A Political Autobiography

Thomas Woodrow Wilson's earliest memory was of hearing, at the age of four, that Abraham Lincoln had been elected President and that there would soon be a war. His father, the Reverend Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was one of Georgia's most prominent Presbyterian ministers and, despite his Yankee heritage, an ardent Southern sympathizer. Both of Wilson's parents were Northerners; in the 1850s, they had moved from Ohio to Staunton, Virginia (where Wilson was born in 1856), and eventually to Augusta, Georgia, where the Civil War overshadowed Wilson's childhood. As his eighth birthday approached, he witnessed the solemn march of thousands of Confederate troops on their way to defend the city against Sherman's invasion. He watched wounded soldiers die inside his father's church and pondered the fate of the ragged Union prisoners confined in the churchyard outside. Soon he would see Jefferson Davis paraded under Union guard through the streets and would recall standing "for a moment at General Lee's side and looking up into his face."

Wilson once commented, "A boy never gets over his boyhood, and never can change those subtle influences which have become a part of him." It is an important fact that he experienced, at an impressionable age, the effects of a great war and its aftermath. It may also be that the foregoing incidents later exerted "subtle influences" on his sense of purpose in the creation of the League of Nations.

Yet undoubtedly the central influence on Wilson's early personal development was his upbringing in a Presbyterian household. "The stern Covenanter tradition that is behind me sends many an echo down the years," he told an English audience in December 1918. Indeed, in most of Wilson's pre-presidential writings and speeches, Christian doctrine played an essential, though not exclusive, role in his political thought. John M. Mulder has argued that the key to understanding Wilson's "years of preparation" is the Presbyterian covenantal religious tradition, the spiritual curriculum that the elder Wilson imparted to his son.

The covenantal tradition itself harked back to the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac and the agreement between God and his people, who, in exchange for their obedience and faith, would receive his blessings and protection. Dr. Wilson taught young "Tommy" that even individual success inhered in obedience to divine law. Moreover, in a world filled with struggle between good and evil, service to God was that much more imperative. Wilson venerated his "incomparable" father and dutifully appropriated the lessons. For example, shortly before graduating from Princeton, he wrote in his journal, "If God will give me the grace I will try to serve him ... to perfection."

Since the early national period, American Presbyterians had expanded the idea of the covenant to account for their perception of a special relationship between the United States and Providence; the new nation, they believed, would prosper as long as it remained righteous. Dr. Wilson embraced this concept, along with another — one that held that the nations of the world also were administered in harmony with God's moral law. This "theology of politics" constituted a comprehensive scheme in which the individual, the church, society, and the nations of the world were all properly juxtaposed in the firmament. Mulder's thesis — that Wilson wove covenant theology into practically every aspect of his existence — is instructive. In his father's well-ordered philosophy of life and politics, Wilson apparently found both emotional and intellectual self-assurance. With his Princeton classmate Charles A. Talcott, for instance, he formed a "solemn covenant" in a joint quest to "acquire knowledge that we might have power." He portrayed his forthcoming marriage to Ellen Louise Axson in 1885 as "a compact," and suggested that they create "an Interstate Love League (of two members only that it may be of manageable size)," complete with a constitution. "Then," he added, "we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary."

Wilson exhibited a penchant for constitutional order in other realms as well. At the rather advanced age of seventeen, he founded the imaginary "Royal United Kingdom Yacht Club," with "Lord Thomas W. Wilson" as commodore, and went so far as to stipulate punishments for breaches of conduct, divisions of command, and regulations for regattas. Three years later, at Princeton, he wrote the constitution for the Liberal Debating Club, "founded upon the fundamental principles of Justice, Morality, and Friendship." Throughout most of his academic career, he founded or revamped debating societies — as a Taw student at the University of Virginia, as an attorney in Atlanta, as a political science graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, and as a professor at Wesleyan University. Although too much should not be inferred from them, these exercises do provide certain insights into Wilson's creation of the League of Nations. Writing constitutions, or covenants, served a number of functions: they brought order and rationality to anarchic conditions; they promoted the cause of democracy through political debate and emphasized the Christian duty to perform good works; and they could be applied to virtually any sphere of human endeavor — even to affairs of the heart or to the setting of goals for a career in politics.

The main intellectual activity of Wilson's academic career was the pursuit of more perfect government at all levels. Congressional Government (1885), his doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins, is the best-known of such works. Inspired by Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867), Wilson argued that the American Constitution was inferior to its cousin. He singled out for special censure the diffuse congressional committee system, which he described as chaotic and irresponsible. Congressional Government represents Wilson's first step toward the kind of critical understanding and mastery of the American political system that in part accounted for his early legislative successes as President. The book received lavish reviews and established his professional reputation. (It is also epigraphically rich in irony. "The treaty marring power of the Senate," he wrote, "... made the comparative weakness of the executive very conspicuous." With the upper house, the President could never deal "upon a ground of real equality," he lamented. "The Senate always has the last word.")

The most mature work of Wilson's early career was probably "The Modern Democratic State" (1885), a little-known benchmark — and a prospectus for many of his subsequent essays — in his lifelong reflections on the nature of democracy, political leadership, relations among nations, and the future of the United States. "Democracy," he wrote, "is the fullest form of state life ... for a whole people" — chiefly because it made politics "a sphere of moral action" and strode inexorably toward "the universal emancipation and brotherhood of man." The United States had been able to practice democracy to a relatively full degree, Wilson believed, because it possessed none of the traditions and institutions — such as entangling foreign alliances and standing armies — that hindered "the free action of social and political forces." Yet democracy was both means and end — "It is a stage of development ... built by slow habit. Its process is experience." In order to put down firm roots, democracy required a well-educated and enlightened people, wide public debate, a citizenry with a common purpose, and "not the habit of revolution, but the habit of resolution." Other countries, therefore, could attain democracy only by steps, "through a period of political tutelage," before their people would be ready to take "entire control of their affairs."

From such a conservative perspective, Wilson was expansively optimistic about the future. He attributed the apparent recession of autocracies and monarchies in the late nineteenth century to the proliferation of public education and democratic institutions; therein beamed the promise of "the establishment of the most humane results of the world's peace and progress." In a "covenantal" conclusion, he equated the supreme objective of both the nation and the individual: "The goal of political development is identical with the goal of individual development. Both singly and collectively man's nature draws him ... towards a fuller realization of his kinship with God."

Most studies of his political career emphasize that Wilson entered public life virtually an unreconstructed Jeffersonian who clung to the concept of the negative state even as he sought the presidential nomination as a progressive Democrat. Yet his intellectual life did not always hew a straight and predictable path. The political and economic upheavals of the final two decades of the century posed unsettling challenges to Wilson's serenity. The trend toward concentration of enormous wealth and power in the hands of a few "Captains of Industry" mocked his perception of political reality. Moreover, the two major parties responded uncomprehendingly to the fitful growth of organized labor and agrarian insurgency. These developments caused Wilson to rethink his views on the proper role of government in constructing a modern political economy. His ruminations in the late 1880s and early 1890s are quite compelling; they entertained the possibilities of an American commonwealth that would at once preserve individual liberties, serve as the guardian of the public interest, and harmonize conservative and radical values.

In August 1887, Wilson read Richard T. Ely's pioneering study, The Labor Movement in America (1886). Within a few days, he composed an essay (buried in his papers until 1968) entitled "Socialism and Democracy." The central idea behind state socialism, he wrote, "is that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will. ... Applied to a democratic state, such doctrine sounds radical, but not revolutionary. It is only a[n] acceptance of the extremest logical conclusions deducible from democratic principles long ago received as respectable. For it is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members." Wilson's meditations on the conditions of social and economic life in the United States grew mainly out of his concern over "a monstrously changed aspect of the social world" — the aggrandizement of giant corporations that threatened to swallow up, not only individuals and small businesses, but democratic government itself. "In the face of such circumstances," he asked, "must not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as political control?" Indeed it should, he concluded. But democracy had yet to undertake "the tasks which socialists clamour to have undertaken."

Two years later, in The State a comparative study of government in Europe and the United States, he went a step further. "The modern industrial organization has so distorted competition as to put it into the power of some to tyrannize over many, as to enable the rich and strong to combine against the poor and weak." On one level, "we ought all to regard ourselves as socialists" he went on. For they were right to condemn "selfish, misguided individualism; and certainly modern individualism has much about it that is hateful, too hateful to last." Thus, because of "the power of unscrupulous or heartless men," it was necessary for the state to regulate monopolies, to establish maximum hours and standards for safe working conditions, and to put an end to child labor. (In the first advanced course in political economy he taught at Princeton, in 1891, he considered, along the same lines of argument, the salutary role socialism might play in the United States.)

Wilson would enter the White House at the beginning of a new epoch in world history, one characterized by profound revolutionary movements — in particular, in Mexico and Russia. These revolutions were informed by the socialist critique of industrial capitalism and presented fundamental challenges to the prevailing political and economic systems of the great powers. Wilson, of course, fell far short of the intellectual coherence that Eugene V. Debs eventually achieved in integrating socialist principles with Christianity and the American democratic and revolutionary traditions. But it is nonetheless significant that, unlike any other chief executive, he had ascribed a considerable degree of legitimacy and had devoted serious thought to socialist theory long before he became president.

During the Great Depression of the early 1890s, Wilson searched for a compass. He found it in Edmund Burke, his new philosophical "master." Populist victories in 1892 and the violence surrounding the Pullman strike in the summer of 1894 had apparently increased his appreciation for Burke's famous condemnation of the excesses of the French Revolution. At the same time, he abhorred the unwillingness of the political leadership of the Gilded Age to tear off the blindfolds of laissez faire and respond to the demands of a new day. To be sure, the center of gravity of his political thought remained relatively conservative, as his statement in a lecture on Burke, "It is both better and easier to reform than to tear down and reconstruct," would suggest. Yet he also admitted that revolutions were sometimes both necessary and productive of good.

Revolution or no, Wilson preferred Burke as a general guide to lasting political change — Burke and his emphasis on the process of law. As he refined his thinking on the proper role of the state, he began to apply to international society his conception of the process of change and social improvement. From 1892 to 1894, Wilson taught courses in international law at Princeton. In these lectures — arguably one of the most important sources on his ideas about international relations before 1913 — he synthesized his thought about the nature of democracy, public debate, reform, the state, sovereignty, and man's responsibility to God.

As he had done in his interpretation of democracy, Wilson emphasized that international law actually was "not made," as such. Rather, it was the result of organic development — "a body of abstract principles founded upon long established custom." Quoting Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, he equated the law of nations with the law of Nature, "which binds different states together in a humane jural society, and which also secures to the members of different states a common protection of law for their general human and international rights." In the second lecture of the series, Wilson asked, "Do the nations of the world constitute a community?" He answered himself in the affirmative, stating that three things had brought into being a community, of sorts, among nations. The first was the recognition of Roman law as the basis of all Western legal systems. The second was the simple fact of commerce — in ideas as well as in goods. The third and most vital component was Christianity. According to Wilson, Christianity had prepared the way for international law by establishing standards of morality and common principles of "civilization" and education. In another lecture, he also maintained that Christianity promoted the growth of international law because the concept of the fatherhood of God implied the brotherhood of man, which, in turn, created natural bonds between nations. "Regardless of race or religion," there existed "fundamental, vital principles of right" proceeding from God and human reason that all enlightened people held in common; this, he said, constituted "the universal conscience of mankind." Hence, any nation could be admitted into the community if it recognized the "common principles of right."

Wilson had thus reduced the objective of international law to a moral and legal system somewhat akin to his father's theological world order, altered now in subtle ways by his reading of Burke (and perhaps by his tentative understanding of socialism). In this instance, the objective was to substitute "disorder and invasion of right which provoked war" with "ordered relationships and recognized obligations" that promoted "a moral sense of community among states." Moreover, girding this community were the "imperative forces of popular thought and the concrete institutions of popular representation," or, to put it another way, the promise of democracy — "the rule of counsel, the catholic spirit of free debate ... [and] the ascendency of reason over passion."