88 Years After Defeat, Wilson’s Specter Still Haunts National Campaign

Thanks to the seemingly inevitable nomination of Senator John McCain, Republicans across the nation need to sit back, take a deep breath, and think long and hard about the direction and future of their party and principles, just as the Democrat Party was forced to do after a fateful election 88 years ago.

While the definition of what constitutes a “Republican” or a “Democrat” has and will change throughout the existence of the parties, the generally accepted definition of what represents “conservatism” and “liberalism” in American politics has generally remained the same over the course of the modern era of American life—which many historians peg as beginning roughly around 1920.

The liberal political philosophy in America has long supported a larger, more powerful federal government, efforts to force or mandate the implementation of certain social and intellectual theories on the populace, and an ongoing interventionist perspective of world affairs. This interventionist, internationalist streak dates back to President Wilson’s failed implementation of the League of Nations, constructed on the concept of revenge and retribution as laid out so haphazardly at Versailles.

At the same time, the conservative political philosophy has incorporated a limited federal government and a Jeffersonian view of federalism that permits the 50 states of the union to make decisions on most matters for themselves, to allow individuals and local or state governments to retain autonomy over most of their own decisions, and to largely uphold the notion that American foreign policy ought to place American national interests above the interests of any other international actor.

No election quite embodied the clash of these theories as did the 1920 race which pitted Democrat James Cox of Ohio, the state’s first three-term governor, against Republican U.S. Senator Warren Harding, also of Ohio. Neither were perfect candidates, neither had the unified support of their parties prior to the conventions, and neither were life-long politicians. In fact, both of these men cut their teeth in the newspaper industry and had served as publishers, Harding of the Marion Daily Star and Cox of The Dayton Times (later known as The News).

The Republicans came into the 1920 race with former president Teddy Roosevelt yearning for a comeback campaign, derailed only by his sudden death in 1919. The Republican field was left with a tremendous void filled by several candidates, yet none of them was a clear frontrunner heading into the convention in Chicago. Harding was nominated on the tenth ballot and set out to campaign for the presidency by stumping largely against the Wilson presidency which had badly fumbled foreign affairs and ignored domestic strife.

Wilson ran his 1916 campaign on the promise of staying out of World War I. In keeping with the trend of the honest politician, Wilson had been planning for American entry into the war long before Election Day, 1916. Despite his slogan and pledge, he sent the doughboys to fight anyway once safely reelected.

Following victory in the war that he had pledged to keep us out of, Wilson tended not to the many festering troubles in the emerging modern American nation but instead spent several months abroad attempting to resolve the problems of the fractured, fragmented, and politically contentious European society. The result was a deal which ignored ancestry, heritage, or reason and punished Germany with a series of indisputably unreasonable mandates.

By the time the 1920 race came about, Wilson had been crippled by a series of strokes, leaving his party also without a clear leader and forced to nominate a second-rate candidate who did not necessarily have the blessing of the incumbent president or the rank and file.

If the story is starting to sound like a reversal of today’s contentious Democrat campaign between Senators Clinton and Obama imitating the 1920 GOP situation (even with the absence of Al Gore somewhat mirroring the unexpected absence of T.R.) and the present Republican state of affairs resembling the 1920 Democrat condition, you are utterly correct.

The Democrats, like the Harding Republicans of 1920, are up against an opposing party front-runner who is saddled with the baggage of a president who has flubbed foreign affairs, forgotten his domestic duties, and ignored the philosophical principles that defined his party for too many years and too many victories to count. McCain, like Cox in 1920, is a weakened candidate who is now forced to defend a series of difficult, unpopular positions, promote his own candidacy, and attempt not to sully the incumbent president of his own party.

Unfortunately for Senator McCain, the 1920 race did not turn out well for the Democrats who were in a position very much like his of today. Harding and the Republicans went on to win one of the most outstanding landslide victories in history, scoring 60% of the popular vote and 404 electoral votes to Cox’s 127.

The problem for Senator McCain and the Republican Party is that they have forgotten the principles and the political philosophy that brought them landslide victories in years like 1920, instead falling into the same position the Democrats found themselves in 88 years ago—clinging to a set of failed priorities, ignorant of the problems faced on the home front, and forgetful of what happens when the national interest is snubbed in favor of appeasing the sirens of interventionism and internationalism.

Who would have expected that Wilson’s ghost could possibly help drive his party back to power the same way his failed administration and daft political philosophy was forced out?

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