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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBeschloss: On this World War I anniversary, let's not celebrate Woodrow Wilson
By Michael Beschloss
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As an academic, Wilson had emphasized the need for presidents to explain military setbacks and other complex or mystifying events to Americans. Yet he spent much of 1917, the first year of U.S. engagement in the war, in kingly isolation, rarely using his luminous oratorical gifts to explain to his countrymen why they needed to make severe sacrifices for a conflict that wasnt an obvious, direct threat to Americas national security.
Wilson, who preened as a civil libertarian, persuaded Congress to pass the Espionage Act, giving him extraordinary power to retaliate against Americans who opposed him and his wartime behavior. That same law today enables presidents to harass their political adversaries. Wilsons Justice Department also convicted almost a thousand people for using disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language against the government, the military or the flag. Wilson is an excellent example of how presidents can exploit wars to increase authoritarian power and restrict freedom, some arguing that criticizing the commander in chief amounts to criticizing soldiers in the field.
In the 1918 midterms, with the Great War heading to its climax, Wilson shamelessly exploited the military struggle for domestic politics, urging voters to support his party for the sake of the nation itself because Republicans were trying to take the conduct of the war out of my hands. This cheap maneuver backfired. Roosevelt and Taft charged that Wilson was asking for unlimited control over the settlement of a peace that will affect them for a century. Partly out of disgust with Wilsons presumptuousness, voters switched control of both the House and Senate to the Republicans.
I admire Wilsons insistence on ending the war with a League of Nations to ensure that such a conflict never happened again, but his plan to achieve it was clumsy political malpractice. He knew the Republican majority in Congress and many other Americans would be troubled by the possibility that if the Senate endorsed U.S. entry into the League of Nations, the new peace organization might have the right to call American troops into battle. Wilson should have immediately made it his central mission to assuage those fears, but he instead decamped to the Paris peace conference for months certain, in his vanity, that no mere professional diplomat could match his negotiating skills. The domestic debate over the League of Nations was left to its loudest opponents, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. By the time Wilson returned in the summer of 1919, fatal damage had been done.
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One can admire Wilson for his progressive reforms, for his idealism and eloquence about Americas role in the world, as I do, without sugarcoating his displays of political incompetence as a president of war. In wartime, Americans have a right to expect that the bravery of U.S. troops is matched by brilliant political leadership in the White House. Too often in the past, World War I anniversaries have been transformed into paeans to Woodrow Wilson. This time, lets keep it focused on the troops.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Certainly agree with Michael Beschloss about that.
I do admire what I know of Wilson as part of the progressive movement a century ago. At different points in reading this images flashed to mind of, not him because I'm missing them, but of Nixon's wide range of brilliant policies and severe abuses of power and of Carter's idealism, "clumsy malpractice" and arrogance. For me, obviously, reading a biography of Wilson himself is way overdue.
no_hypocrisy
(45,779 posts)Ho Chi Mingh went to Paris during the Peace Conference to ask Wilson to influence the French colonialists to leave Vietnam, to allow the Vietnamese to govern their own country. Wilson refused to see him.
And fifty years later . . . . . ,
Bradshaw3
(7,455 posts)And people like Jefferson, early in his life anyway. But as you point out he and the other Vietnamese nationalists were sold out by the winning world powers at Versaille, as they would be again after WWII and the result was a hard swing toward communism. I doubt if most people even know the history of our involvement in Vitenam, bringing up the saying that those who don't learn from history, ...
2naSalit
(86,071 posts)Wilson left us little to cheer about.
customerserviceguy
(25,183 posts)besides the two separated terms of Grover Cleveland in the era between James Buchanan (the President just before Abraham Lincoln) and FDR. Within that great span of American history, it was tough for a Democrat to be elected to the nation's highest office. I learned that from the Woodrow Wilson Museum in Staunton, VA this last year on a trip through that town.
It does not surprise me that Wilson had to make choices that look wrong a hundred years later. Also, he was the last President to have lived with slaves as part of his household in his childhood. That had to have had an influence on the way he viewed some of his fellow Americans.
We seem to spend a lot of time judging past leaders by 2018 standards, rather than focusing on how they dealt with the issues of their times, utilizing the feelings and attitudes of the electorate that they had to work with. I got a sense of that from my visit to the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's home outside Nashville, Tennessee.
get the red out
(13,459 posts)Cruel and unusual punishment for women jailed for demanding the right to vote also?
nocoincidences
(2,195 posts)by John Barry, it is suggested that Wilson was overmatched by Clemenceau during the post-war negotiations because he was suffering from the Spanish Flu and not functioning cognitively as well as he normally did. He never fully recovered from the effects of that flu.
https://www.brevis.com/blog/tag/the-great-influenza/