Woodrow Wilson and Redemption by Blood
From their early Puritan days Americans have painted their politics with Biblical imagery. Perhaps no symbol has excited a more powerful and enduring appeal than that of a new heaven and a new earth, one that we don’t necessarily have to wait for until the end of time but that we can help bring into the here and now. Just as the Israelites of old were God’s chosen people, so too the Americans were in a new covenantal relationship with God and whose shores now became home to a New Jerusalem.
The Old Testament imagery carries within it temptations and challenges for political thinking. For one thing, the Hebrew Scripture tells a story replete with warfare between Israel and the surrounding tribes. The seizing of the land typically came at someone else’s expense, as did the continued holding of the land. Then, too, the approach stressed tribalism, dividing the world into the purified and the pagan. (I’ve long thought that “Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated” is about the most difficult passage in Scripture, even for a Calvinist.)
The Old Testament narrative has two related suggestions that, again, pose problems for people interested in politics: both the promised land and the expiation of guilt in cultic rituals are attained through the same means: the shedding of blood. Since then, the idea that a chosen people can be purified through the shedding of blood has exercised a persistent pull on the human imagination, and Americans have long succumbed to the temptation, most notably in reflections on the Civil War, as we already see in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
The atoning power of a blood sacrifice helps bring in the New Jerusalem. One is tempted to read Lincoln as saying that the new dispensation comes only through a blood sacrifice, and in truth, I think his view is not far from that. Clearly he viewed the War itself as a cleansing ritual, a way of expiating America’s guilt (for slavery) through the spilling of blood and helping America attain its promise as “the last, best hope” of mankind. Indeed, it is the “battlefield and every patriot grave” alone that stir “the mystic chords of memory” which in turn “swell the chorus of the Union” in its transformation of human beings into their better angels (First Inaugural Address). We must "sacrifice unceasingly" upon the altar of the nation.
Lincoln interpreted Gettysburg in the same way: the blood spilled on the ground had “consecrated” it and made it “hallowed.” The justly famous “Second Inaugural Address” reaffirms these themes that the War is both a gift (even true of slavery itself which, “in the providence of God, must needs come”) and a punishment of God, His mysterious way of dealing with His (almost?) chosen people. The righteous judgments of God required that “every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” and only then could we achieve “a just and lasting peace.” Lincoln’s theological beliefs virtually required an apocalyptic war that would cleanse America of its sin and introduce the new millennium.
We find a similar mix of redemptive violence, political religion, American messianism, and the demand for unceasing sacrifice in the war speeches of Woodrow Wilson. Reared as a Presbyterian, Wilson maintained the doctrines of predestination and divine election (God choosing his people) and combined those with his profound sense that he had been especially chosen by God to do great things. The elect (America) were required to demonstrate their favored status repeatedly through the performance of good works -- even though he severed those works from the Christian idea of charity and substituted in its place an abstract “humanitarianism.” In Wilson’s understanding, those good works could lead to mankind’s redemption. But America's purification, Wilson believed, had already occurred in the bloodletting of The Civil War; so America, now justified before God, existed as a fully sanctified nation. The purification was irreversible. As Melville put it in an ironic tone in his White Jacket:
But in many things we Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past, seeing that, ere long, the van of the nations must, of right, belong to ourselves. There are occasions when it is for America to make precedents, and not to obey them. We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall; and, besides our first birthright—embracing one continent of earth—God has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom. At a period when other nations have but lisped, our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough, have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we can not do a good to America but we give alms to the world.Wilson was incapable of such nuance and irony. To not do good in the world, as he saw it, would be to resist “Providence,” the movement of God in history through His appointed agents. Thus Wilson adopted a view of the moral progress of the species that allowed him to believe that humans, under American leadership, would with blood-stained hands emerge into “the full light” of a new day “where all the light that illumines mankind shines direct from the face of God,” who was now completely collapsed into the historical process.
Wilson saw American power as having three main functions: establishing basic principles, eradicating evil, and insuring the flowering of liberty. By wielding its power America would perform a service to all mankind and fulfill its duties to God. In his April 2 1917 Speech to Congress, where Wilson argued in grandiose terms for American involvement in the Great War (after an “America First” campaign whose slogan was “He Kept Us Out of War”), he offered as the motivating principle for American involvement the idea that service to the nation was equivalent to opposition to evil, for “the peace of the world is involved” as well as the “freedom of all peoples” who live under autocracies rather than democracies. “Only free peoples,” he declared, “can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.” Wilson always peddled in abstractions.
For Wilson, any reference to self-interest would have compromised the purity of the principles Americans embodied; indeed, America had “no selfish interests to serve.” Peace could only “be planted on the tested foundations of political liberty.” Civilization itself was “hanging in the balance,” with the only salvation a “universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples” who could perform the utopian task of bringing “peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.” The goal of peace could only be brought about by the means of war and the highly romanticized sacrifice of blood. Wilson believed this duty to be a religious calling, sealed by his evocation of Luther at Worms: “To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”
The sacrificial act of spilling blood in the name of principles established in 1776 resulted in a kind of secularized salvation, conferred on the individual through participation in the life of the nation. We were made righteous, and could reconcile the whole world to God’s plan. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. All nations come to Zion, for the gift of salvation, Wilson insisted, is universal, belonging to “every awakened people” who desire American freedom, and thus the day would come when all would know that America puts “human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag, not only of America, but of humanity.”
It is striking how, in speech after speech, Wilson asserted that America neither served nor had selfish interests, as if even a taint of self-interest would discredit its sanctified status, which of course it would if the project itself was divinely ordained. Perhaps this is why Georges Clemenceau observed concerning one of Wilson’s speeches that "never before has any political assembly heard so fine a sermon on what human beings might be capable of accomplishing if only they weren’t human."
The purification of America through the sacrificial shedding of blood is also a major theme in Wilson’s wartime reflections. As America descended into the war, Wilson’s reflections became more Manichean, dividing the world into good and evil. While early in the war, during the period of America’s non-involvement, Wilson characterized Germany charitably, he later dismissed it as a regime dedicated to lying, deceit and tyranny, while America alone embodied the world’s hopes for rights and self-government. This Manichean struggle necessitated an Apocalyptic War where the forces of evil would be definitively defeated. Indeed, Wilson in 1917 and 1918 talked not of peace, but of victory; not of limited political goals, but of total annihilation of the enemy and the evil it embodied. In his speech at the Baltimore Armory in April of 1918, Wilson created an absolute divide between the sides in the conflict and insisted, rather oddly, that Americans must be willing to sacrifice “all that we possess” in the struggle.
Note how extreme, and how messianic, beyond what is rational, the message becomes: “It shall appear in the utter sacrifice and self-forgetfulness with which we shall give all that we love and all that we have to redeem the world and make it fit for free men like ourselves to live in.” Ordinarily, people might be expected to fight to preserve what they love, not give it up. Wilson’s command thus has about it the Biblical resonance of serving a god whose demands supersede all temporal goods, of a love that requires subordinating all others. We have been transformed from citizens into missionaries. As Melville predicted, we have taken upon ourselves the role of political Messiah.
America had already been transformed (Wilson saw Lincoln as instrumental in this regard) and so now had to transform the world. There was only one way to do this: “Force, force to the utmost, force to the limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.” Again, the absolute nature of the end abolishes the relative limits of the means. The war of the righteous is the war without limits.
We have inherited not only Wilson’s idealism concerning American might, as well as his conception of a humanity that possesses a sanctified vanguard in its midst, but also his abstract reasoning — his obsession with rights and humanitarian compassion. Along with it has come his tendency to divide the world into two camps: a good one and an evil one. It was only a matter of time before that tendency got directed inward rather than outward. Our tendency to view our tribe as sanctified and the other as stained has found a troubling new voice in our age and portends a new kind of civil war whose bloodshed would not purify us but only deepen our guilt and shame. We would do well to reconsider our reliance on Wilson’s musings.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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