IV. Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the Triumph of Conservatism

Enter William McKinley of Canton, Ohio—Civil War veteran, attorney at law, Congressman from Ohio's 17^th district for nearly fifteen years, and two-term governor of his home state. One standard account of his career notes that "[t]he issue with which McKinley became most closely identified during his congressional years was the protective tariff, a high tax on imported goods which served to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition." And no sooner had McKinley been inaugurated than he "called a special session of Congress to revise customs duties upward. On July 24 he signed into law the Dingley Tariff, the highest protective tariff in American history to that time."²⁹⁴

From that point forward, most of the new president's most important and historic initiatives were undertaken at the behest of his secretary of state, John Adams's great-grandson, Brooks Adams, who believed, according to William Appleman Williams, that the United States must "abandon laissez faire, accept the corporation political economy, organize it rationally and effectively, and expand it by tightening up control of the Western Hemisphere and winning economic dominance of Asia."²⁹⁵ It was in order to implement this profoundly illiberal vision that McKinley and a handful of his closest advisors decided in 1898 to go to war against Spain.

It was the selfsame handful of Republicans that decided a short time later to harshly put down the rebellion that arose in the Philippines after U.S. victory in the war—a rebellion led by local nationalists who had dared to imagine that the end of Spanish colonial control meant true independence for their islands. Even men like William Jennings Bryan, who imagined that they "opposed colonialism," supported McKinley and his advisors in this matter. As Williams puts it, Bryan "assumed that America would crush the Philippine revolt, keep an economic and naval base in the islands, and go on to economic predominance in Asia."²⁹⁶ And this was the Democratic presidential candidate whom McKinley had defeated in 1896 and would defeat again in 1900—the nominee of the party that, from its beginnings, had upheld the ideals of liberalism, including the right of national self-determination and the use of military force only to repel invasion.

Clearly, by the turn of the 20^th Century, liberals were no longer in control of the Democratic party. And to the extent that certain liberals did still wield significant influence within the party, they tended to be "liberals of a more conservative persuasion," which is to say, liberals who believed liberal goals could be attained through conservative means. We have already seen how this error fueled the socialist movement, especially in Europe, beginning in the early 19^th Century. Now, in America, a hundred years later, it fueled a new "reform" movement called Progressivism. And just as socialism wound up with both a Left and a Right wing, so did Progressivism. It is useful to recall that, according to Rothbard,

there were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the "withering away of the State" and the "end of the exploitation of man by man."²⁹⁷

Similarly, there were from the beginning two different strands within Progressivism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, best exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt. As Arthur Ekirch writes,

Roosevelt as president exemplified to a superlative degree the nationalistic side of progressivism. An enthusiastic believer in a strong centralized government, under firm executive leadership, Roosevelt was a patrician reformer who frankly preferred the principles of Alexander Hamilton to those of Thomas Jefferson. Concern over the welfare of the common man and an interest in clean government fitted in with his upper-class belief in the social responsibilities of the educated and wealthy citizen. At the same time he had only the greatest scorn for the kind of middle-class individualism and liberalism that emphasized minding one's own business both at home and abroad.²⁹⁸

The other strand within Progressivism was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified by the many Progressives working within the traditionally liberal Democratic party. The most important of these was the idealistic history professor and university president who became the first Democrat to win the White House in twenty years—the first Democratic occupant of that building since the days of Grover Cleveland—Thomas Woodrow Wilson.

John Dos Passos famously sketched Wilson's career in "Meester Veelson," a once notorious chapter of 1919, Dos Passos's historical novel of World War I. "Meester Veelson" actually first saw print two months before the novel's publication, in January 1932 in The New Republic. James J. Martin described it thirty years later as having been "about as fierce a piece on Wilson and the wartime 'liberalism' as ever appeared in any paper in America."²⁹⁹ "The year [1856] that Buchanan was elected president," Dos Passos wrote,

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born to a presbyterian minister's daughter in the manse at Staunton in the valley of Virginia; it was the old Scotch-Irish stock; the father was a presbyterian minster too and a teacher of rhetoric in theological seminaries; [...] Dr. Wilson was a man of standing who loved his home and his children and good books and his wife and correct syntax and talked to God every day at family prayers; he brought his sons up between the bible and the dictionary.

The one of his sons who concerns us most here would have taken rather slowly to either of those guidebooks, however. For, as Dos Passos reminds us, "Tommy was a backward child, didn't learn his letters till he was nine, but when he learned to read his favorite reading was Parson Weems' Life of Washington!' Still, by the time he was fourteen—that was the year his father "was called to the Theological Seminary at Columbia, South Carolina"—he'd become bookish enough. He graduated high school and enrolled in Davidson College, and "then he went to Princeton and became a debater and editor of the Princetonian. His first published article in the Nassau Literary Magazine was an appreciation of Bismarck."³⁰⁰

Dos Passos's later account of Wilson's early years, in his historical work Mr. Wilson's War (1962), contains nothing that contradicts his earlier portrait; the later version does, however, fill in some interesting details. Wilson's mother, it turns out, was "the daughter of Thomas Woodrow, a Scottish minister" who "came of a long line of Presbyterian divines." So it was Presbyterian clergy for generations on both sides of the family. Also, "Woodrow Wilson was still a babe in arms when his handsome preacher father, who was becoming famous for the high style and fine delivery of his sermons, was called to Augusta, Georgia, to become pastor of the First Presbyterian Church there." So the future president grew up, not in his home state of Virginia, but in Georgia, where, "[t]hough the father and mother were both Ohiobred they absorbed the politics of their parishioners. Dr. Wilson became an ardent secessionist." Yet another interesting detail: "For the first ten years of his life Tommy as he was known was the only boy in a family of girls. His parents destined him for the ministry as a matter of course."³⁰¹

As things worked out, Dos Passos tells us in his later account, the Wilsons lived only briefly in Columbia, South Carolina. By the time, only two years later, when Tommy was ready to enroll at Davidson (near Charlotte), the family had already moved on to North Carolina, where Dr. Wilson had "accepted a call to a large church in Wilmington." It was the early 1870s. Tommy's reading had made it clear to him that he did not wish to pursue a career as a Presbyterian clergyman. In his father's copies of "the Edinburgh Review and [...] Godkin's Nation' he had begun

to read of debates in the British House of Commons. These were the years of the great liberals. England was in a period of fervid parliamentary activity. The slender shy awkward lad—"an old young man" the Wilsons' colored butler called him—began to throw all his youthful passion into imagining himself a Cobden or a J ohn Bright thundering from the opposition benches under the hallowed rafters of St. Stephens. Instead of drawings of fullrigged ships [a youthful enthusiasm of Tommy's] a portrait of Gladstone appeared above his desk.³⁰²

It is noteworthy that Dos Passos should choose Richard Cobden and his close friend and fellow MP John Bright as representative of the sort of politician that inspired the young Woodrow Wilson. For Cob-den and Bright were among the most radical and most important of 19^th Century English liberals. In the late 1970s, Murray Rothbard briefly surveyed the "classical English liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries," and singled out for special praise

such laissez-faire "extremists" as Richard Cobden and John Bright of the "Manchester School." Cobden and Bright took the lead in vigorously opposing every British war and foreign political intervention of their era and for his pains Cobden was known not as an "isolationist" but as the "International Man." Until the smear campaign of the late 1930s, opponents of war were considered the true "internationalists," men who opposed the aggrandizement of the nation-state and favored peace, free trade, free migration and peaceful cultural exchanges among peoples of all nations. Foreign intervention is "international" only in the sense that war is international: coercion, whether the threat of force or the outright movement of troops, will always cross frontiers between one nation and another.³⁰³

As for Gladstone, the Libertarian Historian Jim Powell reports that "[h]e entered Parliament at age twenty-three, first held a cabinet post at thirty-four, and delivered his last speech as a member when he was eighty-four. He served as prime minister four times." He "dominated British politics in the heyday of classical liberalism." He "helped abolish more than one thousand—about 95 percent—of Britain's tariffs, and he cut and abolished other taxes year after year." He "believed the cost of war should be a deterrent to militarism and insisted on a policy of financing war by taxation. He opposed borrowing money for war, because this would make conflict easier and future generations would be unfairly burdened."³⁰⁴ Altogether, at the beginning of his intellectual odyssey, Woodrow Wilson exhibited what Arthur Ekirch calls "a good deal of nostalgic sympathy for a Jeffersonian type of liberal society," as well as "a deep admiration for the point of view of classic, nineteenth-century English political and economic liberalism."³⁰⁵

After three years at Davidson, Wilson transferred to Princeton, where he spent most of his time "reading and debating about politics, statesmanship and constitutional law." Just as he had in North Carolina, he "devoured the witty accounts of the debates in British parliament he found in the library." Later, he also "founded a new society: The Liberal Debating Club, modelled on the British parliament, for which he himself furnished the constitution." Next he moved on to the University of Virginia, where he earned his law degree. By this time, he had pretty firmly decided on a career in politics. As he wrote to his fiancee in the 1880s, looking back on his choices of years earlier, "The profession I chose was politics; the profession I entered was the law. I chose the one because I thought it would lead to the other."³⁰⁶

Unfortunately, both the study and the practice of law proved distinctly not to his liking. As the John Dos Passos of 1932 put it, "lawpractice irked him; he was more at home in the booky air of libraries, lecture-rooms, college chapel, it was a relief to leave his lawpractice at Atlanta and take a Historical Fellowship at Johns Hopkins" in Baltimore, where he earned his Ph.D. He "moved to a professorship at Wesleyan, wrote articles, started a History of the United States." Over the next decade or so, teaching, writing, travelling the country on the lecture circuit, Wilson "climbed all the steps of a brilliant university career; in 1901 the trustees of Princeton offered him the presidency."³⁰⁷ He was forty-five years old. He took the job. And less than a decade later, Thomas Fleming writes, he "had left that presidency in a cloud of acrimony, having alienated almost everyone on the faculty and the board of trustees." A single example may serve to illustrate the perspective of the professors and trustees in this matter. "The one talent Wilson displayed in complicated disputes about a building for the graduate school and reorganizing the college around a 'Quad Plan' was a gift for denouncing his opponents as traitors to America's ideals."³⁰⁸ Still, in 1910, "the democratic bosses of New Jersey, hardpressed by muckrakers and reformers, got the bright idea of offering the nomination for governor to the stainless college president who attracted such large audiences."³⁰⁹

Wilson accepted the nomination and won the election "by a huge plurality" and "left Princeton only half reformed to be Governor of New Jersey." Scarcely two years later he accepted the Democratic party's nomination for president of the United States, and won the subsequent election. "[S]o he left the State of New Jersey halfreformed[...] and went to the White House our twentyeighth president."³¹⁰

By this time, his old commitment to liberal ideals had undergone something of a transformation. For though Ekirch says of Wilson that it was only "in the later stages of his career, as he turned his attention from the academic world to the chance of success in politics, that he began to embrace the nationalistic and progressive currents of his time," we have already noted, with John Dos Passos, that first published article by the newly minted Princeton undergraduate, "an appreciation of Bismarck." ³¹¹ "What of the intellectuals of the Progressive period," Murray Rothbard wrote in 1965, "damned by the present-day Right as 'socialistic'? Socialistic in a sense they were, but what kind of 'socialism'? The conservative State Socialism of Bismarck's Germany, the prototype for so much of modern European—and American—political forms [...]."³¹²

From the beginning, that is, Thomas Woodrow Wilson had admired liberal ideals, but he had also been drawn to conservative methods of attempting to realize those ideals. And his two terms as president can only be characterized as an orgy of conservative policymaking. His policies, Ekirch writes, "seemed to vacillate between [those proposed by] conservative business interests and the demands of the more nationalistic progressives."³¹³ With respect to domestic policy, Wilson, the "liberal," was scarcely distinguishable from Theodore Roosevelt, the GOP conservative. In foreign affairs, the story was a bit different. As Arthur S. Link put it in his 1954 study Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917, "[t]he years from 1913 to 1921 witnessed intervention by the State Department and the navy on a scale that had never before been contemplated, even by such alleged imperialists as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft."³¹⁴ According to Ekirch, Wilson considered "an expansion of foreign trade vital, not only to the interests of the United States but also to world peace." Accordingly,

the Wilson administration agressively pursued American commercial interests in the Far East and in Latin America, expanded the foreign trade divisions of the Department of Commerce, and developed the American merchant marine. Wilson no doubt would have preferred the growth of United States foreign trade to come about as a result of free international competition, but he found it easy with his ideas of moralism and duty to rationalize direct American intervention as a means of safeguarding the national interest.³¹⁵

And then, of course, the Wilson administration led America into World War I. "Five months after his reelection on the slogan He kept us out of war" John Dos Passos wrote in 1932, "Wilson pushed the Armed Ship Bill through congress and declared that a state of war existed between the United States and the Central Powers." Thereupon, "Wilson became the state (war is the health of the state), Washington his Versailles [...]."³¹⁶ Robert Higgs puts the same idea even more plainly. "More than anything the Progressives had achieved," he writes,

war undercut American liberties and fed the growth of Big Government. Notwithstanding the accretions of governmental authority during the Progressive Era, the American economy remained, as late as 1916, predominantly a market system. The next two years, however, witnessed an enormous and wholly unprecedented intervention of the federal government in the nation's economic affairs. By the time of the armistice the government had taken over the ocean shipping, railroad, telephone, and telegraph industries; commandeered hundreds of manufacturing plants; entered into massive economic enterprises on its own account in such varied departments as shipbuilding, wheat trading, and building construction; undertaken to lend huge sums to businesses directly or indirectly and to regulate the private issuance of securities; established official priorities for the use of transportation facilities, food, fuel, and many raw materials; fixed the prices of dozens of important commodities; intervened in hundreds of labor disputes; and conscripted millions of men for service in the armed forces. It had, in short, extensively distorted or wholly displaced markets, creating what some contemporaries called "war socialism."³¹⁷

And to say all this is still to say nothing about the Wilson administration's implacable hostility toward freedom of speech or its sponsorship of what Eric Foner calls "one of the most sweeping repressions of the right to dissent in all of American history."³¹⁸