History as Democratic Intervention: Author’s Response to Roundtable Essays on Power Without Victory

Before responding to Robert Adcock, Cara Lea Burnidge, and Amy Kittelstrom, I want to thank them for the time and attention they devoted to my book. I also want to thank them—along with Gene Zubovich, Robert Greene, and Richard Cándida Smith—for their patience as I crafted this long-delayed response. There is no very interesting excuse for my delay. I can only hope that such extended marination has added nuance to my responses rather than merely softened my brain.

Power without Victory was conceived as an intervention. Not just in the literature on Wilson, the League of Nations, and the Progressive Era; or in the larger history of American social thought; or even in the general practice of intellectual, political, or diplomatic history. Though all these objectives informed its design, Power without Victory was conceived above all as an intervention in our contemporary political culture: a culture in which ideology matters more than ideas, indignation precludes empathy, boldness is suspect, humility is cowardice, compromise is treason, and the appreciation for human complexity that defines a genuinely pluralistic society is dead—mourned by too many in the academy with verbal armbands rather than resurrected in the body of their work.

In short, we live in a Manichean age that is tearing our polity apart. Like Wilson, I made a risky decision to intervene that some are bound to consider misguided, but seemed to me appropriate on moral and practical grounds. In my view, both Wilson and the League are central to a simultaneously inspiring and cautionary tale of a time when democracy was conceived and valued differently than it is today: as a relational, co-creative, experimental approach to living with people whose views and lives are foreign and even opposed to one’s own. As I tried to show in my book, Wilson’s encounter with philosophical pragmatists catalyzed an approach to politics that transcended binaries pitting individual versus state, rights versus obligations, and participatory versus interventionist government in the domestic sphere, and which rejected the jealous protection of privilege and zero-sum constructions of power in the international sphere. The more common accounts of Wilson as naïve idealist or cynical racist, and of the League as utopian fantasy or technology of empire, all in their different ways perpetuate the prevailing wisdom of politics: the assumption that power—in domestic and international affairs—is supreme yet scarce, and sharing it can only diminish the sharer. Concluding that such a framing of the human condition makes no room for any genuine improvement in it, and thus no room for any genuinely meaningful action whatsoever, I determined to dismantle one or two of its historical supports.

To be sure, my initial intention was different: to write what I now would call an operative history of ideas, exploring whether and how the pragmatist tradition in American philosophy and social thought that first captured my imagination as a college student had gained traction over events and institutions at a large scale. When I began to suspect and then uncover evidence of such operative significance during the Wilson administration, the project morphed into an effort to bridge the fields of intellectual and diplomatic history and demonstrate the relevance of both to the wider history field and, eventually, to abiding questions in political theory and international relations. But when it came time to set the framing, tone, and thematic cadence of the book, my purpose had grown more ambitious. In the tradition of William James, I hoped to challenge inherited and thus easy ways of thinking about the Wilson era and its ramifying consequences, and thereby encourage—in at least a few bold souls, in a few small circles—the difficult work of reconstructing our democratic culture on more serviceable intellectual foundations.

How embarrassing to write of such a hope! And how much more so to admit that it remains my hope today.

Clearly, my little intervention was not uniformly impressive to my reviewers. In some cases I sympathize with their objections. Taken together, however, the reviewers’ responses raise some troubling questions for me—troubling in the sense of discomfiting yet illuminating, and troubling in the sense of confusing and concerning. These will be my focus below.

Adcock’s generous review gets deepest into the head of the author, an achievement that will surprise no one familiar with his excellent book on the history of American political science.^[1] He correctly outs me as a proud pragmatist, openly engaged in discovering, evaluating, and learning from the successes and failures of others attempting to translate a pragmatist philosophical and ethical orientation into action for the benefit of humanity. He accurately captures my analytical agenda, which was never to reduce Wilson to “a pragmatist,” but rather to identify, explain, and evaluate the influence of pragmatist ideas and thinkers on his policy environment and policymaking. Adcock also firmly grasps one of the book’s main historiographical stakes: namely, that Wilson’s internationalist ideas had to come from somewhere, or some identifiable process of influence, interpretation, and synthesis, rather than…everywhere? Simply pointing out, as has long been fashionable, that lots of people in Britain, France, and the United States were talking about some sort of something involving multiple governments, or that the world was getting complicated and American citizens were getting torpedoed, is like arguing for the intellectual equivalent of the ether.^[2] Wilson developed very clear and controversial ideas about the future of the world order, and he knew, talked to, and read the work of pragmatists obsessed with the topic. They have a credible claim to influence worth exploring.

Adcock also gets into my head when regretting the short shrift I give to those in the pragmatist-progressive camp—such as Jane Addams, W. E. B. DuBois, and Thorstein Veblen—who exercised little or no direct influence on Wilson’s policies. I still think my claim that these figures “laid important cultural groundwork” for many of those policies will withstand historical scrutiny. Sadly, as Adcock and Kittlestrom agree, my book offers no sustained example of such scrutiny. I say “sadly” because I do not join Adcock in blaming this lapse on unreasonable “subfield norms in intellectual history,” but rather on a failure of art on my part. I think I could have done a better job making space for their stories. On the other hand, I think Adcock mistakes my main reason for including these figures. My overarching goal was not to demonstrate the diversity of the pragmatist-progressive camp (however real and significant it was). Rather, I sought, first, to demonstrate the power of pragmatist ideas to reframe multiple fields of inquiry and action in a way that dissolved—with impressive real-life consequences—several previously mentioned binaries obstructing the development and flourishing of American democracy; and second, to explain thereby why those who did directly influence Wilson had such high hopes for a pragmatist approach to problems of human organization on the very largest scales. Ironically, the effort may indeed have exposed my inadequate compliance with subfield norms demanding breadth as well as depth of focus. Still, had I not made it clear—as I think I did—that Croly and Lippmann were part of a larger intellectual and cultural phenomenon with significant and wide-ranging consequences, it would have diminished the plausibility of their influence on Wilson, who found their ideas congruent with the larger shifts he sensed in American politics.

Speaking of subfield credibility, Burnidge’s charitable assessment of my intellectual-historical methods, despite our substantive disagreements, is especially welcome given her own fine efforts to trace the influence of discursive communities on Wilson’s policymaking (along with her excellent taste in publishers).^[3] I also appreciate Burnidge’s critique of my treatment of Wilson’s racism—to a point. Many scholars insist on Wilson’s personal racism as the prism through which his career must be viewed. As I have written elsewhere, I find the case for interpreting Wilson through the prism of structural racism more compelling. If one defines white supremacy as the complex of legal, political, and social institutions structuring American and global society, whose beneficiaries reinforce its power to whatever extent they fail to resist it, then Wilson was indeed a white supremacist as well as racist.^[4] More to the point, there is no question that white supremacy, thus defined, influenced and constrained Wilson’s thinking and decisions more than I explored.

I think this is the argument in which Burnidge is most invested, but I confess I am not quite sure. For me, Burnidge’s comments on Wilson’s racism obscure the book’s primary historical task. That task is to explain the origin and fate of very specific ideas and actions that, at least from the evidence I marshalled, are not well explained by prominent competing frameworks—including white supremacism—but are well explained by Wilson’s developing pragmatist mindset; a mindset that, sadly but by no means necessarily, existed side-by-side with a racist mindset.

As such, the charge that I do not apply the “same level of historicism” to Wilson’s racism as I do to his pragmatism is frankly befuddling to me. I don’t see how acknowledging Wilson’s racism yet refusing to make it the analytical key to everything he ever did is a failure of historicism—especially considering how relatively un-distinctive his racism made him in his social-historical context, and how angrily the nation’s prouder white racists reacted to his appointments of black officials and obstruction of segregation bills. After all, I did not rest my case for the influence of pragmatism on the fact that it influenced lots of other people in Wilson’s circumstances, or that several of Wilson’s comments and actions were indisputably pragmatist in tone and character. Rather, I traced the influence of specific pragmatist ideas, communicated through specific individuals through carefully reconstructed channels, on specific policy frameworks and decisions. Why should the influence of Wilson’s racism on his policies be approached differently?

I had expected more understanding of my approach from Amy Kittelstrom, who has written in admiring yet balanced and illuminating fashion about other white male American liberals (including James himself) whose recorded views on race, gender, and other sensitive matters do not always meet our twenty-first-century standards.^[5] Needless to say, I am saddened by the deep offense my book gave to Kittelstrom. Or rather, I am saddened by the offense caused by one small part of my book; for again, the book is not meant as a biography of Wilson or an audit of his presidency, much less his soul. It is a book about a particular set of ideas regarding the best ways to organize institutions to promote democracy, and about how close they came to shaping a very different world from the one we inhabit—a world I think would have been better in some important ways while leaving us with plenty of problems, including the racism that is Kittelstrom’s focus.

It is important to me to make this purpose plain, for professional as well as personal and public reasons. On the professional score, I had hoped it was clear that I did not set out to write the definitive treatment of Wilson and race. I followed race as far as I thought it explained the evidence I was gathering about Wilson’s implementation of pragmatist political ideas. I concluded that racism explained his failed and inadequate implementation of those ideas because those ideas, as ideas, are incompatible with racism. That is not to say that racism was incompatible with Wilson, as my repeatedly characterizing so many of his views and actions as “racist” reflects.^[6] Nor is racism incompatible with a Wilson who is also pragmatist in his thinking and actions on many issues and in many fields. Finally, I can see no logical disjunction or violation of natural law in someone who is often or even usually racist sometimes transcending their racism, nor find any similar reason to reject, out of hand, the possibility that some of his ideas and commitments might work against his racism in the pursuit of certain goals.

Whether or not Wilson was both racist and pragmatist, or did at times transcend his racism, or did capitulate to the non-racist logic of pragmatism in order to achieve goals that mattered more to him than white supremacy, is a point of dispute that I obviously did not carry in Kittelstrom’s view. But again, I am troubled by the leap to rejecting everything Wilsonian, including the very framework of pragmatist internationalism. It mirrors, in my view, the leap made by a smugly cynical foreign-policy intelligentsia from “the League failed to prevent a second world war” to “the League was a stupid idea and the quest for more democratic and genuinely cooperative relations among states is a delusion.”

On the personal and public score, I finally return to the notion of history as democratic intervention. Historians have much to offer democracy. When we encounter antidemocratic structures, processes, or practices in our culture, we can undermine the historical myths and related assumptions that so often support them. We can go further, and recover other structures, processes, and practices that might guide us in replacing what we seek to displace. These were my main objectives in Power without Victory. I find our contemporary reduction of democracy to elections and distributions, and of citizenship to mere formal status and entitlements, to be antidemocratic and dangerous to the future of the American Republic. I find the unilateralist posture assumed by the United States in world affairs since 1945 equally antidemocratic and dangerous. In their simplest and most widely circulated forms, the tropes of a failed (or purely racist and patriarchal) progressive movement and failed (or thoroughly imperialistic) League of Nations lend support to these political paradigms.

In choosing to challenge those paradigms, I believe I incurred an obligation to intervene in our culture in a different way: by holding myself to a democratic epistemological, rhetorical, and moral standard. That did not require ignoring what I found offensive in my subjects’ speech and actions, but it did mean paying attention to what they were most intent on communicating and accomplishing, and acknowledging their humanity, complexity, and potential value to the democratic project even if I was unimpressed by their arguments and actions. After all, we turn to history—and aspire to democracy—because none of us has all the answers; simply to praise those we deem moral heroes and pillory those we have come to consider moral failures closes too many epistemic and political doors.