Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, is the author
of the new book “Presidents of War” and wrote this op-ed for the Washington Post.
On the Nov. 11
100th anniversary of the Allied victory in
World War I, I’m celebrating the heroism of American warriors in Europe.
Perhaps 116,000 of them died in that struggle. Their commander in chief,
Woodrow Wilson, did not match the quality of their service. During the
conflict, Wilson made serious mistakes as a political leader that should never
be forgotten.
Wilson’s missteps in wartime were hardly his only defects.
His most disgraceful flaw was his
racism. Given his high-flown rhetoric as a professor
about elevating humankind, Wilson especially stood out in his white supremacy.
He was not a man of his time but a throwback. His two predecessors, Theodore
Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, had looked far kindlier on African Americans
and their rights.
In 1916, Wilson, a Democrat, narrowly won
reelection, campaigning under false pretenses
with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” Privately, however, he knew it was
quite possible that he would take the nation into the European struggle soon
after starting his second term.
As an academic, Wilson had emphasized the need for
presidents to explain military setbacks and other complex or mystifying events
to Americans. Yet he spent much of 1917, the first year of U.S. engagement
in the war, in kingly isolation, rarely using his luminous oratorical gifts to
explain to his countrymen why they needed to make severe sacrifices for a
conflict that wasn’t an obvious, direct threat to America’s national security.
Wilson, who preened as a civil libertarian, persuaded
Congress to pass the
Espionage Act, giving him extraordinary power to
retaliate against Americans who opposed him and his wartime behavior. That same
law today enables presidents to harass their political adversaries. Wilson’s
Justice Department also convicted almost a thousand people for using “disloyal,
profane, scurrilous or abusive language” against the government, the military
or the flag. Wilson is an excellent example of how presidents can exploit wars
to increase authoritarian power and restrict freedom, some arguing that
criticizing the commander in chief amounts to criticizing soldiers in the
field.
In the 1918 midterms, with the Great War heading to its
climax, Wilson shamelessly exploited the military struggle for domestic
politics, urging voters to support his party “for the sake of the nation
itself” because Republicans were trying to take “the conduct of the war out of
my hands.” This cheap maneuver backfired. Roosevelt and Taft charged that
Wilson was asking for “unlimited control over the settlement of a peace that
will affect them for a century.” Partly out of disgust with Wilson’s
presumptuousness, voters
switched controlof both the House and Senate to the
Republicans.
I admire Wilson’s insistence on ending the war with a
League of Nations to ensure that such
a conflict never happened again, but his plan to achieve it was clumsy
political malpractice. He knew the Republican majority in Congress and many
other Americans would be troubled by the possibility that if the Senate
endorsed U.S. entry into the League of Nations, the new peace organization
might have the right to call American troops into battle. Wilson should have
immediately made it his central mission to assuage those fears, but he instead
decamped to the
Paris peace conference for months — certain, in
his vanity, that no mere professional diplomat could match his negotiating
skills. The domestic debate over the League of Nations was left to its loudest
opponents, such as
Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. By the time Wilson returned in the summer of 1919, fatal
damage had been done.
Wilson’s famous failure to persuade Americans to accept his
cherished league (he poignantly
suffered a strokewhile campaigning for it) had
gargantuan consequences. It doomed the League of Nations’ potential to keep the
world out of an even more ruinous war, decades later, as Adolf Hitler expanded
his brutal reach in Europe and Japan fell under the spell of a militant,
imperial regime.
In the late 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to
awaken Americans to the possibility that they might have to fight to save the
world from tyranny, perhaps his biggest obstacle was the bitter public memory
of Wilson and World War I. Laboring under the millstone of the then widely
detested 28th president, FDR managed to rearm the United States only in the
nick of time.
One can admire Wilson for his progressive reforms, for his
idealism and eloquence about America’s role in the world, as I do, without
sugarcoating his displays of political incompetence as a president of war. In
wartime, Americans have a right to expect that the bravery of U.S. troops is
matched by brilliant political leadership in the White House. Too often in the
past, World War I anniversaries have been transformed into paeans to Woodrow
Wilson. This time, let’s keep it focused on the troops.
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