There’s no disputing that a big part of Wilson’s appeal then and now, stemmed from the fact that he was the first Ph.D. to serve in the Oval Office. Of course, the White House was no stranger to great minds and great scholars. But Wilson was the first professional academic at a time when the professionalization of social science was considered a cornerstone of human progress. He was both a practitioner and a priest of the cult of expertise—the notion that human society was just another facet of the natural world and could be mastered by the application of the scientific method. A onetime president of the American Political Science Association. Wilson himself is widely credited with having launched the academic study of public administration, a fancy term for how to modernize and professionalize the state according to one’s own personal biases.
Wilson started his academic career at Davidson College, but he was homesick and left before the end of his first year. In 1875, after another year of homeschooling from his father, he tried again. This time he enrolled at the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton, to study politics and history. Wilson liked his new environment, in part because of the high number of southern Presbyterians, and he excelled there. He launched the Liberal Debating Society and served as editor of the school newspaper and secretary of the football association. Not surprisingly, the young Wilson got a taste for politics as he gained self-confidence and learned to like the sound of his own voice.
After graduating from Princeton, he enrolled at the University of Virginia to study law in hopes of one day entering politics. Homesickness and a lifelong difficulty making friends plagued him once again. He left UVA on Christmas Day of his first year, claiming he had a cold, and never returned. He finished his studies at home. After passing the Georgia bar, he spent a short time as a lawyer but found he didn’t have the knack for it and concluded that it was too arduous a course for him to take into politics. Frustrated in his desire to become a statesman, Wilson enrolled at the recently established Johns Hopkins University, where he pursued his Ph.D. After graduating, he landed several teaching posts while he worked on his academic writing, specifically his widely acclaimed eight-hundred-page tome The State. Wilson eventually returned to the one institution where he had known some social happiness, Princeton University, where he rose to president.
Wilson’s choice to head down an academic path should not be seen as an alternative to a political career. Rather it was an alternative path to the career he always wanted. The Sage of New Jersey was never a reluctant statesman. Not long after finishing The State, Wilson began moving beyond narrow academic writing in favor of more popular commentary, generally geared toward enhancing his political profile. High among his regular themes was the advocacy of progressive imperialism in order to subjugate, and thereby elevate, lesser races. He applauded the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines—”they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice”—and regularly denounced what he called “the anti-imperialist weepings and wailings that came out of Boston “ It’s a sign of how carefully he cultivated his political profile that four years before he “reluctantly” accepted the “unsolicited”
gubernatorial nomination in New Jersey, Harper’s Weekly had begun running the slogan “For President—Woodrow Wilson” on the cover of every issue.
Indeed, from his earliest days as an undergraduate the meek, homeschooled Wilson was infatuated with political power. And as is so common to intellectuals, he let his power worship infect his analysis.
Lord Acton’s famous observation that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has long been misunderstood. Acton was not arguing that power causes powerful leaders to become corrupt (though he probably believed that, too). Rather, he was noting that historians tend to forgive the powerful for transgressions they would never condone by the weak. Wilson is guilty on both counts: he not only fawned over great men but, when he attained real power, was corrupted by it himself. Time and again, his sympathies came down on the side of great men who broke the traditional restraints on their power. Two of his biggest heroes were the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln. It might seem odd that someone who fervently believed that giving blacks the right to vote was “the foundation of every evil in this country” would celebrate Lincoln. But what appealed to Wilson about the Great Emancipator was Lincoln’s ability to impose his will on the entire country. Lincoln was a centralizes a modernizer who used his power to forge a new. united nation. In other words. Wilson admired Lincoln’s means—suspension of habeas corpus, the draft, and the campaigns of the radical Republicans after the war—far more than he liked his ends. “If any trait bubbles up in all one reads about Wilson,” writes the historian Walter McDougall, “it is this: he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power.”
Wilson’s fascination with power is the leitmotif of his whole career. It informed his understanding of theology and politics, and their intersection. Power was God’s instrument on earth and therefore was always to he revered. In Congressional Government he admitted. “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive,” Such love of power can be found in many systems and men outside the orbit of fascism, but few ideologies or aesthetics are more directly concerned with the glory of might, will, strength, and action. Some of this was on display in fascist art and architecture, which wallowed in the powerful physical form and the unconquerable might of the nation: strength in unity, the triumph of will, the domination of destiny over decadence and indecision. Doctrinaire fascism, much like communism, sold itself as an unstoppable force of divine or historical inevitability. Those who stood in the way—the bourgeoisie, the “unfit,” the “greedy,” the “individualist,” the traitor, the kulak, the Jew—could be demonized as the “other” because, at the end of the day. they were not merely expendable, nor were they merely reluctant to join the collective, they were by their very existence blocking the will to power that gave the mob and the avant-garde which claimed to speak for it their reason for existence. “Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking.” wrote George Orwell. “Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion.” For some, like Wilson, God gave a divine writ for bullying. For others the license for organized cruelty came from more impersonal historical forces. But the impulse was the same.
Wilson would later argue when president that he was the right hand of God and that to stand against him was to thwart divine will. Some thought this was simply proof of power corrupting Wilson, but this was his view from the outset. He always took the side of power, believing that power accrued to whoever was truly on God’s side. As an undergraduate, Wilson was convinced that Congress was destined to wield the most power in the American system, and so he championed the idea of giving Congress unfettered control of governance. During his senior year, in his first published article, he even argued that America should switch to a parliamentary’ system, where there are fewer checks on the will of rulers. Wilson was a champion debater, so it’s telling that he believed the best debaters should have the most power.
Wilson wrote his most famous and original work, Congressional Government, when he was a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins. He set out to argue that America should switch to a centralized parliamentary system, but the work evolved into a sweeping indictment of the fragmentation and diffuseness of power in the American political system. Wilson fully abandoned his faith in congressional government when he witnessed Teddy Roosevelt’s success at turning the Oval Office into a bully pulpit. The former advocate of congressional power became an unapologetic champion of the imperial presidency. “The President,” he wrote in 1908 in Constitutional Government in the United States, “is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, . .. but only because the President has the
nation behind him and Congress has not.”
Wilson’s view of politics could be summarized by the word “statolatry,” or state worship (the same sin with which the Vatican charged Mussolini). Wilson believed that the state was a natural, organic, and spiritual expression of the people themselves. From the outset, he believed that the government and people should have an organic bond that reflected the “true spirit” of the people, or what the Germans called the Volksgeist. “Government is not a machine, but a living thing,” he wrote in Congressional Government. “It falls not under the [Newtonian] theory of the universe, but under the [Darwinian] theory of organic life.” From this perspective, the ever-expanding power of the state was entirely natural. Wilson, along with the vast majority of progressive intellectuals, believed that the increase in state power was akin to an inevitable evolutionary process. Governmental “experimentation,” the watchword of pragmatic liberals from Dewey and Wilson to FDR, was the social analogue to evolutionary adaptation. Constitutional democracy, as the founders understood it, was a momentary phase in this progression. Now it was time for the state to ascend to the next plateau. “Government,” Wilson wrote approvingly in The State, “does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.” Wilson was the first president to speak disparagingly of the Constitution.
Wilson reinforced such attitudes by attacking the very idea of natural and individual rights. If the original, authentic state was a dictatorial family. Wilson argued in the spirit of Darwin, what historical basis was there to believe in individual rights? “No doubt,” he wrote, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, “a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle;” If a law couldn’t be executed, it wasn’t a real law, according to Wilson, and “abstract rights” were vexingly difficult to execute.
Wilson, of course, was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. “[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many,” declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams. “Now men are free,” explained Walter Rauschenbusch. a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896, “but it is often the freedom of grains of sand that are whirled up in a cloud and then dropped in a heap, but neither cloud nor sand-heap have any coherence.” The remedy was obvious: “New forms of association must be created. Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life.” Elsewhere Rauschenbusch put it more simply: “Individualism means tyranny.” In a sense, the morally inverted nonsense made famous by Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s—”oppressive freedom,” “repressive tolerance,” “defensive violence”—was launched by the progressives decades earlier. “Work makes you free,” the phrase made famous by the Nazis, was anticipated by progressives who believed that collectivism was the new “freedom.”
America is today in the midst of an obscene moral panic over the role of Christians in public life. There is a profound irony in the fact that such protests issue most loudly from self-professed “progressives” when the real progressives were dedicated in the most fundamental way to the Christianization of American life. Progressivism, as the title of Washington Gladden’s book suggested, was “applied Christianity” The Social Gospel held that the state was the right arm of God and was the means by which the whole nation and world would be redeemed. But while Christianity was being made into a true state religion, its transcendent and theological elements became corrupted.
These two visions—Darwinian organicism and Christian messianism—seem contradictory today because they reside on different sides of the culture war. But in the Progressive Era, these visions complemented each other perfectly. And Wilson embodied this synthesis. The totalitarian flavor of such a world view should be obvious. Unlike classical liberalism, which saw the government as a necessary evil or simply a benign but voluntary social contract for free men to enter into willingly, the belief that the entire society was one organic whole left no room for those who didn’t want to behave, let alone “evolve.” Your home, your private thoughts, everything was part of the organic body politic, which the state was charged with redeeming.
Hence a phalanx of progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs. Often the answer was to get children out of the home as quickly as possible. An archipelago of agencies, commissions, and bureaus sprang up overnight to take the place of the anti-organic, contra-evolutionary influences of the family. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in America for precisely this purpose—to shape the apples before they fell from the tree—while at the other end of the educational process stood reformers like Wilson, who summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton, he told an audience, “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life...[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”’
If the age of parliamentary democracy was coming to an end—as progressives and fascists alike proclaimed—and the day of the organic redeemer state was dawning, then the Constitution must evolve or be thrown into the dustbin of history. Wilson’s writings are chockablock with demands that the “artificial” barriers established in our “antiquated” eighteenth-century system of checks and balances be smashed. He mocked the “Fourth of July sentiments” of those who still invoked the founding fathers as a source for constitutional guidance. He believed the system of governmental checks and balances had “proven mischievous just to the extent to which they have succeeded in establishing themselves as realities.” Indeed, the ink from Wilson’s pen regularly exudes the odor of what we today call the living Constitution. On the campaign trail in 1912, Wilson explained that “living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life...it must develop.” Hence “all that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.” As we’ve seen, this interpretation leads to a system where the Constitution means whatever the reigning interpreters of “evolution” say it means.
A more authentic form of leadership was needed: a great man who could serve both as the natural expression of the people’s will and as a guide and master checking their darker impulses. The leader needed to be like a brain, which both regulates the body and depends on it for protection. To this end, the masses had to be subservient to the will of the leader. In his unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, Wilson explained that the “true leader” uses the masses like “tools.” He must not traffic in subtleties and nuance, as literary men do. Rather, he must speak to stir their passions, not their intellects. In short, he must be a skillful demagogue.
“Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses,” Wilson wrote. “They must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once. The competent leader of men cares little for the internal niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much—everything—for the external uses to which they may be put...He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates...It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.” A cynic might concede that there is much truth in Wilson’s interpretation, but he would at least acknowledge his own cynicism. Wilson believed he was an idealist.
Many believed, including Wilson, that they had found just such a figure in Theodore Roosevelt. More than a popular leader, he was
the designated idol of a true leadership cult. William Allen White, the famed progressive writer, recalled in 1934 that he’d been “a young arrogant protagonist of the divine rule of the plutocracy’” until Roosevelt “shattered the foundations of my political ideals. As they crumbled then and there, politically, I put his heel on my neck and I became his man.” Roosevelt was the first to translate “L’etat, c’est mot” into the American argot, often claiming that the nation’s sovereignty was indistinguishable from his own august personage. As president, he regularly exceeded the bounds of his traditional and legal powers, doing his will first and waiting (or not) for the courts and the legislatures to catch up.
This captured in small relief the basic difference between Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, bitter rivals and the only two proudly progressive presidents of the Progressive Era. These were very different men with very similar ideas. Roosevelt was a great actor upon the world stage; Wilson saw himself more as a director. Roosevelt was the “bull moose” who charged into any problem; Wilson was the “schoolmaster” who first drew up a lesson plan. One wanted to lead a band of brothers, the other a graduate seminar. But if the roles they played were different, the moral of the story was the same. While Wilson wrote treatises explaining why Americans should abandon their “blind devotion” to the Constitution, Teddy was rough-riding all over the document, doing what he pleased and giving bellicose speeches about how the courts had sided against “popular rights” and were “lagging behind” the new realities. Indeed, William Howard Taft—Roosevelt’s honorable yet overwhelmed successor in the White House—might not have chosen to run for reelection, hence denying Roosevelt the Republican nomination, had he not been convinced that Roosevelt’s “impatience with the delay of the law” made him “not unlike Napoleon.”