Can Democracy Work? by James Miller

Author:James Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FIVE

A HALL OF MIRRORS

ON THE EVENING of April 2, 1917, the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, addressed a joint session of the House and Senate. In this momentous speech, one of the most carefully wrought and deeply pondered of his political career, Wilson urged Congress to authorize entry into Europe’s Great War. He had not reached this resolution lightly. He abhorred the wages of war and had run for reelection in 1916 as an antiwar candidate. But the German navy’s deployment of submarine torpedo boats to sink ships indiscriminately had forced him, reluctantly, he explained, to change his mind.

Still, far more than the safety of the shipping lanes was at stake, Wilson told Congress. “The world must be made safe for democracy,” he declared. The United States “shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest to 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.”

In this pivotal speech, just what did Woodrow Wilson mean by “democracy”?

It is possible to answer this question with some precision because Wilson was an anomaly: a scholar of politics before he became a politician himself, he had written extensively on the subject of democracy, in academic books, in public lectures, and in extensive manuscripts published only posthumously. Not only that: Wilson was astonishingly consistent in the views he held about modern democracy.

Born into an extended family of Presbyterian ministers in 1856, Wilson grew up in the South but spent most of his adult life in the Northeast. A graduate of Princeton College, with a law degree from the University of Virginia, he abandoned his law practice in order to become a college teacher. In 1886, a year after publishing his first book, Congressional Government, he received a Ph.D. in the new academic field of political science at Johns Hopkins. Four years later, he became a professor of politics at Princeton, eventually becoming the university’s president. (Wilson was the first person with a Ph.D.—and so far the last—to have been elected president of the United States.)

In 1885, shortly after finishing his first book, and while still a student at Johns Hopkins, Wilson produced a rough first draft of an ambitious new book project, which he titled “The Modern Democratic State.” At Hopkins he had learned the scholarly approaches to law and politics then prevalent in England and Germany, where an evolutionary, “organic” outlook on social development was in vogue. “Democracy,” wrote Wilson in his manuscript, “is, of course, wrongly conceived when treated as merely a body of doctrine. It is a stage of development … It is built up by slow habit. Its process is experience, its basis old wont, its meaning national organic oneness and effectual life. It comes, like manhood, as maturity to it is vouchsafed the maturity of freedom and self-control, and no other.

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