On Woodrow Wilson's Leaders Of Men

Posted: 6/4/2016

Introduction

I find Woodrow Wilson to be among the worst Big Government (authoritarian) U.S. presidents of the 20th century right next to Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson. We The People stiff suffer from many of their awful policies.

The early text by Woodrow Wilson is very revealing. His opinion about masses and individual citizens is as bad as in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Wilson clearly appears to be an elitist and believer in the “Great Man of history” nonsense.

I contacted the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library to find a better source of the original text, but the person from the library who responded was of very little help to put it mildly. The text is apparently not available website of the library.

Sources & Attribution

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/leaders-of-men/

June 17, 1890: Commencement address ("Leaders of Men") University of Tennessee, Knoxville

https://www.questia.com/library/115768/leaders-of-men (confirmation of this text)

Wikiquote is here of little help as the excerpts found there are rather trivial and few.

Excerpts & Comments

Emphasis added.

1. “Here, unquestionably, we come upon the heart of the perennial misunderstanding between the men who write and the men who act. The men who write love proportion; the men who act must strike out practicable lines of action, and neglect proportion.”
   [Exactly what President Wilson did, neglect proportion.]
2. “This [see previous quote] would seem to explain the well-nigh universal repugnance felt by literary men towards Democracy.”
   [I suppose, WW writes about himself.]
3. “Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses; they must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half-truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once.”
4. “No popular leader could write fiction. He could not write fiction.”
   [What an absurd nonsense!]
5. “One of the most interesting and suggestive criticisms made upon Mr. Gladstone’s leadership during the life of his ministries was that he was not decisive in the House of Commons as Palmerston and Peel had been before him. He could not help seeing two sides of a question: the force of objections evidently told upon him. His conclusions seemed the nice result of a balancing of considerations, not the commands of an unhesitating conviction.”
   [This is what Wilson had to say about one of the greatest,  classical liberal British prime ministers.]
6. “The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters: he cares much-everything for the external uses to which they may be put. His will seeks the lines of least resistance; but the whole question with him is a question of the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them? He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates. The power will fail if it be misapplied; it will be misapplied if it be not suitable both in kind and method to the nature of the materials upon which it is spent; but that nature is, after all, only its means. It is the power which dictates, dominates: the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.”
   [No authoritarian leader of the 20th century (of which there were many) could have said it better!]
7. “Men in the mass differ from men as individuals. A man who knows, and keenly knows, every man in town may yet fail to understand a mob or a mass-meeting of his fellow-townsmen. ”
   [Wilson’s obsession with mobs!]
8. “Men want the wisdom which they are expected to apply to be obvious, and to be conveniently limited in amount.”
   [Wilson’s awful understanding of individual citizens!]
9. “Persuasion is a force, but not information; and persuasion is accomplished by creeping into the confidence of those you would lead. Their confidence is not gained by preaching new thoughts to them. It is gained by qualities which they can recognize at first sight by arguments which they can assimilate at once: by the things which find easy and intermediate entrance into their minds, and which are easily transmitted to the palms of their hands or to the ends of their walking-sticks in the shape of applause.”
   [Creepy language indeed by Wilson!]
10. “Leadership, for the statesman, is interpretation. He must read the common thought: he must test and calculate very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics. If he fairly hit the popular thought, when we have missed it, are we to say that he is a demagogue? The nice point is to distinguish the firm and progressive popular thought from the momentary and whimsical popular mood, the transitory or mistaken popular passion. But it is fatally easy to blame or misunderstand the statesman.”
    [Here speaks the eternal authoritarian again.]
11. “Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.”
    [Presumably, one of Wilson’s more popular quotes. Wilson here resorts to stigmatizing. Uncompromising is not bad per se.]
12. “’Poetic justice’ we recognize as being quite out of the common run of experience.”
    [Really!]
13. “I do not believe that any man can lead who does not act, whether it be consciously or unconsciously, under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads, -a sympathy which is insight, - an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect. The law unto every such leader as these whom we now have in mind is the law of love.”
    [From the heart rather than the intellect or by the law of love. This is where Wilson becomes incoherent compared to the rest of this text.]
14. “I do not conceive the leader a trimmer, weak to yield what clamour claims, but the deeply human man, quick to know and to do the things that the hour and his people need.”
    [Wilson as a busybody knowing what the people need.]