Worldmaking (23 page)

Wilson set out on his tour at the beginning of September 1919, delivering forty-two speeches in twenty-one days without the assistance of a microphone. It was a magnificent effort, in which he displayed all the rhetorical skills that his father had encouraged from a young age. Wilson described the League of Nations as “the only possible guarantee against war,” and sought to allay fears that Article X of the treaty would result in American boys being dispatched to Central Europe to settle atavistic, irresolvable disputes. While he struggled to compromise with senators, the president was infinitely better at respecting and meeting the doubts expressed by the general public. And it is at this point that the story turns Shakespearean.

Drained by his cumulative efforts, on September 25 Wilson collapsed onstage in Pueblo, Colorado. Ushered away onto another train, Wilson confided to an aide, “I just feel as if I am going to pieces,” before looking away to shield tears that were welling in his eyes. One week later, in Washington, Wilson suffered a massive stroke. Death toyed with Wilson for a week before releasing him partly blind and paralyzed down the left side of his body. If the president had died, one might imagine the Senate passing the treaty with minor amendments: an apt eulogy to a major presidency. As it happened, the wounded Wilson proved even less prone to compromise than before, instructing fellow Democrats to vote down any version of the treaty that was sullied by Republican reservations.
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On March 19, 1920, twenty-one Democrats—ignoring their president's pleas for purity in defeat—and twenty-eight Republicans voted for Lodge's version of the treaty, which greatly reduced the potency of the League of Nations but left much of the original intact. Yet this cross-party tally fell seven short of the two-thirds majority required for ratification.

During the 1920 Democratic Convention, Wilson reluctantly declined to stand for reelection, and the nomination was secured by a rank outsider aided mainly by his lack of connection to the president: Governor James M. Cox of Ohio. Wilson and his followers scored a partial success when Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a Wilson devotee and League of Nations enthusiast—secured the vice presidential nomination. FDR performed well during the campaign and set an important marker in defeat that served him well during later nomination tussles within his party. A few months later, Republicans swept to power, electing Warren Harding to the presidency in a landslide—Harding won more than 60 percent of the vote compared to Cox's sub-Bryan showing of 34 percent. The American public had delivered a damning indictment of Wilson's diplomatic vision, which hurt the president a great deal in the four years that remained of his life. It fell to Elihu Root to register an apt appraisal of the Wilson presidency, observing that Americans “had learned more about international relations within the past eight years than they had learned in the preceding eighty years,” and they were “only at the beginning of the task.”
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AMERICANS FIRST

CHARLES BEARD

The historian and political scientist Charles Beard was unimpressed by Woodrow Wilson's efforts to avoid involvement in the European conflict from 1914 to 1916. He supported early American entry into the First World War, a stance that appears improbable at first sight. Beard hailed from Quaker origins, opposed the expansionist thrust of the McKinley-Roosevelt years, and the main cause of his celebrity was a book reviled by millions of patriotic Americans. His
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
was a provocative reinterpretation of America's founding, which sold in large numbers and made him famous.

Published in 1913, the book observed that while most political actors are driven to some degree by economic self-interest, the Founding Fathers had elevated this imperative to a fine art. Fearful of the chaos created by the Articles of Confederation, in which states' rights trumped those of the federal government, Beard argued, the Founding Fathers had an overarching goal during their deliberations in Philadelphia: to protect men of means from the threat posed by broad-based political activity. The American Constitution was for Beard “essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.”
1
It was a radical piece of revisionism that created an almighty stir. President Wilson denounced the book, as did
The New York Times
in an editorial.
2
The Ohio Star
presented an evocative (and provocative) banner headline, “Scavengers, Hyena-like, Descecrate the Graves of the Dead Patriots We Revere,” then added that the book was “libelous, vicious, and damnable” and that true Americans “should rise to condemn [Beard] and the purveyors of his filthy lies and rotten aspersions.”
3
With admirably dry humor, William Howard Taft wondered why Beard had to depress people by telling the truth.
4

In 1912, Beard refused to vote for either Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, viewing their Progressivism as timid affairs driven by the same economic self-interest—albeit cloaked in ameliorative rhetoric—that motivated the Founders. Away from domestic policy, Beard criticized Wilson's attempts to export democracy to Mexico, dismissing the president's “loose talk … about restoring order by bayonets,” and observing that if worldwide democratization is inevitable, “it is better to let it alone or to aid in its culmination.”
5
Yet there was something about the First World War—and German motives in particular—that roused Beard's pugnacity. On a trivial level, Charles and his wife, Mary Ritter, a distinguished scholar in her own right, had honeymooned on the European continent in 1900, where Beard was “amused at the pretensions of German professors and fuming at Prussian soldiers who forced him into the gutter rather than share the sidewalk,” according to his later friend and colleague, the historian Eric F. Goldman.
6
More substantively, Beard had delivered a speech at the City College of New York in the autumn of 1914 that condemned German militarism so forcefully that the college president banned future talks by Beard on that subject.
7
As German U-boat attacks increased, Beard criticized President Wilson for his weak responses, observing “that this country should definitely align itself with the Allies and help eliminate Prussianism from the earth.”
8

Beard detected something rotten in Germany's heart, and his fierce egalitarianism led him to view the nation as a dangerous adversary to be defeated if Progressive causes were to survive at home and abroad. In a speech at Amherst College in 1917, he warned that the “present plight of the world seems to show that mankind is in the grip of inexorable forces which may destroy civilization if not subdued to humane purposes.”
9
Like Walter Lippmann, Beard viewed American participation in the war as an opportunity to effect lasting social reform in the United States and beyond. Even the robber barons would be compelled to serve a larger good. Dispensing praise that would likely have stirred disquiet among its recipients, Beard lauded the Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Harrimans as “creative pioneers,” anticipating a time when their “magnificent economic structures” would be used for “public purposes.”
10

Irritated by the irresponsibility of the Wilson campaign's slogan in 1916—“He kept us out of war”—Beard held his nose and voted for Charles Evans Hughes, until recently an associate justice of the Supreme Court, primarily due to his support for military preparedness (it also helped that the Republican candidate offered clear support for national woman suffrage). Deploying Mahanian reasoning, Beard observed that “war has been one of the most tremendous factors in the origin of the State and the progress of mankind,” and that ducking a necessary fight was an abdication of responsibility.
11

During the election year, Beard mischievously claimed to understand the tenor of public opinion better than Wilson's campaign advisers: “Millions of Americans would give their life blood to prevent the establishment of [a Prussian state] on these shores. In this I mean no breach of neutrality. With due scientific calm and without expressing any preference in the matter I think I am stating accurately the opinions of most of my countrymen.”
12
Sarcasm aside, Beard's words revealed his sense of urgency. As Wilson edged slowly toward intervention, Beard condemned the president's cant. He complained to
The New York Times
that the “Peace Without Victory” speech was “not much of a basis for negotiation,” and unless Wilson was operating from a script written with the other belligerents, “he was just preaching a sermon.” Wilson's support for ethnic self-determination, meanwhile, brought to mind Pandora opening her box. “Does it mean an independent Ireland?” Beard wondered. “What about Alsace-Lorraine? What about Bohemia? What about Croatia and the scores of little nations in the Balkans? What about India? What about Haiti and Santo Domingo, where the United States is ruling according to President Wilson's orders.”
13
Beard was relieved when Wilson finally requested a declaration of war. Distancing himself from the president's grander ambitions, however, he called for “poise, cold-bloodedness, and a Machiavellian disposition to see things as they are … whether we like them or not.”
14

The First World War witnessed a remarkable mobilization on the part of America's universities and intellectuals. When America's war began, its research universities—inspired by early efforts, such as Robert La Follette Sr.'s “Wisconsin Idea,” to have universities serve a wider political purpose—willingly donated their resources to help realize Wilson's plans. Hopeful that national planning would elevate the significance of the social sciences, Beard wrote in an article for
The New Republic
on November 17, 1917, that “political science, economics, social economy, and sociology are now in the crucible of circumstance.”
15
Yet it was the natural and physical sciences, not the social sciences, that found it easier to embrace their elevation to circumstance. In February 1918, for example, Columbia University's mechanical and electrical engineering departments offered all the assistance to the Navy Department that it deemed useful—a windfall for the government. Science and engineering departments followed suit across the nation.

Concerned lest they be left behind, humanities and social science scholars also began to offer their services to wartime America. Alongside distinguished fellow historians such as Carl Becker, Albert Bushnell Hart, and J. Franklin Jameson, Beard propagandized for President Wilson under the aegis of the Committee on Public Information. His scholarly efforts primarily consisted in placing Wilhelmine Germany in its proper historical context: as a ruthless expansionary power that posed a direct threat to the United States.
16
In an appeal to support President Wilson's fourth Liberty Bond Drive, Beard wrote in
Harper's Magazine
that America “and her allies are now pitted against the most merciless despotism the world has ever seen … A German victory means the utter destruction of those ideals of peace and international goodwill which have been America's great reliance.”
17
Beard was aware that presenting despotism versus democracy in Manichaean terms obscured as much as it revealed. But he willingly set aside complexity to serve a larger good.

Ultimately, though, regimentation of purpose made Beard queasy. In the spring of 1916, when American participation still seemed a distant prospect, Columbia's Board of Trustees had warned Beard against any teaching that was “likely to inculcate disrespect for American institutions”—an admonition that Beard cheerfully ignored, as it would have required disavowal of his
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
. The president of Columbia University, the effervescent and strong-willed Nicholas Murray Butler, then warned the faculty at the onset of hostilities that any professor who failed to support the war would jeopardize his position at the university.
18
In March 1917, the university rescinded a speaking invitation that had been issued to the Russian pacifist intellectual Count Ilya Tolstoy (son of Leo). This infuriated Beard, who viewed freedom of speech as inviolable. In a speech on June 6, 1917, President Butler observed that “what had been tolerated before becomes intolerable now … What had been folly was now treason,” before delivering “the last and only warning to any among us … who are not with whole heart and mind and strength committed to fight with us to make the world safe for democracy.”
19
A few months later, Columbia's Board of Trustees dismissed two professors, Henry W. L. Dana (active in the Anti-Militarism League) and James McKeen Cattell (a pacifist), for expressing unpatriotic sentiments. Butler intervened to stall the promotion of a professor who had failed to accord sufficient respect to the Supreme Court.

On October 9, 1917, Beard concluded a lecture to a class of seventy students with the announcement that this would be his last. The university's efforts to “humiliate or terrorize every man who held progressive, liberal, or controversial views” compelled him to sever his association with the institution.
20
The students rose to their feet and applauded for twenty-five minutes, an affirmation that left Beard in tears.
21
President Butler was blindsided and dismayed, remarking that Beard's “resignation was completely unnecessary; I did my best to get him to stay; he had no excuse for going.”
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