Tall tales are often told in times of war. Stories of masculine courage under fire, of the fog of war, and of the grim realities experienced by embattled bodies dominate the genre. During the Great War, however, Americans told a different kind of story about their president. Rather than picture their president entrenched and fighting, Americans shared accounts of President Woodrow Wilson praying. Dr. Admiral Cary T. Grayson recalled a popular wartime tale about an unnamed Congressman who sought President Wilson's counsel. The story begins with a Congressman, distraught with the state of the war-torn world, insisting upon visiting the White House to speak with the President. Travelling through the White House residence, the Congressman searched for his Commander-in-Chief from the East room to the Green room to the Blue room; all to no avail. Finally, he came to the Red Room, where “he discovered the President on his knees wrestling in fervent prayer, like Jacob, with the Most High.”Footnote ²⁷ As Wilson's friend and physician, Grayson remembered that this story and variations of it were popular despite its complete lack of credibility. This folk tale, Grayson believed, began as a rumor by Wilson's opponents (one that poked fun of a President who preferred to kneel on the floor rather than prepare the country for war) but, after the United States declared war in April 1917, was taken more seriously (as a testament to a Commander-in-Chief who led a righteous war).Footnote ²⁸ What perhaps began as a joke at the president's expense, gained credence as a reflection of President Wilson's approach to the Great War: it was, for him, a part of his religious life.

Following President Wilson's death in 1924, Grayson wrote several chapters for what would later become a memoir of his time serving the twenty-eighth President of the United States. Even though wartime folklore seemed to warm the hearts of many Americans, Grayson pointed out in an unpublished chapter that this story could be no more than a fabrication for two reasons: first, no Congressman would have been allowed to roam the White House (an usher would have informed the president of a visitor and then escorted the vistor to the president); second, the story did not accurately depict Wilson's religious life. According to Grayson, this story misunderstood the way in which Wilson conceived of proper religious piety. Moreover, it misconstrued the way Wilson performed his calling as president. Grayson explained,

Grayson corrected the propaganda about Wilson's religious life not because Wilson separated his religion and politics during the war, as conventional wisdom about the Scholar President suggests,Footnote ³⁰ but rather because Wilson's religious life manifested itself through his civil service work. The popularity of urban legends like this one, if told either as a punch line or in seriousness, demonstrates the assumption that Wilson was a reverent Commander-in-Chief. It also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the way in which Wilson practiced his Christianity. Wilson would have been at his desk not because religion occurred in the White House residence and politics remained in the Oval Office, but rather because working at one's desk was, for Wilson, a social Christian alternative to kneeling in prayer.

Social Christianity, a distinctly liberal persuasion of American Protestantism, provided the framework for Wilson's understanding of the meaning of democracy and the purpose of his presidency. In the late nineteenth-century social Christians developed their message of “applied Christianity,” an idea and ethic that would later be known as the “Social Gospel.” Frustrations with the effects of industrialization led many believers to reconsider the nature and purpose of Protestant Christianity and to exhort other Christians to “apply” the gospel message of redemption to society in addition to individuals. Application occurred in a variety of manners. From Washington Gladden critiquing the selfishness and greed of capitalism to Jane Addams establishing Hull House for immigrants in Chicago, social Christians put their faith into practice through civic reform. The application of Christianity to society resulted in a matrix of civil service endeavors in university and seminary classrooms, on urban streets, and through the ballot box. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, this “applied” Christianity found its public expression in the progressive movement. As social Christians and as progressives, Protestant reformers worked together to cultivate an American democracy that advanced their postmillennial goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth.

A lifelong Presbyterian, Wilson shared social Christians' assumption that religion applied to everyday private and public life. Like other social Christians, Wilson set his sights outside the church walls for opportunities to apply his faith by improving temporal existence. Speaking to the Federal Council of Churches [FCC], the largest ecumenical parachurch organization in the country, Wilson asserted “Christianity is not important to us because it is a valid body of conceptions regarding God and man, but because it is a vital body of conceptions which can be translated into life for us—life in this world and a life still greater in the next.”Footnote ³¹ For Wilson and social Christians across denominational boundaries, Christianity was not merely knowing proper doctrine, but also behaving properly. In other words, Christians do not only believe certain ideas about the nature of man, the existence of God, and expectations for the afterlife, but rather they must make their beliefs manifest through active participation in temporal affairs. Addressing the FCC, Wilson did not offer empty words to a political base; he expressed his own religious inspiration for a life in public office. He carried this sense of duty to serve society with him to Pennsylvania Avenue when he entered the nation's highest office in 1912.

Almost one year after winning a heated presidential race, President Wilson signed one of his first major pieces of legislation, the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Bill, into law in October 1913. Standing behind his desk inside the Oval Office with members of the House Committee on Finance and his closest advisors, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at his side, Wilson enthusiastically addressed the press. Proud of the work accomplished by his party, Wilson announced that he would sleep “with a quiet conscience, knowing that we have served our fellow men and have, thereby, tried to serve God.”Footnote ³² In quintessential social Christian terms, Wilson associated his work as a public servant with following God's will. Put differently, Wilson understood his role as president as Servant-in-Chief.

Historian Gary Scott Smith and others have noted the difficulty in pinpointing the exact parameters and features of social Christianity as it developed between 1880 and 1925.Footnote ³³ Living between 1856 and 1924, Wilson equally is not an easy case study because of the morass of seemingly contradictory statements made throughout his political career that paralleled this enigmatic movement. For instance, in the same speech given to the FCC quoted above, Wilson proclaimed in an uncharacteristically succinct fashion: “legislation cannot save society. Legislation cannot even rectify society.”Footnote ³⁴ Many historians have misused this statement to classify Wilson as an evangelical critic of the Social Gospel. Yet such a perspective belies the complexity of Wilson's religious thought. Laws, Wilson reasoned, merely reflect the moral fiber that currently exists in society; therefore, laws cannot be expected to change social norms let alone transform the inner attitudes of individuals. When laws precede social transformation or try to initiate cultural rebirth, Wilson asserted, “most people will not understand it and, if they do understand, they will resent it, and whether they understand it and resent it or not, they will not obey it.”Footnote ³⁵ Wilson's assertion to FCC members (many of whom hoped that new laws would renew society, rather than a renewed society changing its laws) was a correction to the order of operations rather than an objection to the goal. He wanted to clarify the means, not reject the end. Wilson declared: “our wills have to be regenerated and our purposes rectified before we are in a position to enact laws that record those moral achievements. And that is the business, primarily, it seems to me, of the Christian.”Footnote ³⁶

Since regenerating society was “the business” of the Christian, Wilson assumed Christianity to be a primarily social endeavor. Individual Christians had the social responsibility, even a biblical duty, to transform society. This obligation came first from biblical literacy. As he explained shortly after being inaugurated, his family, education, and lived experiences led him to conclude that the Bible “is the one supreme source of revelation, the revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God, and the spiritual nature and need of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the way of peace and salvation.”Footnote ³⁷ It is important to note that, for Wilson, the gospel message applied to both individual and social regeneration. When one knew his or her Bible well, as Wilson concluded he did, social salvation was a necessary corollary of one's own regeneration. In other words, he reasoned, service endeavors result from a proper understanding of the gospel.

Wilson was not alone in thinking so; he expressed a sentiment central to social Christianity but often misappropriated by historians unfamiliar with the movement's nefarious rhetoric. For example, in his groundbreaking book, Christianity and the Social Crisis, Walter Rauschenbusch, argued that: “any permanent and useful advance in legislation is dependent on the previous creation of moral conviction and custom. . . . If the law advances faster than the average moral sense, it becomes inoperative and harmful.”Footnote ³⁸ Published the same year Wilson entered office, Christianity and the Social Crisis outlined the role Rauschenbusch thought religion should play in society. Like Wilson, Rauschenbusch cautioned against legislating morality from the top down; instead, he advocated educational and religious institutions, as “social” rather than “political” entities, as the arbiters of change. Wilson too preferred his social regeneration like his democracy: to reform from the bottom up. Wilson, Rauschenbusch, and other social Christians agreed that first “the religious sentiment” “can create the convictions and customs which are later embodied in good legislation.”Footnote ³⁹ The reverse was bad legislation and an unnatural order of social change.

Despite the appearance that he criticized social Christianity, Wilson belonged firmly within the movement. Historians who characterize the twenty-eighth president as opposed or even resistant to the Social Gospel ignore Wilson's own words on social salvation: “we hold our Christianity as a private, individual matter, if we think of it at all. Our idea is that we will save ourselves, whereas, in my conception, Christianity was just as much intended to save society as to save the individual.”Footnote ⁴⁰ With that in mind, Wilson devoted himself to a life of public service. Wilson's performance of his civic duties was not divorced from his religious life, but rather integral to it.

Even though it seemed obvious to Wilson administration insiders, like Grayson, that Wilson would be at his desk rather than in prayer, it seemed true to many Americans because they knew Wilson to be a “religious” president. Wilson supporters did not expect Wilson to legislate or enforce laws that were intended to regenerate society on their own. They could—and did—expect Wilson to be the type of president who himself had already experienced a transformation and acted accordingly. Fellow social Christians assumed that Wilson's White House understood that the work of the church and the work of the state were not necessarily seeking separate ends. For instance, at the Maryland Annual Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church, Wilson admitted that, at first blush, even he thought that Washington was “engaged in the things that were temporary and ephemeral, while bodies like this, conferences of a great church, were engaged in things that were permanent, that had to do with the interests of the human race and with human souls”; yet, upon further reflection he noted, “it did not seem to me that this difference was fundamental, after all.”Footnote ⁴¹ The federal government, like Christian churches, was in the business of matters transcendent, universal, and eternal. Wilson declared “back of us here in the government lie the eternal principles of justice and of righteousness, which, in my conviction, at any rate, we do not derive from ourselves, but from the same source from which a great church derives its inspiration and authority.”Footnote ⁴² While never evoking the figure of Christ explicitly, Wilson did not waver from the Christian foundation on which he stood. The Wilson administration, he implicitly asserted, could be trusted to act in accord with Protestant churches like the one his audience attended.

President Wilson was not speaking in abstract metaphors or idealistic prose. He knowingly spoke “when a great cloud of trouble hangs and broods over the greater part of the world.” The unique conditions in Europe confirmed for Wilson that the war was a “contest for some eternal principle of right” that would, at some unnamed future point in time, “enlighten our judgment” if “we can all hold our spirits in readiness to accept the truth when it dawns on us and its revealed to us in the outcome of this titanic struggle.”Footnote ⁴³ In these circumstances, he again compared his work as president to those of church leaders.Footnote ⁴⁴ Missionaries got their hands dirty, put their lives at risk, and sacrificed their own desires to help mankind. Wilson hoped to do this kind of Christian work, much like other white Protestants of his ilk. He saw his own position as holding an opportunity to serve others but, regrettably, not with the same urgency or devotion of a minister or a missionary. Within the next two years, however, world events would lead him to change his opinion about his own role in transforming the world. He would present himself as the Servant-in-Chief, projecting social Christian ideals on a national, and later global, stage first with through the war and second with the Paris Peace Conference where he hoped he could “apply” Christianity to foreign relations through the Covenant of the League of Nations.

As he stood before Congress proclaiming his “War Message” in April 1917, Wilson insisted the United States would “without animus, not in enmity towards a people or with the desire to bring injury or disadvantage” fight for mankind, because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” The United States, he said, sought a lasting peace that rested upon the principle of self-determination, “for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience” and the assurance of an international brotherhood based on these shared principles. Wilson closed his speech by echoing the sentiments held dear to many Americans:

Historians have paid close attention to the final sentence, noting its similarity to Martin Luther's own stand that he “can do other” when “it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This final sentence appears to encapsulate the religious impulse behind Wilson's approach to the war—that he trusted God to aid in the nation's endeavors as Americans sought to follow God's will. Like with other folklore surrounding the President, however, this narrow focus on religion in Wilson's White House misunderstands the American religious landscape during Wilson's career.

While Wilson's particular use of “God” rings as the obvious “religious” statement to twenty-first century readers, the emphasis on democracy, self-determined sovereignty, and service to small nations would have been the “religious” message heard by Wilson's audience. Wilson articulated a war message that appealed to Americans generally while also touching upon the particular interests of social Christians. Privately receiving the praise of some of his most vocal critics, particularly Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and former President Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson put to words the sentiment held broadly by many Americans: the United States existed to serve other nations, with the blood of its most able men and without material gain, so that others may have democracy. Congress responded in good faith. Social Christians especially mobilized to support the President through liberty bond drives, recruitment, and biblical justifications. They did so not because Wilson mentioned God in the final statement of his speech, but rather because service to those in need was the ethic that animated their lived expression of Christianity. American social Christians, like President Wilson, invested in the war effort because they believed public civil service work, not dramatic public prayers, was the necessary means to their social salvation.