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History See other History Articles Title: The Presidency in Wartime: George W. Bush discovers Woodrow Wilson Excerpted from Chapter 10 of You Can’t Be President: The outrageous barriers to democracy in America, published by Melville House. John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper’s Magazine. To understand what war—hot or cold—does to American democracy, examine the last three years of the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, from 1917 to 1920. Wilson’s reputation today remains essentially positive, even glorious. This professor-turned-politician is remembered for the most part as a visionary who was martyred in the cause of world democracy and peace. A self-styled idealist who called World War I “a war to end all wars,” Wilson claimed that America was fighting to make the world “safe for democracy,” not for any crass political motives. For these reasons, millions of high school students have been taught more about Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his failed crusade for American entry into the League of Nations than about George Washington’s or Dwight Eisenhower’s prescient, regrettably unheeded farewell addresses, which argued for restraint in foreign policy and against the dangers of a large, permanent military establishment. But the Woodrow Wilson of dramatic oration and lofty principles was also an intolerant demagogue whose repressive policies and personal ambition sullied his stated aspiration to save the world from war and corruption. Long before there was McCarthyism, there was Wilsonianism, with its own “red scare” tactics and assaults on civil liberties that may have made Joe McCarthy envious. Although he had always insisted he was trying to avoid war, as early as his December 7,1915, State of the Union Address to Congress, Wilson was hinting at the war-fevered crackdown to come: The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue…. A little while ago such a thing would have seemed incredible. Because it was incredible we made no preparation for it. We would have been almost ashamed to prepare for it, as if we were suspicious of ourselves, our own comrades and neighbors! But the ugly and incredible thing has actually come about and we are without adequate federal laws to deal with it. I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment and feel that in doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. What was incredible, and ugly, was the ferocity of Wilson’s antidemocratic impulse. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in his book Secrecy, Wilson’s “plea… astonishes still, as much for its passion as for what it proposes… No president had ever spoken like that before; none has since.” Continued at the [url=http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003638]link[/url] Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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