Studentcam. Org. Harvard professor erez manela talks about Woodrow Wilsons education shaped his policy, specifically the league of nations and the aftermath of world war i and discusses how wilson championshiped. This video is courtesy of the National World war i museum and memorial in kansas city, missouri. Dr. Erez manela is professor of history at harvard university. He also serves as director of graduate programs at harvards weatherhead centers and cochair of Harvard International and global history seminar. He is coeditor of the global and National History series for Cambridge University press, the volume empires at war 1911 to 1923 with robert gurwath which reframes the history as a global war of empires and the international other begins of anticolonial nationalism. Dr. Manela will close our symposium with a lecture that x explores how president wilsons convictions were form the, how they shaped the 1919 peace settlement and how that continues to impact us today. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming dr. Erez manela. [ applause ] thank you for that kind introduction. I want to take a moment to thank lraa, matt, camille, all the rest of the staff at the world war i museum and memorial, including everybody whos kept us organized and on time and well fed throughout these two days. The second time ive worked with this group. And ive been amazed by your intellectual engagement and wizardry, so i would like to take a moment to put our hands together and thank the people who brought us all here. [ applause ]. In december of 1918 u. S. President Woodrow Wilson arriveded in britain en route to the peace conference then gathering in paris, about which weve heard quite a bit already. Now, during his time in london before he arrived in paris, wilson had a private interview with a deputy chief censor of Great Britain, a man by the name of frank worthington. In response to a question from worthington about closer relations between Great Britain and the United States wilson, according to worthingtons notes said the following, and i quote, you must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers. We are neither. Neither must you think of us as anglosaxons as that term can no longer be applied to the people of the United States. He then concluded, i quote again, no, there are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine. They are community of ideals and of interests. This might seem leak a surprising outlook for a man to take like wilson, all the more since it ran against common perceptions among u. S. Elites in that era. Let me give you one example of an opposite perspective on this relationship. Some years earlier the Scottish American steel Baron Carnegie published which he advocated at length for the reunification of britain and north america. In that essay carnegie wondered why a mere disagreement over taxati taxation, one that was already more than a century old, should result in a permanent separation. Now, in that essay, carnegie then proceeded to offer six arguments from his proposed reunion, as he called it, of britain and north america. The first argument and clearly in carnegies view the most important one, was about race. And i quote here from carnegie. First, in race, and there is a great deal in race, the american remains threefourths purely british. He added there is some mixture of german, but that, too, is teutonic. I continue to quote. The american remains british, differing less from the briton than the irishman, scotsman, welshman, englishman differ from each other. Continuing to quote from carnegie, it is to be noted that only in the region of political ideas is there dissimilarity, for no rupture would ever between the parts has ever taken place in language, literature, religion or law. This is the end from carnegie. Now, if we compare these two viewpoints, carnegie on the one hand and wilson on the other, the difference is striking. For carnegie, americans and brits were one race separated by divergent political ideals. For wilson, on the other hand, there were different races, quote unquote, races, united if they were to be united, only by common ideals and interests. The divergence between carnegies view and wilsons is even more striking if we consider that wilson, like carnegie, had deep roots in the British Isles and even more specifically in scotland. His paternal grandfather james wilson was the scotch irish immigrant from america to america from northern ireland. His maternal grandfather, thomas woodrow, after whom he was named, was born in scotland and moved just across the line to Northern England to carlisle, where he headed a congregation in which Woodrow Wilsons mother jesse was born before emigrating to america. So what do we make of wilsons statement in 1918 . In order to understand it, i want to argue to you today, and more broadly, in order to understand his thinking on the postworld war in general, we need to take into account not only wilson as the descendant of scottish immigrants, not even as many historians have often done, as the son of a minister and as a devout presbyterian himself, after all, every single u. S. President in history has professed to be a believing christian. So in this sense, wilson is not unique. Now, of course, we can stipulate that some have done so more credibly than others. But nevertheless, they all have done it. Instead, we must cast our minds to the aspect in which wilson was truly unique among u. S. President s. That is to recall that he was the only president in the history of the United States either before or after who had earned a ph. D. Degree. Which is perhaps why hes a favorite of many academics. And made a distinguished career in academia in the fields of history and politics, no less. So what i want to argue to you today is that its wilson as the academic that we need to think about when we try to reconstruct the intellectual capital that he brought to his career as, first as a domestic leader and then on the world stage. Lets begin with a bit of biography. Wilson, we know, was a product of the u. S. South. Born in virginia and raised in georgia and South Carolina before enduring the civil war. He went on to attend the college of new jersey, later renamed princeton university. And studied law at the university of virginia before attempting to practice it in the new south metropolis of atlanta. But he quit law, bored out of his wits within the year, and decided to pursue advanced studies in history and politics at the newly established Johns Hopkins university in baltimore, maryland. Hopkins had been founded only a few years before with the goal of importing the German University model of combining teaching with highlevel research to the United States. This was a novel model at the time for american colleges. Thus, wilson was a member of one of the very first cohorts of americans to graduate in the United States with a ph. D. Which he received in 1886 at the age of 30. By 1890, he landed back at his alma mater, princeton, and had launched a successful career as an academic and public intellectual. He published a steady stream of books and essays on american politics and history and became a popular teacher and lecturer. In 1902, he was appointed president of princeton, and a decade of his presidency of princeton that followed is still seen as a time when that university was transformed from something of a finishing school for southern gentlemen into a Serious Research university. Now, i recount these biographical details because i think theyre important to the task i have taken on in this lecture. The task, as i said, is to make the argument in order to better understand wilsons thinking about the war and the peace that should follow it, in essence, to understand the sort of International Order that wilson was trying to put together in paris, we must understand the origins of his thinking on the sources of order and disorder sources of order and disorder in social and political life in general. One way to think about it is that wilsons project was and this is the alternate title of my presentation, to avert anarchy. To avert anarchy. And i use anarchy here in two senses of the word. The first sense, perhaps the most obvious one, is the anarchy of war. In this case, world war i. The second sense, related but separate, is the anarchy of social disorder, and specifically, the one that wilson would have associated with socalled anarchists in his time. A designation in which he would most likely have lumped socialists. These two types of anarchy were in wilsons view, tightly connected in the modern world, and the remedy for them was tightly connected as well, that is to say the two types of anarchy, social disorder on the one hand, war on the other. To see just how the two senses of anarchy that have justified were connected in his mind, we need to take stock of the intellectual capital that wilson brought to his position as president of the United States. Capital that he had accumulated over the roughly three decades of his adult life prior to his entry into Politics Around 1910. I use the term intellectual capital here, Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said that decision makers, political leaders, dont have time in office to actually learn anything new. And so all of their decisions and outlooks when they are in office draw, he said, on the intellectual capital they had accumulated prior to taking that position. So thats this intellectual capital wilson brought to his position is what im trying to trace for you today. It was during these decades, two, two and a half decades from the start of his graduate studies or close to three decades, from the start of his graduate studies to his appointment of academic administration, decades that span some of the most tumultuous and transformative times in u. S. History. It was during that time that wilson accumulated intellectual capital he would later draw on when he entered politics, first as a reformative governor of new jersey, and then as president of the United States. Wilsons thinking about politics, government, and the sources of social disorder and order, i argue to you, developed in the context of the Domestic Social and political life of the United States in the decades that preceded the war. Only later after the war broke out was this scheme that he developed applied to the international arena. So what is the intellectual framework within which wilson interpreted the transformation he saw all around him, transformations he saw around him unfolding from 1880 on . Wilson developed his political thought primarily during an era that we historians like to call the gilded age in the United States, which was, of course, as im sure all of you know, a time of profound historical transformation in u. S. History. And since i know all of you recall this from high school or perhaps later, ill go over this material quite quickly. What are these transformations . Well, first, perhaps, and this helps to explain wilsons comment about americans no longer being properly called anglosaxons, this was an era of large scale immigration into the United States, bringing new diversity and new tensions. From 1880 to 1910, some 20 Million People arrived in the u. S. , mostly from south and eastern europe. In the 1910 census, almost 15 of the population were counted as foreign born, higher than even today. So number one, immigration. Number two, sweeping technological changes during that era. In the fields of communication, the telegraph, i like to tell my students who think that the internet and social media have transformed and revolutionized our life, that that revolution pales, i think, as against the revolution of the telegraph, because what happened then is that information that until that time could only travel at the speed of an individual human being, whether mountain walking or running or mounted on a horse or ship, started to travel after that, at the speed of light. And that really is a revolution i think that goes far, much further in many ways than the one we have seen with the internet. So revolution in communication. Revolution in transportation with the steam engine for ships and rail and then the internal Combustion Engine for automobiles. Wilson, of course, was born and raised in the age of the horse and carriage, and by the time he was president , he had a president ial automobile. And i think not long after that, they started building the mall next can to which im standing in kansas city, the country club plaza, which i was told was the first mall built in the United States to accommodate customers coming by automobile. And the third and related set of technological changes, of course, had to do with the industrial revolution. Again, based on steam engines and so forth. We see then in this era wilson saw in that era rapid industrialization that by 1900 made the u. S. Economy account for some 25 , 25 of all Global Industrial production. We see also relatedly, massive social dislocations. Not just because of immigration but also because of internal migration, the runaway growth of cities, relatedly, we see recurring financial panics as they were called at the time, in the 1870s and then the 1890s, and wilson was living throughout this whole time as an adult. And among all of this, and as a result partially of all of this, we see a steep rise in inequality with the attendant strains on the social fabric. Now, i had to summarize how wilson himself saw the sum total of all of these changes in terms of their impact on society and politics. Is that in his view, the result of all these changes was the rapid growth of unaccountable power concentrated in the hands of the few. Let me repeat that. The rapid growth of unaccountable power concentrated in the hands of the few. This for him was a moral problem, yes. But it was also and more so a problem of practical politics. Since, as he saw it, the unaccountable concentration of wealth and power as a historical phenomenon, had to generate an inevitable counterreaction, namely, social unrest and indeed revolution. You could say that if he were a marxist, he would have called it a dialectic. Now, this was no theoretical reflection. Those decades through which he lived and accumulated his intellectual cumulative were filled with unrest and movements wilson saw inimical to social and political order, not least the ideology that led to the assassination of president william mckinley. In september 1901. Actually, this assassination was quite literally the historical event that brought progressivism to power because it brought mckinleys Vice President , theodor roosevelt, to the presidency. And the way i like to show this, i hope its going to work the way i like to show this when i teach about this in the classroom is to present these two threats to order, threats to democracy, that wilson saw. Im sure you recognize j. P. Morgan on the right, representing the concentration of unaccountable power in the hands of the few, and anybody recognize the individual on the left . Yes, the assassin of president mckinley, representing in wilsons view, the inevitable reaction to the phenomenon that morgan represents. And wilson, as he saw himself as a Progressive Political leader, his job was, if you will, to get in between those two and to hold the center, to make sure that through reform, the problem of unaccountable power in the hands of the few can be ameliorated so it doesnt lead to anarchy and revolution. So, the solution in wilsons political terms for wilson, which he articulated as a public intellectual and implemented as a domestic political leader was to push for a stronger role for government in the economy, particularly for the executive branch in the economy, in order to break up the trusts and regulate production, labor, and finance with a goal of restoring balance and order. These reforms included the eighthour workday, limits on child labor, and of course, the founding of the Federal Reserve, and i just was driving by yesterday the Federal Reserve bank of kansas city, which im sure many of you are familiar with. Now, even before the outbreak of the great war, wilson could see this dialectic between concentrated unaccountable power and revolution play out not only domestically but abroad. In fact, the very first Foreign Policy crisis that wilson faced when he came into office as president , this is even before the outbreak of world war i, was how to respond to the ongoing revolution then in mexico. That revolution had broken out in 1910 with the removal of one strongman and it seemed in early 1913 as wilson just came into office, it was on the cusp of inaugurating another military strongman into power. Wilson responded to this, rather to the surprise of his british interlocutors, by trying to support the liberals in mexico by instituting an arms embargo against the militarists. Which quickly led to conflict that saw u. S. Marines land in the mexican atlantic port of veracruz. Ironically here, while u. S. Actions did actually help the liberals in mexico and ended up with the removal of that strongman who was in power at the time when wilson came into power, they also turned liberals at the same time against the u. S. Since, as it turned out, no faction in mexico wished to be associated with the yankee military intervention on mexican soil. So already, the tensions in the wilsonian operating procedure abroad is obvious in the mexican case. In china, too, which had its own republican revolution in 1911, wilson saw the same dynamic at play. With the late dy