Col. Theodore Roosevelt: Leader in the Spanish American War
Why did heroism mean so much to Roosevelt? The Roosevelts, well-to-do New York investors and civic leaders, had almost no tradition of military service, according to Renehan. Perhaps, he suggests, Roosevelt’s attitude grew out of embarrassment over his father’s lack of a military record. Roosevelt not only became a war hero himself, he wanted each of his sons to be.
When World War I erupted in Europe in the summer of 1914, Roosevelt had been gone from the White House for five years. He was bored, and the war gave him a cause to champion. Roosevelt became the most outspoken advocate of U.S. intervention. President Woodrow Wilson, meanwhile, was just as intent on keeping America out of the war.
Then, in 1917, after the Germans repeatedly sunk American ships, Wilson had to declare war. Roosevelt was jubilant. He even went to the White House hoping Wilson would allow him to lead a company of soldiers overseas. Wilson refused. Roosevelt’s four sons, however, did get to serve.
Roosevelt was on hand when Ted and Archie set sail for France in June 1917. Writes Renehan: “He made some of the party uncomfortable when he was heard to anticipate, with apparent elation, that at least one of his sons might be wounded, or possibly even killed, on the glorious field of battle.” If glory was what the father wanted, surely the sons obliged. Ted, a major, was wounded. Kermit, a captain, was decorated for gallantry in the Middle East. Archie, also a captain, was so severely wounded he was declared disabled, and 21-year-old Quentin, an aviator, was shot down over Germany. Theodore Roosevelt never got over Quentin’s death. Within six months, Roosevelt, “the Lion” was dead.
Many historians consider today Woodrow Wilson’s extension and perfection of the powers of the presidency as “… his most lasting contribution … to the development of effective national government in the United States …” (1) Wilson’s vision of leadership and of the role of the leader constituted the philosophical foundation for his actions: early in his age, he concluded that the ideal leader was a strong man, full of energy, and “whose wisdom and eloquence … would ‘master multitudes’ and teach them to ‘keep faith with the past’ and therefore to embrace ‘the progress that conserves’.” (2) Subsequently, from the late 1870s to the early 1900s, Wilson attempted to find an answer to the question: “… how could [the ideal leader] function best in the arena of national politics in a democracy like the United States ?” (3)
Influenced by his admiration of British political leaders, William E. Gladstone in particular, and of the British parliamentary system, as it was described in Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, especially, the young scholar Wilson witnessed the “… extraordinary dearth of leadership in American national politics between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt … a time of almost absolute congressional supremacy and of Presidents who were the captives of Congressional and party machines, not leaders of public opinion and makers of Federal policies.” (4) As a result, in his first and most famous book, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, published in 1885, Wilson recorded that separation of powers had led to congressional hegemony, with the Congress dividing its governing authority among its standing committees and thus giving free way to committee government. (5) Wilson viewed the only proper solution in the adoption of the British cabinet system, with a president that would become a figurehead like the monarch in England. (6) In short, as A.S. Link put it, Wilson had “written off the President as a useless fifth wheel in the American constitutional system …” (7)
Concretely, Wilson considered the presidential nominees, even if elected, unable to become leaders of their party; the president’s duties made of him a mere administrator according to Wilson; eventually, the presidency, Wilson contended, came to be entirely dominated by the Congress and became the weakest and most ineffectual branch of the government. (8) Yet, by the turn of the century, the war with Spain and Theodore Roosevelt’s energical presidency made Wilson “view the presidency in a new light” by the time he published his last scholarly lectures under the title Constitutional Government in the United States, in 1908. (9) In Wilson’s vision, the president became now automatically, after his selection, the leader of his party; from an administrator, the president had won in Wilson’s view the role of political leader of the party and of the country; and finally, Wilson considered that the president had now numerous means at his disposal to become a leader of the Congress. (10) In other words, in his views on the role of the president, Wilson “… seems to have started his political writing with a generally traditional approach to constitutional interpretation … and to have closed it with a generally modern approach.” (11) This study will attempt to compare and contrast Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the role of the president, as resulting from Wilson’s two aforementioned treatises of political science.
In Congressional Government, Wilson considers the passage from the congressional party caucus method of nominating presidential candidates to the national convention method as one of the main reasons for the loss of presidential prestige and power witnessed during the 1870s and 1880s. The congressional caucus method had been abandoned after the controversial election of 1824; yet, Wilson believes that it “was a very logical mode of party government”, (12) provided the selection were not made in secrecy, behind closed doors, as had been the custom. (13) Wilson favors the caucus method because it would allow the emergence of a candidate with high character and leadership qualities, acquired within the party through his services and accomplishments: thus, the candidate could be a quasi-leader of the party and, meanwhile, the party would be able to control his course of action after he became president. (14)
Unfortunately, the role of the presidential candidate and his relationship with his party were to be compromised by the selection in the party nominating convention, since this selection was made “by procedures and for reasons that almost guarantee the nominee’s inability to exercise leadership in case of election.” (15) Indeed, according to Wilson, a person’s “expediency and availability” were the only rules of selection: “… when the presidential candidate came to be chosen, it was recognized imperatively necessary that he should have as short a political record as possible, and that he should wear a clean and irreproachable insignificance … A decisive career which gives a man a well-understood place in public estimation constitutes a positive disability for the presidency …” (16)
The choice of such an unobtrusive person results, according to Wilson, in the impossibility for the convention, and for the party as well, to control the nominee’s actions if he be elected president. The president’s irresponsibility vis-a-vis his party is contrasted, in Congressional Government, with the English prime minister’s continuous responsibility before the House of Commons (17): “… nothing short of a well-nigh impossible impeachment can unmake a President, except four successions of the seasons … A Prime Minister must keep himself in favor with the majority, a President need only keep alive.” (18)
Twenty-two years later, when writing in Constitutional Government in the United States about the candidate’s selection by a nominating convention, Woodrow Wilson ascribes a different influence of this method upon the presidential candidate. If he still acknowledges that the convention appears to be “somewhat haphazard”, Wilson goes on to say: “In reality there is much more method, much more definite purpose, much more deliberate choice in the extraordinary process than there seems to be.” (19) As A.J. Wann avered, Wilson “had come to believe that a president becomes automatically the leader of his party through his selection by a nominating convention.” (20) Since “… sometimes the country believes in a party, but more often it believes in a man, … , the President has the role of party leader thrust upon him by the very method by which he is chosen” (21): the nominee inevitably stands before the voters as the symbol of his party. If the candidate be elected president, that can only reinforce his position as party leader: “He cannot escape being the leader of his party except by incapacity and lack of personal force, because he is at once the choice of the party and of the nation. He is the party nominee, and the only party nominee for whom the whole nation votes … If he lead the nation, his party can hardly resist him … He may be both the leader of his party and the leader of the nation …” (22) This role of the president – his metamorphosis in party leader after the nomination by the party convention – depicted by Woodrow Wilson in Constitutional Government in the United States, appears certainly very different from Wilson’s view on the same person in the same circumstances, as expressed in Congressional Government, almost a quarter of a century earlier.
Another change in Wilson’s vision of the role of the president is noticeable in the former’s discussion of the training and skills a president needs to possess. In Congressional Government, Wilson asserts his approval of the tendency to view state governors as particularly suitable for the presidential office: “The governorship of a state is very like a smaller Presidency; or, rather, the Presidency is very like a big governorship. Training in the duties of one fits for the duties of the other.” (23) As H.W. Bragdon suggested, Wilson especially commends state governorships as a school for the presidency because in his eyes the principal duty of the president is administration. (24) Indeed, in vivid yet concise terms, Wilson portrays the president as a “mere administrator”:
The business of the President, occasionally great, is not usually above routine. Most of the time it is mere administration, mere obedience of directions from the makers of policy, the Standing Committees. Except in so far as his power of veto constitutes him a part of the legislature, the President might, not inconveniently, be a permanent officer; the first official of a carefully-graded and impartially regulated civil service system, through whose sure series of merit promotions the youngest clerk might rise to the chief magistracy. He is part of the official rather than of the political machinery of the government and his duties call rather for training than for constructive genius. (25)
Moreover, convinced by the president’s administrative preeminence, Wilson stresses that administrative ability and training are underestimated in the selection of presidential candidates by people who may think “the work of administration easy enough to be done rapidly, with or without preparation, by any man of discretion and character … something which an old soldier, an ex-diplomatist, or a popular politician may be trusted to take by instinct.” (26) Instead, the fact that “one cannot have too much preparation training and experience who is to fill so high a magistracy” illustrates Wilson’s vision with respect to the administrative skills required by the presidential position. (27)
In comparison, Constitutional Government in the United States expresses ideas sharply contrasting with Wilson’s early views on presidential credentials and, in fact, on the president’s role. Concretely, the selected presidential candidate need not be a successful party leader of long experience or a skilled public administrator, as Wilson had previously advocated. (28) In Wilson’s words: “If the matter be looked a little more closely, it will be seen that the office of President, … , really does not demand actual experience in affairs so much as particular qualities of mind and character which we are at least as likely to find outside the ranks of our public men as within them.” (29)
What needs to be underscored here is the shift of emphasis and outlook on the presidency and the president’s role that took place in Woodrow Wilson’s mind; this change was influenced by the altered balance of power in the American government, a consequence of the war with Spain, in particular. (30) Concretely, Wilson asserts that “It is therefore becoming more and more true, as the business of the government becomes more complex and extended, that the President is becoming more and more a political and less and less an executive officer.” (31); Wilson further supplements his new vision, by contending that: “His executive powers are in commission, while his political powers more and more center and accumulate upon him and are in their very nature personal and inalienable.” (32); Eventually, the fact that “the cabinet is an executive, not a political body” stands as an additional consequence of a self-reliant president’s action. (33)
As stated in a previous paragraph of this paper, the new political role of the president implies, according to Wilson, that the president be the political leader of his party. Yet, Wilson envisions a larger scope for a president’s leadership: the president is also the political leader of the nation or, at least, he “… has it in his choice to be.” (34) Wilson’s own words are again the best instrument for depicting the president in his role of leader of the nation:
The nation as a whole has chosen him, and is conscious that it has no other political spokesman. He is the only national voice in affairs. Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the imagination of the country. He is the representative of no constituency but of the whole people. When he speaks in his true character, he speaks for no special interest. If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its President is of such insight and calibre. Its instinct is for unified action, and it craves a single leader. (35)
According to N. Thorsen, in his portrait of the president as national leader Wilson also ascribes the president the task of teaching the citizen to demand more of his government than spoils and the promotion of self-interest. (36) Thus, Wilson highlights the president’s ability to provide understanding of the world and even comfort, when he identifies him with “… a great human being, with an eye for the great field upon which men like himself struggle, with an unflagging pathetic hope, towards better things … He is a guide, a comrade, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.” (37)
Finally, Wilson’s vision of the relationship between the president and the Congress is, perhaps, the one that underwent the most profound changes in the 22 years elapsed from the publication of Wilson’s first book. As A.J. Wann briefly summarized this evolution, “from the view that the President had no effective power over Congress except his limited right to veto legislation, [Wilson] had changed to the belief that the President could be the true leader of legislative policy through forceful messages to Congress backed up by persuasive appeals to public opinion.” (38)
Early in his Congressional Government’s introduction of the discussion of the role of the president, Wilson contends that Congress is supreme within the American government and operates without restraint upon its own actions. (39) In his study, Wilson proposes himself to follow Bagehot’s step in his English Constitution, namely to analyze the relationship between the president and Congress as these two institutions are in action: indeed, Wilson maintains that the original separation of equal powers in the Constitution has given way to the supremacy of Congress, accompanied by the augmentation of federal power. (40) After his analysis of the organic functioning of the federal government, Wilson puts an emphasis on “the absolute dominance of the legislative over the executive and judiciary branches.” (41) Nevertheless, he takes care to mention that the office of president has known a “first estate of dignity” among the Founding Fathers of the nation. (42)
In fact, the framers of the Constitution imagined the president to be an effective restraint upon the power of Congress. (43) As Wilson puts it, the president “… was costituted one of the three great coordinate branches of the government … and … had the presidential chair always been filled by men of commanding character, of acknowledged ability, and of thorough political training, it would have continued to be a seat of the highest authority and consideration, the true centre of the federal structure, the real throne of administration, and the frequent source of policies.” (44) Wilson amplifies the contrast between the past importance of the early presidents and the loss of power of the contemporary president: “Washington and his cabinet commanded the ear of Congress, and gave shape to its deliberations; Adams … gave character to the government; and Jefferson, as President no less than as Secretary of State, was the real leader of his party. But the prestige of the presidential office has declined with the character of the Presidents.” (45)
Subsequently, Woodrow Wilson provides a brief description of how Congress has broadened its power and prestige at the expense of the president. After becoming counscious of the broad range of its powers, Congress has reorganized itself into standing committees, veritable hegemons over the legislative initiative and action processes. (46) Furthermore, through the standing committees, Congress has extended its power to all sectors of the administration, and “it has virtually taken into his own hands all the substantial powers of government.” (47) Thus, by the time of Wilson’s conception of Congressional Government, the American government is characterized by a pusillanimous “lack of influence of the President and of his cabinet.” (48) In Wilson’s own words: “In so far as the President is an executive officer he is the servant of Congress … The President, however, besides being titular head of the executive service, is to the extent of his veto a third branch of the legislature …” (49) But this last attribute does not provide the president with significant power: “The President is no greater than his prerogative of veto makes him …” (50) The fact that “Congress looks upon advice offered to it by anybody but its own members as gratuitous impertinence” (51) gives an account of the degree to which the relationship between the president and Congress deteriorated, in Wilson’s view. (52) In addition, as H.W. Bragdon points out, “In describing the federal executive, Wilson finds the President not even master in his own house, since the actual practice of administration is in the hands of his cabinet members, who in turn are under the dictation of the standing committees of Congress.” (53)
After Congressional Government, events in the American political life slowly contributed to a change in Wilson’s view on the role of the president vis-a-vis Congress. Wilson was impressed by Grover Cleveland’s strong presidential leadership but he regarded it as an “exception to the generally prevailing rule of presidential mediocrity.” (54) From works published in 1897 it appears that Wilson is still pessimist with respect to the role of the president. But in 1899, he is convinced that the new importance of foreign affairs shifted the balance of power in favor of the president. (55) In 1900, in the Preface he prepared for the fifteenth edition of Congressional Government, Wilson indicates clearly that his views concerning the presidency are different from those expressed in the book’s content. (56)
As it is asserted in Constitutional Government in the United States, the presidency appears to Wilson as a unique and powerful office, whereas the House of Representatives is much less powerful than it might have become. (57) If in Congressional Government Wilson had “brushed aside the potential of the presidency”, he brings the president to a new position of leadership, by considering him the representative of the various interests and needs of the American people. (58) Such a person, Wilson believes, “has the personality and the initiative to enforce his views both upon the people and upon Congress.” (59) Thus, from someone deeply influenced by Congress, the president has become the leader of the House and of the Senate. Nevertheless, as the president does not posess any specific means in order to compell Congress towards any action, Wilson understands the presidential leadership to be exercised “through persuasion and through appeals to public opinion.” (60) In contrast, Wilson sharply criticizes those presidents who “… have deliberately held themselves off from using the full power they might legitimately have used … [who] have held the strict literary theory of the Constitution … and have acted as if they thought that Pennsylvania Avenue should have been even longer than it is … [and] that the President as a man was no more at liberty to lead the houses of Congress by persuasion than he was at liberty to dominate them by authority…” (61) In the Wilsonian view, the president must not fail to use his full power of persuasion when dealing with Congress: “The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, – it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and Congress has not.” (62) In addition, the president controls an important means for exercing strong leadership – the initiative in foreign relations: “The initiative in foreign affairs, which the President possesses without any restriction whatever, is virtually the power to control them absolutely.” (63) If the consent of the Senate is however necessary, Wilson thinks that a secret and efficient negotiation would virtually commit the Senate as well. (64)
Thus, Wilson’s views concerning the role of the president appear to the current reader contradictory and even antagonistic. However, beyond this opposition, one might want to distinguish a common feature in Woodrow Wilson’s understanding of political power. As N. Thorsen maintained, Wilson’s thought is pervaded by his conception of the political actor as a hero, whose supreme act is that of founding “a system that organizes political activity within a scheme of self-government.” (65) As Wilson himself wrote in Congressional Government, “The highest type of statesmanship is the constructive, that which is exhibited in the new conception and execution of policies, in the building up of uniform systems of law and the establishment of great principles of legislation.” (66) Finally, one might contend that Wilson’s different visions of the role of the president corresponded to two different national political moments, which mirrored themselves in Wilson’s conception of the political actor. The self-retired presidents who followed. Abraham Lincoln, until the time of Grover Cleveland, found little room and favor in Wilson’s vision of the political leader. Yet, Wilson was the first to modify his vision of the president when the first signs of political revivification of the office came from Cleveland and, especially, from Theodore Roosevelt. As A.J. Wann summarized it, Wilson’s ceaseless emphasis on the strong leader as a necessity for effective government remained central in his vision of the president: “By paraphrasing an old French proverb, … ,the more Wilson’s theory of the Presidency seemed to change, the more it continued to be the same.” (67)
Notes
Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson: The Philosophy, Methods, and Impact of Leadership,” in Woodrow Wilson and The World of Today, ed. Arthur P. Dudden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 1
John M. Blum, The Progressive Presidents, (New York; W.W. Norton & Company Press, 1980), 64.
Link,
Woodrow Wilson, 3.
ibid., 3.
John A. Rohr, “The Constitutional World of Woodrow Wilson,” in Politics and Administration. Woodrow Wilson and American Public Administration, ed. Jack Rabin and James S. Bowman (New York: Marcel Dekker Press, 1984), 32.
Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson, The American presidency: origins and development, 1776-1993, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1993), 237.
Link, Woodrow Wilson, 3.
A. J. Wann, “The Development of Woodrow Wilson’s Theory of the Presidency: Continuity and Change”, in The Philosophy and Policies of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Earl Latham (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 65-66.
Link, Woodrow Wilson, 4-5.
Wann, The Development, 66.
Christopher Wolfe, “Woodrow Wilson: Interpreting the Constitution,” Review of Politics XLI (January 1979): 121.
Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government. A Study in American Politics, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Press, 1913), 247.
Wann, The Development, 51.
ibid., 51-52.
Niels A. Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson 1875-1910, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 50.
Wilson, Congressional, 42-43.
Wann, The Development, 52.
Wilson, Congressional, 249.
Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States, (New York: The Columbia University Press, 1911), 63.
Wann, The Development, 60.
Wilson, Constitutional, 66.
ibid., 67-69.
Wilson, Congressional, 253.
Henry W. Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson. The Academic Years, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 132.
Wilson, Congressional, 253-254.
ibid., 255-256.
Wann, The Development, 53.
ibid., 61.
Wilson, Constitutional, 65.
Arthur W. Macmahon, “Woodrow Wilson: Political Leader and Administrator,” in Lectures and Seminar at The University of Chicago, ed. The University of Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956), 206-207.
Wilson, Constitutional, 66-67.
ibid., 67.
Macmahon, Woodrow Wilson, 207.
Wilson, Constitutional, 68.
ibid., 68.
Thorsen, The Political, 210.
Woodrow Wilson, “The Law and the Facts,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966 -), XXII, 271.
Wann, The Development, 65.
ibid., 50.
John M. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson. The Years of Preparation, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 79-80.
Arthur S. Link, Wilson. The Road to the White House, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 13.
Walter Lippmann, “The Political Philosopher,” in The Greatness of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Em B.Alsop (New York: Rinehart & Company Press, 1956), 74.
Wann, The Development, 50.
Wilson, Congressional, 41.
ibid., 41-42.
Wann, The Development, 51.
Wilson, Congressional, 45.
Wann, The Development, 53.
Wilson, Congressional, 266.
ibid., 260.
ibid., 270.
Wann, The Development, 54.
Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson, 132.
Wann, The Development, 57.
John M. Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and The Priest, (Cambridge; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), 134.
Wann, The Development, 58.
David H. Burton, The Learned Presidency, (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), 175.
Mulder, Woodrow Wilson, 242.
Wilson, Constitutional, 65.
Wann, The Development, 61.
Wilson, Constitutional, 70.
ibid., 70.
ibid., 77.
Wann, The Development, 62-63.
Thorsen, The Political, 53.
Wilson, The Papers, 572.
Wann, The Development, 66.
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