"He Showed the Way to the Modern World"

"Wilson championed—and came to symbolize—progressive reform at home and liberal internationalism abroad. So long as those causes commanded wide support, Wilson's name resonated with the greats of American history. In our time, however, the American left has subordinated the causes of reform and internationalism to the politics of identity, while the American right has rejected reform and internationalism altogether. Wilson's standing has been crushed in between."

David Frum at The Atlantic calls to "Uncancel Woodrow Wilson."

"I Would Vastly Prefer a Limited Career with the Consciousness of Having Done the Right Thing"

"Finally, as the new postwar president, 'I thought the spirit of clemency was quite in harmony with the things we were trying to do in Washington; that Debs had never been guilty of any overt act; that he never countenanced destruction of government by force, and probably I could persuade him to become a factor in contributing to tranquility throughout the land.'"

Ron Radosh at The Bulwark tells the story of when President Warren Harding freed Eugene Debs from federal prison.

"Less a Contradiction Than an Example of the Unintended Effects of American Foreign Policy Rhetoric"

"Wilson was undoubtedly a racist—even by the standards of his time. His administration resegregated several federal agencies; he wrote sympathetically about the Ku Klux Klan; and he described Southern Black people as an 'ignorant and inferior race' who couldn't be trusted with political power.
"At the same time, his advocacy of 'self-determination' unintentionally inspired people fighting colonialism and European imperialism around the world."

At Slate, Joshua Keating calls Woodrow Wilson the "Accidental Anti-Imperialist."

"Formation Marked the Arrival of the United States as a Global Power Capable of Leading the World During Crisis"

"The United States has long possessed the natural resources and workforce to create great wealth; what it discovered in World War I was the ability to coordinate its industry to address not just national but global emergencies. Expecting the federal government to assume command of and direct industry in how to produce and distribute urgently needed goods does not amount to a radical usurpation of the functions of the private sector. It is, rather, a century-old American practice that amounts, as Bernard Baruch knew, to government leaders acting, as they are supposed to in dire moments, in the public interest."

David Greenberg at Politico tells the story of Woodrow Wilson and the War Industries Board during World War I.

"Debates Surrounding Our National Value System"

"'The American Dream' has always been about the prospect of success, but 100 years ago, the phrase meant the opposite of what it does now. The original 'American Dream' was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation. The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. Our ideas about the 'American Dream' froze in the 1950s. Today, it doesn't occur to anybody that it could mean anything else.

Anna Diamond at Smithsonian interviews Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream."

"The Greatest Pandemic in History"

"The 1918 flu pandemic has been a regular subject of speculation over the last century. Historians and scientists have advanced numerous hypotheses regarding its origin, spread and consequences. As a result, many of us harbor misconceptions about it."

Richard Gunderman at Smithsonian presents "Ten Myths About the 1918 Flu Pandemic."

"Inside the Mind of the Assassin"

"The assassination set in motion an unintended chain of events that culminated in carnage such as the world had never seen. The 1914-1918 conflict killed and wounded more than 35m people, both military and civilian, through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine gun. Few had reckoned on such a long, drawn-out saga of futility and wasted human lives. The teenage Princip himself did not foresee world war. His aim was to liberate swaths of the future Yugoslavia from the Austro-Habsburg yoke and create a State of united South Slavic countries."


In the Financial Times, Ian Thomson reviews Tim Butcher's The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War.

"Lions Led by Donkeys"

"'Our look is at reconciliation, to have as many former enemies together as possible and to show that we have learned from our mistakes,' said Norman Walter, a spokesman for the German Embassy in London.
"But the nature and tone of some events elsewhere have become hotly contested, especially in Britain."

Henry Chu in the Los Angeles Times reports on Europeans being divided over how to commemorate the upcoming centennial of World War I.

"The First Liberal Democratic President Took Office Exactly 100 Years Ago This Spring"

"Yet Wilson, together with his allies on Capitol Hill, also laid the foundation for the 20^th century liberal state. He signed bills that created the Federal Reserve and progressive income tax rates, secured humane working conditions for merchant seamen and railroad workers, restricted child labor and curbed the power of large corporations. After the U.S. entered the war in Europe, his administration began operating the railroads, lifting the hopes of leftists who had long advocated public ownership of what was then a rich and vital industry.
"In 1916, Wilson accepted renomination with a speech that defined political conflict in terms that remain surprisingly fresh. Our programs, he told his fellow Democrats were 'resisted at every step by the interests which the Republican Party … catered to and fostered at the expense of the country, and these same interests are now earnestly praying for a reaction which will save their privileges, for the restoration of their sworn friends to power before it is too late to recover what they have lost.'"

Michael Kazin in The New Republic calls Woodrow Wilson "The Forgotten President."

"The History of Possibility"

"Ever since the 1905 upheaval in Russia, Luxemburg had suspected Lenin’s faction of what she scornfully termed a 'barracks' mentality. A short while after the 1917 revolution, we find her writing a succession of letters, describing the situation in Russia as 'abysmal' and the Bolsheviks as deserving of 'a terrible tongue-lashing' for their repression of rival parties such as the Social Revolutionaries, and their unilateral decision to abolish the Constituent Assembly. She extends this condemnation to include the police mentality (concerning incessant foreign 'conspiracies') that underlay Soviet foreign policy. She singles out a certain 'Józef' as a particular exemplar of this attitude, and with yet another shock of premonition, one discovers that this was the 'party name' of her fellow Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka and later considered the father of the KGB. It was during this time that Luxemburg made her imperishable defense of free speech, boldly stating that the concept was meaningless unless it meant the freedom of 'the one who thinks differently.'"

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic reviews The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg.

"Laws on the Books Are Only as Wise as the People Who Enforce Them"

"In 1917 and 1918, war fever drove many politicians, in all three branches of government, to lose sight of basic rights—just as during other wars a sense of urgency led Abraham Lincoln to wrongfully suspend the habeas corpus writ and subject civilians to military trials, and Franklin Roosevelt to approve the internment of Japanese-Americans. But just as the presence of real communist spies during the early Cold War years helps to explain (but, again, not excuse) the witch hunts that followed, so the legitimate fears of German saboteurs constitute an important piece of the context in which the Espionage Act became law."

David Greenberg in Slate looks to the origins of the Espionage Act of 1917.

Fit as a Bull Moose

"Morris recounts his battle first to wrest control of his party from Taft and the conservatives and, when that failed (only because of 'naked robbery' by 'the forces of reaction,' Roosevelt insisted), to lead a third-party campaign he understood to be doomed almost from the start. Roosevelt’s courage cannot be questioned. Who else would have insisted on delivering an 80-minute speech with a would-be assassin’s bullet freshly lodged in his chest? And the Progressive platform on which he ran was a bold, even visionary document: it recognized labor’s right to organize and promised to curtail campaign spending, promote conservation and provide federal insurance for the elderly, the jobless and the sick. But the evangelistic fervor with which he campaigned probably alienated more voters than it attracted. He had the satisfaction of swamping Taft on Election Day, but the victory went to Wilson, giving the Democrats the White House for the first time in a quarter of a century."

Geoffrey C. Ward reviews Edmund Morris's Colonel Roosevelt in The New York Times.

"A License to Dream and Act in a Noble Direction"

"Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such profound impact. You provided the entire humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a lord in heaven and believers on earth."

Thaindian News runs Nobelist Shimon Peres's letter of congratulation to new Nobelist Barack Obama.

John Milton Cooper in The New York Times compares Obama to Nobelist Woodrow Wilson.

The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

"Why this difference? After all, for citizens of all three countries the date marks a shared victory. In the jargon of the time, Nov. 11, 1918, was the day of their soldiers’ triumph over 'Prussian militarism,' the vindication of a 'fight for civilization' and the successful finish of a 'war to end all wars.'"

Alexander Watson in the Los Angeles Times compares American and European views of Armistice Day, the first of which was ninety years ago today.

"Christianity in Action"

"In 1918, Debs was convicted under the recently minted Espionage Act for questioning America's entry into World War I; before that, free speech protections were more a matter of custom, easily dispensed with during wartime, than of high legal principle. But his 10-year sentence raised 1st Amendment issues with unprecedented force. Sixty-three years old and in poor health, Debs faced the prospect of dying in prison. His drama played out against a backdrop of revolutionary violence both here and abroad: While he was serving his sentence, a bomb planted by anarchists ripped through a busy Wall Street intersection, killing more than 30 people and injuring 200.
"Freeberg shows that in the end it was Debs' popularity, not a knockdown legal argument, that compelled politicians, the mainstream media and eventually federal judges to reconsider the government's power to jail dissidents."

Peter Richardson reviews Ernest Freeberg's Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent in the Los Angeles Times.

When It's Over

"It’s hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It’s not that World War I will then become history; it’s been history for a long time now. But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can’t quite touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just beyond our grasp somehow. We can’t stop that from happening. But we should, at least, take notice of it."

For Armistice Day, Richard Rubin writes in The New York Times about the last surviving American veteran sent by his country to Europe during World War I.

What's in a Name?

"It is absurd, then, that Turkish politicians and some academics (not all of them Turks) insist that the issue is somehow open to debate, though there is certainly room for more research to be done in the Turkish archives. And it is deplorable that writers in Turkey can still be prosecuted for describing the fate of the Armenians as genocide.
"Yet I remain far from convinced that anything has been gained by last week's resolution. Indeed, something may well have been lost. "

In the Los Angeles Times, Niall Ferguson wades into the congressional Armenian-genocide issue.


"The Armenian genocide is a clear-cut case of genocide, and the fact that the U.S. has avoided calling it by its rightful name for decades is shameful. Crimes against humanity must be acknowledged. Hitler infamously said, with reference to the Poles, 'Who, after all, is today speaking of the destruction of the Armenians?' Historical memory must not be sold away for a few pieces of silver. No one would countenance allowing Germany to deny its guilt for killing 6 million Jews. Why should Turkey be let off the hook for a slightly earlier holocaust that took the lives of as many as 1.5 million Armenians "

But in Salon, Gary Kamiya disagrees with Ferguson's arguments.

Palmer Raiding

"Yet when Hoover showed up for his first day of work at the Department of Justice in June 1917, he was a bright 22-year-old, just out of law school. He still had boyish good looks and was cocky and driven. The country had just entered World War I, and Hoover had avoided the wartime draft. Instead, he was ready to help win the war at home, to save the country from spies and subversives.
"What changed this young eager beaver into the crass, cynical tyrant of later years?
"The fact is, Hoover learned his attitudes and worldview from teachers at the Justice Department during his early years there, when the country was going through a period much like today's war on terror."

Kenneth D. Ackerman in the Los Angeles Times traces the emergence of J. Edgar Hoover.

George T.R. Bush

"A glance through T.R.'s biography makes it clear that, while the forty-third president has little in common with the twenty-sixth when it comes to reining in big business, embracing the environment, or reading and writing in voluminous amounts, he bears a strong resemblance to the angry, increasingly conservative Roosevelt who remained a major national figure well after his Bull Moose presidential run in 1912."

In The New Republic, Michael Currie Schaffer connects George W. Bush and the World War I-era views of Theodore Roosevelt.

"Posthumous Pardon"

"'I want to send a message,' said Schweitzer. 'Neighbor informing on neighbor—this isn't the American way, it isn't the Montana way, it isn't the cowboy way. We weren't the only state to have this kind of hysteria, but we will be the first state to say, "We had it wrong."'"

The Los Angeles Times reports the state of Montana pardoning seventy-eight people convicted of sedition in the 1910s.