Technocratic Progressivism

Abraham Lincoln once described American democracy as “by the people, for the people.” Wilson was not so sure about that first part. Born into America’s disintegrating First Republic in Virginia in 1856, Wilson came of age during Reconstruction, in which federal power countered white supremacy in the South in order to realize the postwar promises of black civil rights. White elites called this chaos and anarchy.

Wilson himself later wrote in his five-volume, A History of the American People, that newly free black Americans who had been “shielded” by slavery were unprepared for the “rough bullets of freedom.” It was a “menace to society” that they “should be set free and left without tutelage or restraint.” In the postwar period, Wilson felt, freedmen were duped into voting for corrupt Republicans. Supposedly illiterate black officeholders (no examples are given) ran up vast debts on public works projects and schools.

A History of the American People had a similar critique of late-nineteenth-century organized labor. Wilson viewed workers in 1884 as a kind of mob, which learned unfair boycott tactics from “Irish agitators” and used them to “work the ruin of those who opposed their radical programmes.” Regarding both Irish workers and black voters, Wilson viewed democracy as a threat to the common good and the public as a threat to itself.

Wilson’s ideas of governance had an important early influence: the economist Richard T. Ely, under whom he studied as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the 1880s. Ely was shepherding that era’s economic “classical liberals” in a new direction. The empiricism of Ely’s German historical training had helped him break away from laissez-faire ideas grounded in classical political economy, but this did not mean he was hostile to business.

On the contrary, Ely took anarcho-capitalist best-selling writer Herbert Spencer’s faith in social evolution by competition seriously — only he felt that competition had to be managed to ensure proper outcomes. In Ely’s view, enlightened elites needed to shepherd the unwashed masses to good government. He felt that expert-driven nonpartisanship produced “true democracy — which is the same thing as true aristocracy.” When the Nation editor E. L. Godkin charged Ely with socialism, he defended himself in the same language, insisting that he was not only a capitalist, but an aristocrat.

Ely’s technocratic progressivism was a political platform well-suited for the age. In the 1912 presidential election, Republicans fractured between pro-competition William Howard Taft, who favored breaking up trusts, and the semipopulist proto-dirigisme of now third-party candidate Theodore Roosevelt, who favored managing trusts as much as breaking them up. A smaller but organized and effective socialist bloc instead proposed wholesale economic change. Publicly, Wilson — then governor of New Jersey — initially occupied an uncertain position in the race. A canny political operator, Wilson’s public political statements varied from Jeffersonian small government and anti-tax rhetoric to economic regulation and compromise with labor, with a particular shift in 1908. Prior to this point he presented himself as a laissez-faire man; later he played the role of reluctant regulator.

This was arguably a matter of rhetoric more than policy, however. As Juliette and Alexander George put it in a colorful mid-century psychobiography, prenomination candidate Wilson “could be endlessly eloquent, even if disturbingly vague” concerning government defense of public good from private interest. This served him well in a Democratic Party where populist William Jennings Bryan remained a major figure despite previous electoral failures. Everyone could hear what they wanted in Wilson’s message: calls for reform, respect for the working man, admiration for business.

In 1909, Wilson defended union-busting employers’ efforts to keep an “open shop” — workplaces in which not all employees become members of the union, undermining collective bargaining and union activity. By 1912, he was asking for workers’ votes for his “New Freedom” platform. Aided by sharpened anti-monopoly policy drawn from the mind of lawyer Louis D. Brandeis (also a dedicated open shop supporter), Wilson campaigned for president in 1912, and governed thereafter, as a pro-business regulator — a man who would optimize but not overturn the political-economic order of America. In one campaign speech, Wilson told voters that he felt “the whole business of politics is to bring classes together upon a platform of accommodation and common interest.”

Playing for Both Sides

The new president viewed the public less as a source of potential political strength than as a teeming mass in need of expert guidance, not unlike his onetime mentor, Ely. Wilson’s 1908 Constitutional Government in the United States outlined an expansive vision of the presidency, in which the chief executive pushed Congress hard on legislation and lead as the “spokesman for the real sentiment of and purpose of the country.” Far from being a mouthpiece for popular sentiment, this spokesman should in Wilson’s view be “giving direction to opinion.” In Wilson’s formulation, “A President whom [the national thought] trusts can not only lead it, but form it to his own views.”

Wilson’s own views were technocratic. In his Atlantic article, Frum accurately writes that “Wilson’s tariff, banking, and regulatory reforms were driven more by a quest for rationality and efficiency than by empathy and compassion.” Efficiency meant better business competition — the same competition that drove workers’ wages down — not a fairer economy. And even pursuing efficiency in competition, Wilson was reluctant to take serious measures.

An instructive example is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), created under Wilson to protect competition through antitrust law. Theoretically it had enforcement powers against unfair business, thanks in large part to the efforts of progressive and former Roosevelt ally George Rublee. Like the many federal regulatory bodies that eventually followed it, the FTC was resisted by business, which hoped it would function more like their own trade associations than an enforcement body.

Wilson’s choice of appointments to the body certainly helped. Outside of Rublee, Wilson prioritized patronage and business. Wilson’s friend Joseph Davies was so ineffective as chairman in pushing for proper funding for the FTC that, according to historian Mark Eric McClure, it was almost as though he were asleep during the appropriations process. The president not only appointed several wolves to a commission on protecting the hen house, but he hadn’t even chosen competent wolves. Chaos and ineffectiveness ensued.

Wilson’s FTC was doomed by intention as well as inattention. While his 1912 opponent, Roosevelt, had campaigned on government direction of business, even to the point of potentially setting prices, Wilson’s regulatory vision was much more limited. He believed in promoting competition, not shaping outcomes directly. Moreover, he treated the left wing of the American political mainstream as a constituency to be placated (including with Rublee’s presence on the FTC) rather than a force to be marshaled or a public to be respected. While the FTC is remembered as a blueprint for federal agencies, its early history was a negative example. It was Rublee’s vision of the FTC that was far-sighted, and that vision was undermined by Wilson’s appointments and lack of support.

The Wilson-era Commission on Industrial Relations represents other roads not taken. Convened originally under Taft in response to the bombing of the LA Times building by a striking ironworker, the commission took a long and hard look into American labor practices. Its chairman, labor lawyer and internationalist Frank P. Walsh, was a committed labor progressive. Under his watch, the commission interrogated Frederick Winslow Taylor over “scientific management” and gave the quick-witted Shoe Workers’ Union leader, John F. Tobin, an opportunity to verbally dismantle him in his testimony the same day. The commission also raked John D. Rockefeller over the coals for his Colorado Fuel and Iron company’s 1914 massacre of striking workers. Chairman Walsh’s expert orchestration of the public hearings regarding Colorado infuriated business, as well as President Wilson. But it helped Walsh win in the court of public opinion — news coverage began to refer to the commission increasingly as “the Walsh Commission.”

Ultimately this investigative and advisory body produced a series of different reports with nested dissents, as it was unable to come to a majority decision, let alone a consensus. The most radical report, written by staffer Basil Manly and supported by Walsh, called for utility nationalization, social housing, and empowering the FTC to take on labor issues — effectively a proposal to have it do what the National Labor Relations Board was ultimately created for two decades later. Walsh dissented on the matter of immigration in particular, stating plainly: “I wish to record my opposition, as a matter of principle, to all restrictions upon immigration.”

When the committee report was published in 1916, Walsh and other reform leaders demanded Congress follow its recommendations. In a powerful example of participatory democracy, America’s left rallied around the report with positive reviews, glowing summaries, and even a pocket version. Pro-labor legislation sprang up in Congress, including one of Wilson’s most notable successes: an eight-hour day for railroad workers.

All this from a divided body appointed by a pro-business president in the aftermath of a bombing by labor. A similar committee with enforcement power, organized by an ostensibly more pro-labor president, could have done enormous good. Had Wilson rallied around Walsh and the labor movement instead of keeping them at arm’s length, he might have achieved greater and more lasting improvements in labor rights. More realistically, he might have pitched elements of the more moderate report of commissioners John Commons (a fellow former Ely student) and Florence Harriman to Congress as a kind of compromise — their proposals still would have meant enormous advances for labor.

But ambivalent to workers and hostile to the Left, Wilson was not that kind of president.

Reform and Repression

The sweeping rhetoric of Wilson’s New Freedom platform seemed to promise some measure of justice and equality along lines of race as well as class. W. E. B. Du Bois moved from the Socialist Party to the Democrats to vote for him; journalist and civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter left a 1912 meeting at Wilson’s house feeling hopeful about his potential presidency. Trotter was of course aware that Wilson was a patrician Southerner in an unjust political system. Fellow Wilson supporter and American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, though himself far from a radical, likewise had reasons to be skeptical of Wilson’s commitment to labor given his past support for “open shop.” But both Gompers and Trotter felt Wilson was offering promising change more than his opponents.

They were misled. A 2015 retrospective by writer Dick Lehr, also in the Atlantic, uses the same word that the Georges did for Wilson’s 1912 promises: vague. Another constant refrain in Wilson analysis is cold. Wilson was happy to let voters think he’d promised them something, but the expectations he cultivated did not necessarily have any relationship to his subsequent actions. Wilson not only failed to challenge segregation but brought it to new areas in the federal government, including the Treasury and Post Office Departments. When Trotter met with Wilson again in 1914 over his administration’s racism, the president informed his onetime supporter that “segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit,” and harangued him for the tone with which he dared to criticize him. The following year, Wilson screened the infamous Klan propaganda film Birth of a Nation in the White House.

Wilson’s record on labor is at least more complicated than his record on racial justice. The Clayton Act shielded unions from abuse of antitrust legislation, which was a genuine victory. It was also a limited one: judges after Wilson’s era found plenty of other ways to issue injunctions against workers. Other successes on and around labor are not necessarily attributable to Wilson. While the federal income tax was introduced in Wilson’s first term, it was made possible by a constitutional amendment and supported by the more populist elements among both parties. When Wilson signed into law an eight-hour day for railroad workers, he did so against the backdrop of Walsh Report reform energy and direct pressure in the form of a strike threat from railway unions. This was more labor’s victory than the president’s.

When Wilson broke his promises of peace and took the nation to war, the president turned on any workers who opposed. Using the Espionage, Sedition, and Immigration Acts, he imprisoned and deported opponents of the war on the Left, including Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. Wilson also protected, with military deployments, the open shop from International Workers of the World agitation in the Western states during the war.

Even in this period, Wilson’s administration did do some good for labor — but once again it was often the work of other, better men. Just as there are few atheists in foxholes, there are few laissez-faire advocates in wartime. Upon bringing America into the war, Wilson temporarily nationalized the railways and created the National War Labor Board (WLB), a body meant to mediate disputes between labor and management. In keeping with Wilson’s desire for class consensus, the board had two chairs: one for labor, one for management.

The labor chair was former Commission on Industrial Relations chairman Walsh — a strong choice. Initially the business cochair was reluctant to work with him, but Walsh began to win his counterpart over. By day hearing petitions from workers, by night working into the late hours drafting orders, the two chairs forced through livable wages and empowered shop committees through which workers could vote and actually exert some control over the workplace: industrial democracy. And that business chair who listened to Walsh, visited workplaces, and at one point demanded a doubling of Southern textile workers’ wages. He was former Republican president of the United States and 1912 Republican presidential candidate Taft. Some of Wilson’s best accomplishments for labor came from acts that his former opponent might have done anyway — or even done better — despite his own pro-business position.

Taft and Walsh’s accomplishments faded with the end of the war and the subsequent election of a series of business-aligned Republicans. The WLB was meant to be temporary, and Wilson had neither the interest nor the capacity to continue its cause. War demanded compromise with labor. Peace did not. Taft himself proved only a temporary and limited ally of labor, in his later career on the Supreme Court. President Wilson, by failing to champion the labor movement, jailing many of its most powerful voices — particularly Debs — and developing a federal persecution apparatus to target leftists, made workers politically and legally vulnerable to successors who treated them with open hostility. Wilsonian repression was how a young J. Edgar Hoover got his start in the business of persecuting radicals.

In the grim anti-labor years that followed Wilson’s presidency, Walsh continued fighting for workers against a government of snitches and scabs. In 1923, he successfully defended a group of Michigan leftists from a prosecution for “criminal syndicalism.” The case was part of a broader career representing labor and resisting the rising anti-worker tide. Walsh fought for American workers right up until his heart gave out in front of New York’s State Supreme Court in May 1939.

Attribution in Wilson-era policy successes matters not because of the 28th President’s own reputation, but because of its broader implications. If the income tax and the eight-hour railroad day were the victories of an idealist establishment figure, then we simply need more idealistic establishment figures. Properly attributing these accomplishments to a public that was frequently either orthogonal to or actively at cross purposes with Wilson suggests a different agent: mass politics.

The best of Wilson’s domestic accomplishments were a combination of low-hanging fruit (the FTC), things others would have done (the income tax), things others did do (the WLB), and good things made worse by his involvement (the Federal Reserve and the FTC again). At best, this is the record of a mediocrity, not a visionary. And this is before we even get to foreign policy.

Failure on the World Stage

The June 28, 1915, invasion of Haiti by the United States was, in effect, a conscription of American troops as mercenaries for National City Bank. Haiti had long owed a forced debt to France, a brutal indemnity imposed in the nineteenth century as payment for the economic damage its revolutionaries had inflicted on the empire by freeing themselves. In 1910–1911, National City insinuated itself into this web of debt via Haiti’s originally French-dominated national bank, which like the French before them they would run for their own profit to the detriment of the Haitian government.

In December of 1914, at National City vice president Roger Farnham’s urging, US marines stole Haitian gold reserves and transported them to the United States. The United States invaded six months later, took control of Haitian finances, and forced a new constitution on the nation, one that enabled foreigners to own land in Haiti. The occupation claimed more than ten thousand Haitian lives and left lasting political scars. It continued for two decades, ending only in 1934; it would take another thirteen years for Haiti to finally pay off debts related to France’s indemnity.

Other nations across the world also had reason to find Wilson’s internationalism lacking, particularly during the defining event of his presidency: World War I. Though he is remembered as an idealist, Wilson did not send troops to aid against the aggression of the Central Powers. This was not an unreasonable decision on its own: as the trans-Atlantic antiwar left noted, this was a clash of empires in which the proletariat would suffer. But this was not Wilson’s objection, and as Frum notes, he subsequently failed to negotiate a very possible peace in 1916. Having campaigned for a second term on his record of neutrality, Wilson then broke his promises and took the nation to war in 1917 – now that German submarine warfare was taking American lives and ships. Certainly this was a difficult situation, but it is the president’s job to manage difficult situations. By most metrics this was a failure: Wilson managed neither internationalist peace nor isolationist neutrality nor idealistic intervention.

When Germany was defeated, Wilson personally involved himself in peace negotiations, hoping to secure a new international order. His planned League of Nations was meant to replace arms races and dueling alliances with deliberation. It was a compromise from the beginning. Britain and France remained global empires, which meant calls for global democracy had to come with an asterisk. When Japan put forth a proposal to enshrine racial equality as a “basic principle of the League of Nations” at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson killed it because it threatened the British Empire (at least rhetorically); he tried to make it up to Japan by supporting its own imperial claims on Chinese territory taken in the war. The rejection of this proposal illustrates the pattern of compromise that doomed the League: Wilson sought an end to war without an end to empire, an end to racial inequality, or economic change.

When Wilson brought the Treaty of Versailles home, Republicans refused to ratify it and thus allow American participation in the League of Nations in the Senate, arguing that joining the league would subordinate America to foreigners. The fact that Wilson had kept the United States out of the war until its own interests were directly threatened certainly did not help him sell victory as an internationalist triumph. Wilsonian internationalism’s best elements were to some extent a vision without a constituency. This was Wilson’s own fault. Technocracy can get you a central bank, but it can’t end war. There were of course Americans willing to fight for international solidarity. It’s a shame Wilson had thrown many of them in prison.

Wilson’s expressed desires include elements of a theoretical program of peace and democracy. But when we look at Wilson’s actions, little of this supposed ethic is actually there. How did invading Haiti protect self-determination? How did vetoing racial equality language in the Treaty of Versailles and furthering segregation at home forward freedom? How did criminalizing dissent safeguard democracy? Did keeping the United States out of the war only until its interests were directly threatened signal that the country cared about others? Calling these exceptions to some grand ideal would require us to find that ideal as a pervasive theme in his actions. I’m not sure we can.

At best, Woodrow Wilson desired global peace the way many establishment Democrats do today: earnestly and uselessly. Wilson failed not only because of errors in action, but also because his belief in capitalism and white supremacy got in the way, blocking opportunities for domestic and international cooperation. Even if this weren’t the case, even if Wilson truly was a noble failure, this hardly makes for a positive legacy. The president of the United States should not be considered eligible for participation trophies.

Turning to the Public

Like too many Democrats today, Wilson preached pragmatism to his left and idealism to his right. His establishment-first belief that he knew best hampered his ability to do good, while enabling him to rationalize betraying black voters and breaking his promises of peace. Politicians need not observe the “popularist” creed that every action should be poll-tested. But neither can elected officials consider themselves as parents placating a fickle electorate. Politicians who do either do not share the goals of the public or do not possess the commitment to pursue them.

Wilson’s era offers better examples for the present. Let’s return to Walsh. He was no Debs. While many Socialists were in prison for opposing the war, Walsh was in the halls of government trying to optimize the economy for it. And yet when democracy and capitalism butted heads in the factory, Walsh stood for the former. His achievements in wartime changed workers’ lives. His proposals before it would have changed millions’ more if they had been heeded. And his career after the war was a fight for labor, including for the radicals whom Wilson instead tried to silence. His solidarity extended beyond national borders as well: Walsh supported liberation from India to Ireland. What Wilson is praised for Walsh actually worked toward, and in some cases, actually achieved.

Regrettably, Debs probably wouldn’t win an election today any more than he did over a century ago, but America has plenty of possible Walshs, too. When we seek both useful historical exemplars and useful present-day allies, we must look for those who will choose more change, not less, when reform requires a new world. Today’s progressive coalition has enormous differences, but many among it also share meaningful values. There are liberals, like leftists, to whom a better world is a commitment to be compromised for, rather than merely compromised. It’s true that there aren’t enough of either of these kind of people in Washington. But we can put them there.

If the Walshs of the world aren’t enough, we also can rely occasionally on the Tafts of this country — people who, in the right situation, will temporarily align with us despite profound ideological differences. If we on the Left must compromise to stop Donald Trump today and his successors tomorrow, others have to as well. Noted neoconservative Bill Kristol of all people recently tweeted that he’d accept social democracy “if capitalists side with authoritarians.”

I would not trust Kristol in particular as far as I could throw him, and what he presents as an “if” condition has already been met: beyond the long history of capitalist authoritarianism, consider the recent warm reception of Javier Milei, Argentina’s would-be organ dealer neoliberal president, at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Still, it means something that Kristol would even hypothetically choose compromise with the Left over compromises against democracy, and there are ordinary American voters who can be convinced of the same. The Left is already trying. Liberals need to join us. No amount of clever strategizing or optimistic rhetoric here on the Left will matter much if they refuse.

The resulting coalition must go beyond playing defense. At home, a Democratic president once again faces a public disillusioned in part by his own inaction and failure. Frustration with economic inequality, fury at the genocide in Gaza and outrage at immigration policy extend far beyond socialists. Even those who don’t much care about any of these matters are affected by a descending gloom, the malaise of a political culture in which nothing feels possible and everything is a horse race. Trump supporters revel in it, many of the rest of us rage against it, and still others resign themselves to it.

Practically, the crises of the moment demand bold action. Politically, the despair inaction breeds will only demobilize progressives and arm the Right, at home and abroad. We need a president who is willing to cut off aid to Israel, turn off the HVAC system in the Supreme Court building until American women can get abortions again, or do anything about housing shortages — to name only a few of the challenges the nation’s chief executive must address.

Abroad, America once again faces a war in Europe where its response to reactionary aggression is undermined by the inconsistency (to put it generously) of its democratic principles and “rules-based” international order — including a brutal and illegal occupation. If America calls for allies to get behind it and rally against a future invasion like Ukraine — Taiwan perhaps — or aid in some other global crisis, there is a sizable risk that its president will look over his shoulder and find neither the American people nor the global community behind them. As Wilson himself put it in 1918, we must “see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.”

Perhaps the Biden administration can survive this without taking meaningful action. But undead liberalism won’t be able to shamble on much longer if it does. There are deep structural problems within and beyond the United States. Establishment Democrats face a Red Queen’s race where merely staying in the same place means starting forward, leftward, at a full sprint, and doing it now. Leftists would contend that a return to the eternal 1990s is undesirable, but liberals who disagree at least have to recognize that such a return is also impossible. Are they willing to work with us and change the world, or will they lose what they value in the status quo by trying to preserve it forever? America’s unsteady progressive coalition — and depending on how competent a possible Trump administration is, American democracy itself — will live or die by their answer. Pray they choose better than Wilson did.