Woodrow Wilson's "Rhetorical Restructuring": The Transformation
of the American Self and the Construction of the German Enemy
Flanagan, Jason C.
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 7, Number 2, Summer 2004,
pp. 115-148 (Article)
Published by Michigan State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/rap.2004.0037
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rap/summary/v007/7.2flanagan.html
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WOODROW WILSON’S “RHETORICAL RESTRUCTURING”:
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE AMERICAN SELF AND THE
CONSTRUCTION OF THE GERMAN ENEMY
JASON C. FLANAGAN
From a comprehensive study of the public addresses of Woodrow Wilson in the
period following the outbreak of the war in Europe in August 1914 to the war’s conclusion in June 1919, this essay examines Wilson’s transformation of the long-held
vision of America as merely a great example of liberty to its embodiment as the selfsacrificing champion of liberty. It will demonstrate how this transformation of the
American “self ” was inextricably connected to a changing image of the war and the
construction of an enemy image of the German government.
he significance of the presidency of Woodrow Wilson in American history is
widely acknowledged by admirers and critics alike. Wilson’s new vision of
American foreign policy, while rejected in his own time, largely defined American
foreign policy from the eve of World War II to the end of the Cold War and beyond.1
The ongoing dominance of Wilson’s vision is clearly illustrated by the fact that
almost every American president since Franklin Roosevelt has claimed to be a
“Wilsonian” in foreign policy.2 The last 12 months have even seen the current occupant of the White House, George W. Bush, painted with the Wilsonian brush.3
Beyond its significance to American politics, or rather because of it, Wilsonianism
had, and continues to have, international significance. As Akira Iriye stated in 1993,
“[b]ecause the globalizing of America has been a major event of the [twentieth]
century, Wilsonianism should be seen not as a transient phenomenon . . . but as a
potent definer of contemporary history.”4 Unfortunately, while the significance of
Wilsonianism is clear, our understanding of its origins remains incomplete.
The articulation of that constellation of ideas known as “Wilsonianism” was part
of a larger and more fundamental reinterpretation by Wilson of the image of
America and its role in the world. As James R. Andrews has recently argued, by the
end of World War I “Wilson’s rhetorical restructuring had transformed the long-
T
Jason C. Flanagan is a doctoral candidate in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics
at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
© Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Vol. 7, No. 2, 2004, pp. 115-148
ISSN 1094-8392
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held vision of America as a shining example of liberty for the world to emulate to
its embodiment as the self-sacrificing defender of liberty.”5 While the significance of
this transformation is obvious, just how it was undertaken is much less so. Andrews,
while noting this transformation, does not undertake a broad or in-depth analysis
of it. As in so much of the literature, such an analysis falls victim to a different focus,
namely the nature of Wilson’s rhetorical leadership.6
Like Andrews, many scholars offer tantalizing glimpses into Wilson’s transformation of the American image of “self ” without presenting a full picture of how
that transformation was realized. Lloyd Ambrosius, Amos Perlmutter, Frank
Ninkovich, and Tony Smith have all offered insights into Wilson’s “rhetorical
restructuring,” but such insights are severely limited by their various foci.7 These
scholars essentially focus on the nature and significance of “Wilsonianism,” rather
than on the rhetorical evolution of which its articulation was part and product.
Mary E. Stuckey and James Jeffery Tarbox offer similarly valuable but limited
insights into Wilson’s “rhetorical restructuring” in their studies of the constitutive
function of his rhetoric, as does Robert W. Tucker in his discussion of Wilson’s war
address.8
While the scholars mentioned above have all examined the rhetoric of Woodrow
Wilson to varying degrees, and while innumerable other scholars have touched on
Wilson’s rhetoric at least in passing, just how Wilson transformed the vision of
America and its role in the world remains unclear. This essay will seek to redress this
important gap in the literature by analyzing the rhetorical evolution by which
Wilson undertook that transformation. It will show that this transformation of the
American “self ” was part of a wider rhetorical restructuring of America’s image of
the war and was inextricably connected to the transformation of the German
“other” into an enemy of liberty.
“Wilsonianism” was based upon, among other things, the belief that democracies rarely wage war upon one another, a belief that in turn provided a rationale for
promoting “democratization” as a central pillar of American foreign policy. The
American claim of a democratic peace, however, is flawed in a manner central to the
current study. As Ido Oren has argued,
[the] democratic peace claim is not about democracies per se as much as it is about
countries that are “America-like” or of “our kind.” . . . The values embodied in the current definition of democracy were historically shaped by the need to distance America
from its adversaries. They are products, more than determinants, of America’s past
foreign political relations. The reason we do not fight “our kind” is not that “likeness”
has a great effect on war propensity, but rather that we from time to time subtly redefine our kind to keep our self-image consistent with our friends’ attributes and inconsistent with those of our adversaries.9
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Wilson’s rhetorical restructuring of the American “self ” can be seen as part of
this process discussed by Oren, and indeed central to that restructuring was the
development of an enemy image of Germany. Oren goes on to state:
Only after U.S.-German political rivalry developed did Wilson begin to differentiate
a democratic America from an autocratic Germany. Indeed, America’s very selfportrayal as a democracy and the norms by which it defines democracy were in part
shaped by the conflict with Imperial Germany.10
This link between Wilson’s changing vision of America and the German enemy is
one that is apparent in Wilson’s rhetoric, in which his evolving definition of
America parallels the development of an enemy image of the German government.
ACT I: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF AMERICAN NEUTRALITY, AUGUST
1914–OCTOBER 1915
As Jörg Nagler has observed, during World War I the United States was not
exposed on any front nor subject to the immediate threat of attack, making the war
remote in a spatial as well as a psychological sense.11 It was this very remoteness,
combined with traditional ideas of American exceptionalism, that formed the
foundation of Wilson’s early vision of American neutrality. Wilson’s early neutrality rhetoric was defined by three fundamental and interconnected ideas, namely
distance, friendship, and duty. The United States stood physically distant from the
war by matter of its geography, just as it stood politically distant by nature of its
long tradition of avoiding “entangling alliances.” To these two forms of distance
Wilson added a third, calling for Americans to adopt a sentimental or psychological distance from the war. Wilson called for the American people to be “impartial
in thought as well as in action,” to put a curb upon their sentiments as well as their
deeds.12 This strict form of impartiality was to be based not upon an equal aversion to the belligerents, or even an equal indifference, but upon equal feelings of
friendship for the nations on both sides of the conflict. Wilson made such friendship a test of patriotism, saying: “Every man who really loves America will act and
speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness
and friendliness to all concerned.”13
In Wilson’s rhetoric ideas of distance and friendship often combined in the idea
of an American duty to mankind, a duty that while only vaguely defined was itself
used to justify and delineate American neutrality. In his neutrality appeal of August
18, 1914, Wilson warned that domestic divisions had the potential to interfere with
the proper performance of America’s duty “as the one great nation at peace, the one
people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the
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counsels of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan but as a friend.”14 Later in
the address Wilson discussed an American duty to keep itself “fit and free to do what
is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”15 This
vaguely defined American duty to remain free from the conflict in the service of
peace both stemmed from and reinforced the ideas of distance and friendship.
Wilson’s second Annual Message in December 1914 clearly illustrated the interconnectedness of the central themes of friendship, distance, and duty in his early
neutrality rhetoric. Wilson defined the United States as “a true friend to all the
nations of the world” and characterized the war not as a threat, but as an “opportunity to counsel and obtain peace in the world and reconciliation and a healing settlement of many a matter that has cooled and interrupted the friendship of
nations.”16 Wilson resisted those already calling for military preparedness. While
accepting voluntary civilian training in arms and the development of the National
Guard, he said:
More than this, proposed at this time, permit me to say, would mean merely that we
had lost our self-possession, that we had been thrown off balance by a war with which
we have nothing to do, whose causes cannot touch us, whose very existence affords us
opportunities of friendship and disinterested service which should make us ashamed of
any thought of hostility or fearful preparation for trouble. This is assuredly the opportunity for which a people and a government like ours were raised up, the opportunity
not only to speak but actually to embody and exemplify the counsels of peace and amity
and the lasting concord which is based on justice and fair and generous dealing.17
Thus Wilson rejected any significant preparedness measures while reinforcing the
central themes of friendship, distance, and duty that formed the foundation of his
conception of American neutrality.
Wilson’s early neutrality rhetoric reflected ideas expressed in the earliest canons
of American presidential rhetoric. In his Farewell Address George Washington had
called for America to be a friend to all the nations of the world, but the permanent
ally of none, a sentiment reiterated in Thomas Jefferson’s famous warning against
“entangling alliances.”18 Wilson’s neutrality rhetoric, however, presented neither a
realistic nor a complete vision of American neutrality. America’s multiethnic population undermined the psychological distance stressed by Wilson.19 Moreover, and
perhaps more importantly, Wilson’s idea of a physical distance from the conflict was
undermined by the fact that neutral trade had rescued an American economy struggling with recession. While essentially ignored in Wilson’s public addresses, the volume and consistency of such trade were of vast domestic importance.20 In addition,
American neutral trade quickly gained a size and importance such that it had the
potential to affect the outcome of the war, provoking increasing efforts by the opposing belligerents to secure such trade for themselves and deny it to their enemies.
WOODROW WILSON’S “RHETORICAL RESTRUCTURING”
119
The United States, beginning in late 1914, faced intermittent but escalating disputes with both Great Britain and Germany over the issue of neutral rights.21
German and British challenges to American neutrality, and the fundamental differences between them, would later play a central role in shaping Wilson’s transformation of the American image of “self.” For the time, however, Wilson’s rhetoric
remained largely unchanged. Wilson repeatedly asserted America’s physical and
psychological distance from the war.22 Continuing to link ideas of distance and
friendship to the concept of an American duty to mankind, Wilson began to clarify
his vision of such a duty. In remarks to the Associated Press on April 20, 1915,
Wilson outlined America’s duty as entailing an essentially postwar role, summing
up American neutrality in these words:
The test of friendship is not now sympathy with one side or the other, but getting ready
to help both sides when the struggle is over. The basis of neutrality, gentlemen, is not
indifference; it is not self-interest. The basis of neutrality is sympathy for mankind. It is
fairness, it is good will, at bottom. It is impartiality of spirit and of judgment.23
Wilson said that at the end of the war the true test would come, not only to the belligerents, but to the United States in particular, for at that time the world would
look to America for assistance in “reconstructing the processes of peace.”24 Wilson
thus defined a passive wartime role for the United States in terms of an important
and altruistic postwar role.
Assigning none of the belligerents responsibility for the war, Wilson characterized the conflict as the release of “great blind material forces” that had long been
restrained.25 He went on to say that underneath one could see “the strong impulses
of great ideals,” and asserted that all of the belligerents believed “that they were
standing, each on his own side of the contest, for some eternal principle of right.”26
While both belligerents had challenged American neutral rights, neither had done
so in such a way as to threaten a break in relations, making it easy for Wilson to
place them on the same high moral plane. Beginning in early 1915, however, the
Wilson administration began to be confronted with American casualties as a result
of German attacks on Allied and American vessels.27 A turning point came when a
German submarine sank the Lusitania on the Irish sea, killing well over a thousand
passengers and crew, including 128 Americans.28 As Arthur S. Link has argued, the
sinking of the Lusitania “had a more jolting effect on American opinion than any
other single event of the World War,” provoking the first appearance of a significant
and organized body of pro-intervention sentiment.29
Three days after the Lusitania sinking Wilson publicly responded by stating that
there was “such a thing as a man being too proud to fight . . . such a thing as a nation
being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”30
This statement, essentially disavowed by Wilson the next day, was ambiguous at
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best.31 Just what would be America’s position on the incident was soon clarified in
three diplomatic notes that were to mark an important turning point in the Wilson
administration’s portrayal of German actions.32 These notes essentially labeled the
Lusitania sinking an act of evil, so far as it was an illegal, inhumane, and wanton act
involving the needless destruction of human life. Submarine warfare was also condemned in broader terms, the first note stating that there was a “practical impossibility of employing submarines in the destruction of commerce without
disregarding those rules of fairness, reason, justice, and humanity which all modern
opinion regards as imperative.”33 The two subsequent notes employed similar language, with the third describing submarine warfare in terms of “grave and unjustifiable violations of the rights of American citizens by German naval commanders”
and expressing a belief that the German government would no longer refrain from
“disavowing the wanton act of its naval commander in the sinking of the Lusitania
or from offering reparation for the American lives lost, so far as reparation can be
made for a needless destruction of human life by an illegal act.”34
While German actions were strongly condemned, the German government was
never directly vilified in the course of the crisis. This balance was achieved through
a slight variation of the “reluctance to believe” expressed in earlier American notes
to the belligerents.35 The first Lusitania note praised the humane, enlightened, and
just record of the Imperial German government and said the U.S. government could
not bring itself to believe that recent attacks against vessels such as the Lusitania
could have had the sanction of that government.36 The blame for the evils of submarine warfare was laid squarely at the feet of individual submarine commanders,
whom the United States assumed, according to the Lusitania notes, had acted under
a misapprehension of their orders.37 Thus the need to hold the German government
directly responsible for the violations of American rights, and more importantly for
the actual death of American citizens, was momentarily sidestepped. The German
government, however, was issued a firm warning, the third note explicitly stating
that a repetition by German naval commanders of acts in contravention of neutral
rights “must be regarded by the Government of the United States, when they affect
American citizens, as deliberately unfriendly.”38 The Wilson administration made it
clear that while the German government was not blamed for past submarine
attacks, it would be held accountable for any future attacks if only insofar as its failure to prevent them. The Lusitania notes marked an important turning point and
paved the way for labeling the German government, upon its return to indiscriminate submarine warfare, both evil and an enemy of the United States.
While Wilson at the time avoided public discussion of the Lusitania sinking, the
crisis marked the beginnings of both an enemy image of Germany and a new image
of the United States. While the Lusitania notes were asserting that submarine warfare violated the principles of humanity, Wilson publicly portrayed the United
States as representing and promoting such principles. Just four days after the first
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121
note was dispatched, Wilson discussed American navy vessels being commanded by
officers who knew how to use them “as engines to promote the interests of humanity,” arguing that America stood for what every nation wished to stand for and spoke
for those things that all humanity desired.39 In a brief address just five days after the
second Lusitania note, Wilson declared the American people “the host which always
responds to the dictates of humanity and of liberty.”40 The Lusitania crisis marked
the beginnings of a divergence in images of the American “self ” and the German
“other,” a divergence that would see the transformation of the United States into a
global champion of democracy and the rights of mankind and Germany into the
autocratic enemy of such rights.
On August 19, in the face of the explicit warning contained in the third Lusitania
note, a German submarine torpedoed the White Star liner Arabic with 44 casualties,
including two Americans. While the maintenance of American prestige all but
demanded a break in relations, a rupture was finally averted when the German government issued a written promise stating: “liners will not be sunk by our submarines without warning and without safety of the lives of noncombatants,
provided that the liners do not try to escape or offer resistance.”41 This promise,
immediately labeled the Arabic pledge, was hailed by the American people as a great
victory for Woodrow Wilson and for humanity.
ACT II: THE RHETORIC
AND THE
OF MILITARY PREPAREDNESS
SUSSEX CRISIS
While the so-called Arabic pledge temporarily settled the submarine issue, crises
with Germany had already raised the real and frightening possibility of American
entry into the war and led to the realization of how ill-prepared the United States
was for such entry. The drive for military preparedness, once advocated only by a
small minority, became a large and powerful movement in the wake of the Lusitania
crisis. By July 1915 Wilson himself had become a convert, if a reluctant one, to the
preparedness movement.42 From October 1915 through early 1916, Wilson publicly
outlined and advocated his plans for military preparedness, his rhetoric reaching its
zenith during an eight-day speaking tour of the Midwest.43 This period, more than
any other, represented a pivotal turning point in Wilson’s rhetoric. It witnessed the
transformation or outright abandonment of the themes that characterized Wilson’s
early neutrality rhetoric and saw the explicit beginnings of the rhetorical restructuring of the United States into a global and self-sacrificing defender of liberty and
the rights of mankind. While Wilson had previously opposed military preparedness, saying it would mean that America had been thrown off balance “by a war
with which we have nothing to do, [and] whose causes can not touch us,” and had
characterized America as “a nation being so right that it does not need to convince
others by force that it is right,” in October 1915 he not only began to argue that the
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war could touch American interests, but said that if it did so it might be necessary
to resort to force in their defense.
Central to Wilson’s rhetorical metamorphosis was the metaphor of fire. While
Wilson’s use of the fire metaphor remained tentative and somewhat confused in his
early preparedness rhetoric, during his preparedness tour it was to redefine
America’s relationship to the war.44 On January 29, 1916, he suggested the war’s
potential to involve the United States by saying: “The world is on fire and there is
tinder everywhere. The sparks are liable to drop anywhere, and somewhere there
may be material which we can not prevent from bursting into flame.”45 Later that
day he reiterated the idea that America was full of tinder and the sky full of floating
sparks, going on to say that should the fire once touch the United States, “it may
touch the very sources of our life, it may touch the very things we stand for and fight
for.”46 Wilson lent his fire metaphor specific meaning through a clear definition of
the “sparks” and “tinder” that lie at its heart.
While he had initially defined America in terms of a duty to exemplify and speak
the counsels of peace, Wilson’s preparedness rhetoric placed certain things above
the nation’s love of peace. It was these things that represented the “tinder” of his fire
metaphor. On January 27, after discussing how peace dwelled in the heart of the
American people, Wilson said:
The only place where tinder lies and the spark may kindle a flame is where still deeper
things lie which they love—the principles and independence of their own life. Let no
man drop fire there, because peace is inconsistent with the loss of self-respect [and] . . .
the abandonment of principle.47
While Wilson still professed to love peace, he placed interconnected concepts of
independence, character, principle, and self-respect above that love of peace.48 Such
ideas fell under the broader label of “honor,” with Wilson’s preparedness rhetoric
essentially placing the maintenance of American honor above the maintenance of
peace.49 Time and again throughout his preparedness tour Wilson reinforced this
hierarchy and anticipated American entry into the war by anticipating a time when
it would be impossible to maintain both peace and honor.50 Wilson said: “You may
count upon my heart and resolution to keep you out of the war, but you must be
ready, if it is necessary, that I should maintain your honor. . . . And the Nation’s
honor is dearer than the Nation’s comfort and the Nation’s peace and the Nation’s
life itself.”51 With such rhetoric Wilson clearly developed the idea that peace was
subordinate to the maintenance of honor and anticipated American belligerency in
defense of such honor.
Just as the nation’s honor was the “tinder” of Wilson’s fire metaphor, so too were
challenges to that honor the “spark” that would ignite it. In an address on January
31, Wilson described such a “spark,” saying:
WOODROW WILSON’S “RHETORICAL RESTRUCTURING”
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[A]ny man who does violence to right, any nation that does violence to the principles
of just international understanding, is doing violence to the ideals of the United States.
We observe the technical limits. We assert these rights only when our own citizens are
affected. But you know that our feeling is just the same whether the rights of those
individual citizens are affected or not . . . 52
While Wilson at this time attached “technical limits” to his definition of what constituted a violation of American honor, his definition of such honor nonetheless
marked the beginnings of a new definition of the United States as a global champion of international law and the rights of mankind.
Abandoning the idea of America’s physical distance from the war, Wilson recognized American cargoes and citizens traveling the high seas as volatile points of contact with the war and as potential sources of the “spark” that would lead to
American involvement. Wilson said: “wherever there is contact, there is apt to be
friction. Wherever the ordinary rules of commerce at sea and of international relationship are thrust aside or ignored, there is danger of the more critical kind of controversy.”53 He asserted that the question of American entry into the war would be
decided by “what foreign governments do; what the commanders of ships at sea do;
what those in charge of submarines do; what those who are conducting blockades
do.”54 While Wilson anticipated any future involvement in the war as being the
product of belligerent provocations, he nonetheless continued to refrain from
directly vilifying belligerent governments. Continuing to place the belligerents
upon the same moral plane, Wilson portrayed them as desperate and preoccupied
powers whose actions threatened to involve the United States in the war, but whose
leaders believed they were fighting for the survival of their nations and should not
be criticized for going to every length and desperate endeavor to ensure victory.55 At
the same time, however, Wilson abandoned his calls for strict impartiality and a
psychological distance from the war. He said the American heart throbbed “with all
sorts of intense sympathies,” and argued that while Americans refrained from
unneutral actions, they were having trouble refraining from unneutral thought.56
Considering the context, Wilson’s talk of “unneutral” thoughts seemed to imply the
existence, if not the official acceptance, of anti-German rather than anti-British sentiment.
Just as Wilson’s preparedness rhetoric redefined the idea of distance, so too did
it redefine the related themes of friendship and duty. Wilson argued that America
was “trying to preserve the foundations upon which peace can be rebuilt,” and peace
could only be rebuilt “upon the ancient and accepted principles of international
law.”57 This duty of “preservation” entailed, as Wilson put it, a responsibility “to
assert in times of war the standards of times of peace,” or more specifically “to assert
the principles of international law in a world in which the principles of law have
broken down—not the technical principles of law, but the essential principles of
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right dealing and humanity as between nation and nation.”58 Thus Wilson subtly
but fundamentally redefined the nation’s duty, abandoning the idea of a passive
wartime role in preparation for an active postwar role. He now defined for the
nation an active wartime role of preserving and more importantly asserting the
essential principles of international law and humanity.
Wilson’s definition of an active wartime role for the United States was part of a
more fundamental break with the long-held vision of America primarily as a great
example of liberty for others to emulate, a “Citty [sic] upon a Hill” in the words of
John Winthrop.59 In his preparedness rhetoric Wilson began to present a vision of
America that directly contradicted John Quincy Adams’s famous assertion that the
United States was “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all . . . [but]
the champion and vindicator only of her own,” and as such did not go abroad “in
search of monsters to destroy.”60 In an address on January 29, Wilson said that ever
since the inception of the United States, Americans had “undertaken to be the
champions of humanity and of the rights of men.”61 He linked this role as the
champion of mankind directly to the preparedness effort and any future involvement in the war, later saying:
When I speak of preparation for national defense I am speaking for something intangible and visionary. . . . America has no reason for being unless her destiny and her
duty be ideal. It is her incumbent privilege to declare and stand for the rights of men.
Nothing less is worth fighting for, nothing less is worth sacrificing for.62
Thus Wilson began to define the United States as a champion of the rights of
mankind, one willing to fight in their defense.
In defining the United States as a champion of the rights of mankind, Wilson differentiated those rights from the rights of property. On January 29, Wilson said of
America’s position:
Our chief interest is not in the rights of property but in the rights of men. Our chief
interest is in the spirits of men that they might be free; . . . that they might deal with
their fellowmen with their heads erect, the subjects and servants of no man—the servants only of the principles upon which their lives rested.63
To differentiate between the rights of property and the rights of mankind was to effectively differentiate between British and German actions. While both belligerents violated American rights, British actions affected property rights while German actions
affected the more fundamental rights of mankind, most importantly the right to life
itself. Just as changing definitions of the belligerents influenced a changing definition
of self, so too was the reverse true. Wilson’s definition of the United States as the
champion of the rights of mankind, given the differing nature of belligerent actions
WOODROW WILSON’S “RHETORICAL RESTRUCTURING”
125
upon the high seas and the characterization of German actions in the Lusitania notes,
began to develop an implicit enemy image of Germany.
In defining the United States as a champion of the rights of man, Wilson defined
such rights in American terms, that is as involving the right to political liberty. In
his outline of his preparedness program, after asserting that Americans held their
principles as more valuable than peace, Wilson said:
Our principles are well known. It is not necessary to avow them again. We believe in
political liberty and founded our great government to obtain it, the liberty of men and
of peoples—of men to choose their own lives and of peoples to choose their own allegiance. Our ambition, also, all the world has knowledge of. It is not only to be free and
prosperous ourselves, but also to be the friend and thoughtful partisan of those who are
free or who desire freedom the world over. . . . [W]e passionately believe, in the right of
every people to choose their own allegiance and be free of masters altogether. . . . It is
with a full consciousness of such principles and such ambitions that we are asking ourselves at the present time what our duty is with regard to the armed force of the
Nation.64
Thus Wilson asserted not that America sought to be the “true friend of all the
nations of the world,” as he had declared in late 1914, but that it sought to be the
friend and partisan of the free and those that desired freedom. In an address on
January 29, 1916, Wilson said that the old call for the defense of hearth and home
was not a very handsome appeal, going on to say:
America stands, first of all, for the right of men to determine whom they will obey and
whom they will serve; for the right of political freedom and a people’s sovereignty. And
anybody who interferes with those conceptions by touching the affairs of America
makes it necessary that America should assert her rights.65
Later in his preparedness tour Wilson said of the American flag:
That flag stands for the rights of mankind, no matter where they be, no matter what
their antecedents, no matter what the race involved. It stands for the absolute right to
political liberty and free self-government, and wherever it stands for the contrary
American traditions have begun to be forgotten.66
With such rhetoric Wilson explicitly transformed the United States into a global
champion of the rights of mankind, standing “first of all” for the right of all mankind
to liberty and democracy. While at this time Wilson made it clear that the United
States would not act unless its own affairs were involved, he clearly implied that a
person or power that denied any people the right to liberty stood in opposition to
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American principles and ambitions. Once again, we see that of the belligerents it was
autocratic Germany that represented the most obvious “other” to the evolving definition of the American “self.”
Throughout his preparedness rhetoric Wilson repeatedly suggested that democracies, by their very nature, were peaceful. In his third State of the Union address,
Wilson said: “Great democracies are not belligerent. They do not seek or desire
war.”67 He later said: “I have no indictment against any form of government, but I
do believe in my heart that the world has never witnessed a case, and never will witness a case, where one people desired to make war upon another people.”68 Having
asserted that no people, as a people, desired to make war, Wilson argued that
America’s security lay in the fact that as a democracy it was its people that decided
the fate of the nation. This developing definition of democratic states is a rhetorical step the significance of which is immediately apparent. While Wilson at this time
continued to argue that the origins of the war were unclear, to define democracies
as inherently peaceful was to essentially absolve them of culpability in the outbreak
of the war. This absolution in turn clearly implied the guilt of nondemocratic states.
The later portrayal of autocratic Germany as responsible for the outbreak of the war
was a small rhetorical step from this portrayal of democratic governments as inherently peaceful.
While Wilson’s preparedness rhetoric developed an implicit enemy image of
Germany, the torpedoing of the Sussex, an unarmed French channel steamer, on
March 24, 1916, provoked the first explicit condemnation of the German government in Wilson’s rhetoric. During past controversies Wilson had allowed diplomatic notes to speak for themselves, refraining from public discussion of the issues
involved, but in the case of the Sussex he dramatically departed from this approach.
The American response to the Sussex incident was sent to Germany on April 18.69
The very next day Wilson delivered an address before a joint session of Congress
condemning the German government’s conduct of submarine warfare.70
Wilson’s Sussex address was a watershed. For the first time in a public speech
Wilson condemned German submarine warfare as increasingly ruthless and
indiscriminate, and as involving “the most palpable violations of the dictates of
right and humanity.”71 More importantly, Wilson specifically discussed such warfare not as the product of rogue submarine commanders, but as a policy of the
German government.72 Breaking with his preparedness rhetoric, Wilson did not
characterize submarine warfare as the understandable measure of a desperate
nation, but only as evidence of the German government’s perfidy and willingness
to set aside the principles of law and humanity. Wilson argued that the attack on
the Sussex was in no way an isolated incident, but rather simply “one instance,
even though it be one of the most extreme and distressing instances, of the spirit
and method of warfare which the Imperial German Government has mistakenly
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adopted.”73 Wilson discussed how the German government allowed its submarine
commanders to repeatedly disregard its solemn assurances regarding submarine
warfare with entire impunity. He also described German submarine warfare as
involving an “ominous” American death toll mounting into the hundreds.74
Mentioning such a death toll made it clear that Germany had met the “technical
limits” Wilson had previously placed upon American actions as the champion of
liberty and of the rights of mankind.
Bringing the war home to the American people, Wilson argued that America
sought to restrain itself from any extreme course of action, despite “tragedy after
tragedy in which its own citizens were involved.”75 He continued to assert American
friendship for “the German nation,” but argued that the position his administration
had taken at the outset was inevitable, namely that “the use of submarines for the
destruction of an enemy’s commerce is of necessity . . . incompatible with the principles of humanity, the long established and incontrovertible rights of neutrals, and
the sacred immunities of noncombatants.”76 That being the case, Wilson went on to
say “that unless the Imperial German Government should now immediately declare
and effect an abandonment of its present methods of warfare against passenger and
freight carrying vessels this Government can have no choice but to sever diplomatic
relations with the Government of the German Empire altogether.”77 Refraining
from carving the enemy image in stone, Wilson concluded the address by expressing hope that Germany would meet American demands and redeem itself as a
champion of international law and the dictates of humanity.78
Crises with the German government over its conduct of submarine warfare provoked an explicit divergence of the image of the American “self ” and the German
“other” in Wilson’s rhetoric, one characterized by the transformation of both
images. The United States was no longer the impartial friend to all the belligerents,
standing geographically, politically, and psychologically distant from the war, pursuing a passive wartime role in preparation for an active postwar role in reconstructing the processes of peace. America was transformed into the global
champion of the rights of mankind, including the right to political liberty, standing
in immediate danger of being drawn into the conflict. It was the friend and partisan of the free and those struggling toward freedom, pursuing an active wartime
role of asserting the essential principles of right dealing and humanity. Germany
was no longer simply one of many belligerents fighting for what it believed to be
eternal principles of right, having been drawn into the war by blind material forces.
The German government was transformed into a ruthless power that wantonly violated the essential principles of international law and the dictates of humanity in
pursuance of victory. While these divergent images of America and Germany would
later be further developed and intensified, there was first to come something of a
lull in the development of Wilson’s rhetoric.
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ACT III: A RETREAT TO IMPARTIALITY
From May 1916 to February 1917 Wilson beat something of a rhetorical retreat,
abandoning overt vilification of Germany and those themes that suggested the imminent possibility of American involvement in the war. A number of developments, both
at home and abroad, provoked this retreat. Germany’s reply to America’s Sussex note,
while labeled a “‘gold brick’ swindle” by Robert Lansing, essentially conceded to
American demands and temporarily settled the submarine question.79 At the same
time the British government’s ruthless suppression of the Irish rebellion, and the tightening of the Allied blockade through the publication of a “black list” and the seizure
of mails, had a profoundly negative effect upon American opinion.80 Added to this was
Allied rejection of American mediation along the lines outlined in the House-Grey
Memorandum.81 This rejection further disillusioned President Wilson and led him to
once again place the belligerents upon the same, although by this time much lower,
moral plane. Wilson’s reinvigorated determination to remain neutral was further reinforced by strong peaceful sentiments among the American people, as dramatically
revealed by the 1916 Democratic National Convention. An implied promise to keep
the nation out of war became the central theme of Wilson’s presidential campaign.82
While Wilson abandoned explicit development of an enemy image of Germany
in the wake of the Sussex crisis, he did not work to undo the image already constructed and continued to develop a definition of the American “self ” that was
increasingly antithetical to it. Particularly throughout October 1916, Wilson bluntly
attested to the global scope of America’s concern for the rights of mankind, most
importantly the right to political liberty. In an address on October 5, Wilson said:
“Nothing that concerns humanity, nothing that concerns the essential rights of
mankind can be foreign to us.”83 Later in October, Wilson said:
[T]he whole point of America is not merely that she should keep her doors open and
say to the oppressed and the unhappy and the unfortunate elsewhere, “Our doors are
open and you are welcome to come here and find free opportunity.” But we are here
to say to other peoples remaining at home, “So far as we can help you, our help is free
to you if you mean to make an honorable and free use of it.” . . . We pretend, at any
rate, that we know what liberty is. If we do, then we have got to stand for liberty outside America as well as inside . . .”84
Wilson expressed similar sentiments in an address at Shadow Lawn two days later.85
Significantly, such assertions were no longer qualified by the “technical limits” that
marked earlier rhetoric.
Wilson continued to differentiate the rights of mankind from the rights of
property. Asserting that American rights had become involved in the war, Wilson
went on to say:
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Where they did, this was our guiding principle: that property rights can be vindicated
by claims for damages when the war is over, and no modern nation can decline to arbitrate such claims; but the fundamental rights of humanity cannot be. The loss of life
is irreparable. Neither can direct violations of a nation’s sovereignty await vindication
in suits for damages. The nation that violates these essential rights must expect to be
checked and called to account by direct challenge and resistance. It at once makes the
quarrel in part our own.86
While Wilson’s mention of violations of a nation’s sovereignty may have been a reference to the recent maritime measures of Great Britain, such rhetoric once again
essentially differentiated between British and German actions. While British actions
could generally be settled after the war, German actions, so far as they had already
resulted in American casualties, had made the war in part an American one. In
October 1916 Wilson argued that the United States was set up “to vindicate the
rights of man and not the rights of property” and went on to assert an American
willingness to fight “so that all the common compacts of liberty may be sealed with
the blood of free men.”87 Such rhetoric clearly reinforced the diverging images of
America and Germany, and did not bode well, given the realities of the war, for
future German-American relations.
The year 1916 also saw the further development of themes first raised in Wilson’s
preparedness rhetoric that contradicted his ongoing assertions as to the obscurity
of the war’s origins. In his first address on the League of Nations, Wilson said the
war had come “suddenly and out of secret counsels . . . without discussion, without
any of the deliberate movements of counsel with which it would seem natural to
approach so stupendous a contest.”88 In October he argued that the conflict had
come about “because of suspicion of intrigue, of the working of secret influences
confined to small circles of men in which nations as nations had no part at all.”89
Later, in an interview in the Washington Post, Wilson reportedly said:
I am convinced that only governments initiate such wars as the present, and that they
are never brought on by peoples, and that, therefore, democracy is the best preventative of such jealousies and suspicions and secret intrigues as produce wars among
nations where small groups control rather than the great body of public opinion.90
Thus, while Wilson continued to pay lip service to the idea that the war had obscure
European roots, he simultaneously began to suggest that nondemocratic nations
“where small groups control” were responsible for the conflict.
Wilson reinforced the idea that nondemocratic nations were inimical to peace in
his January 22, 1917, call for “peace without victory,” stating: “No peace can last, or
ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments
derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”91 He said that in
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proposing his outline of a League of Nations he was “proposing government by the
consent of the governed,” justifying his stance by arguing:
Any peace which does not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably be upset.
It will not rest upon the affections or the convictions of mankind. The ferment of spirit
of whole populations will fight subtly and constantly against it, and all the world will
sympathize. The world can be at peace only if its life is stable, and there can be no stability where the will is in rebellion, where there is not tranquility of spirit and a sense
of justice, of freedom, and of right.92
Thus while Wilson called for a “peace without victory” he simultaneously asserted
the necessity of a total victory for the principles of democracy. Wilson’s argument
that the universal adoption of democratic forms was essential to the permanency of
any peace was of enormous significance. Building on ideas first raised in his preparedness rhetoric, Wilson suggested that autocracies, by their very nature, were
inimical to peace. While he did not yet specifically name autocratic Germany as an
enemy of peace, the implications were clear.
Within weeks of his call for “peace without victory” the German government
announced a return to unrestricted submarine warfare. This time a rupture could
not be averted. Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to announce a break
in relations on February 3, 1917.93 Between the break with Germany in early
February 1917 and Wilson’s call for war in early April of that year, two important
developments influenced the evolution of Wilson’s rhetoric. The first was the
Zimmermann telegram, a copy of which Wilson received on February 25 and which
served to remove any lingering doubts concerning German intentions.94 The second
important development was the Russian Revolution, which removed the primary
obstacle to depicting the war as one between the forces of democracy and those of
autocracy. Events in Petrograd allowed Wilson to fully develop the
democracy/autocracy dichotomy in his depiction of the war, a development that
would mark the final stage in the construction of a new vision of America and an
enemy image of the German government.
ACT IV: WILSON CALLS
FOR
WAR
After a brief period of “armed neutrality,” Wilson ended the ambiguity surrounding
American policy and on April 2, 1917, went before Congress to call for a declaration of war.95 As Herbert Carson has noted, one requirement of the ritual of the
declaration-of-war address is “the use of dramatic simplification—the black versus
white nature of the conflict.”96 Wilson used such simplification and explicitly
labeled the German government not only an enemy of the United States, but an
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131
enemy of all mankind. He described how Germany’s new policy of unrestricted
submarine warfare had “swept every restriction aside,” with even hospital ships
being “sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle,” despite having been provided safe conduct by the German government.97 Wilson declared:
I am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as that
is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of non-combatants,
men, women, and children, engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be
paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be. The present German
submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind.98
Wilson went on to say:
It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in
ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other
neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the
same way. There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind.99
Wilson’s Sussex address had already defined submarine warfare in almost identical terms.100 Wilson had also already asserted that while property could be paid for,
human life was irreplaceable.101 Wilson’s war address simply took the next rhetorical step and explicitly stated what had long been implicit in his rhetoric, namely that
German submarine warfare represented a war against both the United States and
mankind. Having long anticipated American involvement in the war at the provocation of one of the belligerents, and having long made it clear that of the belligerents it was the German government that would most likely offer such a provocation,
Wilson advised Congress to “declare the recent course of the Imperial German
Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people
of the United States,” and urged it to “formally accept the status of belligerent which
has thus been thrust upon it.”102
Building upon previous suggestions that nondemocratic nations were inimical
to peace, Wilson argued that autocracies by their very nature represented a threat to
the peace and liberty of the world. Justifying American belligerency in terms of that
threat, Wilson said:
Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved
and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the
existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled
wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.103
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Thus began the explicit development of the idea that the war was between autocracy and democracy, a vision of the war central to Wilson’s final development of
both the enemy image of Germany and his new image of America.
While the Russian Revolution helped pave the way for condemnations of autocratic governments, the revelations surrounding the Zimmermann telegram helped
lend them form. In characterizing autocratic governments as a threat to the peace
and liberty of the world, Wilson focused upon their supposed duplicitous and
intriguing nature. Wilson said:
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course of
intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out only
under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived
plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation,
can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind
the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily
impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation’s affairs.104
From such a general characterization of the nature of autocracies Wilson went on
to specifically discuss German intrigue in the United States, using it to reinforce his
characterization of the German government as an enemy of the United States.
Wilson said it was evident that German spies had been in the United States even
before the war and that their “criminal intrigues” against American peace, industry,
and commerce had been carried out “at the instigation, with the support, and even
under the personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Government accredited to the Government of the United States.”105 Wilson argued that such facts
served to convince America that the German government “entertains no real friendship for us and means to act against our peace and security at its convenience.”106
Wilson said the Zimmermann telegram was “eloquent evidence” that the German
government “means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors.”107
Wilson discussed the hostile purpose revealed in the Zimmermann telegram not
only as a challenge to the United States, but as a threat to all democracies:
We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we know that in such a
Government, following such methods, we can never have a friend; and that in the
presence of its organized power, always lying in wait to accomplish we know not what
purpose, there can be no assured security for the democratic governments of the
world. We are now about to accept gage of battle with this natural foe to liberty and
shall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense
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about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of
its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and
the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The
world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested
foundations of political liberty.108
Wilson said it was a fearful thing to lead a “great peaceful people . . . into the most
terrible and disastrous of all wars,” but qualified the statement by saying:
But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we
have always carried nearest our hearts,—for democracy, for the right of those who
submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last
free.109
In such rhetoric we see Wilson’s images of America and the German government
begin to take their final forms, with the idea of liberty becoming increasingly central to both images. The autocratic nature of the German government is emphasized, and it is labeled the “natural foe to liberty.” Having already defined the United
States as a champion of the rights of mankind, Wilson’s war address began to define
America more specifically as a champion of liberty and democracy.
In his war address Wilson fully developed the differentiation between the
German people and the German government he had only hinted at in his rhetoric
up to that point. He absolved the German people of any responsibility in the actions
of their government, arguing that the war was not started upon their impulse or
with their previous knowledge or approval. Wilson said:
It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy
days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked
and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were
accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools.110
According to Wilson it would be easier for America to conduct itself as a belligerent because it acted not in enmity toward a people, “but only in armed opposition to
an irresponsible government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity
and of right and is running amuck.”111 This differentiation between the German
people and their government was central not only to the enemy image of the German
government as evil and tyrannical, but to the image of the United States as a global
champion of the right of all peoples, as Wilson first explained in his preparedness
rhetoric, “to choose their own allegiance and be free of masters altogether.”112
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ACT V: AMERICA
AT
WAR: IMAGES TAKE THEIR FINAL FORM
While the period of American neutrality was marked by an evolution of images in
Wilson’s rhetoric, the period of American belligerency was characterized by essentially static images and can thus be analyzed as a whole. Although Wilson indeed
lent emphasis to different themes at different times, the wartime images of
Germany and America were quickly established and then essentially reiterated time
and again. In his characterization of the German government as an enemy of the
United States, Wilson repeatedly assigned it total responsibility for American
involvement in the war. In an address in June 1917 Wilson said:
It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The extraordinary insults and
aggressions of the Imperial German Government left us no self-respecting choice but
to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government. The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral.113
In a manner reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence, Wilson went on to
document these “extraordinary insults and aggressions,” depicting the German government as a militaristic and tyrannical cabal that relied on treachery and intrigue,
one that had not only killed American citizens abroad, but had attempted to corrupt those remaining at home.114 This cabal had sought to disrupt and destroy
American industry and commerce and had plotted to turn Mexico and Japan
against it. While continuing to make reference to such issues throughout the war, by
December 1917 Wilson considered German culpability in American belligerency to
be self-evident, saying: “I shall not go back to debate the causes of the war. The
intolerable wrongs done and planned against us by the sinister masters of Germany
have long since become too grossly obvious and odious to every true American to
need to be rehearsed.”115
German “insults and aggressions” were only one facet of the enemy image.
Equally important was the idea that the German government threatened America’s
long-term security and independence. In December 1917 Wilson argued that the
Central Powers were in reality a single power ruled by the German government, and
declared that America’s security would be at an end and its honor forever brought
into contempt should that power be allowed to triumph.116 Wilson discussed past
submarine controversies in terms of an effort by the German government to shut
the United States off from Europe “while they accomplished purposes which would
. . . have put the fortunes of America at the mercy of the Imperial Government of
Germany.”117 He went on to say:
We are fighting, therefore, as truly for the liberty and self-government of the United
States as if the war of our own Revolution had to be fought over again; and every man
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135
in every business in the United States must know by this time that his whole future
fortune lies in the balance. Our national life and our whole economic development
will pass under the sinister influences of foreign control if we do not win.118
Comparisons with the American Revolution not only served to drive home the
image of the German government as a dire threat to American independence, but
also served to reinforce the image of the war as one between the forces of tyranny,
represented by the German government, and the forces of liberty, represented by
the United States.
Completely abandoning assertions regarding the obscurity of the war’s origins,
Wilson’s war rhetoric held the German government responsible not only for
American belligerency, but for the war itself. In June 1917 Wilson bluntly stated:
“The war was begun by the military masters of Germany, who proved to be also the
masters of Austria-Hungary.”119 On November 17 he reiterated this assertion, stating that the war was started by Germany and the only question that remained was
why it had done so.120 To this question of German motives Wilson offered an
answer, attributing to the German government ambitions of global domination. He
said that Austrian demands upon Serbia had been “merely a single step in a plan
that encompassed Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad.”121 Wilson said of
Germany’s masters:
Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German military power and political control
across the very center of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia;
and Austria-Hungary was to be as much their tool and pawn as Serbia or Bulgaria or
Turkey or the ponderous states of the East. . . . The dream had its heart at Berlin. It
could have had a heart nowhere else!122
Emphasizing the threat, Wilson went on to argue that the German cabal had
achieved the greater part of their sinister plan. He said the German government,
through the control and domination of the Central Powers, had spread its net from
“Hamburg to the Persian Gulf.”123 That government was not merely an enemy of
the United States; it was the sinister power behind the entire war and an enemy of
all mankind.
While characterizing the war as one that involved the interests and rights of all
mankind, Wilson continued to define it in uniquely American terms, as a kind of
global extension of the American Revolution. Wilson said:
We have said in the beginning that we planted this great government that men who
wished freedom might have a place of refuge and a place where their hope could be
realized. And now, having established such a government, having preserved such a
government, having vindicated the power of such a government, we are saying to all
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mankind, “We did not set this government up in order that we might have a selfish and
separate liberty, for we are now ready to come to your assistance and fight out upon
the field of the world the cause of human liberty.”124
In early November 1917, Wilson said of American participation in the war:
We have been given the opportunity to serve mankind as we once served ourselves in
the great day of our Declaration of Independence, by taking up arms against a tyranny
that threatened to master and debase men everywhere and joining with other free peoples in demanding for all the nations of the world what we then demanded and
obtained for ourselves.125
In July 1918, after discussing American participation in the war as the fruits of
what the founding fathers had planted, Wilson defined the conflict as one between
peoples and tyrannical governments, governments “clothed with the strange trappings and the primitive authority of an age that is altogether alien and hostile to our
own” and “whose peoples are fuel in their hands.”126
Wilson’s war rhetoric suggested a Manichean and millenarian understanding of
the conflict. The Central Powers, ruled by Germany, fought for an age of oppression, one in which people would be used to fuel the selfish ambitions of the governments that dominated them. Against them stood the United States and the
peoples of the world, fighting for a new age of liberty and freedom. In a July 4, 1918,
address Wilson said America had come to regard the right to political liberty as a
common right of all mankind, and argued that the world now faced a menace that
endangered all that America and the world had won:
In all its old insolence, with all its ancient cruelty and injustice, military autocracy has
again armed itself against the pacific hopes of men. Having suppressed self-government
among its own people by an organization maintained in part by falsehood and treachery,
it has set out to impose its will upon its neighbors and upon us. One by one, it has compelled every civilized nation in the world either to forego its aspirations or to declare war
in their defense. We find ourselves fighting again for our national existence. We are face
to face with the necessity of asserting anew the fundamental right of free men to make
their own laws and choose their own allegiance, or else permit humanity to become the
victim of a ruthless ambition that is determined to destroy what it cannot master.127
Wilson went on to say that centuries of subjugation had not destroyed the racial
aspirations of the peoples of Eastern Europe, and they now demanded autonomy
and self-government. He called upon the American people “to unite with them in
making this our Independence Day the first that shall be consecrated to a declaration of independence for all the peoples of the world.”128
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Time and again during the war Wilson characterized the conflict as a kind of
millennial struggle between freedom and oppression. He discussed the war as “the
last decisive issue between the old principle of power and the new principle of freedom,” “the culminating and final war for human liberty,” and “this great last war for
the emancipation of men from the control of arbitrary government and the selfishness of class legislation and control.”129 Again, while this struggle was universal and
global in nature, it was simultaneously uniquely American. In February 1918
Wilson said:
This is the final struggle between the things that America has always been opposed to
and was organized to fight and the things that she stands for. It is the final contest, and
to lose it would set the world back, not a thousand, but perhaps several hundred years
in the development of human rights.130
In April 1918 Wilson described Germany’s program of world domination as
rejecting the ideals of justice and humanity and liberty for the idea “that the peoples of the world are to be made subject to the patronage and overlordship of those
who have the power to enforce it.”131 He went on to say that should that program
be carried out, “the old, age-long struggle for freedom and right” would begin again
at its beginning and “[e]verything that America has lived for and loved and grown
great to vindicate and bring to a glorious realization will have fallen in utter ruin
and the gates of mercy once more pitilessly shut upon mankind!”132 In September
Wilson depicted the German government as “plotting while honest men work, laying the fires of which innocent men, women and children are to be the fuel” and
asserted that only after the defeat of that government could the liberty of mankind
be made secure.133
Wilson’s definition of the war in Manichean and millenarian terms saw the
German government transformed into a kind of archenemy of mankind.
Germany’s “military masters” knew neither truth nor honor, oppressed their own
people with falsehood and treachery while they set about to impose their will upon
the world. It was they that were determined to destroy what they could not master,
that led the forces of ancient cruelty and injustice against the hopes of mankind,
that laid the fires of which innocent people were to be the fuel. It was their ambition that threatened to usher in an age of oppression and from which the world
needed to be emancipated. Germany’s military masters were a force of evil whose
victory would usher in a new age of darkness, but whose defeat would usher in a
new age of light.
Just as Wilson’s definition of the war transformed the German government into
a tyrannical and evil cabal that threatened to usher in an age of darkness, so too did
it transform the United States into a kind of divine champion of mankind and its
right to liberty. Wilson not only asserted that all of American history had been
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138
preparation for its wartime role as the international champion of liberty, but his
discussion of the war in Manichean and millenarian terms implied that behind
American history was divine will. Wilson made such a view explicit in June 1917,
saying the American people were to be “an instrument in the hands of God to see
that liberty is made secure for mankind.”134 Wilson said of the American Civil War:
At the day of our greatest division, there was one common passion amongst us, and
that was the passion for human freedom. We did not know that God was working out
in His own way the method by which we should best serve human freedom—by making this nation a great united, indivisible, indestructible instrument in His hands for
the accomplishment of these great things.135
Thus, in Wilson’s vision, the United States was not merely a blessed land that served
as a shining example of liberty for others to follow, it was a divine tool designed to
actively secure liberty for all mankind.
CONCLUSION: WILSON’S RHETORIC
IN
PERSPECTIVE
A number of scholars have examined, in general terms, the link between the construction of enemy images and the development of national identity.136 More
specifically, Robert L. Ivie has examined the role contrasting images of the enemy
and the American “self ” play in presidential justifications for war.137 Ivie argues that
the contrasts of force versus freedom, irrationality versus rationality, and aggression
versus defense permeate the substance and style of the call to arms throughout
American history. While an examination of Wilson’s call for war certainly supports
Ivie’s conclusions, an analysis of Wilson’s rhetoric before and after that time shows
that the contrasts described by Ivie were part of a wider rhetorical evolution, one
involving not only the construction of an enemy image, but the transformation of
the image of the American “self.” Put differently, Woodrow Wilson’s “rhetorical
restructuring” of the American “self ” was inextricably connected to the development of an enemy image.
Wilson initially defined the United States in terms of a distance from the war, a
friendship for all the nations involved, and a pacific duty to mankind. At this time
he did not discriminate between the belligerents, placing them all upon the same
high moral plane and discussing the outbreak of the war as the release of blind
material forces. Repeated German-American crises over submarine warfare provoked a changing definition of the war and diverging images of the American “self ”
and the German “other.” Following German attacks on the Lusitania, the Arabic,
and the Sussex, Wilson came to implicitly redefine the German government as an
enemy of both the United States and mankind, so far as it pursued a policy that not
only involved the violation of the essential principles of international law and the
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139
dictates of humanity, but also involved a growing American death toll. In parallel
with a developing image of the German government as a violator of the rights of
mankind, Wilson began to redefine the United States as a champion of such rights,
or more precisely as a champion of an American conception of such rights as
including the right to political liberty.
In Wilson’s war rhetoric the idea of liberty specifically, rather than the rights of
mankind in general, became central to the image of both Germany and the United
States. The “other” that was the German government was explicitly transformed
into an evil enemy of the United States and all mankind, one guilty of starting the
war in an effort to gain global domination and usher in an age of oppression and
tyranny. At the same time the United States was defined as the international champion of liberty, an agent of the divine serving mankind as it once served itself in its
fight for independence, by taking up arms against a tyranny that threatened to master and debase humanity. Wilson’s definition of what America stood for was inextricably linked to his definition of what it stood against.
While Ivie has convincingly argued that “throughout the nation’s history of
international conflict an enduring, relatively uniform vocabulary of motives has
existed,” he has conceded that “democracy . . . does not surface clearly as a god-term
until the twentieth century.”138 This development can largely be traced to Wilson’s
“rhetorical restructuring,” which effectively divided the world into two opposing
camps. On one side were the “good” democratic nations of the world and the forces
of liberty, led or personified by the United States. On the other side stood the “evil”
nondemocratic governments of the world and the forces of oppression. According
to such a worldview the defeat of democracy anywhere represented a form of defeat
for the United States and an increased risk to its security, making active American
engagement in world affairs easy to justify.
Wilson’s characterization of World War I was to have a lasting impact on presidential rhetoric. Theodore Otto Windt Jr., analyzing John F. Kennedy’s speech on
the Cuban missile crisis and Richard M. Nixon’s address on the invasion of
Cambodia, has argued that each president “elevated his particular policy to a struggle between the Free World and the Communist World, one in which ideological
angels do mortal and moral combat with ideological devils.”139 Philip Wander has
labeled such a mode of argument “prophetic dualism,” and along with Mary
Stuckey has discussed how it defined much of the Cold War.140 As a rhetorical strategy “prophetic dualism” essentially divides the world into two opposing camps, one
acting in accordance with all that is good, decent, and at one with God’s will, the
other acting in a directly opposite manner. While Wander argues that such a rhetorical strategy reflected the traditional religious cast to America’s public discourse and
the American experiences in two world wars, “prophetic dualism” can most directly
be traced back to Woodrow Wilson and the “rhetorical restructuring” discussed in
this essay. As for the ongoing relevance of Wilsonian justifications for war, one need
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140
look no further than George W. Bush’s justifications for the war on terror, in which
once again the United States is portrayed as an international champion of liberty
and democracy waging war against an evil enemy bent on tyranny and oppression.
NOTES
I would like to thank Andrew Bonnell, Joseph M. Siracusa, and Neal Rosendorf, as well as Martin
Medhurst and the anonymous reviewers, for their assistance in improving this essay.
1. Many political actors and observers alike looked to Wilsonianism following the end of the Cold
War in an effort to articulate a defining paradigm for post–Cold War American foreign policy.
Robert W. Tucker, “The Triumph of Wilsonianism?” World Policy Journal 10, no. 4 (1993): 83–99;
Tony Smith, “A Wilsonian World,” World Policy Journal 12, no. 2 (1995): 62–66; James Chace,
“The Wilsonian Moment?” Wilson Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2001): 34–41; Michael Mandelbaum, “Bad
Statesman, Good Prophet: Woodrow Wilson and the Post–Cold War Order,” The National Interest
64 (2001): 31–41.
2. Tucker, “The Triumph of Wilsonianism?” 83.
3. For example, on July 1, 2002, an article entitled “George W. Bush: The ‘W’ Stands for Wilson”
appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post discussed Bush’s “Wilsonian course for
war” on August 30, 2002, and on October 6 Walter Lafeber, again in the Washington Post, discussed Bush’s rhetoric as echoing Wilsonian ideas. On December 22, Time magazine discussed
Bush’s “muscular Wilsonianism,” while on January 20, 2003, Business Week discussed how
President Bush embraced Wilsonian internationalism in his third term in office. Similar articles
can be found in many other recent American periodicals.
4. Akira Iriye, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 3, The Globalizing of
America, 1913–1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 72.
5. James R. Andrews, “Presidential Leadership and National Identity: Woodrow Wilson and the
Meaning of America,” in The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership, ed. Leroy G. Dorsey (College
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 141.
6. Much of the scholarship examining Wilson’s rhetoric focuses on the nature of Wilson’s leadership and the related debates surrounding the so-called “rhetorical presidency” and the traditional-modern divide in presidential history. For example see James E. Ceaser et al., “The Rise of
the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (1981): 158–71; and Jeffery K. Tulis,
The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). See also relevant
chapters in Martin J. Medhurst, ed., Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 1996); and Richard J. Ellis, ed., Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical
Presidency in Historical Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).
7. Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations
(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); Amos Perlmutter, Making the World Safe for Democracy:
A Century of Wilsonianism and Its Totalitarian Challengers (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1997); Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States
and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1994).
8. Mary E. Stuckey, “‘The Domain of Public Conscience’: Woodrow Wilson and the Establishment
of a Transcendent Political Order,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (2003): 1–24; James Jeffrey Tarbox,
WOODROW WILSON’S “RHETORICAL RESTRUCTURING”
141
“The Constitutive Function of Woodrow Wilson’s Rhetoric, 1914 to 1917” (Ph.D. diss.,
Pennsylvania State University, 1992); Robert W. Tucker, “A Benediction of the Past: Woodrow
Wilson’s War Address,” World Policy Journal 17, no. 2 (2000): 77–93.
9. Ido Oren, “The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial
Germany,” International Security 20, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 147.
10. Oren, “Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace,” 148. The development of Wilsonian liberal-internationalism as a response to German imperialism and Bolshevik revolution was also discussed in
N. Gordon Levin’s groundbreaking Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War
and Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).
11. Jörg Nagler, “Pandora’s Box: Propaganda and War Hysteria in the United States during World
War I,” in Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918, ed.
Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 2000), 490.
12. An Appeal to the American People, August 18, 1914, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur
S. Link (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966–94), 30:394 [henceforth PWW].
13. PWW, 30:393.
14. PWW, 30:394.
15. PWW, 30:394.
16. An Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1914, PWW, 31:422.
17. An Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 31:423.
18. Copies of George Washington’s Farewell Address, September 19, 1796, and Thomas Jefferson’s
First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, can be found in By These Words: Great Documents of
American Liberty, Selected and Placed in Their Contemporary Setting, ed. Paul M. Angle (New
York: Rand McNally, 1954), 135–51, 154–59.
19. In 1914 approximately one-third of America’s almost 92 million people were either foreign born
or with at least one immigrant parent. Eight million German Americans, many of the four million Irish Americans, and many Russian-hating American Jews sympathized with the Central
Powers. On the other hand “old-stock” Americans tended to align with the Entente Powers.
Daniel M. Smith and Joseph M. Siracusa, The Testing of America: 1914–1945 (Saint Louis: Forum
Press, 1979), 21.
20. Daniel M. Smith, The Great Departure: The United States and World War I, 1914–1920 (New York:
John Wiley and Sons, 1965), 6–7.
21. First came disputes with Great Britain regarding contraband lists, the planned purchase of
German ships, and British rights to search and detain American ships. There soon followed disputes with the German government following its proclamation that all the waters surrounding
Great Britain and Ireland were within the seat of the war, with all enemy merchant vessels in
those waters after February 18 to be destroyed and any neutral vessels exposing themselves to
attack intended for the enemy. In turn, the British used the German proclamation as a justification to increase their own efforts toward a complete blockade of Germany, effectively announcing such a blockade, without the legal formalities, on March 1, 1915.
22. A Jackson Day Address in Indianapolis, January 8, 1915, PWW, 32:41; An Address to the Annual
Baltimore Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, March 25, 1915, PWW, 32:430;
A Welcome to the Daughters of the American Revolution, April 19, 1915, PWW, 33:16; Remarks
to the Associated Press in New York, April 20, 1915, PWW, 33:38.
23. Remarks to the Associated Press in New York, April 20, 1915, PWW, 33:38.
24. PWW, 33:38.
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25. Remarks to the Maryland Annual Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church, April 8, 1915,
PWW, 32:495.
26. PWW, 32:495.
27. Late in March 1915 a German submarine sank the British steamship Falaba, killing over 100 people, including a single American passenger. The Falaba incident was followed by German attacks
on the American vessels Cushing and Gulflight in late April and early May respectively, the latter
of which involved the deaths of two more Americans. See Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Struggle for
Neutrality, 1914–1915 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960), 356–58, 366–77.
28. The Lusitania was sunk on May 7, 1915. For a detailed discussion of the incident see Thomas A.
Bailey, “The Sinking of the Lusitania,” American Historical Review 41 (1935): 54–73.
29. The editor of the New York Sun summarized the convictions of the American people when he
said: “Germany ought not to be left in a moment’s doubt how the civilized world regards her latest display of ‘frightfulness.’ It is a deed for which a Hun would blush, a Turk be ashamed, and a
Barbary pirate apologize. To speak of technicalities and the rules of war, in the face of such
wholesale murder on the high seas, is a waste of time. The law of nations and the law of God have
been alike trampled upon.” Quoted in Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 372.
30. An Address in Philadelphia to Newly Naturalized Citizens, May 10, 1915, PWW, 33:149.
31. During a press conference on May 11, Wilson said that he had not been thinking of policy in any
particular way at the time of his address the day before, and it could not be taken as a declaration of policy of any sort. Remarks at a Press Conference, May 11, 1915, PWW, 33:153.
32. The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard), May 13, 1915, Foreign Relations
of the United States [hereafter FRUS], 1915, Supplement (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1928), 393–96; the Secretary of State ad interim to the Ambassador in Germany
(Gerard), June 9, 1915, FRUS, 1915, Supplement, 436–38; the Secretary of State to the
Ambassador in Germany (Gerard), July 21, 1915, FRUS, 1915, Supplement, 480–82.
33. Later in the note such an assertion was reiterated: “Manifestly submarines can not be used against
merchantmen, as the last few weeks have shown, without an inevitable violation of many sacred
principles of justice and humanity.” This assertion stemmed from the practical impossibility for
submarines to safely follow the rules of cruiser warfare and the procedures of visit and search.
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard), May 13, 1915, FRUS, 1915,
Supplement, 395.
34. The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard), July 21, 1915, FRUS, 1915,
Supplement, 481.
35. In response to the German war zone proclamation and the British announcement of what
amounted to a complete blockade of Germany in February and March of 1915, the Wilson
administration expressed a “reluctance to believe” that the belligerents intended to pursue policies that would violate neutral rights while issuing warnings to the belligerent governments that
reflected the differing nature of their challenges. The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in
Germany (Gerard), February 10, 1915, FRUS, 1915, Supplement, 98–99; the Secretary of State to
the Ambassador in Great Britain (Page), March 30, 1915, FRUS, 1915, Supplement, 155.
36. After discussing the conduct of German submarine warfare and the sinking of British and
American vessels, the first Lusitania note stated: “Recalling the humane and enlightened attitude
hitherto assumed by the Imperial German Government in matters of international right, and
particularly with regard to the freedom of the seas; having learned to recognize the German views
and the German influence in the field of international obligation as always engaged upon the side
of justice and humanity; and having understood the instructions of the Imperial German
WOODROW WILSON’S “RHETORICAL RESTRUCTURING”
143
Government to its naval commanders to be upon the same plane of humane action prescribed
by the naval codes of other nations, the Government of the United States was loath to believe—
it can not now bring itself to believe—that these acts, so absolutely contrary to the rules, the practices, and the spirit of modern warfare, could have the countenance or sanction of that great
Government.” The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard), May 13, 1915,
FRUS, 1915, Supplement, 394.
37. The note later stated: “Long acquainted as this Government has been with the character of the
Imperial German Government and with the high principles of equity by which they have in the
past been actuated and guided, the Government of the United States can not believe that the
commanders of the vessels which committed these acts of lawlessness did so except under a misapprehension of the orders issued by the Imperial German naval authorities. It takes it for
granted that, at least within the practical possibilities of every such case, the commanders even
of submarines were expected to do nothing that would involve the lives of non-combatants or
the safety of neutral ships, even at the cost of failing of their object of capture or destruction.”
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard), May 13, 1915, FRUS, 1915,
Supplement, 395–96.
38. The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard), July 21, 1915, FRUS, 1915
Supplement, 482.
39. Remarks at a Luncheon in New York, May 17, 1915, PWW, 33:210.
40. A Flag Day Address, June 14, 1915, PWW, 33:393.
41. The German Ambassador (Bernstorff) to the Secretary of State, September 1, 1915, FRUS, 1915,
Supplement, 531. The so-called “Arabic pledge” was printed in the New York Times, September 2,
1915.
42. On July 21 Wilson asked Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison and Secretary of the Navy Joseph
Daniels to investigate and recommend upon plans for national defense to enable the administration to propose a wise program to Congress when it convened in December. Woodrow Wilson to
Lindley M. Garrison, July 21, 1915, PWW, 34:4; Woodrow Wilson to Joseph Daniels, July 21,
1915, PWW, 34:4–5. These letters were released to the press for publication on September 3, 1915,
tacitly confirming that the president would soon lead the fight for military preparedness.
43. The tour began in New York City on January 27 and ended in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 3.
44. For early examples of Wilson’s use of the fire metaphor, see An Address on Preparedness to the
Manhattan Club, November 4, 1915, PWW, 35:167, 171; An Annual Message on the State of the
Union, December 7, 1915, PWW, 35:293–310.
45. An Address in Pittsburgh on Preparedness, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:32.
46. An Address in Pittsburgh to an Overflow Meeting, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:37. A few days later
Wilson reiterated this vision of the war, stressing the immediacy of the threat by saying that it had
been the government’s “hourly and daily anxiety . . . to see that the exposed tinder was covered
up and the sparks prevented from falling where there were magazines.” An Address on
Preparedness in Topeka, February 2, 1916, PWW, 36:89.
47. Remarks to the Clerical Conference of the New York Federation of Churches, January 27, 1916,
PWW, 36:6. In an address later the same day Wilson reiterated such an idea. After discussing
America’s love of peace, Wilson went on to say: “But, gentlemen, there is something that the
American people love better than they love peace. They love the principles upon which their
political life is founded. They are ready at any time to fight for the vindication of their character
and of their honor. They will at no time seek a contest, but they will at no time cravenly avoid it.
Because, if there is one thing that the country ought to fight for, and that every nation ought to
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fight for, it is the integrity of its own convictions. We cannot surrender our convictions. I would
rather surrender territory than surrender those ideals which are the staff of life of the soul itself.”
An Address in New York on Preparedness, January 27, 1916, PWW, 36:10.
48. Wilson reinforced his assertion that self-respect was more important than peace by invoking the
most sacred event in American history, namely the American Revolution. In an address on
January 31, Wilson discussed the revolution as having been sparked by self-respect, saying:
“America was offended and restless under the mere suggestion that she was not allowed to get her
prosperity in her own way and under the command of her own spirit and purpose, and the
American Revolution was fought for an ideal. We would have been prosperous under the British
Crown, but we should not have been as happy and we should not have respected ourselves as
much. Therefore, what America is bound to fight for when the time comes is nothing more nor
less than her self-respect.” An Address in Chicago on Preparedness, January 31, 1916, PWW,
36:72. Such an argument not only allowed Wilson to portray a new rhetorical theme in terms of
sacred and founding ideals, but served to pave the way for casting American entry in the war in
the same noble light in which the American revolution was viewed.
49. The term “honor” was obviously somewhat interchangeable with the idea of “self-respect.” By
placing American honor above its love of peace, Wilson also placed anything essential to that
honor above peace, such as the vindication of American principles and character and the maintenance of its independence.
50. An Address in Pittsburgh to an Overflow Meeting, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:38; An Address in
Milwaukee on Preparedness, January 31, 1916, PWW, 36:57–58; An Address in Chicago on
Preparedness, January 31, 1916, PWW, 36:66; Remarks from a Rear Platform in Davenport, Iowa,
February 1, 1916, PWW, 36:75; An Address in Des Moines on Preparedness, February 1, 1916,
PWW, 36:78–81; An Address to an Overflow Meeting in Topeka, February 2, 1916, PWW,
36:98–99; An Address on Preparedness in Kansas City, February 2, 1916, PWW, 36:101–2.
51. An Address in Cleveland on Preparedness, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:47.
52. An Address in Chicago on Preparedness, January 31, 1916, PWW, 36:66.
53. An Address in Pittsburgh on Preparedness, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:32. Wilson made this
point more bluntly later in his preparedness tour, saying every American cargo could “be the
point of ignition, because every cargo comes into the field of fire, comes where there are flames
which no man can control.” An Address in St. Louis on Preparedness, February 2, 1916, PWW,
36:116. See also: An Address in Cleveland on Preparedness, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:41; An
Address on Preparedness in Topeka, February 12, 1916, PWW, 36:92–93.
54. An Address on Preparedness in Kansas City, February 2, 1916, PWW, 36:108. For a similar assertion, this time with specific reference only to German submarine commanders, see An Address
in St. Louis on Preparedness, February 3, 1916, PWW, 36:116.
55. An Address in Pittsburgh on Preparedness, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:32; An Address in
Milwaukee on Preparedness, January 31, 1916, PWW, 36:57; An Address in Des Moines on
Preparedness, February 1, 1916, PWW, 36:77; An Address in St. Louis on Preparedness, February
3, 1916, PWW, 36:117.
56. An Address to the Daughters of the American Revolution, October 11, 1915, PWW, 35:49; An
Address in Cleveland on Preparedness, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:42; An Address on
Preparedness in Topeka, February 2, 1916, PWW, 36:87.
57. An Address to the Daughters of the American Revolution, October 11, 1915, PWW, 35:49.
58. An Address in Chicago on Preparedness, January 31, 1916, PWW, 36:65.
59. John Winthrop’s 1630 “City upon a Hill” address is reproduced in Major Problems in American
WOODROW WILSON’S “RHETORICAL RESTRUCTURING”
145
Foreign Relations, vol. 1, To 1920, ed. Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill (Lexington, Mass.:
D. C. Heath and Company, 1995), 29–30. This essay is not suggesting a strictly isolationist reading of Winthrop’s famous phrase or the vision it represented, for as James Chace has discussed
America’s tradition of interventionism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries renders such a
reading highly suspect. James Chace, “The Dilemmas of the City Upon a Hill,” World Policy
Journal 14, no. 1 (1997): 105–7. Nevertheless, it is quite apparent that the vision illustrated by the
rhetoric of Winthrop and Adams is of a fundamentally different nature from that articulated by
Wilson.
60. John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1821, in Paterson and Merrill, Major Problems in American Foreign
Relations, 175–76.
61. An Address in Cleveland on Preparedness, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:48.
62. An Address in Chicago on Preparedness, January 31, 1916, PWW, 36:71–72. Wilson reiterated
such an idea later in his preparedness tour, asserting that human rights were indeed worth fighting for. An Address to an Overflow Meeting in Topeka, February 2, 1916, PWW, 36:100.
63. An Address in Cleveland on Preparedness, January 29, 1916. PWW, 36:43.
64. An Address on Preparedness to the Manhattan Club, November 4, 1915, PWW, 35:168.
65. An Address in Pittsburgh to an Overflow Meeting, January 29, 1916, PWW, 36:37.
66. An Address on Preparedness in Topeka, February 2, 1916, PWW, 36:95.
67. An Annual Message on the State of the Union, December 7, 1915, PWW, 35:297.
68. An Address in St. Louis on Preparedness, February 3, 1916, PWW, 36:115–16.
69. The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard), April 18, 1916, FRUS, 1916,
Supplement, 232–34. A “statement of facts” regarding the Sussex case accompanied this note; see
FRUS, 1916, Supplement, 234–37.
70. An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 19, 1916, PWW, 36:506–10.
71. PWW, 36:507.
72. PWW, 36:507.
73. PWW, 36:509.
74. PWW, 36:508.
75. PWW, 36:508.
76. PWW, 36:508. The vague wording of this expression of friendship is significant. Wilson at this
time was constructing an enemy image of the German government, not the German people, and
his assertion of friendship for the German “nation,” given the rhetorical context, would imply a
reference to the German people. As Wilson continued to construct an enemy image of Germany,
he would later explicitly differentiate between the German people and the German government,
asserting American friendship for the former while characterizing the latter as an enemy of the
United States and mankind.
77. PWW, 36:509–10.
78. PWW, 36:510.
79. Such a concession, however, was based on the condition that the United States compel the British
to observe international law. The note stated that should the United States fail to do this, “the
German government would then be facing a new situation in which it must reserve itself complete liberty of decision.” The Ambassador in Germany (Gerard) to the Secretary of State, May 4,
1916, FRUS, 1916, Supplement, 257–60. There was also a supplementary note on the Sussex issue
sent on May 8: the Ambassador in Germany (Gerard) to the Secretary of State, May 8, 1916,
FRUS, 1916, Supplement, 265–66. For Lansing’s comments regarding the German note, see
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146
Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1954), 217.
80. The New Republic observed: “The Dublin executions have done more to drive America back into
isolation than any other event since the war began. . . . The muddle of Ireland . . . has made
America question the liberalism of Britain and the sincerity of her talk about small nationalities
or the good faith of her interest in Poles, Danes, and Alsatians.” New Republic 7 (July 29, 1916):
312–22. Quoted in Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 218. For a discussion of the
impact of the blacklist, see Thomas A. Bailey, “The United States and the Blacklist during the
Great War,” Journal of Modern History 6 (1934): 14–35.
81. For a discussion of the memorandum and related events, see Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Confusion
and Crises, 1915–1916 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 101–41.
82. Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1974), 526; Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 43–45.
83. An Address in Omaha, October 5, 1916, PWW, 37:347–48. Wilson expressed similar sentiments
throughout October; see: A Campaign Address, Shadow Lawn, October 7, 1916, PWW, 38:363;
An Address in Chicago to New Citizens, October 19, 1916, PWW, 38:492–93; A Nonpartisan
Address in Cincinnati, October 26, 1916, PWW, 38:539.
84. A Nonpartisan Address in Cincinnati, October 26, 1916, PWW, 38:540–41.
85. A Campaign Address to New Yorkers at Shadow Lawn, October 28, 1916, PWW, 38:558–59.
86. A Speech in Long Branch, New Jersey, Accepting the Presidential Nomination, September 2,
1916, PWW, 38:132.
87. An Address in Omaha, October 5, 1916, PWW, 38:348.
88. An Address in Washington to the League to Enforce Peace, May 27, 1916, PWW, 37:113, 114.
89. A Nonpartisan Address in Cincinnati, October 26, 1916, PWW, 38:541.
90. An unsigned interview with the president, probably early in November, from the Washington Post
of November 5. Presidential Papers microfilm, Woodrow Wilson Papers, series 7A: Speeches, reel
478:6. (Princeton University).
91. An Address to the Senate, January 22, 1917, PWW, 40:536–37.
92. PWW, 40:539, 537.
93. An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, February 3, 1917, PWW, 41:108–12.
94. The telegram, from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in
Mexico City, stated that should the United States enter the war the minister should propose an
alliance to the Mexican government by which they would enter the war against the United States
in return for gaining back by conquest “territory lost by her at a prior period in Texas, New
Mexico, and Arizona.” It also stated that Mexico should invite Japan to join the coalition. For the
text of the Zimmermann telegram, see From Walter Hines Page, London, February 24, 1917,
PWW, 41:280–82.
95. An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 2, 1917, PWW, 41:519–27.
96. Herbert L. Carson, “War Requested: Wilson and Roosevelt,” Central States Speech Journal 10, no.
1 (1958): 30.
97. An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 2, 1917, PWW, 41:520.
98. PWW, 41:520.
99. PWW, 41:520.
WOODROW WILSON’S “RHETORICAL RESTRUCTURING”
147
100. An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 19, 1916, PWW, 36:508.
101. A Speech in Long Branch, New Jersey, Accepting the Presidential Nomination, September 2,
1916, PWW, 38:132.
102. PWW, 38:132.
103. An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 2, 1917, PWW, 41:523.
104. An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 2, 1917, PWW, 41:523. Wilson went on to argue
that the intriguing and duplicitous nature of autocracies made them unsuitable for any concert
of nations dedicated to peace and its guarantees, saying: “A steadfast concert for peace can never
be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could
be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could
plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very
heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and
prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interests of their own.” PWW, 41:524.
105. An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, April 2, 1917, PWW, 41:524.
106. PWW, 41:525.
107. PWW, 41:525.
108. PWW, 41:525.
109. PWW, 41:526–27.
110. PWW, 41:523. Wilson reiterated such an idea later in the address, absolving the German people
of responsibility for German intrigues against the United States, saying of such intrigues: “[W]e
knew that their source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people towards us
(who were, no doubt as ignorant of them as we ourselves were), but only in the selfish designs of
a Government that did what it pleased and told its people nothing.” PWW, 41:524–25.
111. PWW, 41:526.
112. An Address on Preparedness to the Manhattan Club, November 4, 1915, PWW, 35:168.
113. A Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917, PWW, 42:499.
114. PWW, 42:499–500.
115. An Annual Message on the State of the Union, December 4, 1917, PWW, 45:194–95.
116. An Annual Message on the State of the Union, December 4, 1917, PWW, 45:202.
117. A Message to a Farmers’ Conference, January 31, 1918, PWW, 46:174. Due to illness Wilson was
unable to present this address in person, and it was presented instead by Edmund James, president of the University of Illinois.
118. PWW, 46:174–75.
119. A Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917, PWW, 42:500.
120. An Address in Buffalo to the American Federation of Labor, November 12, 1917, PWW, 45:12.
121. A Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917, PWW, 42:501.
122. PWW, 41:501.
123. PWW, 42:501. Such a view was also clearly expressed in Wilson’s call for a declaration of war
against Austria-Hungary, in which he argued: “Austria-Hungary is for the time being not her own
mistress but simply the vassal of the German government. We must face the facts as they are and
act upon them without sentiment in this stem business. The government of Austria-Hungary is
not acting upon its own initiative or in response to the wishes and feelings of its own peoples but
as the instrument of another nation. We must meet its force with our own and regard the Central
RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
148
Powers as but one. The war can be successfully conducted in no other way.” An Annual Message
on the State of the Union, December 4, 1917, PWW, 45:200.
124. An Address at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, May 30, 1917, PWW, 42:423.
125. A Thanksgiving Proclamation, November 7, 1917, PWW, 44:525.
126. An Address at Mount Vernon, July 4, 1918, PWW, 48:516.
127. Four-minute Address by the President, Read by Four-Minute Men in 5,300 Community Meetings
in the United States, July 4, 1918, The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Ray Stannard Baker
and William E. Dodd (New York: Harper, 1925–27), 5:236–37.
128. Baker and Dodd, Public Papers, 5:237.
129. An Address in Buffalo to the American Federation of Labor, November 12, 1917, PWW, 45:12;
An Address to a Joint Session of Congress, January 8, 1918, PWW, 45:539; A Message to a
Farmers’ Conference, January 31, 1918, PWW, 46:177.
130. Remarks to Farmers’ Representatives, February 8, 1918, PWW, 46:282.
131. An Address, April 6, 1918, PWW, 47:269–70.
132. PWW, 47:270.
133. A Labor Day Message, September 2, 1918, PWW, 49:414.
134. Remarks to Confederate Veterans in Washington, June 5, 1917, PWW, 42:452.
135. PWW, 42:452.
136. For example, see: Kenneth E. Boulding, “National Images and International Systems,” Journal of
Conflict Resolution 3 (1959): 120–31; Ole R. Holsti, “The Belief System and National Images: A
Case Study,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 6 (1962): 244–52; Ivar B. Neumann, Uses of the Other:
‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
Alexander Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” American Political
Science Review 88 (1994): 384–96.
137. Robert L. Ivie, “Presidential Motives for War,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 337–45;
Robert L. Ivie, “Progressive Form and Mexican Culpability in Polk’s Justification for War,” Central
States Speech Journal 30 (1979): 311–20; Robert L. Ivie, “Images of Savagery in American
Justifications for War,” Communication Monographs 47 (1980): 27–294; Robert L. Ivie, “The
Metaphor of Force in Prowar Discourse: The Case of 1812,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68 (1982):
240–53; Robert L. Ivie, “The Ideology of Freedom’s ‘Fragility’ in American Foreign Policy
Argument,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 24 (1987): 27–36; Robert L. Ivie, “Fire,
Flood, and Red Fever: Motivating Metaphors of Global Emergency in the Truman Doctrine
Speech,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 29 (1999): 570–91.
138. Robert L. Ivie, “Presidential Motives for War,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 340, 345.
139. Theodore Otto Windt Jr., “The Presidency and Speeches on International Crises: Repeating the
Rhetorical Past,” Speaker and Gavel 11, no. 1 (1973): 11. Richard A. Cherwitz has analyzed how
Lyndon Johnson cast the Tonkin Gulf incident in similar devil/God terms. Richard A. Cherwitz,
“Lyndon Johnson and the ‘Crisis’ of Tonkin Gulf: A President’s Justification of War,” Western
Journal of Speech Communication 41 (1978): 93–104.
140. Philip Wander, “The Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984):
339–61; Mary E. Stuckey, “Remembering the Future: Rhetorical Echoes of World War II and
Vietnam in George Bush’s Public Speech on the Gulf War,” Communication Studies 43 (1992):
246–56; Mary E. Stuckey, “Competing Foreign Policy Visions: Rhetorical Hybrids after the Cold
War,” Western Journal of Communication 59 (1995): 214–27.