The Legacy of Wilsonian Idealism

Want to explore even more history Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world from the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland There is plenty to discover With your subscription, you'll unlock hundredundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exxploring everything from the ancient world to World War II Just visit historyhit d. com slash subscribe bring the past alive Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. 'Twas a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it Tonight, we feast An offer you can feast on. seell your car today on Carvana Pick up these maily We all belong outside We're drawn to nature calluse to us whether it's the recorded sounds of the ocean we doze off to or the succents that adorn our homes Nature makes all of our lives richer, calmer. And frankly Better. Despite all this, we often go about our busy lives removed from it. But the outdoors is closer than we realize. With all trails, you can discover trails nearby or trails worth traveling to and explore confidently with offline maps and on trail navigation. Whether you're looking for a laid back walk with family For something more adventurous to get your heart pumping. All Trails gives you the tools you need to get out there and find your outside. Download the free app today and make the most of your summer with all trails Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. Running a business means you're always reachable until you're not. and the moment you miss that call, a competitor picks it up That's why this episode is brought to you by Quo, spepelled QUO. the business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. Anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G two trrusted by over ninety thousand businesses. Set up in minutes on any device. Keep your existing number, addd teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle o's built in AI agent even handles after hours calls and books appointments. So you're covered around the clock Money is on the line. Always say hello with Qo. Try CQuo free plus twenty percent off your first six months at cQuo. com slash tech Quo d. com slash text It's nineteen oh one and we're at Faniel Hall in Boston. Back in the Halcyon days of the American Revolution This was home based to radicals like Sam Adams and John Hancock here In seventeen seventy three, the first ever meeting over Boston's tea crisis was held before the rabble, steeped patriotic fervor, famously boiled over and dunked that tea in the harbor But today It's a brand new age Dawn of the twentieth century And Americans are confronting a new crisis filled with irony Two years earlier, in eighteen ninety nine The Treaty of Paris had ended the Spanish American War and granted to the United States what it never planned to possess far flung territories in the Pacific and beyond colonies a Perto Ric the Philippines. A nation that had once struggled so mightily to shed its own colonial skin now molted into an imperial power For the crowd crammed into this historic hall This is a gross betrayal of the principles upon which American blood had been shed from the rosteral The speaker thunders The political philosophy that Jefferson embodied in the Declaration of Independence Is it true Is it still an ideal for twentieth century America freer and more prosperous than in the days of her youth War hasas plutocracy bred tyrants And we must give up our ancient faith how that question is answered will redefine America's place in this new century. and in the process profoundly alter the course of global history I'm Don We Wildban, this is American History Hip. Our guest today is Christopher McKnight Nichols, prorofessor of history and Wayne Woodrow Hayes chair in National security Studies at the Ohio University leas to say this, this is Chris's fourth appearance on the podcast. Check out previous episodes on the Spanish American War, President Eisenhower, and the Monroe doctrine Chris, nice to see you back. Happy two hundred fifty Happy two hundred fifty to you, Daon, and nice to be back. Let's first go back to the early Republic. What did Early presidents think of America's relationship with the rest of the world, What it should be like. Was everyone in lock step with George Washington and his negative feelings of entangled alliances So long story short, they had just as much disagreement as we do today in many ways. So going back to this perfect question for the two hundred fiftieth From the origins of the US Republic, figures like John Adams, Ben Franklin, and others wanted to have a kind of model vision, a so called model treaty in seventeen seventy five and seventeen seventy six for how the US should interact with other countries What they began to chart was a vision of something like cautious, realistic engagement through commerce and a real set of profound worries about entangling alliances But what shape those should take? what shape the sorts of security alliances or other kinds of treaties and relations to other nations should take was totally up in the air And so you see over the first couple decades of the early Republic, an unfolding relationship towards especially the major powers of Europe First antagonism with the British, of course, but then the alliance with France to win the war. And then a set of questions about how neutral the nation should be in the seventeen nineties, thinking about the Napoleonic warar and if maybe the U.S. should have more of a rarochement with the British or stick with the French who had helped And then there's all sorts of other secondary questions about Catholicism and poperry and the relationship of the US as a sort of Protestant nation state to other nation states, including the Barbarary Coast pirates, which you've also had a great podcast on. So in thinking this through, you can begin to see that there's a real disagreement. It starts with commerce, but the question of what that relationship to other states should be is up in the air. One more thing to think about is threats. What were the main threats to the Republic in that period? And you had to think internally as well as externally. And internal would have been both the possibility of slave revolt. Eslaved people were an enormous and restive population within the colonies. And then of course, indigenous nations, which still had a whole lot of power in the seventeen seventies and seventeen eighties And so that played an important role they did in the waging and winning of the Revolutionary War, but also in thinking about what the peace should look like I mean, Thomas Jefferson sees the USA as an empire of liberty where yeoman farmers can vote and true freedom and all that sort of thing. But entangling alliances it's not as simple as isolationism, right? No, it's not. I mean, isolationism also isn't simple. That The way that we tend to think of it today is sort of as a caricature The question is about the degree and type of U.S engagement with the world, and that's where the no entangling alliances and neutrality come in But for someone like, Jefferson, he wanted trade with the world. It's a sort of specious view or set of assumptions and caricatures about him that he didn't want the US to trade. Rather, he didn't want the US to be predominantly a sort of capital intensive industrial economy. He saw that the potential of those Yeoman farmers was as individual sort of Democrats in the nation state owning a stake in the country because they own some property. they own farms that were productive And this actually gets to the next level question here who's productive in the American society and who isn't? And for them thinking about foreign relations, for the founders and framers, a huge challenge and something foreign to ourers today is the problem of a standing army. the ways that it would be paid for. And so the worry for founders and this is pretty uniform is that a large standing army would create a large group beholden to the government and not productive like the Yeoman farmers. And therefore, this would be a huge problem moving forward. And you see this rise in the debates later in the nineteenth century as the US begins to rise to commercial and military power and seems to require more military force to project power, protect trade, that sort of thing. Yeah and to hold the gold. You have to have a very safe government and a very safe nation to have that much gold inside of it. The bottom line is stay out of European endless conflicts and corruptions, which sounds very familiar to us today The simple fact is our own continental geography and the inherent challenges that this made, you, but this was our own contiguous empire, you know, of states, not nations. It's really important to keep that in mind even for those early folks Yes. So the Jeffersonian sort of emmpire of Liberty was one extending across the continent. off course, that had an internal and external dimension. The Louisiana purchase of eighteen oh three on his watch was one of the biggest, you know, moves towards land acquisition in U. S. history. It both foreclosed certain kinds of threats gaining that land from France, but it also opened up new sorts of threats as the US makes claims now all the way to the Pacific. that Russia is making claims. The British want pieces of British Canada to be involved there So you're exactly right in that empire of Lberty expanding, then the question becomes as the nineteenth century moves on in the sort of old parlance of Frederick Jackson Turner, when westward expansion ends, what next where does the US go? And that noncontiguous dimension is the piece of the debate that the sort of founders and framers never quite got to. They didn't really have a set of views that were well formed that we can excavate on whether or not the US should expand to the Pacific or very far down south as opposed to having quote, sister republics in central and South America. And how could they ever predict, of course, that communication would become what it is and the world would become so small and all the rest of that that happens in the nineteenth into the twentieth century The question becomes how does a country built on avoiding foreign problems somehow emerge as a global empire The very thing Washington had warned about in his Farewell address. Well, it was a splendid little war, the Spanish American War of eighteen ninety eight, when America becomes by some definitions an empire. The Spanish American War oddly, has its roots in isolationism, doesn't it? the Monroe doctrine? For sure. Yes. So the increasing articulation of a US dominant position in the hemisphere that was simultaneous to rising capability to project power in the eighteen nineties meant that the US actually got into this war in eighteen ninety eight and before that was quite bellicose in terms of Chile and some affronts to American seemen in the seventeen eighties and seventeen nineties, you saw a boundary crisis with Venezuela where the US was projecting the Monroe doctrine into Venezuela's boundaries, very eerily like our present moment in some ways, saying the US gets to help decide what goes on within repepublics borders within the hemisphere And then in eighteen ninety eight, the US, you know there's a whole lot of reasons why the US. gets involved in the Spanish American War. But one is for humanitarian reasons in Cuba, that the Spanish were treating people so poorly there Others were because of longstanding commercial ties to places like Hawaii, where there wasn't a war of course, but thinking about annexing that territory and the Philippines, which is an area in which the US could then have at least a harbor in Manila and more access towards China. Meanwhile Europe is spreading out all over the place. You've got the eighteen hundreds is the age of colonialism. and everywhere there is imperialistic power being expressed And we're watching this from afar I'm wondering about jealousy that was happening then. Are we part of that game? For sure. And so if you read the periodicals of the late nineteenth century, you find that the North American Review and in the nation and in a host of other kinds of papers in commercial and trade papers of American manufacturers, you find a jealousy, a set of worries about the US being left behind in the scramble for Africa, that the US as a rising power should be right there with Germany and acquiring territories and producing steel in high amounts and having a Navy that was at least a peer of many of the European powers So it could project its power throughout the hemisphere and perhaps beyond There's a real also sort of insecurity crisis of the period. Is the US culturally, commercially, militarily producing enough? Can it continue this rise, right? We tend to think back and project back that it's an era of sort of unalloyied optimism about moving forward. But of course, this is also the era of cyclic downturns and depressions, seventeen seventy three, seventeen ninety three, there's significant labor unrest, The question of what capitalism and democracy will look like are really live questions then And so Americans are looking to the other empires and they're saying Hey, we could be like you What would that look like? Should we do that, you know, or should we eschew that entirely? Should Americans think back to their colonial origins, think back to the Declaration and the Constitution and say, no, this is not for us. We are a republic. We are not an empire. And that's literally the question that American anti imperialists start to ask sort of profound angst about what the Republic might become if it acquires colonies. Yeah. I mean, there's so many new pressures. You have the industrialization of the world and all the minerals that are needed for that and all the supplies that are required that are beyond your shores. I mean, what we find so much that's discussed even today in Africa and so forth and how are we going to get those in those days and the idea of a colony was really the good idea But all of this was a rupture from what had previously been the definition of America. And that's important also to keep in mind because we've so far wandered from this in our times that this was really precious, this idea that this was based on the fact that we had been a colony and we're not going to be making other people colonies of ours. This was central to our idea of democracy, wasn't it It was. You know, it's like we've talked about this before. It's the aspirational dimensions of the Revolution, the Delaration are so present in this rupture moment in the late nineteenth and early twentih century. At the same time, we can't ignore the fact that there's blinders within that, right? And so the US expansionross across the continent, of course, involved pushing out indndigenous people, involved military policy, literally involved territories and territory making So a kind of colonial project But what was so different was going abroad and fighting a European power to do so. So if all the other elements seem somewhat present in westward expansion and manifest destiny, the rupture piece is this piece that, okay, now the US will acquire colonies across the Pacific down near the hopeful Imian Canal, Panama Canal, to project power in a whole new sort of way That's the change, right? So even if you want to argue for some continuity, this change is really massive, and it is very much with us today as a set of assumptions. There's almost no coming back, no matter what retrenchment any sort of arch right or left wing person in US politics thinks of in the near past. Yeah, this is the precedent. It really is. Chris and I had a big conversation about the Spanish and American warar, Let's skip to the end of that war and say when we sign what's called the Treaty of Terrace. And the Senate ratifies it on february sixth eighteen ninety nine. The U.S begins to look a lot like an overseas empire. or does it? I mean, there's not that many colleagues. I mean, Puerto Rico and the Philippines are definitely there as well as Guam, which always confuses me. The Filipinos immediately revolt against American rule, february eighteen ninety nine. The U.S. has to suppress them in a bloody, ruthless guerrilla war. I mean, this is old fashioned colonial behavior. Yes, it is exactly that. And so the US begins to haltingly set up a sort of in set of insular policies. Is this apartment Is this a department of the interterior policy? Is this a state deepartment foreign policy? They're trying to figure out in real time because there hadn't been a plan for this. colonies outside of the sort of contiguous states would look like Or even if you include the purchase of Alaska in eighteen sixty seven, what it would look like outside of just the broadly of the continent And it's halting and it moves all the way up til nineteen seventeen and this thing called the Jones Act to think about what citizenship the citizenship process should look like for those. There's a series of famous constitutional law cases, the insular cases. And I don't mean to get about these questions of how should citizens relate when they're outside of the formal territory process in the U. S to the nation state. But I don't want to get into too many of those details. The key and what you're hitting on here is that the US now does have colonies, bottom line and has an empire of some sort And in having an empire, the question in that moment, really starting in the midst of the war was what shape should it be? And how did an empire and its organization accord with sort of declaration and constitutional er of values about the nation's place in the world and its relationship to its own citizens But there's going to be big pushback. The problem is now we're an empire of a certain scale and a storm is brewing at home And we'll talk all about that after the break This episode is brought to you by Best Western Hotels and Resorts. Summer is upon us. And you know what that means Vacation. Whether you've been planning it for months or you're ready to pack a bag and go on a whim, Having a place you can rely on makes every trip feel that much easier. That's where Best Western comes in. From scenic road trips to spontaneous adventures abroad You'll find welcoming stays wherever you land, so you can focus on making memories, not managing the details This summer get one thousand bonus points and a chance to win two hundred fifty thousand bonus points So wherever you're headed, make the stay part of the trip. and make it count with this limited time offer Life's a trip Make the most of it at Bwestern. com No additional purchase necessary for sweeps. See bonus points, terms and conditions, and swweeps rules for details and visit bestwestern. com for complete terms and conditions Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun An army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. 'twas a lovely SUV, an inexplicably queenly offer. They're even coming to the castle to collect it Tonight, we feast. An offer you can feast on, sell your car today on Carbana Pick up these Mifi Iroducing the tootal Solutions advantage only from Comcast Business. It's the largest fastest fiber powered network for small business, gig speeds with equipment and security included, and a five year price lock. No one does business like comcast business Switch today. Get started for sixty dollars a month for twelve months when you add an advanced solution to a qualifying interternet package. Limited time offer. restestrictions apply. New customers only requires three hundred megabs per second internet, security edge and additional qualifying service one year agreement, perless billing and autoay bank account required. Tax and fees extra Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. Running a business means you're always reachable until you're not. and the moment you miss that call, a competitor picks it up That's why this episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled QUO. the business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. Anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G two. trusted by over ninety thousand businesses. Set up in minutes on any device. Keep your existing number, addd teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. o's built in AI agent even handles after hours calls and books appointments. So you're covered around the clock Money is on the line Always say hello with quote Try cuo free plus twenty percent off your first six months at cuo d. com slash tech. That's Quo. com slash tech Professor Chris Nichols of Ohio State University, Chris, there is a serious backlash within America to the new idea of the United States maintaining colonized territories abroad. It's called the anti imperialist Lague Where did this group come from? Did it just sprout right up after the Spanish American War? Well the longer organizational structure and core ideas come from abolitionist Republicans out of the Civil War O guard abolitionist Republicans who are sometimes then referred to as mugwumps, a kind of iconoc cllastic group of Republicans, for whom principal often was more important than some of the potential benefits for the state. They continue to hold on. So this group is the central force, mostly located in New England And then there's a real heterogeneous set of others involved. It's arguably the largest and most heterogeneous foreign policy lobby group in US political history It's a really inspiring and fascinating kind of group. It ranges from Mark Twain to Andrew Carnegie to in a small role, Jane Adams, racial Reformer W.V. Duvois, amazing American philosopher, William James, one of the founders of the Republican Party, George Boutwell. Senators, Cgressmen forormer presidents like Grover Cleveland. I mean it's really something. It starts in Boston in summer eighteen ninety eight It's formally incorporated in the fall right before the Paris peace process ending the war of eighteen ninety eight really takes off in some ways from late eighteen ninety eight through eighteen ninety nine into the election of nineteen hundred, gaining offices major offices in significant cities New York Boston, Chicago, all the way west to Portland, Oregon and San Francisco. I don't want to overblow how massive the group was, but it had lots of elites who were writing and speaking regularly in major cities across the US and therefore garnered lots of public coverage Yeah, what were they framing this idea as? I mean, we just won a war that we were very proud of. I mean, this is a big deal. And suddenly these guys just sound like they're throwing a wet blanket on the whole thing. They absolutely were. Full wet blanket. Yeah for very different reasons. So historians have emphasized lots of different pieces of their reasoning and there's many coalition political groups. There's no simple way to put it The first set of animating principles was the U.S. should not rule alien peoples against their will If the US is going to have colonies like the territory making process in the U.S. they should have a say in it and they should be part of it from the start So the acquisition, the purchase of the Philippines is a bridge too far Cubans also, though many American imperialists like Henry Cabbot Lodge,illi Mcinley Teddy Roosevelt wanted Cuba, Cubans actually continue to voice concern about becoming a colony. and that's partly why it becomes a protectorate The second level challenge that they see is that the U.S. should focus at home. They disagree on what the U. S. should focus on. but they argue in classic sort of progressive era ideas that there's a lot to reform, a lot to change in American society, live up to those declaration and constitutional founding values. And it would take the eye off the ball, so to speak, to have colonies abroad Another set of ways that they debate this is the question of whether or not colonies are actually profitable So in the British sense, that India is very profitable. Most other colonies and colonial systems that American elites were aware of were more for extractive kinds of neocolonial processes. like you mentioned, rare earths and that sort of thing, which is common to us to thinking today. But they actually arere quite costly to administer. You have to have armies, you have to have diplomats, you have to have naval structures, commerce, etcet, probably tax breaks, all that kind of stuff. So there's a big worry, especially from industrialists and business leaders that this will be very costly and that's Andrew Carnegie's main critiqu Then there's one more that we have to get on the table. There's a real debate amongst anti imperialists and imperialists about race and capacity to self govern This will not be surprising to anyone listening to this podcast. S Thinking about the U.S. gaining territories think that the U.S can be a tutor quoteittle Brown brothers in places like Hawaii in the Philippines, so that they can eventually acquire an ability to self govern. Others argue that they will never have that capacity that peoples in the racial hierarchy lower than Anglo Saxons aren't capable of it. And therefore, The US either should or shouldn't rule those places. There's a real debate there. Should rule it because of Rudyard Kipling ask white M's burden or shouldn't rule it because they never have that capacity and it's a fool's errand to even try to administer those kinds of places. The Philippines is the archetype of this. seven thousand islands, tons of different languages,? How could the US do that effectively to help help those people rule themselves. So these are some of the critical dimensions here, and as I mentioned before, the question of militarism, standing armies and those costs is another piece of this. Is that un American On the pro side of this, the McKinley side, I guess, I always assumed that this was about expanding markets The age of sale had developed such a degree that that was sophistication. Now you have rail delivering stuff. like we were already at basically what we have today, which is using the Pacific as a highway system, you know towards Asia. I assume that that was, you know front and center. And you're not wrong. The major arguments of the so called large policy advocates like McKinley and Roosevelt were gain market access in places like China They're also thinking about and negotiating treaties in Korea, Japan. and then market access throughout the hemisphere, Cuba as a sugar producer, but also now getting that out of Spanish hands would allow the US to import and export more of that and have a larger role in Cuba in Central and South America. Part of that too, in terms of trade was building a canal, and it's being canal that the US would control, not the British or abbrogating a treaty You know, we really can't discount a couple other elements here. McKinley famously says that now that the US has acquired the Philippines, the US has a moral obligation to uplift and Christianize them, kind of very much conveniently omitting or outright rejecting the Catholicism of many of the inhabitants there. And then also this question of the humanitarian dimensions of the US's role in the hemisphere. I think while we can look at it with skeptical eyes, there is a real set of arguments and a real pathos that comes out of how the Cubans were being treated by the Spanish after they rebelled for the sixth time, I think, in the nineteenth century, starting in eighteen ninety five, and given that Americans are sympathetic to trying to help them. And you could see in the political cartoons of the era, a kind of feminized Cuban image needeing Uncle Sam to come help them, lift them up, build homes, you know, provide food, provide education. And so these are all all intermingled. What they aren't is democratic or mixed with a kind of declaration, all people created equal kind of self government piece. Did it get out on the streets? I mean, were there protests? So it didn't get out on the streets, and that's an interesting piece of this. Many of the speakers here really are speaking only to other elites trying to shape the contours of American Empire, if not outright reject them. However, it does get on the streets in the sense that William Jenx Brian, the famous populist fuses with the Democratic partarty is very much anti imperialist in eighteen ninety six and then especially in the nineteen hundred election. And in that election, anti imperialism features prominently as a core foreign policy principle There's another way that this gets out on the streets and it's through the troops. And it's fascinating thing I we I think we talked about it a little bit when we did a podcast on the Spanish American War, the war in the Philippines and the counter inssurgency is very brutal And it's highly racialized And though sort of systemic American atrocities are overstated by some, what does happen is the racialized component has a backlash against Black American soldiers And you have bllack American soldiers writing back to the American presses, especially the Black press, saying, you're treating Filipinos like you treat us in segregated units or using the N word. some pretty harsh stuff. And the Filipino revolutionaries actually convert a few mutineer American Back soldiers to their cause and publicize that significantly. So that's another piece of the puzzle here. And it's no coincidence, of course, that much of this energy and some of these issues find their way into the progressive era discussions, right? I mean, this is a big gasoline on that fire For sure, for sure. And one of the things I' like to emphasize here in my thinking is that William James argues that the forces of patriotism were so like burning white hot to paraphrase him that it was like blowing cold air on the hot fire atriotis And he argued that some of these ideas like manifest destiny and even sort of imperialist expansionism are these empty vessels. They're really attractive to people. They're good rhetoric from presidents. But in fact, when you look within them, you don't find anything there. And that's precisely what people likeill William James and Mark Twain were skewering when they were writing essays ain, I highly recommend to folks listening his essay. to the person sitting in darkness, which is really about this deep dark satire about how American mission and American empire go hand in hand. undercut the autonomy of Filipinos in really fundamentally un American ways. Wow. He would have come back from his his worldwide trip I bet at that point, right? He would have probably visited these places. He had indeed. He'd visited a whole lot and he just really started, Twain had really started writing about the problems of British emmpire in this period, the governing of Rhodesia, for instance. So he's primed in eighteen ninety seven and then eighteen ninety eight when the American War happens. And he comes over, he actually stays in the same house in New York that Teddy Roosevelt had and hosts all these salons And famouslyeen the end of eighteen ninety eight, eighteen ninety nine, nineteen hundred, he's holding these salons and at the end of them after he sort of captured the essence of the people who came with his amazing sparkling wit. He's to have a diatribe about anti imperialism. He would cap the evening with his core politics. We've talked a lot about Cuban. I don't want to go off too much on it, but this is why such things are weird with Puerto Rico these days We so take it for granted because of basically the migration that happened and so many Puerto Ricans coming to the United States as a result of annexation but it was never a settled issue. where that island country sat in in the United States, just like Cuba, but a different story unfolded from there. This is a huge story in eighteen ninety eight ninety nine. What happens to the anti Iperialist League? Yeah, so it's a mixed bag story. My argument would be When the war in the Philippines largely reaches its conclusion in nineteen oh two, there's less of the front page news, the sensational news to keep the anti imperialists really rolling. that many of these individuals we've talked about continue their advocacy. They write these searing kinds of essays, but they get less traction. But the other piece of that is that's really essential to keep in mind is after eighteen ninety nine, the US never annexes territories again persuasiveness of their arguments, particularly their arguments harkening back to Washington and Jefferson is one that resounds through the next several decades. It keeps in mind no entangling alliances. It gets us back to perhaps the U.S. should have a role in the world, but a less militarized one a less expansionist one, a more commercially and culturally engaged role. That makes more sense. And so I'd argue that the anti imperialists in some ways fail in their own terms, the election of nineteen hundred goes quickly to McKinley. on the longer term horizon, they've kind of won the logical debates. ruling people against their will is un American, right? Who's going to say it's not But then you have to reshape that relationship to the world in some way So if if they can't have formal colonies, they have to have something else Enter Woodrow Wilson. We'll talk about him after the break Introducing the total Solutions advantage only from Comcast Business. It's the largest fastest fiber powered network for small business, gig speeds with equipment and security included and a five year price lock. No one does business like Ccast business. Switch today. Get started for sixty dollars a month for twelve months when you add an advanced solution to a qualifying interternet package. Limited time offer. restestrictions apply. newew customers only, requires three hundred megab per second internet, security edge and additional qualifying service onene year agreement, papless billing and autoay bank account required. Tax and fees extra Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. Running a business means you're always reachable until you're not. and the moment you miss that call, a competitor picks it up That's why this episode is brought to you by Quo, spepelled QUO Business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. Anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G two, trusted by over ninety thousand businesses. Set up in minutes on any device. Keep your existing number, add teammates as you grow No IT, no hassle o's built in AI agent even handles after hours calls and books appointments. So you're covered around the clock Money is on the line. Always say hello with quQoto. Try cuo free, plus twenty percent off your first six months at cuo d. com slash tech. That's Quo d. com slash tech When World War one breaks out, the United States and its President Woodrow Wilson is faced with a huge question. What should they do here? How do we react to this kind of global conflict It's probably the most profound question in U. S. foreign policy history since the more of eighteen twelve It's enormously significant How should the US be oriented to European powers at war What should the US's roule be? And now the U.S has commercial and cultural power. the US has significant military power. The US could be a big player in this conflict. So what role should it be? Like the anti imperialists, like those a century before They go back to Washington and Jefferson and they argue the U.S.' essential role in European power conflicts is neutrality Mhm We're going to maintain neutrality like we were always meant to do, like George Washington told us It's quite popular, especially when we understand the horrors of the trenches Americans are very much put off by the whole project. a total mess the Europeans created. Why should we be a part of that? Sidebar, interestingly, Woodow Wilson's first secretary of state is William Jennies Bryan presidential candidate from the anti imperialist Lague. Exactly. Yeah. and Brian's arguments as seecretary of state and one of the reasons he actually resigns as Scretary of state is the U.S. needs to be an authentic, legitimate and one hundred percent neutral power How can that happen in an interconnected world where the US is a major financier of the war effort and a potential trading partner of all the belligerents? Yeah, exactly. The world has completely fundamentally changed in twenty years or whatever. It can't really be neutral anymore. It's too far and too large and entangled. It's a huge commercial power now in the world Wilson joins the war, finally with the idealistic vision of America as a peacemaker a global mediator. He sets out his vision in what is called the fourteen Point plan Can you take us through the fourteen points? For sure. First thing to know, it originates in the middle of nineteen sixteen. So before the U.S is even in the war. You can find in Wilson's writing that he's thinking about a League of Nations. He's thinking that if the U.S. helps mediate the European conflict, the U.S. can be part of the solution and a guarantor of peace moving forward. He then later, in nineteen seventeen, talks about peace without victory. This is what he hopes the Allies will pursue as opposed to something vindictive january nineteen eighteen, he issues the fourteen points in part because it looks like the other Allies are going to pursue that kind of indictive peace. and he's hoping to foreclose that And so the first of these, it's a list of five general claims to start it out They're popular among liberals in this era. There're things like open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, freer and fairer trade conditions, reduction of national armaments, adjustment of colonial claims. Th thenen there's something like eight points, which I won't go in through entirely, which are critical components of the fighting of the war itself and how they could be resolved, areas that have been taken and where they should be sent back to. But the final point, the most important point, and the point we're leading up to here in terms of his idealism and a new shape for the U.S's role in the world. is the fourteenth, the League of Nations It's the prism of the League of Nations through which he views all of the other ones. It's why he's willing to compromise in the Paris peace that follows World War One on so much, becausecause he believes that if the US joins the League through the Lague, the US can help to shape and reorient a peace so that the other kinds of claims and questions will come into being that there can be free trade, that there can be disarmament. becomes its own conversation we will now have about the League of Nations and the evolution of that idea but I don't want to let go the anti imperialist L so much of what he is Creating this list for is the pressure that came from that resistance, isn't it He could not be that president if it hadn't been for all those elites he was probably listening to back in the day, saying, we're not this kind of country. Yes, exactly right. Yeah. he comes out of a kind of anti imperialist tradition, even though he was reluctantly actually in favor of the war with Spain, or somewhat reluctantly, ambivalently in favor of it Because his view was that the internnessing rivalries between European imperial powers are why the world gets into World War one. And so for him, this argument about colonies, although one of the big challenges of the fourteen pointoints and the US's role in moving forward with the peace process is that he's quite vague about it. For him, anti colonialism and self determination are crucial The issue is Who gets self determination And he never spells that out quite as clearly as he might want or as those listening to him might want But the arguments here about peace through an international organization are vital. And I would add also this gets to an element of those anti imperialist debates that we didn't engage, which is about democracy promotion For Wilson, the League of Nations is really something, he would call it an association somethingomething akin to democracy. All these member nations would have greater or lesser powers would all have pretty similar powers within the league structure therefore, you'd have a more democratic process moving forward and they would sanction any nation state that used force coerce peopleoples in and groups to do things that they wanted to colonize, to start wars, etcera This is also why his opponents argue that that's fundamentally un American, that this kind of entangling alliance would lead the US possibly to more wars and not fewer ones. Yeah, and you'll find this all echoing through the NATO Alliance and all all kinds of military agreements that come out of World War I later on. Wilson delivers his plan to the Senate january nineteen eighteen. One of the most important speeches he ever made as a president or any president, really, he states the U. S. should stop territorial expansionism problems of World War O are created by empires trying to hold themselves to these these colized things. it's an unnatural practice to do that And it's the idea of self determination, which becomes his vision and foreign policy This is so twentieth century. This is everything we're hearing about when I was a kid, you know, the big vision of America promoting democracy around the world, which we don't hear so much about these days, which is interesting This is articulated by Wilson Democracy is the solution. The Grand finale, which you talked about, which is point fourteen, the creation of the League of Nations, a world organization to collectively guarantee every country's independence. prettyret ambitious, isn't it? Right out of the gate where people are skeptical of this? You know, what's fascinating is that European audiences are really excited by it. By the time he gets the Paris peace, now this is jumping slightly ahead, but you know the Germans have sued for peace on the terms of the fourteen points, not on the terms offered by the French or the British. And he's greeted in Paris by millions of people, the largest, arguably the largest foreign reception of any U S president ever in US history C certainly per capita, you'd have to assume it was So it's widely popular and wildly popular globally. Within the US, it doesn't have as much traction. There's not as much worry about the fourteen points until the resolution of the conflict. The US famously had a really hard time mobilizing for the war. And so don't you're not really seeing significant amounts of American troops fighting until the end of nineteen seventeen and early nineteen eighteen around when the speech comes out. So it takes a while for the US to really engaged and that's much more in the front of mind for the American population. But what is important to think about in this by the end of nineteen eighteen into nineteen nineteen, Wilson also is only bringing his sort of closer confidants to Paris. What he doesn't do is bring sort of a team of rivals group. and this is what diplomatic historians and people at the time recognizeed as a real problem. He doesn't bring someone like Henry Cabbot Ludge back to eighteen ninety eight who's an opponent, a Republican opponent you know who had been this expansionist and who is really worried about what a League of Nations might do to infringe on congressional or presidential or US power He's only looking into his own mirror with his people, isn't he? That's the difference of a Lincoln versus a Wilson. or an FDR for that matter The US Senate rejects the plan mostly because the League of Nations has this entanglements written all over it. I mean, they're looking at this very simply. There's probably electoral politics involved in this at that time, I imagine. It just couldn't have been very popular to say after World War, we've done all this stuff for World War onene, Oh, and we're going to now manage the world through this great plan. The League of Nations would be abandoned at that time and the Treator of Versailles later on would become the only tool for settling the peace which eventually opens the door to all kinds of problems down the road, which is the rise of fascism Hitler and the Nazi partarty and all the rest of this. Chris, it would take World War two to reartticulate this idea, wouldn't it? The United Nations is an outgrowth, obviously of the League of Nations, but confronting whole other challenges. It would. Yes. arguably with the US not joining the League of Nations, though it is stood up, has lots of operating committees. It works quite well through the interwar years in its own way. It does not have the US there as a backstop