WEBVTT NOTE Woodrow Wilson's Revolution Within the Form 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.000 My name is Richard Gamble and I'm from Palm Beach Atlantic College in beautiful West Palm Beach, Florida. 2 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Woodrow Wilson was not a revolutionist. With this emphatic denial, University of Virginia president, E.A. Alderman, 3 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:26.000 defended the legacy of the late president before a joint session of Congress, convened especially to hear this eulogy. 4 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:34.560 ology. Alderman addressed Congress on December 15, 1924, several months after Wilson's death. 5 00:00:34.560 --> 00:00:41.600 Seeing himself somewhat in the role of Pericles praising the Athenian war dead, Alderman elevated 6 00:00:41.600 --> 00:00:48.440 his friend and fellow academic into the American pantheon to join Washington, Jefferson and 7 00:00:48.440 --> 00:00:55.480 Lincoln. He marveled at the quote, revolutionary transformation that in so few years had taken 8 00:00:55.480 --> 00:01:02.160 Wilson from school teacher to president, a feat matched only by Lincoln's own meteoric 9 00:01:02.160 --> 00:01:06.120 and seemingly inexplicable rise to power. 10 00:01:06.120 --> 00:01:12.240 Typical of the progressive spirit of the age, Dr. Alderman praised Wilson for having redefined 11 00:01:12.240 --> 00:01:18.780 America as the servant among nations and for establishing his foreign policy on service 12 00:01:18.780 --> 00:01:24.300 to humanity rather than on selfish national interests. 13 00:01:24.300 --> 00:01:31.340 Wilson had summoned America, he said, to a crusade, not to a war. 14 00:01:31.340 --> 00:01:34.660 There was really nothing startling in Alderman's claims. 15 00:01:34.660 --> 00:01:39.980 This was the very definition of the war and of the American destiny that Wilson himself 16 00:01:39.980 --> 00:01:45.380 had worked so hard to infuse into the American mind. 17 00:01:45.380 --> 00:01:52.100 Wilson had never tired of referring to America as the servant nation, chosen to bring light 18 00:01:52.100 --> 00:01:57.980 and Liberty and Peace to All the World. Like the late 19th century romantic nationalists 19 00:01:57.980 --> 00:02:05.200 he so admired, Wilson divinized the American state and its mission to the world, applying 20 00:02:05.200 --> 00:02:12.140 to the United States all the divine attributes of the nature of Christ and His atoning work, 21 00:02:12.140 --> 00:02:19.140 the promise and the hope of the incarnation secularized and fulfilled. Alderman's tribute 22 00:02:19.140 --> 00:02:26.040 Alderman recognized Wilson as the one who promised to make all things new. His 14 points, 23 00:02:26.040 --> 00:02:32.080 for example, were intended to found, quote, a new order and a new life, for the president 24 00:02:32.080 --> 00:02:40.480 had caught a glimpse of the new earth. Nevertheless, Alderman pleaded that Wilson could not properly 25 00:02:40.480 --> 00:02:46.780 be classified as a revolutionary, because after all, he devoted so much of his energy and 26 00:02:46.780 --> 00:02:52.440 and imagination to building up institutions, such as the League of Nations, and not to 27 00:02:52.440 --> 00:02:57.780 breaking up institutions as a true revolutionary would do. 28 00:02:57.780 --> 00:03:04.860 And yet, despite his protest that Wilson was no revolutionary, Alderman closed his eulogy 29 00:03:04.860 --> 00:03:11.380 by likening Wilson to Martin Luther, to the English Puritans John Milton and John Hampton, 30 00:03:11.380 --> 00:03:19.380 and to the romantic nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, each of them either a religious or political revolutionary. 31 00:03:19.380 --> 00:03:25.380 To be sure, not all Americans shared this glowing assessment of Wilson at the time of his death. 32 00:03:25.380 --> 00:03:35.380 In contrast to Alderman's periclean praise of Wilson, essayist H. L. Mencken and the old right poet Robinson Jeffers 33 00:03:35.380 --> 00:03:39.460 offered a scathing assessment of the fallen war president. 34 00:03:39.460 --> 00:03:42.100 With characteristic deadpan, Mencken 35 00:03:42.100 --> 00:03:45.580 referred to the president as the late messiah 36 00:03:45.580 --> 00:03:48.500 and the deceased Moses. 37 00:03:48.500 --> 00:03:55.780 He lamented that Wilson's remarkable rhetorical skill in, 38 00:03:55.780 --> 00:03:59.180 quote, reducing all the difficulties of the hour 39 00:03:59.180 --> 00:04:02.780 to a few sonorous and unintelligible phrases, 40 00:04:02.780 --> 00:04:06.620 often with theological overtones. 41 00:04:06.620 --> 00:04:10.100 And what troubled Mencken most was that the American people 42 00:04:10.100 --> 00:04:15.140 had taken this man and his words so seriously. 43 00:04:15.140 --> 00:04:17.660 The controversial Jeffers in a poem 44 00:04:17.660 --> 00:04:20.060 dated the month of Wilson's death 45 00:04:20.060 --> 00:04:23.980 wrote of the president's huge delusion that, quote, 46 00:04:23.980 --> 00:04:28.700 the god of the stars needed his help. 47 00:04:28.700 --> 00:04:31.940 After a distinguished career as a college professor, 48 00:04:31.940 --> 00:05:01.940 As president of Princeton University and one-term governor of New Jersey, Wilson was elected president in 1912, the first Democrat to hold that office since Grover Cleveland, but Wilson proved to be a chief magistrate with a very different vision of the role and scope of government from that of the minimal state anti-imperialist Cleveland. There has been a change of government, Wilson announced in the opening sentence of his first inaugural. 49 00:05:01.940 --> 00:05:08.700 The government he promised would now be, quote, put at the service of humanity. 50 00:05:08.700 --> 00:05:13.880 Having preached the new freedom in his campaign, his slate of successful reform legislation 51 00:05:13.880 --> 00:05:20.460 in his first term alone included the Underwood Tariff, the Federal Reserve System, the Federal 52 00:05:20.460 --> 00:05:26.300 Trade Commission, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the Federal Farm Loan Act. 53 00:05:26.300 --> 00:05:31.720 In the war emergency of his second term, he nationalized the railroads and the merchant 54 00:05:31.720 --> 00:05:37.720 Marine, and expanded the use of the new income tax beyond what even the most pessimistic 55 00:05:37.720 --> 00:05:44.800 Cassandra had predicted possible in the hands of an imperial president. 56 00:05:44.800 --> 00:05:50.540 As Murray Rothbard observed in his essay, War as Fulfillment, the First World War provided 57 00:05:50.540 --> 00:05:56.120 the opportunity that the progressives needed to remold the American economy and the American 58 00:05:56.120 --> 00:06:02.520 in mind, taking the nation decisively toward a command economy, what the Germans were 59 00:06:02.520 --> 00:06:10.320 then referring to in their own context as war socialism. The editors of the New Republic, 60 00:06:10.320 --> 00:06:17.520 close associates of Wilson's, boasted during the war that, quote, we revolutionized America. 61 00:06:17.520 --> 00:06:24.560 Indeed, Wilson and the Democratic Congress dramatically expanded the government's powers 62 00:06:24.560 --> 00:06:32.520 in War Time, including military conscription under the euphemism selective service and 63 00:06:32.520 --> 00:06:37.920 silence their critics on the left and the right with the espionage and sedition acts. 64 00:06:37.920 --> 00:06:43.960 The irony of this war to make the world safe for democracy in light of these violations 65 00:06:43.960 --> 00:06:49.880 of American freedoms did not escape courageous critics. 66 00:06:49.880 --> 00:06:56.360 Rothbard traced the Progressive's wartime agenda to the post-millennialist, pietist impulse, 67 00:06:56.360 --> 00:07:03.040 quote, to make America and eventually the world holy and thereby to bring about the 68 00:07:03.040 --> 00:07:11.200 kingdom of God on earth. Rothbard was correct to see this link to the theological presuppositions 69 00:07:11.200 --> 00:07:17.520 then guiding the social gospel clergy and their political and academic allies as they 70 00:07:17.520 --> 00:07:21.520 which built the modern interventionist state. 71 00:07:21.520 --> 00:07:30.520 But in Wilson's case, the effort to create heaven on earth fits into the broader theological problem of political Gnosticism, 72 00:07:30.520 --> 00:07:33.520 identified by Eric Vogelin. 73 00:07:33.520 --> 00:07:38.520 Wilson typifies the profile of the Gnostic prophet. 74 00:07:38.520 --> 00:07:46.520 Gnosticism, in Vogelin's use of the word, is the modern attempt to infuse mundane secular human history 75 00:07:46.520 --> 00:07:50.280 with the Transcendent Mission of the Kingdom of God. 76 00:07:50.280 --> 00:07:56.480 The Gnostic prophet is a leader, a saint, convinced of his own calling, who claims to 77 00:07:56.480 --> 00:08:02.740 know with utter certainty the direction of history, the inexorable movement of human 78 00:08:02.740 --> 00:08:06.440 affairs toward apocalyptic fulfillment. 79 00:08:06.440 --> 00:08:12.200 The Gnostic prophet promises emancipation from the constraints of the past, the abolition 80 00:08:12.200 --> 00:08:21.000 of War and Oppression and the Coming of Universal and Everlasting Peace, Justice and Righteousness. 81 00:08:21.000 --> 00:08:26.680 The Gnostics, Vogelin wrote, quote, will not leave the transfiguration of the world to 82 00:08:26.680 --> 00:08:33.080 the grace of God beyond history, but will do the work of God Himself right here and 83 00:08:33.080 --> 00:08:42.080 now in history. They take into their own hands the remaking of the world. Moreover, they 84 00:08:42.200 --> 00:08:47.560 Where they tend to divide the world into two camps, light and dark, and to interpret all 85 00:08:47.560 --> 00:08:53.720 political disagreements and wars as absolute struggles between the kingdom of God and the 86 00:08:53.720 --> 00:09:02.720 forces of Satan. In their hands, ordinary war becomes the last judgment and every battle 87 00:09:02.720 --> 00:09:05.920 becomes Armageddon. 88 00:09:05.920 --> 00:09:11.920 Wilson was not the first of America's Gnostic prophets, nor the last, unfortunately. 89 00:09:11.920 --> 00:09:16.920 Abraham Lincoln's Gnosticism, for example, is evident throughout his speeches. 90 00:09:16.920 --> 00:09:24.920 The late Mel Bradford called Lincoln's rhetorical strategy in speeches such as the Gettysburg Address 91 00:09:24.920 --> 00:09:27.920 a rhetoric for continuing revolution. 92 00:09:27.920 --> 00:09:35.920 This phrase applies equally well to Wilson, the heir of Lincoln's secularized revolutionary puritanism. 93 00:09:35.920 --> 00:09:44.920 We discern in Wilson the same destructive tendency to use language to wage an ideological war of revolutionary implications. 94 00:09:44.920 --> 00:09:52.920 Wilson was a gnostic revolutionary at the most elemental level in that he wished to repeal the past, 95 00:09:52.920 --> 00:10:02.920 to wage war against the institutions of the past, especially against monarchy, multinational empires and balance of power diplomacy. 96 00:10:02.920 --> 00:10:14.920 Wilson's gnostic temperament was evident before the United States entered the war in 1917 and even before the outbreak of the European War itself in 1914. 97 00:10:14.920 --> 00:10:23.920 In the 1912 campaign, for example, Wilson carefully explained his internationalist creed. 98 00:10:23.920 --> 00:10:39.920 I believe that God planted in us visions of liberty, that we are chosen and prominently chosen to show the way to the nations of the world, how they shall walk in the paths of liberty. 99 00:10:39.920 --> 00:10:53.920 And in his first term, Wilson showed his faith by his works, intervening militarily in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, and the Dominican Republic in 1916. 100 00:10:53.920 --> 00:11:18.920 his wartime speeches such as his extravagantly praised peace without victory address, the war message and the 14 points ache with millennial expectancy of the final war and the last crusade with hyper-spiritualized Gnostic longings to escape from history, materiality and contingency. 101 00:11:18.920 --> 00:11:33.920 Wilson distorted a rather conventional war fought for conventional territorial and dynastic objectives into something unrecognizable, into an apocalyptic transformation of human nature and reality. 102 00:11:33.920 --> 00:11:41.920 One speech in particular, a speech generally overlooked by historians, illustrates Wilson's temperament. 103 00:11:41.920 --> 00:11:52.420 On a warm Independence Day, 1918, just over a year after America's entry into the war and four months before the armistice, 104 00:11:52.420 --> 00:11:59.920 Wilson addressed the diplomatic corps assembled at George Washington's tomb at Mount Vernon. 105 00:11:59.920 --> 00:12:05.920 In the shadow of the architect of America's tradition of non-intervention and neutrality, 106 00:12:05.920 --> 00:12:12.080 Wilson performed the alchemy of his rhetoric for continuing revolution. 107 00:12:12.080 --> 00:12:15.360 Clothed like Lincoln in the authority of the Fathers, 108 00:12:15.360 --> 00:12:18.440 Wilson's words, whether consciously or not, 109 00:12:18.440 --> 00:12:22.840 echoed the very language of the Gettysburg Address. 110 00:12:22.840 --> 00:12:26.480 Like Lincoln, he sought to interpret for his hearers 111 00:12:26.480 --> 00:12:30.120 the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence 112 00:12:30.120 --> 00:12:37.840 and the intention of the fathers, within the context of the present war, to interpret intervention 113 00:12:37.840 --> 00:12:45.320 into the European war, that is, not as a betrayal of America's traditions, but as their inevitable 114 00:12:45.320 --> 00:12:51.400 fulfillment. Washington and the other founders, according to Wilson, had turned their back 115 00:12:51.400 --> 00:12:58.860 on the past and had looked ahead to the whole wide world. Quote, a great promise that was 116 00:12:58.860 --> 00:13:28.860 was meant for all mankind was here given plan and reality it was the duty of those present to conceive anew the purposes that must set men free it has been left for us to see to it that it shall be understood that they the founders spoke and acted not for a single people only but for all mankind we are in this war to fulfill the promise of their vision 117 00:13:28.860 --> 00:13:37.860 Having achieved our own liberty, we are to strive for the liberties of every other people as well. 118 00:13:37.860 --> 00:13:46.860 We see in this speech Wilson's totalist mind at work, a worldview that leads so easily to total war. 119 00:13:46.860 --> 00:13:52.860 The past and the present are in deadly grapple, he continued. 120 00:13:52.860 --> 00:13:56.860 America was fighting for the final settlement. 121 00:13:56.860 --> 00:14:00.860 There can be no compromise. 122 00:14:00.860 --> 00:14:04.860 As a minimal condition of peace, he said, there must be, quote, 123 00:14:04.860 --> 00:14:06.860 now listen to this, 124 00:14:06.860 --> 00:14:12.860 the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere 125 00:14:12.860 --> 00:14:20.860 that can separately, secretly, and of its single choice, disturb the peace of the world. 126 00:14:20.860 --> 00:14:29.860 Furthermore, a League of Nations was required to quote, check every invasion of right. 127 00:14:29.860 --> 00:14:35.860 And remarkably, he claimed that the founders themselves would have approved of these principles. 128 00:14:35.860 --> 00:14:43.860 In fact, over the past century, the British had come to see the revolution as leading toward the liberation of their own people. 129 00:14:43.860 --> 00:14:47.860 But the work was not over, Wilson continued. 130 00:14:47.860 --> 00:14:58.860 I stand here now to speak of the spread of this revolt, this liberation to the great stage of the world itself. 131 00:14:58.860 --> 00:15:09.860 These were Wilson's revolutionary principles. Deathless, he called them, and of the very stuff of triumph. 132 00:15:09.860 --> 00:15:16.860 Unfortunately, Wilson did not confine his revolutionary principles to simply rhetoric. 133 00:15:16.860 --> 00:15:26.860 What the historian Christopher Dawson concluded about Cromwell's Revolutionary Army during the English Civil Wars was true of Wilson. 134 00:15:26.860 --> 00:15:31.860 He worked for nothing less than, in Dawson's words applied to Cromwell, 135 00:15:31.860 --> 00:15:42.860 quote, the translation of the conception of the Holy Community from an ecclesiastical ideal to a principle of revolutionary political action. 136 00:15:42.860 --> 00:15:51.860 Or, we could say, in Wilson's case, also its translation into a principle of revolutionary foreign policy. 137 00:15:51.860 --> 00:15:59.860 It was Wilson himself, after all, who claimed, quote, what America touches, she makes holy. 138 00:15:59.860 --> 00:16:06.860 Wilson's redemptive impulse to save the old world is the high watermark of progressive imperialism, 139 00:16:06.860 --> 00:16:10.860 even though he claimed to be the sworn enemy of empire. 140 00:16:10.860 --> 00:16:24.860 The American mission was no longer to be simply an example to Europe, but to free Europe from its own past, from its institutions, its imperialism and its system of alliances. 141 00:16:24.860 --> 00:16:33.860 As the trustee of liberty, as the servant nation, America had to wage war on behalf of others. 142 00:16:33.860 --> 00:16:45.860 The worthy principle of liberty for us had somehow become in Wilson's hands the limitless promise of liberty for all. 143 00:16:45.860 --> 00:16:51.860 And he took aim against Central Europe with devastating consequences. 144 00:16:51.860 --> 00:16:57.860 Wilson waged war from 1917 to 1918, not primarily to defend U.S. interests or honor, 145 00:16:57.860 --> 00:17:10.860 But to destroy German autocracy in the name of democracy and peace, to end multinational empires in the name of self-determination for all peoples, and to transcend balance of power in the name of brotherhood. 146 00:17:10.860 --> 00:17:25.860 With the advice of his closest unofficial advisor, Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson consistently distinguished between the German people and their government in order to undermine the German monarchy. 147 00:17:25.860 --> 00:17:36.860 As historian Lloyd Ambrosius, a realist historian, notes, in 1917, House, quote, recommended an appeal to the German people against their government. 148 00:17:36.860 --> 00:17:45.860 For, in House's words, imperial Germany should be broken down within, as well as from without. 149 00:17:45.860 --> 00:17:51.860 But Wilson needed little encouragement from House or other advisors. 150 00:17:51.860 --> 00:17:58.860 In his war message of April 2, 1917, and then in a Flag Day speech in June, 151 00:17:58.860 --> 00:18:03.860 Wilson had already claimed that the American people entered the war as, 152 00:18:03.860 --> 00:18:07.860 quote, the sincere friends of the German people. 153 00:18:07.860 --> 00:18:13.860 With this sort of sophistry, he claimed he was waging war not against the people of Germany, 154 00:18:13.860 --> 00:18:20.060 of Germany, but against their system of autocratic government. He delegitimized the German government 155 00:18:20.060 --> 00:18:27.060 as alien to its own people, as a despotic master that had enslaved its people. 156 00:18:27.820 --> 00:18:34.260 On August 11th, 1917, Wilson spoke of being, quote, anxious to see that the German people 157 00:18:34.260 --> 00:18:41.260 have their glad emancipation from the German imperial ideology imposed upon them. 158 00:18:41.260 --> 00:18:50.260 We are fighting a thing, not a people, he said. And his war against this thing knew no limits. 159 00:18:50.260 --> 00:19:00.260 We intend, he said, to see to it that no other people suffers a like humiliation and subordination. 160 00:19:00.260 --> 00:19:07.260 The key point here, and a point directly relevant to our own time, is that Wilson waged ideological warfare 161 00:19:07.260 --> 00:19:12.260 against a form of government, and not just against its behavior. 162 00:19:12.260 --> 00:19:16.260 Wilson tried to defeat Germany from the inside out. 163 00:19:16.260 --> 00:19:22.260 As the anti-statist essayist Randolph Bourne, the man who coined the phrase, 164 00:19:22.260 --> 00:19:28.260 war is the health of the state, as he wrote concerning one of Wilson's speeches against the German government, 165 00:19:28.260 --> 00:19:34.260 quote, it implies that America is ready to pour out endless blood and treasure, 166 00:19:34.260 --> 00:19:45.260 not to the end of a negotiated peace, but to the utter crushing of the central powers, to their dismemberment and political annihilation." 167 00:19:45.260 --> 00:19:57.260 This strategy was crucial to Wilson's revolutionary democratism and the defining feature of the continuing Wilsonianism of the White House down to our own time. 168 00:19:57.260 --> 00:20:10.260 The peace and freedom of the world, he had said in his war message, was threatened by the existence of autocratic governments, unaccountable as they were to the will of the people. 169 00:20:10.260 --> 00:20:20.260 Wilson clearly was at war with a system of government and at war to export another system of government to take its place. 170 00:20:20.260 --> 00:20:25.260 Now, Wilson implemented this policy toward Germany in at least two ways. 171 00:20:25.260 --> 00:20:31.260 First, by refusing to accept a mediated settlement once the United States entered the war, 172 00:20:31.260 --> 00:20:37.260 and secondly, by working to dismember the Central Powers' multinational empires. 173 00:20:37.260 --> 00:20:46.260 When the Pope proposed a negotiated end to the war in the summer of 1917, Wilson refused, 174 00:20:46.260 --> 00:20:57.260 Wilson refused, noting that compromise was unimaginable when the free peoples were fighting against a vast secret conspiracy to take over the world. 175 00:20:57.260 --> 00:21:08.260 Wilson refused to negotiate with the German imperial government, claiming that their word could not be trusted and that therefore no covenant could be entered into with them. 176 00:21:08.260 --> 00:21:20.260 When Germany faced imminent defeat in the autumn of 1918, Wilson forced a political revolution in Germany as a precondition of negotiations and peace. 177 00:21:20.260 --> 00:21:30.260 It seems clear now that a constitutional monarchy in Germany would have been a more responsible alternative to the forced creation of a republic. 178 00:21:30.260 --> 00:21:44.760 As historian John Lukash writes, quote, that this kind of ideological democratism was disastrous should be obvious in retrospect. 179 00:21:44.760 --> 00:21:55.600 Had the Kaiser abdicated in favor of his son and of a constitutional monarchy, Adolf Hitler may have remained unknown to the world, end quote. 180 00:21:55.600 --> 00:22:01.600 Unfortunately, clear thinking about the consequences of America's entry into the Great War seems impossible. 181 00:22:01.600 --> 00:22:12.600 It is unassailable orthodoxy these days, especially among neoconservatives, that it was the US withdrawal from Europe after 1918, 182 00:22:12.600 --> 00:22:18.600 invariably demonized as a retreat or as a lapse into isolationism, 183 00:22:18.600 --> 00:22:25.600 and the U.S. refusal to join the League of Nations that opened the way for Hitler and precipitated World War II. 184 00:22:25.600 --> 00:22:32.600 But it is more historically demonstrable that America's entrance into Europe in 1917 185 00:22:32.600 --> 00:22:39.600 and Wilson's revolutionary People's War, as he once called it, are the main culprits. 186 00:22:39.600 --> 00:22:47.600 Wilson sowed the seeds of World War II by guaranteeing political instability and a power vacuum in the heart of Europe. 187 00:22:47.600 --> 00:22:58.600 Under Wilson's leadership, furthermore, the United States entered the European War not only to defeat the abstraction of autocracy, but also to end multinational empires. 188 00:22:58.600 --> 00:23:08.600 Originally disclaiming any such intention, Wilson worked systematically to dismantle the empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Turks, 189 00:23:08.600 --> 00:23:17.600 and Turks, while simultaneously defending the progressive, enlightened imperialism of Britain and the United States. 190 00:23:17.600 --> 00:23:25.600 Despite his reputation then and since as an anti-imperialist, Wilson was not opposed to empire in principle. 191 00:23:25.600 --> 00:23:34.600 He was not opposed to what we could call redemptive imperialism, but only the retrograde, predatory variety. 192 00:23:34.600 --> 00:23:40.600 Wilson outlined his vision of the New World Order in his well-received 14-point speech. 193 00:23:41.600 --> 00:23:48.600 As prejudicial as these points were to the central powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, 194 00:23:48.600 --> 00:23:53.600 they did form a basis for an armistice in 1918. 195 00:23:53.600 --> 00:24:01.600 But they were accepted in desperation by defeated empires unwilling to trust their fate to vengeful European victors, 196 00:24:01.600 --> 00:24:06.600 and not because they saw any wisdom in Wilson's ideological crusade. 197 00:24:06.600 --> 00:24:14.600 The revolutionary implications of the 14 points were well understood at the time, even by the American press. 198 00:24:14.600 --> 00:24:19.600 The New York Tribune, for example, called Wilson's 14-point speech, quote, 199 00:24:19.600 --> 00:24:25.600 a second emancipation proclamation, as the editors continued. 200 00:24:25.600 --> 00:24:37.600 As Lincoln freed the slaves of the South half a century ago, Mr. Wilson now pledges his country to fight for the liberation of the Belgian and the Pole, the Serb and the Romanian. 201 00:24:37.600 --> 00:24:55.600 The 14 points were a direct effort to rearrange Europe, marking an unprecedented entry of the United States into European affairs and a further departure from America's traditional foreign policy of non-entanglement and non-intervention. 202 00:24:55.600 --> 00:25:02.600 For Wilson to claim repeatedly that he was fulfilling the intention of the founders was absurd. 203 00:25:02.600 --> 00:25:15.600 One of Wilson's 14 points was the guarantee of government by the consent of the governed, or self-determination of all peoples, a sort of universalization of the Declaration of Independence, as it were. 204 00:25:15.600 --> 00:25:24.600 Wilson used recognition of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia as means to defeat the Austro-Hungarian Empire from within. 205 00:25:24.600 --> 00:25:34.600 Wilson recognized the Czech Slovak government in 1918 before the armistice as a co-belligerent against Germany and Austria-Hungary. 206 00:25:34.600 --> 00:25:41.600 The process of carving up Eastern Europe did not begin with the post-war settlements at Versailles. 207 00:25:41.600 --> 00:25:50.600 Self-determination in Wilson's hands was first used as a weapon of war and not an instrument of peace. 208 00:25:50.600 --> 00:25:56.600 There were other, more radical Gnostic voices in 1917 and 1918, of course. 209 00:25:56.600 --> 00:26:01.600 Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised heaven on earth by other revolutionary means. 210 00:26:01.600 --> 00:26:09.600 But again, as historian John Lukash argues, Wilson has proven to be the more influential revolutionary. 211 00:26:09.600 --> 00:26:17.600 Quote, Thomas Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin were contemporaries who died ten days apart. 212 00:26:17.600 --> 00:26:32.600 It was the idea of the former, not of the latter, national self-determination and not proletarian revolution that turned out to be the principal factor in the history of the rest of the century. 213 00:26:32.600 --> 00:26:43.600 Now, historians who excuse the excesses of Wilson's visionary rhetoric and the impracticality of his millennial schemes tend to do so on the basis that he was an idealist. 214 00:26:43.600 --> 00:26:49.600 But Wilson was dangerous precisely because of his idealism. 215 00:26:49.600 --> 00:26:55.600 University of Virginia President Alderman had said more than he realized in his eulogy 216 00:26:55.600 --> 00:27:03.600 when he observed that Wilson was, quote, a master and in some sense a slave of ideas and ideals. 217 00:27:03.600 --> 00:27:11.600 The tragedy for America's subsequent history is that Wilson made this republic a slave 218 00:27:11.600 --> 00:27:21.600 of those same ideas and ideals. Such delusions lead inevitably to the perpetual war for perpetual peace that Charles Beard warned about. 219 00:27:21.600 --> 00:27:27.600 Wilson provoked revolution in Europe, but more importantly, he provoked revolution in America. 220 00:27:27.600 --> 00:27:36.600 A revolution in how we understand ourselves and our responsibility to the rest of the world. 221 00:27:36.600 --> 00:27:43.600 Now, as you know, the problem of Wilsonianism persists, and its dangers are not abstract. 222 00:27:43.600 --> 00:27:51.600 There are those who intend to see Wilsonian democratism re-emerge in the post-Cold War world. 223 00:27:51.600 --> 00:27:59.600 Neoconservative pundits, in particular, continue to dream under the spell of Wilson's Gnostic theology of empire, 224 00:27:59.600 --> 00:28:04.800 Conjuring with the magic words, democracy, destiny, and mission. 225 00:28:06.600 --> 00:28:08.600 Shall I name names? 226 00:28:08.600 --> 00:28:13.600 Joshua Muravchik, In Exporting Democracy, Fulfilling America's Destiny, 227 00:28:13.600 --> 00:28:19.600 calls upon the United States to continue its crusade for global democracy, now that the Cold War is over. 228 00:28:19.600 --> 00:28:22.600 Tony Smith, America's Mission, 229 00:28:22.600 --> 00:28:41.600 While a much more substantial and sophisticated work than Moravchik's also advocates a renewal of America's democratic mission primarily on the basis of national security and the vain hope that a democratic world will be a world at peace and therefore a world safer for America. 230 00:28:41.600 --> 00:28:54.600 But the proponents of Wilsonianism offer no consideration of what this crusade for global democracy has done and will do domestically to America's own free institutions. 231 00:28:54.600 --> 00:29:03.600 What are the costs of exporting democracy? What are the costs of America pursuing a divine mission? 232 00:29:03.600 --> 00:29:21.600 As critics of empire have been asking for the past century, what does this ideological imperialism do to the size of our government, to the burden of taxation, to the power of the presidency, to our own self-government, to our own free market? 233 00:29:21.600 --> 00:29:28.600 What does it do to the meaning of words? What does it do to the moral character of our people? 234 00:29:28.600 --> 00:29:40.600 These are the questions that William Graham Sumner and other anti-imperialists had the courage to ask in 1898 when it still seemed possible to prevent America's plunge into empire. 235 00:29:40.600 --> 00:29:47.600 These are the questions we must have the courage to ask again in 1998. 236 00:29:47.600 --> 00:29:56.600 Now next February, mark your calendars, marks the 75th anniversary of the deaths of both Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin. 237 00:29:56.600 --> 00:30:10.600 The time for eulogies is long past. But the last time I checked, Lenin's body and Wilson's legacy remained unburied. It is time to bury both.