Woodrow Wilson's Burden, Bush's--And Ours
First, the important similarities: Like W.W., W believes that he speaks both for God and for the noblest aspirations of all humankind. Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, saw the United States as the “Elect” nation, with the right and obligation to “do justice and assert the rights of mankind.” The born-again (in essence, self-Elected) Bush takes a similar view of his nation’s divine role. The arrogance of such an assumption does not, understandably, go over well in other countries. “Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points,” French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau is said to have snorted. “Why, God Almighty has only ten.”
The Wilson-Bush view differs from the Social Darwinism that formed the foundation for many twentieth-century national leaders who sought to intervene in other nations. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, was a firm proponent of the might-makes-right school of foreign affairs. Wilson, on the other hand, tried to argue from a “right-makes-might” position that might usefully be termed “Social Calvinism.” Bush, while he certainly seems to think that American military power allows him to do as he pleases, also tends toward the right-makes-might argument, as he showed in his recent address.
Yet there are critical differences between Wilson’s illusion that he could remake the world in America’s image and Bush’s similar fantasy nearly a century later.
“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,” Judge Learned Hand declared in a 1944 address. Although Wilson came to be too sure that he was right as he sought to reshape the world, he had not been without serious doubts about the wisdom of involving his nation in World War I. He agonized over the decision. The current President Bush admits of no doubt; he is certain that he is right and weeds from his inner circle anyone who has the temerity to suggest otherwise.
When Wilson addressed a joint session of Congress on April 2, 1917, to call for a declaration of war, his insistence that “the world must be made safe for democracy” was greeted with enthusiastic applause. Later that evening, shaken by the gravity of the step he had taken and upset by the cheering response, a tearful Wilson said to his secretary, “Think of what it was they were applauding. My message of today was a message of death to our young men.” There has never been any hint of a similar comprehension of the human cost or of empathy with the troops on the part of George W. Bush.
Wilson, moreover, sought to bring about world peace through an international organization. Bush has acted—and proposes to act—unilaterally. Finally, Wilson’s ideals were, in practice, not universal. Wilson was a racist (to cite one example, he heaped praise on D.W Griffith’s cinematic paean to the Klan, Birth of a Nation) and did not think that his call for self-determination applied to non-whites. Bush believes that democracy is right for everyone in the world. This is a view with which most Americans would readily agree; the differences arise over what the American role in reaching that objective ought to be.
A quarter century after Wilson tried to remake the world, American leaders found themselves in a position of clear military and economic superiority over all other world powers, even without the atomic bomb. That “weapon of unusual destructive force,” as Harry Truman described it to Stalin at Potsdam, put the United States in a position of unprecedented power that was quickly taken to be omnipotence. In enunciating the doctrine that bears his name in 1947, President Truman proclaimed an open-ended commitment to “assist free peoples” anywhere in the world.
By 1961, the illusion of American omnipotence had reached its zenith. “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” John F. Kennedy boldly proclaimed as he assumed the presidency. “This much we pledge—and more.”
A dozen years later, the tragedy of the Vietnam War had burst the balloon of American omnipotence, as Richard Nixon recognized in his second inaugural address in 1973. “The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs,” Nixon declared.
Under George W. Bush that time has returned. He seems to have ingested again a drug that produces a false feeling of omnipotence. Mixing that substance with the Wilsonian narcotic of being on God’s mission is a potentially lethal combination.
“He never seemed to understand there’s a big difference between trying to save people and trying to help them,” progressive activist Raymond Robins wrote of Wilson in words that apply as well to Bush. “With luck you can help ’em—but they always save themselves.”
Supporting democracy and self-determination, as both Wilson and Bush claimed to do, clearly implies being free to go in a different direction from that prescribed by the United States. What happens if, as seems quite possible, the Shiite majority in Iraq determines that it wants to establish an Iranian-style theocracy?
In his 1948 World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer symbolically captured Wilson’s legacy. A character named Woodrow Wilson is ripped apart and bleeding, but will not die. Two soldiers, one a Christian, the other a Jew, carry Wilson on a stretcher and he becomes ever more of a burden. Even after he dies and the burden of carrying him becomes more oppressive, they continue to feel that they must bear his weight. They refuse to believe that he is dead. “Dead, he was as much alive to them as he had ever been,” Mailer wrote.
The burden of George W. Bush is likely to be at least as difficult for the next generation to bear.