Paper delivered at the meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California, September 1, 2001.

Chaired by Ronald J. Pestritto of the University of Dallas, the panel was on John Alvis’s play, “WW”: A Play in Two Parts.

 

Among the letters of our alphabet, “W” is uniquely dual. “WW” means duality times two. “WW” is “A Play in Two Acts,” a twice-told tale of a man with two wives, two friends, two main enemies, and two spiritual but not biological sons. We see one of his daughters twice, once in girlhood, once in womanhood. Wilson in a sense had two lives—the first as a political academic, the second as a professional politician. Like Hawthorne, John Alvis considers men and women between two worlds, the one Christian, the other not. All Christians live in two cities, Godly and human, and all Christians seek to be doubles, actors if you will, standing in for or imitating Christ. the Christ they imitate comes to light in that two-part book, the Bible, with characters in the first or “Old” Testament held to prefigure those in the second. The Bible’s “New” Testament describes a founding presented as a return to old ways. Although they all live in the two cities, not all Christians live in earthly cities in which the ways of God are giving way to some alien but equally systematic body of thought. Modern Christians experience a double duality—living not only in two cities, heavenly and earthly, but in an earthly city divided between what remains of Christendom and not-entirely coherent secularism This duality lends itself especially to drama as conceived in the West, a literary form with duality built into it: dialogue, conflict, parallel. Drama combines thought and action, imitating by bringing out or revealing certain dualities: cant or double-talk, duplicity or double-dealing (two-facedness), and betrayal or double-cross. Doubleness implies authority, the appeal from what is to what should be, the duplication or imitation of the good. (I mean “duplication” and “imitation” in two senses, good and bad, both the good imitation of the good–modeling oneself upon the good–and the bad or counterfeit imitation, a disguise put on to boost oneself into a position of authority.) Whether religious or political, any founding implies a drama or doubling of Old and New, and in “WW” Woodrow Wilson is seen attempting two foundings.

I am delighted to report that John Alvis is a dramatist, and not just another professor with a hobby. Ezra Pound, his politics less sound than Mr. Alvis’s, did nonetheless write both fine poetry and intelligent literary criticism. He said that a poet must double, intensify, his insight and require the same of his readers by condensing his language—the technique of condensare. Poets should say in a line what lesser writers say in a paragraph, a chapter, even a book. As one who has read Wilson’s many pages of published prose, I can say that Alvis enacts this poetic virtue. His characters speak economically, quite unlike economists, to say nothing of lecturing political scientists and filibustering pols, which Wilson by turns was. Alvis packs lifetimes into his two-hour drama.

Who is Alvis’s Wilson? The play’s prologue introduces some Wilsonian themes without bringing the man on stage. Oaths fly—oaths Christianly not scatalogically derived, connoting passions and loyalties, punctuating such other theological-political themes as executive authority, guild and responsibility, and the rule of women. This latter theme also brings nature in, by asking, ‘Who rules by nature?’ Much of organic nature is dual, engendering itself by means of gender.

The first act concerns Wilson’s struggle to found Princeton College anew. The old Princeton served Christianity and America by educating Presbyterians. But God no longer works through the Church, Wilson has decided. God now works through the State. Providence is now History, and so Princeton must shift from educating Presbyterian ministers to educating prime ministers—states’ men, so to speak, men of the state. God once worked through spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, and the Christian college completed that education. The father sent his son to the old alma mater, mostly, in latter-day Princeton’s case, to get him into the right eating club (a fraternity by another name). In Wilson’s estimation, the fraternalism of the eating clubs substituted cliquishness for brotherliness. Wilson demanded that progress, movement toward the future, must replace the ancestral, the ambitions of fathers for their sons. And it shall, because progress is God’s work, and having God on our side apparently obviates the need for compromise with the declining ancestral order. At Princeton, Wilson practiced the high politics of centralization, attempting to destroy the old civil-social institutions and to reconstitute them so that students would not rule themselves in fraternities or imitate their fathers, but be ruled by administrators, faculty, and (God help them) graduate students. Princeton would remain (as it was from its first founding) “in the nation’s service.” But the nation, having changed into a modern nation-state, requires that the new Princeton imitate, become the double of, the nation-state itself as a centralized, tutelary authority.

At Princeton, Alvis’s Wilson confuses human love and friendship, along with the kind of fidelity they beget, with a shared fidelity to ideals he posits, in the name of God. He overlooks his own emotional infidelity to wife and friend in his ambition to be a lover and friend while being also a founder/creator. He conceives fidelity to his ideal of meritocratic equality, in a regime ruled by unelected local authorities, to be true freedom, opposed to the false freedom of “privilege” and “cronyism”—what his enemies think to be the freedom to associate privately in order to form friendships and to learn without any immediate concern with serving the State. That is, Wilson wants others to be faithful to him by being faithful to ‘progress,’ to the cause they share, but, as a sort of lone founder of a miniature modern state, he cannot partake of the love and friendship that would engender such fidelity. So what? Machiavelli might ask Did Moses have friends? Did Caesar? But Wilson also wants the personality of the Christian God. Professor John Hibben, the friend who deserts his cause, is a Judas, he says. The real Jesus had at least eleven other friends, and they made the difference in the success of His founding. Wilson does not have eleven other friends.

The Princeton of Wilson’s time remained a civil association, never quite achieving miniature-state status. Wilson failed to make it state-like, or a servant of any real state, and so turned to national and international politics, again as a founder-leader. In Act II, President Wilson, on his speaking tour during his fight for the League of Nations, regards the United States Senate rather as a Princeton eating club writ large, an entity that resists progress or History in the name of a sort of ancestral piety toward the work of the founding fathers—the Constitution, the invocation of which Wilson dismisses as a cloak for the senators’ will to power. Wilson and his new wife imagine that he draws strength from the people at large, that his tour will revive instead of exhausting him. The tour effectively kills him, because the spirit of the crowd may giveth power (or taketh it away) but it cannot give life; when the cheering stops—it must, as it is human, mortal—the democratic leader can only quit. The seduction of popularity, the confusion of vox populi with vox Dei, doubly confused by the ambition to become the leading voice, the prophet of the popular spirit, as a self-conceived servant of the State and instrument of God, leads the leader not to the Cross but back to the White House and to defeat at the hands of the Senate. Stricken with thrombosis, Wilson does not die but loses voice and executive capacity, his body rebelling against too much of the unlively spirit of crowd-swaying. Wilson’s “opinion leadership” is a sort of baptized Baconianism. But it cannot conquer nature. Nor is it clear that holy water turns the soul of Bacon around, or merely rolls off him like water off a duck. It looks as if holy water makes Bacon an idealist without making him a Christian, a point to which I shall recur.

Wilson’s second-act friend, Colonel Edward House, tries to instruct him in a less confused Machiavellianism. Wilson wants the “New Freedom” for the nation and a new order for the world, both “unselfish” not “self-interested.” He fails to see what Franklin Roosevelt would see: that tangible freedom for the people within a modern state, and in a system of modern states, requires the rule of the executive eagle who can frighten the lesser birds of prey that roost in Senate committees and corporate boardrooms. This eagle will found and direct a bureaucratic state consolidated thanks to the opportunity a world war affords, securing itself by the act of securing the welfare of the sparrows which fear the nearer hawks more than the distant eagle. In Alvis’s epilogue, House steps forward to judge Wilson as Christian-all-too-Christian for such world-historical predation or empire-building. FDR, House says, was not too Christian for the task. Wilson became the John the Baptist in the progressive-American narrative, that reverse gospel which ends with a new Rome, not a new Heaven and a new earth—although some of its imperators are working on that project, too.

Thus, by John Alvis’s reckoning, Woodrow Wilson was a man who never quite knew if he wanted martyrdom or victory. His modernized or neo-liberal Christianity impelled him to confuse the two. Victory was impossible for him, neglectful of lover of neighbor and of personal God, animated instead by such abstractions as idealism and power. And so was martyrdom, for the same reason. Most political men have no difficulty in choosing between martyrdom and victory. Their rallying cry, ‘Victory or death,’ means ‘We risk martyrdom, but we strive for conquest.’ Martyrdom as a choiceworthy way of dying, rather than as a harsh necessity, makes no sense to most political men. For them, ruling necessitates survival first of all. Martyrdom makes no sense to any but the most extraordinary political men, for whom it might make the regimes they founded immortal in human memory. Alvis has seen what Colonel House saw, that Wilson was not wholeheartedly a political man, even in the extraordinary sense of the victorious martyr. Early in the Great War, House called Wilson “too refined, too civilized, too intellectual, too cultivated not to see the incongruity and absurdity of war.” House said that a nation “needs a man of coarser fibre and one less a philosopher than the President, to conduct a brutal, vigorous, and successful war” (House papers, II. 463-465). House underestimated his friend, there. Wilson as we know did go on to conduct a successful war, did not lack leonine teeth. It was at peacemaking that he failed. To say that Wilson was to some degree a philosopher is not to say that he really was a philosopher. In the opinion of Alvis, and perhaps of House, Wilson did not really know himself, as a philosopher does. He lacked the self-examining duality of Socrates, and Socrates’ dialogic virtues. His classes at Princeton were lectures and, unlike Lincoln, his public ‘debates’ never involved another live person on the other side of the stage. His duality lacked the final degree of thoughtfulness, even as it gestured at rationality. The Wilson I find in his arguments and actions is perhaps even more sharply dual than Alvis’s, both more Machiavellian and more profoundly Christian—even more sharply ambivalent.

Wilson made himself hard to know. “Opinion leadership” is not transparent; publicity for Wilson often consisted of hiding in plain sight. In 1896 he published a respectful essay on Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat elected to the White House in Wilson’s adult lifetime except himself. He had to profess respect for Cleveland, and he did. He called Cleveland “the sort of President the makers of the Constitution had vaguely in mind,” a man of “robust sagacity,” a practical man, no mere theorist, a “President in ordinary times but after an extraordinary fashion,” a “man without a party” who “carried civil service reform to its completion at last.” This all seems quite stirring, until one reflects on Wilson’s other writings of the period. There he says that partisanship is indispensable to political life, the foundation of leadership (a party being a sort of peaceful army, always in need of a general). Leaders need vision more than prudence, in order to inspire their fellow citizens to advance. The sort of man the Framers wanted, the president who governs rather than leads, is not the sort of man Woodrow Wilson wanted, or the sort of president he became. So Wilson made it hard for others to know him, a lion in lamb’s clothing, a fox posing as the loyal family dog.

We are looking, then, at a doubly elusive man, concealing himself from others while concealing himself from himself. No wonder that at least two intelligent women, one of them also wise, found him a fascinating, if vexing, companion. The perfect study for a dramatist.

John Alvis’s Wilson conceals his Machiavellianism from himself by believing himself a Christian—a Christian who never quite gets to church on Sunday, or prays, but seems not to notice that he does not. “I think we fight on behalf of the Prince of Peace,” he tells his daughter, old enough to raise an eyebrow. “It has become my cross and my privilege, unworthy vessel of Providence that I am.” This spiritual warfare for peace, undertaken necessarily by military means and by political activity conceived militarily, as leadership rather than statesmanship, crowds out worship—and with it, humility—precisely while its practitioner calls himself an unworthy vessel.

I think Wilson’s dilemma may have had less moral and more doctrinal content than we easily understand. In taking Wilson’s Christianity seriously, I distance myself from most political scientists and side with the general run of historians, who tend to take Wilson’s religiosity more on ‘face value.’ Wilson gave lay sermons to churches and to church-affiliated groups even as president of the United States—no Jeffersonian “wall of separation” for him. Of our major presidents, he is the only one, with the exception of Reagan, likely to answer with an honest ‘yes’ to the old sermon chestnut, ‘If you were accused of Christianity, would you be convicted?’ Wilson tried to think through his simultaneous commitments to Christianity, progressivism, and political life.

A few months before publishing his double-edged tribute to President Cleveland, Wilson spoke to the Philadelphia Society. He gave his talk what is to our ears the odd and rather funny title, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” [1] The original text is lost; we have only a newspaper summary. He discusses many of the same themes in his most celebrated early speech, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” delivered in the fall semester of the same year.

In Philadelphia, Wilson said that “if we wish to get a bad thing out of our soul, we must get a good thing in.” The “good thing” is the “new affection”; only it, and not self-censorship or moderation, has “expulsive power,” the power to purge the soul of evil. “Such a power must be aggressive in its nature,” he said. “There is… great danger in the inoccupancy of the soul, danger that in such a condition small evils may creep in and displace the good.” This closely resembles the Christianity of the Gospels. One turns to the Gospel writers from the ancients struck by the degree to which early Christians regarded the soul as a vulnerable, even weak, entity–almost a passive battleground for good and evil spiritual beings who seek to claim it for themselves. The virtues that seem so sturdy in Cicero seem rather flimsy to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Wilson here acknowledges the Christian stance, although for him the warring armies on the field are forces—virtues and vices—rather than persons–angels and demons. Also, for Wilson the power of a new affection suffices actually to expel sin, not merely to keep it at bay.

Wilson also endorses the Gospel shield in this warfare: agapic love, the love of God and neighbor, “the one thing that can replace… the very evils of the soul.” To “allow” such love “to fill our whole life and soul” is “not only our duty but our privilege.” Again, this is a ‘liberal’ and ‘abstract’ reading of Christianity, one that emphasizes the virtue of agape rather than the agapic infilling of the soul by that person, the Holy Spirit. It is, if you will, a rather spirited spirituality, very much a Scotsman’s creed. The supreme stubbornness of Wilson, his inclination to sublimate his sins or vices by intensifying his efforts toward some other, better goal (a goal itself saturated by his own spiritedness or ambition), is filtered through and refined by this political theology. Notice how close this progressive Presbyterianism is to the austere willfulness, the discipline commended by the founders of the modern scientific project—Descartes, Bacon.

Wilson effectually acknowledges this spirited spirituality in his Princeton speech. In those days, Princetonians took their Presbyterianism seriously, or at least said they did. Wilson said so, too: “Your thorough Presbyterian is not subject to the ordinary laws of life,—is of too stubborn a fibre, too unrelaxing a purpose, to suffer mere inconvenience to bring defeat. Difficulty bred effort, rather….” [2]Here is the Wilson who would not compromise, either with his enemies at the college or, later, in Washington. Spirit natural and Christian amalgamate here. Only God could separate and weigh these elements in Wilson.

Wilson goes on to name three founders, all of whom he would rival. The first is John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, “a man,” Wilson says, “so compounded of statesman and scholar, Calvinist, Scotsman, and orator that it must be a sore puzzle where to place or rank him,—whether among the great divines, the great teachers, or great statesmen.” The Princeton of Wilson’s Witherspoon, Presbyterian and political, a pivot of the Revolutionary War and a school for statesmen, has continued into the 1890s. Wilson’s envisioned new founding at Princeton along lines of English, Christian, and modern ideas, dramatized by Alvis, makes him praise Witherspoon even as he intends to replace him.

“A commencement day came,” Wilson reminds his audience, “which saw both Washington and Witherspoon on the platform together—the two men, it was said, who could not be matched for striking presence in all the country.” [3] Washington is Wilson’s second founder in this speech. As Alvis and all of us recall, in his own utterly in-Washingtonian way, Wilson too would see, when circumstances allowed him the chance, to be first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. But he so sought in part by ending Washington’s foreign policy of American seclusion from permanent political ties with Europe.

The last founder Wilson names is James Madison, whom he styles “the philosophical statesman.” Madison numbered among the “nine Princeton men [who] sat in the Constitutional Convention of 1787,” six of them former students of Witherspoon. “Princeton men,” Wilson tells his Princeton men, “fathered both the Virginia Plan which was adopted, and the New Jersey Plan which was rejected,” as well as “the compromises without which no plan could have won acceptance.” By Wilson’s reckoning, Princeton men just had the market cornered when it came to constitution-building. And, Wilson suggests, they’re not done, yet. True, “the revolutionary days are gone,” and generations have since entered “a list of the silent men who carry the honorable burdens of business and of social obligation.” Nevertheless: These same silent men “suggest a fertile soil full of the old seed and ready, should the air of the time move shrewdly upon it as in the old days, to spring once more into the old harvest.” [4] A new American founding might occur, and if you wonder how a new founding might come from old dormant seed, shrewd Wilson assures you that “the law of conservation is really the law of progress.” [5]

Princeton Presbyterianism lends itself both to unrevolutionary and revolutionary politics. “Religion, conceive it but liberally enough, is the true salt wherewith to keep both duty and learning sweet against the taint of time and change; and it is a noble thing to have conceived it thus liberally, as Princeton’s founders did…. The men who founded Princeton were pastors, not ecclesiastics. Their ideal was the service of congregations and communities, not the service of a church. Duty with them was a practical thing, concerned with righteousness in this world, as well as with salvation in the next. There is nothing that gives such pith to public service as religion. A God of truth is no mean prompter of the enlightened service of mankind; and formed, as if in his eye, has always a fibre and sanction such as you shall not easily obtain for the ordinary man from the mild promptings of philosophy.” [6] Washington had said as much is his Farewell Address, but without Wilson’s critique of traditional liberal education or the American Constitution. Wilson has invoked what to his audience was the familiar model of the Presbyterian ‘secular saint,’ now envisioned as a carrier into society not only of the Holy Spirit but the Spirit of the Age valorized by Hegel.

Turning to Wilson’s critique of traditional liberal education, consider with President Wilson the mild promptings of philosophy. Wilson makes one of the most eloquent defenses of liberal education, classically conceived, that any ‘modern’ has written. But in the end the old liberal education, and the old liberalism of the Founders, are like Grover Cleveland: admirable but superannuated. “Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep,” he says. “There is no sanity comparable with that which is schooled in the thoughts that will keep.” Now here’s the gambit: thoughts that have kept, literature that has survived, hold “a sort of leadership in the aristocracy of natural selection.” [7] Wilson uses reverence for old things to ‘bring in’ the themes of leadership and progress.

The classics give us “the thinking which depends upon no time but only upon human nature”–no apparent progressivism, there. Yet Wilson also gives this claim one of his characteristic twists. First, those who only read the classics may neglect their “practical duties in the present,” spurning politics for “the peculiarly pleasant and beguiling comradeship” of “authors.” [8] Undergraduate education cannot and should not produce scholars but rather men of affairs who are friends of scholars and of authors, those potential revolutionaries of a new America.

Second, Wilson deploys literary education against a scientific education that holds out a false progressivism, rival to his own. “Science has bred in us a spirit of experiment and a contempt for the past.” It is materialist. “It has,” he says, “given us agnosticism in the realm of philosophy” and “scientific anarchism in the field of politics” by making “the legislator confident that he can create and the philosopher sure that God cannot.” Science’s conquest of nature “has not freed us from ourselves,” has not “purged us of passion or disposed us to virtue”; instead it “may be suspected of having enhanced our passions by making wealth so quick to come, and so fickle to stay.” Progressivism based on materialism does not work. It does not engage the whole human soul. Only the purgative or “expulsive” and progressive Christianity of Presbyterian Princeton can lead Americans to the new republic of which Woodrow Wilson will serve as the Witherspoonian spiritual-political educator, the Washingtonian executive, and the Madisonian legislator, all in one. If that Wilson bears an unsettling resemblance to the Trinitarian God of the Gospels, and also to Jefferson’s definition of the tyrant, then the question we must ask, with John Alvis, is: How do you know when the chosen vessel of that god, guiding the course of human events, leading his militant party and sect forward, charges into an unholy megalomania? The answer must be that God’s true vessel will be chosen for his humility–as Abraham was. Alvis thinks that Wilson misconceived of himself as that vessel. I am inclined to agree, adding only that Wilson did see these dangers, and tried to avoid them by conceiving a neo-liberal, democratic-progressive, Protestant answer to the theological-political problem of progress and return.

Introduction
In 1915, a few months into the great European war, President Woodrow Wilson and former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered speeches defining and commending ‘Americanism.’ The term itself dates back to Wilson’s distinguished predecessor at Princeton College, John Witherspoon, who used it to refer to the dialect of the new independent nation. By the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson was already brandishing it in the ideational sense, associating it with the rule of reason. But by 1915 any such term might easily carry associations with nineteenth-century theories on nationality and race. Wilson and Roosevelt both understood this. They also understood that the war was in some sense the result of the heightened sense of nationality among rival Europeans, and that this national sense underlay the contest between political regimes—commercial republicanism and military monarchism—that were themselves held to be expressions of national characters.

Wilson and Roosevelt proposed to unify ethnically and racially diverse Americans in order to enable the United States to assume an elevated station among the nations of the earth. In so doing, they spoke to, and about, European-Americans, scarcely mentioning African-Americans. I shall examine the content of the two speeches in three ways: the very different conceptions of American greatness set forth by the two statesmen in the body of their work; their divergent policies toward African Americans; their largely convergent policies toward European Americans.

I. Wilson’s Americanism
In his speech accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1912, Woodrow Wilson deployed a rhetoric of inclusion. “You see that these multitudes of men, mixed of every kind and quality, constitute somehow an organic and noble whole, a single people, and that they have interests which no man can privately determine without their knowledge and counsel. That is the meaning of representative government itself.” In a contemporary letter he assured an Italian-American leader that “The Democratic party would not, without forgetting its very origin, advocate an illiberal policy in the matter of immigration. The party may almost be said to have originated in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Laws….” Regulation of immigration, yes: Wilson advocated a policy similar to that advanced by Henry Cabot Lodge, who proposed to exclude the diseased, the defective, and those “unable to support themselves.” But illiberality, no. [1] However, as his opponents were quick to trumpet, in his voluminous scholarly writings Wilson had not treated immigrant peoples with uniform courtesy. “The huge stream of immigrants” prior to the Civil War had “deepened that habit of charge, of experiment, of radical policies and bold proposals, which was bringing the people into a frame of mind to welcome even civil war for the sake of a reform.” As recently as his 1902 History of the American People Wilson had exhibited a distinct asperity toward recent immigrants not born of the “sturdy stocks of the north of Europe.” [2] By 1915, ‘hyphenated’ Americans still posed difficulties for any would-be Americanizer, not least in the conduct of foreign policy. German-Americans and German-Jewish Americans tended to favor the Kaiser; so did many Irish-Americans, on the grounds that the enemy of our enemy, the English, is our friend Jews from central and eastern Europe were equally pro-German, detesting the anti-Semitic governments they had fled, which were allied with England and France. The Swedish-Americans of the upper Midwest also detested the Russians and sided with the Germans. Although not classed as hyphenates, Americans of English ancestry of course inclined toward the republics. Propaganda on both sides filled the newspapers. [3]

Wilson distinguished nationality from race, theoretically. In a Princeton letter he had explained that English and American writers mean by ‘nation’ what the Germans mean by ‘volk’: “community of organization, of life, and of tradition. By ‘race’ English and American writers mean what Germans mean by ‘nation’: natio or birth, “community of origin and blood.” Notwithstanding this scholarly distinction, in contemporary politics the two ideas are imbricated: “Race tradition… is for the most part contained in and transmitted by political associations. It is largely dominated by habits of allegiance.” Blood and tradition are “compounded” in modern “consciousness.” [4] Thus in his May 1915 speech on ‘Americanism’ before newly naturalized citizens in Philadelphia, Wilson described America as a nation “founded for the benefit of humanity”—founded for “a great ideal”—but solidly based upon populations drawn from all other nations. But this solidity is only potential unless the immigrants who comprise America perform an act of “will” to adhere to the ideal of service to their new nation. This “consciousness different from the consciousness of every other nation in the world” can bring peace to the world. Breaking with the Hegelian tradition that would overcome the bourgeois spirit with the spirit of the warrior, Wilson urged self-transcendence—the immigrants’ transcendence of their old nations—via the ideal of peace: “[P]eace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not.” Peace-loving not war-loving is the true thumotic passion: “There is such a thing as a man too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” [5] In Wilsonian rhetorical heights, the willed ideal trumps blood, even as in Wilsonian political science things are much murkier.

With respect to the warring nations of Europe, Wilson linked the patriotic pride of his motto, “American First,” with his policy of neutrality. Neutrality was “good will”—the same will that naturalized Americans were to share, namely, the will to peace intra-nationally and internationally. America is “the mediating nation of the world”: “We mediate their blood, we mediate their traditions, we mediate their sentiments, their tastes, their passions; we are ourselves compounded of those things.” America no longer sees territory, as it had as recently as Roosevelt’s administration. “We do not want anything that does not belong to us.” Her industrial resources, enhanced by the war, her financial resources strengthened, her consciousness of her nationhood—her “new union”—heightened, America can bring “new leadership” to war-weary Europe. “A nation made up out of the world ought to understand the world. No nation, I venture to say, constituted out of a single racial stock could undertake the task which the United States has undertaken, namely to stand, not for national aggression, not for hostile rivalry, not for the things that stir the antagonistic passions of mankind, but for the rights of mankind of every sort, everywhere.” [6] Woodrow Wilson, the leader of the leading nation, the leader whose mind synthesizes the minds of the citizens of the most grandly comprehensive nation on earth, can serve as a secular prophet of the living, agapic God, the Prince of Peace. [7]

By May 1915, however, Realpolitik was drawing an ever more confining circle around Wilson’s policy of neutrality. As late as January, Wilson and Democratic Party leaders in Congress had agreed to reduce military expenditures in the coming year. Only seven U-boats could patrol the northern Atlantic at any one time; occasional attacks on American merchant shipping did not anger Americans sufficiently to be persuaded by the speeches of Roosevelt, Lodge, and others who advocated military readiness. But passenger ships were another matter. Three days before the ‘Americanism’ speech, the Germans sank the Lusitania, killing 1,198 passengers, including 124 Americans. ‘Preparedness’ spokesmen had their issue. Wilson’s catchy phrase, “Too proud to fight,” could now be described by Roosevelt as “the nadir of cowardly infamy.” Wilson himself rued the day: “That was just one of the foolish things a man does. I have a bad habit of thinking out loud.” By July, Wilson had ordered recommendations for increased military readiness from the relevant cabinet secretaries. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the kindly old Populist-Party peace-horse, resigned in sorrow. In November Wilson presented a $1.6 billion naval construction program to the country. [8]

Wilson’s turn toward military readiness provoked a crisis in the Progressive movement, which, except for its northeastern fraction led by Roosevelt, remained strongly pacifist, convinced that war would bring the reversal of Progressive domestic reforms. Wilson temporized throughout the election year of 1916, and seemed to be negotiating improved relations with Germany. While publicly defending the preparedness drive, he could nonetheless campaign on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War.” Progressives held firm in the November elections. Only after the Germans renewed U-boat campaign of 1917 did Wilson switch his slogan to “War to end war”—a formula that carried many of the Progressives, including organized labor (with the exception of the small, radical IWW) with him. [9] Wilson could now fight the war on essentially the same basis on which he had maintained neutrality. American would still enter at the decisive moment—now with force—and lead the world to a peaceful settlement. Wilson’s ‘Americanism’ argument held firm; if anything, war afforded hyphenates—especially those from the nations forming the Central Powers—the opportunity to prove their Americanness in deeds and not only in the profession of ideals. War became the ultimate melting pot.

Or it did—for European-Americans. Wilson’s ‘Americanism’ speech did not mention African-Americans. The glib explanation is that the speech was delivered to newly naturalized citizens, and none of them were from Africa. African-Americans did not need to be Americanized. They needed civil rights. Still, in a larger sense, Wilson’s silence expressed his preference for treating American blacks as invisible men.

Wilson’s admiring biographer Arthur S. Link duly notes his hero’s mild expressions of sympathy toward blacks, some dating back to the 1880s. [10] And indeed Wilson was no race-baiter of the James K. Vardaman stripe. But neither did he much advance the cause of civil rights. As a historian, he had presented the Confederate cause with considerable sympathy, describing it as an attempt to defend self-government rather than as an attempt to perpetuate slavery. He described slavery primarily as an economic drag on the South, even going so far as to suggest that the “stubborn” defense of the Southern “way of life” might have been a sort of noble sacrifice of the region’s “material interests”—a refusal of the fleshpots of Yankee industrialism. [11]  During Reconstruction, Wilson complained, “unscrupulous adventurers” from the North manipulated “inexperienced blacks” who ruled Southern whites so long as Northern armies enforced “the temporary disintegration of southern society.” The rise of the Ku Klux Klan mean that “one lawless force seemed in contest with the other.” Post-1876, “the determination of the Saxon race of the South that the negro race shall never again rule over them is… not unnatural, and it is necessarily unalterable.” It is not the dark skin of the Negro that offends the Southerner, Wilson maintained, but his dark, unenlightened mind. Compulsory education of Southern blacks can remedy this in time. [12]  One must conclude from Wilson’s argument that this is likely to be a very long time.

In Wilson’s account, Reconstruction reconstructed not the South but forged, for the first time, the American nation. “The law of the Constitution reigned until war came,” a civil war prosecuted by the North in violation of the confederal constitution of the American Founders. “[T]he ultimate foundation of the structure was laid bare: physical force, sustained by the stern loves and rooted predilections of masses of men, the strong ingrained prejudices which are the fibre of every system of government”—surely not the ‘ideals’ of natural-rights equality propounded by Jefferson and Lincoln. The war over and Reconstruction exhausted—the deconstruction of constitutionalist illusions completed—”the real revolution was not so much in the form as in the spirit of affairs.” Now, “statesmen knew that it was to be their task to release the energies of the country for the great day of trade and of manufacture which was to change the face of the world; to ease the processes of labor, govern capital in the interest of those who were its indispensable servants in pushing the great industries of the country to their final value and perfection, and make law the instrument, not of justice merely, but also of social progress.” “A citizenship of the United States was created,” founded not on the weak reed of natural-rights constitutionalism but on the strong historical tide of economic progress. “It is evident that empire is an affair of strong government, and not of the nice and somewhat artificial poise or of the delicate compromises of structure and authority characteristic of a mere federal partnership.” The “national spirit” arose from the detritus of the Founders’ constitutionalism. [13] Although Wilson made favorable remarks about Lincoln, he is in a sense Lincoln’s opposite, replacing the natural-right foundation of American constitutionalism with historicist teleology. The slaughterbench of history served as prelude for the most glorious idealism, an idealism solidly grounded in economic life. So it has been for America. So it shall be for the world of the Great War and after.

In such a time, is it any wonder that African-Americans were regarded by Wilson as no more than annoying details? In his mind, blacks were still in tutelage during a period when the fate of all humanity was being settled. At best, they were to be placated. During the 1912 election campaign, Wilson met with representatives of the National Independent Political League of Washington—actually a Democratic Party organization—and told them, “You may feel assured of my entire comprehension of the ambitions of the negro race and my willingness and desire to deal with that race fairly and justly.” Such ambiguous assurances swayed W. E. B. DuBois and others to back Wilson—Roosevelt had meanwhile capitulated to Southern interests at the Progressive Party convention. Democrats spent some $50,000 in New York to win the votes of African-Americans there, arguing that blacks had no profited from their loyalty to the Republican Party. Arthur S. Link contends that in the end it is likely that most African-Americans voted for Taft, not Wilson or Roosevelt, given the faithful support of black Americans for the party of Lincoln up until that time. [14]

Whatever his intentions, once in office Wilson had to face the political facts. Southern Progressives were anything but progressive on race issues—or rather they were, if one defines Progressivism in terms of ‘race theory,’ as many did. Wilson allowed several cabinet officers to impose segregation within their departments for the first time since the Civil War. Black postmasters were swept from office throughout the South. In a showdown meeting with Oswald Garrison Villard of the NAACP, Wilson could only claim, lamely, that segregation in federal employment was “in the interest of the colored people, as exempting them from friction and criticism in the departments.” To the hapless William Monroe Trotter of the National Independent Political League, Wilson intoned, “We are all practical men.” [I]t takes the world generations to outlive all its prejudices”—which is true enough, but not quite on point. “It is not a question of intrinsic equality, because we all have human souls. We are absolutely equal in that respect. It is just at the present a question of equality—whether the Negro can do the same things with equal efficiency. Now, I think they are proving that they can. After they have proved it, a lot of things are going to solve themselves.” One area in which that demonstration might have been furthered with Wilson’s help was in the implementation of the Smith-Lever Act, which provided for farmers’ instruction in soil conservation, crop diversification, and other farming practices. The program never quite got to black farmers, as that comparative radical, Booker T. Washington, rightly observed. [15]

In his second inaugural address, weeks before coming before Congress to request a declaration of war, Wilson again invoked national unity. “We are being forged into a new unity amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world. In their ardent heat we shall, in God’s providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and division, purified of the errant humours of party and of private interest, and shall stand forth in the days to come with a new dignity of national pride and spirit.” After America’s entry into the war, and despite black participation in the war effort, racial antagonism continued with little opposition from the Wilson Administration. Pleas for intervention to protect blacks in a July 1917 St. Louis race riot went unheeded. Lynchings rose from thirty-eight to fifty-eight in 1918, at which point the Administration, alarmed that such unrest might disrupt the war effort, issued a proclamation condemning racial violence. Seventy blacks were lynched in 1919. At the Versailles Peace Conference in April 1919, Wilson opposed a move to require racial equality in each nation that would become a member of the League of Nations. “My own interest, let me say, is to quiet discussion that raises national differences and racial prejudices. I would wish them, particularly at this juncture of the history of the relations with one another, to be forced as much as possible into the background.” [16] Increased local violence against blacks should not be laid at the doorstep of the Wilson Administration, except perhaps in the vague sense that the Administration was perceived as ‘Southern’ in its orientation, and so may have increased the insouciance of race-baiters. But Wilson did nothing effectively to discourage such incidents.

Roosevelt’s Americanism
Roosevelt’s ‘Americanism’ speech, delivered five months after Wilson’s echoed themes he had sounded consistently throughout his career. Roosevelt had no need to put a thumotic face on pacifism because he had no use for pacifism in the first place. Not peace but strife forms nations. “The law of worthy national life, like the law of worthy individual life, is, after all, fundamentally, the law of strife. It may be strife military, it may be strife civic; but certain it is that only through strife, through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and by resolute courage, we move on to better things.” [17]  In 1890 he read Albert Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power in History, 1660-1763, which became a seminal book in ruling circles in America, Britain, Germany and Japan. Mahan was one of the first military strategists to grasp what we now call ‘geopolitics’: the idea of the world as one system, its parts all connected directly or indirectly, and therefore open to the projection of military, political, and economic power worldwide by nations with adequate technology and manpower. American commercial republicanism could for the first time be something other than a mere exemplar to other nations; it could enforce the Monroe Doctrine against them, challenge British naval supremacy on the high seas, open new markets in Asia. [18]

From that time forward, Roosevelt thought geopolitically. The German invasion of Belgium was a moral outrage, but Roosevelt understood that “the men who shape German policy take the ground that in matters of vital national moment there are no such things as abstract right and wrong, and that when a great nation is struggling for its existence it can no more consider the rights of neutral powers than it can consider the rights of its own citizens as these rights are construed in times of peace, and that everything must bend before the supreme law of national self-preservation. Whatever we may think of the morality of this plea, it is certain that almost all great nations have in time past again and again acted in accordance with it.” To this neo-Darwinian Realpolitik Roosevelt added the geopolitical point that Belgian neutrality had held the balance of power in western Europe. By invading Belgium, the Germans had outflanked the French and aimed a sword at Britain’s heart. German domination of Europe would in turn threaten the United States. Not only is it “a wicked thing to be neutral between right and wrong” (Roosevelt wrote, echoing Lincoln and scoring Wilson), it is also a stupid thing. Geopolitics permits no neutrals. And in moral terms, courage scorns the “base materialism” of “the coward who excuses his cowardice, who tries to cloak it behind lofty words, who perseveres in it, and does not appreciate his own infamy.” “The worst infamies of modern times—such affairs as the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, for instance—have been perpetrated in a time of profound international peace, when there has been a concert of big Powers to prevent the breaking of this peace, although only by breaking it could the outrages be stopped. Be it remembered that the peoples who suffered by these hideous massacres, who saw their women violated and their children tortured, were actually enjoying all the benefits of ‘disarmament.’ otherwise they would not have been massacred….” [19] The moral distinction between a national massacre and a national conquest—the one evil, the other sometimes good, a sign of ennobling strife—evidently may be seen in the lack of resistance in the first case, courageous self-defense in the other.

American needs ‘Americanism’ because “the patriotism of the belfry”—localism, sectionalism, “the spirit of provincial patriotism”—causes not only strife but disintegration, as seen in ancient Greece, medieval Italy, and modern South America. Smallness of territory comports with smallness of soul. American nationalism despises Know-nothingism, socialist class conflict, bourgeois money-grubbing, and ethnic divisiveness. “There is no room for the hyphen in our citizenship.” The children of immigrants “must forget their Old World national antipathies and become purely Americanized…. This is not to blind us at all to our own shortcomings; we ought steadily to try to correct them; but we have absolutely no ground to work on if we don’t have a firm and ardent Americanism at the bottom of everything.” Although he did not say so publicly, for Roosevelt Americanism was as much for old American stocks as for new. That is, whereas the new immigrants needed assimilation, the old immigrants needed toughening. “We [old-stock Americans] are barbarians of a certain kind, and what is most unpleasant we are barbarians with a certain middle-class, Philistine quality of ugliness and pettiness, raw conceit, and raw sensitiveness. Where we get highly civilized, as in the northeast, we seem to become civilized in an unoriginal and ineffective way, and tend to die out”—commit what Roosevelt elsewhere and famously called “race suicide.” [20]

By ‘Americanism’ Roosevelt meant primarily the natural and Constitutional rights of the American founding and their reciprocal obligations, along with patriotism and—here is the Progressivist element—”the democratization of industry so as to give at least a measurable equality of opportunity for all.” “Everything is in-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy, or government by a mob”—that is, anything that tends toward unjust divisiveness. By ‘preparedness’ Roosevelt meant preparedness “of the soul no less than of the body”: keeping Americanist principles of natural and constitutional right “steadily before us” while “train[ing] ourselves in practical fashion so that we may realize these ideals.” Preparedness for war increases the chances of obtaining and maintaining a just peace, as Americans learned (on the negative side) in the War of 1812, when Congress declared war but voted against increasing the number of Navy battleships. In his fifth annual message to Congress, Roosevelt had said what he was saying ten years later to the Knights of Columbus: “Our aim is righteousness. Peace is normally the handmaiden of righteousness; but when peace and righteousness conflict then a great and upright people can never hesitate to follow the path which leads toward righteousness, even though that path also leads to war.” The price of “peace at any price” is human and national rights. [21]  Preparedness need to require “Prussian militarism.” The Swiss system of military training will do; national service, for women and men, would form part of high school education and would continue for six months every year for youths aged sixteen to twenty-one. Such service would augment preparedness and national unity at the same time, bringing together youth of all classes and nationalities; it shall be “a potent method for Americanizing the immigrant” and will have “an immense democratizing effect” because rich and poor will serve together. [22]

Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt did mention African-Americans in his 1915 ‘Americanism’ speech. But he made only passing mention, citing slave emancipation during the Civil War. It was as if the race problem had been solved, and its solution served as a model for solving the immigrant problem. Of course, Roosevelt knew very well that the race problem hadn’t been solved. He wrote much more extensively on race than Wilson did, and also had more experience in race relations, traveling to Asia, Africa, and South America as well as Europe. His experience as a self-trained and respected amateur field biologist also put him in a position to think about racial pseudoscience.

Roosevelt endorsed the fashionable Anglo-Saxonism of his time; with Gustave le Bon, he regarded the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ as uniquely well-fitted to rule itself and others. [23]  According to his friend Owen Wister (a fine novelist but rather hidebound white supremacist from Charleston, South Carolina), Roosevelt doubted Wilson’s claim that self-government eventually would be earned by all races: “We are all unquestionably members of the human race, just as much at the North Pole as at the Equator. And trees are all trees, wherever they grown. But I am prepared to assert that you can give an apple-tree all the time you want and it wants, and it will not produce oranges.” [25]  If this reminiscence accurately reflects Roosevelt’s views, this would reflect a biological racism—essentially polygenicist. But in his actual correspondence with Wister Roosevelt undermined such biologism. “I entirely agree with you that as a race and in the mass [the Negroes] are altogether inferior to the whites…. But admitting all that can truthfully be said against the Negro, it also remains true that a great deal that is untrue is said against him; and that much more is untruthfully said of the white man who lives beside and upon him. Your views of the Negro are those expressed by all of your type of Charlestonians. You must forgive my saying that they are only expressed in their entirety to those who don’t know the facts.” In the same letter, he undercut “the latest scientific theory” of cranial measurement in two ways: by saying that it will “doubtless… be superseded by others” and by pointing out that whites and blacks have skulls much more like each other than either is like the skull of “the Mongolian.” To his English friend Cecil Arthur Spring Rice he remarked that language and race are unrelated. Moreover, the modern Turks are “just as much white people” as any other European nation, but are nonetheless “a curse to Europe” because of their “absolutely alien” creed, culture, historic associations, “and inherited governmental and social tendencies.” “The Turks are ethnically closer to us than the Japanese, but they are impossible members of our international society, while I think the Japs may be desirable additions.” [25]  Roosevelt combined natural-rights morality with Neo-Darwinism regarding international relations and probably, at most, a vague neo-Lamarckianism regarding (biological) race. But ‘nation’ and ‘race’ are often used interchangeably by him, so his Neo-Darwinism, his survival-of-the-fittest ideology, sometimes seems to bleed over into his writings on race relations.

A clearer understanding of Roosevelt’s view of race may be seen when he gets down to cases and discusses specific racial groups. Of these, none interested him more than the Amerindians, whom he had lived among as a young man in the American West in the 1880s.

Roosevelt tells a multicultural story about a Chinook named Ammal, who listened to a white hunter tell of a Chinese laborer who fleeced some Indians at cards. One of them, an Upper Kootenai, killed the card sharp but was never punished, “as it did not seem any one’s business to avenge a mere Chinaman.” “Ammal was immensely interested in the tale, and kept recurring to it again and again, taking two little sticks and making the hunter act out the whole story. The Kootenais were then only just beginning to consider the Chinese as human. They knew they must not kill white people, and they had their own code of morality among themselves; but when the Chinese first appeared they evidently thought that there could not be any special objection to killing them, if any reason arose for doing so. I think the hunter himself sympathized somewhat with this view.” [26]  Whites and Amerindians of a certain type both agree on a sort of rough justice because rough justice exists across the lines of ‘race,’ however defined; Roosevelt conceives of civilizational level more than race as the key determinant of conceptions of justice. ‘Civilization’ is not identical with Anglo-Saxonism, although Anglo-Saxonism is a very good thing. As seen above, the Japanese are civilized but not Anglo-Saxon. The ‘winning of the West’ by Americans has been a victory for civilization won not by the civilized but by civilization’s barbaric advance guard.

“Many of the frontiersmen are brutal, reckless, and overbearing; most of the Indians are treacherous, revengeful, and fiendishly cruel. Crime and bloodshed are the only possible results when such men are brought into contact. Writers usually pay heed only to one side of the story; they recite the crimes committed by one party, whether whites or Indians, and omit all reference to the equally numerous sins of the other.” This error oddly mimics the unsubtle distinctions made on the frontier, where Indians and whites each tend “to hold the race, and not the individual, responsible for the deeds of the latter.” In the 1770s, in the Alleghenies (for example) “a race of peaceful, unwarlike farmers would have been helpless before such foes as the red Indians, and no auxiliary military force could have protected them or enabled them to move westward.” The civilized colonists needed “a living barrier of bold and self-reliant American borderers” for protection. In fact, a pacifist community of Dunkards and an equally peaceful community of Moravian Indians (converted to Christianity by the Quakers) both met the same fate: “Hateful to both sets of combatants, [and] persecuted by both,” each “finally fell a victim to the ferocity of the race to which it did not belong.” A civilization separated from its barbaric roots will weaken and be killed. Roosevelt’s ‘race’ stories reinforce his ‘preparedness’ and ‘Americanism’ urgings, and are represented as illustrative of universal truths that cross racial lines. [27]

The savagery of the Amerindians results not from some innate ferocity but from their socioeconomic order. “The Indians were formidable in warfare… because they were so few in numbers. Had they been more numerous they would perforce have been tillers of the soil, and it would have been far easier for the whites to get at them.” They could fight the most effective sort of guerrilla warfare, as “there was little chance to deliver a telling blow at enemies who had hardly anything of value to destroy.” By contrast, the Navajo of the late nineteenth century were an agricultural people, “stand[ing] far above mere savagery”; “everything possible should be done to help them help themselves.” Compared with the neighboring Indian tribes, they had already made a long stride in cultural advancement when the Spaniards arrived; but “they were shrinking back before the advance of the more savage tribes.” Roosevelt concludes, “As always when I have seen Indians in their homes, in mass, I was struck by the wide cultural and intellectual difference among the different tribes, as well as among the different individuals of each tribe, and both by the great possibilities for their improvement and by the need of showing common sense even more than good intentions if this improvement is to be achieved. Some Indians can hardly be moved forward at all. Some can be moved forward both fast and far.” Such differences could be seen among the three main groups of Amerindians in the Appalachian Confederacies of the 1770s: the Iroquois were the most warlike; the ‘Appalachians’ of the southern Alleghenies (Creeks and Cherokees) were non-nomadic, “barbarous, rather than in the merely savage state”; the Algonquins were in-between. [28]

Roosevelt accordingly wasted little sympathy or antipathy on the conquered Amerindians or the conquering frontiersmen who, by the time he wrote, were also vanishing. “[T]he world would probably have gone forward very little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement of submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years. Every such submersion or displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or conquest by a superior race, means the infliction or suffering of hideous woe and misery. It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs of a new and vigorous people.” Roosevelt looks at “savage and barbarous peoples” rather as Marx (an earlier Victorian) looks at the bourgeoisie, albeit with perhaps a shade less moral dudgeon. “The Indians should be treated in just the same way that we treat white settlers. Give each his little claim; if, as would generally happen, he declined this, why let him share the fate of thousands of white hunters and trappers who have lived on the game that the settlement of the country has exterminated, and let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers. The doctrine seems merciless, and so it is; but it is just and rational for all that. It does not do to be merciful to a few at the cost of justice to the many.” [29]  Human groups adapt to new circumstances or die.

Roosevelt’s accounts of blacks in Africa and Mississippi are entirely consistent with these views. In Africa, his hunting companions “showed a courage and loyalty and devotion to duty which would have put to shame very many civilized men”; at the same time, “most of them were like children, with a grasshopper inability for continuity of thought and realization of the future.” These characteristics are cultural, not innate. Here as among the Amerindians, tribes range from “pure savages” to “races of a higher type” at “the upper stages of barbarism.” In Uganda, “the chief task of the officials of the intrusive and masterful race must be to bring forward the natives, to train them, and above all to help them train themselves, so that they may advance in industry, in learning, in morality, in capacity for self-government—for it is idle talk of ‘giving’ a people self-government.” Similarly, on a hunting trip to Mississippi, Roosevelt reports: “These negroes of the Black Belt have never had the opportunity to develop beyond a low cultural stage. Most of them with us were kindly, hard-working men, expert in their profession.” For them he recommended a Booker T. Washington-like program of education, self-help, and law-abidingness. To Roosevelt’s neo-Darwinian eye, such (to us) modest efforts are the realistic alternative to racial extermination. The “mercifulness” of the dominant (in this case white) race “would disappear instantly if any of the inferior races began to encroach” upon them in any violent way. Violence had already occurred in local areas of the South, in response to “insurrectionary movement[s]” by blacks, and in the frontier West. “Of course the central or home population… would always clamor” against such warfare, “but if [an insurrection] became sufficiently strong to jeopardize white control I think this clamor would be hushed, and it would certainly be disregarded.” [30]

Roosevelt’s conception of Americanism, based as it was on natural right as conceived by the American Founders, excluded the worst forms of racial prejudice. For example, as a Northerner and a Republican, Roosevelt felt no need to write an apology for slavery, “a grossly anachronistic and un-American form of evil.” In a children’s history book he co-authored with Henry Cabot Lodge, he celebrated Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, commander of an African-American regiment during the Civil War, who defied “the prejudice against the blacks” that “was still strong even in the North.” The Confederate general’s order “to bury [Shaw] with his ‘niggers,’ which ran through the North and remained fixed in our history, showed, in a flash of light, the hideous barbarism of a system which made such things and such feelings possible.” Roosevelt himself commanded black troops in Cuba in 1898, “who did as well as any soldiers could possibly do.” [31]

At the beginning of his first term as president, Roosevelt approached white-black relations with blunt modesty: “I have not been able to think out any solution of the terrible problem offered by the presence of the negro on this continent, but of one thing I am sure, and that is that inasmuch as he is here and can neither be killed nor driven away—treated like many of the Indians—”the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have…. [I]f I am , then all my thoughts and beliefs are wrong, and my whole way of looking at life is wrong…. I do not intend to offend the prejudices of anyone else, but neither do I intend to allow their prejudices to make me false to my principles.” [32]. These last brave words played out to some degree in practice. Roosevelt’s time in the White House saw several collisions with the race issue: his October 1901 dinner with Booker T. Washington, which agitated Southern newspaper editors for months thereafter; his closing of the Indianola, Mississippi post office after local whites forced the resignation of Mrs. Minnie M. Cox, the black postmaster; the appointment of Dr. William D. Crum to the position of collector of the Port of Charleston in 1902. In each of these incidents Roosevelt acquitted himself honorably, at one point lecturing the Charleston mayor that “the question raised by you [concerning the Crum appointment] is simply whether it is to be declared that under no circumstances shall any man of color, no matter how upright and honest, no matter how good a citizen, no matter how fair in his dealings with all his fellows, be permitted to hold any office under our government. I certainly cannot assume such an attitude, and you must permit me to say that in my view it is an attitude no man should assume, whether he looks at it from the standpoint of the true interest of the white men of the south or of the colored men of the south—not to speak of any other section of the Union.” Roosevelt vigorously and lengthily denounced lynching in a letter to Governor Winfield Taylor Durbin of Indiana on the grounds that lawlessness must not be tolerated; his rough treatment of the black soldiers of the 25th U. S. Infantry after violence committed in Brownsville, Texas in 1906 was the opposite side of the same coin, in his view. [34]

Roosevelt could not understand the racial animosity of Southern whites as expressed in their overheated rhetoric in response to the Washington, Cox, and Crum incidents. “[A]s regards the race problem in the South I have been greatly puzzled,” he wrote to the venerable liberal Carl Shurz, who had complained about Southerners’ effectual nullification of the Civil War amendments to the Constitution. “I do not mean that I was puzzled as to whether what I did was right”—and indeed he rarely was—”for I have never been clearer about anything. But I have been greatly puzzled to account for the yell of bitter anger caused by my action, and I have found it difficult to know how far I ought to go at certain points, and exactly what I ought to say.” In his last years as president he continued to insist in public speeches that whites and blacks in American would rise or fall together, and that justice should be done to individuals regardless of race. [34]

In the 1912 presidential election campaign, however, Roosevelt sacrificed much of the good will he had built up on racial issues. Although many Southern blacks initially joined the new Progressive Party, Roosevelt’s chief Southern adviser, John M. Parker of Louisiana, persuaded him that the party could never get anywhere in the region by appealing to black voters. Roosevelt attempted to please white Southern Progressives by excluding Southern blacks from the Progressive Party convention. At the same time, Roosevelt welcomed Northern blacks to the convention. During the subsequent campaign, he lauded the Progressives’ “good faith” and “entire frankness and sincerity” toward African-Americans. Predictably, his machinations gained him nothing among whites or blacks. [35]  By the time of the 1915 ‘Americanism’ speech, Roosevelt had become, if not a lonely figure in American public life, a man of much reduced popularity, advocating preparation for intervention in the European war to a people who were still profoundly isolationist. Unlike Wilson, he had remained quite consistent in his views on race and nation, but also unlike Wilson he was in large measure unwilling to adjust to ever-shifting public opinion. The new “racial type” or nation, the American, had proved himself too bourgeois for Roosevelt’s arguments, and Southerners had proved themselves too recalcitrant to embrace Americanism as Roosevelt defined it.

 

Conclusion

Wilson and Roosevelt both spoke for the nationalism, although not for the nativism, current in post-Civil War America. As John Higham observes, nationalist sentiments reacted to labor-capital strife and immigration. [36]  Nationalism also probably represented an attempt to heal the lingering injuries of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Both Wilson and Roosevelt were acutely conscious of those injuries. Wilson was the first Southern president since the war; Roosevelt repeatedly umped his head against intractable Southern ‘difference.’ The careers of both men illustrate the constraints that public opinion places on political actors, even those noteworthy for bold invocations of ‘leadership’ and ‘stewardship.’

Examination of the complete published writings of Wilson and Roosevelt confirms Higham’s account of the ‘Americanization’ movement as an event that remained for the most part within the scope of political liberalism [37], although it is well worth remarking that the moral foundations of that liberalism were shifting from natural to historical rights. This is especially noticeable when American is contrasted with the contemporary regimes in Europe, liberal and illiberal alike. The presence of large immigrant populations in the United States required a mixture of rousing rhetoric about ‘American ideals’ with a simultaneous moderating rhetoric of inclusiveness. This duality of the rhetoric reflects the ‘hyphen’ itself; to dissolve the hyphen one must not let (for example) the word ‘German’ slip too far into a pejorative connotation, lest such new Americans be goaded into further collaboration with their country of origin.

In this effort of the 1915-1918 period, both Wilson and Roosevelt tended to treat African-Americans as invisible men and women. Earlier, as president, Roosevelt had taken some tentative steps toward advancing black interests—steps he could afford to take because Republicans weren’t getting many votes in the South, anyway. After the 1912 debacle in which he reversed his field, he kept his mouth shut on race, preferring to campaign for ‘preparedness,’ comprehensively conceived as Americanism.

As a Southern Democrat, Wilson operated under still tighter constraints. He seems not to have been much discomfited by these constraints. Whereas Roosevelt publicly endorsed much of the Booker T. Washington program—putting himself rather in the better portion of white American politicians of the period—Wilson did not even go that far. Most disappointing was his failure to reverse segregation orders governing federal workplaces, orders enacted by his own cabinet officers.

Unlike the Civil War and the Second World War, World War I did little to improve race relations in America. This was so because World War I was prosecuted by Americans of the generation born around the Civil War who came of age during Reconstruction and the backlash against Reconstruction. Republicanism being only as good as the republicans who compose it, elected politicians had very little room to maneuver on race issues, given the sectional realities of American politics. Reaching out to immigrants did nothing to make this better; most immigrants were not in the South, and most immigrants had no affection for African-Americans, with whom they competed for jobs. The ‘melting pot’ of pre-war and wartime preparedness rhetoric, designed for European-Americans, may well have helped to achieve its intended purpose, but that purpose did not include justice for African-Americans, which was neither a priority for white politicians nor a concern of ordinary white citizens at the time. Disenfranchised by post-Reconstruction restrictions, African-Americans lacked the political and economic power to make racial justice a concern, over and above whites’ intentions.

Significant improvements in race relations had to await shifts in public opinion that accompanied demographic and socioeconomic shifts, some of which (e.g. black migration to Northern cities) began during the war. In the wake of the Great Depression, the construction of a powerful national state that eventually overruled state-sponsored Jim Crow laws, along with factionalism among Southern elites, gave New-Deal progressives far better opportunities than did the circumstances of 1900-1920.

 

Notes

1. Speech Accepting the Democratic Nomination, Sea Girt, New Jersey, August 7, 1912, Link 1966-95 (hereinafter citied as PWW), 25.7; Letter to Anthony Geronimo, August 16, 1912, PWW 25. 40-41. A few years later, Wilson would invoke the remaining piece of the Alien and Sedition Act, the Alien Enemies Act, as soon as war was declared in 1917 (Higham 1955, 210).
2. Wilson 1961, 141; Link 1947-65, I. 381; Clements 1992, 20. See also Higham 1955, chapter 7.
3. Link 1947-63, 3. 23.
4. Notes for Lectures in a Course on the Elements of Politics, March 1898, PWW. 10. 471.
5. Compare Friedrich Nietzsche: Human All Too Human, II. section 284, “The means to real peace.”
6. Remarks to the Associated Press, New York, New York, April 20, 1915, PWW. 33. 38-39; An Address on Preparedness to the Manhattan Club, New York, New York, PWW. 35. 169-170; “America’s Opportunity,” unpublished essay, July 1917, PWW. 37. 500-501; Address to New Citizens, Chicago, Illinois, October 19, 1916, PWW. 38. 490-491.
7. On Wilson’s Christianity—specifically, Presbyterian Christianity, the Christianity of the ‘secular saint’—see Link 1965 and Link 1971, passim.
8. Link 1947-65, 3. 358, 366-375,420-425; Link 1954, 174-179; Cooper 1983, 407 n. 3; Heckscher 1991, 360-366.
9. Link 1947-65, 4. 26; Link 1954, 180-181; Cooper 1983, 298; Mayer 1958, 346-350.
10. Link 1971, 29-30.
11. Link 1971, 29-30; Wilson 1961, 110-113, 117; “John Bright,” essay, March 6, 1880, PWW. I. 618-619; “Marginal Notes,” July 19, 1880, PWW I. 664-665; Address to the New York Southern Society, Washington, D. C., December 12, 112, PWW. 25. 596; Remarks to the Confederate Veterans, Washington, D. C., June 5, 1917, PWW. 42. 451-452.
12. Wilson 1961, 222-224; Wilson 1906, 4. 58-59, 64; “Stray Thoughts from the South” (unpublished essay), February 22, 1881. PWW. 2. 28-29.
13. “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” essay, March 1900, PWW. 11. 460, 466, 473-479; Wilson 1906, 5. 300.
14. Link 1947, I. 502, 505; Link 1971, 259-271.
15. Link 1947, 2. 248; Link 1954 64-65; Clements 1992, 45-46; 59-60 (on Booker T. Washington’s reaction); Remarks by Wilson to William Monroe Trotter, PWW. 31. 301-303.
16. Second Inaugural Address, WPP. 41. 335; Clements 1992, 160; Remarks Upon the Clause for Racial Equality, Paris, France, April 11, 1919, WPP. 57. 268.
17. “America’s Part in the World’s Work,” Speech at Lincoln Club Dinner, New York, New York, February 13, 1899, Hagedorn 1923-26 (hereinafter cited as WTR) 16. 475.
18. See Burton 1997, 56-57. Although Roosevelt’s foreign policy was and is often called ‘the policy of the big stick,’ and is associated with international aggression, Roosevelt himself denied this, reminding his readers that the full slogan was “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” “[W]e lay equal emphasis on the fact that it is necessary to speak softly; in other words, that it is necessary to be respectful toward all people and scrupulously to refrain from wronging them….” (America and the World War [1916], WTR 20. 30.) On balance, Roosevelt historians are inclined to agree, pointing to Roosevelt’s secret negotiations with Germany over Venezuela in 1902, mediation in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, his participation in the 1906 Algeciras Conference on Morocco, counterbalancing his spectacular acquisition of Panamanian territory for the (Mahanian) purpose of canal-building. “Behind both the appearance and the reality of his public stances, the president led an almost secret life as a sensitive, subtle diplomat” (Cooper 1983, 72-75; see also Buehrig 1955, 151). Roosevelt spoke loudly in public, softly in the back channels.
19. America and the World War (1916) WTR 20. 18; Buehrig 1955, 160-161; Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916) WTR 20. 239, 322, 363; Autobiography (1913) WTR 22. 606. In a letter to his friend the British ambassador Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, Roosevelt confided: “Wilson is, I think, a timid man physically. He is certainly a timid man in all that affects sustaining the honor and national interests of the United States and justice by force of arms…. He believes that in the course he has followed he will keep the pacifists with him here at home and placate the German vote and the Irish vote…. Furthermore, he believes that whatever sense of injury the British may like to show they won’t show it, that when the time comes they will turn to him for help and that he will then gain great glory as the righteous peacemaker. I think this is very probably a correct estimate of the future on his part. I think it very probable that he will profit by his wrongdoing [because] England and France will find that his own misconduct has made him available for action as a mediator between them and Germany.” (Letter, November 121, 1914, Morison 1951, 8. 841). In promoting military intervention in the war, Roosevelt deliberately chose what he took to be the losing side. (On another claim, we now know Roosevelt was mistaken: genocide can be perpetrated in war as well as in peace, as Hitler demonstrated in the 1940s.)
20. The Strenuous Life (1900), WTR 15. 18, 34; The Great Adventure (1918) WTR 21. 329-330; Letter to Osborne Howes, May 5, 1892, Morison 1951, 8. 278-279; Letter to Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, Morison 1951, 1. 648-649.
21. Letter to S. Stanwood Mencken, January 10, 1917, Morison 1951, 8. 1143-1144; American Ideals (1897) WTR 15. 240-259; Fifth Annual Message to Congress, WTR 17. 346-348.
22. America and the World War (1916), WTR. 20. 104-109; The Great Adventure (1918) WTR 21. 278; Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916) WTR 20. 297-299.
23. Beale 1956, 27. See also Higham 1955, 10 on Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons.
24. Wister 1930, 362.
25. Letter to Owen Wister, April 27, 1906, Morison 1951, 5. 226; Letter to Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, June 13, 1904, Morison 1951, 4. 832-833.
26. The Wilderness Hunter (1893) WTR. 2. 131-132.
27. Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888) WTR 4. 484-485; The Winning of the West (1889-96) WTR 10. 114-115; WTR 11. 6-7. See also Ibid. 10. 78. For an application of the same lesson to Europe, see “The World Movement,” Lecture at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910, WTR 14. 275-276.
28. The Winning of the West (1889-1896) WTR 10. 46; WTR 11. 287; A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916) WTR 4. 28-29, 39. The founding generation in the United States also distinguished between the ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ Amerindian nations and tribes, a distinction the Washington Administration followed in dealing with southeastern Indians.
29. The Winning of the West (1889-1896), WTR 11. 389-390; Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) WTR 1. 20-21. Moreover, the very life that Roosevelt himself enjoyed, the life of the cattle rancher, :the free, open air life” that is “the pleasantest and healthiest life in America, is from its very nature ephemeral.” Even “the most powerful ranches, owned by wealthy corporations or individuals,” may not last to the end of the twentieth century. (Ibid. 1. 21.).
30. A Book Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916) WTR 4. 120, 132; African Game Trails (1910) WTR 5. 4, 363; Gould 1991, 238; Letter to Charles Henry Pearson, May 11, 1894, Morison 1951, 1. 377-378.
31. Thomas Hart Benton (1887), WTR 8. 117; Hero Tales from American History (1895) WTR 9. 141-143; The Rough Riders (1899) WTR 13/ 109-110.
32. Letter to Albion Winegar Touree, November 8, 1901, Morison 1951, 3. 190.
33. Gatewood 1970, 36-38; 63-66, 82, 89, 91-104; Letter to James Adger Smith, November 26, 1902, Morison 1951, 3. 385; Letter to Winfield Taylor Durbin, August 6, 1903, Morison 1951, 3. 540-543; Mowry 1958, 212-213. See also Wister 1930, 117-118.
34. Letter to Carl Schurz, December 24, 1903, Morison 1951, 3. 680; Speech at the Lincoln Day Dinner at the New York Republican Club, New York, New York, WTR 18. 464; Sixth Annual Message to Congress, Washington, D. C., December 12, 1906, 413-415.
35. Link 1971, 244-247; “The Progressives and the Colored Man,” article, August 24, 1912, WTR 19. 412, 415.
36. Higham 1955, Chapter 4.
37. Higham 1955, Chapter 9.

 

Works Cited

Beale, Howard K. 1956. Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Buehrig, Edward H. 1955. Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Burton, David H. 1997. Theodore Roosevelt, American Politician. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Clements, Kendrick A. 1992. The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Cooper, Jr., John Milton. 1983. The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Gatewood, Jr., Willard B. 1970. Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy: Episodes of the White House Years. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Gould, Lewis L. 1991. The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Hagedorn, Herman, ed. 1923-26. The Works of Theodore Roosevelt. 24 volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Heckscher, August. 1991. Woodrow Wilson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Higham, John. 1955. Strangers in the Land. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Hunt, George L., ed. 1965. Calvinism and the Political Order. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press.

Link, Arthur S., ed. 1947-1965. Wilson. 5 volumes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

_____. 1954. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era. New York: Harper and Row.

_____. 1965. “Woodrow Wilson: Presbyterian in Government.” In Hunt 1965.

_____, ed. 1966-95. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. 69 volumes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

_____. 1971. The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Mayer, Arno J. 1969. Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917-1918. Cleveland: New World Publishing Company.

Morison, Elting E., ed. 1951-54. The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. 8 volumes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Mowry, George E. 1958. The Era of Theodore Roosevelt: 1900-1912. New York: Harper and Row.

Wilson, Woodrow. 1906. A History of the American People. 5 volumes. New York: Harper and Brothers.

_____. 1961. Division and Disunion, 1829-1889. New York: Collier Books.

Wister, Owen. 1930. Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, 1880-1919. New York: The Macmillan Company.

 

 

Jonathan Schell: The Time of Illusion: An Historical and Reflective Account of the Nixon Era. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

 

Upon being told that an unadmired acquaintance was a self-made man, Oscar Levant asked, “Who else would have helped?” This is the dilemma of Machiavelli’s prince: Having created a world of effectual truth, with yourself as its god, how do you know you didn’t botch the job? And if you did, will your confederates help you to recoup, or leave you to twist in the wind? Jonathan Schell’s book provides an American object lesson on a Machiavellian moment, the self-construction and deconstruction of Richard Nixon.

Given its publication almost immediately after the much-encouraged retirement of our Puritan Alcibiades, The Time of Illusion is remarkably penetrating. But it also bears the marks of the heated political atmosphere of the time, and some of the niaiseries one expects from a staff writer for The New Yorker. The argument can now be strengthened in the revisiting, decades later.

Problem: As Machiavelli sees, you can’t be an executive unless you can execute, in the several senses of that word. In a government with an extensive bureaucracy (in America, the post-New Deal government), how can any chief executive actually govern his own branch of government? The much-remarked Nixonian feelings of impotence, persecution, etc. had a real structural foundation. The even more-remarked Nixonian tactics of evasion and deception have the same foundation—or rather, the foundation lends itself to those tactics, practices them itself and invites their practice in others, as countermeasures. To the maxim ‘Tory men, liberal measures’ Nixon added McLuhanite (or pop-Machiavellian) means. Nixon wanted simultaneously to remedy, and to take advantage of, the statist labyrinth—rein in Leviathan and to retreat into its belly.

As far as I can tell, in extreme cases Nixonian problems are only soluble by the route actually taken: Congressional investigation, threat of impeachment. This is a messy and exhausting process, but that’s self-government for you. The Whigs were right: Democracy and distrust go together. Democrats are supposed to harbor “a mistrust of all politicians” (317). When new, technical means of communication—and therefore of deception—are invented, citizens had better figure out how to abuse them, the better to guard themselves from abuse.

My sermon finished, I turn to a critique of Schell. Generally, I think he wants to center his critique on nuclear-weapons issues, but a better center would be the problem of statism. It’s the elephant, not the duck. Many of my criticisms are trivial and pedantic, but mildly interesting nonetheless.

1. Schell could not have had much practical political experience at the time he wrote this book. Example: his hand-wringing over Nixon staffers’ practice of writing letters-to-the-editor in support of administration policies, and having party loyalists sign them and mail them in. This is a longstanding gimmick on all levels of politics. Back in the days when I was paid to do it in Monmouth County, New Jersey, I often wondered who my counterpart on the other side was. Similarly, in deploring Nixon’s attempt to “load the world itself with events that would induce the Democrats turn against one another,” one can only ask: Did Schell ever hear of the New Deal? As his admiring biographer James Macgregor Burns remarked, FDR was a fox as well as a lion. Maybe more fox than lion.

2. Schell writes eloquently about the Constitution, but he doesn’t understand its basis. He refers casually, and incorrectly, to “the sovereignty of the federal government” (133). Notwithstanding the famous New Yorker ‘view of the world,’ even Manhattan is not an outpost of the European state system. James Monroe had it right in his book title: The People, The Sovereigns. Similarly, Schell mis-teaches his readers that “rights are granted to the people, to protect them against abuse of government powers” (157). The Hell they are. Rights are inherent in the people, individually and collectively, then secured by the grantees (or so they hope) when they institute government. Government contradicts its own purpose when it violates those unalienable rights: thus the Americans’ charge that King George III was ‘revolutionizing’ them. Schell wants to be a good Whig, but he doesn’t know how.

3. Schell can’t quite make up his mind on who ‘the people’ are. Were anti-war demonstrators “the nation” (101)? The majority thereof? A harmless is vocal minority that should never have disturbed Lincoln-bedroom dreams? How unpopular was the Vietnam War when Nixon took office? I understand Schell’s reluctance to sully his prose with polling data, and I know he would regard any such data as compromised by the systematic deceptions of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but some sort of effort needs to be made.

4. Schell frequently claims that this or that Nixonian depredation was unprecedented, extraordinary, remarkable, well-nigh sui generis. I would be interested to know if this is true. I rather suspect that the president’s men perfected techniques not unknown to previous Washington pols. One minor example: After an Australian émigré named Dr. Fred Schwarz established a right-wing organization called the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, New Yorker foreign policy hero Senator J. William Fulbright had the Internal Revenue Service audit the books. (They found no improprieties.) Tsk, tsk, Senator ‘Arrogance of Power.’ I am not sure that Washingtonians had the right to be shocked, simply shocked, that wiretapping was going on in this place. Senator Barry Goldwater—a tolerably honest pol, if no genius—probably spoke the truth about that.

5. Similarly Schell sometimes writes as if ‘public relations’ had been invented by Nixon in collaboration with Pat Buchanan. Walter Lippmann knew otherwise.

6. As for Nixon’s statement, “the press is the enemy” (55)—well, wasn’t it? How many New Yorker staffers joined in chanting “Nixon’s the One”? No Silent Majoritarians in William Shawn’s shop, I’ll wager. A good example of a fairly typical press-politics tactic may be seen on page 185, where Schell calls attention “once again” to “the affinity of the right-wing strategists in the White House with the left-wing fringe on the streets” (emphasis added). This equation puts New Yorker-ites comfortably in the center of the ideological Downs curve. No such luck!

7. Schell is at his weakest when considering foreign and military policy. He makes Henry Wallace look like a hard-nosed realist. The “linkage” doctrine of the Nixon administration (196) is nothing other than Mackiinder’s geopolitics—a commonplace among U. S. policymakers by 1945, as it had been among the Soviets two decades earlier (and ever after), the Germans throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the British, the French, and pretty much everyone else. The world, Mackinder sees, is a single system; the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. While this has always been true geographically, as of the turn of the twentieth century it had become true politically, as well, thanks to transportation and communication technologies along with modern techniques of political organization.

It is not enough to talk about the motif of nationalism as if it were an alternative to Mackinderian ideas. What is nationalism without foreigners with imperial designs” The world is not a duck. It’s not an elephant. It’s a flying elephant, a vast Dumbo, alternatively soaring awkwardly in the internationalist/globalist empyrean and thudding to the ground of soil and blood. In the event, the Soviets did exploit U. S. disarray in the 1970s, seeing it as providing an opportunity to push ahead in the Third World—where, like the Americans, they appealed to nationalism and their political doctrines. (A lot of good it did them, but that’s another story.)

What is more, ‘communism’ and ‘democracy’ made two competing claims to nationalism. Democrats said: You can’t have national self-determination without representative government that enables the nation to make determinations. Communists said: Bah! bourgeois democracy is nothing but a superstructural con-game; only the proletarian vanguard can express the will of the nation. In Vietnam, too, many of the people mistakenly concurred with the communists’ line. Elsewhere, they didn’t. Generally speaking, “linkage” was right. Johnson and Nixon failed to see how to apply the doctrine intelligently.

8. Schell makes some unfathomable objections to Nixon’s carrot-and-stick tactic against foreign rivals, calling them contradictory (327 and elsewhere). Well, yes, a carrot is a reward and a stick is a punishment. To use both is not to contradict oneself; it is to recognize the variety of human motives.

9. On nuclear-weapons issues, it is nonsense to imagine that Nixon’s policies brought “the entire world… repeatedly… to the verge of war” (343). Americans and Soviets came fairly close to war in 1962, during the Kennedy Administration—de Gaulle rightly refused to be overly impressed by the posturing, during and after the event—and that was about it. The rest in my estimation was nukes-rattling, for foreign and domestic consumption.

One of the peculiarities of the nuclear arms race with respect to issues of deception may be seen rather in the rhetoric concerning arms build-ups throughout that era. Both sides had a stake in deliberately playing to, and augmenting, the fears of the American public. Because the weapons procurement process is long-drawn-out, the ‘Right’ periodically would warn about missile gaps and present dangers—which were really future dangers, when they were dangers. For  its part, the ‘Left’ tried to frighten people with the Armageddon which was always just around the corner. Both sides were fighting over their share of scarce resources in the New-Deal state. Once the Cold War gave them no cover, the battle shifted to tax cuts on the Center-Right and politics-of-compassion on the Center-Left. Scare tacticians have shifted their focus to the wallet and the child.

Subtract these errors and misjudgments, and Schell still has an unanswerable case against Nixon. Fewer distractions.