Let’s not ‘uncancel’ Wilson. He wasn’t just a racist, he was bad in many other ways.
David Frum wrote an essay arguing that it’s time to “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson.” No. Just no. Wilson didn’t champion any values that we need to reinstate in America, a fact that goes beyond his acknowledged racism.
Wilson was racist, something even Frum concedes. He undid the last remnants of Reconstruction. However, according to Frum, there are things about Wilson conservatives should admire:
- He instituted the first income tax to redistribute wealth.
- He took America off the gold standard.
- He nationalized America’s rail system.
There are a few other credits to Wilson’s name: He supported women’s suffrage (something I’ve come to disagree with when I look at leftist women) and nominated Louis Brandeis to become the Supreme Court’s first Jewish justice. He started giving the Philippines autonomy, although he managed to embroil us in Haiti for two decades. He also promised but failed to keep America out of WWI.
And it’s WWI that leads me to what is Wilson’s biggest flaw, and that’s the policy he crafted that saw America as the world’s policeman, tasked with making “the world safe for democracy.”
Americans did not want to enter WWI, and the country was ostensibly neutral, although that neutrality was Anglophilic. That was partly because the British cut the transatlantic cable, so all war news that Americans received came via England. More importantly, American ships could continue to engage in commerce with Britain while Britain’s blockade kept them from the continent. Eventually, England owed America a lot of money, making England’s possible economic collapse a threat to America’s economy. It didn’t help when the Germans sank the HMS Lusitania.
Image: Woodrow Wilson. Public domain.
By 1916, the Germans concluded that the Americans were a de facto combatant in WWI. They announced that moving forward, all American ships approaching Britain were fair game. With that, plus the infamous Zimmerman Telegram, Wilson felt he could no longer stay out of the war. This was true even though if Americans returned to true neutrality, there was no reason for Germany to threaten them—and Americans knew that.
Still, the monied interests needed that war, so, in April 1917, Wilson made his case to the American people, setting the tone for America’s foreign policy for the next 100-plus years. Since he couldn’t admit that Britain’s debt to America was the real reason to side with it, Wilson instead came up with a high-flown moral doctrine justifying America’s entry into the war. And so the Wilson doctrine was born:
The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
Although the Wilson doctrine was essentially a cover for an economic war, Wilson probably believed his own rhetoric, which is why he tried to get the victorious allied nations to welcome Germany back into the fold. The Allies thought the American president was a ridiculous little man and ended up, disastrously, wringing every penny possible out of Germany.
While the Europeans sneered at the idealistic hick from America, the American intelligentsia, deeply in love with the whole rule of expertise that Wilson promised, agreed that America was the engine of a higher calling. It did not occur to them that America’s freedoms might, in fact, be uniquely American.
Since then, with only a brief break during the Trump administration, official American foreign policy has hewed tightly to the Wilson Doctrine. America’s foreign wars, whether in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now (via proxy) in Ukraine, have ostensibly been about “democracy” and “liberation.” (WWII was the exception because Japan directly attacked America and Germany then declared war against us.)
No matter the special interests behind the scenes tugging policy one way or another, in the grand panoply of American foreign policy, America fought on the principle that her blood and wealth, when spilled on foreign shores, would free the world from tyrants to the benefit of all, America included.
The policy stuck during the Obama years, except that Obama, unlike Wilson, who was a patriot, albeit a progressive one, hated America. Obama’s dark vision led him into a Bizarro World version of the Wilson doctrine. We were no longer tasked with making the world safe for democracy. Instead, we had to make the world safe from America. Thus, Obama pulled us out of nations where we were making a positive difference and allied us with Iran, Turkey, and Ukraine while bowing to China. America would make this world safe by leading from behind.
Trump, for the first time in over 100 years, came up with an America-first policy. Our politicians shouldn’t be making the world better; they should be making America better. With Biden, though, we’re right back to Wilson: We’re going to make Ukraine, one of the world’s most corrupt countries, “safe for democracy.”
And it all started with Wilson, who should never be rehabilitated.
(You can read my longer, more detailed version of the same essay here.)