When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  Wilson is an internationalist exception in a country of natural isolationist bent. He took America into the Great War and devoted his career to the formation of the League of Nations. In this respect, his hopes were to be dashed, but his legacy thrives all the same. Wilson brought America to the world. The Fourteen Points he enunciated, that would make the world safe for democracy, were the basis of a deal that allowed the new German chancellor, Prince Maximilian of Baden, to end the war.

  Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia in 1856, the first son and third child of a Presbyterian minister of Scottish heritage. The young Woodrow saw the end of the Civil War as a boy and retained his allegiance as a Southerner all his life. He taught history at the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton, and in 1902 produced his five-volume History of the American People, to some acclaim. Later that year he became the president of Princeton. His early politics were conservative but he trimmed that aspect of his character to make himself a more appealing prospect to the Democrats. Having won the endorsement of the party leaders in his home patch of New Jersey, he charted a reforming course, under the slogan of New Freedom, to a presidential victory in November 1912.

  As president, Wilson does have a domestic legacy. The Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission were created on his watch. Farm loan reform and child labour laws were enacted. He was however – and here weighs his heritage in the South – slow to support the right of women to vote. He also failed to advance the rights of the black population, allowing racial segregation to continue in federal offices.

  But above all, Wilson was consumed by foreign policy. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, he was unready for it; he was still mourning the death of his beloved wife. His first announcement was that the United States would stay neutral, a stance that lasted two and a half years until Germany made it clear that no merchant ship servicing Britain and continental Europe would be safe from U-boat attack. At that point, Wilson concluded that America had to enter the war. His words in the speech that follows fell into an America happy to follow a lone path in the world. He was speaking before a joint session of Congress with the express purpose of seeking a declaration of war against Germany. Four days later, Congress did indeed vote, 82 to 6, for war. The House of Representatives concurred on 6 April by a vote of 373 to 50.

  Gentlemen of the Congress, I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making. On the third of February last I officially laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and after the first day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean … The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom: without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of belligerents. Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with safe conduct through the proscribed areas by the German Government itself and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.

  This is about as plain as speaking gets. There is no adornment to the opening. Wilson begins with his main point. If the audience had paid attention merely for a few seconds they would know something serious was afoot. Of course the consequence of opening in so grave a fashion is that it sets a tone it is hard to depart from. This helps to explain why this is a simple speech, sombre in its beauty.

  The war speech almost always does what Churchill later does so well, which is to exude total confidence in eventual victory. Wilson’s tone is much more professorial and scholarly. Tinged with doubt, he is clear that humanitarian principles demand American participation and victory but he does not seek to inspire his audience with the confidence that victory is inevitable. Wilson felt the responsibility for America’s participation in the war very keenly, and though he clearly needs to be persuasive he does not want to gild his language too much. Too great a flourish would not be appropriate to the violence that he knows he is unleashing on those who will embark to Europe to fight the war. Too much optimism, given the carnage in foreign fields, would have rung very hollow.

  That said, the grave nature of his speech’s material and the controversy of his position does at least mean that Wilson did not have to strain for effect. Like David Lloyd George in Britain before him, Wilson was the anti-war radical who changed his mind. He was also a skilled writer and speaker, and contemporary accounts testify to his command. The speech was punctuated by applause and cheering. In this compressed opening Wilson summarises his theme. The reckless hostility of the Germans, their lack of compassion, their failure to adhere to any principle of restraint, lead to the inevitable conclusion that this must mean war.

  I was for a little while unable to believe that such things would in fact be done by any government that had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of civilized nations. International law had its origin in the attempt to set up some law which would be respected and observed upon the seas, where no nation had right of dominion and where lay the free highways of the world … This minimum of right the German Government has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and necessity and because it had no weapons which it could use at sea except these which it is impossible to employ as it is employing them without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understandings that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the world. I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of non-combatants, men, women, and children, engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be … There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgement befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion.

  Having posed the immediate threat, Wilson universalises it. He cites the heritage of international law whose fledgling achievements, he says, are threatened by German aggression. This speech is constructed around a simple binary opposition: the rest of the humane world against the Germans who have no respect for the norms and standards of international law. Theirs is therefore a war against all nations and a challenge to all mankind.

  This is a vital strategy for the purpose of the speech in which Wilson is about to perform a major volte-face. Wilson had been inaugurated as president for a second term less than a month before he spoke, and at least some part of his popularity stemmed from his keeping America out of the European war; he had issued a declaration of neutrality in a speech in August 1914. Wilson’s 1916 election slogan had been ‘He kept us out of the war’. He calculates, therefore, that mere self-defence will not be sufficient. He has to gain a more Olympian height, as he is about to change a basic tenet of American foreign policy which has till now been based on calculations of narrow interest.

  The speech now begins to unfold into a series of universal reasons for action, all of which have America at their centre and all of which depict Germany as in serious breach not just o
f international law as it stands, but of humanitarian principles that hold for all time.

  There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making: we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our Nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life. With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defence but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

  After building the case of Germany as an aggressor against all civilised nations, Wilson gets to his point, which is to ask Congress to acknowledge that Germany has, in effect, declared a state of war. In 1915 a German U-boat torpedoed the RMS Lusitania, killing 128 Americans. Wilson had threatened action at the time which had come to naught. Now, his decision to seek permission to go to war was aided by a missive sent by the German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to Germany’s Mexican ambassador promising to help Mexico reclaim US land in exchange for support in the war.

  But the claims Wilson makes that he did not want to fight are more than rhetorical play. He really was reluctant. Wilson had barely mentioned the outbreak of war in Europe. In 1914 he gave a 4th of July address little more than a week after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo that did not even mention it.

  Accounts of the preparation of this speech, which was all Wilson’s own work, describe his fingers trembling as he turned the pages, seized as he was with the magnitude of what the words he had written foretold. Edward M. House, Wilson’s closest aide, told Henri Bergson, the visiting French philosopher, that when Wilson declared war, he felt that ‘God would hold him accountable for every American soldier killed’. Even if God would not, Congress would.

  Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in such circumstances. We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states. We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools.

  After a long section setting out what it will mean for America to join the war, Wilson returns to the central principle. It seems odd, in the middle of the speech, to return to the binary opposition, like a popular song with a chorus but no verses. This time Wilson describes it as the battle between autocracy and freedom, between barbarism and civilisation. La Rochefoucauld once said that some forgotten notable was like a popular song that we only sing for a short time. Wilson’s intention in his repetition is the opposite. His return to barbarism/civilisation or autocracy/freedom is because he knows this is operatic in scale. He needs to convince Congress to commit to war, and no such warrant will be granted unless the cause is large enough.

  Wilson therefore co-opts the German people to his cause. The Germans are, in his account, victims of their autocratic government no less than are the citizens of invaded nations. This narrows the target further. It is not even Germany against the world, but the German elite against a world that includes the German people. ‘Germany’ in this speech is therefore retrospectively personalised. If the word ‘Kaiser’ were substituted for most of the references to Germany, the speech would not lose much in the way of sense. Recall that, in his earthier way, Lloyd George had done the same. An enemy with a human face is more frighteningly immediate than an abstraction, especially a deranged leader who commands military might. This separation of Germany from the Germans is a sleight of hand at which good orators specialise. The trick is smuggled in under cover of generosity about the German people with whom nobody has any quarrel.

  A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honour, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own. Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their habitual attitude towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honour.

  How history can mock our hopes, let alone our prophecies. This speech was delivered two months after the February revolution in Russia that brought Alexander Kerensky to power and opened, for a fleeting moment, the prospect of a social democratic future. Six months later the October Revolution had shattered this hope. Briefly, Wilson can dream. Indeed this whole section now reads like a dream sequence, and it is hard to recapture the hope that was vested in it as he spoke.

  Wilson was to devote the latter part of his career to the idea of the League of Nations that was formed in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference but folded in 1946. The United States never saw fit to involve itself, despite the constant lobbying of this former president who conducted a speaking tour to convince America of its virtues. Wilson covered almost 10,000 miles and spoke in twenty-nine cities. The effort cost what remained of his depleted strength, and he collapsed in Pueblo, Colorado, on 25 September 1919 and then the following month at the White House. Not long after that he suffered a serious stroke that left him half-paralysed and entirely secluded for the rest of his presidency.

  In January 1918 Wilson had returned to Congress to set out, in the Fourteen Points, his war aims. The final one was to establish ‘a general association of nations … affording mutual guarantees of independence’. He later presented to the Senate the Versailles Treaty which contained the Covenant of the League of Nations, and asked: ‘Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?’ The election of 1918 had shifted the balance of Congress towards the Republicans, however, and the answer, by seven Senate votes, was that they did dare.

  We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we know that in such a Government, following such methods, we can never have a friend; and that in the presence of its organised power, always lying in wait to acco
mplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured security for the democratic Governments of the world. We are now about to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.

  Wilson sings the chorus again, now to a rising inflection, so that it feels as if this must be the ending. The composer of a speech always faces a question about where to locate the best line. Should it come, like their finest hour, at the end? Should it open the speech? Or should it be – like ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’ – buried in the text? It does feel lost here. This is the formula that contains the two promises of all democratic societies – security and liberty – and he might have done better to leave with it, or maybe conclude with it. The effect of the repeated chorus structure is to amplify the point with each refrain, and after a section on the eternal contest between liberty and tyranny, it is hard to see where to go next.