“Freedom exists only where people take care of the government.”
-T. Woodrow Wilson
Unfortunately, we get the government we deserve. We've become so jaded by being constantly disappointed by the people that we've elected, that we feel that it really doesn't matter who we vote for, since they're all bound to let us down in the end. I'm here to tell you that we can do better, but we need to make an effort. One way to start is to learn something from history.
I love to read. I also consider it my duty as a citizen to expand my base of knowledge, and reading books is one of the best ways to accomplish that task. Recently I finished reading Wilson by A. Scott Berg, which is a new biography about our twenty-eighth President, T. Woodrow Wilson. I never really knew much about President Wilson (including the fact that his first name was Thomas, not Woodrow), and always thought of him as a prim, uptight, stick-in-the-mud kind of guy. I knew he was reelected President using the slogan “He kept us out of war,” and then, before his second term even started, began the process to lead America into World War I. That had always seemed a bit incongruent to me. Of course that’s why it is always a good idea to add to your knowledge base. Our current world seems to run on sound bites and tweets, but they rarely present enough depth to fully understand issues.
One of my favorite historical quotes comes from George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which underscores the necessity of learning and applying our knowledge of the past to the problems of the present. However, I was surprised to learn that Wilson said: “The world’s memory must be kept alive, or we shall never see an end of its old mistakes.” This was said in a speech which commemorated the 150th anniversary of Princeton University and predated Santayana’s famous quote by a decade. It’s not surprising that Wilson recommended learning from the past since he was a professor of history at several colleges before becoming the President of Princeton University.
Another thing that surprised me was that old Woodrow wasn’t as much of a fuddy-duddy as our superficial first impressions of the man might suggest. His love letters to his first wife, who died in 1914 while Wilson was President, bordered on erotica in some cases. In 1915, he married a buxom younger widow that had caught his eye. He was known to be romantic, a good dancer, and even humorous. Wilson said that he left academia for public service in order to escape politics. You see, “politics” doesn’t just influence how our government is run, it influences how everything in the world is run. Apparently, Wilson thought the situation was worse in the administration of educational facilities than it was in Washington. Plus, he was going for a laugh. However, history suggests that despite his impressive record of accomplishments, he remained pretty much a novice in the politics of governance.
Wilson held only two elected offices in his entire political career. He served briefly as Governor of New Jersey before being elected President on the Democrat’s ticket. His actions in office tend to reflect a more of a statesman-like approach to his jobs than what would be more typical for a politician. Wilson greatly admired the British Parliament, where the Prime Minister and Cabinet remained an integral part of the legislative body, feeling that it offered a better system for enacting needed laws and reforms. Unlike chief executives before or since, Wilson frequently left the isolation of the White House for the Capitol, where he addressed the Congress in person. He was also considered one of the most eloquent speakers ever to hold the top political office, which helped him push his agenda of progressive reforms.
America faced various problems at the start of Wilson’s first term as President. Wealth was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest citizens. Corporations and wealthy individuals exercised considerable influence over elections. Teddy Roosevelt was elected to his first full term as President largely through campaign money provided by only four groups. These included the J.P. Morgan banking company as well as railroad and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick (once known as the most hated man in America). Although TR was known as the “trust-buster” and eventually ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket, he actually thought that the trusts should be regulated, not “busted” as his nickname would otherwise suggest. At the start of the 20th century, the average American worker toiled for long hours, frequently under less than ideal conditions. While Wilson was able to pass significant progressive reform measures, often as a result of magnificent speeches made in person to Congress, it seems that many of his efforts to provide some relief to working men and women have not endured.
Unlike today’s “free-market” loving Republicans, the Republican Party of Wilson’s time had enacted high tariffs on imported commodities, which adversely affected poorer Americans, by causing high prices for life’s basic necessities while providing excessive income to domestic corporations. At the urging of President Wilson, tariffs were reduced or eliminated, with the tax revenue lost from tariffs replaced by a tax on income. The wealthy hated the income tax, primarily because they were the only ones that had to pay. Most of the lower income Americans were exempt. While the wealthy pissed and moaned about the inequity of the income tax, the economy actually grew and improved, and wealthy Americans became even richer, and still enjoyed all of the benefits that entailed.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the First World War had begun, although at the time it had yet to be numbered. America, including its President, saw no need to embroil itself in this European brouhaha, remaining blissfully neutral, with the economy benefitting from increased trade with everyone. Sadly, Germany’s actions eventually forced America’s hand, and we entered the conflict on the side of England, France, and Italy (Russia was also an Allied Nation at the start of the Great War, but was dealing with its own internal revolution at the time, which eventually brought a communist government to power). The addition of fresh American troops, backed by our country’s incredible industrial might, turned the tide, resulting in a victory for the Allied Nations.
Wilson saw the chance that the victory offered. He made it his mission in life to make the world safe from this kind of horrible conflict forever more. The keystone of his plan was to establish a League of Nations that would have the power to prevent this type of total war through negotiated settlement with united world opinion to back it up, before it could ever get started.
One of the sad realities of learning about the lives of great men is when we are able to look back with perfect hindsight at decisions, or events, that prove to be their undoing. Wilson was a man that thought through a problem, then made a decision and stuck to it, never changing his mind. He sailed for Europe and the peace talks with a devoted cadre of minions who would offer no resistance to his grand plan. He should have made the group bipartisan, and included someone like his most vocal critic in the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge. After months of negotiations and discussion, Wilson returned home with a peace proposal that he believed would forever prevent the kind of mass slaughter and destruction that had recently devastated France and Belgium, among other places. Furious over having been excluded from the limelight (as well as the actual peace process) Lodge and the rest of the Republican leadership vowed to sink the peace treaty, including its most critical element, the League of Nations, before it could start.
Another sad reality of our political system is that the American electorate loves to change its collective mind at the drop of a hat. The opposition managed to derail America’s involvement in the peace treaty that ended the war as well as quashing Wilson’s hope that diplomacy would forever prevent another world war through the negotiating process of the League of Nations. After two terms that mostly saw a healthy, rapidly expanding national economy, American voters elected a Republican-controlled Congress, Senate, and made Ohio’s Warren G. Harding President of the United States. Harding managed to become one of history’s worst ranked Presidents during his brief tenure in office. High tariffs were restored, and income taxes for the wealthy were significantly lowered under the theory that high income people were “job creators” in the economy, needing the extra income to create more jobs (recent research has shown that such funds are typically used for speculative purposes, not job creation).
By the end of the decade, stock market speculators plunged the U.S. economy into what we now refer to as the Great Depression. A decade after that, the League of Nations was too weak without America’s participation to halt German military aggression, and the conflict known as World War II began.
In recent years, campaign financing laws have been weakened, once again opening the door to excessive corporate influence with money considered equivalent to free speech. Our system of government has been held hostage by our own elected representatives, who, despite hard evidence to the contrary, are still claiming that tax cuts for the wealthy are necessary for job creation. History again seems to be repeating itself. It is time for all us to learn from the past, and apply those lessons to bring about a better world for us all.
Woodrow Wilson’s obsession with establishing the League of Nations on his terms led him to undertake a speaking tour of America in order to take his message directly to the people. The stress of the tour, following on the heels of the exhausting peace negotiations, led to a stroke from which he never fully recovered. Although the League of Nations was established, America never joined, and without us it was never able to achieve the results that were envisioned by its founder and principle champion. We’ll never know what might have happened had he been willing to compromise. It is a lesson for our time. It is a lesson for all time.
.jpg)
