[The Lecturer’s Art: Gems of American History by Walter A. McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025. xxii + 291 pp.]
The historian Walter McDougall is not a libertarian, but he criticizes the Progressives and Woodrow Wilson in a similar way to Murray Rothbard. He does so from the perspective of “realism.” Although people benefit from cooperation, realists maintain, their desires for wealth and power often lead them to act in ways that violate morality and go against their long-run self-interest. Things will go better if people, especially policy makers, act in awareness of these tendencies rather than hope that their avowal of idealistic motives suffices to enable them to act unchecked.
The founders of the American republic were realists in this sense, McDougall says. They had learned from Machiavelli that checks and balances were essential to counter untrammeled power. This by no means implies that they were Machiavellians, as most people understand this term. They had other sources for their view, especially the history of Venice, the longest-lived republic. “The Founders all saw the wisdom of such Machiavellian notions as separation of powers, checks and balances, an independent judiciary, sacrosanct private property, robust commerce, and occasional political tumult.”
Woodrow Wilson saw matters differently. He supported a powerful presidency that would be able to do good, as he interpreted this:
Wilson was a High Progressive who, as one of the earliest participants in the then-new discipline of political science, cheered America’s rise to world power because he believed that vigorous foreign policies would empower the presidency. He was also a liberal Presbyterian whose modern theology imagined Jesus Christ a social reformer who called followers to build heaven right here on earth.
Readers will recall Murray Rothbard’s emphasis on “postmillennial Pietism” as a source for the Progressives.
When World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, most Americans thought the conflict was not of direct concern to them. America had a long tradition of avoiding entanglement in European power politics. At first, Wilson agreed, calling for Americans to be neutral in thought, word, and deed, but as the war continued, he saw his opportunity:
Wilson famously agonized until, by the end of March [1917], he made up his mind to wage war.... Moreover, he made that personal, unforced choice to preach a crusade for liberal internationalism under the worst possible circumstances.
Wilson was fully aware of the costs of entering the war:
Nonetheless, Wilson chose to flip Washington’s biggest “Thou shalt not meddle in Europe’s broils” into a “Thou must,” and to insist on threat of imprisonment that all Americans fall into line. Most damning of all, Wilson knew well, unlike the over-confident Europeans, exactly how hellish modern, industrial war had proved to be.
You probably expect that McDougall will now go on to argue that Wilson made a mistake in entering the war. That is Rothbard’s conclusion, and McDougall acknowledges that there is much to be said for it. Britain had let Wilson know that if America did not enter the war, it would have to make peace on terms favorable to Germany, but would this be so bad? “Kaiser Wilhelm II was no Adolf Hitler, and after their sacrifices in a total war the Germans would likely have demanded democratic reforms. Moreover, a German victory might likely have meant no totalitarian dictators, no World War II, no Holocaust, and no Cold War.” This sounds like an excellent reason to stay out of the war, but McDougall does not agree.
Why not? Hitler arose from the combination of defeat in war and ruinous peace terms, but to avert these, staying out was not a necessary condition. America could have entered a war with more limited aims than those of Wilson. For McDougall, the supreme sin was Wilson’s holy crusading:
He could preach a crusade, a holy “war to end all war,” enthrall Americans with that fantastic mission, and then hope to persuade or cajole Europeans to convert to it too.
McDougall offers several examples of the type of war he has in mind, including a “war over neutral rights, as in 1812, and waged a naval campaign rather than shipping an army to France.” This would have involved insisting on America’s rights against Britain as well as Germany. McDougall is fully aware that Wilson, owing to a bad case of Anglophilia, was much tougher on the British than the Germans.
But one of the types of war McDougall offers as a substitute for crusading surprises me. He says that Wilson “could have justified total war, but on the realistic grounds of preserving the European balance of power and thus U.S. security.” Why would a total war, which presumably would have involved invading Germany, have different consequences from a crusade? Even more fundamentally, why should America’s security depend on preserving a balance of power in Europe? A key point of the traditional non-interventionist American foreign policy was to avoid European entanglements, not to engage in them in a supposedly more realistic fashion.
Like Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt rejected our traditional non-interventionist foreign policy, but on entirely different grounds. FDR did not seek to ignite a holy crusade to establish international relations on a new basis. Indeed, his initial campaign for president was conducted on an isolationist premise. “It was Roosevelt who ran on an isolationist platform in 1932 and it was the large New Deal democratic majorities in Congress which passed the Neutrality Acts in 1935 to 1938.”
To the contrary, he aimed to destroy Germany and Japan and then rule the world in collaboration with Joseph Stalin:
FDR had witnessed Wilson’s blunders when he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during and after World War I and meant not to repeat them in 1945. . . .FDR’s real blueprint for the postwar era was for a Great Power condominium.
Although this association was supposed to include Britain and China, the United States and Soviet Russia would be the real holders of power. McDougall, to be clear, opposes Roosevelt’s plan. Although we could wish that he were a more consistent non-interventionist, nevertheless McDougall has much to teach us in his valuable book.
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