Walter Berns: Making Patriots. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 40, Number 2, January/February 2003.

 

A scholar writing on patriotism, and not to debunk it: Will wonders never cease? After all, isn’t patriotism a bit of an intellectual embarrassment? How can the love of country, pledging allegiance to the American flag, possibly interest anyone with an education beyond grammar school? Emotion aside—even a Ph. D. might feel something for the old sod—how could patriotism have sufficient rational content to interest a human mind?

Yet highly intelligent men have found American patriotism intellectually engaging: Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Lincoln. “There was not then,” Berns writes, “as there is now, a division between intellectuals and politicians,” a division that now results in politicians knowing (perhaps blissfully) “nothing about what is goin on in the world of political theory,” and in theorists refusing “to believe it part of their job to promote the cause of republican government” (135). Thoroughly ‘politicized,’ too many intellectuals have no realistic sense of the political. What happened between, say, the Civil War and today, to make this so?

For a model of what thoroughgoing politicization really means, Berns points to Sparta, where there were no intellectuals. Philosophy in Athens and Christianity in Europe compromised the whole-heartedly political way of life in the West, but in time the combination of philosophic precision and Christian devotion led to schisms and wars. The American Founders solved this problem by rejecting religious establishment in favor of allegiance to the American flag, to the republic for which it stands, and, ultimately, to the principle of unalienable human rights that they designed that republic to protect. That is, the Founders invited their fellow citizens to defend a country, a particular place ruled by a particular regime, for the sake of a universal principle, a quality shared by all human beings whether or not they were Americans. As Americans, this group of human beings dedicated itself to the duty of securing universal rights for themselves and their posterity.

In so solving the problem of the tension between particular attachments and universal rights and duties, Americans brought on a new set of problems. How shall these agreed-upon, self-evident rights be secured in practice? (For example, what should be the relation between the one general government and the many small ones?) How far shall America go in defending its republican regime in a world of nations often uncongenial to republicanism? (The French went conquering in the name of universal rights, provoking the extreme particularity of nationalist politics, thereby rendering the French nation’s condition precarious, intermittently, for the next 150 years.) In the last century, America had to face down two tyrannies infected by virulent combinations of the particular and the universal. And in the 21st century Americans must consider how to defend natural-rights republicanism from countries understandably suspicious of what the powerful victor in those confrontations with tyranny might do. If American established itself as a sort of worldwide church militant for natural rights, the defense of natural right might suffer as much as Christianity did, when politicized too heavy-handedly.

Berns writes seven succinct chapters, the first on the thoroughgoing patriotism of antiquity; the second on the division of human devotion introduced by Christianity; the third on the division of human energies introduced by commercialism; the fourth on the educational needs caused by these three phenomena; the fifth on the patriotic poetry of Lincoln, which combined the intellectual grasp of the American principle with the emotional resonance of words fitly spoken; the sixth on the special problem that race-based slavery posed to American patriots; the seventh on the problem of patriotism and the law, especially constitutional law, with respect to the symbolic object of American patriotism, the American flag. Patriotism turns out to be thought-provoking, in part because it provokes. Thinking about patriotism requires us to come to terms with the spirited part of our souls, the part that holds the near dear, and finds the universal in the near, making the near all the more with fighting for.

Contrasting ancient Greece with America, Berns observes that patriotism requires education, and that the Spartans coordinated “every detail” of theirs to the inculcation of patriotic sentiment—even to the extent of suppressing questions concerning the right and wrong of the city’s conduct. Even Athens, whose philosophers did conspicuously raise such questions, never separated something called ‘civil society’ from another thing called ‘the state,’ never separated ‘church’ from ‘state,’ and (in)famously executed the annoying questioner, Socrates. For Athenians, love of country came to mean love of empire and the glory attendant to empire. “The institutions of both Athens and Sparta were ordered with a view to war” (17) to a degree that the institutions of American commercial republicanism never were. American patriotism might decline into individual and family self-interest. Tocqueville worried that it might. In America, the political community cannot be made to seem all-encompassing, and so patriotism will remain limited.

Disestablished, religion moved away from ‘the state’ and was restricted to ‘civil society.’ “[B]y separating the spiritual from the temporal, Jesus not only provided the basis for the separation of church and state, he made it impossible for a Christian to be a patriotic citizen in the ancient sense” (24). For a Christian, God’s City inspires the fullest loyalty, not Rome. No prophetic religion makes a good civil religion; attempts to do so run afoul of confusion between ‘temporal and eternal’—the misattribution (for example) of the vices of the French Old Regime and its visible church to Christianity itself. Americans met this problem not by inventing a new civil religion, as the French tried so implausibly to do, but by making religion civil; by transforming laws against blasphemy into violations not of dogma but of the public peace. By removing religion as a gateway to political power, Americans retained it as a guardian of morals and sundered its dangerous association with the jealous, angry passions ambition arouses. Here, Berns goes too far in claiming that the God of the Declaration of Independence is “Nature’s God,” the god of the philosophers, only. The plain language of the Declaration also refers to the Creator-God, the God of Judgment, and the God of Providence. ‘God and country’ has been an American motto; if patriotism here centers on a particular defense of universal rights, and if those rights are endowed by the Creator of men, there need be no contradiction between patriotism and philosophy, or between patriotism and religion.

What if religion, now at liberty in civil society, meets commercial life, equally at liberty there, and fails to balance this countervailing tendency toward materialism and selfishness? Will not patriotism too dissolve in those solvents? Jefferson supposed so, consequently preferring gun-bearing farmers to the bankers who collected farmers’ debts. And as farm populations decline and the populations of bankers, stockbrokers, and shopkeepers increase, what then? A standing army to replace yeoman militia, to be sure, but a standing army needs citizen support. Berns devotes his central chapter to citizen education.

Jefferson wanted public education controlled locally by parents who in this way would participate (as he put it) “in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day” (65). Participation in government will foster love of the public things, making them one’s own. Given the predominantly religious persuasion of Americans, local control meant religious instruction, the strengthening of moral conduct pointing beyond the self and, under the American regime, toward the self-risking defense of the natural-rights principles the regime defends. “[N]othing in the First Amendment was then understood to prohibit the states from providing religious instruction in the schools,” and nothing did until the 1940s—that is, when the American national state began routinely to overbear local self-government. Berns laments, “Not one of the [1940] Supreme Court jutices gave any thought, any thought whatsoever, to the role of religion in republican government, specifically, the possibility of a connection between religious training and the sort of citizen required by a self-governing republic” (75). Berns associates this self-governing virtue with the modern (specifically Montesquieuian) redefinition of virtue not s the classical moral quadrivium (courage, moderation, prudence, justice) but as the self-sacrificing love of country. It would be more accurate to say that the Founders—Washington being the highest example—esteemed all of those virtues, classical and modern, but Berns’s basic point is sound: Schools wrested from parental control and handed over to secularizing bureaucrats who teach moral relativism may rot the foundations of patriotism. They have not done so, yet, but Berns might argue that our patriotism, though ardent, could be more thoughtful and principled than it is. And if it is not very thoughtful and principled, how distinctively American can it be said to be?

“[D]evotion to a principle requires an understanding of its terms,” and “that understanding cannot be taken for granted” (83). For understanding, one needs, so to speak, Madison first, Madison Avenue second. Among statesmen who understand both the American principles and how to convey that understanding, Lincoln has no equal. The Founders knew that the truths of the Declaration of Independence respecting natural right were self-evident to Americans but not to everyone; they never expected George III to nod soberly in concurrence with his colonists’ strictures and repent. Lincoln saw that the sovereign people themselves might become blinded by the same tyrannical passions, obscuring truths in a desire to maintain slavery or studiously to overlook it. In his wartime rhetoric Lincoln set the sentiments of shared guilt and forgiveness against those evil passions. the new birth of freedom, freedom for every American regardless of race, could result from the new glimpse of natural right that Lincoln’s cleansing and healing rhetoric made possible.

Slave emancipation only began this new life; emancipation was precisely a new birth of an infant liberty, long from being nourished and educated to maturity. Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address as encouragement to the first steps in that education, what would have been Lincolnian reconstruction. That reconstruction aimed at again reconciling natural right with consent; the assassination ended it, and the dynamic of Southern resistance and Northern force continued for a hundred years, ending only when a recognizable modern state, unintended by Lincoln or any other Civil War-era American, an entity needing minimum local consent, moved on the South with Hobbesian rigor. This did secure rights for the descendants of slaves, but the absence of consent did little to enhance patriotic feeling on the other side, instead recasting some of that sentiment into the now-familiar ‘pro-government’ versus ‘anti-government’ struggle.

Insofar as they are formed by the moral-relativist ethos of bureaucratic public schools and by the impassionating appeals of entertainment and advertising, Americans begin to resemble their antebellum forbears in one respect: They begin not to see the natural rights they once held to be self-evident. This time, however, it is not the passion to enslave others but passions of self-enslavement that rightly trouble Berns. Without expecting to see a new Lincoln, one can still provide the materials with which resistance to such passions might be buttressed.

Berns therefore concludes his argument by discussing the Constitutional debate over the American flag—specifically, the Supreme Court’s rulings holding laws that prohibit flag defilement unconstitutional. Emptied of intellectual content by the claim that the legal right to free speech trumps the natural rights that free speech and all other constitutional guarantees are intended to secure, “the flag stands for nothing in particular” (137), except maybe free speech itself. Logically that means that if free ‘speech’ includes flag defilement, free speech is entitled to put n end to free speech—that natural right re alienable by majority (or even Supreme Court-based) fiat. If freedom and/or the will of the Supreme Court trumps logic itself, then speech is chatter, and chatter cannot be desecrated. To this, Berns replies that the flag stands not only for free speech—understood as real, human speech, deliberation, not the mindless expression of the impassioned ‘self’—but for all the natural rights defended by those who live and fight under the flag, and the republic for which it stands. Those natural right are not opinion but truth. Those truths frame free ‘expression,’ not the other way around. The other way confuses libertinism with liberty.

‘Public intellectuals’ are a dime a dozen. Their publicity is an advertisement for themselves, their intellect often ignorant of the conditions needed for a life of the mind. In his long career as a public intellectual of a more sober sort, Walter Berns has called his more celebrated colleagues to greater thoughtfulness. They have preferred to bask in their celebrity. But others have listened, and maybe they have had some good effect, a bit removed from the limelight.

 

This is a response to three papers presented at the Southwestern Political Science Convention, New Orleans, Louisiana, March 30, 2002.

The papers were:
Lee Ward: “Thomas Jefferson on Natural Rights and Empire.”
J. David Alvis: “A Plan for Reform: Herbert Croly’s Critique of American Democracy.”
Patrick J. Bernardo: “Ortega y Gasset on Rights and Self-Government.”

 

The papers before us raise the question of the American regime in the twenty-first century, although none of them concerns a thinker of this century.

The American Founders claim that popular self-government best secures our natural rights. Like Great Britain, America too will be an empire, but one of unprecedented character. This will be an empire of liberty, a place to which men and women will want to immigrate, and never again need to exercise their natural right of emigration. That is the original “promise of American life.”

In so claiming and so promising, the Founders follow Locke in two ways. They are ‘individualists’ in the sense that life, liberty, and property are rights held by individuals. But almost to a man, and also following Locke, the Founders regarded human nature as social. Even in the state of nature, human beings live in families. This natural fact encompasses a moral fact. Jefferson, for example, calls “the natural sense of justice” or “sense of right and wrong” “as much a part of [our] nature” as the senses of hearing, seeing, feeling. Dismissing the spiritual claims of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson lauds his moral claims, which contradict the claims of the form of modern individualism stemming from Machiavelli, an individualism tout court which leaves no place for genuine sociality or morality, and therefore with no real place for natural rights.

The natural sense of justice makes popular self-government possible; reason alone would never suffice to rule l’homme moyen sensuel. This natural sense cuts through the conventional claims of aristocrats and monarchs, enabling the people to see and feel their way to self-government.

In addition, this new kind of empire can flourish because the principle of representation extends popular self-government across big places. As Jefferson writes, “No constitution was ever before so well-calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.” With such institutional backing, and with the kind of commercial ties commended by Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu, human sociality makes ‘friendship’ among self-governing regions possible; it makes a non-bureaucratic political whole possible, countering the centrifugal human passions sufficiently to allow reason to rule where it would otherwise be too weak.

The natural rights of social animals must differ fundamentally from the natural rights of solitary animals. Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau all deny the sociality of human nature. The Founders depart from their fellow moderns in this. They reconcile individuality and sociality by first seeing that life, liberty, and property are always someones; there can be no life of a community without the lives of the individuals who compose it. Liberty and property, indispensable to life, similarly require individual fulfillment. However, the Founders also see that individuals must defend themselves together; this takes more than calculated contractarianism, although it does take that. The calculating contractarian rescues no one from burning buildings, nor does he give up his life for his friend—much less for his political friend, his fellow citizen, that intimate stranger.

Whatever else they were, the Founders were hardly Croly’s naïve “pioneer democrats.” The Progressives offered a new promise of American life. Seeing the old one broken, injured by artificial persons called ‘corporations’—unnatural bodies—they turn not only from America’s constitutional foundation but from its natural-rights foundation. They turn instead to the subspecies of utilitarianism called ‘pragmatism’ (Croly) or to instantiated ‘idealism’ (Wilson), or to their unholy and unstable combination, dialectical materialism (Lenin). All these progressivisms endorse forms of the ‘leadership principle,’ a principle admitted by the Founders only in military affairs. Croly’s elevation of ‘History’ over natural right and his consequent replacement of statesmanship with leadership is really neither Hamiltonian nor Jeffersonian, with respect to ‘means’ or ‘ends.’ Eschewing an account of natural rights republicanism, Croly instead tells a story, a tale of American political and social development.

But absent natural right, why are the economic and social inequalities the progressives deplore wrong? Why should democracy preserve itself, with or without expert ‘leaders’? Does Croly’s misconception of American liberty as “individual self-determination” not simply find a loud echo in the progressives own grander, collectivized triumphalism? Croly’s historicist vitalism, issuing in his call for “a continual process of internal reformation” —what Trotsky later and more forcefully calls permanent revolution—animates much of twentieth-century collectivism, but in this Croly speaks past the American Founders, not to them. As a historicist, he must.

Croly replies to this ‘why’ question by saying that “the democratic scheme of moral values” is a “religion” of “loving-kindness” (albeit one with technical-administrative efficiency), preparing the American landscape for “the crowning work of some democratic Saint Francis.” “Democracy,” he contends, “cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility.” Actually, the Founders had rather thoroughly disentangled their democratic republicanism from any such aspiration. Croly takes Jefferson’s Jesus and brings His millenarianism back, this time without a God to back it up. It is the failure of the progressivist promise in all its forms, its lack of sustainable religiosity and statist loving-kindness—the compassion of the cold monster—that brings us to Ortega’s version of the ‘last man.’

Ortega cites Nietzsche, Hegel, and Comte, but not Tocqueville. Yet his problem is the Tocqueville problem. Democracy, a social condition of long gestation, has been born and it is growing. It releases immense energy, “a fabulous increase of vital possibilities,” strength not decadence. But so far it is rather too much like a college sophomore—long on potential, short on actualization. It doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. It’s all revved up with no place to go.

Progressivism is not vital but fatal, Ortega argues, because at bottom it is fatalistic. “We are not launched into existence like shot from a gun.” Our potential can issue either in liberty or in the worst despotism, as Tocqueville foresaw and Ortega sees before his eyes. Our democrats begin to care only for anesthetics and motor-cars. With the new tyrannies, “there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions,” under “the right not to be reasonable.” Genuine liberalism requires the nobility of the aristocrats that democracy inundates. “The great sin of those who directed the nineteenth century” was their “lack of recognition of their responsibilities”—their failure, I should say, to heed Tocqueville. Oddly, Ortega fails to see the threat to philosophy in all this, but he sees the threat to liberty clearly enough. “Modern technicism springs from the union of capitalism and experimental science,” and both capitalists and scientists are mass-men, ignorant of the whole, hermetic and self-satisfied individuals who do not understand the conditions of their own ways of life. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Ortega calls not for an inspiriting recognition of “the natural greatness of man” but for popular recognition of human limitedness.

Unfortunately, like so many European writers, Ortega has only the weakest understanding of America, which he dismisses as “the paradise of the masses.” “America has not yet suffered; it is an illusion to think that it can possess the virtues of command.” Had Ortega never heard of the American Civil War, of Lincoln? He does see that the bourgeoisie can fight, which is the beginning of wisdom in such matters.

On the theoretical level, we need an account of natural right understood as characteristic of a social and political animal. I say “natural” because Kant’s categorical imperative doesn’t work, being too deeply embedded in the Rousseauian wing of the Machiavellian fortress. Specifically, what does it mean to wed Lockean natural rights to sociality and not only to political institutions but to politics as a way of life?

On the practical level, we need a constructive reply to Croly and his allies. The Progressives saw clearly that the American regime faced the challenges of ever-increasing scale and complexity. They failed to show that the American regime as designed by the Founders and amended in the wake of the Civil War could not meet those challenges, but no one has shown that it can, either. The mixture of the original design and the progressives’ design that prevails today has met with challenges from a position more radically to the ‘Left’ than anything the old progressives intended, and the result has been a hash.

In 1650, Europe, having embarked on the nation-state system, the system of the Peace of Westphalia, could consider fundamental political-philosophic alternatives when understanding that system. One was that of Hobbes’s Leviathan, that vast blueprint for the modern state, home of the mass-man. The other was Grotius’ The Laws of War and Peace, which looks at exactly the same political phenomena through neo-Aristotelian eyes. Europe chose the systematic Machiavellianism of Leviathan. Americans may still have the other choice available to them, the choice of self-government. But we will need to start using the old political science of Aristotle and the new political science of the Founders and of Tocqueville if we are to make that choice in the real world, and keep ‘the promise of American life.’

 

 

 

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.