4 THE GREAT ADVENTURE

In the second decade of the twentieth century the United States became the principal arbiter, defender, and proponent of human rights around the world, cloaking itself in a mantle of moral supremacy that it retained for a hundred years, until the presidency of Donald Trump.

It was not evident even ten years earlier that this would be the case. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras it was Britain, primarily and sometimes alone, that raised the tattered standard of universal justice on the world stage: abolishing the slave trade, spreading its message of Western law and morality throughout the empire, and critiquing other nations (with no small degree of self-satisfaction) for their deficiencies in the same. Among those nations was the United States, whose slave-owning South was an object of derision and bemusement. After the Civil War, the slaves were freed and the Union restored, but the republic itself was exhausted. It was not for several decades that Americans began to look outward, and even then rather timidly; colonial adventures in the Caribbean and South Pacific were almost afterthoughts. Even so, the juggernaut of American corporate wealth gathered steam. Fortunes born of the Civil War compounded and multiplied. By 1900, for example, industrialist J. Pierpont Morgan had amassed enough capital not only to establish a monopoly of American shipping but also to lay claim to British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and German lines as well.[1] American financial hegemony far outstripped its military or political prowess. Thus the new century opened with Great Britain at the fragile apex of its imperial power and the United States in a chrysalis between its bloody past and a new, possibly glorious, certainly very rich future.

Then the Great War came, and visions of universal human progress became quaint at best. By its conclusion, Britain and Europe had forfeited any claim to high ground.

His failure was Shakespearean. Yet his legacy was more complex: despite the United States’ refusal to join the League of Nations (caused in no small part by Wilson’s rigidity during negotiations), the country somehow retained its status as international peacekeeper during the interwar years. Moreover, despite the futility and ultimate collapse of the league, the precedent was set for an international organization devoted to not only preserving peace but upholding human rights around the globe. That it would be an American organization in concept, design, and location was perhaps inevitable.

Before there was genocide, ethnic cleansing, or war crimes, there were “crimes against humanity.” It is impossible to say precisely when the term appeared, but until the mid-twentieth century its meaning was ambiguous: such “crimes” were not crimes at all, in the legal sense, but actions that shocked the conscience of the world. The accepted response was outrage, not legal sanction. The reason was simple: state sovereignty. State sovereignty meant that each nation and its government had absolute authority to enact all laws for citizenry and anyone else within its jurisdiction. Such laws might be mystifying, draconian, or even horrifying to others, but the state’s right to enforce them was beyond dispute.

The long-established remedy for that challenge was revolution. A people might assert its rights and overthrow its own government; the people might even, as in the case of the American colonists, enlist the aid of other nations to do so.

Yet by the beginning of the twentieth century this concept was beginning to seem antiquated, if not among governments then certainly in the court of public opinion. Consider the case of the Congo, at the time a personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium. For decades Leopold employed a policy of calculated brutality in the colony, enslaving its population and enforcing his will through institutionalized arson, rape, murder, and mutilation. Gradually, and despite the king’s efforts at obfuscation, technological advances shed unwelcome light on these ugly truths. Photographers recorded images of maimed children, piles of corpses, and severed limbs; men tied to railroad tracks being whipped mercilessly by the chicotte. Journalists arriving on steamships and traveling inland by railroad sent back vivid accounts of the humanitarian crisis through another new medium, the wireless telegraph. Public outrage around the world was aroused. The British Parliament unanimously passed a resolution affirming that the Congolese “should be governed with humanity” and chided Leopold for his failure to do so. Newspapers demanded some form of international action to end the horror and ran editorial cartoons depicting Leopold as a malignant boa constrictor with an African victim in his coils.[2]

Yet response to the rape of the Congo and other atrocities also revealed the limits of what governments could legitimately do. They could protest, condemn, or—under rare circumstances—impose trade sanctions. Reformist sentiment in the United States and Britain, discussed extensively in the last chapter, fueled grassroots efforts pressuring governments to do yet more.

Another atrocity, occurring almost simultaneously, is indicative. In 1903, following a mass killing of Jews in the Russian city of Kishinev, a delegation of American Jews asked the State Department to relay a petition to the tsar condemning the Kishinev pogrom. President Theodore Roosevelt was sympathetic. “Would it do any good for me to say a word on behalf of the Jews?” he asked his cabinet, “Or would it do harm?” Ruefully, he bowed to the realities of state sovereignty: “I suppose it would be very much like the Tsar spreading his horror of our lynching Negroes.”[4] Ultimately the petition was not sent, though the American government registered its displeasure through the usual channels. The overriding message was clear.

Yet just as technology made it increasingly difficult for states to hide abuses committed within their borders or empires, it also facilitated the scale of such abuse. Not only railway lines and telegraphs but Maxim guns, repeating rifles, and other mechanical advances allowed for slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Terrible culmination came in the summer of 1914 with the beginning of the Great War. On the front lines, submarines attacked civilian vessels, howitzers leveled entire villages, and most notoriously poison gas was unleashed in the trenches.

Pogroms against the Armenians had flared for decades and were well known. In 1905, a British cartoon depicted the sultan seated on a divan with King Leopold, sharing a hookah. “Silly fuss they’re making about these so-called atrocities in my Congo property,” Leopold laments. “Only talk, my dear boy,” the sultan assures him. “They won’t do anything.” However, in 1915 the Turks drastically escalated their efforts, confident that the confusion of war would conceal or at least excuse mass killings and forced relocations of alleged “fifth columnists.” They were not wrong. Internal memoranda by their German allies described the genocide as “an internal matter” and even offered military instruction to the very officers tasked with the killings. But on the other side of the conflict there was shock and horror. In May 1915 the Allies released a joint statement decrying Turkish “crimes against humanity and civilization,” further promising that perpetrators would be held “personally responsible.” Criminal liability was implied, though not explicitly stated. That would prove useful later.[5]

The American position was more equivocal. A neutral nation until 1917, it could do little but register concern at the diplomatic level. The American ambassador to the Ottomans was Henry Morgenthau Sr., a career diplomat whose son, Henry Jr., would eventually become a leading advocate for justice against the Nazis. Henry Sr. was no less appalled by what he discovered in Constantinople. “Turkish authorities have definitely informed me that I have no right to interfere in their internal affairs,” he cabled Washington in frustration, yet “there seems a systemic plan to crush the Armenian race.” One of his interlocutors was even more brazen. “Why are you so interested in the Armenians, anyway?” he asked Morgenthau.

Still international outrage continued, with the New York Times alone publishing 145 articles on the Armenian “crisis” in one year. Finally, at Versailles in 1919, the victorious Allies were poised to make good their promise to hold the Ottomans criminally accountable. Some nations, including Great Britain, were enthusiastic to do so. Yet it was the Americans—ironically, given what was to come—that ultimately balked. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, speaking for President Wilson, warned that international tribunals holding court over “internal matters” were not only unprecedented but dangerous. What was to prevent another tribunal from someday exercising its jurisdiction over the United States? (It was this very fear, incidentally, that has prevented the United States from joining the International Criminal Court, established in 1999.) Wilson was looking ahead: protracted Allied tribunals of German and Turkish war criminals would look like victors’ justice and perpetuate animosities that hampered his ultimate goal of universal comity. Ultimately the Allies punted, handing the Turkish “defendants” over to the Turks themselves for trial. The result was a farce and a tragedy. As with the German war crimes tribunals at Leipzig, the Turks were universally acquitted. Worse still, the trials became a tool for the Ataturk government to foster its own dominant, nationalist narrative of the genocide—which the Turkish government holds to this day. “Who remembers the Armenians?” Adolf Hitler once scoffed, when the question of postwar reprisals was raised.[7]

This sorry outcome was foreordained. Several years earlier, former president Theodore Roosevelt rejected an invitation by a pro-Armenian protest committee to speak on its behalf. While he was entirely in accord with its aims, he told the committee, he had no faith whatsoever in its methods. His reply spoke not just to the futility of the Armenian crisis but to the basic inhumanity of state sovereignty itself:

Mass meetings on behalf of the Armenians amount to nothing whatever if they are mere methods of giving sentimental but ineffective and safe outlet to the emotion of those engaged in them. Indeed they amount to less than nothing…. Until we put honor and duty first, and are willing to risk something in order to achieve righteousness both for ourselves and for others, we shall accomplish nothing; and we shall earn and deserve the contempt of the strong nations of mankind.[8]

The force of Roosevelt’s argument lies in the fact that it could have been written yesterday, not over a century ago. Even as we grapple with issues of human rights now, there is a vast gulf between protest and policy; mass demonstrations often do little more than gratify the consciences of those engaged in them. But there was another, even more profound thread of argument: that states must, under certain circumstances, be willing to “risk something in order to achieve righteousness.” The first cracks in the monolith of state sovereignty had begun to appear.

Roosevelt would have found an unlikely ally in his Democratic successor. In the cold-eyed pantheon of Edwardian heads of state, Woodrow Wilson was an anomaly: a moralist. “We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind,” he famously stated, as he ushered his nation into war. “We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”[9] Others wanted only victory; Wilson would accept nothing less than utopia. In another age, the president’s inflexible idealism might have placed him favorably alongside men like John Winthrop; juxtaposed against the realpolitik ruthlessness of his peers, however, he appears naïve, even foolish. “Talking to Wilson is something like talking to Jesus Christ,” Georges Clemenceau complained.[10] Historians have not been much kinder. Judged with the clear hindsight of two world wars and the failed League of Nations, chroniclers are apt to dwell on those aspects of Wilson’s character that doomed his grand designs: rigidity, arrogance, self-righteousness, and a vindictive streak. Contemporaries noted these qualities and immortalized them. “I am coming to the conclusion,” a British diplomat wrote, “that I do not personally like him. I do not know quite what it is that repels me: a certain hardness, coupled with vanity and an eye for effect.”[11] His French colleague went even further. Given the right circumstances, he said, Wilson might “have been the greatest tyrant in the world, because he does not seem to have the slightest conception that he can ever be wrong.”[12]

Such harsh judgments must be placed in context. Wilson’s idealism and vision for the world were not entirely his own; rather, they reflected the progressivism of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century. Wilson had emerged victorious from a three-way 1912 election where two candidates—he and Theodore Roosevelt—ran on near-identical progressive platforms. William Howard Taft, the Republican incumbent, received the fewest votes. The essence of progressive reform was a resolute belief that all things can be made perfect, and that all persons have a moral duty to try. It was a universalist worldview: at bedrock, all peoples’ wants and desires are essentially the same. This was certainly the view of Wilson’s first secretary of state, the irrepressible populist William Jennings Bryan. As one historian writes, “The precedents and minutiae of international law struck him as so many barnacles on the Bible. All men were brothers, were they not?”[13] In the tense spring of 1914, Bryan presented an astonished British ambassador with a sword hammered into a plowshare, inscribed with quotes from Isaiah and Bryan himself.

Balancing a progressive view of humanity with the realities of weltpolitik was no easy task. Heads of state had long learned to put aside their personal morality in international affairs and deal with persons whom, in any other circumstance, they would abhor. Theodore Roosevelt pungently described Venezuelan president Cipriano Castro as “an unspeakably villainous little monkey,” yet did not hesitate to work with him in brokering a peace. Applying a morality test to international relations was, for men like Roosevelt, unworkable and absurd. It was tantamount to assuming all peoples and governments shared the same moral code.

It was precisely this understanding that Woodrow Wilson brought to international relations. Since not all people shared the same religion and culture, morality must transcend both. This belief was, in fact, a restatement of natural law. Wilson, a lawyer, historian, and Christian, understood this implicitly. The United States, he declared repeatedly, coveted no territory, wanted nothing from its neighbors but peace and equity. It had very definite political and economic interests yet would pursue them with the same morality that private citizens brought to their daily business. To those who thought “moral diplomacy” sounded like a contradiction in terms, Wilson had a stern reply. In a speech for the Railway Business Association in 1916, he lectured: “Gentlemen, there is something that the American people love better than peace. They love the principles upon which their political life is founded…. We cannot surrender our convictions. I would rather surrender territory than surrender those ideals which are the stuff of life, of the soul itself.”[14]

Wilson’s moral diplomacy was reciprocal; it expected other states to respond in kind. If they did not, the breach was not merely diplomatic but ethical. “And because we hold certain ideals,” Wilson told the railroad men, “we have thought that it was right that we should hold them for others as well as ourselves.” The theoretical implications were profound. Centuries earlier, Hugo Grotius posited that since states were nothing but collectives of moral beings, they likewise had morality themselves: a collection of like objects will share the intrinsic qualities of each object. Heads of state did not lose their morality by representing the collective but rather multiplied it millionfold. Consequently, heads of state who behaved immorally violated the trust placed in them by their people.

But what of other morally minded states, and their leaders? Should they suffer this aberration in their midst, even parlay with it? Until Woodrow Wilson, the answer was an unequivocal yes. Like Roosevelt, even the most upright statesmen followed the Jesuitical line that one might move amongst the unclean without sullying oneself. Wilson disagreed. Dealing with tyrants legitimized their rule, whereas in fact every nation had a contrary duty to uphold natural law principles wherever and whenever possible. “We hold,” he declared in 1913, “as I am sure all thoughtful leaders of republican governments everywhere hold, that just government rests always upon the consent of the governed, and that there can be no freedom without order based upon law.” There was nothing particularly radical in that statement, but what followed was truly revolutionary:

We shall look to make these principles the basis of mutual intercourse, respect, and helpfulness between our sister republics and ourselves. We shall lend our influence of every kind to the realization of these principles in fact and practice, knowing that disorder, personal intrigues, and defiance of constitutional rights weaken and discredit government and injure none so much as the people who are unfortunate enough to have their common life and common affairs so tainted and disturbed…. We are friends of peace, but we know that there can be no lasting or stable peace in such circumstances.[15]

If his listeners could believe their ears, Wilson appeared to suggest that the United States might intervene, even militarily, to protect the rights of people around the globe. This was not merely a stark rejection of state sovereignty but a new and unique strain of American exceptionalism. The United States was the most virtuous of nations; if it must go to war, it would be guided by no craven territorial ambitions but something far nobler: “America has more than once given evidence of the generosity and disinterestedness of its love of liberty. It has been willing to fight for the liberty of others as well as its own liberty…. The world now knows…that a nation can sacrifice its own interests and its own blood for the sake of liberty and happiness of another people.”[16]

In effect, Woodrow Wilson was applying natural law principles to international statecraft. All men might not be brothers, as Secretary Bryan had it, but they did exist within the same moral universe. Each had a responsibility to ensure the rights of others, regardless of state boundaries. Ironically, for all that Wilson loathed Old World imperialism, one might draw a direct line between his logic and theirs: both advocated the spread of Western values by force, if necessary. There was one crucial difference. Whereas imperialists underscored the need to raise other peoples to the same level of “enlightenment” as themselves, Wilson argued the opposite: all peoples by their nature already knew and sought their rights. If they did not enjoy them it could only be because an external force—namely, a tyrannical government—prevented it. In threatening military force or lesser measures to uphold natural rights, the United States was declaring recalcitrant governments not only illegitimate but criminal. By introducing morality to diplomacy, President Wilson provided the legal foundation for both international criminal law and, ultimately, human rights law as well.

In 1914, however, such potentialities seemed fantastical. The first tests of President Wilson’s moral diplomacy came not from the Old World but the shallower waters of Latin America and the Caribbean. Weeks into his first term, Wilson added his own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: “We can have no sympathy with those who seek to seize the power of government to advance their own personal interests or ambitions.”[17] The president had the opportunity to exercise that principle in the spring of 1914, when revolution erupted in the Dominican Republic. Wilson initially supported the government of President Jose Bordas but withdrew after reports reached him of arbitrary executions and imprisonment. That August, just as events in Europe reached devastating climax, Wilson dispatched a commission to Santo Domingo with a plan, drafted by himself, demanding an immediate end to hostilities, establishment of a provisional government, and free and fair elections. The Wilson Plan—underscored by the threat of gunboat diplomacy—was sufficient to preserve the peace until 1916, when renewed conflict drove Wilson to order a full-scale military occupation.[18] Similar meddling in revolutionary Mexico provoked a storm of protest from all sides, including the American public. Stung, Wilson shot back:

There is one thing I have got a great enthusiasm about, I might almost say a reckless enthusiasm, and that is human liberty…. I hold it as a fundamental principle, and so do you, that every people has the right to determine its own form of government; and until this revolution in Mexico, until the end of the Diaz reign, eighty percent of the people never had a “look in” in determining who should be their governors or what their government should be. Now I am for the eighty percent![19]

Set against the cataclysm of the Great War, unfolding even as President Wilson spoke these words, the United States’ hemispheric adventures seem almost quaint. Yet Wilson and his cabinet were not unmindful of events overseas. Since the beginning of the century, Wilson watched with alarm as Great Britain and Germany outpaced each other in dreadnoughts, armies, and munitions. As president, he believed his moral diplomacy offered an escape route for them as well. In 1913 Walter Hines Page, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James, came to the Asquith government with an extraordinary proposal: let all civilized nations put aside their animosities and use their armies instead to “clean up the tropics,” presumably on the model of Wilson’s gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean. The beauty and simplicity of the plan was so self-evident that Page wondered how anyone could fail to see it. Give the armies and navies a job, he said, and “they’d quit sitting on their haunches, growling at one another.” Instead of destroying the world, the great powers could save it once and for all.[20]

When the British expressed tepid interest, Wilson was emboldened. He dispatched his factotum, Colonel Edward M. House, to present the governments of Europe with an even more grandiose scheme. The United States, Britain, France, Germany—the wealthiest nations—would pool their resources and use them to invest in the underdeveloped world, literally building democracies from the ground up. The Great Adventure, he called it. Colonel House approached the British first and found them surprisingly receptive. It is difficult to speculate on what the Foreign Office actually made of this moonshine. Perhaps they regarded it as a potential American investment in the British Empire, or perhaps they simply didn’t wish to seem like the aggressors in a conflict nearly everyone agreed was inevitable. It is even conceivable they believed—or hoped—some last-minute influx of American cash might succeed where decades of diplomacy had not. In any case, Colonel House left London convinced that the British would join the adventure, if the Germans did so as well. Go talk to the kaiser, House was advised.

Colonel House arrived in Berlin in late May of 1914 and was instantly disabused of all fantasies. Admiral von Tirpitz coldly informed him that the best way for Germany to ensure peace was to “put fear in the hearts of its enemies.” When the colonel was finally granted an audience with Wilhelm II, he found the kaiser cordial but noncommittal. Troops drilled outside House’s windows, and everyone seemed to be in uniform. Dejected, he wrote back to the president that in Germany “jingoism run[s] stark mad, [and] there is someday to be an awful cataclysm.”[21]

When that cataclysm came, Wilson’s response was a careful “watching and waiting and watching.” American neutrality persisted even as the German government stepped up its aggressive campaign of submarine warfare, torpedoing vessels just off the US coast and, in May of 1915, sinking the British liner Lusitania at the cost of some 123 American lives. As late as 1917, Wilson still held out hope that the United States might broker a peace; the Great Adventure had been postponed but not canceled. Other voices were more strident. William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge, along with many other prominent Republicans, founded the League to Enforce Peace in 1916. Their aim was simple: create a postwar worldwide organization with a combined army greater than any one nation could possibly muster. “Probably it will be impossible to stop all wars,” Lodge admitted, “but it certainly will be possible to stop some wars and to diminish their number.”[22]

Such language seems astonishing from the very men who would later confound Wilson’s dream of a League of Nations, but it also reflected popular sentiment. The Great War proved that the old system of alliances carved from the wreckage of the Napoleonic Wars was moribund; something new and radical was needed. Even before hostilities, English author H. G. Wells predicted that war would be endemic until some form of world government came into being. Wilson was initially dismissive of the League to Enforce Peace, composed as it was of political enemies whom he saw as jingoists. But he shared their vision. Surely, he declared in 1917, there must be a postwar international organization of such force that “no nation, no probable combination of nations could face or withstand it.”[23] The difference lay not in the destination but the route: Roosevelt and Lodge believed America must wage war in order to determine the peace, while Wilson remained convinced—for the moment—that American neutrality made it an honest broker for the settlement to come.

It might therefore have been a matter of acute embarrassment for the president when German aggression finally provoked the United States into entering the war in 1917. Instead, Wilson sought to recast the United States’ role in familiar terms. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he roared to a tumultuous Congress. “We desire no conquest, no dominion…. 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 a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations.”[24]

On the one hand, this language was hardly original: Wilson had spoken in nearly identical terms in 1913 and reiterated his message of moral hegemony again and again throughout his presidency. America would wage war only to defend and preserve the rights of oppressed peoples. In fact, it had already done so. “The world sneered when we set out upon the liberation of Cuba,” Wilson declared in 1916, “but the world sneers no longer.”[25] That might not be strictly true, but—and this was the crucial point—it could be made true. For if the ideas themselves had not changed, their context certainly had. This was no backyard scuffle in Mexico or Haiti. By bringing American guns, men, and morality to turn the tide of the Great War, Woodrow Wilson was attempting an unprecedented act of political alchemy: transforming an amoral, meaningless, centuries-old dynastic squabble into a moral crusade for “a universal dominion of right.” Having failed to lure the nations into his Great Adventure with diplomacy or cash, Wilson was now prepared to pay the price in blood. The Old World would be reshaped by the New, whether it liked it or not.

For the remainder of the war, Wilson planned for the peace. In practical terms this meant transforming high-minded but vague rhetoric on peace, rights, and justice into a coherent plan. First and foremost was the establishment of an international organization tasked with preventing war, especially the catastrophic breakdown the Great War had become. On this point there was near unanimity of agreement among all the Allies and in the United States as well. Still mourning the death in battle of his youngest son, Quentin, Theodore Roosevelt gave a qualified endorsement. “Of course, fundamentally war and peace are matters of the heart rather than of organization, and any declaration or peace league which represents high-flown sentimentality of pacifists and doctrinaires is worse than useless,” he began waspishly. One the other hand, “if, without in the smallest degree sacrificing our belief in a sound and intense national aim, we all join with the people of England, France and Italy…we may be able to make a real and much-needed advance in the international organization.” He concluded, “The United States cannot again withdraw completely into its shell.”[26]

Wilson agreed that, as war represented the ultimate collapse of civilization, preventing war must be any international organization’s primary aim. But why stop there? At the risk of incurring Roosevelt’s epithet of a woolly sentimentalist, he began to articulate a new and broader vision. “Shall there be a common standard of right and privilege for all peoples and nations, or shall the strong do as they will and the weak suffer without redress?” he demanded of the crowd on the steps of the Fourth Liberty Loan in September 1918. “Shall the assertion of right be haphazard and by casual alliance, or shall there be a common concert to oblige the observance of common rights?”[27] These rhetorical questions had very definite answers. A common standard of right and a common concert to oblige it meant a codified human rights law and an international organization with sufficient force to compel compliance. These aspirations were well beyond a League to Enforce Peace; in fact, Wilson appeared to advocate nothing less than world government.

The truth, however, was more nuanced. For all the derision of Woodrow Wilson as an impractical idealist, he understood only too well that utopia could not be constructed overnight. Writing privately to Colonel House, he admitted frankly, “The United States Senate would never ratify any treaty which put the force of the United States at the disposal of any such group or body.” The wisest choice would be to secure the creation of a League of Nations based upon universal areas of agreement, then allow the institution to take on a life of its own. That, after all, was how all legal systems developed: a constitution or charter brought them into being, but it was humanity itself which added layer upon layer of precedent, transforming the law from brittle shell into a living entity. “My own conviction,” he told House, “is that the administrative constitution of the League must grow and not be made…. Why begin at the impossible end when there is a possible end and it is feasible to plant a system which will slowly but surely ripen into fruition?”[28]

Wilson’s Fourteen Points for Peace, released in January 1918, spoke of a “general covenant of nations…for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence,”[29] but said nothing of an international covenant of human rights. Arriving at the Paris peace talks in December of that year, his first public remarks sounded like platitudes. His audience could make of them what they liked:

The triumph of freedom in this war means that spirits of that sort now dominate the world. There is a great wind of moral force moving through the world, and every man who opposes himself to that wind will go down in disgrace…. My conception of the League of Nations is just this, that it shall operate as the organized moral force of men throughout the world.[30]

What exactly was a “moral force?” Wilson did not elaborate. In all likelihood, human rights were not at the forefront of the president’s mind. There were more pressing issues to be considered first: the French wanted German territory, the Italians coveted a share of the Balkans, and the Japanese sought Manchuria. Wilson, as self-appointed defender of the powerless, advocated self-determination for states and liberal terms for the vanquished. The majority of his time in Paris was consumed with territorial disputes and indemnities. This was enough to put him at odds with the French and British, whom he found hopelessly reactionary. Georges Clemenceau, he told House dismissively, was “an old man, too old to comprehend new ideas.” David Lloyd George, almost ten years Wilson’s junior, was merely a “second rate politician.”[31] But at least in George he recognized someone with a comparable understanding of law and right. “An essential element in the peace settlement,” George had written, “is the constitution of the League of Nations as the effective guardian of international right and international liberty throughout the world.”[32]

When the time came to draft the founding covenant of the league, the practical limits of Wilson’s vision—and his own faults as negotiator—became increasingly apparent. As chair, he was impatient with committee members, often terminating discussion midsentence. He also showed a curious reluctance for the use of force. Wilson himself had argued repeatedly that no international organization could preserve the peace or uphold human rights by word alone. Yet when the French delegate recommended the establishment of a league army, Wilson rejected it out of hand: “Unconstitutional and impossible.”[33] He later admitted he was thinking of the Senate, which would never ratify a treaty that abrogated military authority to any other power. That was certainly true, but the lack of enforcement gutted the league’s effectiveness and contributed to its ultimate failure.

As discussions dragged on, other uncomfortable issues bubbled to the surface. The Japanese delegation wished to add a seemingly innocuous paragraph to the covenant, which read as follows:

The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of States members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect; making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.[34]

It was hard to see at first how this could be controversial; the very foundation of natural law rights lay in their recognition of equality before the law. Yet the storm was immediate. The British, thinking of empire, objected at once. Others soon followed. “No government could live for a day in Australia if it tampered with a White Australia,” one delegate declared. Sooner than agree to it, he would “walk into the Seine—or the Folies Bergere—with my clothes off.” His colleague from New Zealand concurred. The ubiquitous Colonel House took Wilson aside and pressed a note into his hand. “The trouble is that if this Commission should pass it, it would surely raise the race issue throughout the world.” Wilson, a Virginian and avowed segregationist, did not need further elaboration. When the Japanese insisted upon a vote, much to his chagrin, the amendment passed by a small majority. Wilson abruptly declared from the chair that because there were strong objections to the language, it could not be included. This patent nonsense left the Japanese stunned, and the Tokyo press angrily derided “the so-called civilized world.”[35]

Wilson believed he was bowing to greater realities. The league would not pass Congress with an army; it certainly would not pass if the Dixiecrats believed it enshrined desegregation. Nor would they be alone in their objections. Even as a distant aspiration, racial equality before the law threatened the very foundations upon which a great many societies rested, including the United States. Ultimately the league charter avoided any enumeration of rights and called instead for the creation of an international court of justice, provisions against slavery and human trafficking, and universal standards for working conditions.

This in itself was no small accomplishment. If the League of Nations was not exactly “the organized moral force of men throughout the world,” it was at least a start. There is no evidence Wilson had abandoned his vision of international human rights; instead, he recognized the need to move incrementally, to build the house before furnishing it. He believed he had skillfully excised any language from the league covenant that his political enemies could object to; once it was ratified, the gates would swing shut behind them.

It was said of Woodrow Wilson that he believed all men who opposed him were not only wrong but wicked.[36] He was also, one of his contemporaries noted, “a man who really knows how to hate.” Miraculously, these failings had not prevented his steady ascension in public life until its climax, when he returned from the Paris talks in triumph with a draft treaty for the League of Nations ready to be signed.

There were warning signs. Unaccountably, Wilson had failed to bring a single Republican with him to Versailles, even men like William Howard Taft who shared his views. The president instead chose to surround himself with a cadre of sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Very little else reached him. A young Eleanor Roosevelt was astonished to discover that Wilson never read newspapers: his staff prepared briefs instead.[37] Having dealt handily, as he saw it, with the French, British, Italians, Japanese, and others, he had little fear of Congress. But when the first group of senators met with the president after his return, they came away mystified. “I feel as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter,” one admitted.[38]

Wilson’s confidence was not baseless. He was a successful wartime president who had also proved himself a shrewd negotiator. The American public wanted peace, and a league bearing the unmistakable stamp of American authority was an almost universally popular idea. Treaty ratification required a two-thirds majority of the Senate, but nearly that number had already expressed public support for the League of Nations, and others were open to being convinced. Even his archrival Henry Cabot Lodge privately admitted that ratification was a foregone conclusion.

But Wilson could not persuade; he could only preach. In an earlier speech he compared league opponents to Southern secessionists and came dangerously close to branding them traitors: “I look for the time when every man who now puts his counsel against the service of mankind under the League of Nations will be just as ashamed of it as he now regretted the union of the states.”[39] Now addressing the Senate, he declared in ringing tones: “There can be no question of our ceasing to be a world power. The only question is whether we can refuse the moral leadership that is offered us, whether we shall accept or reject the confidence of the world.”[40] The choice was between light or darkness, courage or cowardice. His argument could best be summed up by a Latin expression harkening back to his days as a university professor: res ipsa loquitur, the thing speaks for itself.

This was not enough for the Senate, which disliked being lectured to, and disliked even more having policy decisions presented to them in biblical terms. Article 10 of the Versailles Treaty stated, “The members of the league undertake to respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members of the league.” To many this seemed impossibly vague. Even without an international army, would American boys be arbitrarily called upon to shed their blood all over the world, in conflicts they barely understood? Wilson tried to allay the senators’ fears and succeeded in inflaming them. Senator William Borah asked him, “Mr. President, with reference to Article 10…in listening to the reading of your statement I got the impression that your view was that [it] was simply a moral obligation.”

“Yes, sir,” Wilson answered, “inasmuch as there is no sanction in the treaty.”

Borah pressed, “But that would be a legal obligation so far as the United States was concerned if it should enter it; would it not?”

“I would not interpret it that way, Senator…. It is an attitude of comradeship and protection among the members of the league, which in its very nature is moral and not legal.”[41]

Moral and not legal. Yet Wilson had spent much of his public life arguing they were one and the same. Sensing an opening, the Ohioan Warren G. Harding entered the fray: “Right there, Mr. President, if there is nothing more than a moral obligation on the part of any member of the league, what avail articles 10 and 11?”

The president affected astonishment. “Why, Senator, it is surprising that that question should be asked. If we undertake an obligation we are bound in the most solemn way to carry it out.”[42]

There is a surreal quality to this exchange. Woodrow Wilson, righteous and indignant, was sparring with the man who would succeed him—whose own presidency would become synonymous with corruption and scandal. The immediate issue, ratification of the treaty, was subsumed by a philosophical conundrum that rang down the centuries: was there a universal standard of morality, and did all nations have an obligation to abide by it? If so, as Wilson argued, there could be no reason not to bind oneself to a document stating as much. Yet Harding, with a legal acumen few might have credited, raised the old ghosts of Demosthenes and Xenophon and seemed to hint at a form of cultural relativism that would appear long after both men were dead and gone:

HARDING: Another question: That is surrendering the suggestion of a moral obligation for this Republic to the prejudices of the nations of the Old World, is it not?

WILSON: I do not understand that we make such a surrender….

HARDING: Would it not be quite as moral for this Republic itself to determine its moral obligations?

WILSON: Undoubtedly, Senator; but in the meantime the world would not have knowledge before it that there will be concerted action by all the responsible governments of the world in the protection of the peace of the world. The minute you do away that assurance to the world, you have reached the situation which produced the German war.[43]

The president’s point was valid; in fact, it was the crux of the league itself. America alone might be moral, but America alone could not prevent the rise of another tyranny, another world war. There must instead be a shared moral standard, a legal covenant among nations akin to that which each state makes with its citizens. Wilson, who believed in natural law, saw nothing amiss in the assumption of a universal morality. Harding, on the other hand, saw “Old World prejudices” entangling the United States in their inextricable web. The gulf between their views would define American foreign policy for decades.

Faced with intransigence from the Senate, Wilson took his argument to the people. In the fall of 1919 he embarked on a cross-country tour, hoping a tsunami of public opinion would drown the naysayers. In San Francisco, he thundered, “We cannot desert humanity. We are the trustees of humanity, and we must see that we redeem the pledges which are always implicit in so great a trusteeship.”[44] In Pueblo, he struck a note of confidence and inevitability:

There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted that truth and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and through the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before.[45]

But the pastures of quietness were receding out of reach. Exhausted, desperately ill, Wilson was ultimately forced to cancel the remainder of the tour. Shortly after returning to the White House, he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him unable to speak or move unaided. The Senate, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, rejected membership in the League of Nations. The league itself would continue its half-life existence for another two decades, shorn of the moral mandate Wilson sought and sustained reluctantly by nations that had never shared his comprehensive vision. It is remembered now only for its failures: abortive attempts to quell aggression in Manchuria and Ethiopia, culminating in total collapse against the rise of Nazi Germany. Coupled with that failure is the even more maddening possibility of what might have been, if Wilson had prevailed. Yet the assumption that American membership alone might have prevented the Second World War also presumes universal adoption of Wilson’s vision of moral diplomacy, and there is scant evidence to support that course of events. The objections of Borah, Harding, and Lodge mirrored a greater skepticism among other nations: for all their expressions of hope and optimism, few were truly committed to Wilson’s new world order.

It is better to consider Wilson’s legacy on its own merits. Though it rejected the league, the United States did not “withdraw completely into its shell,” as Theodore Roosevelt feared. In 1922, Wilson’s bête noir Harding hosted a conference resulting in the Washington Naval Treaty, ending an arms race among the great powers and committing them to peaceful competition. If America is—or ever was—“the leader of the free world,” it owes that title entirely to Woodrow Wilson. The mantle of moral diplomacy would be taken up by every president that followed him, articulated most famously by Ronald Reagan in his vision of the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” Wilson was the first president to advocate a natural law standard for international law, the first to suggest that nations had an equal duty to protect basic human rights around the globe. Even within the half-baked Great Adventure we might find the seedlings of such institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But most importantly, his vision of American exceptionalism—that America fights not for conquest or glory, but for the rights of the oppressed—became the touchstone of US foreign policy throughout the Second World War, Cold War, and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Then it was abandoned. The Trump administration’s isolationist “America First” policy may now be as moribund as the League of Nations, but its scars remain. That the United States was capable of so completely divorcing itself from the world, after decades of responsible stewardship, calls into doubt many of our most fundamental assumptions about ourselves and our role; doubts shared by other nations as well. In a radio address three months before his death, Woodrow Wilson bemoaned the “sullen and selfish isolation” of the United States, “which is deeply ignoble because manifestly cowardly and dishonorable.” His last words hold sudden and terrible relevance as we craft anew our relationship with the global community:

This must always be a source of deep mortification to us, and we shall inevitably be forced by the moral obligations of freedom and honor to retrieve that fatal error and assume once more the role of courage, self-respect, and helpfulness which every true American must wish to regard as our natural part in the affairs of the world…. Happily, the present situation in the world of affairs affords us the opportunity to retrieve the past and to render to mankind the inestimable service of proving that there is at least one great and powerful nation which can turn away from programs of self-interest and devote itself to practicing and establishing the highest ideals of disinterested service and the consistent standards of conscience and of right.[46]