For Americans, the Great War was, as historian David M. Kennedy wrote, “peculiarly an affair of the mind,” evident above all in the country’s sense of national identity. Many Americans regard “nationalism” as a vice evident in others; some scholars of that “ism” even omit the USA from their analysis. Yet the United States exhibits a recognizable form of civic nationalism, akin to Britain’s though with distinctive twists. The essence of its identity lies not in common ethnicity but in shared civic values: Americans, to quote Eric Hobsbawm, are “those who wish to be.” These values (for which a shorthand is “liberty”) were transplanted to the American colonies from England and then politicized by the spread of democracy, which embraced nearly all white males by the 1830s—far earlier than in Europe. Despite their English origin, these political values were trumpeted as preeminently American amid the anti-British frenzy that fueled two wars of independence (1776–83 and 1812–14). During the nineteenth century, the United States became a “nation of immigrants” originating from all over continental Europe, but the core of US citizenship remained these democratic liberties and also the use of English as the country’s official language.

America was wracked for its first eighty years by secessionist forces and shamed by the persistence of racial slavery in a so-called land of liberty.

A 1918 poster urging Americans to buy Liberty Bonds in support of the war effort

The infant United States was not, however, a unitary state like France or Britain but a loose federal polity, wracked for its first eighty years by secessionist forces and shamed by the persistence of racial slavery in a so-called land of liberty. These tensions culminated in the Civil War of 1861–65. The South claimed to be fighting a war of independence, akin to 1776, for what in later Wilsonian parlance would be called “self-determination.” The North’s initial aim was to stop Southern secession from what it asserted to be an indissoluble union. But as the struggle deepened, this became for the North a war to free the slaves. At Gettysburg in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln redefined America as a single democratic nation now undergoing “a new birth of freedom” to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” His assertion that America’s democracy should be a model for the whole world would be taken up fifty years later by Woodrow Wilson.

Wilson’s early career had been spent at Princeton—first as a professor of politics, then as president of the university—but his ambition was always to do politics for real. He was fascinated by the challenge of political leadership in an age of democracy, believing that presidents should listen to the public mood but not be constrained by it. Frankly contemptuous of Congress, which he regarded as a forum for small-minded local interests, he favored a British-style prime-ministerial approach in which the president led from the front, especially on foreign policy. Wilson was the son of a Presbyterian minister, and Calvinist religion helped shape his thinking, including a strong sense of Providence, especially where his own country was concerned. Although often depicted as an uptight academic, he was more exactly an intellectual—fluent with words (usually speaking from notes rather than a text) and often seduced by his own slogans. Nowhere was this more fatefully true than in foreign policy.

Woodrow Wilson was often seduced by his own slogans.

When war broke out in Europe, Wilson adopted a stance of studied neutrality. More than 8 million of America’s 105 million people had been born in Germany or had at least one German parent; conversely, many Czechs and Serbs in America sought the defeat of the Habsburgs to promote national liberation back home. “The people of the United States are drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war,” Wilson observed. “Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle.” To enter the war in Europe might therefore mean civil war at home, and the president did not wish rival ethnic nationalisms to imperil America’s overriding civic nationalism. He justified American neutrality by treating the war as a typical Old World feud, devoid of morality. One-liners about “nothing in particular started it” and America being “too proud to fight” did not go down well in London and Paris.

When Germany’s desperate resort to unrestricted U-boat warfare in 1917 forced Wilson into war, he explained his policy shift in the language of civic nationalism. His war message of April 2 envisioned a world “made safe for democracy” (perhaps his most famous slogan), with peace “planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.” The enemy, Wilson insisted, was not the German people but “Prussian autocracy”; similarly, he welcomed the collapse of tsarism as the end of a “terrible” autocracy that had repressed the “democratic” instincts of the Russian people. So, Wilson declared, the United States would fight “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.”

An American propaganda poster from World War I

In short, to recast the world in America’s self-image. There was, of course, more than a touch of self-deception here, given the racial discrimination endemic in the United States. When Wilson lectured Queen Marie of Romania about how her country should treat its minorities, she replied archly that of course the president must be well aware of minority issues because of the Negro and Japanese questions in the United States. But after a ruinous war in which ten million had died, Wilson and most Americans were more conscious of Europe’s defects than their own. He went to Paris in a position of great influence, yet he was venturing into uncharted waters. He was the first US president to leave the Western Hemisphere while in office, and none of his predecessors had been centrally involved in a European war. “Lacking adequate guidance from the American diplomatic tradition, he internationalized the heritage of his country.” His overriding aim in Paris was to create a new framework for international relations, based on a League of Nations that would reflect the reality of nationalism yet regulate its warlike tendencies within a world that was, he believed, moving inexorably toward the triumph of democracy.

But in 1919, Wilson’s ideological sound bites collided with European realities. “When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind?” asked his frustrated secretary of state, Robert Lansing. “Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?” The phrase, Lansing warned, was “simply loaded with dynamite”: it would “raise hopes which can never be realized” and “cost thousands of lives.” Rather plaintively Wilson told senators in 1919 that when he stated that “all nations had a right to self-determination,” he had spoken “without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.” He also backed off from the implications of his democratic slogans, telling journalists testily, “I am not fighting for democracy except for the peoples that want democracy. If they want it, then I am ready to fight until they get it. If they don’t want it, that is none of my business.”

President Wilson asks Congress to declare war, April 2, 1917.

Neither had Wilson thought through what he meant by a League of Nations. The idea originated among British Liberals, especially Sir Edward Grey. Haunted by the utter failure of diplomacy to halt the slide to war in 1914, the British foreign secretary advocated a forum for international discussion that would require nations to talk before they fought. This minimalist version of the League was always the preference in London. But on that foundation Wilson built a more elaborate edifice, whose heart was Article 10 of the League Covenant. This committed the League to “preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence” of all member states. Breaches of this principle could be met by economic sanctions and even military force. The British and French governments went along with Article 10 because it signified an unprecedented and vital American engagement in global affairs. The Foreign Office, however, was wary of such a rigid commitment to “territorial integrity” and “political independence” when the borders of the new Europe were so problematic, but it was unable to get an equally strong commitment in the treaty for the League to promote territorial revisions if these seemed desirable in the interests of peace. Wilson regarded Article 10 as “the key to the whole Covenant,” considering the pledge as essentially a deterrent, so strong that it would not need to be invoked, and he did not want its wording weakened in any way.

The president’s intransigence became a major stumbling block when he tried to bulldoze the League through the US Senate, controlled by his Republican political opponents. They were not persuaded by his casuistic arguments about how League membership would allow America to shape world affairs without abridging its freedom of action. Wilson’s archrival, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, did not oppose specific commitments in Europe, for instance an Anglo-American guarantee of French security against future German aggression, but he objected “in the strongest possible way to having the United States agree, directly or indirectly, to be controlled by a league which may at any time . . . be drawn in to deal with internal conflicts in other countries, no matter what those conflicts may be.” In frustration, Wilson tried to whip up popular support through a whirlwind speaking tour across the American heartland, but his frenzied efforts eventually laid him low with a paralyzing stroke. The administration was unable to secure the two-thirds majority in the Senate necessary to ratify the peace treaty. So the League of Nations came into existence without the most powerful of the victor nations. This left the British and French to try to make it work despite a central principle that they had not wanted—committed now to a new map of the Old World designed not by reason in the salons of Paris but by blood across the battlegrounds of Europe.

Wilson’s underlying conviction, born of the tragedy of world war, was that the United States must now play a decisive role in shaping world affairs, breaking out of its isolationist tradition. He attempted to sell that to his skeptical people through the language of principle rather than interest—much as British leaders had presented the war to their own people, semidetached from the continental cauldron. In both these countries during the 1920s and 1930s the bright language of idealism would struggle against dark postwar realities. But Wilson’s seductive sound bites, expressing America’s distinctive civic nationalism, would echo down the twentieth century. And the most resonant, even more than “self-determination,” was “democracy.”