Statecraft and Salvation: Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism as Secularized Eschatology

6. “To Release Mankind from theIntolerable Things of the Past”: Wilson’s Wartime Statecraft as a Mission to Redeem the World

175 CHAPTER SIX “to releaSe mankind from the intolerable thingS of the PaSt” Wilson’s Wartime Statecraft as a Mission to Redeem the World Although traditionally the secularization thesis about the biblical presuppositions of modern historical consciousness has been applied almost exclusively to totalitarian and irreligious ideologies, it is no less pertinent to liberal and religious narratives of progress. Wilson’s domestic political ideas and practice offer an excellent illustration: his vision of national progress flowed from his deep religious convictions as their secularized expression. This was no idiosyncrasy in the broader historical context of American liberal thought, whose strong eschatological inspiration had molded it in crucial ways from the Puritan origins down to the nineteenth century. Wilson’s foreign policy was undergirded by the same impulses. The influence of his patriotic Protestant salvationism on his statecraft was pervasive and manifested itself vividly on many different occasions, even though it remains possible to this day to come across scholarship paying practically no attention to it—generating the impression that salvationist religion had no place in his diplomacy.1 Such an impression not only is 1 An illustrative example is G. John Ikenberry et al., The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). 176 STATECRAFT AND SALVATION inaccurate in the sense that it precludes recognizing the narrow, culturally specific character of Wilsonian liberalism internationalism, but also produces a variety of additional problems. For example, it makes it more difficult to notice Wilson’s lingering presence in the background of other, more recent doctrines of American statecraft laden with eschatological presuppositions.2 Fortunately, owing especially to the recent cultural turn in American diplomatic history, the eschatological moorings of Wilson’s statecraft are no longer any secret, even if debates concerning their significance persist .3 The ensuing discussion contributes to this literature in at least two different ways: it offers new evidence of these moorings, such as by illuminating Wilson’s neglected relationship with the American Protestant theologian and millennialist preacher George Davis Herron (1862–1925), and above all it places them in the novel context of secularization theory, heretofore unconnected to Wilson. Insofar as the following pages show that the president’s IR utopianism, identified by E. H. Carr in the late 1930s, was simultaneously utopian in the sense of secularized biblical eschatology, theorized by Karl Löwith and other intellectual historians around the same time, they represent the culminating part of this study. As the mapping of Wilson’s crusade to spread the American liberalrepublican Millennium worldwide is about to begin, it is worth stressing that neither a detailed nor a comprehensive account of his statecraft is the point here. Rather, the objective is to give compelling evidence of the religious foundations underlying that part of his foreign policy that later became the target of Carr’s scathing critique and cries of 2 See Milan Babík, review of The Crisis of American Foreign Policy, by Ikenberry et al., Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 2 (2009): 470–73, which makes this point with reference to the neoconservative Bush Doctrine and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 3 Among Wilson scholars, representatives of the cultural turn include Malcolm Magee and Frank Ninkovich, although the religious underpinnings of Wilson’s politics have been recognized by other historians and biographers also—from Ray Stannard Baker via Arthur S. Link to Lloyd E. Ambrosius. As for the actual impact of Wilson’s religious faith on his diplomacy, whereas Baker held that “Religion was never incidental with [Wilson]; it was central,” New Left historians such as N. Gordon Levin have tended to downplay its importance and narrate it as mostly a rhetorical cover for what was really a bid for global economic hegemony. This is in keeping with the traditional Marxist view of religion as merely an epiphenomenal expression of weightier, more fundamental forces. See respectively Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1927–1939), 1:68, and Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). “TO RELEASE MANKIND FROM THE PAST” 177 “utopianism” in The Twenty Years’Crisis. Therefore, the ensuing discussion largely ignores Wilson’s early initiatives such as the Mexican intervention (1914).4 Instead, it is skewed toward his diplomacy during and after World War I. Moreover, his international ideas and actions come into focus only insofar as they reveal the...