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Opinion Leadership and the Problem of Executive Power: Woodrow Wilson's Original Position

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Robert Eden
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Extract

This article challenges the received view that Woodrow Wilson provided the intellectual foundation for the subsequent expansion of the executive power of the presidency, by examining how Wilson arrived at his later presidentially centered account of American politics in Constitutional Government. Its focus is a memo that Wilson wrote in December 1885 while preparing an essay on “The Modern Democratic State.” Wilson's objectives in using the executive were determined in large measure by a conception of modern democratic opinion leadership that he had worked out before he entered public life. He correctly sensed that executive power, with its decisionistic bias, posed a serious problem for constitutional self-government. By making it subserve opinion leadership, Wilson meant to remove executive action from the apex of modern constitutional government and thus subordinate executive power to deliberative politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , Summer 1995 , pp. 483 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1995

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References

This study was made possible by a Sabbatical Leave Grant from Hillsdale College. I am also grateful to my colleagues Professor Mickey Craig of Hillsdale College and Professor Robert K. Faulkner of Boston College, and to the referees and editors of this journal, for critical suggestions.

1. Morison, Samuel Eliot, Commager, Henry Steele, and Leuchtenburg, William E., The Growth of the American Republic 7th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2: 338.Google Scholar See also Ceaser, James W., Presidential Selection: Theory and Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 171–73Google Scholar; Tulis, Jeffrey K., The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p.132.Google Scholar

2. Kesler, Charles R., “Woodrow Wilson and the Statesmanship of Progress,” in Natural Right and Political Right: Essays in Honor of Harry V.]affa, ed. Silver, Thomas B. and Schramm, Peter W. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1984), p. 111.Google Scholar

3. See Wilson's Preface to the Fifteenth edition, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Link, Arthur S. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1972-), 11: 567–71.Google Scholar Hereafter the Papers will be cited by volume and page, as follows: PWW 11: 567–71.

4. For an analysis of Wilson's later account see Robert Eden, “The Rhetorical Presidency and the Eclipse of Executive Power: Woodrow Wilson's Constitutional Government in the United States” (forthcoming in Polity).

5. Neustadt, Richard E., Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 3–9, 29–49.Google Scholar Wilson's book is mentioned on pp. 6, 31,89,147,163,177,205, 234, and 270.

6. See note 1 above.

7. Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 16.Google Scholar Wilson had denigrated the Framers' “Newtonian” view of the Constitution as a mere “literary theory.”

8. See Tulis, , Rhetorical Presidency, pp. 3–23, 117–44.Google Scholar

9. The study of this conception should begin with a confessional letter that Wilson wrote to his fiancee 24 February 1885: “I have a strong instinct of leadership, an unmistakably oratorical temperament, and the keenest possible delight in affairs; and it has required very constant and stringent schooling to content me with the sober methods of the scholar and the man of letters. I have no patience for the tedious toil of what is known as ‘research’; I have a passion for interpreting great thoughts to the world; I should be complete if I could inspire a great movement of opinion, if I could read the experiences of the past into the practical life of the men of today and so communicate the thought to the minds of the great mass of the people as to impel them to great political achievements. Burke was a very much greater man than Cobden or Bright; but the work of Cobden and Bright is much nearer to the measure of my powers, it seems to me, than the writing of imperishable thoughts upon the greatest problems of politics, which was Burke's mission” (PWW 4: 287). (Richard Cobden was a prime mover of the great movement of British public opinion that led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.)

10. We focus here on Wilson's early accounts of the final stage of constitutional government. For a discussion of the later writings, see Eden, “The Rhetorical Presidency and the Eclipse of Executive Power.”

11. On the invention of the modern executive and its doctrine see Mansfield, Taming the Prince.

12. Tulis, , Rhetorical Presidency, pp. 117–44Google Scholar; Ceaser, , Presidential Selection, pp. 170–212.Google ScholarEden, Robert, Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984), pp. 2–13.Google Scholar These accounts seek to do justice to Wilson's subtle and audacious notion of opinion leadership. A single quote may give the reader a provisional idea of what he had in mind: “I have pointed out in previous lectures that opinion was the great, indeed the only, coordinating force in our system; that the only thing that gave the President an opportunity to make good his leadership of the party and of the nation as against the resistance or the indifference of the House or Senate was his close and especial relation to opinion the nation over, and that, without some such leadership as opinion might sustain the President in exercising within the just limits of the law, our system would be checked of all movement, deprived of all practical synthesis by its complicated system of checks and counterpoises” (Wilson, , Constitutional Government, in PWW 18:181 [all emphasis added]).Google Scholar

13. Wilson, Woodrow, “The Modern Democratic State,” (1885), PWW 5: 58–61.Google Scholar

14. “Editorial Note,” PWW 5:57.Google Scholar

15. “One dare not… outrun or shock the common habit; dare not innovate. Such is not the task of leadership” (PWW 5:59Google Scholar). See also PWW 12:365Google Scholar: “But there are common elements in all leadership Common elements: Ordinary ideas, extraordinary abilities (W. Bagehot). The habitual ideas of the governing group or class or of the existing task as performed in the past, and a power of effective presentation, progressive modification, a power to conceive and execute the next forward step and to organize the force of the State for the movement” (“A Memorandum on Leadership” 5 May 1902).

16. Wilson, Woodrow, Memoranda for “The Modern Democratic State,” (1885), PWW 5: 59.Google Scholar By a searching analysis of the intimate nature of the state, Wilson probably means Hobbes's effort to ground sovereignty in the natural right of each individual to preserve itself. The modern doctrine of social contract would thus be an example of “searching analysis.” This inference seems confirmed by the passage from The State cited in the next footnote below.

17. Wilson, Woodrow, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics, re. ed. (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1918), p. 48.Google Scholar

18. Wilson, Woodrow, “An Introduction to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” PWW 12:168.Google Scholar

19. PWW 12:166.Google Scholar

20. PWW 5:59.Google Scholar

21. PWW 5:59.Google Scholar

22. The State, 1906 #1391 (emphasis added).

23. See notes 16 and 17, above.

24. PWW 6:227Google Scholar. (Compare Burke as quoted in Wilson's unpublished tract, Government by Debate, PWW 2:228Google Scholar.)

25. See Kesler, “Woodrow Wilson and the Statesmanship of Progress.”

26. PWW 5:65, 303–304Google Scholar; 6:224, 228–31.

27. See Eden, Robert, “The Ambivalent Executive in the Political Philosophy of Hobbes,” The International Hobbes Association Newsletter (07 1990)Google Scholar, a review essay on Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989).Google Scholar

28. PWW 6:221–39 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

29. PWW 5:89–90 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

30. PWW 5:89.Google Scholar

31. Wilson offers two unreconciled and contradictory accounts of the Founders’ political science. On the one hand, they were captive to a dogmatic and mechanical understanding of Montesquieu, and produced a literary theory devoid of prudence or great foresight. On the other, they were empiricists attentive to historical particulars, reasoning carefully in response to concrete situations, adapting precedents to novel circumstances as statesmen should. Had Wilson's understanding of the Founding and of The Federalist been more coherent, he might have discovered in their Constitution provision for deliberation, even an effort to bring the decisionist bias in the modern executive power under the sway of deliberative republican politics—and conversely, to temper the aversion of popular governments toward facing unwelcome necessities. See Mansfield, , “Republicanizing the Executive,” in Taming the Prince, pp. 53, 210, 244–45.Google Scholar The caricature saved Wilson from the painful task of subjecting his proposals to a high and exacting standard of judgment; it is unthinkable that his master Edmund Burke would have been less exacting than The Federalist.

32. PWW 5:59.Google Scholar

33. Tocqueville, Alexis De, Democracy in America, trans. Lawrence, George, ed. J.P.Mayer (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 2, bk. 2, chaps. 1–8.Google Scholar For the evidence of Wilson's study of Tocqueville, see the Index to Volumes 1–12, PWW 13:240.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., chap. 4, p. 510.

35. PWW 5:483.Google Scholar

36. PWW 5:483.Google Scholar In the phrase “synthesis instinct with,” Wilson is using “instinct” as an adjective, meaning “profoundly imbued, filled, charged.”

37. PWW 4:114–15Google Scholar; 5:90; 6:236–37. As we have seen, Richard Cobden was Wilson's first model of the opinion leader (note 9 above).

38. Kesler observes that Wilson's quest for such a synthetic statesmanship was a rejection of traditional statesmanship: “It was Woodrow Wilson who first asserted in a comprehensive way that the traditional definition of statesmanship as the highest form of practical wisdom had become untenable—and had to be reconstructed with a view to the historical understanding of being” (Kesler, , “Woodrow Wilson and the Statesmanship of Progress,” p. 104.Google Scholar In focussing upon these great alternatives, Kesler in my estimation overlooks the pivotal issue of executive power. He assumes quite rightly that the Framers thought the presidency would provide a seat for prudence (even perhaps for the highest form of practical wisdom); in this connection, they would be led by Kesler's observation to doubt the wisdom of Wilson's policy. But it is also the case that executive power stands in a certain tension with such prudence; an effort to strengthen it in response to Wilson's policy might conserve the executive office with neither Wilson's loftier possibilities not those of traditional statesmanship, as exemplified by Abraham lincoln. This seems to be the main direction the office has taken since FDR.

39. PWW 18:113.Google Scholar

40. Wilson, Woodrow, 31 08 1901, “The Real Idea of Democracy,” PWW 12: 175–79.Google Scholar See also Wilson, Woodrow, “The Ideals of America” (A Commemorative Address, 26 12 1901Google Scholar) Printed in Atlantic Monthly 90 (12 1902: 721–34)Google Scholar(PWW 12: 208–27).Google Scholar

41. See Mansfield, , Taming the Prince, pp. 53, 210, 244–45Google Scholar.

42. From Constitutional Government, PWW 18:142Google Scholar; compare Wilson's preference for “the better reason rather than the prompt dictum, PWW 5:90Google Scholar. See also the end of the lengthy quotation above at note 29.

43. See Marini, John, The Politics of Budget Control: Congress, the Presidency, and the Growth of the Administrative State (Washington, D.C.: Crane Russak, 1992).Google Scholar

44. See Mansfield, , Taming the Prince pp. 279–97.Google Scholar

45. Eden, , Political Leadership and Nihilism, pp. 1–35, 211–15,236–44.Google Scholar