David Frum’s effort to defend our worst two-term president says more about Frum than about Wilson.
David Frum’s effort to defend our worst two-term president says more about Frum than about Wilson.
I t takes extraordinary perversity to rise in defense of Woodrow Wilson in 2024. David Frum is equal to that task. What Frum fails to do is present a consistent, coherent, or persuasive case for rehabilitating America’s worst two-term president. Frum’s apologia is so riddled with errors of commission, omission, perspective, and internal inconsistency that his heart hardly even seems to be in it.
Conservatives rightly loathe the man who first brought academic progressivism to the Democratic Party, shaping the approach to governance it follows to this day. When it comes time to respond to Wilson’s conservative critics, Frum doesn’t even appear to understand the arguments enough to address them. Moreover, as I detailed at length two years ago in my “Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson,” there are a great many reasons for people of all persuasions to despise Wilson. Frum scarcely begins to cover that expansive waterfront.
If Wilson Wins
Frum’s article, “Uncancel Woodrow Wilson,” appears in the March 2024 issue of the Atlantic. How perverse a choice is it to write on this now? Consider that the last thing the magazine published was a special issue dedicated to the topic “If Trump Wins,” warning of peril to the American system and the civil liberties of our people from a man who would come to the Oval Office with a dictatorial temperament and contempt for the constraints of our Constitution. Frum himself contributed a screed against the menace of such a president:
If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury. A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. . . . For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.
How terrible to contemplate a president who loathes the Constitution and is bent on permanently subverting it. And worse, imagine one who might win the job without a popular majority at his back, owing to an opposition divided by a third-party challenge:
If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time.
If the nation indeed stands at such a precipice, you and I might think it the worst possible occasion to laud Woodrow Wilson. But you and I are not David Frum.
Wilson openly scorned our constitutional system in his academic writings; he explicitly ran for governor of New Jersey openly pledging to be “an unconstitutional governor” who would burst restraints on his powers. He was elected president in 1912 with 42 percent of the vote almost entirely as a result of a third-party challenge that split his opposition — and both of his elections depended upon the mass disenfranchisement of black voters in the Solid South. He was reelected with less than a majority of the vote on the pledge to keep America out of war, and proceeded to lead the United States into a global war and a global pandemic, trample civil liberties in office, engage in mass censorship, jail political opponents, intern and deport people of disfavored national origin, lead a racist backlash against vulnerable minorities, stoke runaway inflation, and conduct a secretive White House in which an unelected First Lady ruled while Wilson himself was immobilized by a stroke. (The fact that the Constitution had to be amended to prevent a repeat of Wilson’s continuance in office while incapacitated is not a compliment to his record.) None of this is hyperbole; it is settled historical fact that Frum does not dispute.
Having It Both Ways
Frum pursues two general lines of argument. One is the standard case against “canceling” figures from the past: that we should not be so morally sure of ourselves that we give no grace or mercy to people who inhabited a different time full of different assumptions. The other is that Wilson stood for well-meaning things — such as “reform” in domestic policy and American leadership abroad — and therefore we should admire him for those aspirations even when they produced disastrous results. “He is scorned now because of our weakening attachment to what was formerly regarded as good and great,” Frum complains, and we lose something valuable if we stop telling “the story that once would have been told about Wilson by the liberal-minded. . . . He showed the way to the modern world. He did not reach his hoped-for destination, but neither yet have we. Cancel Wilson, and you empower those who seek to discredit the high goals for which he worked.”
Fear of empowering Frum’s ideological opponents seems to be the actual concern here, rather than telling the truth about the past.
There are two fundamental contradictions in Frum’s arguments, both of which involve the inconvenient character of Wilson himself. First, Frum wishes us to credit Wilson for his good intentions, yet he must contend at great length with Wilson’s vicious bigotry. We may forgive a good man who fails at good things, or we may honor a bad man who succeeds at great things. But Wilson was a rotten person who failed on the world stage. He was a bad man and a bad president.
Second, Frum asks us to apply to Wilson what Judge Learned Hand called “the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” Yet the “schoolmaster in politics” was more sure he was right than any man ever to hold his office. Even Frum is compelled to concede that, “as he settled into the presidency, Wilson became more rigid, more convinced of his own righteousness and his adversaries’ wickedness.” Moreover, hardly anybody in modern American political punditry more embodies that spirit of Wilson than Frum himself.
Wilson lived to see his political legacy decisively rejected by huge popular majorities in the years immediately following his presidency. His approach to America at home was out of favor with the voters until nearly a decade after his death, and as Frum acknowledges, Wilson’s approach to foreign affairs was anathema for another decade after that. It was the professors and intellectuals — his own tribe — who rescued a reputation that didn’t deserve it. They did so for purposes not so dissimilar from Frum’s: not a spirit of mercy but in order to wield Wilson as a weapon against the sorts of conservatives who stood in Wilson’s way. He was rehabilitated in order to slander the likes of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Henry Cabot Lodge, and their partisan and ideological heirs in the America that followed the Second World War.
Wilson the Racist
The aspect of Wilson that today attracts the most unified opprobrium across the partisan and ideological spectrum is his racism, which is by now proverbial. Frum wrestles with the topic, and is bested by it.
Wilson was not merely a man of his time who shared its common prejudices. He was notably racist even by the standards of the 1910s. Nor was he simply a man who looked the other way at racial injustice: He actively made things worse. In assessing the racism of Wilson’s time, he was not the led but the leader.
Wilson did not just refuse to rock the boat in the noontide of Jim Crow — although he did that, too, bluntly refusing to racially integrate Princeton on his watch — he bent federal law in a pro-segregation direction. He imposed rigid segregation on the federal government where it had not been before. His administration required photos on job applications to spot the black people. Even with hundreds of thousands of black Americans serving their nation in the First World War, Wilson’s policies compelled United States Army units to fight under French command because they were manned by black soldiers. This was a disgrace to the American flag.
Wilson employed, promoted, and allied himself with even worse people, such as the ardently pro-lynching Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman. He did other racist things Frum neglected to mention (covered in my long bill of particulars), including supporting legislation making interracial marriage a felony in the District of Columbia and putting government backing behind eugenic compulsion, decades before the Nazis did so. Wilson made Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen the chief eugenicist of New Jersey, in pursuit of a campaign of forced sterilizations. Katzen-Ellenbogen ended up working at Buchenwald and was convicted of crimes against humanity in 1947.
Even Frum, who spends a good deal of the column trying to get past Wilson’s unbroken record of discrimination and contempt toward African Americans, must concede quite a bit, quoting one early associate who said “that Wilson was the first southern white man she’d ever met with no personal warmth for any individual Black person.” Yet he tries to defuse this by noting that it took until Truman for anyone to unwind all the damage Wilson did in segregating the federal government, and by equating Wilson with other Republican presidents of his era: “Why Wilson rather than Taft or Coolidge?”
The answer is in part to be found in a fact that Frum notes but finds puzzling: that active bigotry in Wilson’s era was more commonly found among progressives and economic populists than among classically liberal conservatives such as Lodge. In fact, ideologies of economic resentment are natural friends of ideologies of racial resentment, and a preference for government by administrative experts rather than representative legislatures flows easily from a Wilsonian view that the common people include too many lesser beings. Thence flowed Wilson’s view that public input into administration was “a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.”
The bid to excuse Wilson by comparison to his conservative Republican successors is a calumny. Consider Warren G. Harding:
Harding screened The Covered Wagon and became the first president to agitate for civil rights on Southern soil. In October of 1921, speaking to a huge, segregated crowd in the booming city of Birmingham, Ala., Harding championed “an end of prejudice,” praised the Southern blacks who had migrated north for enriching their communities, and applauded the black soldiers for bravely serving during the Great War.
He gave that speech, ironically, in a newly named “Woodrow Wilson Park.” Robert Graboyes calls it “the single most courageous speech on race relations ever delivered by an American president,” and it was praised by Wilson critic W. E. B. Du Bois as “like sudden thunder in blue skies.” Three days after the notorious race massacre in Tulsa, Harding “went to the nation’s first degree-granting all-black university (Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University) to denounce the slaughter, praise the contribution of black soldiers in World War I, and shake hands with every graduate.” Harding also backed an anti-lynching law that southern Democrats filibustered in the Senate.
Calvin Coolidge likewise supported the anti-lynching law and presided over a dramatic national decline in lynchings, reversing the trend line of anti-black violence that had crested during and immediately after Wilson’s tenure in office. Coolidge was hesitant to call out the Ku Klux Klan by name but gave a much-noted rebuttal in 1925 to its views, a speech the Baltimore Afro-American said at the time “whales the Ku Klux Klan between the eyes.”
“Silent Cal” was, as liberal historian Jon Meacham has noted, “better on matters of race than is generally thought, if it is thought of at all.” For example:
In his first State of the Union message in 1923, Coolidge called for a major appropriation to traditionally black Howard University in Washington, D.C. . . .
In August 1924, a black man named Charles H. Roberts, a dentist by trade, was nominated as a Republican to run for Congress in New York’s 21st District. A man named Charles F. Gardner wrote to the president to protest. . . . In a quick reply, which Coolidge two days later released to the press, the president said he “was amazed to receive such a letter.” He went on to note the honorable service of a half a million black troops in World War I and to reject the thought he could or would interfere in a local Republican primary.
“Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights,” Coolidge wrote. “A colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party primary, as is any other citizen. The decision must be made by the constituents to whom he offers himself, and by nobody else.”
In fact, “on his final day in office, March 4, 1929, Coolidge signed a public resolution that initiated a commission to design and construct a national monument to African Americans, according to an article by Rushad L. Thomas in the Coolidge Quarterly. This monument would be a ‘tribute to the Negro’s contributions to the achievement of America.’”
So no, not everybody was like Wilson.
Wilson the Anti-Constitutionalist
The central conservative charge against Wilson is that he was, from the beginning to the end of his career, a critic, opponent, and subverter of our constitutional separation of powers. He preferred the unified executive and legislative power of Westminster-model parliamentary systems, such as exist in Britain and in Frum’s native Canada. It was Wilson who bequeathed to us the concept of a “living Constitution,” and who lauded and promoted the unrepresentative power of the administrative state — in the latter case, retracing the footsteps of the Confederacy. His malign influence on American constitutionalism is with us still.
Frum doesn’t even bother mentioning any of this. It’s a curious omission for a man raising alarms about Trump, but then, it would raise uncomfortable questions about the extra-constitutional executive edicts of our current president.
Wilson’s record on civil liberties was abysmal, and while Frum leaves a lot of it unmentioned, he makes no effort to justify it. He was the closest thing we ever had to a dictator — and if Franklin D. Roosevelt is a close second, it should be recalled that FDR learned it all from his eight years in the Wilson administration. Wilson saddled us with J. Edgar Hoover (first hired and promoted under Wilson), the Palmer raids, and the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs, one of Wilson’s 1912 opponents. It took Harding to pardon Debs and dismantle Wilson’s oppressive apparatus. Historians who share Frum’s sympathies mocked Harding for this because he coined a funny word (“normalcy”) to describe the restoration of constitutional government.
Sometimes Wilson Comes as a Man of Peace
Frum’s principal case for Wilson is as “the founder and definer of American world leadership.” But Frum gets wrong what was new about Wilson, while yet again being forced by the facts to acknowledge that his foreign policy in practice was a colossal failure.
“Wilson,” Frum tells us, “was the first world leader to perceive security as a benefit that could be shared by like-minded nations.” That’s curiously ahistorical. European diplomacy between 1815 and 1848 was built around the Concert of Vienna system, which was explicitly designed by Klemens von Metternich to resolve disputes and facilitate collective security after the long ordeal of the Napoleonic Wars. William Gladstone spent a good deal of his career trying to revive the concept. Otto von Bismarck likewise spent the years from 1872 to 1890 promoting multilateral diplomatic systems for avoiding the ruinous rivalries that would reemerge in Europe after his fall from power. Bismarck took up that stance out of practicality, rather than principle — he first consumed all the territory he felt Germany needed in three wars — but it nonetheless shaped the world in which Wilson came of age.
Frum attributes to Wilson the dawn of idealism in American foreign policy, but that’s not quite right, either. The promotion of liberty, democracy, and republicanism abroad — even if often only by words — was a strain in American foreign policy throughout the 19th century, as reflected in John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July address in 1821 and the Monroe Doctrine’s grounding in the different political systems of the Old and New Worlds. Americans went wild for Lajos Kossuth when the Hungarian nationalist toured the country in 1851–52. William McKinley’s entry into the Spanish–American War and absorption of new colonies was publicly justified by a sort of idealism, both in the drive to end Spanish oppression of Cuba and to take up the Christian duty to govern and civilize “our little brown brothers” in the Philippines. The latter was no less idealistic for being a product of the racial paternalism of its day.
What Wilson introduced was not so much idealism as hubris. No president before Wilson would have made the leap from declaring our desire to spread liberty and self-government to asserting our power to “make the world safe for democracy.” None would have arrived, as Wilson did at Versailles in 1919, prepared to dictate terms to the great powers of Europe, or dispatched American soldiers to the snows of Russia in the hopes of affecting the course of the Russian Revolution.
Frum concedes, as he must, that “Wilson’s gravest failures were in his chosen mission as a peacemaker,” including failing to even attempt in 1916 the sort of mediation of the First World War that Theodore Roosevelt had provided between Russia and Japan in 1905. (Whether this would have worked is hotly contested.) Oddly, given its prominence in our current debates and in Frum’s own worldview, he neglects to mention that Wilson sold out Ukraine to Russia at the peace table in 1919, thinking (wrongly) that keeping Ukraine inside Russia would pull the country away from Bolshevism rather than allow the Bolsheviks to commit genocide there once they had consolidated power. Millions died as a result.
The List Goes On
I could go on. Frum’s enthusiasm for Wilson’s introduction of the income tax and the Federal Reserve is unsullied by questions about the role of the Fed in giving us the Great Depression and the 2008 credit crisis. Frum credits Wilson for appointing the first Jewish justice to the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis, but neglects to mention that he also saddled Brandeis with Wilson’s former attorney general James McReynolds, a colleague so antisemitic that he would walk out of the room whenever Brandeis spoke. He lauds Wilson as a free trader without mentioning that he signed the Jones Act. He praises Wilson for supporting women’s suffrage, which he did belatedly and reluctantly after having opposed it.
Walter Weyl, writing in the pro-Wilson New Republic in 1919, described Wilson’s approach:
This simple faith of Mr. Wilson in his Fourteen Points, unexplained and unelaborated, was due, I believe, to the invincible abstractness of his mind. He seems to see the world in abstractions. To him railroad cars are not railroad cars but a gray, generalized thing called Transportation; people are not men and women, corporeal, gross, very human beings, but Humanity — Humanity very much in the abstract. In his political thinking and propaganda, Mr. Wilson cuts away all the complex qualities which things possess in real life in order to fasten upon one single characteristic, and thus he creates a clear but over-simple and unreal formula. . . .
His thinking rarely concerns itself with concrete differences; it is never a quantitative thinking; it is never inductive. And this abstractness of Mr. Wilson is part of a curiously a priori metaphysical idealism. His world stands firmly on its head, Ideas do not rest upon facts but facts on ideas. Moral and laws are not created out of the rub and wear of men and societies but are things innate, uncreated, immutable, absolute and simple; and human relations arise out of them.
Wilson was, in this respect, the perfect exemplar of the ivory-tower intellectual and the gray bureaucrat who moves around real-world human beings like so many pieces on a game board, oblivious to the cost. As a Ph.D. scholar, a university administrator, and himself a periodic contributor to the Atlantic, his ascent to power and his capacity for imposing change on the American system and the world appeals naturally to the sorts of people who share his credentials and his limitations. His class has done no better in managing a pandemic and a dangerous world in the 21st century than Wilson himself did.
We should keep Wilson canceled not because we lack mercy toward the past but because we still have some for the future. The last sort of hero America needs is the man who seems good in theory but was dreadful and inhuman in practice.