Focusing on President Woodrow Wilson and the United States in international relations, this collection of essays addresses enduring questions about American political culture and statecraft. His liberal internationalist vision of a new world order, which he articulated during World War I and which expressed his version of Americanism, would shape U.S. foreign policy for the next century. The following chapters thus assess not only his role during his presidency but also his legacy in defining the United States’ place in world history. They explore the nexus between American culture and international relations, between ideas and diplomacy, between ideology and power, and between humanitarian promises and self-interests. My critique of Wilson’s leadership in international relations highlights the limits of his definition of a new world order, notably with respect to religion and race. His belief in God’s providential mission for the United States in world history and his racial/ethnic identity profoundly limited the president’s international vision and statecraft, which expressed a Eurocentric, particularly Anglo-American, bias and drew a global color line. This book thus examines the exclusive as well as the universal dimensions of Wilsonianism.
Modern Anglo-American liberalism furnished the ideological foundation for Wilson’s new foreign policy in the early twentieth-century Progressive Era, an era in world history of imperialism and both nationalism and internationalism. When he called for making the world safe for democracy through American intervention in the European war, he envisaged a new world order that projected his understanding of U.S. national identity. He affirmed the tenets of collective security through a new League of Nations, national self-determination as the rationale for drawing new borders, and an “open door” for international commerce and finance as well as travel and cultural exchange. This vision required the freedom of the seas and the removal of barriers to trade and investment across borders. Hoping the Great War would culminate in the creation of a global community of liberal democracies with capitalist economies, he saw nation-states as the building blocks of this new world order.
Paradoxically, Wilson’s American vision of a new world order followed an old European intellectual tradition with biblical and classical roots. As Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt observed in The Myth of the West (1995), the idea of America came from the old world, not from the frontier in the American West as Wilson as well as Frederick Jackson Turner affirmed. This worldview depicted the United States as the culmination of world history, and gave Americans confidence in their future. Their new land represented a “city on a hill” or “last frontier” or “end of history.”Footnote 1 Their incomparable empire was not really like those of other great powers that had risen and fallen. The myth promised the United States a happier destiny with unending progress. Wilson embraced this mythic American exceptionalism in his understanding of world history.
Wilson applied this nationalist perspective to international relations during and after World War I. Within the framework of American exceptionalism, the president claimed to offer the postwar world its best hope for lasting peace. The League, which he saw as the centerpiece of the Versailles Treaty with Weimar Germany, promised a new era of international relations. It would protect modern civilization against barbarism. It would replace old rivalries with “the united power of free nations” to keep the peace. He sought to establish the United States as the world’s preeminent leader in pursuit of “international social control” or, actually, of U.S. hegemony. The League, he believed, would enable Americans to provide worldwide leadership largely through their moral influence over public opinion, and thus fulfill their God-given destiny. “America shall in truth show the way,” he affirmed as he presented the peace treaty to the Senate.Footnote 2 At stake was nothing less than the defense of civilization against the barbarism of another world war.
Wilson’s belief in America’s God-given destiny and its progressive history blinded him from seeing what Wolfgang Schivelbusch called “the culture of defeat” in other countries. Born and raised in the American South, the president had experienced the trauma of defeat after the Civil War. This experience profoundly influenced him. Yet he found it difficult to empathize with foreigners who also suffered from military defeat. In The Culture of Defeat (2004), Schivelbusch compared the American South after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and Germany after World War I. The losers in all three wars claimed moral superiority over their conquerors. They regarded themselves as true defenders of civilization against barbaric victors.Footnote 3 Wilson’s claim to have created a new world order of “civilized men” at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 did not appear that way to most Germans in the Weimar Republic. Nor did it look that way to French premier Georges Clemenceau, who had experienced military defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Wilson shared the white South’s trauma after the American Civil War, but he did not understand either Clemenceau’s fixation on French security or Weimar Germany’s almost universal rejection of the Versailles Treaty. Wilson’s new world order fell short of French and German expectations, and those of other nations that had anticipated more from the peacemakers in 1919. Widespread disillusionment fed belligerent nationalism, which manifested the culture of defeat and contributed to the failure of democracy and peace after World War I. Wilson’s concept of a global community of nations offered no solution to the postwar conflicts in Europe. Nor did it fulfill the hopes of anticolonial nationalists on the other side of the color line elsewhere in the world.
Wilson’s biographers and historians of his role in international relations have typically applauded the positive qualities of Wilsonianism. So too have political scientists. Emphasizing supposedly universal principles of his liberal internationalism, they have tended to downplay his religious and racial prejudices. In contrast, Joyce Carol Oates, in her novel The Accursed (2013), depicted his as well as Princeton’s provincialism in 1905–06, although, as the university’s president, he was one of the most cosmopolitan residents in this predominantly white Protestant community. He embraced its “Anglo-Saxon Christianity.” In the novel Wilson asserted, “the United States is charged by God with spreading Christian democracy throughout the world, and opening the markets of the East as well – by diplomacy if possible, by power otherwise.” His Calvinist faith required both local and global engagement on “a battleground between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil.”Footnote 4 Oates portrayed the demonic consequences in Princeton of this racial and religious mission, and by implication, potentially elsewhere in the world whenever provincial Americans encountered foreign peoples and ideas. Essays in this book explore such encounters in Wilson’s diplomacy and statecraft during and after World War I and in his legacy of Wilsonianism.
This book provides my historical perspective on fundamental issues in the ongoing debates over the role of the United States in the world. Other historians such as David ReynoldsFootnote 5 and political scientists such as G. John IkenberryFootnote 6 have recognized the importance of the Wilsonian legacy. As they observed, the history of World War I and of Wilson’s role in it has continued to influence international relations throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. My book on Wilson and his definition of America’s place in world history will offer insights not only on his diplomacy and statecraft and on American political culture during the World War I era but also on his legacy in current international relations.
Since the end of the Cold War, two major trends in historiography have provided new perspectives on America’s place in the world. In this new era of globalization after the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians have sought to escape the limits of Cold War scholarship that emphasized the global division among the First, Second, and Third Worlds. In that framework, the United States and its allies had defended their freedom, democracy, and capitalism against the threat of dictatorial communism from the Soviet Union and other communist countries in a rivalry that had often played out in the Third World. With the apparent triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism over communism and the new era of globalization, historians looked for better ways to understand not only the present but also the past. One major historiographical trend was the emergence of the field of world history. No longer restricted by Cold War categories, scholars in this field sought to understand the history of various peoples and regions of the world by comparing them and identifying their transnational and international connections. Their focus was global, typically not adopting an America-centric or Eurocentric viewpoint like the one that privileged the First World during the Cold War. The second new historiographical trend was the internationalizing of American history. Scholars in this field also looked for transnational connections between developments in the United States and comparable ones elsewhere in the world. Historians of U.S. foreign relations, including myself, have contributed to and benefited from these two trends in contemporary historiography.
Conceptualizing World History
In Navigating World History (2003), Patrick Manning described how historians have created a global past by developing the field of world history and making it a significant part of historical studies. It has become an important subject for courses at colleges and universities and for research. He found the modern roots of Western ideas about world history in early modern Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. Nineteenth-century Europeans further developed a philosophy of history that placed Western civilization at its core. “In the emerging hierarchy of empires, nations, and colonies,” Manning explained, “the term civilization became part of the vocabulary of every philosophical camp. The term served as a double-edged weapon for confirming the primacy of European (and later, North American) nations in the world order. For premodern times, civilization referred to the succession of leading empires and societies, in contrast to each other and to the timeless barbarians beyond their limits. For modern times, civilization meant the civilized world, including the leading nations and imperial homelands but not the colonies.”Footnote 7 World War I, he noted, expanded global awareness. Thus, Manning observed, “Woodrow Wilson, who as a historian participated actively in the nationalistic style of writing about American history, became a theorist for a new world order once he became president and a leader of the Allied war effort.... Wilson’s vision of the League of Nations contributed, in the minds of some, to the notion of world government.”Footnote 8 He proceeded from nationalism to internationalism.
Manning recognized that scholars in the new field of world history studied primarily the subjects that had characterized diplomatic history. “World historians have worked in most detail on the social sphere, focusing especially on politics, warfare, commerce, and the rise and fall of states.” But they no longer interpreted these subjects within the nineteenth-century framework that continued to shape the thinking of twentieth-century leaders such as Wilson. Instead, they recognized greater diversity and relativity among the historical actors and their viewpoints. Manning emphasized that
the logic of world history, while reliant on the facts as they are known, leads inevitably instead to a multiplicity of interpretations. Thus, writers a century ago chose to focus on “civilization” as the basic concept in world history, and attempted to write master narratives focused on this concept.... By the opening of the twenty-first century, civilization had ceased to be an absolute standard. It maintained its significance, but, like everything else in world history, civilization had to be relativized.Footnote 9
Recent historical scholarship on World War I has increasingly embraced the perspective of world history. Rather than adopting a single national viewpoint, historians have placed the war in the broader framework of international and transnational history. Although the assassinations of Austria’s archduke and his wife by a Serbian terrorist in Sarajevo precipitated the July 1914 crisis in Europe, the resulting war quickly became global. It involved not only European empires around the world but also independent nations in Asia and the Western Hemisphere. It soon led to conflict between Japan and China and eventually to intervention by the United States and other nations in the Western Hemisphere. Not only did the war become global; it also became total, affecting all aspects of the state and civil society. In The Cambridge History of the First World War (2014), edited by Jay Winter, the authors interpreted it as both global and total.Footnote 10 Other historians also framed their studies of the war and postwar peacemaking as world history. This perspective characterized Hew Strachan’s The First World War (2001), Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 (2001), Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World (2006), Erez Manela’s The Wilsonian Moment (2007), and Adam Tooze’s The Deluge (2014).Footnote 11
Emily S. Rosenberg and her coauthors in A World Connecting (2012) examined the period from 1870 to 1945 as an era of major transition in world history. They analyzed the invention of modern statehood, examined the global reach of empires, studied the migrations of peoples around the world, traced commodity chains in the global economy, and focused on transnational and international currents in the shrinking world. The contributions of this book demonstrated the paradoxical experience of the world becoming more interdependent and yet apparently more diverse as different peoples increasingly interacted with each other. “Over the period from 1870 to 1945,” Rosenberg observed in the introduction, “the world became both a more familiar and a stranger place. Fast ships, railroads, telegraph lines, inexpensive publications, and film all reached into hinterlands and erased distances. The exchange of people and products accelerated, while the fascination with traveling around and describing foreign areas–long evident in human history–reached new heights.” This interaction created not only a greater sense of familiarity but also of strange differences. “New connections highlighted all kinds of regional differences,” Rosenberg noted, “and the awareness of difference could promote suspicion and repulsion perhaps even more easily than it facilitated understanding and communication.” In this modern era of interdependence and fragmentation, the world was increasingly characterized by both “the intensifying global interconnectedness” and “the multiple processes of disintegration and reintegration.”Footnote 12 For better or worse, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what happened in one place vitally impacted people in other countries or regions of the world, increasingly connecting the local and the global.
Internationalizing American History
As the field of world history was emerging, the Organization of American Historians launched its Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History. Directed by Thomas Bender, its La Pietra Report (2000) called for “new understandings of the American nation’s relation to a world that is at once self-consciously global and highly pluralized.”Footnote 13 In Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002), which Bender edited, he explained the purpose of this new direction in historiography. “My argument and that of this book,” he wrote, “is not for increasing the study of American foreign relations, although that is important. The point is that we must understand every dimension of American life as entangled in other histories. Other histories are implicated in American history, and the United States is implicated in other histories. This is not only true of this present age of globalization; it has been since the fifteenth century, when the world for the first time became self-consciously singular.”Footnote 14 Bender offered his own understanding of “America’s place in world history” in A Nation Among Nations (2006).Footnote 15
As historians of the United States increasingly transcended national borders in their scholarship, they also crossed the artificial boundaries between subfields of American history. Historians of U.S. foreign relations often pioneered in this new direction but they were soon joined by others, especially as they too sought to internationalize the study of their particular specialties. Outstanding examples of this recent scholarship combined American diplomacy, culture, and economics,Footnote 16 gender and international history,Footnote 17 race and U.S. foreign relations,Footnote 18 U.S. diplomatic and American western history,Footnote 19 labor and U.S. foreign relations,Footnote 20 American intellectual and diplomatic history,Footnote 21 immigration and U.S. foreign relations,Footnote 22 and religion in American war and diplomacy.Footnote 23 These historical studies provided new perspectives on America’s place in the world by transcending national borders and disciplinary boundaries that divided scholarship into fields and subfields.
Placing the United States in the global context of world history involved comparisons between American values and institutions and those of others. It required scholars to study the popular and scholarly claims of American exceptionalism, which affirmed that the United States was a providential nation with a unique history and mission. President Ronald Reagan expressed his belief in American exceptionalism in his farewell address on January 11, 1989. He saw the United States as still a “shining city upon a hill,” misquoting Puritan leader John Winthrop’s sermon to English settlers upon their arrival in the new world in 1630, to describe the “God-blessed” America he imagined as a land of “freedom.”Footnote 24 In the new era of globalization after Reagan’s presidency, his widely shared belief in American exceptionalism continued to shape how the United States defined its place in the world. This nationalist mythology still influenced American historiography as well. Among others, Australian historian Ian Tyrrell challenged this perspective that had characterized the way Americans had typically interpreted their history for the past century. He heralded a new framework to escape this exceptionalist perspective. “The internationalization of scholarship itself,” he noted, “is steadily eroding the boundaries that at the turn of the [twentieth] century created strong national historiographical traditions, including American exceptionalism.”Footnote 25
Within this new framework, which the OAH Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History promoted, historians placed the United States in a global context but without regarding it as an exceptional nation. Yet they understood that Americans, such as Wilson and Reagan, affirmed American exceptionalism. For example, Daniel T. Rodgers examined the transatlantic connections of social politics in the “progressive age” of the early twentieth century in Atlantic Crossings (1998). He noted that American progressives initially derived many of their ideas from European reformers, but this changed when the United States intervened in World War I. “Into the heart of guidebook Europe the American expeditionary army had rushed in the summer of 1918, not as a junior partner in an entangling foreign alliance but, as the American progressives preferred to see it, in a crusade to rescue civilization itself.” Leadership shifted to the United States.
“America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world,” Woodrow Wilson put the war’s moral in a nutshell in late 1919, in the messianic rhetoric that American war propaganda agencies had disseminated wholesale on both sides of the Atlantic. With Wilson mapping out the future of democracy in liberated Europe, with cheering crowds lining his procession through Dover, Paris, and Rome, it was not hard to imagine that the torch of world progress had indeed passed, once more, to the United States.Footnote 26
For Wilson, but not Rodgers, the emergence of the United States as the top progressive global leader during World War I seemed to vindicate America’s exceptionalist role in world history.
Ian Tyrrell also offered a transnational interpretation of American history that eschewed the framework of American exceptionalism that Wilson, both as historian and president, had embraced. In Reforming the World (2010), he examined “the creation of America’s moral empire” during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
The new internationalism that moral reformers supported turned on the exchange of ideas, norms, and values among like-minded individuals in voluntary organizations across national boundaries. Ordinary people would work together in non-state relationships to enhance international understanding, to foster ethical conduct, and to promote moral reform. Peace between nations would flow from the activities of clubs and reform organizations.
This transnational culture of moral reform, he noted, usually exerted only an indirect influence on U.S. foreign policy. “While moral reform networks and missionaries did contribute at times to specific policy outcomes,” Tyrrell observed, “these were usually determined by realpolitik. Rather than determine statecraft, the Christian coalition contributed to a missionary and reformist Weltanschauung within the higher echelons of American politics.”Footnote 27 Within that cultural milieu, Wilson defined his vision of a new world order during World War I.
In American Exceptionalism (2015), Finnish political scientist Hilde Eliassen Restad argued persuasively that the national identity of the United States profoundly influenced its approach to international relations. Its British heritage, including Puritanism, persisted in ideas about race and religion that characterized America’s national identity, shaping both its nationalism and its internationalism. Rejecting the false dichotomy between isolationism and internationalism, she observed that throughout their history Americans had instead alternated between “exemplary” and “missionary” internationalism. The United States had never tried to isolate itself from the world, although it sought to control its own involvement. In accordance with American exceptionalism, which combined both universalism and uniqueness, it pursued “unilateral internationalism.” Restad observed that this tradition characterized U.S. foreign relations from the American Revolution to George W. Bush’s global war on terrorism after 9/11. In agreement with my scholarship, she affirmed that “President Wilson ... applied a nationalist perspective to America’s new world role. Specifically, he utilized the rhetorical framework of American exceptionalism, arguing that the United States and its system offered the world the best hope for enduring peace.” Restad challenged many of the restrictive categories that other political scientists used. But she lapsed back into the more traditional dichotomy when she identified Wilson only with “multilateral internationalism” and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, his opponent in the fight over the League of Nations, with “unilateral internationalism.” She did not recognize that Wilson’s liberal internationalism combined both unilateralism and multilateralism. Like most political scientists, she equated Wilsonianism with multilateralism, thus removing Wilson from the American diplomatic tradition of “unilateral internationalism,” although she viewed him as “American exceptionalism personified.”Footnote 28
Recent Scholarship on Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism
In contrast to Rodgers, Tyrrell, and Restad, Frank Ninkovich argued in The Global Republic (2014) that American exceptionalism did not shape U.S. foreign relations. Instead, he emphasized
the historical singularity of [U.S.] policies whose formulation, implementation, and consequences were prompted by an unprecedented commitment to maintaining an international society that had developed independently of American initiative. American exceptionalism, by contrast, suggests a redemptive compulsion to export American views and values to an unreformed world.
He noted that American exceptionalism was not unique to the United States because it had originated in the political ideology inherited from Great Britain. It came from British exceptionalism, which John Winthrop had expressed in his Puritan vision of “a city upon a hill” for “the eyes of all people.” The lineage of this ideological perspective, moreover, went back to classical Greece and Rome and to the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe. During the American Revolution, the new nation drew on this European, particularly British, heritage to launch its unique experiment in republican government, which was exceptional in the late eighteenth-century era of monarchs and empires. However, Ninkovich argued, despite the founding fathers’ desire for the United States to serve as a model for the old world, they did not use their liberal republicanism to define an exceptionalist foreign policy to redeem the world. Thus, he concluded, “America’s uniqueness as a geopolitically isolated republic was not matched by a corresponding exceptionalism in its approach to foreign relations.”Footnote 29
In Ninkovich’s view, the United States became even less exceptional after the Civil War as it experienced the transnational process of civilization, later called globalization. “Civilization was a convenient abstraction for powerful forces of history that had altered seemingly everything concrete: how people lived and died, governed, worked, loved, worshipped, proselytized, traveled, and understood themselves and the world.” This structural transformation created an international society beyond the political control of any nation: “it just happened.” Although this process originated in the West, initially in Great Britain, it produced “a new global civilization.” “Thanks to globalization,” Ninkovich argued, “the old world was no longer old and the new world no longer distinctively new. Instead, both were caught up in the process of becoming modern.”Footnote 30 Cosmopolitan Americans embraced the ideas of British liberals such as John Bright, Walter Bagehot, and William Gladstone to explain this transformation and define America’s place in the changing world. Transatlantic Anglo-American liberalism provided the cultural foundation of American internationalism, as Ninkovich perceptively explained in Global Dawn (2009). “The issue was not the Americanization of England or the Anglicization of America, but rather the globalization of both.” He noted, moreover, that “one of the principal legatees of nineteenth-century liberalism” was Woodrow Wilson, who believed its universalism would allow the United States to escape European power politics even after it entered World War I. Accordingly, when the president asserted America’s interest in world peace, not just Europe’s, Ninkovich concluded, “Wilson’s declaration was a reaffirmation of the nineteenth-century liberal belief in the primacy of the globalizing process.”Footnote 31
At the turn of twentieth century, as Ninkovich observed in The Global Republic, the United States had joined the international club of European empires, creating its own new empire with its “civilizing mission.” This departure from the nation’s non-imperial westward expansion across North America provoked a debate over imperialism. “Though both sides of the debate on empire sought to package their ideas in exceptional rhetoric,” he emphasized, “the global frame of reference had little to do with national ideals.” After its “aberration” of empire-building, the United States soon looked for a different relationship with Europe’s great powers. “It was the pursuit of cooperation among the so-called civilized powers, and not empire, that would leave a deeper and more lasting imprint on American policy,” Ninkovich claimed. U.S. presidents during the Progressive Era – Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and then Wilson – imagined and pursued new ways of relating to the international society.Footnote 32
Wilson’s liberal internationalism seemed to provide the answer during World War I. “Among a host of other important consequences,” Ninkovich observed, “the war also launched the career of Wilsonianism as the ideological embodiment of America’s ingrained belief that it was the world’s redeemer nation. Despite its fall from grace, for both its die-hard supporters and its critics Wilsonianism would remain the supreme expression of the nation’s exceptionalist spirit.” Ninkovich offered a different interpretation, arguing that it was really an anomaly. Its central feature, the League of Nations, was actually “far more British and European than American.” Moreover, the president was not a crusader for democracy. “For Wilson, making the world safe for democracy did not mean democratizing the world. As John Milton Cooper Jr. has noted, the phrase was crafted in the passive voice that did not envision an American jihad against nondemocratic infidels.” Although Wilson advocated anti-imperialism and national self-determination, Ninkovich noted, he restricted the application of this vision. “For the foreseeable future, democratization and national self-determination for most peoples was a pipe dream.” In the peacemaking after World War I, Wilson’s ideals failed to materialize in a new world order. “The story of the League fight,” Ninkovich concluded, “suggests that Wilsonianism was not the paradigmatic example of American idealism at work, but an anomaly in the history of US foreign relations – an exceptionalist exception whose guiding ideas were short-lived in practice.”Footnote 33
This interpretation of Wilsonianism departed in some basic respects from Ninkovich’s earlier versions. Rather than viewing it as an anomaly, he had seen it as the core ideology of U.S. foreign policy in The Wilsonian Century (1999). In that book, he argued, “the Wilsonian century was the product of an imaginative interpretation of history that survived not only because it seemed to make sense of a confusing modern world, but also because it successfully passed the test of experience.” “It was Wilson’s gift for historical interpretation rather than empirical observation that enabled him to give such a compelling reading of a chaotic world scene,” Ninkovich added. He applauded the president for positing the concept of a nonexistent “world opinion” and for rejecting the realist tradition of power politics in international relations.
It would have been a remarkable story if the United States had gone from isolationism to world politics by following the traditional path of power politics. But the nation took a different and altogether more extraordinary course by radically redefining what it meant to be a world power. American internationalism in the 20th century was truly exceptional because it abandoned the idea of interest as traditionally understood over thousands of years, opting instead to identify its national security with global needs.Footnote 34
Ninkovich still defined America’s foreign threat in the same way he did in Modernity and Power (1994), when he credited Wilson with originating the Domino Theory.Footnote 35 Yet that metaphor, which influenced U.S. foreign policy throughout the Cold War, obscured real cultural distinctions among diverse nations or peoples in a globalized world.
In The Global Republic Ninkovich stressed the external environment of the international society rather than the internal origins of U.S. foreign policy. Instead of any particular ideology such as American exceptionalism or its manifestation in Wilsonianism, he emphasized the universal and progressive historical process of globalization toward modern civilization. Like Wilson, who projected presumably universal principles of modern Anglo-American liberalism onto the world, Ninkovich emphasized interdependence between the local and the global. Unlike realists who recognized the diversity of interests and cultures in the modern world, he focused on the homogeneity of the emerging international society. He still applauded Wilson’s rejection of traditional power politics. Like him, Ninkovich conflated Western civilization with global civilization and identified American nationalism with internationalism, which blinded them from seeing or understanding the world’s diversity of peoples and nations. This profound failure to recognize pluralism in the modern world was the fundamental flaw in Wilsonianism and in Ninkovich’s various interpretations of it. Neither Wilson nor Ninkovich was alone in this common limitation. As Glenda Sluga revealed in Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (2013), even “the international turn” in the modern Western world did not enable self-identified internationalists to escape their own nationalism.Footnote 36 They projected their own visions of an international society onto the world and called it global.
In Woodrow Wilson (2009), John Milton Cooper, Jr. offered an affirmative biography, yet acknowledged some flaws. He noted the president’s poor record on race and civil liberties but did not allow it to tarnish the story of his remarkably successful career as an academic leader and statesman. Cooper downplayed Wilson’s racism, while other recent scholarship emphasized that he drew the color line at home by introducing Jim Crow segregation in the federal government and abroad by rejecting racial equality in the League of Nations and national self-determination for peoples of color. His racism coincided with his liberalism, fundamentally influencing his foreign policy.Footnote 37 Recent scholarship, moreover, highlighted religion as another key factor in Wilson’s statecraft. The Social Gospel in American Christianity profoundly influenced his worldview.Footnote 38 Cooper, however, argued that “Wilson practiced a severe separation not only between church and state but also between religion and society,” claiming that he was not “a secular messiah or a naïve, wooly-headed idealist.” Cooper saw him as “one of the most careful, hardheaded, and sophisticated idealists of his time.” The president led the United States into the Great War as a shrewd statesman, not as a crusader for democracy. “Wilson spoke the language of exalted idealism, but he did it in a humble, circumspect way.... He did not say that Americans must make the world safe for democracy; he did not believe that they could. They could only do their part, join with other like-minded nations, and take steps toward that promised land.”Footnote 39 Under Wilson’s leadership, in Cooper’s view, the United States sought to reach the “promised land” through progressive reform of the world, but not as an exceptionalist redeemer nation.
Cooper saw Theodore Roosevelt, in contrast to Wilson, as more of a crusader, and in some ways he was. TR criticized Wilson for his failure to condemn Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France in 1914 and for his weak response to its sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. He thought the United States should have entered the war sooner than 1917 and denounced Wilson for his belated and insufficient efforts to protect the democratic nations of Western Europe and for his failure to demand Germany’s unconditional surrender in 1918. Despite later perceptions to the contrary, Roosevelt’s internationalism, more than Wilson’s, affirmed the British (and French) liberal tradition of humanitarian intervention to protect human rights.Footnote 40
In fundamental disagreement with Cooper, A. Scott Berg emphasized the centrality of Wilson’s Christian faith in all aspects of his life. He used religious terms for all chapter titles in Wilson (2013). In this biography Berg observed that
the Wilson Cabinet of 1913 was a ten-way mirror, each panel of which reflected a different aspect of the man at the center. This was mostly a team of Rebels – lawyers from the South who had pursued other professions and never shed their Confederate biases, Anglo-Saxon Protestants all, mostly newcomers to Washington, if not politics altogether.... For the most part, the President would delegate power to his Secretaries ... to run their own departments, as he seldom found reason to countermand any of them. Every decision from this administration, noted one close observer, would contain a moral component, inspired by “the breath of God.”
After the United States entered the Great War, moreover, Wilson hoped “to carry the ‘Gospel of Americanism’ to every corner of the globe.”Footnote 41
Richard Striner as well rejected Cooper’s interpretation in a sharply critical account of Woodrow Wilson and World War I (2014). He argued that “the religious heart of Wilson’s sensibility cannot be denied” and that “Wilson’s brand of Christianity was heavily (and perhaps unusually) millennial.” Perhaps Georges Clemenceau went too far when he sneered that the president thought of himself as another Jesus Christ. “And yet,” Striner stressed, “since the very beginning of the war, he had felt that he himself might be destined by God to play the central role in putting an end to the horror: he himself would find a way to create the new dispensation.” However, by the time of the armistice, Wilson had alienated the Republicans to such an extent that there was no prospect for successful bipartisan peacemaking. “With Wilson being the stubborn and delusional man he had become by the final months of 1918,” Striner concluded, “what good would the presence of leading Republicans in the American delegation have done? Wilson, being Wilson, was his own worst enemy in ways that were far beyond retrieval. Any blunders he committed were the latest missteps in a very long series that were leading him, his country, and the world to disaster.”Footnote 42 Unlike Cooper’s Wilson, who was taking the United States toward the promised land of a world safe for democracy, Striner’s Wilson was heading it toward global disaster.
Like Cooper, Charles E. Neu offered a generally positive view of Wilson and his close friend, Edward M. House, in his biography of Colonel House (2015). In assessing House, Neu concluded that
in foreign affairs he was the most cosmopolitan of Wilson’s advisers, having traveled extensively in Western Europe in the years before the outbreak of the war. House followed great power politics closely, and during his wartime trips to Europe he tried to assess the complex currents of the struggle. He understood, earlier than most Americans, that the United States could not stand apart from events in Europe, that it must find a way to end the war and to rebuild international community.
Despite this praise, Neu inadvertently supported Striner’s critique of Wilson with his devastating criticism of House’s incompetence during his trips to Europe in 1914, 1915, and 1916 in search of peace. Referring to the 1916 peace mission, Neu observed, “House’s curious performance in Paris revealed once again his uneven skills as a diplomat. He had exaggerated his own accomplishments, misunderstood French leaders, and conveyed to Wilson an inaccurate assessment of the possibilities for peace.” When House then returned to London, he once more showed his inability to comprehend European international relations. “Instead,” Neu argued, “he continued to pursue his illusion of peace.”Footnote 43 This damning critique of House begged the question as to why the president persisted in relying on House’s judgment and gave him important diplomatic assignments until 1919, when Wilson finally lost confidence in his close friend during the peace conference.
Wilson exiled House to London to represent the United States on the Commission on Mandates during the summer of 1919. That commission laid the foundation for dividing former Ottoman territories and German colonies into League of Nations mandates based on a racial hierarchy but, presumably, on the level of development toward civilization of the different peoples of color. Not only Wilson but also Jan Smuts of South Africa, both of whom were dedicated to white supremacy, collaborated during the peace conference to create this alternative to traditional empires. “Everywhere,” Susan Pedersen observed in The Guardians (2015), “mandatory administrations deployed the language of civilization to justify their presence. Occasionally, however, the realities of race and power shone through.”Footnote 44 Neu barely mentioned House’s part in the Commission on Mandates and remained silent on the racial factor in U.S. policy toward the League mandates or in any other aspect of Wilson’s and House’s diplomacy. Nor did Neu recognize the religious factor in Wilsonianism. These were serious omissions from his biography of House.
What Cooper could not see in Wilson, Cara Lea Burnidge brought into sharp focus in A Peaceful Conquest (2016). She recognized the centrality of religion in Wilson’s statecraft and in his paternalistic and racist ideas about American nationalism and internationalism. “Southern evangelicalism and social Christianity shaped Wilson’s conception of democracy,” she observed.
For Wilson, democracy was a form of government based in a Calvinist notion of God’s order that regulated citizens according to social divisions he understood to be natural and inherently good, particularly whites’ racial superiority and patriarchy. He also regarded democracy as a national way of life, an ideal society reflecting the ethos of the social gospel and, therefore, worth spreading around the world. Successful evangelization of this democracy unified America’s domestic politics and foreign policy with the telos of humanity.
Religion and politics merged in the president’s vision of a new world order. While Burnidge agreed with Cooper that “Wilson supported the separation of church and state,” she emphasized, in contrast, that “his ideas of separating his religion and his politics were another matter entirely.” Wilson’s worldview prevented him from understanding that his particular Christian American perspective was not universally relevant as the foundation for a new world order. “Following the tradition of social Christians before him,” Burnidge noted, “Wilson conflated his particular, and peculiarly, white American Protestant view of equality with a universally applicable truth. The distance between his specific religious ideologies and universal truisms was lost on Wilson as he associated them with ‘American’ values.” She explained that “Wilson’s Presbyterian childhood taught him that all people were equal in the eyes of God, but it also taught him that God created both masters and slaves who were equal in their sin, salvation, and access to God’s grace but not equals in society on earth.” What appeared as hypocritical to others seemed inherently natural as an “integral part” of “providential design” to the president. He did not see the disparity between his advocacy of democracy and his commitment to racial inequality. “His effort to spread democracy, then, was an enterprise qualified by a particular type of democracy, born in America and made more perfect through the ‘civilizing’ force of his Christianity.”Footnote 45
Burnidge observed that Wilson’s religion shaped his understanding of America’s place in the modern world. “Drawing upon white Protestant moralisms,” she wrote, “he based his version of American exceptionalism upon a teleological interpretation of U.S. and world history in which the U.S. government, formed by the consent of the people, served as the culmination of Christian progress. In this way, Wilson believed, American democracy stood as a testament to God’s order and represented the progressive unfolding of God’s will. It was not perfect, but citizens could adapt and improve it over time. Democracy in the United States, then, continually developed through the will of the people, a will he firmly believed flowed naturally from the well-spring of providential design.” Having incorporated modern British liberalism into his vision of a new world order, the president saw the British Empire as a partner in establishing it at the Paris Peace Conference. Like him, the British sought to preserve global leadership for white men who presumably represented the best of Western civilization, including Protestant Christianity. They too drew a global color line. Burnidge noted, “Wilson’s particular understanding of democracy, like the British delegation’s view of world order, assumed the superiority and authority of white Protestants to properly lead. White male leadership, especially by Protestants, was the fundamental assumption at the heart of the informal moral establishment that had made America exceptional and social Christianity a unique social justice enterprise.”Footnote 46 For the president, this exceptionalist American vision seemed universally relevant as the foundation for a new, predominantly Anglo-American, world order. His American nationalism and internationalism expressed his fundamental religious beliefs.
Abstracts of Chapters
Major trends in recent historiography toward “navigating world history” and “rethinking American history in a global age” have provided new perspectives on America’s place in the world. My scholarship on Woodrow Wilson and American internationalism has both contributed to and benefited from these two historiographical trends, as shown by the chapters in this book.
Chapter 1 focuses on “U.S. Military and Diplomatic Affairs during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.”Footnote 47 Between 1877 and 1920, the United States emerged as one of the world’s great powers. It made the historic transition from so-called American isolationism to President Wilson’s liberal internationalism during World War I. Leaders in all countries, whether global empires or small states, regarded him as the preeminent statesman at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Anticolonial nationalists looked to him as the potential champion of their aspirations against their imperial masters. That global status, which Wilson enjoyed briefly, was quite different from the minimal role the United States had played in world affairs in 1877. This transition resulted from major developments in the United States and throughout the world.
Chapter 2 analyzes “Making the World Safe for Democracy.”Footnote 48 By April 1917, Wilson decided to take the United States into the European war against Imperial Germany on the side of the Allies. The war had started in the summer of 1914 and then continued year after year with no end in sight. It expanded beyond Europe to become a world war and did not end until November 1918. Except for large-scale fighting by the great powers in Western Europe, it did not totally halt even then. When Wilson had finally decided in 1917 to recommend that the U.S. Congress declare war against Germany, he hoped to guide Europe and other nations into a new world order. As he proclaimed in his war message, he wanted to make the world safe for democracy. That vision proved far easier for the president to articulate in theory than to accomplish in practice in a world that was deeply divided by competing ideologies as well as imperial, national, racial/ethnic, and economic claims and interests. A new liberal democratic world order eluded the peacemakers after the Great War.
Chapter 3 examines “Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation: American Democracy and International Relations.”Footnote 49 Wilson led the United States into World War I, promising to make the world safe for democracy. Advocating liberal internationalism, he called for collective security and national self-determination. He wanted democratic states to create the League of Nations as a partnership for peace in a new world order. But in his thinking and statecraft, the text of modern liberalism was intertwined with the subtext of white racism. His friendship with Thomas Dixon, Jr., and his contributions to David W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation revealed this nexus between modern liberalism and white racism. His liberal civic ideals appeared quite different from the ultra-racism of the film, which was based on Dixon’s novels. He seemed to advocate inclusive nationalism, in contrast to its exclusive Americanism. The president’s apparently universal principles, however, were still influenced by the white South’s Lost Cause. His diplomacy and his legacy of Wilsonianism combined racism with liberalism. He adhered to the color line at home by promoting Jim Crow segregation in the federal government and abroad by limiting his liberal internationalism in practice. Historians and political scientists have typically identified Wilsonian diplomacy only with liberalism. To see him and his legacy in international history from a different perspective, which brings into focus the experience of people of color, it is necessary to recognize the subtext of racism in the text of Wilson’s liberalism. Racism shaped his understanding of America’s national identity and global mission, and thus his vision of liberal democracy and peace.
Chapter 4 highlights “The Others in Wilsonianism.”Footnote 50 Wilson affirmed modern liberalism as the foundation for America’s foreign policy when he led the United States into World War I. Liberal democratic ideals, which he proclaimed as potentially applicable throughout the world, should define America’s wartime purposes and guide its postwar peacemaking. In his war message he called for making the world safe for democracy. In subsequent speeches he outlined his vision of a new world order that, he hoped, would replace the old, discredited European order, which had collapsed in 1914. The president’s liberal vision, later known as Wilsonianism, was apparently universal. His rhetoric suggested that it could apply to all nations. Yet in practice he did not believe in the universality of his modern liberal principles and did not plan to implement them for the benefit of all peoples. Although apparently universal, Wilson’s vision left some peoples on the outside at least in the foreseeable future. He saw real or potential enemies, whether at home or abroad, as disqualified in some way from full participation in his new world order. Unless or until they conformed to his vision, if they could, these others would be kept out. Thus, a fundamental paradox of apparent universality and actual exclusivity characterized Wilsonianism.
Chapter 5 deals with “The Great War, Americanism Revisited, and the Anti-Wilson Crusade.”Footnote 51 From the beginning of the Great War in 1914 to his death in 1919, Theodore Roosevelt identified the national interests of the United States with the European Allies. He blamed the Central Powers for starting the war, and especially Imperial Germany for its brutal aggression against neutral Belgium. The former president soon directed sharp criticism against President Wilson, who called on the American people to remain neutral in thought as well as deed. Never neutral in his attitude toward the two sides, TR expressed his views in private letters and public speeches as well as published articles and books. He sharply criticized the Wilson administration for its aloofness from the global conflict and for its lack of military preparedness in anticipation of America’s entry into the war. Even after the United States declared war against Germany on April 6, 1917, Roosevelt persisted in his anti-Wilson crusade. He advocated Allied military victory over the Central Powers. He blamed Wilson for failing to mobilize U.S. military force more quickly and for favoring a negotiated peace with the Central Powers that would not require their unconditional surrender. Identifying Americanism and patriotism with the all-out pursuit of total victory, TR attacked the Wilson administration for its continuing weakness and ineptitude in the Great War.
Chapter 6 focuses on “Woodrow Wilson, Alliances, and the League of Nations.”Footnote 52 Wilson’s vision of the League of Nations and its place in a new world order after World War I evoked both praise and criticism. Looking back on his leadership during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, scholars have variously lauded or condemned his statecraft, including his role in drafting the League Covenant. His responsibility for the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty, which contained the Covenant as an integral part of the peace settlement with Germany, has likewise remained a subject of debate. What was Wilson’s own understanding of the postwar League of Nations? Why did he make its creation his top priority at the Paris Peace Conference? How did he conceive of the League and its potential role in a new era of international relations? What limits did he place on the new League’s functions and thus on American obligations under the Covenant? Answers to these questions can help clarify the ongoing debates among scholars and in public discourse over Wilson’s historical record and over his legacy for future generations after World War I.
Chapter 7 evaluates “Wilsonian Diplomacy and Armenia: The Limits of Power and Ideology.”Footnote 53 Armenia emerged as a new nation during World War I, joining the world order that was taking shape in the wake of collapsing empires. President Wilson, in his wartime addresses, proclaimed the principles that should guide the peacemaking. His decision to attend the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 increased the expectations that all peoples, including the Armenians, would have a better future in a new world order, which would feature national self-determination guaranteed by the League of Nations. Wilsonian ideology promised peace and justice for all nations, both old and new. American power would presumably enable the United States to help others fulfill Wilson’s ideals in the postwar world. Contrary to these hopes, however, Armenia failed as a new nation, revealing not only its own limits but also those of Wilsonianism. The realities of international politics prevented the Armenian people, who had suffered so much in the past, from achieving the Wilsonian promise after the Great War. The limits of American power and ideology resulted in an outcome very different from what the Armenians wanted and what the U.S. president had heralded.
Chapter 8 on “Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush: Historical Comparisons of Ends and Means in Their Foreign Policies” contrasts the ideology and statecraft of these two presidents.Footnote 54 After 9/11 Bush used the Wilsonian promise to justify America’s global war on terrorism. Affirming triumphal Americanism in response to the terrorist attacks, he retaliated in Afghanistan and then launched a preventive war in Iraq, ostensibly to create a new world order of freedom and democracy. He rallied the nation with Wilsonian rhetoric, as noted by historians and other pundits. But his unilateralism and his approval for abusive methods, including torture that violated U.S. and international law, marked a radical departure from Wilson’s legacy, despite some commonality. Bush’s goals were similar, but his means were more extreme.
Chapter 9 evaluates Woodrow Wilson’s “Legacy and Reputation.”Footnote 55 The president left an enduring legacy, which enhanced his lasting reputation, in both American and world history. Although the Republicans triumphed over the Democrats in the elections of 1920, they did not overturn all the progressive reforms he had achieved with his New Freedom at home. Nor did they succeed in killing his vision of America’s new mission in international relations. With Republicans in charge of the White House and Congress during the 1920s, the nation turned away from Wilson’s style of presidential leadership and his progressive domestic and foreign policies. But that reversal ended with the Great Depression in the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s. These new crises created the context for President Franklin D. Roosevelt to revive and expand Wilson’s progressive agenda at home and abroad. In its continuously revised forms, Wilson’s legacy influenced American and world history throughout the remainder of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. The Cold War consensus affirmed his modern liberalism. In the aftermath of the Cold War and of 9/11, Americans still avowed many of his beliefs and policies. The ideological framework of Wilsonianism helped them explain America’s place in contemporary history. His legacy and reputation were thus enduring.
