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« Back to Woodrow Wilson, Part Two main page    Transcript for: Woodrow Wilson, Part TwoThink Tank with Ben WattenbergTTBW 1231 Woodrow Wilson, Part Two PBS air date: Funding is provided by At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. (music) WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Woodrow Wilson rose in just 10 years from college professor, to president of Princeton, to governor of New Jersey, to President of the United States, to ultimately the most admired man in the world. He was a progressive who banned child labor and introduced the federal income tax. Wilson led America through the first World War. He proposed the League of Nations, fore-runner to the UN. But it was his willingness to use American military power to further democratic ideals that makes him so relevant today - with America at war, using similar means for similar ends. Who was Woodrow Wilson? And how has Wilsonian idealism shaped American foreign policy? To find out, Think Tank is joined by H. W. Brands, the Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A & M University and the author of 19 books, including the new biography 'Woodrow Wilson'; and Kendrick Clements, professor of American diplomatic history at the University of! South Carolina and the author of 'The Presidency of Woodrow Wilson' and 'Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman.' The topic before the house: Woodrow Wilson, Part Two. This week on Think Tank. (musical break) WATTENBERG: Ken Clements, Bill Brands, welcome back for Part Two of our discussion of Woodrow Wilson. So America goes to war in 1917? The war’s already been going on for three years, and there’s this great patriotic feeling. We’re coming over, we’re coming over and we won’t be back ’til it’s over over there, and there’s patriotic songs and Irving Berlin and all that kind of stuff. And in the beginning it goes well, is that right - for Americans? CLEMENTS: It went very well for Americans. Americans came in late. Really I think they were not militarily terribly important at first but just simply the numbers of Americans pouring in were enough to break the will of the Germans who had thrown everything into a last ditch effort to win in the spring of 1918. BRANDS: That’s it. In fact it was the British - excuse me - it was the German decision that brought the United States ultimately in the war. Because the Germans decided that they had to break the stalemate and therefore they would risk American entry into the war by cutting off all trade with Britain. They would start sinking American ships, which they did, knowing pretty much full well that this would force Wilson’s hand. That the Americans would come into the war. But the Germans were betting that they could win the war on the western front. They could win the war in France before the United States could get enough troops in France to make a difference. CLEMENTS: They had defeated Russia - made a separate peace with Russia - and that meant that all those troops... WATTENBERG: 'They' meaning the Germans. CLEMENTS: The Germans had, yes. And that meant that all those troops that had been on the eastern front fight Russia could now be thrown into a great offensive in the spring of 1918 in the west. WATTENBERG: The allies with America’s help, are coming in late, win the war and then they have this great peace conference at Versailles. Is that where he first surfaces this idea of the League of Nations? BRANDS: He’d been talking about that for some time while the war was on and so when he gave his... WATTENBERG: This was the war to end all wars. Was that his phrase? BRANDS: Yes. And the idea was that this war was so bad that civilization can’t survive another one. We’ve got to make sure that when this war is over we settle the issues; we establish a framework of peace so that we don’t do this again, because civilization surely won’t survive another one. CLEMENTS: There were lots of other people who had the same idea and believed this very strongly. There was a strong movement to create a League of Nations in Britain, for example, too, at about the same time and there was a league to enforce peace in the United States which had bipartisan support. So it’s not unique to Wilson. He was picking up an idea that was in the atmosphere at the time. WATTENBERG: Of course we didn’t have public opinion polling at that time, or not in any scientific way, but Wilson maintained that the majority of Americans agreed with this idea, although the League of Nations as originally conceived did not have a veto power by the great powers including the United States. Is that correct? BRANDS: No, in fact the essence of the League of Nations was the surrender of a certain amount of sovereignty - national sovereignty - to this international body. Because Wilson, as a political theorist, recognized that until this point nations were essentially outlaws to one another and the only way they could adjudicate differences, the only way they could settle disputes was by war. So what he wanted the nations to do was to give up a certain amount of their sovereignty to this international body, which then could say if country A had wronged country B - well, you’re right; you’re wrong, and this is the way we’re going to settle it without war. CLEMENTS: But the league did have a veto in a sense. The great powers did have a veto because nobody could be compelled to commit troops without their agreement to that. They could recommend to its members that they act in that way, (A) either adopt economic sanctions or (B) military sanctions, but they couldn’t compel a nation to do that. There was no surrender... WATTENBERG: And that’s something through the veto power that to this day has not been solved. I mean, that America is not prepared, and I think correctly, but be that as it may, is not prepared to give that grant of sovereignty of using military force to anybody else. BRANDS: Right. Now as a practical matter, and the practical politicians and diplomats who thought this through, recognized there was no way the League of Nations was going to be able to compel the United States to do anything. Or for that matter Britain or France. CLEMENTS: Wilson was convinced that that would never need to be done. He was convinced that simply the existence of a unified opinion and an attitude on a part of the international community would make it unnecessary ever to use force in that kind of circumstance. BRANDS: And in that regard, Wilson’s thinking was very much like the thinking behind NATO. You create this alliance; you make clear that bad things can happen to people who violate the peace, and then they don’t violate the peace. So if you have the alliance, if you have the organization, you won’t need to use it. WATTENBERG: And the key to this supra-national organization is the idea of self-determination. Is that right? That nations, or at least most nations, should have the ability to choose their own leaders. BRANDS: That was Wilson’s idea in principle. Now, he wasn’t going to be hardcore about it and apply it immediately to every part of the British empire, for example. WATTENBERG: Right. I mean the colonialism thing he sort of stayed away from. BRANDS: Right. But it was a goal that the world should work toward. Because Wilson, like most believers in democracy, thought that people themselves tended to be naturally peaceful and if people could determine their own fate they would be less likely to go to war than if someone else was to determine their fate for them. CLEMENTS: He assumed that if people chose their own destiny they’d choose democracy. That would be the automatic decision on their part. The thing about self-determination is of course that once the genie was out of the bottle I don’t think Wilson had any notion when he first said it how powerful that concept was going to be and how it was going to tear apart the world of the 19th century and the empires of Europe ultimately. WATTENBERG: It is a radical idea, isn’t it? BRANDS: It is radical. And I think it’s Wilson’s most lasting legacy. This revolutionary notion and all - literally revolutionary because it sparks lots of revolutions - that people in India, that people in southeast Asia, the people in Africa, the people in Latin America ought to be able to govern themselves. WATTENBERG: The people in Iraq. BRANDS: People in Iraq ought to be able to govern themselves. You bet. Middle East as well. WATTENBERG: That’s the magic word I want to bring up now for a moment. George Will did a column quoting President George W. Bush in some of those what I think were great speeches in 2003. The two quotes I picked out of it was one is 'liberty is the design of nature' and the other one is 'freedom is the right and the capacity of all mankind.' And this is President Bush talking; not President Wilson, but this is clearly derivative of what - I mean that’s why Wilson is called the first modern president. Is that about right? BRANDS: Yes. If you had told me that President Bush was quoting President Wilson there I would have believed you. CLEMENTS: I would say that’s derivative of Wilson, but it’s also virtually every American president said very much the same thing. Ronald Reagan you can find saying... WATTENBERG: Since Wilson. CLEMENTS: Well, even before Wilson. Theodore Roosevelt would have said the same thing. There’s hard to find an American president who didn’t believe that democracy was the best possible form of government in the whole... WATTENBERG: I mean that’s the whole shining city on the hill, John Winthrop and all that. CLEMENTS: Exactly. I think the distinction, though, is that Bush is not a Wilsonian because Wilson said that this had to be done through collective action; that this was an international process; one did not do this on one’s own. WATTENBERG: Well, hold on. Bush tried to get international action going through the UN and he got 30 nations of the coalition of the willing, so-called, but they wouldn’t play. I mean, the French and the Germans and the Russians. BRANDS: Well in fact I’m going to differ with you guys. WATTENBERG: He had three veto votes, let alone the rest of the Security Council. BRANDS: I think that President Bush is actually a radical Wilsonian. He’s taken this Wilsonian notion of self-determination, of democracy in foreign countries, but adding something that Wilson himself didn’t and that is to use American force, unilaterally if necessary, to democratize foreign countries. CLEMENTS: But Wilson did try that. BRANDS: Well he tried it close to home. CLEMENTS: He tried it in Mexico, for example. BRANDS: Right. CLEMENTS: He tried it in Haiti, in the Dominican Republic. BRANDS: But it wouldn’t have occurred to him to try to... CLEMENTS: And it didn’t work. BRANDS: Well, okay. CLEMENTS: And I think he learned from that experience that that was a mistake and that’s why he opposed intervention in Russia, for example. BRANDS: But he reluctantly went along. CLEMENTS: Well, reluctantly. But very reluctantly. BRANDS: Right. Yes. WATTENBERG: Well, I mean just to make sure we have some of the complexities in it, I mean, this was not President Bush’s first idea in terms of Iraq. It’s, like most things, a little more complicated. BRANDS: Sure. And I’ll add that one of Wilson’s fourteen points was disarmament. So he was very interested in reducing the arsenals around the world because he believed that those contributed to the willingness and capacity to go to war. WATTENBERG: So he’s out there. He, Wilson, is out there plugging for peace and democracy and willing to use force. Is it fair to say that he was an early day neoconservative given those ideas, which are all part of the neoconservative playbook? BRANDS: I think Wilson was much more of an internationalist than the neoconservatives are. WATTENBERG: Well, the neoconservatives I think are - they’re internationalists when it works; when it doesn’t work they’re prepared to go it alone. BRANDS: Okay. Well, Wilson was more prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to the League of Nations. In fact that was the whole point. If you want to look at two... WATTENBERG: And neoconservatives are very suspect of the UN. BRANDS: Precisely. I mean in Wilson’s day, Theodore Roosevelt had a quite different view - views of American power than Wilson did. Theodore Roosevelt was really a nationalist. America first. And he would use American power alone before going to some international body, whereas Wilson was the other way around. He might have been willing to rely on American power as a last resort, but it wasn’t going to be his first resort. He really did take the League of Nations seriously and he really did believe that another war like the Great War was going to destroy civilization. And it had to be avoided at nearly all costs. WATTENBERG: So he goes out after his term - he was elected in 1912; he was reelected to keep us out of war in 1916; his term expires in 1920; the Versailles agreement is 1919 and he goes out around the country by railroad car basically, I guess, to sell this idea of the League of Nations to the American people. And what happens? CLEMENTS: Well, he gave a series of speeches, sometimes two and three a day over a considerable period; I don’t know how many all told. But major speeches... WATTENBERG: I mean whistle-stop, back of the train... CLEMENTS: Some of those and then also a major address in almost every city he stopped where he talked to 15 or 20,000 people with no amplification. I think the only place he had a loudspeaker system was in San Diego where he did have in fact that, but otherwise he was speaking to these enormous crowds... WATTENBERG: So it was an enormous physical feat. CLEMENTS: It was hugely exhausting and he had been working harder than he ever had before during the peace conference and had been ill a couple of times, whether he had strokes or not... WATTENBERG: He had had some early strokes apparently. CLEMENTS: Well, there’s some debate about that but he certainly had had health problems - serious health problems. And he was absolutely exhausted in that summer of 1919 and felt that he had to do this because it was the only hope for selling this to the American people and overcoming the opposition in the Senate. BRANDS: That’s it - the Senate was controlled by Republicans including the arch foe of the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles, Henry Cabot Lodge. WATTENBERG: Who was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. BRANDS: That’s right. A long time - a Republican...a long-time foe. WATTENBERG: And a treaty has to be passed by two-thirds of the Senate? BRANDS: Right. WATTENBERG: So it’s an uphill fight to begin with. BRANDS: You bet. And Wilson understood that he couldn’t directly deal with the Senate, but if he could go over the head of the Senate to the American people, then he thought that he could generate enough of a groundswell behind the League of Nations and Treaty of Versailles that the Senate would be forced to go along. And he seemed to be making good progress until his physical collapse outside or Pueblo, Colorado, in September of 1919. He suffered a massive stroke. He was never the same. And all of a sudden this voice that had been so eloquent in support of the League of Nations, the idea of this new kind of peace, this voice fell silent and there was no one else to make that case. WATTENBERG: The vote for the League of Nations, notwithstanding everything that happened, he exceeded a majority, didn’t he? BRANDS: That’s it. WATTENBERG: He came within six or seven votes of getting the two-thirds. BRANDS: That’s right. You could say he was trumped by that provision in the Constitution that says you have to get two-thirds for a treaty instead of just a simple majority. WATTENBERG: It’s been written that had Wilson tried to do this in the era of television or television and radio that he might well have succeeded. BRANDS: Wilson was a great communicator. WATTENBERG: He was a great communicator and it would have been just so much less of a physical stress. I mean, you have amplification; you sit down in a television studio; you do a talk show. I mean, it’s not fun but... BRANDS: And he could have reached many millions more people than he ever could hope to on these whistle-stop train tours. WATTENBERG: And he only needed another six or so votes in the Senate. Then what happens is a great personal and political tragedy. This whole issue of, aside from the League, who’s running the country? CLEMENTS: He had the stroke in October; he was paralyzed, lay in bed for weeks, nobody knew whether he was going to live or die, didn’t see much of anybody for several months. Cabinet didn’t meet until the following April and there was no - and the only kind of communication that came from the president came through his wife who would carry messages to him and come back with some scribbling on the margin saying the president thinks or the president wants. Nobody quite knew what the president wanted or what was being said or who was making the decisions. WATTENBERG: And the argument is made that she, this unelected woman - boy that sounds familiar - going back just a very few years - was running the country. Is that right? BRANDS: Well, she was in the sense of the White House and in the sense of determining what information Wilson got and what information got from Wilson back out again. WATTENBERG: Which is an enormous power in itself aside from the fact that she may have been pushing him one way or the other. BRANDS: Yes. And she was much more concerned at this point about Wilson’s legacy, his reputation, his standing, than she was about the national interest broadly. She - as far as I can tell, she didn’t have any particular policy hobbyhorses. She just wanted to protect her husband, the president. WATTENBERG: Was there talk - you mentioned it in your book - was there talk of him resigning the presidency and turning it over to the vice president? BRANDS: There was talk but nobody knew how sick he was. No one knew if he was getting better, and so the initiative at that point had to come from the - from the president, from the White House. And it wasn’t. WATTENBERG: And his doctors, to put it mildly, lied? BRANDS: They conspired in this cover up as well. He actually had one doctor primarily. CLEMENTS: I think, in fairness to them, I think they didn’t altogether understand what they were facing. They thought that this was purely a physical problem. His mind was relatively clear, he was coherent, he was able to talk to people. They assumed he was okay, even though he was very weak. But I think they misunderstood the psychological impact of a terrible stroke like this and it really incapacitated him; it really destroyed his ability to think rationally. Doctors had known for years that Wilson had high blood pressure but there wasn’t anything they could do about it. So they just ignored it. BRANDS: And he had had, as Ken suggested, he had had these episodes that were probably strokes earlier but he had recovered. So there was reason to think he might recover again. recover again. CLEMENTS: One more thing about Edith, if you don’t mind - we’ll just pick it up... WATTENBERG: Oh, no. Go ahead. CLEMENTS: One more thing I think has been crucially important about Edith’s role. One of the things she did keep from the president was a real sense of what the political opinion of the time was. He had very little sense of the climate. That’s always a - it was a problem in this period anyhow for a president to know what the American people thought and he had depended upon his secretary, Joseph Tumulty for years to sort of keep him briefed on what people were saying and what the back corridors were doing. And that was really cut off from him in this period. WATTENBERG: What is your guess - what did the American people think about the League of Nations and self-determination and democracy? I mean suppose you did a, quote, a good public opinion survey in 1919. What would you have come up with? BRANDS: I’m going to guess that a majority would have supported Wilson and through Wilson, the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles, whether it would have been a two-thirds majority; I doubt it. You can hardly get a two-thirds majority for anything in this country on any issue. WATTENBERG: Do you buy that, Ken? CLEMENTS: I think that probably that was true, but I would also say that the great majority of people didn’t really have much idea of what that meant; what obligations were being undertaken by joining the league. BRANDS: Precisely. But I think - and that’s why I said they would have supported Wilson. They could support this person and to some extent they would trust him. They had trusted him during the war. They had trusted during the peacetime. WATTENBERG: And he was regarded at his high point, as not only a great American hero but as the most popular man in the world, by far. BRANDS: When he went to Europe in 1919 for the Peace Conference, it was almost like the second coming of Jesus. He was that popular. CLEMENTS: Something like two million Parisians turned out and lined the streets when he came into Paris. It was just astonishing. WATTENBERG: Okay. And then he - he leaves the presidency in 1920. Harding becomes - Warren Harding becomes president. Warren Harding dies while Wilson is still alive in this house and Wilson is too sick to go to the funeral. He stays outside in the car. How were those last years in this house? Let’s just end it up on that. Just give us a little sense. Here we are in this incredible house. How does he live? Is he bitter? Is he ill? CLEMENTS: Well he certainly was very ill and I think although it’s interesting the few public statements we have from him, he expressed optimism that eventually the ideas that he had, eventually the principles of the league would triumph; eventually the American people would accept the idea that he had. So I think there’s some bitterness and some unhappiness but the fact is that I don’t think he was every really down about the future of his hopes and ideas for the country. WATTENBERG: Wilson is said by some - that’s a good neutral way of saying it - to be one of our half dozen or so greatest presidents. I mean, not Washington, but in the rank immediately below that. Do you agree with that as presidential scholars? And if so, why? CLEMENTS: Yes. I think that that’s true. Obviously the League of Nations legacy, the whole idea of American joining in international organization, the breaking down of isolationism is a huge impact. But there’s also an important domestic impact. WATTENBERG: But that’s why he’s called the first modern president. CLEMENTS: In many ways, yes. But also, of course, there’s an enormous domestic impact, too. The creation of the Federal Reserve System, the first peacetime income tax, reform of the antitrust laws. And all of that was done, I think, in a most remarkable way because he did it in time of peace. There was no national crisis and he shoved that legislation through Congress in a year or a year-and-a-half. You know, it’s an extraordinary mastery over Congress - a control over Congress that’s very rare among American presidents. BRANDS: Simply by establishing the Federal Reserve System, Wilson should get the lasting thanks of nearly everybody in this country. He solved, finally, the money and banking problem that had vexed Americans from the very beginning. And so the kind of banking crises that were a regular feature of American life during the 19th century, pretty much have disappeared. Yes, there was one at the beginning of the Great Depression, but since then things have been relatively smooth. So for that alone I’d credit Wilson with being a great domestic innovator. But I think it’s on the foreign policy side that Wilson really ranks in the top. Because Wilson dealt with the first great international crisis of the 20th century, and he led the United States to victory, at least to participation on the victorious side. But beyond that he established this notion that the United States always going to be involved in world affairs. Now, Americans would forget that for awhile during the 1920! s and 1930s, but it was Wilson who said that the world had to be made safe for democracy and every president certainly, from Wilson, take a break during the 1920s and ’30s, but from Franklin Roosevelt to President George W. Bush believes that. WATTENBERG: And you have had - here we are in 2004 - you have had in the last ten, twenty years this incredible surge of democratic governance around the world. CLEMENTS: Exactly. BRANDS: Right. WATTENBERG: And free markets and national banking systems and all the things that Wilson was talking... CLEMENTS: That’s also a result of another of Wilson’s major statements and he was the first international leader to talk about self-determination and to say that the day of the European empires was finished and liberation and independence for all of those colonies was the future. So, that’s where much of this became possible. That’s how these countries began to move toward democracy because they began to get out from under the colonial control. BRANDS: Wilson was one of those rare presidents who had almost more impact on the world outside the United States than he did on the United States itself. It’s Wilson who enunciates these ideals of self-determination and democracy that the rest of the world catches onto. And so when... WATTENBERG: All of a sudden these little countries in Europe sort of... Sfume... in places like that suddenly start springing up and saying... BRANDS: Precisely. WATTENBERG: ... we want some of that also. BRANDS: And they can say that the American president told us we could do this. He was the first American president to do that. CLEMENTS: Now that’s had some disastrous affects in eastern Europe for example. The fragmentation of the Austrian/Hungarian empire may not have been a great thing for stability I that region. But it was irreversible. BRANDS: Democracy’s not the answer to every problem in the world. WATTENBERG: No. Okay on that note that democracy is not the answer to every problem in the world I think we can agree, although long-term, in my judgment, it’s the answer to a lot of problems. So... BRANDS: That’s right. It’s a very good start. WATTENBERG: Thank you very much, Bill Brands and Ken Clements. And thank you. Please, remember to send us your comments via email. We think it makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. (credits) We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 4433 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.; Suite C-100. Washington, D.C., 20008 or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS online at PBS.org and please, let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for Think Tank is provided by... At Pfizer we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. We are PBS. 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