Hating on Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson's been getting a lot of attention lately because Glenn Beck has been holding him as a straw man to attack modern progressives. Of course, there's lots of reason to hate Wilson--he was an extreme racist and a moralistic bastard mostly. This discussion from leading historians and Wilson scholars show Beck's hypocrisy and distortions in attacking Wilson--both in the sense that Wilson was a right-wing moralist, that Beck's attacks on Wilson are precisely because nobody knows anything about him (as opposed to FDR or LBJ), and that he's cherrypicking the bipartisan nature of Progressivism by attacking Wilson and not Theodore Roosevelt.

But then again, no one expects integrity from Beck. What surprises me is that no one mentioned the real shocker in all of this--that Wilson was a hero to the administration of George W. Bush because of his moralistic and totalizing foreign policy. Is Beck rejecting the Wilsonian foreign policy so beloved by neocons? I doubt it. More likely, Beck would easily come around if a Republican president again invoked Wilson. Because of course, Beck is an opportunistic hypocrite.

Most Prominent Politicians From Each State, III: New Jersey

New Jersey has had a somewhat weak group of national politicians throughout its history with an obvious choice for the top. I suspect a lot of this is getting overshadowed by New York and Pennsylvania. That the Frelinghuysen family has dominated New Jersey politics from its early days, a family that has long aspired to mediocrity in office, has certainly not helped.

1. Woodrow Wilson. A native of Virginia, but his political career was in New Jersey. Certainly one of the most important presidents in  U.S. history, though one I also find pretty loathsome.

2. William Paterson. Key player in the Constitutional Convention, 2nd governor of New Jersey, early Supreme Court justice. Put the hammer down on the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion while a Justice.

3. George McClellan. We usually think of McClellan as a failed general, and indeed he was.  But he was also the Democratic candidate for president in 1864 and later governor of New Jersey from 1878-81. His big post-war political ambition was to be Grover Cleveland's Secretary of State, but he failed to get the position.

Paterson and McClellan are fairly lame 2 and 3 choices for the 3rd oldest state, but the other possibilities are also pretty underwhelming. In chronological order:

Frederick Frelinghuysen--Chester Arthur's Secretary of State, senator, general Republican hack who helped decide the disputed 1876 election.

William Pennington--Governor of New Jersey in the 1830s and 40s, later elected to the House of Representatives where he served as Speaker of the House in 1860 and early 1861. He also once turned down the chance to be governor of Minnesota Territory. Pretty hot stuff, I know.

John Griggs--Governor of the state. William McKinley tapped him to be Attorney General in 1898, where he served until 1901.

Thomas Kean--Like most other long-time New Jersey politicians, solid and remarkably unspectacular. Governor of the state from 1982-90, most known for his service on the 9/11 Commission. That alone separates him from the pack of mediocrity known as New Jersey.

Bill Bradley--Some might put Bradley in the top 3 and maybe he had more of an impact than either Paterson or McClellan. He was senator from 1979-97. Launched a particularly lame campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2000. Mostly I find him to be an annoying blowhard, which is why I couldn't move him to #3. 

Tomorrow: Georgia. Getting to the South should be fun, for it gives me the chance to eviscerate racist politicians. 

Bad Days in American History: October 28. 1919

On this date in 1919, the United States officially went insane. That day marked Congress' overriding of President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act, for all intents and purposes banning the consumption of alcohol in this nation.

It's hard to stress how loathsome the temperance movement was. While it's true that early Americans were extreme drunks (as demonstrated amply in W. J. Rorabough's The Alcoholic Republic), the temperance movement moved beyond reforming extreme behavior and into a moral crusade that saw alcohol use as an overarching explanation for everything wrong with America. That included immigration and there were many connections between the temperance movement and the anti-immigration movement that succeeded in closing America's gates to most immigrants by 1924.

Now, one might think that Wilson vetoing the Volstead Act reflects well upon him, but he certainly didn't veto it out of principle. Rather, it was on technical matters concerning its relationship to wartime prohibition. Wilson had supported prohibition as part of the New Freedom when he was elected in 1912. As I was researching this, I was hoping to finally find something worthwhile about Woodrow Wilson; alas, I was again foiled in this quest.

The Volstead Act also demonstrated the worst characteristics of Americans: nativist, puritanical, simple-minded, insular. We became the laughing stock of much of the world (though in fact we were not the only nation to attempt banning alcohol during these years). Of course, prohibition had massive unintended consequences that its priggish supporters neither anticipated nor had any answer for. It made drinking cool again for the first time in decades. It created a massive surge in crime. It led to a huge black market. Police corruption became an epidemic as guys who didn't want to enforce the law found it really easy not to do so. Politicians and other societal leaders rather openly ignored it. Prohibitionists' reaction was simply to demand greater enforcement and tell everyone to go to church.

Prohibition played a major role in the standardization of bad beer in this country. I am just beginning research on a book length project on beer and local breweries in America and I understand that up until Prohibition, local breweries around the nation made a wide variety of sometimes very high quality beer. I hear the original recipe for Coors produces a quite delicious beer, though I have not had it. But after years of not drinking beer, the public had largely lost its taste for complex beers by 1933 and in order to survive, the breweries who managed to reopen after fourteen years found it in their interests to produce weak lagers that appealed to wider audience. I need to research this phenomenon in significantly more detail, but if we have the Volstead Act to blame for Miller Lite and Keystone, I am going to be even more full of rage than I already am.

Of course, the Volstead Act is hardly the only time the nation has decided to criminalize a drug for less than rational reasons. Many of the Volstead Act's less savory elements have contributed to the current War on Drugs. Combine this with a far more advanced police state than we had 90 years ago and you see the elimination of the 4th Amendment from providing any real protections for people, a skyrocketing prison population, and the forcing of perfectly decent people into lives of poverty and stigma because of harmless crimes.

All in all, I wonder if October 28, 1919 isn't one of the very worst days in American history. I know it's not quite on the same level as FDR's executive order placing Japanese- Americans in concentration camps or the founding of the KKK, or the election of George W. Bush, but it's pretty nightmarish. A social and political disaster, it reeked of the most disturbing and close-minded trends in American life that we still have to fight today.

From Colony to Superpower, Part X

This is the tenth installment in the 20 part series Rob Farley and I have commenced to review George Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776. See the Herring Review tag below for previous entries.

This week we discuss Woodrow Wilson's presidency. Rob focuses a great bit on the buildup to World War I and has a lot of interesting things to say about the matter. I agree with his analysis about the Lusitania sinking being an overrated event. It didn't actually change anything. It led to a limited amount of bad press for Germany among the US public, but it's important to note that a lot of said public supported Germany. I think more importantly was that it turned American politicians and business leaders against Germany, but even this was limited and has relatively little to do with the nation's later decision to join the war. Likewise, I agree with Rob that it would have been very difficult for the U.S. to remain out of World War I--as soon as the Germans began unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, the only way for the U.S. to stay out would have been to give up trading with the British which was clearly not happening.

I'm more interested in how Herring shapes this chapter. Wilson's racist foreign policy leads to even more invasions in Latin America, including the disastrous attempt to apprehend Pancho Villa. This failure is a precursor for the failure of Wilson's foreign policy during and after World War I, ending in the watering down of his Fourteen Points at Versailles and the defeat of the League of Nations at home. While I certainly don't disagree with this analysis, I think it lacks useful context. Wilson's story is a Progressive story. In many ways, Wilson was the ultimate Progressive. Yet we get little context about internal developments in the U.S. during these years. I have long found to many narratives of U.S. foreign policy to exist in a contextual vacuum. A lot of recent scholars are moving beyond these traditional narratives, but Herring doesn't engage this work quite enough for my tastes.

As a scholar of Progressivism, I see these disparate movements as being tied together by a few basic themes. First, an overwhelmingly moralistic way of looking at the world and your involvement in it. Second, a belief that the reformer knew what was best for the world and if just the world would adhere to the provided solution, the problem would simply go away. Third, a lack of deep thinking about many of these problems and a lack of awareness of unintended consequences. Fourth, a view of the world infused with Anglo-Saxon superiority and racism toward other peoples. I'll avoid domestic examples here but can certainly provide them if anyone wants.

All of this describes Woodrow Wilson and his foreign policy. Sure he was racist. But so were most policy makers. Wilson though combined that racism with a self-assured superiority in regards to the rest of the world, a belief that America provided the best model for other nations to follow, and a simplistic idea about social and political problems that led him to catch-all solutions like the Fourteen Points.

Now, you might argue that I'm wrong here. But what you can't argue is that Herring deals with these ideas either way. To what extent do domestic issues and intellectual/political/cultural trends affect U.S. foreign policy? Herring, like most foreign policy scholars, does a good job during the pre-1815 period. But this gets lost in the late 19th and 20th centuries. This is too bad.

A lack of context hurts the chapter in other ways. For instance, what about immigrant groups within the US? Herring mentions that Irish-Americans were upset that the peace treaty didn't deal with Irish independence, but that's about all we hear about them. Yet there were many immigrant groups in the U.S. who openly supported Germany--including the Germans and Irish, which I believe were the 2 largest groups.

Moreover, there was a lot of residual anti-English sentiment among old-stock Americans dating back to the Revolution. I have read with my own eyes books published in 1916 and 1917 convincing Americans that those days are over, that we should get over our dislike of England and realize that Germany is the greatest threat the world faces. That Americans still needed convincing in 1917 that England was our ally was amazing to me. Yet we hear none of this in the chapter.

Similarly, I'd like to see more discussion and awareness of cultural issues. For instance, the same cult of masculinity that so influenced Americans to jump to war with Spain in 1898 played an equally important role against Germany in 1917. In fact, the industrial brutality of the war helped to kill that particular strain of upper-class men's obsession with their own masculinity that influenced hunting legislation, National Parks, the establishment of the Boy Scouts, early anthropology, the Marquis of Queensbury rules in boxing, making football a respectable sport, and many other things. Hunting, boxing, and the Boy Scouts were poor substitutes for the ultimate man-making exercise: war. The Spanish-American War was simply too short to satisfy upper-class men. This is a big reason why Theodore Roosevelt left his career behind to fight in Cuba and why he wanted to fight in Germany--he had prepared his entire life for these battles.

Moreover, these ideas of masculinity were international and influenced our foreign relations. Whether in England, Germany, or the U.S., young middle and upper class men rushed to volunteer for the conflict as soon as they could. That so many of them were slaughtered on the fields of northern France made them realize their romanticization of war was a lie and helped lead to the amazing literature of the war and postwar period. Before the war, the Boy Scouts was an international movement, men from around Europe and America traveled the globe looking for exploring and hunting adventures, and English and German investors went to the U.S. West to play cowboy like TR. People of the time were aware of these ideas and they talked openly in these terms. These constructions of masculinity influenced our interactions with the rest of the world. Yet I'm not seeing much awareness of this in the major works of U.S. foreign policy history and certainly not in Herring.

But it's not as if no historians are looking at cultural connections between the U.S. and the world during the Progressive Era . Daniel Rodgers' excellent history of transatlantic Progressivism, Atlantic Crossings, demonstrates how Progressives in the U.S. were talking to and were influenced by their counterparts in Europe and vice versa. Many of these Progressives entered government and influenced foreign policy. How did these Progressive ideas influence our relations with other nations? We really don't know from Herring.

Now, I'm not trying to be a jerk here. Readers of this series know that I like the book a good bit. I think it is a very solid overview of U.S. foreign policy history. My criticism is of the field more broadly, in particular the major narratives. There are many excellent historians working on the kinds of foreign policy history that I find increasingly satisfying; to a certain extent this is the difference between "diplomatic history" and "U.S. in the world" in the profession. It might seem like a semantic difference, but the latter works to decenter the foreign policy elite and traditional narratives from our understanding of the relations between the United States and the world. It seeks to complicate our narratives by showing how consumers, social workers, civil rights activists, everyday soldiers, and other nontraditional actors shaped our interactions with other nations. Herring is aware of this work and gives occasional nods to it, but ultimately is still writing a traditional foreign policy history with all its benefits and problems.

Rob also wanted to me to talk a bit about Mexico. I've blathered on for so long that I'll keep it short. I think Herring did a pretty good job with this, but I really wish that he would develop a broader narrative framework to encapsulate our interactions with Latin America. He signals changes and continuities between TR, Taft, and Wilson, but I'd like to see sharper clarity on how these Progressive Era presidents and the business interests they allied themselves with in Latin America would shape our dealings with that part of the world through the 20th century. Perhaps the reader can draw those connections for themself, but I'm not sure the non-specialist really would.

Sometimes Herring suggests at these larger frameworks in interesting ways. He points out that John Foster Dulles was a key advisor to Wilson at Versailles. It turns out that Dulles wrote the clause in the peace treaty ascribing all guilt for the war to the Germans. These two men allowed their overweening moralism to affect U.S. foreign policy, often in negative ways. It was Dulles after all who pushed Eisenhower to support Diem; he was confident in that leader because of his Catholicism. That was his major qualification, along with being anti-communist. Wilson and Dulles also followed similar foreign policies in regards to Latin America, using the military (and the CIA for Dulles) to crush resistance to U.S. hegemony and business interests. The Dulles brothers were close to the fruit growers in Guatemala who had their interests threatened by Jacobo Arbenz' government in the 1950s. Allen Dulles' position as CIA head and John Foster Dulles' position as Secretary of State made them unusually capable of using all means necessary to protect their friends and their own investments.

Ultimately though, I don't suspect Herring will draw these connections that sharply in the upcoming chapter on the Eisenhower years.

Overall though, I think Herring summarizes the complexities of the Mexican Revolution to my satisfaction, shows how U.S. racism negatively influenced Haiti, and how U.S. actions in the Dominican Republic led to the rise of the odious Rafael Trujillo. This represents the best of Herring's work--providing a coherent, if traditional, foreign policy narrative that takes at least some of the insights of more non-traditional work into account, while also being willing to call out U.S. presidents for their policies in ways older scholars might not have done so bluntly.

Again, I like the book and I want to stress that. But overall, I found this chapter unsatisfying because there are so many unexplored issues that I think are indicative of my problems with traditional narratives of the field as a whole.

There's more to say but I'll save it for Rob's response.