What We Can Learn From Woodrow Wilson

By Ted Widmer, MIT Center for International Studies. Posted April 30, 2008.

We can't do much better than reclaiming the Declaration of Independence as a fundamental foreign policy document in American history. We have a tendency to read it in a simplistic way, and to think of it only as a sort of airy declaration of what were then human rights, and a declaration of separation from England. But, in fact, the founders had a fairly well-articulated sense of what they were doing with foreign policy, and a fairly revolutionary sense of their foreign policy. So I'm quite interested in how Woodrow Wilson rediscovers the founders and makes them relevant for his time.

This thinking about Wilson began for me about ten years ago when I came to be a speechwriter in the second term of Bill Clinton's presidency. I was quite interested in which presidents were considered historically interesting to Clinton and quickly figured out it was John F. Kennedy, obviously, and Franklin D. Roosevelt a little less obviously, and Teddy Roosevelt, who was a huge influence on Bill Clinton, and always has been. It was a time in the 1990s when a lot of very favorable books were coming out about Teddy Roosevelt, and it was an attractive time to be thinking about him. At the same time, I felt Wilson was completely ignored. I don't remember Clinton ever talking about Wilson. In the collected speeches of Bill Clinton -- it's something like eighteen very fat volumes, the man enjoys speaking -- if we looked up Wilson, I'm sure we could find a few references, but very few.

As a historian, I thought that was fascinating. I looked a little into Wilson and the way people talk about him, a sort of casual dismissal of Wilsonian idealism, which is a put-down -- I don't think it's ever used favorably in the press. George Bush vigorously denies that he's a Wilsonian idealist, and it's largely an accusation leveled at him, not something he claims for himself. Henry Kissinger's book, Diplomacy, opens with a discussion of Wilson versus Theodore Roosevelt, and he states it very clearly. One is an idealist, one is a realist.

I think the tide may be about to turn for Wilson. I do think he is a pivot for all of American history before him, converting it into the twentieth century. For my research, more than anything, I read his speeches, which was a pleasure. There are a lot of Wilson's speeches, and they are fascinating. They are radically different from what came before. They are radically different from what Theodore Roosevelt was saying. We think of them as roughly equal levels of orators, but I think Wilson vastly exceeded Teddy Roosevelt, and there's nothing in the late nineteenth century like him at all. You really have to go back to Abraham Lincoln for a sense that there's a mystical power in American history that's very forceful, that is acting through Wilson and through the American people and exerting considerable force on world events.

You can call it naïve and idealistic, and it's easy to find examples of naïve phrasings in Wilson's oratory, but you can also say, this person knew American history better than any president before him, and arguably better than any president since, and knew the founding moment extremely well: Jefferson in particular, but Hamilton, also, and knew the Civil War vividly, with first-hand knowledge. It's always worth restating that he was a war child. He grew up in a ravaged South. He saw destruction around him. He was not in peril himself, but he certainly lived in a South that was basically destroyed by the Civil War and had a lifelong, profound aversion to war.

He knew -- as many people did, but I think with particular clarity -- that the moment he was living in was a moment of great destiny for the United States. He uses the word destiny and the word providence a lot. Throughout the years of his presidency, you see him changing and evolving considerably. He comes in, of course, as an anti-war president, and even in his second term he promises to keep us out of war. Events conspire against him, and in April 1917 he leads the United States into World War I, where it exerted a decisive impact -- a late entrance into the war, but a very decisive entrance, and there was nothing half-baked about it. Nearly two million soldiers were sent over. It was full war. It was the first European intervention by the United States, and it was a moment of tremendous change in the history of the United States that I don't think we give him proper credit for. It seems like our mixed memories and our largely negative memories are almost entirely rooted in the failed struggle to bring the U.S. into the League of Nations, and we overlook the considerable importance of the fact that he entered World War I at all.

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Ted Widmer is author, most recently, of Ark of the Liberties: America and the World, forthcoming from Hill & Wang. He is director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. This Audit is adapted from Widmer's January 2008 presentation at "The Liberal Foreign Policy Tradition," a conference cosponsored by CIS, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the History and Democracy.