Paper delivered at the meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, California, September 1, 2001.
Chaired by Ronald J. Pestritto of the University of Dallas, the panel was on John Alvis’s play, “WW”: A Play in Two Parts.
Among the letters of our alphabet, “W” is uniquely dual. “WW” means duality times two. “WW” is “A Play in Two Acts,” a twice-told tale of a man with two wives, two friends, two main enemies, and two spiritual but not biological sons. We see one of his daughters twice, once in girlhood, once in womanhood. Wilson in a sense had two lives—the first as a political academic, the second as a professional politician. Like Hawthorne, John Alvis considers men and women between two worlds, the one Christian, the other not. All Christians live in two cities, Godly and human, and all Christians seek to be doubles, actors if you will, standing in for or imitating Christ. the Christ they imitate comes to light in that two-part book, the Bible, with characters in the first or “Old” Testament held to prefigure those in the second. The Bible’s “New” Testament describes a founding presented as a return to old ways. Although they all live in the two cities, not all Christians live in earthly cities in which the ways of God are giving way to some alien but equally systematic body of thought. Modern Christians experience a double duality—living not only in two cities, heavenly and earthly, but in an earthly city divided between what remains of Christendom and not-entirely coherent secularism This duality lends itself especially to drama as conceived in the West, a literary form with duality built into it: dialogue, conflict, parallel. Drama combines thought and action, imitating by bringing out or revealing certain dualities: cant or double-talk, duplicity or double-dealing (two-facedness), and betrayal or double-cross. Doubleness implies authority, the appeal from what is to what should be, the duplication or imitation of the good. (I mean “duplication” and “imitation” in two senses, good and bad, both the good imitation of the good–modeling oneself upon the good–and the bad or counterfeit imitation, a disguise put on to boost oneself into a position of authority.) Whether religious or political, any founding implies a drama or doubling of Old and New, and in “WW” Woodrow Wilson is seen attempting two foundings.
I am delighted to report that John Alvis is a dramatist, and not just another professor with a hobby. Ezra Pound, his politics less sound than Mr. Alvis’s, did nonetheless write both fine poetry and intelligent literary criticism. He said that a poet must double, intensify, his insight and require the same of his readers by condensing his language—the technique of condensare. Poets should say in a line what lesser writers say in a paragraph, a chapter, even a book. As one who has read Wilson’s many pages of published prose, I can say that Alvis enacts this poetic virtue. His characters speak economically, quite unlike economists, to say nothing of lecturing political scientists and filibustering pols, which Wilson by turns was. Alvis packs lifetimes into his two-hour drama.
Who is Alvis’s Wilson? The play’s prologue introduces some Wilsonian themes without bringing the man on stage. Oaths fly—oaths Christianly not scatalogically derived, connoting passions and loyalties, punctuating such other theological-political themes as executive authority, guild and responsibility, and the rule of women. This latter theme also brings nature in, by asking, ‘Who rules by nature?’ Much of organic nature is dual, engendering itself by means of gender.
The first act concerns Wilson’s struggle to found Princeton College anew. The old Princeton served Christianity and America by educating Presbyterians. But God no longer works through the Church, Wilson has decided. God now works through the State. Providence is now History, and so Princeton must shift from educating Presbyterian ministers to educating prime ministers—states’ men, so to speak, men of the state. God once worked through spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, and the Christian college completed that education. The father sent his son to the old alma mater, mostly, in latter-day Princeton’s case, to get him into the right eating club (a fraternity by another name). In Wilson’s estimation, the fraternalism of the eating clubs substituted cliquishness for brotherliness. Wilson demanded that progress, movement toward the future, must replace the ancestral, the ambitions of fathers for their sons. And it shall, because progress is God’s work, and having God on our side apparently obviates the need for compromise with the declining ancestral order. At Princeton, Wilson practiced the high politics of centralization, attempting to destroy the old civil-social institutions and to reconstitute them so that students would not rule themselves in fraternities or imitate their fathers, but be ruled by administrators, faculty, and (God help them) graduate students. Princeton would remain (as it was from its first founding) “in the nation’s service.” But the nation, having changed into a modern nation-state, requires that the new Princeton imitate, become the double of, the nation-state itself as a centralized, tutelary authority.
At Princeton, Alvis’s Wilson confuses human love and friendship, along with the kind of fidelity they beget, with a shared fidelity to ideals he posits, in the name of God. He overlooks his own emotional infidelity to wife and friend in his ambition to be a lover and friend while being also a founder/creator. He conceives fidelity to his ideal of meritocratic equality, in a regime ruled by unelected local authorities, to be true freedom, opposed to the false freedom of “privilege” and “cronyism”—what his enemies think to be the freedom to associate privately in order to form friendships and to learn without any immediate concern with serving the State. That is, Wilson wants others to be faithful to him by being faithful to ‘progress,’ to the cause they share, but, as a sort of lone founder of a miniature modern state, he cannot partake of the love and friendship that would engender such fidelity. So what? Machiavelli might ask Did Moses have friends? Did Caesar? But Wilson also wants the personality of the Christian God. Professor John Hibben, the friend who deserts his cause, is a Judas, he says. The real Jesus had at least eleven other friends, and they made the difference in the success of His founding. Wilson does not have eleven other friends.
The Princeton of Wilson’s time remained a civil association, never quite achieving miniature-state status. Wilson failed to make it state-like, or a servant of any real state, and so turned to national and international politics, again as a founder-leader. In Act II, President Wilson, on his speaking tour during his fight for the League of Nations, regards the United States Senate rather as a Princeton eating club writ large, an entity that resists progress or History in the name of a sort of ancestral piety toward the work of the founding fathers—the Constitution, the invocation of which Wilson dismisses as a cloak for the senators’ will to power. Wilson and his new wife imagine that he draws strength from the people at large, that his tour will revive instead of exhausting him. The tour effectively kills him, because the spirit of the crowd may giveth power (or taketh it away) but it cannot give life; when the cheering stops—it must, as it is human, mortal—the democratic leader can only quit. The seduction of popularity, the confusion of vox populi with vox Dei, doubly confused by the ambition to become the leading voice, the prophet of the popular spirit, as a self-conceived servant of the State and instrument of God, leads the leader not to the Cross but back to the White House and to defeat at the hands of the Senate. Stricken with thrombosis, Wilson does not die but loses voice and executive capacity, his body rebelling against too much of the unlively spirit of crowd-swaying. Wilson’s “opinion leadership” is a sort of baptized Baconianism. But it cannot conquer nature. Nor is it clear that holy water turns the soul of Bacon around, or merely rolls off him like water off a duck. It looks as if holy water makes Bacon an idealist without making him a Christian, a point to which I shall recur.
Wilson’s second-act friend, Colonel Edward House, tries to instruct him in a less confused Machiavellianism. Wilson wants the “New Freedom” for the nation and a new order for the world, both “unselfish” not “self-interested.” He fails to see what Franklin Roosevelt would see: that tangible freedom for the people within a modern state, and in a system of modern states, requires the rule of the executive eagle who can frighten the lesser birds of prey that roost in Senate committees and corporate boardrooms. This eagle will found and direct a bureaucratic state consolidated thanks to the opportunity a world war affords, securing itself by the act of securing the welfare of the sparrows which fear the nearer hawks more than the distant eagle. In Alvis’s epilogue, House steps forward to judge Wilson as Christian-all-too-Christian for such world-historical predation or empire-building. FDR, House says, was not too Christian for the task. Wilson became the John the Baptist in the progressive-American narrative, that reverse gospel which ends with a new Rome, not a new Heaven and a new earth—although some of its imperators are working on that project, too.
Thus, by John Alvis’s reckoning, Woodrow Wilson was a man who never quite knew if he wanted martyrdom or victory. His modernized or neo-liberal Christianity impelled him to confuse the two. Victory was impossible for him, neglectful of lover of neighbor and of personal God, animated instead by such abstractions as idealism and power. And so was martyrdom, for the same reason. Most political men have no difficulty in choosing between martyrdom and victory. Their rallying cry, ‘Victory or death,’ means ‘We risk martyrdom, but we strive for conquest.’ Martyrdom as a choiceworthy way of dying, rather than as a harsh necessity, makes no sense to most political men. For them, ruling necessitates survival first of all. Martyrdom makes no sense to any but the most extraordinary political men, for whom it might make the regimes they founded immortal in human memory. Alvis has seen what Colonel House saw, that Wilson was not wholeheartedly a political man, even in the extraordinary sense of the victorious martyr. Early in the Great War, House called Wilson “too refined, too civilized, too intellectual, too cultivated not to see the incongruity and absurdity of war.” House said that a nation “needs a man of coarser fibre and one less a philosopher than the President, to conduct a brutal, vigorous, and successful war” (House papers, II. 463-465). House underestimated his friend, there. Wilson as we know did go on to conduct a successful war, did not lack leonine teeth. It was at peacemaking that he failed. To say that Wilson was to some degree a philosopher is not to say that he really was a philosopher. In the opinion of Alvis, and perhaps of House, Wilson did not really know himself, as a philosopher does. He lacked the self-examining duality of Socrates, and Socrates’ dialogic virtues. His classes at Princeton were lectures and, unlike Lincoln, his public ‘debates’ never involved another live person on the other side of the stage. His duality lacked the final degree of thoughtfulness, even as it gestured at rationality. The Wilson I find in his arguments and actions is perhaps even more sharply dual than Alvis’s, both more Machiavellian and more profoundly Christian—even more sharply ambivalent.
Wilson made himself hard to know. “Opinion leadership” is not transparent; publicity for Wilson often consisted of hiding in plain sight. In 1896 he published a respectful essay on Grover Cleveland, the only Democrat elected to the White House in Wilson’s adult lifetime except himself. He had to profess respect for Cleveland, and he did. He called Cleveland “the sort of President the makers of the Constitution had vaguely in mind,” a man of “robust sagacity,” a practical man, no mere theorist, a “President in ordinary times but after an extraordinary fashion,” a “man without a party” who “carried civil service reform to its completion at last.” This all seems quite stirring, until one reflects on Wilson’s other writings of the period. There he says that partisanship is indispensable to political life, the foundation of leadership (a party being a sort of peaceful army, always in need of a general). Leaders need vision more than prudence, in order to inspire their fellow citizens to advance. The sort of man the Framers wanted, the president who governs rather than leads, is not the sort of man Woodrow Wilson wanted, or the sort of president he became. So Wilson made it hard for others to know him, a lion in lamb’s clothing, a fox posing as the loyal family dog.
We are looking, then, at a doubly elusive man, concealing himself from others while concealing himself from himself. No wonder that at least two intelligent women, one of them also wise, found him a fascinating, if vexing, companion. The perfect study for a dramatist.
John Alvis’s Wilson conceals his Machiavellianism from himself by believing himself a Christian—a Christian who never quite gets to church on Sunday, or prays, but seems not to notice that he does not. “I think we fight on behalf of the Prince of Peace,” he tells his daughter, old enough to raise an eyebrow. “It has become my cross and my privilege, unworthy vessel of Providence that I am.” This spiritual warfare for peace, undertaken necessarily by military means and by political activity conceived militarily, as leadership rather than statesmanship, crowds out worship—and with it, humility—precisely while its practitioner calls himself an unworthy vessel.
I think Wilson’s dilemma may have had less moral and more doctrinal content than we easily understand. In taking Wilson’s Christianity seriously, I distance myself from most political scientists and side with the general run of historians, who tend to take Wilson’s religiosity more on ‘face value.’ Wilson gave lay sermons to churches and to church-affiliated groups even as president of the United States—no Jeffersonian “wall of separation” for him. Of our major presidents, he is the only one, with the exception of Reagan, likely to answer with an honest ‘yes’ to the old sermon chestnut, ‘If you were accused of Christianity, would you be convicted?’ Wilson tried to think through his simultaneous commitments to Christianity, progressivism, and political life.
A few months before publishing his double-edged tribute to President Cleveland, Wilson spoke to the Philadelphia Society. He gave his talk what is to our ears the odd and rather funny title, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” [1] The original text is lost; we have only a newspaper summary. He discusses many of the same themes in his most celebrated early speech, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service,” delivered in the fall semester of the same year.
In Philadelphia, Wilson said that “if we wish to get a bad thing out of our soul, we must get a good thing in.” The “good thing” is the “new affection”; only it, and not self-censorship or moderation, has “expulsive power,” the power to purge the soul of evil. “Such a power must be aggressive in its nature,” he said. “There is… great danger in the inoccupancy of the soul, danger that in such a condition small evils may creep in and displace the good.” This closely resembles the Christianity of the Gospels. One turns to the Gospel writers from the ancients struck by the degree to which early Christians regarded the soul as a vulnerable, even weak, entity–almost a passive battleground for good and evil spiritual beings who seek to claim it for themselves. The virtues that seem so sturdy in Cicero seem rather flimsy to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Wilson here acknowledges the Christian stance, although for him the warring armies on the field are forces—virtues and vices—rather than persons–angels and demons. Also, for Wilson the power of a new affection suffices actually to expel sin, not merely to keep it at bay.
Wilson also endorses the Gospel shield in this warfare: agapic love, the love of God and neighbor, “the one thing that can replace… the very evils of the soul.” To “allow” such love “to fill our whole life and soul” is “not only our duty but our privilege.” Again, this is a ‘liberal’ and ‘abstract’ reading of Christianity, one that emphasizes the virtue of agape rather than the agapic infilling of the soul by that person, the Holy Spirit. It is, if you will, a rather spirited spirituality, very much a Scotsman’s creed. The supreme stubbornness of Wilson, his inclination to sublimate his sins or vices by intensifying his efforts toward some other, better goal (a goal itself saturated by his own spiritedness or ambition), is filtered through and refined by this political theology. Notice how close this progressive Presbyterianism is to the austere willfulness, the discipline commended by the founders of the modern scientific project—Descartes, Bacon.
Wilson effectually acknowledges this spirited spirituality in his Princeton speech. In those days, Princetonians took their Presbyterianism seriously, or at least said they did. Wilson said so, too: “Your thorough Presbyterian is not subject to the ordinary laws of life,—is of too stubborn a fibre, too unrelaxing a purpose, to suffer mere inconvenience to bring defeat. Difficulty bred effort, rather….” [2]Here is the Wilson who would not compromise, either with his enemies at the college or, later, in Washington. Spirit natural and Christian amalgamate here. Only God could separate and weigh these elements in Wilson.
Wilson goes on to name three founders, all of whom he would rival. The first is John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, “a man,” Wilson says, “so compounded of statesman and scholar, Calvinist, Scotsman, and orator that it must be a sore puzzle where to place or rank him,—whether among the great divines, the great teachers, or great statesmen.” The Princeton of Wilson’s Witherspoon, Presbyterian and political, a pivot of the Revolutionary War and a school for statesmen, has continued into the 1890s. Wilson’s envisioned new founding at Princeton along lines of English, Christian, and modern ideas, dramatized by Alvis, makes him praise Witherspoon even as he intends to replace him.
“A commencement day came,” Wilson reminds his audience, “which saw both Washington and Witherspoon on the platform together—the two men, it was said, who could not be matched for striking presence in all the country.” [3] Washington is Wilson’s second founder in this speech. As Alvis and all of us recall, in his own utterly in-Washingtonian way, Wilson too would see, when circumstances allowed him the chance, to be first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. But he so sought in part by ending Washington’s foreign policy of American seclusion from permanent political ties with Europe.
The last founder Wilson names is James Madison, whom he styles “the philosophical statesman.” Madison numbered among the “nine Princeton men [who] sat in the Constitutional Convention of 1787,” six of them former students of Witherspoon. “Princeton men,” Wilson tells his Princeton men, “fathered both the Virginia Plan which was adopted, and the New Jersey Plan which was rejected,” as well as “the compromises without which no plan could have won acceptance.” By Wilson’s reckoning, Princeton men just had the market cornered when it came to constitution-building. And, Wilson suggests, they’re not done, yet. True, “the revolutionary days are gone,” and generations have since entered “a list of the silent men who carry the honorable burdens of business and of social obligation.” Nevertheless: These same silent men “suggest a fertile soil full of the old seed and ready, should the air of the time move shrewdly upon it as in the old days, to spring once more into the old harvest.” [4] A new American founding might occur, and if you wonder how a new founding might come from old dormant seed, shrewd Wilson assures you that “the law of conservation is really the law of progress.” [5]
Princeton Presbyterianism lends itself both to unrevolutionary and revolutionary politics. “Religion, conceive it but liberally enough, is the true salt wherewith to keep both duty and learning sweet against the taint of time and change; and it is a noble thing to have conceived it thus liberally, as Princeton’s founders did…. The men who founded Princeton were pastors, not ecclesiastics. Their ideal was the service of congregations and communities, not the service of a church. Duty with them was a practical thing, concerned with righteousness in this world, as well as with salvation in the next. There is nothing that gives such pith to public service as religion. A God of truth is no mean prompter of the enlightened service of mankind; and formed, as if in his eye, has always a fibre and sanction such as you shall not easily obtain for the ordinary man from the mild promptings of philosophy.” [6] Washington had said as much is his Farewell Address, but without Wilson’s critique of traditional liberal education or the American Constitution. Wilson has invoked what to his audience was the familiar model of the Presbyterian ‘secular saint,’ now envisioned as a carrier into society not only of the Holy Spirit but the Spirit of the Age valorized by Hegel.
Turning to Wilson’s critique of traditional liberal education, consider with President Wilson the mild promptings of philosophy. Wilson makes one of the most eloquent defenses of liberal education, classically conceived, that any ‘modern’ has written. But in the end the old liberal education, and the old liberalism of the Founders, are like Grover Cleveland: admirable but superannuated. “Your enlightenment depends on the company you keep,” he says. “There is no sanity comparable with that which is schooled in the thoughts that will keep.” Now here’s the gambit: thoughts that have kept, literature that has survived, hold “a sort of leadership in the aristocracy of natural selection.” [7] Wilson uses reverence for old things to ‘bring in’ the themes of leadership and progress.
The classics give us “the thinking which depends upon no time but only upon human nature”–no apparent progressivism, there. Yet Wilson also gives this claim one of his characteristic twists. First, those who only read the classics may neglect their “practical duties in the present,” spurning politics for “the peculiarly pleasant and beguiling comradeship” of “authors.” [8] Undergraduate education cannot and should not produce scholars but rather men of affairs who are friends of scholars and of authors, those potential revolutionaries of a new America.
Second, Wilson deploys literary education against a scientific education that holds out a false progressivism, rival to his own. “Science has bred in us a spirit of experiment and a contempt for the past.” It is materialist. “It has,” he says, “given us agnosticism in the realm of philosophy” and “scientific anarchism in the field of politics” by making “the legislator confident that he can create and the philosopher sure that God cannot.” Science’s conquest of nature “has not freed us from ourselves,” has not “purged us of passion or disposed us to virtue”; instead it “may be suspected of having enhanced our passions by making wealth so quick to come, and so fickle to stay.” Progressivism based on materialism does not work. It does not engage the whole human soul. Only the purgative or “expulsive” and progressive Christianity of Presbyterian Princeton can lead Americans to the new republic of which Woodrow Wilson will serve as the Witherspoonian spiritual-political educator, the Washingtonian executive, and the Madisonian legislator, all in one. If that Wilson bears an unsettling resemblance to the Trinitarian God of the Gospels, and also to Jefferson’s definition of the tyrant, then the question we must ask, with John Alvis, is: How do you know when the chosen vessel of that god, guiding the course of human events, leading his militant party and sect forward, charges into an unholy megalomania? The answer must be that God’s true vessel will be chosen for his humility–as Abraham was. Alvis thinks that Wilson misconceived of himself as that vessel. I am inclined to agree, adding only that Wilson did see these dangers, and tried to avoid them by conceiving a neo-liberal, democratic-progressive, Protestant answer to the theological-political problem of progress and return.
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