Upon reading Bernstein’s book, socialists across Europe breathed a sigh of relief. Now they could feel free to push the socialist agenda from within the existing system as organized political parties, instead of trying to impose it by force from outside. Lenin, however, reacted to Bernstein’s optimistic message with hostility bordering on fury. His deepest worry was not that Bernstein was wrong about the future of capitalism, including capitalism in Russia, but that he was right. With the dawn of the new century, czarist Russia was feeling the first stirrings of the economic “takeoff” that had swept parts of western Europe, including Germany, during the previous century. A growing economy that expanded Russia’s tiny bourgeois class and made its working class feel comfortable and well fed would do more to derail the hopes for a Marxist-led revolution in Russia than anything the czarist government could do.
In a short article entitled “Urgent Tasks of Our Movement,” Lenin penned his response to Bernstein’s thesis. His essay warned that Russia’s labor movement would slide into passivity and “become petty and inevitably bourgeois” unless a strong revolutionary vanguard seized control of that movement, a vanguard of full-time professionals “who shall devote to the revolution not only their spare evenings but the whole of their lives.”20
Stealing the title from his favorite novel, Lenin turned his short article into the core argument of his first important revolutionary tract, What Is to Be Done? The book is a fierce blast against those of his Russian Marxist colleagues who were hinting that it might be best to wait to allow the Russian labor movement to develop its own momentum, like the labor movements in western European countries, in order to advance the socialist agenda. That would be a catastrophe, Lenin averred, at least as far as bringing on a truly Marxist, or “social-democratic,” revolution was concerned. The wait-and-see approach would result in mere trade unionism, a movement that restricted itself to getting higher wages and better working conditions, and nothing else.
There cannot “yet be Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers” unless it comes from outside, from an elite leadership dedicated to provoking revolution and keeping the Russian working class on course through constant political activism and agitation. “In no other way,” Lenin wrote emphatically, “can the masses be trained in political consciousness and revolutionary activity”—which means, in turn, that “to conduct such activity is one of the most important functions of international Social-Democracy as a whole.”
Why hadn’t this happened already? “We must blame ourselves,” Lenin wrote to his fellow Russian Marxists, and “our remoteness from the mass movement.” From now on, he proclaimed, they must put themselves at the head of that movement and never falter from the revolutionary course.21
What Is to Be Done? marks the birth of Marxism-Leninism, and the idea that revolution comes not through waiting for the right historical conditions. It comes from a dedicated elite bending history to their will, rather than the other way around. It is also the first work Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov signed with his new revolutionary nom de plume, “N. Lenin.” (Later, he changed it to “V. I. Lenin.”)
The stage was now set for the rest of Lenin’s career. With the exception of two years in 1905–6, he would spend the next fifteen years, until 1917, outside Russia while he implemented his program—not against the czarist government but against his fellow Marxists. When he often spoke of being surrounded on all sides by enemies, he was referring to them in addition to the czarist police. His first goal as a leader of revolution was to bring his colleagues into his line of thinking or to crush them out of political existence. Starting in 1902, that was exactly what he set out to do, even as he drew around him a small band of dedicated followers who would form the core of his Bolshevik Party, including a fiery middle-class Jewish intellectual named Lev Davidovich Bronstein who would be better known by the revolutionary pseudonym he adopted soon after meeting Lenin, Leon Trotsky; and a Georgian dropout from a theological seminary named Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, also better known by his revolutionary pseudonym, Joseph Stalin.
AS COPIES OF What Is to Be Done? were rolling off the presses of the publisher Lenin had found in Stuttgart, Germany, Woodrow Wilson was assuming the mantle of president of Princeton University. Over the next half decade, Wilson would be catapulted into national fame not only as a distinguished scholar but also as a spokesman for a new forward-looking approach to American education. He would also be propelled into a controversy that would split Princeton and its alumni down the middle for decades to come—a controversy that would reveal Wilson at his self-righteous and vindictive worst.
Attending his installation as president of Princeton proved to be the hottest ticket on the East Coast. Mark Twain, J. P. Morgan, and Booker T. Washington were all there. President Theodore Roosevelt himself was supposed to attend, but a trolley car accident delayed his arrival at the campus until it was too late.22
Even critics admitted that Wilson’s early years at Princeton were an impressive success. He recruited top young talent for the faculty; he transformed and modernized the undergraduate curriculum. He also assumed “unprecedented control over faculty affairs,” as one historian has put it. “During his eight-year tenure, Wilson was not reluctant to exercise any of his new powers.”23
Most important, he reinforced his own Progressive idea that the four years of college were to be preparation for assuming life’s responsibilities as well as training for the mind. He wanted his Princeton graduates to be ready to be “actors on the stage and stand in the midst of life,” with the “largeness of view, of judgment, and easy knowledge of men” that went beyond old-fashioned book learning.24
Yet that largeness of view and judgment, that knowledge of men, was precisely what Princeton’s own president lacked, and this failing was in full display in the battle royal that developed over the location of a new graduate college for the university.
The dean of the graduate faculty was Andrew West, whose chief credential consisted of having very wealthy friends who gave generously to Princeton. In 1907, he conceived a plan for a new building to house the graduate college off campus. The plan included a lavish budget and a distinguished architect to design the building. Wilson opposed the plan at once. He had his own plan for completely redesigning the campus, one that incorporated the graduate facilities with the new quadrangles for the undergraduates. The resulting quarrel was one of those tedious squabbles that develop in academic institutions and that are soon forgotten a few years later—but Wilson refused to allow this one to be forgotten. His fight with Dean West and his fight over the quads that both students and alumni opposed became more than power struggles. They became a crusade pitting right (President Wilson) against wrong (everyone else, including the board of trustees, who rejected his quads plan).
By 1909, the former star of Princeton was the most hated man on campus, someone who had polarized the university and its board into two irreconcilable factions. In April 1910, Wilson gave a speech that compared his battle with the board to the cause of democracy in America. “What we cry out against is that a handful of conspicuous men have thrust a cruel hand among the heartstrings of the masses of men upon whose blood and energy they are subsisting.” This is what was happening at Princeton and other universities, he proclaimed to his audience. The same “handful of conspicuous men” (including President William Howard Taft, who strongly supported Dean West) were corrupting the very institutions of learning, “to forget their common origins, forget their universal sympathies, and join a class—and no class can ever serve America.”25
Later, even Wilson admitted that the speech had been “a stupid blunder.” It gave plenty of ammunition to his enemies. It was also a foretaste of the later Wilson: the man who stubbornly dug in on a position he believed to be right, to the point where those who opposed him were not just wrong but evil. “The most conspicuously contemptible names in history . . . If I did not despise them, I would feel sorry for them” is the way he would later refer to politi
cal opponents.26 This disturbing blend of self-righteousness and paranoia is one others would get to know all too well at the Paris Peace Conference and on the floor of the U.S. Senate in a vote on the League of Nations.
In the ensuing uproar after his speech, it was apparent to Wilson and his wife that his days at Princeton were numbered. It was time to “look for a new career,” he informed her, and the one that beckoned most was in politics.
It was clear he had the physical and mental gifts for it. He was a dynamic speaker, a writer with a flair for phrasing. On issues that mattered, he could display irresistible drive and energy combined with the power to charm when necessary. (Unfortunately, he didn’t find it necessary often enough.) Even more, Wilson felt his scholarly work at Princeton had given him the background he needed for a political career. He had finally finished his magnum opus, the groundbreaking Constitutional Government in the United States.
More than any other work by a prominent American political scientist, the book embodied an approach to understanding American governance derived from the early nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Wilson had been exposed to Hegel during his years at Johns Hopkins, where his teachers had been steeped in the German theory of government and the philosophy of history. Wilson wrote to his then-fiancée, “Hegel used to search for—and in most cases found it seems to me—the fundamental psychological facts of society.” This was reflected in Wilson’s 1890 work, The State, which became a standard textbook until the 1920s, and in Constitutional Government, which is largely an iteration of Hegel’s theory of the state, in an American guise.27
What was Hegel saying that appealed so powerfully to Wilson? Above all, Hegel saw government, or the state, as the direct reflection of a society’s historical evolution. The higher the level of that evolution, the more active and interventionist that government must necessarily become. In that sense, government, including American government, can have no legitimate limits placed on its power, since that power is actually the expression of the objective will of the people. Otherwise, it would not exist at all.
Indeed, the state is itself the embodiment of human progress. “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth,” Hegel wrote. Even in a democratic society such as the United States, those who exercise its functions have the responsibility to wield its influence in keeping with that faith in progress.
Hegel’s vision of the power of government to shape society for a better future, and of the need to reform or strip away those institutions that stand in the way of the forward march of history, would be the foundation for Wilson’s presidential ideal. It underpinned his lifelong belief that, in the end, the federal government could do no objective harm, and in the fundamental rightness of America’s role in world history. “Here is a great people,” he once said, “great with every force that has ever beaten in the lifeblood of mankind . . . The United States has the distinction of carrying certain lights for the world that the world has never so distinctly seen before . . . of liberty, principle, and justice.”28
It was a heady worldview—at least as potent as Lenin’s at about the same time: the power of government to do only good, a power that had no legitimate limits, a power that would lead a great people to their irresistible historical destiny. These principles made Wilson one of the outstanding exponents of American Progressivism, and united him with men such as Herbert Croly, Edward Bellamy, and even Wilson’s longtime adversary Theodore Roosevelt.
These were also, it has to be said, a far cry from the ideals that had animated America’s Founding Fathers: the necessity of limited government and strict formal limits on its powers as the fundamental foundation of freedom. Wilson never went as far as Croly and other Progressives in denouncing those founding ideals as hopelessly out of date, even socially debilitating, in the modern world. But he did see them as reflecting the narrow historical circumstances of the thirteen colonies in the late eighteenth century, and not some larger insight into human nature and the permanent character of the relation between the individual and government—let alone relevant to America as it had developed by 1908. As Hegel had taught him, there was no fixed human nature, anyway, and no fixed set of political principles that applied in all places and at all times.
Wilson’s Progressive views had been clearly and concisely set forth in his books. All that was needed next was an opportunity to apply those theories in practice—even though certainly no one could have expected a college professor and university president, no matter how distinguished or dynamic, to have that chance.
Yet, ironically, that’s exactly what one national party, the Democratic Party, was looking for.
In 1908, the Democrats had suffered their fourth straight defeat in a presidential election and the third defeat for the man who had come to embody the party for more than twelve years, William Jennings Bryan. Many Democrats now realized that Bryan was part of the problem: once the youthful voice of American Populism and rural small-town virtues, he now seemed anachronistic in a growing, industrializing America. They were looking for a new kind of candidate, one who could assume the mantle of Progressivism that Republicans had adopted since Theodore Roosevelt but that might be a useful way to rally big-city voters to the next Democratic ticket.
The eloquent and vigorous president of Princeton University seemed to be just what the party needed. In fact, Wilson was being considered presidential timber even before he accepted the offer of New Jersey’s Democratic bosses to run for the state’s governorship in 1908. His lack of political experience made him even more attractive: such a man, they reasoned, would be all the more willing to listen to the wisdom of his party superiors—that is, if he could get his foot in the door of the White House.
The race for governor was the dry run. Starting with his acceptance speech, Wilson used it to outline a political program that not only was Progressive in its policy details, by relying on government to address and solve the many problems society faced, but also raised American politics to a higher, even spiritual level. “We are witnessing a renaissance of public spirit,” he proclaimed, “a reawakening of sober public opinion, a revival of the power of the people . . . that makes our thought hark back to the great age in which Democracy was set up in America.”
He spoke of government as a matter of “common counsel” rather than competing interests, where “everyone must come into the consultation with the purpose to yield to the general view,” that is, the one that most closely adheres to the common interest. American democracy, in short, was about not a multiplicity of views but a single vision embraced by all, with the Democratic Party acting as its political vehicle: as “the instrument of righteousness for the state and for the nation.”29
In other times or places, this would have been seen as long-winded, overheated rhetoric and nothing more. But in 1908, it struck a chord with New Jersey voters; the state’s local bosses delivered the rest. Wilson won the election, beating his Republican rival by more than two to one.
And this was only a prelude to what was to come. Wilson had barely entered the governor’s mansion when the Democratic Party leadership began grooming him for the next big contest, the U.S. presidency in 1912. It proved to be an epic struggle. As a virtual political novice, Wilson was running against a sitting president, William Howard Taft, a man with long experience in government and strong support from the monied interests of Wall Street and America’s leading industrialists. Indeed, it’s doubtful Wilson would have stood a chance if Theodore Roosevelt had not taken a hand in giving him the election.
Furious with Taft’s reversal of several of the Progressive reforms Theodore Roosevelt himself had carried out while he was president, Roosevelt turned against his handpicked heir and successor and launched his own, third-party campaign for president, as the candidate of the Bull Moose Party. The resulting split virtually guaranteed Wilson the election, even though he took barely 41 percent of the popular vote. He was the first Democrat elected president in twenty years, an
d the first southerner since Zachary Taylor, in 1848.
Now he would have the opportunity to carry out the reforms he had advocated and written about for more than two decades. His head was filled with plans and programs, ways to transform America for the better, using the power of the federal government, and to lead the country to that destiny he believed all other nations looked to America to fulfill.
That didn’t leave much room for ordinary politicians. When the chairman of the Democratic National Committee came to see him after the election to ask for some political favors, and reminded Wilson that he owed his election to that party and its leadership committee, Wilson coldly cut him down to size.
“Remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States,” he told the astonished chairman. “Neither you nor any other mortal could have chosen another president.”30
In his inauguration speech, he made clear just whom he considered his real constituency: “This is not a day of triumph,” he told the crowd gathered on the steps of the Capitol. “It is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men’s hearts wait upon us, men’s lives hang in the balance . . . Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares to fail to try?”31
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