One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the First World War. Four days earlier, in his war message to Congress, he gave his rationale for declaring war against Imperial Germany and for creating a new world order. He now viewed German submarine attacks against neutral as well as belligerent shipping as a threat to the whole world, not just the United States. “The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind,” he claimed. “It is a war against all nations.” He now believed that Germany had violated the moral standards that “citizens of civilized states” should uphold. The president explained: “We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.” He focused on protecting democracy against the German regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II. “A steadfast concert for peace,” he said, “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.” Wilson called on Congress to vote for war not just because Imperial Germany had sunk three American ships, but for the larger purpose of a new world order. He affirmed: “We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense 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 foundation of political liberty.”Footnote ¹

Wilson's definition of the nation's new global mission emphasized two key concepts: democracy and civilization. In his understanding of American and world history, the United States had emerged as the preeminent liberal democracy with a capitalist economy, having progressed to this apogee of modern civilization. It was time for the American people to protect their historic achievement and promote it worldwide. In his war message, he explained: “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.”Footnote ²

Wilson believed that the time had come for the United States to save the old world. It should join the European Allies, particularly the democratic states of Great Britain, France, and Italy, against autocratic Germany, the dominant leader of the Central Powers. However, the United States would not become one of the Allies; it would only join them as an “Associated Power,” thereby retaining its independence and traditional aloofness from the old world. The Russian Revolution in March 1917, with the abdication of Czar Nicholas II and the emergence of the provisional government to replace him, apparently opened the opportunity for Russia to become another liberal democracy. Wilson welcomed the new Russian government as a democratic partner in the ongoing war. He wanted it to continue fighting on the Eastern front. Revealing his profound ignorance of Russian history, Wilson proclaimed in his war message: “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 origins, 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.”Footnote ³ Thus, Wilson characterized the world war as a global conflict between democratic and authoritarian governments, the outcome of which would determine the fate of civilization. For such a purpose, the United States should enter the Great War.

The president had not previously viewed the war from this perspective. He had not highlighted its stakes as the preservation and promotion of democracy and civilization. In contrast, the former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (TR) had emphasized these two key concepts from the beginning of the European war in 1914. Condemning Imperial Germany for invading Belgium and France in violation of international law, he identified with the European Allies against the Central Powers. He praised Great Britain for entering the war and criticized Wilson for attempting to maintain U.S. neutrality, even after Germany sank the Lusitania on May 7, 1915. TR thought the United States should prepare its armed forces for war long before the Democratic president did. After America's intervention in 1917, he wanted no delay in putting “the American flag on the battle front [sic] in this great world war for democracy and civilization and for the reign of justice and fair dealing among the nations of mankind.”Footnote ⁴

Wilson's call in his war message to make the world safe for democracy did not convince Roosevelt that the president would pursue that goal by fighting for military victory, which would require Germany's unconditional surrender to the Allies. TR chastised the journalist William Allen White for crediting Wilson as a true champion of democracy. “Wilson did not come into this war for Democracy,” Roosevelt wrote White on May 28, 1917. “For two and one half years he announced again and again and again that he was neutral and that we should all be neutral in the war; and he didn't know what the different peoples were fighting about; that he didn't side with one party more than with the other; and we had no concern with the purpose of the war, and finally, that we ought to strive for a peace that did not bring victory. … He is a treacherous hypocrite and to praise him is to praise his moral obliquity.”Footnote ⁵

Unlike TR, Walter Lippmann, a New Republic editor, affirmed Wilson's vision of a new world order. In a July 1917 article entitled “The World Conflict in Its Relation to American Democracy,” Lippmann praised Wilson's speech on May 27, 1916, to the League to Enforce Peace. “The speech,” he explained, “was an announcement that American isolation was ended, and that we were prepared to join a League of Peace. This was the foundation of all that followed, and it was intended to make clear to the world that America would not abandon its traditional policy for imperialistic adventure, that if America had to fight it would fight for the peace and order of the world.” Lippmann claimed that the Allies, but not Germany, welcomed Wilson's call for a new era of international relations, which the president had elaborated in his “peace without victory” address to the Senate on January 22, 1917. “It was an international program for democracy,” Lippmann asserted, while “Germany proclaimed herself an enemy of international order.” The Germans and their Allies fought for their own competitive nationalism rather than for Wilson's new world order of cooperative democratic nations. “The Alliance to which we belong,” Lippmann exalted, “has suddenly grown hot with the new democracy of Russia and the new internationalism of America.” He anticipated that “the Federation of the World” would create “a union of peoples determined to end forever that intriguing, adventurous nationalism which has torn the world for three centuries.” He foresaw a new era of peace with a new partnership of democratic nations that would replace the old order of international wars. “Good democrats,” Lippmann affirmed, “have always believed that the common interests of men were greater than their special interests, that ruling classes can be enemies, but that the nations must be partners.” He believed that “the whole world is at war with the greatest autocracies. That is why the whole world is turning so passionately towards democracy as the only principle on which peace can be secured.”Footnote ⁶

Wilson used his understanding of American nationalism as the foundation for his vision of a new world order. Prior to the 1890s, he had emphasized the nation's European heritage as the principal factor that shaped American history. At Johns Hopkins University in the 1880s, he studied with Professors Herbert Baxter Adams and Richard T. Ely, who had earned their PhD degrees from the University of Heidelberg. They taught Wilson German historicism. This Hegelian theory of history affirmed that modern nations grew like biological organisms from primordial racial roots. He embraced this “germ” theory in his second book, The State (1889). He affirmed, “The main stocks of modern European forms of government are Aryan.” The Aryan and Semitic races, he believed, “have played the chief parts in the history of the world.” From these primordial racial origins, modern European and American governments emerged and now evidenced “the most notable progress in civilization.” Wilson asserted that, in contrast, “non-Aryan races” still lived in “a savage state” of barbarism. He thought the English had gained “a very fierce democratic temper” from “the first Teutons,” and passed this Anglo-Saxon heritage on to the Americans. “The political institutions of the United States,” he wrote, “are in all their main features simply the political institutions of England, as transplanted by English colonists in the course of two centuries which preceded our own, worked out through a fresh development to new and characteristic forms.” Given his belief in primordial racial contributions to modern English and American statecraft, Wilson restricted his study of politics almost exclusively to the history of the West. He traced the origins and development of government from ancient Greece and Rome through medieval and modern Europe to the United States. He saw a pattern of unidirectional progress toward liberal democracy. “Tested by history's long measurements,” he affirmed, “the lines of advance are seen as singularly straight.” He expected democratic states to prevail in the future as this progressive development “was reducing all forms of government to Democracy.”Footnote ⁷

In 1889, Wilson returned to Johns Hopkins University to deliver a series of lectures. Frederick Jackson Turner, as a graduate student there, attended the lectures and enjoyed long discussions with Wilson. Both historians shaped each other's thinking about American history. Under Turner's influence, Wilson began to study the American West. Before Turner delivered his famous paper on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to the American Historical Association in 1893, Wilson wrote his own frontier thesis in his new book, Division and Reunion: 1829–1889 (1893). In agreement with Turner, he focused on the contribution of America's western frontier to the nation's identity. He argued that the frontier had produced “a new epoch” by Andrew Jackson's presidency. “A new nation had been born and nurtured into self-reliant strength in the West, and it was now to set out upon a characteristic career.” The United States had reached a high stage of historical development. Wilson affirmed that Jackson, who was “wholly a product of frontier life,” marked the triumph of “a distinctly American order of politics, begotten of the crude forces of a new nationality.” As a “masterful frontiersman,” Jackson ended “the old line of Presidents” who were more like “old-world politicians.” Given their experience on the western frontier, the American people had transformed their European, particularly British, heritage into a new national identity. For the next sixty years, as Americans followed the westward movement of the frontier, they continued progressive development from “their incomplete civilization” in 1829 to their more advanced stage of democracy by 1889.Footnote ⁸

In a book review in The Forum (1893), Wilson summarized his new interpretation of American history, emphasizing that the frontier had reshaped the nation's European heritage: “Every element of the old life that penetrated the continent at all has been digested and has become an element of new life. It is this transformation that constitutes our history.” The frontier enabled individual opportunities and mobility, while it promoted free and democratic institutions. It created a national identity for native-born Americans, while also permitting the assimilation of immigrants. Stressing the frontier's unique contribution to American history, Wilson concluded: “That part of our history, therefore, which is most truly national is the history of the West.”Footnote ⁹

Even after Wilson joined Turner in focusing on the American frontier's influence on the nation's identity, he still maintained his Eurocentric orientation toward history. He continued to identify the United States with its racial or ethnic heritage from Europe. In an article on “The Significance of American History” (1902), he rejoiced that “the virgin continent discovered in the West” had provided a place where European immigrants could transform themselves into Americans. Although some Americans also came from Africa and Asia, he did not regard them as part of the “new race” that had “fused to make a common stock.” Emphasizing the process of assimilation that turned immigrants into citizens, he affirmed: “Nations grow by spirit, not by blood; and nowhere can the significant principle of their growth be seen more clearly, upon a more fair and open page, than in the history of the United States.” By excluding African and Asian Americans from this process, Wilson offered an exclusive interpretation of American history. “It is an offshoot of European history and has all its antecedents on the other side of the sea, and yet is so much more than a mere offshoot.” The closing of the American frontier in 1890 led Wilson to expect the United States to have a different history in the twentieth century. “A nation hitherto wholly devoted to domestic development,” he concluded, “now finds its first tasks of the great world at large, seeking its special part and place of power. … But the past is the key to it; and the past of America lies at the center of modern history.”Footnote ¹⁰

The closing of the American frontier, Wilson observed, led Americans to look for new frontiers overseas. He supported the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the subsequent U.S. dominance of Cuba. He welcomed the acquisition of new colonies, including the Philippines. In an article on “The Ideals of America” in The Atlantic Monthly (1902), he described the history of American continental expansion throughout the nineteenth century. He wrote, “This great pressure of a people moving always to new frontiers, in search of new lands, new power, the full freedom of a virgin world, has ruled our course and formed our policies like a Fate.” The 1890 census takers discovered, however, that “they could no longer find any frontier upon this continent.” Wilson noted, “We had not pondered their report a single decade before we made new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas, accounting the seven thousand miles of ocean that lie between us and the Philippine Islands no more than the three thousand which once lay between us and the coasts of the Pacific.” He wanted the United States to play a larger role in the world, giving self-rule to Cuba and eventually to the Philippines. Despite racial differences that separated these nations from his own, Wilson saw Americans as “apostles of liberty and self-government.” He claimed, “We have given pledges to the world and must redeem them as we can.”Footnote ¹¹

During the Great War, Wilson reiterated this interpretation of American history, stressing that the closing of the frontier in 1890 led the United States to intervene overseas. In an address in Omaha on October 5, 1916, he reminded the audience that “only eight years elapsed before we got into the politics of the world.” Americans acquired new possessions beyond their continent after winning the war against Spain in 1898. “And that frontier, which no man could draw upon this continent in 1890, had been flung across the seas seven thousand miles to the untrodden forests of some parts of the Philippines.” Wilson interpreted America's new role abroad as the global extension of its experience at home. “Nebraska was once, as I have phrased it, the melting pot in which the various elements of America were fused together for the purposes of American life. Now it is our great duty to fuse the elements of America together for the purpose of the life of the world.” He denied that his new internationalism violated President George Washington's advice to avoid foreign entanglements. “What disturbs the life of the whole world is the concern of the whole world. And it is our duty to lend the full force of this nation—moral and physical—to a league of nations which shall see to it that nobody disturbs the peace of the world without submitting his case first to the opinion of mankind.”Footnote ¹²

During the decades before the Great War, Americans had increasingly encountered foreign peoples at home and abroad. U.S. intervention in Cuba, the Philippines, and elsewhere overseas contributed to this new experience, but so too did the increase in immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some foreigners came to the United States from the newly acquired protectorates or colonies. Even more came from Southern and Eastern Europe. These “new immigrants” were often Catholic and Orthodox Christians or Jews. They were less likely to be Anglo-Saxon Protestants.Footnote ¹³ Nevertheless, once Wilson began to emphasize how the Western frontier had turned foreigners into loyal citizens, he remained optimistic that most immigrants could be assimilated as Americans. During the Great War, he reaffirmed his belief in liberal assimilation. On October 11, 1915, he told the Daughters of the American Revolution that “America has not grown by the mere multiplication of the original stock.” The United States had preserved the ideals of the founders by teaching them to generations of foreign immigrants. “It is easy to preserve tradition with continuity of blood,” he acknowledged, “.… but it is not so easy when that race is constantly being renewed and augmented from other sources, from stocks that did not carry or originate the same principles.” Under proper American tutelage, however, they too could learn the national legacy of liberty. “So from generation to generation strangers have had to be indoctrinated with the principles of the American family, and the wonder and beauty of it all has been that the infection has been so generously easy.” New immigrants from various lands had become foreign-born citizens who were just as patriotic as those born in the United States. With rare exceptions, they were ready to fulfill their duties as Americans.Footnote ¹⁴

Although Wilson now regarded the American frontier experience as the primary influence in shaping the nation's identity as a free and democratic people, he still held an essentially European view of history. An old European intellectual tradition with biblical and classical roots shaped his presumably American design for a new world order. As Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt observed in The Myth of the West (1995), the idea of America originated in old Europe, not in the American West. Europeans saw the new world as the “end of history” before Americans exalted the United States as history's culmination, a belief that gave them confidence in their future. Accordingly, English colonization served “to spread Christianity and civilize a barbarous country.” Although “Turner's grand thesis” affirmed that “American democracy was born in the West,” Schulte Nordholt found its origins in the visions of European philosophers. The myth promised the United States that its empire, unlike those of other great powers that had risen and fallen, would have a happier destiny with unending progress. Wilson adopted this mythical interpretation of history, affirming America's place as the world's “last frontier” and offering “the hope of general peace” in a new order of international relations.Footnote ¹⁵

Patrick Manning, a pioneer in the new field of world history, agreed that Wilson derived his historical perspective from Europe, particularly from the philosophy of history that developed there during the nineteenth century. In Navigating World History (2003), he noted that Western ideas about world history began to form during the Renaissance and Enlightenment in early modern Europe. Developing these ideas during the nineteenth century, Europeans placed Western civilization at the core of their philosophy of history. “In the emerging hierarchy of empires, nations, and colonies,” Manning explained, “the term civilization became part of the vocabulary of every philosophical camp. … For pre-modern times, civilization referred to the succession of leading empires and societies, in contrast to each other and to the timeless barbarians beyond their limits. For modern times, civilization meant the civilized world, including the leading nations and imperial homelands but not the colonies.” Manning observed that Wilson, first as a historian and then as the U.S. president during the Great War, affirmed this understanding of history in his scholarship and in his vision of global reform. “Woodrow Wilson, who as a historian participated actively in the nationalistic style of writing about American history, became a theorist for a new world order once he became president and a leader of the Allied war effort. … Wilson's vision of the League of Nations contributed, in the minds of some, to the notion of world government.”Footnote ¹⁶

When Wilson employed the contrast between civilization and barbarism to describe his vision of global reform during World War I, his American perspective retained an old European idea. In Savage Anxieties (2012), Robert A. Williams Jr. traced the origins of this worldview. “From its very beginnings in ancient Greece,” he explained, “Western civilization has sought to invent itself through the idea of the savage. We are all familiar with the basic elements of the idea: The savage is a distant, alien, uncivilized being, unaware of either the benefits or burdens of modernity. Lacking in sophisticated institutions of government and religion, ignorant of property and laws, without complex social bonds or familial ties, living in a state of untamed nature, fierce and ennobled at the same time, the savage has always represented an anxious, negating presence in the world, standing perpetually opposed to Western civilization.”Footnote ¹⁷ So when Turner defined the frontier in the American West as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” his interpretation was not very original in its fundamental assumptions.Footnote ¹⁸ Nor was Wilson's when he offered his own frontier thesis and later used it to justify his vision of a new world order, which would require the United States to join a league of nations after the Great War. Both of them adhered to the European historical tradition that distinguished between civilized and savage peoples. This legacy profoundly influenced Wilson's peacemaking.

Two new trends in historiography have characterized scholarship in the era of globalization after the Cold War. One was the emergence of the new field of world history. The other was the internationalization of American history. Challenging nationalist interpretations, both trends called into question the Eurocentric historical perspective that Wilson inherited from the nineteenth century and used as the intellectual foundation of his foreign policies. In A World Connecting (2012), Emily S. Rosenberg and her coauthors examined the era from 1870 to 1945 as a time of major transition in world history. They studied the invention of modern statehood, the global reach of empires, the migrations of peoples around the world, the commodity chains in the global economy, and the transnational and international currents in the shrinking world. Describing a history that Wilson only partially understood, they noted the paradoxical experience that the modern world, while becoming more interdependent, was also apparently more diverse as different peoples interacted with each other more than ever before. This interaction created a greater sense of strange differences among peoples, not just a common familiarity. Rosenberg noted, “New connections highlighted all kinds of regional differences, and the awareness of difference could promote suspicion and repulsion perhaps even more easily than it facilitated understanding and communication.” In this age of interdependence and fragmentation, the world experienced both “the intensifying global interconnectedness” and “the multiple processes of disintegration and reintegration.”Footnote ¹⁹

In the new era of globalization after the Cold War, the internationalization of American history coincided with the emerging field of world history to challenge the historical perspective that scholars such as Wilson and Turner inherited from the nineteenth century. The Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History of the Organization of American Historians encouraged this new direction in historiography.Footnote ²⁰ Historians transcended not only national borders but also artificial boundaries between subfields of American history. Walter Nugent combined U.S. foreign relations with American western history in Habits of Empire (2008).Footnote ²¹ Like others who created the so-called new western history, he recognized that the United States had created its own empire when it expanded across North America. He agreed with Patricia Nelson Limerick, who criticized Turner's frontier thesis and described the mythical “empire of innocence” that Americans had imagined to exonerate themselves from their own imperialism. In The Legacy of Conquest (1987), she rejected Turner's definition of the frontier as the dividing line between civilization and savagery in the American West. In her view, rather than promoting freedom and democracy, the frontier was the place of conquest.Footnote ²²

Nugent went beyond Limerick by incorporating U.S. foreign relations into American western history. Some leading historians of American diplomacy had long recognized that the United States pursued its own empire. In Empire on the Pacific (1955), Norman A. Graebner challenged Turner's interpretation of the frontier's progressive movement across the continent. He focused on President James K. Polk's imperial ambitions to acquire the future American ports at Seattle, San Francisco, and San Diego. Moreover, Graebner used the word “empire” instead of the euphemistic terminology of westward expansion.Footnote ²³ In The Rising American Empire (1960), Richard W. Van Alstyne likewise recognized that Americans engaged in their own imperialism throughout their history.Footnote ²⁴ In Imperial Democracy (1961), Ernest R. May understood that the United States, although a democratic state, emerged in the late nineteenth century as a great imperial power. So too did Walter LaFeber in The New Empire (1963).Footnote ²⁵ Nugent combined this understanding of imperialism in American foreign relations with insights of new western history to emphasize the “habits of empire” in the nation's history from the American Revolution to its “global empire” in the twentieth century. Thus, Nugent rejected the historical perspective that had characterized the worldviews of Turner and Wilson.

Internationalizing the history of the United States challenged the nationalist belief in American exceptionalism. To escape that perspective, Ian Tyrrell heralded a new historical framework. “The internationalization of scholarship itself,” he explained, “is steadily eroding the boundaries that at the turn of the [twentieth] century created strong national historiographical traditions, including American exceptionalism.”Footnote ²⁶ In Reforming the World (2010), Tyrrell eschewed the exceptionalist interpretation that Wilson, both as a historian and later as president, had expressed. He adopted instead a transnational perspective toward “the creation of America's moral empire” during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. “The new internationalism that moral reformers supported,” Tyrrell explained, “turned on the exchange of ideas, norms, and values among like-minded individuals in voluntary organizations across national boundaries. Ordinary people would work together in non-state relationships to enhance international understanding, to foster ethical conduct, and to promote moral reform. Peace between nations would flow from the activities of clubs and reform organizations.” This transnational culture of moral reform mostly influenced U.S. foreign policy only indirectly. Tyrrell observed that “Rather than determine statecraft, the Christian coalition contributed to a missionary and reformist Weltanschauung within the higher echelons of American politics.”Footnote ²⁷

This transnational culture of moral reform, which affirmed the centrality of Christianity, profoundly influenced Wilson's emerging vision of a new world order during the Great War. It allowed him, paradoxically, to believe in American exceptionalism and to advocate presumably universal principles that should apply to all peoples. It undergirded the strange combination of exclusivity and universality in his ideology and statecraft. Given his understanding of American and world history and his Christian faith, Wilson did not perceive any contradiction between what was good for the United States and what was good for the whole world, and he could not comprehend why others might adopt different perspectives.

A fundamental paradox characterized Wilson's liberal internationalism, which scholars later identified as Wilsonianism. When he defined a new world order, he affirmed that American principles were universally applicable. His understanding of American nationalism provided the intellectual foundation for his new vision of international relations. Seeking to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world, and thereby guarantee international peace, Wilson hoped other nations and peoples would adopt the values and institutions of modern Anglo-American liberalism. His conception of a new world order projected his exceptionalist understanding of American history as a presumably global vision for everyone. Yet his peacemaking excluded some peoples who, in his judgment, did not qualify—at least not yet—for equal participation. Thus, Wilsonianism combined both universality and exclusivity.

Wilson outlined his conception of a new world order in his Fourteen Points address to Congress on January 8, 1918. He emphasized the universal scope of his vision, although he applied it primarily to Europe. “What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.” As defined in this address, Wilsonianism affirmed four tenets. First, Wilson devoted most of the fourteen points (six through thirteen) to the principle of national self-determination, which required both state sovereignty and democracy. He wanted Russia to retain its territory, presuming that it would have a liberal democratic government, not the communist dictatorship of Vladimir I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks who in November 1917 had seized power in Petrograd and Moscow. Wilson planned to restore Belgium's independence and reduce the size of Germany, notably by giving some of its eastern lands to a newly independent Poland and returning Alsace-Lorraine to France. He favored “autonomous development” for the nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but not their self-determination in separate nation-states. He approved some revisions in Italy's borders “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” Wilson expected the Central Powers to evacuate Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro, and also anticipated the political and economic independence of several Balkan states. The Turks should retain sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, he thought, but other nationalities in the empire should have the opportunity for “autonomous development.” Notably, Wilson did not call for national self-determination for colonial peoples in Africa and Asia, but only for taking their interests into account in “the adjustment of all colonial claims.” As the second tenet of Wilsonianism, he advocated a new league of nations, which would guarantee what would later be called collective security. His fourteenth point proposed “a general association of nations” to provide “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity.” If democratic nations could depend on each other for defense, they could reduce their national armaments to the level needed for domestic order. As the third tenet of Wilsonianism, the president envisaged an “open door” globalized world with “open covenants,” “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas,” and the removal of “economic barriers” that prevented “equality of trade conditions among all the nations” that would associate together in his new system of international relations. Undergirding his vision, as Wilsonianism's fourth tenet, was Wilson's belief in historical progress. He wanted the United States and other nations to embrace the fourteen points as the foundation for a new era of world peace. Emphasizing his program's universality, he concluded that it was based on “the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.”Footnote ²⁸

While advocating his new world order, Wilson still emphasized America's traditional independence and aloofness from the old world. He told Congress on February 11, 1918: “The United States has no desire to interfere in European affairs or to act as arbiter in European territorial disputes.”Footnote ²⁹ He wanted Americans to play the leading role in a new league of nations, but still hoped to preserve the nation's traditional isolation from the old world. “We still read Washington's immortal warning against ‘entangling alliances’ with full comprehension and an answering purpose,” he assured his New York audience on September 27, 1918. “But only special and limited alliances entangle; and we recognize and accept the duty of a new day in which we are permitted to hope for a general alliance which will avoid entanglements and clear the air of the world for common understandings and the maintenance of common rights.”Footnote ³⁰ Thus, the president affirmed both the multilateralism of his new internationalism and the unilateralism of traditional American isolationism. He did not recognize this paradox, however, because he expected that, as president, he would decide whether to intervene in foreign affairs.

At the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson reaffirmed that in his approach to peacemaking he would make a distinction between the new and old worlds. At a plenary session on January 25, 1919, right after he expressed his commitment to creating the League of Nations, he reminded the delegates that he wanted to avoid foreign entanglements. “In coming into this war,” the president explained, “the United States never for a moment thought that she was intervening in the politics of Europe or the politics of Asia or the politics of any part of the world. Her thought was that all the world had now become conscious that there was a single cause which turned upon the issues of this war. That was the cause of justice and of liberty for men of every kind and place.”Footnote ³¹

At the peace conference, Wilson placed highest priority on the League of Nations. He chaired the commission that drafted its Covenant, which he presented to a plenary session on February 14, 1919. Article 10, which he regarded as the most important, committed nation-states in the League “to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence” of each other. Neither Wilson nor the Allies expected Germany or Bolshevik Russia to become members, although the new German republic might qualify in the future. Colonies and territories in the former German and Ottoman empires were not eligible for membership because they were not recognized as nation-states. They were too low in their stage of political development. Article 19 stated that because these former colonies and territories were “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in the constitution of the League.”Footnote ³² In other words, they would be placed under League mandates.

Following this plenary session, Wilson returned briefly to the United States. Speaking in Boston on February 24, 1919, he affirmed the importance of American global leadership. He said, “I do not mean any disrespect to any other great people when I say that America is the hope of the world.” He also emphasized that the concept of civilization was fundamental to his vision of a new era of international relations. He claimed, “Arrangements of the present peace cannot stand a generation unless they are guaranteed by the united forces of the civilized world.”Footnote ³³

For Wilson, “the civilized world” excluded peoples of color. Born and raised in the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, he shared its commitment to Jim Crow racial segregation. As president, he encouraged and authorized members of his cabinet to separate black and white workers in federal departments.Footnote ³⁴ He also implicitly endorsed The Birth of a Nation, the silent film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan's violent role in “redeeming” the South from the interracial state governments of the Reconstruction era. As a favor to his former Johns Hopkins classmate and friend, Thomas Dixon Jr., who had collaborated with David W. Griffith to produce the film, the president agreed to view it at the White House on February 18, 1915. The film quoted Wilson's own words from the fifth volume of A History of the American People (1902) to give credibility to its historical interpretation, which exonerated the KKK for restoring white supremacy in the South through violence. Despite knowing that all Americans who viewed the film would identify him with its racist message, he refused to express any public criticism of it. This amounted to an implicit endorsement of this most popular silent movie.Footnote ³⁵

Steadfastly opposing racial democracy for African Americans, Wilson advocated national reconciliation between white southerners and northerners. In an address to Confederate veterans on June 5, 1917, he said, “And now that we see ourselves part of a nation, united, powerful, great in spirit and in purpose, we know the great ends which God in His mysterious Providence wrought through our instrumentality. Because at the heart of the men of the North and of the South, there was the same love of self-government and of liberty, and now we are to be an instrument in the hands of God to see that liberty is made secure for mankind.” While excluding African Americans and other peoples of color from his vision of worldwide democracy, Wilson affirmed his belief that the white South, even during the Civil War, shared the same commitment to liberty as the North. “At the day of our greatest division there was one common passion amongst us, and that was the passion for human freedom.”Footnote ³⁶

Wilson revealed his racism during the drafting of the League of Nations Covenant. He worked closely with the British delegates to draw a global color line. Their common view of world history, which privileged Western civilization and particularly modern Anglo-American liberalism, justified white supremacy over peoples of color in their empires. After returning to Paris, the president sought to revise the Covenant to prevent the League from interfering with the Monroe Doctrine. Japanese delegates seized the opportunity to introduce their own amendment to affirm the racial equality of all nations. The British opposed it in the League commission. Wilson and a Polish representative also criticized the amendment, while other delegates favored it. On April 11, 1919, eleven of the seventeen delegates voted for it. However, as chair of the commission, Wilson ruled that it was defeated because the vote was not unanimous. He did not require unanimity on any other vote. Japanese delegates raised the issue again on April 28 at a plenary session, but once more lost to the British and the Americans. Along with the British, who wanted to exclude Asian immigrants from their empire without any League interference, Wilson drew a global color line. Despite his apparently universal liberal ideals, the full benefits of Wilsonianism were open only to white nations of the West.Footnote ³⁷

Other peoples of color around the world found Wilson's role at the peace conference deeply disappointing. He had advocated self-determination for presumably all nations. His message resonated in places like Egypt, India, China, and Korea. Anticolonial nationalists used his words to advocate their independence from the great powers. Expecting him to uphold their claims at the peace conference, they felt betrayed because he never gave them the support they had expected. Given his focus on modern Western civilization as the essence of world history, he had not imagined that so many peoples outside of Europe might think he was promising self-determination to them any time soon. In his view, most of them were not yet sufficiently civilized to qualify as nations ready for self-government. He thought Egypt and India should remain in the British Empire and allowed Japan to keep Korea and take over Germany's assets in the Chinese province of Shandong. In short, given Wilson's racist attitude toward these peoples of color, he was not ready for what Erez Manela called “the Wilsonian moment.”Footnote ³⁸

Wilson also disappointed Europeans. His vision of national self-determination projected his American belief in the “melting pot” onto the peacemaking. He wanted viable nation-states in Europe to establish liberal democratic governments and join the League of Nations. But he greatly underestimated the problems of competing nationalities in Europe and the Middle East after the collapse of the Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires. Various peoples in these former empires embraced ethnic nationalism rather than his civic nationalism. Civil war in Russia, which the Bolsheviks eventually won, prevented it from becoming the democratic partner Wilson had expected. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia experienced ethnic conflicts within their borders as well as with their neighbors. Even in Europe he faced considerable difficulty in seeking to promote liberal democracy.Footnote ³⁹

German leaders in the new Weimar Republic, which replaced the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II, understood national self-determination from their perspective of ethnic nationalism. When they accepted Wilson's fourteen points as the basis for the peace settlement, they expected him to help them keep or acquire the Central European lands inhabited by Germans. When he joined the Allies to require Germany to surrender territories to Poland, France, Belgium, and Denmark, and also to prevent Germany from annexing Austria or German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia, the Germans felt that he had betrayed them. They could not comprehend his liberal American idea of the “melting pot” that expected Germans who lived outside the new German borders to assimilate into other nations. Wilson's understanding of liberal assimilation, which he associated with America's experience on its western frontier, was quite different from their ethnic nationalism.Footnote ⁴⁰ When the Germans received the peace treaty at Versailles on May 7, 1919, they began to protest against the betrayal of Wilson's fourteen points. Among other complaints, they resisted the loss of territories in Europe and of colonies overseas, and they demanded the right to join the new League of Nations. Rejecting most German requests for revision of the peace conditions, the president joined the Allies to require Germany's new republican government to sign the treaty on June 28, 1919.

Wilson had experienced the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction, when the white South lost the war to the North but restored its supremacy over African Americans during the postwar years. Yet he did not empathize with foreigners who also suffered military defeat and wanted to reverse the outcome. He failed to understand why almost all Germans denounced the Versailles Treaty, believing it was not the kind of peace settlement he had promised them. Nor could he comprehend why French Premier Georges Clemenceau was obsessed during the peace conference with his nation's security against future German aggression. In The Culture of Defeat (2004), Wolfgang Schivelbusch compared the American South after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and Germany after World War I. He noted that in all three wars the losers claimed moral superiority over their conquerors, regarding themselves as true defenders of civilization against barbaric victors.Footnote ⁴¹ The South's experience had profoundly influenced Wilson as a scholar and statesman, but he did not see that the “culture of defeat” affected others in a similar way. Clemenceau had suffered military defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, and the Germans had just lost the Great War. They too rejected the outcomes of these wars and sought to reverse the fate of their nations. Wilson, however, did not understand their trauma. He did not appreciate Clemenceau's doubts about the League of Nations or anticipate Germany's strong resistance against the peace settlement.

After returning home, the president addressed the Senate on July 10, 1919, to explain the Versailles Treaty. He acknowledged, “It was not easy to graft the new order of ideas on the old, and some of the fruits of the grafting may, I fear, for a time be bitter. But, with very few exceptions, the men who sat with us at the peace table desired as sincerely as we did to get away from the bad influences, the illegitimate purposes, the demoralizing ambitions, the international counsels and expedients out of which the sinister designs of Germany had sprung as a natural growth.” He emphasized that the world's peace depended on the new League of Nations. “A league of free nations had become a practical necessity,” he said. “Examine the treaty of peace and you will find that everywhere throughout its manifold provisions its framers have felt obliged to turn to the League of Nations as an indispensable instrumentality for the maintenance of the new order it has been their purpose to set up in the world,–the world of civilized men. … The League of Nations was not merely an instrument to adjust and remedy old wrongs under a new treaty of peace; it was the only hope of mankind.” Wilson identified the peace treaty not only with his progressive vision of a new world order but also with God's will. “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed,” he affirmed. “It has come about by no plan of our own conceiving, but by the hand of God who led us into this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams on the path ahead, and nowhere else.”Footnote ⁴²

Wilson's religion profoundly influenced his vision of America's global mission. His father, a prominent Presbyterian pastor in the South, had taught him the Christian faith that guided him throughout his life. As a liberal Calvinist, Wilson affirmed the progressive belief that Christians could reform the world to inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth. They did not need to await the second coming of Jesus Christ. George D. Herron, a Social Gospel theologian, recognized that Wilson's ultimate wartime goal was to create God's kingdom in the world, and the president affirmed that this was his purpose. He expressed his faith, for example, when he called the basic document of the League of Nations a Covenant and insisted on Geneva as the location for the League's headquarters because John Calvin had lived there. His postmillennial Christianity undergirded his presumably universal vision of a new world order. However, not all Protestant Christians shared his theological perspective, which the Social Gospel movement had proclaimed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fundamentalists did not accept his progressive or liberal faith. Their premillennial belief convinced them that God's kingdom on earth was possible only after the second coming of Jesus Christ. The treaty fight over the League divided these theologically different Protestant Christians. While those in the Social Gospel tradition generally shared Wilson's vision of America's global mission and wanted the United States to join the League, most fundamentalists opposed the peace treaty. Protestant Christians separated between progressive advocates of Wilson's liberal internationalism and conservative evangelicals who favored their alternative of anti-internationalism.Footnote ⁴³

In the president's view, the Versailles Treaty, particularly the League of Nations, would move the world toward God's kingdom on earth. Joan Hoff, in A Faustian Foreign Policy from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush (2008), criticized him and his successors in the White House for seeking what she called “dreams of perfectibility.” She wrote, “Wilson entered into a series of mini-Faustian bargains both before and after World War I, as have most presidents since, particularly in time of war.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The negative consequences of presidential “dreams of perfectibility” produced disillusionment. The peace treaty with Germany disappointed Walter Lippmann, turning him into a critic of Wilson's foreign policy because it failed to create a new world order like the president had promised and Lippmann once expected. Likewise after 9/11, Peter Beinart, also a New Republic editor, became a critic, although he had initially applauded another president's false promise. He supported George W. Bush's war in Iraq, believing that it would create democracy and peace in the Middle East. The consequences of the war, however, disillusioned Beinart. Now critical of the “American hubris” that characterized presidents from Wilson to Bush, Beinart noted in The Icarus Syndrome (2010) the repeatedly false promise of progressive history that undergirded Wilsonian internationalism. For liberals such as the young Lippmann, he observed, “Progress was possible because deep inside, people were better—much better—than the world in which they lived. It was a stirring faith, nurtured by the progressive movement's success in bringing reason and order to the United States. And at a fevered moment at the height of World War I, after the planet itself had erupted in civil war, Woodrow Wilson decided to export it—via the sword—to the entire world.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He had failed, however, and so too did Bush when he promised after 9/11 to reform the Middle East with his war for civilization against barbaric terrorism. After similar wartime experiences, both Lippmann and Beinart became more realistic in their analysis and expectations of U.S. foreign policy.

Republicans in the Senate, under Henry Cabot Lodge's leadership, did not share Wilson's liberal Christian belief that the Versailles Treaty would fulfill America's global mission. They demanded the adoption of amendments or reservations to the resolution of ratification as their condition for approving the treaty. Wilson adamantly rejected any amendments or reservations to the peace settlement he had negotiated in Paris. Seeking to put public pressure on Republican senators, he went on a speaking tour through western states. On September 5 in St. Louis, he defended his vision of America's global mission as the extension of its nationalism. “The politics of the world, the policy of mankind, the concert of the methods by which the world is to be bettered, that concert of will and of action which will make every nation a nobler instrument of divine Providence—that is world politics,” he proclaimed. “I have sometimes heard gentlemen discussing the questions that are now before us with a distinction drawn between nationalism and internationalism in these matters. It is very difficult for me to follow their distinction. The greatest nationalist is the man who wants his nation to be the greatest nation, and the greatest nation is the nation which penetrates to the heart of its duty and mission among the nations of the world.”Footnote ⁴⁶ On September 9 in St. Paul, Minnesota, Wilson affirmed that “America does not march, as so many other peoples march, looking back over its shoulder. It marches with its eyes not only forward, but with its eyes lifted to the distance of history, to the great events which are slowly culminating, in the providence of God, in the lifting of civilization to new levels and new achievements. That is what makes us Americans.”Footnote ⁴⁷

On September 18 in San Francisco, Wilson reaffirmed that world peace depended on the League of Nations and that those who opposed it were resisting God's will. He said, “I want to remind you how the permanency of peace is at the heart of this treaty. … So that it is nothing less than a world settlement, and at the center of that stands this covenant for the future which we call the Covenant of the League of Nations. Without it the treaty cannot be worked, and without it, it is a mere temporary arrangement with Germany. The Covenant of the League of Nations is the instrumentality for the maintenance of peace.” He added, “I believe in divine Providence. If I did not, I would go crazy. If I thought the direction of the disordered affairs of this world depended upon our finite endeavor, I should not know how to reason my way to sanity. But I do not believe there is any body of men, however they concert their power or their influence, that can defeat this great enterprise, which is the enterprise of divine mercy and peace and good will.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Identifying the peace treaty with God's will for the world, Wilson suggested that its opponents were aligned with Bolshevism. In Kansas City on September 6, he asserted that: “Opposition is the specialty of those who are Bolshevistically inclined. And again I assure you I am not comparing any of my respected colleagues to Bolsheviki; but I am merely pointing out that the Bolshevistic spirit lacks every element of constructive opposition. They have destroyed everything, and they have proposed nothing. And, while there is a common abhorrence for political Bolshevism, I hope there won't be any such a thing growing up in our country as international Bolshevism, the Bolshevism that destroys the constructive work of men who have conscientiously tried to cement the good feeling of the great peoples of the world.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Wilson went on to question the loyalty of the opposition. In Billings, Montana, on September 11, he claimed: “There are disciples of Lenin in our own midst. To be a disciple of Lenin means to be a disciple of the night, chaos, and disorder. There can be no discord or disorganization. Our immediate duty, therefore, my fellow countrymen, is to see that no minority, no class, no special interest, no matter how respectable, how rich or how poor, shall get control of the affairs of the United States.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Wilson thus whipped up the Red Scare in his attempt to win the treaty fight.

Beyond the threat of Bolshevism, Wilson blamed hyphenated Americans for opposing the peace treaty. On September 24, he told his Cheyenne audience that “it is the pro-German forces and the other forces that showed their hyphen during the war that are now organized against this treaty.” He contrasted their disloyalty with the patriotism of fully assimilated Americans who supported his internationalism. “We were all foreigners once, but we have undergone a climatic change, and the marvel of America is its solidarity, is its homogeneity in the midst of its variety. The marvel about America is that, no matter what a man's stock and origin, you can always tell that he is an American the minute he begins to express an opinion.”Footnote ⁵¹ In Denver on September 25, Wilson again condemned hyphenated Americans for opposing the peace treaty. “Out of doors, that is to say, out of legislative halls,” he claimed, “there is no organized opposition to this treaty except among the people who tried to defeat the purpose of this government in the war. Hyphen is the knife that is being stuck into this document.” With opponents such as these, Wilson refused to consider amendments or reservations. “We therefore have come to the straight-cut line—adoption or rejection. … We must either go in or stay out.”Footnote ⁵²

Wilson lost the fight. In November 1919 and again in March 1920, the Senate refused to approve the peace treaty with a two-thirds majority, thus keeping the United States out of the League of Nations.Footnote ⁵³ He had proposed a new world order of democracy and peace, which, he expected, would enable history to progress to an even higher stage of civilization. He sought to spread American liberal values and institutions to other countries and to create a new era of international relations. Moreover, he believed this global reform would fulfill God's will for the world. His vision seemed to have the quality of universality. But, paradoxically, Wilson limited it in practice, excluding nations and peoples that had not yet reached the stage of development that, in his judgment, was required by democratic nations in modern civilization. His vision thus also possessed the quality of exclusivity. The president's understanding of American and world history privileged Western civilization. His exclusion of peoples of color from his new world order turned supporters into critics. The peace treaty also disappointed the Germans and even most of the Allies. After marginalizing and alienating so many others by the end of the Great War and the Paris Peace Conference, he experienced the same fate. He too suffered defeat. His promise of Wilsonianism did not become reality in the postwar world, yet his legacy lived on.