The Icarus Syndrome

A History of American Hubris

Peter Beinart

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780061456473
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061998034
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

"Peter Beinart has written a vivid, empathetic, and convincing history of the men and ideas that have shaped the ambitions of American foreign policy during the last century—a story in which human fallibility and idealism flow together. The story continues, of course, and so his book is not only timely; it is indispensable." — Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars

Peter Beinart's provocative account of hubris in the American century describes Washington on the eve of three wars: World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq—three moments when American leaders decided they could remake the world in their image. Each time, leading intellectuals declared that the spread of democracy was inevitable. Each time, a president held the nation in the palm of his hand. And each time, a war conceived in arrogance brought tragedy.

But each catastrophe also imparted wisdom to a new generation of thinkers. These leaders learned to reconcile the American belief that anything is possible with the realities of a world that will never fully conform to this country's will—and in their struggles lie the seeds of American renewal today.

PART I

THE HUBRIS OF REASON

CHAPTER ONE

A SCIENTIFIC PEACE

Woodrow Wilson had very few friends, and that bothered him. People considered him “cold and removed,” he groused. He wished journalists would write about his lighter side—his love of baseball, his gift for mimicry, his flair for limericks—but instead they depicted him as a bloodless “thinking machine.” He longed for a nickname. Perhaps if he had kept his birth name, Thomas, he mused, people would call him “Tommy” and thus find him more approachable. Theodore Roosevelt was known as “Teddy,” and no one ever called him cold and removed.

The problem was that while Wilson loved the idea of friends, he wasn’t very friendly up close. One reporter compared his handshake to “a ten-cent mackerel in brown paper.” A Baltimore ward leader said the president “gives me the creeps. The time I met him, he said something to me, and I didn’t know whether God or him was talking.” Wilson knew his reputation as aloof was partly his own fault. “I have a sense of power in dealing with men collectively which I do not feel always in dealing with them singly,” he acknowledged, which may have had something to do with the fact that when he dealt with them singly, they often talked back.

There was one big exception, a genuine, honest-to-goodness presidential friend: Colonel Edward House. The two men took drives together, gossiped in their nightgowns, read poetry aloud to one another, shared secrets of their love lives. House, remarked Wilson, “is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”

For Wilson, House had three endearing characteristics. First, he shared the president’s background, having been raised in the genteel South. Second, he was a world-class sycophant. Third, he did the things that Wilson needed done but didn’t like doing himself. The “Colonel” was not actually a military man at all; he was a fixer, highly skilled in the dark arts of patronage, conspiracy, and intimidation. “He could walk on dry leaves,” remarked Oklahoma Senator Thomas Gore, “and make no more noise than a tiger.” He always made you feel “intimate,” noted another observer, “even when he was cutting your throat.”

Woodrow Wilson, a politician with little patience for the more corporeal elements of his craft, needed someone like that, and he rewarded House with both affection and power. For a long spell in the middle of Wilson’s presidency, House wielded more influence over American foreign policy than the secretary of state and the secretary of war combined. He was a kind of ambassador without portfolio: Wilson’s emissary to the actually existing human race.

Walter Lippmann also seduced the powerful, but he did it through the front door. Disappointed by his own father, he acquired others, becoming the brilliant son that great men felt they deserved. At nineteen, as a Harvard junior, he took weekly tea with one world-renowned philosopher, William James, and gossiped over dinner with another, George Santayana. After graduating, he apprenticed for the famed muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens. His first book, written at age twenty-three, drew praise from Sigmund Freud. After his second, published the following year, Theodore Roosevelt declared him “the most brilliant young man of his age in the United States.” By 1916, at age twenty-seven, he was dining at the White House, and his editorials for a new progressive journal, the New Republic, were finding their way into Wilson’s speeches. In the spring of 1917, while his contemporaries were being shipped across the Atlantic to the charnel house of World War I, he procured a draft exemption from Secretary of War Newton Baker, who was accumulating whiz kid assistants. Then, a few months later, as a damp Washington summer gave way to a frigid fall, Baker called Lippmann into his office. Colonel House wanted to meet him outside.

The fixer and the wunderkind began to walk, past Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House, and down Seventeenth Street toward the Potomac. In the distance spread the marshland that would become the National Mall, and beyond that the partially completed Lincoln Memorial, its white columns already standing, but empty of the seated figure who would reside within. As they walked, House described a project of the most fearsome secrecy. America had been at war for only six months, but already Wilson was designing a peace to redeem the slaughter. Three million Russians and five million Germans were either wounded or dead. In France, four thousand villages had simply ceased to exist. The European state system, long anchored by four vast overland empires, based in Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, and Istanbul, was imploding. Like most Americans, Wilson had hoped against hope that the United States could escape the widening gyre. He had resisted fierce pressure to join the fray, even after hundreds of U.S. civilians were drowned by German subs. On the night he finally asked Congress to declare war, he returned to the White House and wept. But now that America had joined the battle, Wilson was determined to build a new world on the ruins of the old, to ensure that barbarism never overthrew civilization again.

When the slaughter stopped, the world would need a new map, which gave every nation the territory it deserved and not an inch more. And it would need laws, so that international affairs no longer followed the law of the jungle. For Wilson, it fell to America—which he considered the sole disinterested combatant, the only nation that wanted nothing out of the war save that it not happen again—to draw up the plans. And House was tapping the country’s best minds for the task. He told Lippmann to join a group of experts working from a secret office in the New York Public Library. To disguise the project’s import, they would call it simply “the Inquiry.” From the ashes of war they would construct what House called a “scientific peace.”

A scientific peace. The concept came straight from the belly of the progressive movement. Progressivism, historians insist, was not one thing. It was a swarm of impulses and interests, often colliding with each other. But if progressivism was an ideological cacophony, one note cut through the din: faith in human reason. This faith predated World War I. Indeed, it grew from progressivism’s success in remaking the United States. Surveying their country at the dawn of the twentieth century, many progressives had seen a society hurtling toward a second civil war. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, they believed, were dividing the nation against itself, making it a battlefield of hostile tribes—business versus labor, urban versus rural, immigrant versus native-born—each trying to smash each other into submission, each trampling democracy along the way. It was up to government to impose order, not through brute force—then it would be just another selfish tribe—but through the force of reason. Government would provide answers to society’s conflicts: answers so disinterested, so rational, so self-evidently fair that the tribes would lay down their arms. It was no accident that many progressives saw a scientific peace as the answer to Europe’s war. For close to two decades, they had been fashioning a scientific peace inside the United States.

Rational, disinterested policies required rational, disinterested policymakers: experts. And experts occupied a hallowed place in the progressive mind. Lippmann’s boss at the New Republic, Herbert Croly, a homely, taciturn man—alternately likened to a yogi and a crab—suggested entrusting them with a fourth branch of government. The eccentric Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen proposed handing them control over the economy. And no one gave the concept grander expression than House himself. Five years earlier he had anonymously published a strange little novel, in which a young “mastermind” named Philip Dru, watching the United States sink into civil war, seizes power and declares himself “Administrator of the Republic.” He replaces Congress with a commission of five expert lawyers who decree all the high-minded reforms that selfish interests have long stymied. With order and reason thus enthroned in the United States, Dru sails off into the Pacific with his bride, determined to bring a scientific peace to the world beyond America’s shores.

Philip Dru: Administrator was a lousy book, but a revealing one. Dru is not merely an expert. He is also an inspirational leader, able to rally the public to his cause. And as a great leader, he is largely an educator. While they revered experts, the progressives knew it took leaders to convince—to educate—the public to accept their conclusions. “The nation,” wrote Croly, “like the individual, must go to school.” And if the nation was a schoolhouse, the president was its schoolmaster. It was no coincidence that John Dewey, progressivism’s most influential democratic theorist, was also a philosopher of education. To make democracy work, leaders had to educate Americans to embrace—indeed, to demand—the rational answers formulated on high.

This, then, was the essential progressive equation: Objective experts plus inspiring leaders plus educated citizens equal a society governed by reason, not force. And underlying it all was the most basic faith of all: in humanity itself. Against the late-nineteenth-century Social Darwinists who declared people fundamentally selfish, progressive thinkers like Dewey, Veblen, and the historian Charles Beard insisted that they were naturally generous and cooperative; it was the evil of anarchic capitalism that made them act like beasts. Against the theologians who saw humanity forever maimed by original sin, Walter Rauschenbusch and the champions of Social Gospel Christianity insisted that evil resided in the world, not in man.

Progressivism’s great discovery, declared the historian Christopher Lasch, was the “lost innocence of the race.” Progress was possible because deep inside, people were better—much better—than the world in which they lived. It was a stirring faith, nurtured by the progressive movement’s success in bringing reason and order to the United States. And at a fevered moment at the height of World War I, after the planet itself had erupted in civil war, Woodrow Wilson decided to export it—via the sword—to the entire world. For a glittering constellation of American intellectuals, it was the crusade of a lifetime, a high-water mark of American optimism that would not be reached again until our own time. And it was shot through with hubris, hubris that America could make politics between nations resemble politics between Americans, hubris that the progressives could build a world governed by reason when, as it turned out, they weren’t always that reasonable themselves. It was a hubris from which America would not fully recover until Wilson and House were dead, Lippmann was a weary, humbled man, and the world had endured more catastrophe than their innocent minds could even imagine in the brisk and intoxicating fall of 1917.

By the time House dispatched Lippmann to help draft a progressive charter for the postwar world, progressivism had already transformed public life in the United States. And it was because of their success rationalizing government at home that reformers dared imagine they could rationalize the entire globe. Until 1900, the tribes—especially the mega-corporations, or “trusts,” which had amassed vast wealth since the Civil War—had dominated the impotent, corrupt federal government. But as the new century dawned, impartial experts and heroic leaders began to seize command.

They didn’t come much more heroic than Theodore Roosevelt. A war hero, a boxer, a ferocious reader with a photographic memory, and a big-game hunter who did his own taxidermy, America’s twenty-sixth president was also the author of a four-volume history of the American West; biographies of Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Hart Benton, and Oliver Cromwell; the standard work on the Naval War of 1812; a book on child rearing; and several on the birds of New York state. As deputy sheriff of Medora, North Dakota, in the 1880s, he had captured three men who tried to steal his boat, and guarded them single-handedly for forty hours, keeping himself awake by reading Tolstoy.

Roosevelt inaugurated the progressive age. In May 1902, 150,000 soot-covered men emerged from deep inside the earth in eastern Pennsylvania. They were anthracite coal miners, men at constant risk of suffocation, asphyxiation, or explosion, and they were on strike in pursuit of an eight-hour workday, a 20 percent wage hike, and recognition of their union. Past strikes had usually been resolved with buckshot, as the trusts and their government lackeys bloodied workers into submission. But Roosevelt didn’t want a class war; he wanted a scientific peace, a settlement based on reason, not force. So he created what would become the quintessential progressive entity: an expert commission. Two engineers, a business specialist, a union leader, a judge, a priest, and the federal commissioner of labor heard testimony from 558 witnesses. They compiled statistics on the frequency of mine accidents, the quality of company-sponsored medical care, and the number of children working underground. In the end they gave the miners almost exactly half of what they asked for, along with a permanent commission to settle future disputes—all without anyone getting shot.

Using the coal settlement as a model, Roosevelt then proposed a Bureau of Corporations to gather data on business practices, and a Bureau of Labor to do the same for working conditions. When conservative senators balked, he took his case to the people, telling cheering crowds that selfish corporations must submit to rational control. In 1906, he signed the Hepburn Act, which empowered another group of experts—the Interstate Commerce Commission—to hold hearings on railroad pricing, and in case of abuse, set rates itself. Meanwhile, Upton Sinclair’s bestseller about the revolting conditions in Chicago packing houses, The Jungle, was sparking a furor over the safety of American meat. Roosevelt invited Sinclair to the White House, then sent government investigators to confirm his findings. When they did, Roosevelt muscled through the Meat Inspection Act, which authorized Agriculture Department experts to ensure that America’s chickens, hogs, and cows were not poisoning America’s people, and to shut down slaughterhouses if they did.

From coal to railroads to beef, this was the ethic of reason sprung to life. Experts and muckraking journalists gathered data about the irrationality and injustice tearing America apart. A charismatic leader used it to educate the people, building a mighty tide of public opinion that overwhelmed the selfish tribes. And thus empowered by an active and reasoned populace, the leader built a permanent machinery of investigation, creating a virtuous cycle of objective information, public education, and scientific peace.

But these achievements were a mere warm-up for what progressives would accomplish under their greatest White House champion, the man with few friends but epic dreams, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Even more than other progressives, Wilson feared a second civil war, mostly because he remembered the first one. His earliest memory was of standing outside his family’s home in Augusta, Georgia, at age four and hearing people yell that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and there would be war. When war came, he watched Confederate soldiers moaning on gurneys inside his father’s church, which had been turned into a makeshift hospital, and he peered at the Union soldiers milling in the courtyard outside, which had been turned into a makeshift jail. The war split the Wilson family asunder; its northern and southern branches never spoke again. “A boy never gets over his boyhood,” Wilson later declared, and his left him with a gnawing anxiety that order might break down once more.

Wilson never truly identified with either Blue or Gray. In his mind, they were both selfish tribes. Even as a boy, he tried to stand outside the conflict, to find an impartial, rational vantage point. When he played soldier, his imaginary armies flew neither the Stars and Stripes nor the Stars and Bars, but rather the Union Jack. As he grew older, Wilson came to idolize Lincoln, not because Lincoln had led the North to victory, but because, in Wilson’s mind, he had stood above the parochial interests of both sides and thus restored unity to a divided nation. Lincoln “was detached from every point of view and therefore superior,” Wilson said of his political hero. “You must have a man of this detachable sort.”

In his own mind, Wilson was such a man. He considered himself detached from narrow regional interests because although born in the South, he had spent his adulthood in the North and so understood both worlds. And he considered himself detached from America’s looming second civil war—between rich and poor—because he was neither a worker nor a capitalist; he was a scholar. He believed government could be “reduced to science,” a science in which he had particular expertise, since his own writings had helped establish public administration as an academic discipline in the United States. In 1910, when he ran for governor of New Jersey, his first foray into electoral politics, Wilson boasted that as the president of Princeton University he had run an institution dedicated to the production of unbiased expertise.

The job of impartial experts, in Wilson’s view, was to write impartial rules. And in their grandest form those rules took the form of constitutions. Constitutions were precious to Wilson. The son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, he was reared in a religious tradition that placed special emphasis on the covenant between God and his people. For Wilson it was this basic compact, writes one biographer, that “imposed a comprehensible pattern—orderly, predictable, and permanent—upon the transient character of human affairs.” Wilson saw the Bible as the greatest constitution of all, “the ‘Magna Charta’ of the human soul.”

It was fitting, in Wilson’s view, that the Civil War had ended in a rewritten American constitution, a new, fairer set of rules under which the entire country could peaceably live. And in his own life, Wilson drafted constitutions wherever he went. As a kid, he wrote one for his local baseball league. When he turned seventeen, he founded an imaginary yacht club and wrote a charter for it as well, complete with bylaws, regulations, and penalties for those who disobeyed. As an undergraduate at Davidson College, he transcribed the debating society’s constitution by hand. At Princeton, where he transferred, he tinkered with the constitution of not one debating society, but two. From the University of Virginia, where he studied law, to Johns Hopkins, where he got his Ph.D., to Wesleyan, where he taught, it was more of the same. Like a legalistic Johnny Apple-seed, Wilson traveled from place to place replacing disorder with order, unfairness with fairness, anarchy with law. He even recommended to his wife that they draft a constitution for their marriage. Let’s write down the basic principles, he suggested; “then we can make bylaws at our leisure as they become necessary.” It was an early warning sign, a hint that perhaps the earnest young rationalizer did not understand that there were spheres where abstract principles didn’t get you very far, where reason could never be king.

If Wilson’s devotion to order and reason was classically progressive, so was his faith that leaders could educate people to want them. It was no coincidence that so many of his constitutions were written for debate societies. “Statesmen,” Wilson declared, “must possess an orator’s soul,” and he certainly did: He was among the greatest orators in the history of American politics. If Wilson believed he was impartial, he believed just as strongly that his words could make ordinary people impartial, too. He possessed, his press secretary explained, “an almost mystical faith that the people would follow him if he could speak to enough of them.” He knew that people sometimes believed irrational, selfish things. He just didn’t think they would continue to believe them after listening to him.

Nothing in Wilson’s early years as president shook that faith. On the contrary, his already considerable self-confidence swelled as he compiled one of the most dazzling first terms in American history. A month after taking office, he put his oratorical gifts to use, becoming the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person. His topic was the tariff on imports, which had more than doubled since the Civil War. In Wilson’s view, the tariff was irrational: Many of the sheltered industries were perfectly capable of competing with their foreign competitors. They enjoyed government protection not because it served the public interest, but because they had members of Congress in their pockets. Outraged by Wilson’s proposal, the selfish tribes descended on Washin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Searchable Terms
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher