Woodrow Wilson and Freedom

by
David Gordon
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Woodrow Wilson is no longer the left-wing icon he once was owing to his role in promoting segregation in federal employment, and this revised view is much evidenced in Corey Brettschneider’s work “The Presidents and the People.” Those of us already inclined to a negative view of Wilson will find much of value in the book.

According to Brettschneider, beginning with his time as a graduate student in political science at Johns Hopkins University, Wilson believed throughout his academic career in a strong state based on hierarchy.

“Wilson attended lectures about how history could be theorized in systematic terms that describe a progressive improvement of the human condition. He became absorbed by the philosophy of Georg Hegel. ... In Hegel’s works, personal freedom was framed as a national ideal — only achieved when each individual fit a hierarchy that served the larger whole. Hegel’s ideas from the early 1800s aligned with an idea emergent in intellectual life in the early 1900s: applying biological principles to social and political conditions. Wilson ... began to view individuals as cells or cogs within a living organism, which he analogized to the nation. As Wilson’s worldview solidified, he came to believe that the individual rights described in the Constitution, championed by Jefferson and Madison, were not immutable triumphs, but were instead subservient to transcendent ideals of national order and societal hierarchy.”

I don’t think that Wilson’s account of Hegel is entirely accurate; in particular, it does not appreciate the significance of the first part of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” that deals with freedom, but what matters for our purposes is that this is the way that Wilson understood Hegel. In Orwellian fashion, Wilson equated freedom with the absence of disorder or friction.

“One Princeton student captured Wilson’s thinking particularly vividly: ‘A free people is a people not subject to the arbitrary choices of its rulers.’ ... Wilson added a crucial qualification: that liberty was reflected in ‘a people whose interests and whose individual rights somehow get rewarded with a good deal of system and without serious friction.’ ... True liberty was a condition that emerged only in a national system lacking ‘friction’ — and was defined by efficiency in its affairs. Such a system focused on productivity in reducing impediments to society’s goals, like the ‘friction’ of social conflict, especially racial violence and class conflict” (emphasis in original).

In achieving the goal of reducing friction, society must be guided by a strong executive:

“Wilson’s academic work guided his presidency. He idealized a robust central government ... which was a departure from American federalism. On Wilson’s view, the president would singularly helm this massive ship of state. This was in contrast to the more traditional view of the presidency as defined by constraints. ... But in his 1908 book Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson described the Constitution as ‘elastic’ — a document that conferred immense presidential power if one chooses to take it. In his writings, Wilson declared that ‘the president is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can.’ While the president could not exactly usurp the roles of the other branches, Wilson thought it fine if ‘Congress be overborne by [the president]’ due to his popular support.” (Brettschneider’s comments are insightful, but it is difficult to forgive the use of “helm” as a verb.)

Wilson was as good as his word:

“In the White House, Wilson adhered with remarkable precision to these views, making sweeping changes to government. He expanded the federal government’s power in the economy, creating the Federal Reserve System to manage the nation’s money supply. He expanded the press office, holding 159 news conferences during his two terms. And he used that office to appeal directly to the American people, rallying them to support his legislative agenda and pressure their congressional representatives to enact it. Most significantly, he greatly increased the size of the federal government.”

In his efforts to appeal directly to the public, Wilson was quick to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by mass culture.

“After the first voice broadcast was aired in 1906, a strange new technology — radio — was born, which exploded in popularity by the end of Wilson’s presidency, knitting the country together. ... Wilson capitalized on the zeitgeist, resulting in what scholar Jeffery Tulis has called the ‘rhetorical presidency.’ ... Wilson took the bully pulpit concept a step further when he utilized all the levers of mass culture, not simply the news, to keep the president permanently atop the national discourse. ... According to one scholar, he acted like a professor [during his press conferences], dictating what reporters should write, an ambition made easier by the fact that many present were former Princeton students.”

When America entered World War I, it is hardly a surprise that Wilson demanded unity. Many readers will already be familiar with the suppression of dissent and the campaign against German Americans and German culture during the war, but Brettschneider points out that blacks who demanded an increase in civil rights legislation were also charged with sedition:

“At home, the war spurred the passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts under the [John] Adams presidency had there been federal laws banning disloyal speech but Wilson saw them return. [William] Trotter’s allies, including a young A. Philip Randolph, a critic of Wilson and the war ... were prosecuted. Randolph fled the federal authorities after being charged with distribution of ‘seditious material’ — an article criticizing Wilson — under the Espionage Act.”

It is to be hoped Brettschneider’s excellent criticism of Wilson will influence mainstream historians and political scientists, who do not pay attention to libertarian and conservative critics of that academic sawdust Caesar.