The Chosen Peoples by Todd Gitlin & Liel Leibovitz

Author:Todd Gitlin & Liel Leibovitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Wilson successfully spoke for the bulk of popular sentiment in his 1916 reelection campaign, when he harnessed his missionary ideals for national preeminence to the compelling slogan “He kept us out of war.” He channeled America’s exceptionalist fervor in January 1917, when he claimed to transcend politics-as-usual by playing peacemaker between the warring alliances, insisting that “Americans set up a new nation in the high and honorable hope . [to] show mankind the way to liberty,” and that “[m]ankind is looking now for freedom of life, not for equipoises of power.” (The political scientist Adam Gómez rightly calls Wilson’s speech “messianic and millennial,” possessed of “a strong element of the apocalyptic.”) Wilson continued to feel this way when he brought America into World War I as a crusading universalist (“ the wrongs against which we now array ourselves . cut to the very roots of human life”). He continued to feel this way during the war, when he stood for “ Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust. We shall give all that we love and all that we have to redeem the world and make it fit for free men like ourselves to live in.”

During and after America’s engagement in World War I, Wilson often identified America with the Crusaders. This was no merely partisan view: ex-president TR, who continued to joust with President Wilson over war policy, declared in September 1917: “To my fellow Americans I preach the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.” Wilson told the Senate in 1919 that the Versailles Treaty was “produced by the hand of God.” Defending the League of Nations, he harked back to the religious declarations of his youth when he declared: “I am a Covenanter!” But for the most part, Wilson believed that God conducted His work by wielding the strong arms of the nation. Although his explicit references to God or Christianity dwindled after the war—perhaps because Wilson discerned that the Republican case against the League might be strengthened if he resorted to any more rhetorical overreach—he continued to speak of faith, crusades, and martyrdom, with American political ideals now justifying religious zeal. In Boston on February 24, 1919, Wilson exulted that Europeans, at the moment when they realized America’s mission was selfless, “raised their eyes to heaven, when they saw men in khaki coming across the sea in the spirit of crusaders.” On Memorial Day that year, he declared that American troops, whose “like has not been seen since the far days of the Crusades . had a touch of the high spirit of religion, that they knew they were exhibiting a spiritual as well as a physical might, and those of us who know and love America know that they were discovering to the whole world the true spirit and devotion of their motherland.” Adam Gómez does not exaggerate when

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