It said, Loyal to your highest, sensitive, brave,
Sanguine, some few ways wise, you and all men are drawn out of
this depth
Only to be those things you are, as flowers for color, falcons for
swiftness,
Mountains for mass and quiet. Each for its quality.
–”Woodrow Wilson,” Robinson Jeffers
In the camera’s excessively soft focus light refracts diffusely through the diamond-cut glass pendants that sway soundlessly from the chandelier. This image, which dominates Public Television’s documentary of Woodrow Wilson, seems a director’s desperate attempt to symbolize a subject that so baffled him, he could only fall back on a shopworn image.
Although he is routinely ranked among our greatest presidents, Woodrow Wilson also could be our most enigmatic. Our mental pictures of those who occupied the White House in the last century quickly conjure up Teddy Roosevelt’s toothy grin, Franklin Roosevelt’s jaunty cigarette holder, and the dour ministerial face that aptly personifies Silent Cal Coolidge.
But evoking Wilson becomes more difficult. The enigma of Woodrow Wilson confounded his own times as well as ours. David Houston, who served eight years in Wilson’s cabinet, took almost 100 pages to compose “An Estimate of Woodrow Wilson,” which begins with several pages describing the difficulty of his task.
Wilson also remains an enigma because in the era of the sound bite we associate with him few memorable quotes. Wilson’s writings and speeches are so well-constructed that extracting a single sentence from them is like ripping a piece from an old master’s painting.
A minister’s son, who vividly remembered the devastation of his native South wrought by the Civil War, Wilson spent most of his life in academia, where as president of Princeton he produced speeches, essays and books whose depth and breadth rank him with Jefferson. This makes the task of choosing one piece to represent his beliefs particularly difficult. Yet given the gravity of the occasion, few would argue with the choice of his First Inaugural.
The years of ferment at the birth of the 20th century brewed an incendiary concoction of labor organizers, academics, feminists, social workers, reformers, anarchists, and protesters. Among them was a college professor named George Herron, who organized the Social Gospel movement. His essay about the 1871 Paris Commune gives a flavor of those times;
The time when the working class was in actual control affairs of Paris, free of its own leaders and getting along without government, administering society through simple law of association for the common good, was a time of unequaled human order, elemental law and real liberty. At no other time or place has life been so free and safe, with so small an average of human misery, with so large a fund of secure fellowship, and with so hopeful and common a well-being.
Against the reformers, the tycoons who were their targets dolled out huge volumes of cash to those willing to sell out and when that did not work they invoked their own naked power in events such as the Latimer Massacre. Three-hundred pound President William Howard Taft served as a tool of the laissez-faire fundamentalists, the rotund girth of our fattest president mirroring the economic excesses of the plutocrats.
The 1912 election with its four candidates– Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Debs and Wilson– remains one of the most bitterly fought in American history. It took 46 ballots and the support of William Jennings Bryan for Wilson to win his party’s nomination. In winning the presidency Wilson received a tarnished prize, garnering only 42% of the popular vote–although he captured 435 electoral votes–causing many to assert that in a two-person contest Wilson would have lost.
This made the delivery of his inaugural address one of the most difficult since Lincoln’s inauguration. Even his own party was skeptical. Wilson knew that he not only had to articulate a vision that would rally all Americans but also define what he and the reformers believed was a new era, for 1912, like 1932 and 1960 marked a major turning point in American history.
Our first president who also served as a university president (Dwight Eisenhower was the other) also supplies the answer to a second trivia question for he is the only president who regularly used shorthand. Many handwritten drafts of his speeches and the notes he took at meetings look illegible to those who cannot read the strange loops and swirls of this almost forgotten skill. Although the First Inaugural underwent a draft and its shorthand notes are kept by the Library of Congress, I was unable to access them to trace the speech’s evolution. Apparently the Library is the only source for the shorthand draft since Arthur Link’s monumental The Papers of Woodrow Wilson contains only the final address.
The speech Wilson delivered represents the practiced arts of a man generally credited as one of his era’s leading writers and speakers. This put additional pressure on Wilson because people expected a great speech on that usually warm day in early March of 1913.
Wilson begins his address by acknowledging the political changes. Remarkably his circumstances parallel our own times in that two years before the Democrats gained control of Congress and now controlled all three branches of government for the first time in almost a generation. In his opening remarks Wilson asks the question that was on the mind of every American that day, “What does the change mean?”
It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party.
With an economy of words that Lincoln would admire, Wilson has transported us from politics to values. At this point a Lincoln might have proceeded directly to those values as he did so eloquently at Gettysburg, but Wilson instead feels a need to reflect on his times, saying, “We have been refreshed by a new insight into our own life.:
Here he faces a figurative fork in the rhetorical path, for he must outline both the positive and negative aspects of that vision. The campaign had been too contentious, the divisions too pronounced, to not define what both united and divided the nation. The instinct of most speech writers dictates moving from negative to positive, but Wilson counterintuitively starts with the positive. Rather than launching into a stem-winding jeremiad, as say a Bryan might have done, Wilson instead reassures his audience that while the country may be divided, it still has much to celebrate.
“We see that in many things that life is very great,” he says, “It is incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of groups of men.” He goes on to expand upon this in a short paragraph.
Then comes what most consider to be the first great section of the speech. I quote the words at length, because like the inaugurals of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, Wilson here weaves together the universal and particular into an eloquent indictment of the runaway excesses of his times.
But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste . . . We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories, and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat. With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.
“The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.” In the hand-written correction he made to the typed draft Wilson added the words “too often,” heightening the emphasis of that sentence. That sentence states what I believe represents the core value of Liberal America: government exists to keep the playing field level. Wilson and Bryan may have come from entirely different places and had vastly different personalities and religious beliefs, yet what links the two of them–and what made Bryan throw his support to Wilson–lies in that single sentence.
“Those who had used it had forgotten the people,” those words send shivers up my spine as I read them. When was the last time you heard an American politician–particularly a Democratic politician–say anything like that? And yet, these almost-century-old words could just as well be describing the Bush Administration. Wilson, the preacher’s son, is delivering what may be our nation�s greatest political sermon, adding in the following paragraph words indicting the laissez-faire Pharisees of his time who believed that a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” would make the nation stronger.
There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been “Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,” while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.
What is fascinating about Wilson’s sermon with its Lincolnesque (and Bryanesque) extolling of the importance of the common people and the level playing field is that just before leaving Princeton on March 1 for Washington, he had spoken to his neighbors much as Lincoln had when he left Springfield, Illinois. As Link quotes him in the Collected Papers, he said:
You have got to know people in order to love them. You have got to feel as they do in order to have sympathy with them. and any man would be a poor public servant who did not regard himself as a part of the public himself.
Wilson’s Inaugural then moves to what public relations people call “positioning” his administration, whose purpose he sums up in one short sentence, “Our work is a work of restoration.” David Noble has termed this “the paradox of Progressive thought,” for these words provide a clear statement that many Progressives desired to return the nation to what Wilson�s contemporaries would have termed “traditional values.”
He follows this with a paragraph that outlines some of the programs he will propose, but then returns to values. This portion of his speech stands as one of the supreme statements of the core value of Liberal America:
This is no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food laws, and laws determining conditions of labor which individuals are powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency.
“These are matters of justice.” Where today’s politicians toss out new programs faster than you can keep up with them and issue position papers on whatever they think will get them one sound bite on tonight�s newscast, here is a statement of principle. We do not need to hear a list of programs from this president because he has told us what will serve as the compass points of his administration.
Wilson has adroitly set up the passage that many commentators have likened to the “mystic chords of memory” portion of Lincoln’s First Inaugural. Wilson’s new cabinet member, Houston, saw the parallel even as he listened to the words. Wilson had to have had Lincoln in mind, even to the point of obliquely evoking some of his metaphors. Yet rather than a mere imitation of Lincoln he does something much more powerful, by subtly evoking Lincoln’s values those “mystic chords” once again resound with the fundamental principles of this nation in a new environment.
These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man’s conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they can not tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.
It is the additional three words–and only justice–that are yet another example of what separates a great speech from a mediocre one.
Wilson’s ending is pure Lincoln.
The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action.
The presidency that would follow this speech is still ranked among the greatest. Many of Bryan’s so-called lost causes became law under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson. His term was marked by a flurry of social legislation that would be matched only by that of Franklin Roosevelt and perhaps Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Among these are the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Trade Commission, laws against child labor, and the eight-hour day.
It is safe to say during the era of Woodrow Wilson this nation marched out of the industrial wasteland of the end of the Nineteenth Century and into the enlightened vision of government balancing the playing field that characterized most of the Twentieth Century. Although FDR pulled us out of the Great Depression, there is little doubt the task might have been impossible if Woodrow Wilson had not laid the groundwork.
A word should be said here about Versailles, for Wilson ended under a cloud as he struggled to get Congress to approve the treaty he had worked so hard to secure. When Wilson walked out the doors of Versailles with more than anyone expected, the Republicans knifed him in the back for what even they admitted were partisan purposes. For this, the GOP bears the responsibility for laying the ground work for World War II and the Holocaust–and also for Iraq.
Perhaps one of the greatest what-ifs of Twentieth Century foreign policy is the United States and the League of Nations. Given Wilson was followed by two Republican administrations it is questionable whether our participation would have strengthened the League. Yet one very subjective source, my grandfather, whose escape from the Nazis was aided by the League and who worked in China for them and served on the NATO Council, believed that had the United States been part of the League, international events alone would have forced us to play an active role.
Besides the monumental achievements of his administration, what Woodrow Wilson teaches today’s Democratic Party is that adherence to the principles of Liberal America represents the foundation for the Party’s strength. The line from Bryan to Wilson runs straight and true. “Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto,” said Wilson. The candidates now vying for the nomination would do well to adopt that motto.
NOTE: This is the second in an ingoing series focusing on presidential candidates and their visions of the Democratic Party. The purpose of this series is quite simple, to knit the threads of the past into the fabric of a political party so that they form a vision of what that party once represented and must recover if it hopes to govern. Yet, as Wilson noted, that vision must not be a mere restatement of the past but relevant to the new times we live in.
Print Posted by: liberalamerican
