World War I marked the third turning point: America stepped forward to assume its role as a world power. It happened under President Woodrow Wilson, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers.
Many people found Wilson hard to take. At the end of his career, on his return from negotiations in Paris at the close of the war, he went down in flames?—shot out of the sky like the Red Baron by a Senate and nation unwilling to join the League of Nations, which Wilson had more or less invented, or ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which he championed.
Yet Wilson stands right at the center of classical Americanism. No President spoke the language of Bible and divine mission more lucidly. His First Inaugural address was composed in pure and perfect American, Lincoln-inspired:
The nation has been deeply stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God?’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one.
During Wilson?’s administration, Americanism accomplished a fundamental transition. It had always included the idea of divine mission. But what was the mission? Until the closing of the frontier in the last decade of the 19th century, the mission was to populate the continent. With the frontier closed, the mission became ?“Americanism for the whole world.?” Of this transition, the historian William Leuchtenberg writes:
The United States believed that American moral idealism could be extended outward, that American Christian democratic ideals could and should be universally applied. . . . The culmination of a long political tradition of emphasis on sacrifice and decisive moral combat, the [world] war was embraced as that final struggle where the righteous would do battle for the Lord.
In his speech asking for a declaration of war, Wilson told Congress that ?“The world must be made safe for democracy?”?—a much-ridiculed phrase, and one that captures perfectly America?’s sense of obligation to spread its own way of life and its own good fortune. In another speech, this one explaining American war aims and intended for German consumption, Wilson concluded with these words about America: ?“God helping her, she can do no other.?” The historian Mark Sullivan comments:
Probably not one in a hundred of his American hearers recognized that paraphrase of Martin Luther?’s declaration, immortal to every German Lutheran, ?“Ich kann nicht anders?” (I can do no other).
And so we circle back to the beginnings of Protestantism, which begot Puritanism, which begot Americanism.
The final climacteric was the cold war?—its start and its finish. Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken the United States into World War II, but stubbornly refused to accept Churchill?’s diagnosis of Stalin as a ruthless imperialist. His successor, Harry Truman, followed FDR?’s path?—at first. But in 1946 Truman changed course dramatically. When Britain was no longer able to prop up the non-Communist governments of Greece and Turkey, Truman decided that the U.S. must take over that soon-to-lapse commitment. He announced the Truman Doctrine. From then on, the Soviets would no longer be allowed unlimited scope for their imperialist ambitions; the United States had decided to get into the game.
By Sam Adams of Braintree
Many people found Wilson hard to take. At the end of his career, on his return from negotiations in Paris at the close of the war, he went down in flames?—shot out of the sky like the Red Baron by a Senate and nation unwilling to join the League of Nations, which Wilson had more or less invented, or ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which he championed.
Yet Wilson stands right at the center of classical Americanism. No President spoke the language of Bible and divine mission more lucidly. His First Inaugural address was composed in pure and perfect American, Lincoln-inspired:
The nation has been deeply stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God?’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one.
During Wilson?’s administration, Americanism accomplished a fundamental transition. It had always included the idea of divine mission. But what was the mission? Until the closing of the frontier in the last decade of the 19th century, the mission was to populate the continent. With the frontier closed, the mission became ?“Americanism for the whole world.?” Of this transition, the historian William Leuchtenberg writes:
The United States believed that American moral idealism could be extended outward, that American Christian democratic ideals could and should be universally applied. . . . The culmination of a long political tradition of emphasis on sacrifice and decisive moral combat, the [world] war was embraced as that final struggle where the righteous would do battle for the Lord.
In his speech asking for a declaration of war, Wilson told Congress that ?“The world must be made safe for democracy?”?—a much-ridiculed phrase, and one that captures perfectly America?’s sense of obligation to spread its own way of life and its own good fortune. In another speech, this one explaining American war aims and intended for German consumption, Wilson concluded with these words about America: ?“God helping her, she can do no other.?” The historian Mark Sullivan comments:
Probably not one in a hundred of his American hearers recognized that paraphrase of Martin Luther?’s declaration, immortal to every German Lutheran, ?“Ich kann nicht anders?” (I can do no other).
And so we circle back to the beginnings of Protestantism, which begot Puritanism, which begot Americanism.
The final climacteric was the cold war?—its start and its finish. Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken the United States into World War II, but stubbornly refused to accept Churchill?’s diagnosis of Stalin as a ruthless imperialist. His successor, Harry Truman, followed FDR?’s path?—at first. But in 1946 Truman changed course dramatically. When Britain was no longer able to prop up the non-Communist governments of Greece and Turkey, Truman decided that the U.S. must take over that soon-to-lapse commitment. He announced the Truman Doctrine. From then on, the Soviets would no longer be allowed unlimited scope for their imperialist ambitions; the United States had decided to get into the game.
By Sam Adams of Braintree
