through the ranks of American universities. He took a job at Bryn Mawr College in 1885, moved to Wesleyan College in 1888, and returned to his alma mater two years later to assume a professorship in jurisprudence and political economy. Wilson was a popular figure on the Princeton campus, with colleagues and students alike, and his reputation as a scholar—strong but fading—and as a deft and forceful administrator, led the universities of Illinois and Virginia to offer him the presidencies of their institutions. Wilson remained loyal to Princeton, however, and was in turn rewarded by significant salary increases that eventually made him its highest-paid professor. In 1902, Wilson’s gifts as a leader landed him the academic job he valued the most: the presidency of Princeton.
Wilson’s second stint at Princeton was the happiest time of his life.33 Assuming the head of one of America’s most venerable institutions provided a platform for him to convey larger messages on education, politics, and society to a wide audience. But Wilson also made multiple enemies during his tenure. He was determined to raise academic standards, to challenge the centrality of the eating clubs and the tradition of the gentleman’s C, to hire fresh talent to inject scholarly rigor into a parochial faculty, and to make Princeton equal to Harvard and Yale in respect to academic reputation and endowment.34 He was only partly successful in embedding meritocratic principles—in respect to staff recruitment and student attainment—in a university that had traded for too long on past glories. His campaign for reform provoked the ire of entrenched elites who liked things the way they were and did not care for the sanctimonious manner in which this Virginian upstart went about his task.
Wilson also established himself as something of a public intellectual (a term that had not yet entered the lexicon), a major educational figure whose writings and speeches entered the national consciousness. He made his ultimate ambitions clear on the eve of his Princeton inaugural address when he remarked to his wife, “I feel like a new prime minister getting ready to address his constituents.”35 The subjects Wilson discussed publicly ranged widely, focusing primarily on domestic reform—both elite political and grassroots social. Yet foreign affairs also came to interest him more than previously. In 1906, for example, Wilson delivered a high-profile speech in which he observed that America’s vast latent energy would propel its strength and ideals outward: “Soon … the shores of Europe and then Autocratic Europe shall hear us knocking at their back door, demanding admittance for American ideas, customs and arts.”36 Significantly, Wilson also recognized that “the President can never again be the mere domestic figure he has been throughout so large a part of our history. The nation has risen to the first rank in power and resources … Our President must always, henceforth, be one of the great powers of the world, whether he act greatly and wisely or not.”37
Crucially, Wilson believed that his discipline of political science could play a central role in improving the nation’s domestic and foreign policies. In 1909–1910, Wilson served as president of the American Political Science Association. During his presidential address, he expressed hope that the political scientist, “out of his full store of truth, discovered by patient inquiry, dispassionate exposition, fearless analysis and frank inference [would] enrich the thinking and clarify the vision of the statesman of action.”38 Wilson’s demonstrated talent as a political scientist and vast potential as a “statesman of action” was not lost on him. He embodied the nexus between the social sciences and politics, meaning he was peculiarly well positioned to practice a new kind of leadership.
Wilson’s wider political ambitions were made clear in a sharply progressive speech he delivered in Pittsburgh in February 1910. Turning to the problems that beset the institution he led, and that were common to many other universities besides, Wilson said that the “colleges are in the same dangerous position as the churches … They serve the classes not the masses.” In his rousing peroration he said he had “dedicated every power that there is within me to bring to the colleges that I have anything to do with to an absolutely democratic regeneration in spirit.”39
It was rhetorical flourishes like these that led Democratic strategists in New Jersey to identify the potential that would take Wilson first to the governor’s mansion in Trenton and then to the White House. Two prominent individuals in the party—Colonel George Harvey, editor of Harper’s Weekly, and former New Jersey senator James Smith—urged Wilson to run for the governorship of New Jersey in 1910 as a preliminary to running for the presidency two years later. Wilson’s interest was piqued immediately. He wrote to Mary Peck that “this is what I was meant for, this rough and tumble of the political arena. My instinct all turns that way.”40 The Democrats’ carefully laid plans were realized when Wilson prevailed in New Jersey and then nationally in 1912 against Roosevelt and Taft. It was a meteoric rise—a two-year governorship and then straight to the White House—that has not been repeated. It was testament to his ambition as much as to his capabilities.
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On Election Day, 6.3 million Americans cast their vote for Wilson, 4.1 million for Roosevelt, 3.5 million for Taft, and 900,000 for Debs. The electoral college, which is unkind to third-party candidates, translated these results into 435 votes for Wilson, 88 for Roosevelt, 8 for the unfortunate Taft, and none for Debs. Wilson had secured a comprehensive victory with just 43 percent of the popular vote. A united Republican Party would have certainly secured Taft’s reelection, but Roosevelt was not to be denied denying Taft, who in turn wa
s consoled by denying Roosevelt. It was a peculiar election all around. Taft and Roosevelt had foreseen their fate well in advance and both were gracious in defeat. As Roosevelt observed of Wilson, “I think him a very adroit man; I do not think he has any fixity of conviction.”41 Roosevelt’s assessment was informed by good manners, but it was also shaped by recognition that he and Wilson shared a common Progressivism on domestic politics. As the early Wilson biographer William Allen White observed, “Between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom was that fantastic imaginary gulf that always has existed between tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.”42 Foreign policy was a different matter entirely, however, and it took little time for Roosevelt to retract his generous assessment, viewing Wilson as being driven by a misguided “fixity of conviction” in the transformative power of good intentions.
At that stage, Wilson could scarcely have visualized what his foreign-policy agenda might look like—he was necessarily reactive. Up to 1912, his most important recorded statement on foreign affairs related to his belief that the president possessed absolute power in respect to diplomacy. This lack of sustained interest is comprehensible in light of the fact that the outside world scarcely registered among the electorate and the candidates during the campaign. The only international issue of note covered comprehensively by the media related to the revolution in neighboring Mexico, and Wilson said very little on that subject or, indeed, on the increasing tensions in Europe. Wilson would craft his foreign policies on the job, although certain traits established through his academic career would become apparent. With a sense of foreboding, perhaps, a few days after the election Wilson remarked to a former colleague at Princeton, the biologist Edwin Grant Conklin, that “it would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign problems, for all my preparation has been in domestic matters.”43