“Uncancel Woodrow Wilson” is the case David Frum attempts in the new issue of The Atlantic. Frum thinks well of Wilsonian internationalism, and thinks Wilson’s progressive reformism was . . . pretty good too.
Where to begin?
Frum is a skilled polemicist and writer, but his case for Wilson is unconvincing. Frum affects a both-sidesism, trying to scold lefties who hate Wilson for his open and vicious racism, and trying to shame conservatives for not liking Wilson’s internationalism and all-around gooey goodness. To be sure, whinny students at Princeton managed to get Wilson’s name stripped from Princeton’s graduate school of public and international affairs which Wilson himself helped to found. I’d have preferred to keep Wilson’s name, as a citadel of the kind of progressivism that needs always to be overturned. It was truth in advertising.
Frum’s case essentially boils down to “everyone was a eugenicist racist back then, so why single out Wilson for special opprobrium?” This deflection is weak.
But more defective is the defense of Wilson’s international record. Frum’s rendition of Wilson’s decisions, principles, judgment, and actions can be sharply contested as a matter of history, but this gets tedious in a hurry.
Most significant is the largest glaring omission of the article: Wilson’s deliberate violence to the founding principles of the nation, and the Constitution. At one point, Frum writes:
The gradual progress that the U.S. has made since 1787 has all depended on the respect Wilson and other leaders had for the original plan, as much as some on the right insist that they betrayed it.
But Wilson did betray it, because he (and other leading Progressives) did not “respect” the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence—in other words, “the original plan.” As Harvey Mansfield wrote years ago, Wilson was the first American president to attack the Constitution. Wilson, along with his contemporary progressive intellectuals like Frank Goodnow, John Burgess, Charles Beard, J. Allen Smith, etc., all argued openly that the Constitution, and the philosophy of the founders, was obsolete, and needed to be replaced. Far from “respecting” the “original plan” of the founders, Wilson and his compatriots expressed open contempt for it. How does Frum—or anyone—miss this?
Frum explains: “In our zeal, we refuse to understand past generations as they understood themselves.” Readers with a background in political philosophy will recognize this as the interpretive principle of Leo Strauss. But Frum turns it on its head, not noticing that he (Frum) does not understand Wilson as Wilson understood himself, that is, as someone who took his guide from Kant and Hegel (with a side helping of Darwin), rejecting Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln—and the constitutional order they built but which Wilson and his successors have spent a century deliberately tearing down. When Wilson wrote his 1889 book The State, he admitted that he “wore out a German dictionary while writing it.” It is indeed ironic that Wilson would end up taking the nation to war against the Germany whose political theory of history Wilson found the most compelling.
There is no recognition or discussion in Frum’s defense brief of this central aspect of Wilson’s thought and legacy. I doubt Frum is even aware of the critique, or if he is, he does not take it seriously or think it worth trying to refute.
For a thorough antidote, see William Schambra’s fine extended treatment of Wilson and the recent conservative response to him in his 2007 lecture at the Heritage Foundation entitled “Revisiting Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism, America’s transformation, and the conservative response.” Or R.J. Pestritto’s indispensable book, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism.
Chaser: One especially fun quotation that Frum includes that ironically undermines his case is from Arthur Link, Wilson’s most devoted biographer. Here’s Frum’s account:
Arthur S. Link, who edited 69 volumes of Wilson’s papers and wrote five volumes of biography, paid Wilson this tribute: “Aside from St. Paul, Jesus and the great religious prophets, Woodrow Wilson was the most admirable character I’ve ever encountered in history.” [Emphasis added.]
This is precisely why I have always referred to him as “the missing Link.”
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