Wilson Agonistes
THE ORDEAL OF WOODROW WILSON by , with a new introduction by Senator Mark Hatfield. Woodrow Wilson Center / Johns Hopkins University, $12.95.
THE GREAT WAR had ended, and the old order of Europe lay in heaps of rubble. Fields were blasted into cold mud, sliced with trenches, laced with barbed wire. Refugees drifted across meaningless borders, while armies of revolutionaries and reactionaries fought to impose their separate visions of the future on stretches of ungoverned land. Victors ravenous for spoils professed, with some sincere part of their split consciousness, the ideals declared by Woodrow Wilson, the President of the brash republic across the Atlantic. And Herbert Hoover, a humanitarian on a scale that still staggers the reader, was undertaking mammoth labors for the fulfillment of what he defined as Wilson’s goals and his own.
The reissue of Hoover’s remembrances of the period after the First World War, first published in 1958, by McGraw-Hill, tells a familiar story: Wilson’s hopes, the greed of the Allies, the President’s disastrous refusal to compromise with the Senate on the League of Nations, the public turn against the Treaty of Versailles in the election of 1920. No one, certainly not Wilson himself, could have been in a better position to tell that story than was Herbert Hoover. His tremendous effort with the Belgian Relief Commission in bringing aid to occupied Belgium had given him unofficial connections with the Wilson Administration even before the entrance of the United States into the war. During U.S. participation in the conflict he served as domestic food administrator, while continuing with the commission. The strong-willed Wilson, in his 1918 call for a Democratic Congress, gratuitously suggested that the Republicans had been obstructionists to the pursuit of his war goals. Yet Hoover remained doggedly loyal to the President, and broke with his own party to support his chief’s appeal. During the early days of peace Hoover administered relief throughout a continent torn by war and revolution, meanwhile advising Wilson on the needs especially of Eastern Europe, where Bolsheviks and rightists battled against emerging democratic-libertarian regimes.
So Hoover was an insider as to the Administration’s objectives and actions, or as much of one as the increasingly sick and remote President would allow. And from his relief efforts he knew what were the dangers and promises that came with peace and the fall of the German, Austrian, Russian, anti Turkish empires.
In his book Hoover retold events that were widely known. And Wilson came out looking much like the figure in the standard histories: magnificently broad in his vision, and hopelessly ensnared in the unnecessary detail of it; relentlessly moral, and ruinously moralistic; compassionate and generous to the stricken peoples of Europe, and quite other than generous to his friends; heroic and self-destructive in will. Hoover’s book was meant as a tribute to his former chief, but it is easy to suspect that anger and hurt might underlie a portrayal that presents the worst as well as the best in one of our greatest statesmen. What makes Hoover’s memoir especially valuable to readers already familiar with the story are matters of tone and interpretation which Hoover himself, in his plodding and colorlessly earnest telling, probably did not notice that he was making available.
For example, Hoover’s account indirectly helps to correct the notion that isolationism and Wilsonian internationalism were polarities. They were, of course, at political odds. But a look backward reveals how closely both adhered to a prevailing American mentality.
Hoover did not analyze the isolationists, anti rarely even mentioned them. But students of the period need to keep in mind that isolationists at the time were not the stingy and xenophobic conservatives of the late 1940s, rhetorically anticommunist but offended that the United States should do anything effortful or costly to help Western Europe keep out of the hands of Stalin. Nor were they ethnic purists of the Patrick Buchanan variety. Helping people, or nations, has not been high on the wish list of twentieth-century American conservatives. No, the progressive isolationists of Wilson’s time, sufficiently rooted in ethnic communities to be partly immune to xenophobia, argued simply that we would do neither ourselves nor the Old World a service by becoming entangled in Europe, and could be more useful if we perfected the example of our democratic institutions. That assumption contains its share of arrogance and condescension— but those are vices that Wilsonians could not claim to be superior to, and that at their worst lack the meanness of more recent isolationism. What Hooter’s book has to offer, though, relates to Wilsonian internationalism, such as it was; and there is much in Hoover’s recollections to indicate, without the author’s intent, how much the Wilsonians shared with their putative opponents.
THE LEADING evidence is Wilson’s refusal during the war to call the United States an Ally. We were, he insisted, in an association with the Allies: hence the phrase “Allied and Associated Powers.” The technicality makes some sense. In Europe the conflict was in part for territorial boundaries that could mean nothing to us. The stakes were an imperial dominion and a commercial advantage for which Britain was surely more our potential rival than was Germany. Self-interest was among our motives for wishing for Allied success—very cold motives of finance and commerce, if some careful historians are to be believed—but they differed at least in detail from the ambitions that drove the Allies themselves. Wilson, in his fastidious aloofness from the term “Allies,” was to an extent doing nothing more than keeping his nation clear of the squabbles that he rightly saw as having fueled the war in the first place. We were associated with the Allies because we had certain things to straighten out in the theater of war, notably the matter of submarine warfare. We were not allied with France in a hostility toward Germany which went back before the Franco-Prussian War and its territorial settlements, or with Britain in her industrial and commercial competition with the Germans. Nor did Wilson wish to commit us to rearranging the map of Europe on terms that were important only to Europeans.
Wilson, however, intended more than a merely strategic distancing of his country from endless and exhausting European quarrels. The United States had not yet become irretrievably entangled in the rest of the world. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans were still traversable only by boat. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, My Lai and our support of death-squad regimes—such evidence that in foreign policy we would share Europe’s fall from Edenic purity remained in the future. What we had already been doing south of our border was apparently not sufficiently coherent and prominent to reveal its meanings even to Wilson, who was responsible for some of it. Wilson actually believed that we differed from the Allies not only in the specifics of our aims but also because we had the geographical and historical good fortune to be free of any greed that reached beyond our borders, and he wished to assert the difference in the very language of our alliance. The President, in short, was himself something of an isolationist in outlook, just as, in their own way, the progressive isolationists of his time were internationalist in their commitment to the perfection of political and economic justice.
The care to maintain independence, desirable for any nation but especially so for a country convinced of its moral separateness, dictated the President’s insistence during the war on keeping American forces under separate command. It guided the Wilsonians also in the early days of peace. Some of them, including Secretary of State Robert Lansing and Hoover himself, disliked the idea of the President’s sitting in on the Peace Conference. Frank I. Cobb, the editor of the New York World and an assistant to Colonel Edward House in Paris, argued in a memorandum dated November 4, 1918, that in sitting down with other world leaders Wilson would lose “all the power that comes from distance and detachment.” Cobb continued, “Instead of remaining the great arbiter of human freedom he becomes merely a negotiator dealing with other negotiators.” Wilson went, and perhaps for the better, though it is hard to imagine what he salvaged there, or could have salvaged. A telegram of November 7 from Hoover to Joseph P. Cotton, the representative of the Food Administration in Europe, advised that as the major supplier of food and other materials for postwar relief and reconstruction, the United States would not put its resources under the direction of an Allied board.
There was a brief and interesting moment of insight in Wilson’s nearly isolationist caution about entanglements. He had proposed mandates as an alternative to annexations of lands and peoples liberated from the fallen empires, his idea being that the mandates would be handed to small rather than large nations. The instant of insight came in an address of February 28, 1919, by the President to the Democratic National Committee. He observed that for the United States to reject any mandate role might smack of “Pharisaical cleanliness.” In time, and with Wilson’s acquiescence, the big countries got the mandates. Hoover observed that Wilson was fooled in believing that the Old World powers would make the slightest practical distinction between mandates and imperial possessions. As infuriating as Wilson’s posture of uncompromising rectitude can be to a present-day historian, the issue of mandates reveals the bind he was in. A bit more of the Pharisaical cleanliness that was to be the President’s chief vice in his dealings with the Senate might here have been in order. He could not have prevented acquisitions, defined as mandates or not. But a recognition of the whole grab for what it was, and a refusal to countenance it in any form, would at least have rescued language from the violation that was done to the ideals on which the League had been founded.
IN THE END, as the issue of mandates in a sin-sullied world shows, Wilson’s tremendous will and his determination to make the globe saner came up against contradictions inherent in the realities of the time. Compromise with the Allies did not work, nor did a rejection of compromise with the Senate. Can it be said with assurance that reversing those approaches would have worked either?
The resolution among the Wilsonians during and just after the war to keep the nation clean of the evils of Europe makes all the more puzzling Wilson’s later rejection of Henry Cabot Lodge’s reservations about the League Covenant. It is a puzzle that Hoover did not address. Even with reservations, strong or mild, the Covenant would have bound the United States more closely to Europe than seems consistent with the thinking of the President who had feared to call his country an Ally. Wilson’s reasoning is clear enough. If a signatory could in effect write its own treaty, the whole of Versailles, including the good in that badly marred document, would have been compromised—or so the President thought. But that reads more like a quibble than a substantive objection. Wilson would doubtless have believed that even, and especially, an unqualified signature on the treaty and on the League document could have allowed the United States to remain something of an outsider, lending itself carefully but cooperatively to the making of the future. Still, it is a curious mixture on the part of Wilson and the Wilsonians, this compound will to distance their country from the fallen world and yet enter into it.
An observer can reason consistencies into Wilson’s mind. Perhaps, though, that mind was the richer for its inconsistencies, as it attempted to find for the nation some role that would negate neither autonomy nor cooperation, practicality nor virtue.
Whether the United States is to be enmeshed in the troubles of the rest of the world has ceased to be an issue. The terms of the engagement—more particularly, the proper compounding of virtue and strategy—will never stop being a question. It is part of Wilson’s place in history that his struggles were an asking, an enactment of the question at a vital moment. The same is true of Herbert Hoover, who as the administrator of relief activities that spanned a continent had to make spot calculations about the needs of economies, the course of revolutions, and the ways in which relief and diplomacy could alter events. And Hoover’s simple recounting of his role reveals essentially a statesman without Cabinet position and a diplomat without portfolio more consistent in moral judgments than his successors in the days of the Cold War.
This committed spokesman for enlightened capitalism, this early enemy of Bolshevism and all its works, would not have understood recent neoconservatives and their arcane distinctions between the atrocities of the right and the atrocities of the left. The major manifestations of Bolshevism, Hoover commented in a letter to Wilson dated March 28, 1919, were confined “to areas of former reactionary tyranny” and warranted from free and comfortable Americans some sympathy for “these blind gropings for better social conditions.” Imagine the sputtering that such comments would have elicited in the lesser conservatism of the 1980s. Having described the brutality and mass murder that took place during a temporary communist rule in Riga, Latvia, Hoover protested against a “White Terror” that followed the defeat of the Red. Specifically in the case of Hungary, Hoover opposed die West’s restoring or propping up reactionaries, even when the shoring up would be in the face of the left. These sentiments of uncompromising hostility to the Bolsheviks’ opposite likenesses in brutality, remember, do not represent only the thinking of Hoover in 1919. They are the views also of the reminiscing Hoover of 1958, in the bleaker days of the Cold War, when even liberal American anticommunism was virtually oblivious of any evil that did not proceed from Moscow or Beijing.
Equally a measure of Hoover’s brand of free-market progressivism is his comment, in a letter of December, 1918, intended for the President, that hunger abroad made an increase in food production in the United States and the prevention of spoilage a moral obligation. Hoover, the engineer and administrator of Quaker upbringing, looked upon the production and distribution of life’s necessities as a fundamental reason for work, to be undertaken not merely for profit but because it was the point of being a producer or a distributor. He happened to consider a well-regulated capitalism to be the efficient means to those ends. Any financial gain to the producer or the distributor was well and good. But Hoover did not reduce work and administration to the mechanisms and acquisitive motives that have appealed to other champions of capitalism.
Hoover’s remarks in the 1918 memorandum, like his entire experience in administering food production at home and relief abroad, are consonant with the similarity that others detected between him and the social scientist Thorstein Veblen, a brilliantly crotchety admirer of modern industry and enemy of capitalism. Veblen expected the austere methods of twentieth-century technology to awaken in engineers and workers a dedication to exact workmanship as a severe virtue in itself and an act of provision for the human race. Veblen would remove the capitalists from the process; Hoover would instruct them in social conscience. But both belong to an age also characterized by Wilsonian resolve.
The handsome introduction by Mark Hatfield to this reissue of Hoover ‘s memoir sketches the previous separate careers of these two remarkable public figures, who for all their differences complemented each other in the making of history. For a brief time the progressive Republican and the progressive Democrat were a logical pair. Later, when Houver’s politically disastrous presidency and his defeat had turned him into an embittered conservative, he seemed an uncompromising enemy of the liberalism that Democrats of the 1930s and 1940s somewhat too easily traced back to Woodrow Wilson. President Harry Truman’s admiring use of Hoover lessened the distance, and here the thoughtfully respectful commentary of a leading Republican liberal senator helps further to replant Hoover in a tradition of American progressivism.