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 dynasty representing unaccountable power and the revolution representing the inevitable reaction against it. As in mexico, wilsons policy toward china vacillated between letting events take their course and trying to tip the scales in the favor of the results he favored. Wilson spied a similar dialectic at work there. That is to say the connection between concentrated unaccountable power on the one hand and disorder and revolution on the other. On the world stage, it was the kaiser and to some extent also the russian czar who for wilson represented the most visible symbols of unaccountable power. He called it autocracy, exactly the sort of unaccountable power that would and could incite revolution. One reason that wilson kept the u. S. Out of war for the first nearly three years is that he believed that the czar who was one of the allies was on the wrong side of history. This is also why when the march 1917 revolution in russia replaced the czar with a provisional government that seemed to fit in a reformist mold, wilson recognized the new government within a week. The first major nation to do so. This change in the russian government and this, again, this is after the removal of the czar from power but before the bolshevik takeover of the revolution later that year, this change also played a role in wilsons decision to take the u. S. Into the war the final month. March is when the czar is removaled, april is when the United States goes to war. They became less tainted by the stain of autocracy. You may ask, what about the british and french and for that matter american overseas empires . Surely, those were prime examples of unaccountable power exercised on the world stage. Well get to that a bit later. In any case, the bolshevik takeover of the revolution in russia in 1917 both changed the calculus and proved to wilson he was in fact right. Wilson knew little of lenin at that time, but he knew enough not to have any sympathy at all for his program. Lenin in fact epitomized precisely the sort of revolution that was bound to come of the persistence as occurred in russia under the romanovs of concentrated unaccountable power. Now, its worth noting i think that wilson and lenin agreed on some things. That as they both shared the sense that the established order both domestic and international had to be transformed in order to make power more accountable. But beyond that, they parted ways. What wilson was looking for is a third way between reaction on the one hand and revolution on the other. For lenin, the choice was stark. Either you have reaction defined by capitalism and imperialism, or you have revolution. There was for lenin no third way. And this is the slide i used to represent wilsons conundrum abroad, the kaiser on the one hand representing unaccountable power, lenin on the other hand, representing the inevitable revolutionary response to unaccountable power and wilson coming into the war and then coming to paris to try to hold the fort against both of these threats. Okay. So what were the main components of this wilsonian third way . In the context of the paris peace conference. Put simply, they were the league of nations and the principle of selfdetermination. Lets take each of them in order. I know you have heard quite a bit about each of them, but lets take each in order and examine them in the context of this framework that i have set up for you. First the league. The Crucial Point here is that in wilsons original conception of the league, it was not simply to be a body that would coordinate among individual fully sovereign nation states, which is what it became later. Rather, in his original conception, it was to be an instrument in which states would pool some aspects of their respective sovereignties in some ways not unlike the European Union in recent decades. Maybe i should say the European Union before brexit, or well see how that goes. But in any case, political supernational political structure in which nations or states would pool some of their sovereignty. It was to be in wilsons view, the league, also unrelatedly, the organization that would make the power of sovereign states and stateds people more accountable to what wilson liked to called world people. There is plenty much evidence from the draft of the League Covenant that wilson drew up and took with him to europe to the public statements that he made to the American Public when he came back from europe, that shows this was the league that he wanted. That, by the way, was henry cabots law, the league that wilson wanted. But doesnt that idea of pooling sovereignties in an International Organization stand in conflict with the selfdetermination, with which wilson is famously associated and seems to suggest, at least, the sanctity of National Sovereignty. How can National Sovereignty be sacred and also be pooled in this International Institution . I would say quite the con temporary. Such pooling of sovereignties as wilson wanted in the leaguings could, he thought, only work if it was done in a way that was accountable to the people the peoples involved. That is to say in the way that took into account selfdetermination. For wilson, selfdetermination was never about primarily about creating ethnically homogenous policies. By the way, wilson borrowed the term selfdetermination from l bolchuvic. It was consent of the government. That was his term of art. Goes back, obviously, to several centuries and angloamerican political thought, consent of the government. Even when he started using the term selfdetermination, even when he became identified with it quite closely, ive never been able to find a single instance in the archives, in the documents, where wilson specifically defined selfdetermination as national. National selfdetermination. Thats a phrase, as far as i can tell, he never used. Lenin and troske and other bolsheviks always talked about national selfdetermination, theyre very specific about what sort of selfdetermination was to be had. And the reason was that wilson knew very well he was working from the american model and he knew very well, as we could see from his statement to the british censor, that the United States was not annet ethnically homogenous nation, and that if it were to have selfdetermination, to the extent it has selfdetermination, it was to be exercised through the consent of the governed through democratic and deliberative processes and not through a process of ethnic homogeneity. The form that selfdetermination took in europe and to some extent in parts of asia after the war, that is to say ethnic cleansing and homogenization, ideas that were indigenous to europe and these other regions. So as i was saying for wilson it wasnt about creating ethnically hoe hoe homogenous but the governments. Again, concentration of unaccountable power. Now this, of course, was the theory, but wilson was first and foremost, despite having a ph. D. Not a theorist but a practical politician, which means he made many compromises, driven by both his own inconsistencies and prejudices. Weve heard about some of them earlier today. And also by the designs and interests of others who had power over the course of events. We also heard quite a bit about those, not least from Margaret Mcmillan last night. Now, there are many examples we can think of such wilsonian domp myselves but perhaps the most illustrative is the mechanism built into the league intended to inform imperial rule beyond europe. The mandate system was a compromise with influence of other allies, british and french primarily, who had no intention of letting go of their imperial possessions. Quite the opposite. It was also a compromise, the mandate system was, with wilsons own prejudice, reflected in his sense that the peoples of asia, of africa, of the middle east were somehow less advanced in their, as he called it, Political Development than peoples of Northern European descent and therefore had to be prepared or tutored for selfgovernment. And mandates were to provide that preparation. Still even with this compromised state, even in this compromised state, the league of nations mandate system challenged at least in principle the absolute sovereignty of colonies. By making them accountable to an international authority. The mandate system did not topple colonialism immediately. It did not intend to. That would have been a revolution and wilson was not a revolutionary, but it did challenge the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise saying essentially the main purpose of kol colonial rule was to prepare colonial people for independence that is to say the main purposes colonial rule was to make itself unnecessary. It also included the mandate system did, however partially, colonial populations in a system whose purpose was to make government more accountable to them, which wilson, this accountability, wilson viewed as key to world peace after the war. So, so far weve focused on what wilson wanted and why, but, of course, we should emphasize his wartime rhetoric resonated well beyond its intended audiences and that that rhetoric was given meanings that went well beyond his own plans and intentions. Wilson may have wanted reform as a bulwark against revolution, but for many who heard him, his words and the opportunities that they appeared to create had revolutionary rather than reformist implications. In fact, by the words end of the president became world famous of a symbol of the coming world order onto which various groups, which weve heard from a number of times, from various speakers, various groups, both within and outside europe projected their fondest hopes and dreams. His words helped inspire anticolonial movements in regions from east africa to egypt, korea, china, and if you want to read a whole book about that, its in the bookstore. And his failure, wilsons failure, to make good on his perceived promises of selfdetermination led some anticolonial activists, including the yong ho chi minh, and others to look to bolshevism for inspiration and support after 1919. Its no accident that the Chinese Communist party is founded in 1921. Still, after 1919, selfdetermination became a central principle of International Legitimacy where it persisted. Franklin roosevelt, who had served in the Wilson Administration as assistant secretary of the navy during the war and during peace negotiations, actually spent a few days in paris as part of the u. S. Delegation. Franklin roosevelt recommitted the United States to that principle of selfdetermination during world war ii when he compelled the reluctant Winston Churchill to include it explicitly in the atlantic charter. Churchill had to go back to london and explain to everyone why that didnt apply to india and other british possessions. Fdr also took it further, this principle, than wilson had. Particularly as it applied to territories outside europe. And this is this is a an issue of research im working on right now, so i can talk about it at length, those of you who are interested. Indeed, the support for the emergence of selfdetermining nations and their incorporation into institutions of International Governance were the two Main Elements of the International Order that the United States did go on to establish at the end of world war ii. Can i say world war ii here at the world war i museum . I dont know if its can i get away with it. Of course, what fdr did not sufficiently account for, we now know, is the tension at the center of u. S. Advocacy for selfdetermination. And the tension is, of course, this what if a nation having gained its selfdetermination determines to take a path that is not aligned with u. S. Interests . In other words, what do you choose when the principle of selfdetermination clashes with other principles or interests that you hold dear . Already by the late 1940s, washington chose what it saw as the containment of communism over support for colonial selfdetermination. Most prominently when it chose to back the french war against the vietnam led by ho chi minh in indough indochina and then when the french lost the war, the United States took it over itself. And vietnam is one example. Throughout the postwar decades, the post world war ii decades, principle for selfdetermination remained prominent in u. S. Rhetoric and selfimage even while its policy flouted it in practice in the name of containment or other pressing concerns and interests. So where does that leave us . First, i hope ive convinced you in order to understand what wilson came to europe to try to do we must first take account of the intellectual capital he applied to the problem, capital he built up over the two decades of thinking and writing of u. S. History and politics, and that his analysis of the conditions of modernity which americans found themselves by the time he was elected president , was centered on the desire to escape the dialectic that he saw as playing out between the concentration of unaccountable power on the one hand and dangers of revolution on the other. And that once he came to the presidency he applied this framework to World Problems first in mexico and china, then europe, and the world at large. Now, if ive convinced you of all this, i have to say that the legacy of all of this is also complicated. In one sense, and i know im going against the grain of historical consensus here, wilson succeeded. The league of nations was in fact founded and several new independent states arose from the wreckage of fallen empires pursuant to the principle of selfdetermination. In another sense, however, he clearly failed. He could not convince the senate to ratify the treaty. The u. S. Remained outside the league, and the league itself was but a shadow of what he imagined it might be. And selfdetermination, too, proved even more complicated than he suspected, not only in its attainment but also in its use. Still, in the limited but important sense wilsonism, as they called it at the time, became the blueprint for the construction of the u. S. Led liberal International Order, in order that, as solidified after 1945, had undergirded, has undergirded International Relations and defined International Relations for the best part of a for the better part of a century. Whether it still is there to define our future im not so sure. Well have to wait and see. So thinking about this history, then, highlights the tensions and contradictions that were embedded in such a project as wilson had undertaken from the outset. It also reminds us it also reminds us that it is an order, the liberal International Order, that is now facing unprecedented challenges, both at home and abroad, and that it is doing so also under circumstances that are eerily reminiscent of those over a century ago. If we look at our present, it is easy to see ourselves, perhaps even too easy to see ourselves as undergoing a new gilded age with accelerating globalization, largescale immigration, rapid technological change, crisis and social contracts and Political Institutions both in the u. S. And abroad, and the recrudescence of concentrated unaccountable power. We live today in a world not unlike the one wilson saw around him in the early 20th century. A world in which we are speaking globally not cousins, still less brothers, and yet continue to search for a way to build a community of ideals and of interests. Thank you. [ applause ] gentlemen, we would open the floor to your questions. And the first question will come from the gentleman on the left. Yes. That was fascinating. If i could pick up on your theme of failures, wilsonian failures. Uhhuh. Im thinking that it didnt have so much to do with his intellectual capital but had to do more with his character. That he was, at least as far as i can tell, a very stubborn man a selfrighteous man and that this was a major factor why he wasnt able to persuade others of the value of his thinking and intellectual capital and his ideas. Uhhuh. Yeah. Thats a great question. I think for me its not an either or proposition. I think its both and. His intellectual capital, the tensions i outlined and, of course, his character had a lot to do with it as well. I will add, this is important to remember, that wilson actually, both his governor of new jersey and as president for most of his two terms was actually quite an effective politician and quite a compelling politician. He was able to convince a lot of people of quite a few things. Not least with his rhetoric during the war, able to convince innumerable people around the world that he was the man to make the change that they wanted to see in their own affairs and world affairs. At the same time his failure at the end of his political career is undoubted. And it has to do with his character and it also has to do and theres research on this which is really interesting with the deterioration of his health. As im sure you know, in early october of 119, shortly after he came back, he had a major stroke, which essentially put him out of commission. Its very likely that he had minor strokes in the months prior to that. That that didnt didnt invert his character but made him perhaps more stubborn and less flexible than he might otherwise have been. And, you know, counterfactual history is hard to do. So its impossible to know for sure what would have happened had he not had those strokes. But its not difficult to imagine he could have reached a compromise with look, Henry Cabot Lodge was a harvard man. Wilson was a princeton man. That might have been doomed to fail to begin with. Putting that aside for a second. The the versailles treaty with the league of nations covenant did garner a majority in the senate, it just didnt garner the twothirds majority constitutionally required for ratification. Its not implausible to think a healthier wilson would have been able to convince the senate to go through with it and maybe then wed have a different assessment of his legacy. Thanks. Great talk. Im really intrigued by how youre framing wilsonianism and intellectual origins and this idea of anarchy. And i cant help but think of Woodrow Wilsons very extensive writings about the reconstruction era. I wondered if you could maybe talk a little more about that and how hes writing about conceptualizing reconstruction as this period of anarchy, just to make it simple, and how hes then applying that to his ideas of selfdetermination, and particularly as it relates to the colonized people in asia, africa and elsewhere. Yep. Thats a great question. And, you know, i im not qualified for sigh coanalysi po i cant say for sure whether wilsons experience in the u. S. Civil war was one of the elements at the basis of his fear of anarchy, but i wouldnt be surprised if it was. A boy who grows up in antebellum, virginia, then South Carolina and suddenly the whole world falls apart in front of his eyes, and that could very well be in part at least part of the explanation for his fear of anarchy and anarchism and his attachment, therefore, to this idea of reform and gradual, and i like to call it containment. The idea its a contained revolution to contain disorder and do it as a historian, he in as an historian he knew history always involved change. You cant do it by keeping things static. The only solution he could think of is reform and nonviolent change. What you see in specifically to your question, in response, when he realizes the echoes that his rhetoric has in parts of the colonial world, his response is mixed. On the one hand, he has no particular support for, or love for the sort of european imperialism, on the other hand he has a greater fear of anarchy and disorder. 1919 against british rule in egypt. Put out mildly supportive statements or appears to. They say to him, look, its your president s fault that the egyptians are rising up, because they think hes bringing Self Determination and its creating chaos. And when reports come from egypt that some of the protesters are being violent, theyre knocking down telegraph lines, sort of the infrastructure of imperialism as they saw it, wilson hears that and, of course, he never cares much about the Self Determination of nonwhite peoples because his instin instinct, without knowing anything about egypt, is that theyre probably not prepared for it. Maybe they need more time. Theres history there with wilsons policy on the philippines. He has this approach of gradual move toward Self Government. When the british convinced him with regard to egypt that his words have helped to cause violence and disorder there, he quickly backtracks and issues a statement where not him personally but the state Department Issues a statement where they say were sympathetic toward egyptian desires for more Self Government but were completely opposed to violence or disorder and thats not the right way to go about things. In some ways, the mandate system, i think, encapsulates those tensions you were alluding to. Yes, there is an end goal of independence for these colonial peoples, but it has to go through all of these different stages and needs to be reformist and nonviolent. We have time for two more questions. The first will come from this side and will be closed out by dr. Brockner. Speaking of the mandates there were talks of possible mandates in the middle east. How serious did those discussions get, and is there much documentation as what wilsons general reaction to those proposals were . To the best of my recollection, the biggest part of the conversation about the possible use of mandate in the middle east was over armenia. Weve already heard, actually, in the presentation yesterday the Armenian Genocide was very much publicized during the war. Henry morgantheau, minister toies stan bul, who reported back on all of this during the war, it was not a high priority for him. Once he got the sense that the senate and u. S. Public was not going to be supportive of a kind of ongoing would have required some kind of ongoing military presence in that ongoing conflict in asia minor, and i think his sense was that the United States just couldnt do it. It petered out. The other element that has to do with the mandates, of course, is the king crane commission, or famous in some circles. Parts of the middle east comprised lebanon, syria, jordan, palestine and israel. They meet with hundreds of delegations there and get their views about what should be done. Basically their view is we want an american mandate we want independence. If we cant have independence, we want an american mandate. If we cant have an american mandate maybe we could live with a british mandate. Definitely not a french mandate. Independence would be the best thing. And what happens when the king crane commission, by the time they write this great report that you can find online, by the time they come back and deliver it, Margaret Mcmillan was referring to this yesterday. Never published and never acted up upon, just buried by the state department. Thanks for that. That was really great. Im just thinking that you could almost float a picture up in the middle of hoover, too, who politically is opposite in so many ways from wilson, but theyre working together during the war. But hes making the same argument about why feed europe. No return to monarchy. Avoid social revolution. And so my question is well, first, did wilson just convince him of this while theyre working together, or is there a broader kind of sense that this is the u. S. Role in the world . No. Or is wilson shaping it . Thats a great question. Its one of the things that reminds me i need to emphasize is that im making no claim here that wilson was an original political thinker and that those ideas i described were original to him, that he came up with them by himself and no one else is saying this is not the case at all. He was reflecting a fairly broad sensibility among americans, among american progressives, as we would call them at the time. What makes wilson stand out, of course, is that he had a great deal more power than any of these other individuals, particularly at that moment in 1919 when he comes to paris and, as you see in the mural upstairs, hes at the center of everything. The germans want an armistice so they go to wilson. What hoover does, its a difference between humanitarian aid and political change. So, hoover is worried about revolution and says, well feed these people and well stem the tide of revolution temporarily, but wilson is thinking im not saying that hoover that wilson is a better thinker than hoover but just positioned differently. Hoover has his own job, wilson has a different place in the fermament. And hes thinking longterm, the longterm political requirements to, in his view, stem the revolutionary tide, restore order through reform, through more accountability. But it doesnt surprise me at all that they were there was overlap in their thinking. I dont know if you would call hoover a progressive, but there certainly are some shared aspects in that thinking. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking dr. Erez manela. The contenders, about the men who ran for the presidency and lost but changed political history. Fourtime governor of new york and the first catholic president ial candidate for a Major Political party al smith. 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