The Fire Bringer Left on the Rock: Woodrow Wilson and the Promethean Tragedy of American Internationalism

The aspect of the Prometheus myth that tends to receive the least attention in casual reference to it is also, I think, the aspect that matters most. We remember Prometheus as the rebel, the martyr, the figure chained to the rock while the eagle comes each day to devour his liver, and we remember this because it is vivid and because suffering of that particular theatrical quality lodges itself in the memory without much effort. What we tend not to remember, or not to dwell on, is the prior moment: the moment of decision. Prometheus is not a man surprised by consequences. He knows, before he acts, what Zeus will do to him. The fire he gives to humanity is not given impulsively or accidentally; it is given with full knowledge of the cost, after what we must imagine was genuine deliberation, by a figure who has concluded that the world in which humanity continues without fire is less tolerable than the world in which he himself suffers the punishment for changing that condition. The act is not rebellion for its own sake. It is a considered moral choice made under conditions of perfect foreknowledge, which is, if one sits with it long enough, one of the more extraordinary things any figure in classical literature does.

Aeschylus understood this, and his Prometheus Bound is the text that most fully realizes the implications of it. The Prometheus of Aeschylus does not weep on the rock. He argues. He insists, from his position of total physical helplessness, that what he did was right, that Zeus's punishment is an act of tyranny rather than justice, and that the suffering he endures confirms rather than refutes the decision that produced it. He is not broken. He is, in a very specific sense, more himself in his punishment than he was before it, because the punishment has clarified what he values and what he was willing to pay for it, and the clarity is a form of authority that the chains cannot diminish.

I have been thinking about Woodrow Wilson in connection with this myth for some time, and the more carefully one examines the parallel the more it holds, and the more it illuminates things about Wilson that the ordinary vocabulary of political biography tends to obscure or flatten. Wilson is not a figure who yields easily to simple characterization. He accomplished things of genuine and lasting importance; he failed in ways that had catastrophic consequences for the world; he held convictions that were decades ahead of the international order as it actually existed, and he held other convictions, about race and about who counted as fully human, that were not merely wrong but actively harmful to people who deserved far better from the president of the United States. He is, in short, exactly the kind of figure that honest historical engagement finds most difficult, because he resists the categories of hero and villain with a thoroughness that makes both designations feel like evasions. The classical framework is useful precisely because tragedy has always been the appropriate genre for figures who are simultaneously right and wrong, visionary and blind, capable of gifts and capable of harm, and whose stories do not resolve into the comfortable verdicts that simpler narratives prefer.

To understand Wilson requires beginning where Wilson himself began, which is in the South, in the years immediately following the Civil War. He was born in 1856 in Staunton, Virginia, the son of Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister of genuine intellectual substance and considerable theological rigor. The Southern context matters in ways that are not always adequately acknowledged. Wilson grew up in a world that was processing a catastrophic defeat, that was constructing, with considerable psychological energy, the narrative of the Lost Cause that would shape Southern cultural and political life for generations, and that understood the relationship between race and political order in ways that would mark Wilson permanently and that would eventually produce the most serious failures of his presidency. Joseph Wilson was not a peripheral figure in his son's development; the cadence and the moral urgency of Wilson's best public rhetoric is recognizably a minister's son's rhetoric, the kind of speech that understands itself to be making claims on the conscience of the audience rather than merely informing or persuading it. This would serve Wilson brilliantly in Paris in 1919 and contribute to his undoing in Washington in the same year.

He studied at Davidson College briefly, then at Princeton, then attempted the law at the University of Virginia before concluding, as some people do after a period of honest self-examination, that the law was not the right instrument for what he wanted to do. He went instead to Johns Hopkins for graduate study in political science, and it was there that he wrote Congressional Government, a serious academic work that argued with considerable prescience that American constitutional arrangements concentrated too much effective power in legislative committees and too little in the executive, producing a system of governance that was simultaneously inefficient and unaccountable. This is worth pausing on, not as a biographical footnote but as an indication of the particular cast of Wilson's mind. He was, from very early in his career, a man who thought in institutional terms, who was interested not merely in the personalities and the events of political life but in the structures through which political power was organized, exercised, and made answerable. That disposition would eventually produce the League of Nations. It would also, in a different register, produce the rigidities that prevented him from saving it.

He spent nearly two decades in academic life, teaching at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan before returning to Princeton as a professor and eventually, in 1902, as president of the university. His Princeton presidency deserves more attention than it typically receives in accounts of his life, because it contains, in miniature, nearly everything that would characterize his subsequent political career. The reform impulse was genuine and produced real results; he reorganized the undergraduate curriculum, introduced the preceptorial teaching system, and raised the academic standards of the institution in ways that his predecessors had been unable or unwilling to attempt. The early achievements were impressive enough to generate a kind of reformer's momentum that carried him forward for several years. And then the momentum encountered resistance, first over his proposal to reorganize the residential system in ways that would have democratized the eating clubs, and then over the location and governance of the Graduate College, and the resistance produced in Wilson not the tactical flexibility that might have preserved something of his program but rather an increasingly rigid insistence on full vindication that eventually made compromise impossible. He lost both fights. He left Princeton in 1910 for the New Jersey governorship with genuine accomplishments behind him and a trail of embittered opponents that he had not needed to make.

The governorship is important for a reason that is sometimes overlooked: it demonstrates that Wilson was not a man constitutionally incapable of effective political action. He reformed New Jersey's political structure with a thoroughness that surprised observers who had expected the Princeton professor to be too fastidious for the demands of machine politics. He was capable of tactical flexibility and, when he judged the situation required it, of a certain ruthlessness. This means that the later failures of his presidency cannot be explained simply as the failures of a man who never understood how political power actually worked. They require a more complicated account, one that attends to the specific conditions under which Wilson's capacity for inflexibility was activated and why those conditions were present in such force during the League fight.

He won the presidency in 1912 in a fractured field, with Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose candidacy splitting the Republican vote and delivering the White House to a Democrat for the first time since Grover Cleveland. His domestic presidency, the years before the war consumed everything, was genuinely productive. The Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the first significant progressive income tax under the newly ratified Sixteenth Amendment: these were substantial achievements that reshaped the relationship between the federal government and the American economy in ways that persisted long after Wilson himself had left the scene. He was, in the domestic sphere, a serious and largely effective progressive president, and this record tends to be overshadowed by the drama of what happened afterward in ways that do him a modest injustice.

Then the war came, and everything changed, and Wilson eventually changed with it, reluctantly and then with a convert's conviction that would prove, in the end, both his greatest achievement and his most complete undoing. He had campaigned for reelection in 1916 partly on the grounds that he had kept the country out of war, which was true, and he had meant it, which was also true, and then the German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram made a position of continued neutrality genuinely untenable, and he went before Congress in April of 1917 and asked for a declaration of war in a speech that remains one of the more remarkable documents in the history of American public address. What is striking about it, reading it now, is the extent to which Wilson was already, even in the moment of committing the country to war, thinking about what would come after the war and what it needed to mean. The war, in his framing, was not simply a response to German aggression; it was a necessary precondition for the reconstruction of international order on principles that would make future wars of this kind unnecessary. He was already thinking about Paris before the fighting had properly begun.

He arrived in Paris in December of 1918 as something that no American president had been before and that none has been since. The crowds that turned out to receive him in Paris and London and Rome were not simply cheering an allied leader; they were expressing something closer to desperate hope, the hope of populations that had endured four years of industrialized slaughter on a scale the nineteenth century could not have imagined, and that needed to believe the man arriving from across the Atlantic had the power and the will to ensure it would not happen again. Contemporary accounts describe scenes of genuinely overwhelming popular enthusiasm, people weeping in the streets, reaching out to touch his car, treating him with a reverence that would have been more appropriate to a religious figure than a head of state. Wilson understood what he was being asked to carry, and he was not, I think, unaware of the danger that the weight of that expectation represented.

The League Covenant that he shepherded through the Paris negotiations over the following months was a genuine intellectual achievement, and it is worth recovering a sense of what it actually was before attending to what happened to it. Its central provision, Article X, committed member nations to respect and preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of all other members against external aggression, and to treat an attack on one as a matter of collective concern requiring collective response. This was an attempt to change the fundamental logic of international relations in a way that had no real precedent; the Concert of Europe that had managed great power relations across much of the nineteenth century had no enforcement mechanism and no formal institutional structure of this kind. The idea that sovereign nations might submit their disputes to arbitration rather than war, that the international community had both the right and the obligation to intervene before conflicts reached the catastrophic threshold of 1914, was not the naive idealism that Wilson's critics then and since have sometimes characterized it as. It was a recognition, grounded in the actual experience of what modern industrial warfare produced, that the old system of national sovereignty and bilateral alliance had become genuinely unsurvivable in the long run.

Wilson understood something that his opponents in the Senate either did not understand or chose not to acknowledge: that the world had been changed by the war in ways that made the traditional American posture of hemispheric isolation increasingly untenable, that the mechanisms of modern warfare would not respect the Atlantic Ocean indefinitely, and that American participation in a system of collective security was therefore not a gesture of generosity toward exhausted Europeans but a straightforward act of prudence in the American national interest. He made this argument repeatedly and with considerable force during the ratification fight. He was not believed, or rather he was believed by too few people in too few places that mattered.

The story of the Senate's rejection of the League is customarily told as a story about Henry Cabot Lodge, and Lodge deserves a significant portion of the responsibility. His personal animosity toward Wilson was real, documented in his own correspondence, and it would be naive to pretend that this animosity played no role in his management of the ratification fight. But making Lodge the primary villain of the piece, as popular accounts sometimes do, is historically inaccurate and, more importantly for this essay's purposes, lets Wilson off too easily, because Wilson's own conduct during the Senate fight was a significant contributing factor to the outcome.

Lodge's reservations about the League were not entirely without substance. His concern that Article X represented an unconstitutional delegation of Congress's war-making authority was a serious constitutional argument, whatever one thinks of the motives behind it. The irreconcilable opponents, men like Hiram Johnson of California and William Borah of Idaho, were expressing a strain of American political thought, the deep suspicion of permanent entangling alliances and open-ended foreign commitments, that had genuine roots in the founding tradition and that could not be dismissed simply as ignorance or isolationist selfishness. Washington's Farewell Address was a real document with real authority in American political culture, and invoking it was not dishonest. Wilson had also, over the course of the Paris negotiations, failed to bring any significant Republican figures into the process, an exclusion that was politically extraordinary given the composition of the Senate he would need to persuade, and that left him without the bipartisan credibility that ratification required.

And then there was Wilson himself in the final stages of the fight, and this is where the Promethean parallel becomes most precise and, I think, most genuinely illuminating. He had been advised by people he trusted, including Colonel House and, at certain moments, his wife Edith, that some accommodation of the Lodge reservations was both possible and necessary; that accepting modifications that did not fundamentally alter the Covenant's core provisions was preferable to losing the Treaty entirely. He refused. He decided instead to take his case directly to the American people, embarking in September of 1919 on a grueling national tour that covered thousands of miles by train and required him to deliver dozens of major speeches in the space of a few weeks, at an age and in a physical condition that made the undertaking genuinely dangerous.

In Pueblo, Colorado, on September 25th, 1919, Wilson broke down on the platform, unable to continue. He was taken back to Washington, where, a week later, he suffered a severe stroke that left him partially paralyzed, his left side weakened, his capacity for sustained rational judgment impaired in ways that his inner circle, most effectively Edith Wilson, worked very hard to conceal from the public and from Congress. He lay in the White House through the final months of the ratification fight, physically reduced to a condition of considerable helplessness, and continued from that condition to insist that no compromise was acceptable, that the Treaty must be ratified as written or not at all. The Senate voted on the Lodge reservations in November of 1919. The Treaty failed to achieve the two-thirds majority required for ratification. Wilson ordered Democratic senators to vote against the Lodge version, and enough of them obeyed to ensure the defeat of the very treaty he had spent eighteen months of his life building.

Prometheus on the rock does not recant. This is the essential thing about him. He continues to insist, from his position of absolute physical helplessness, chained to the rock with the eagle arriving daily, that what he did was right and that the punishment does not constitute a refutation. Wilson in the White House, paralyzed and politically defeated, refusing the compromise that might have preserved something of his project, was behaving in exactly this way. Whether this constitutes heroic integrity or catastrophic stubbornness is a question that the essay cannot resolve, because I am not certain it can be resolved, and I am suspicious of accounts that resolve it too confidently in either direction. What can be said is that the rigidity and the vision were not separable in Wilson any more than they are in Aeschylus's Prometheus, that the same quality of mind that produced the Covenant produced the refusal to compromise it, and that the world paid an enormous price for that inseparability.

Before continuing to what that price was, the essay must engage something that cannot be handled as a footnote or a qualification to be acknowledged and moved past. Wilson's record on race is not a peripheral matter in the accounting of his career. It is central to any honest understanding of him, and the Promethean parallel, if it is to illuminate rather than flatter, must incorporate it rather than bracket it.

He resegregated the federal civil service upon taking office in 1913, reversing the modest but real progress of the preceding decades and imposing a system of racial separation on a federal workforce that had been, however imperfectly, integrated since Reconstruction. He screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House, D.W. Griffith's glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, and reportedly offered praise for its historical accuracy, a characterization of the film that suggests either a remarkable degree of historical ignorance or something considerably worse. When a delegation of Black leaders led by William Monroe Trotter came to him to protest the segregation policies, he dismissed them with a contempt that was, even by the degraded standards of 1913 Washington, notable in its explicitness.

These are not the actions of a man who failed to live up to his ideals in moments of weakness or political pressure. They are the actions of a man whose ideals, in this domain, were genuinely cramped and genuinely harmful, and the harm was visited on people who had supported his election and who had reasonable grounds to expect better from a Democratic president of progressive inclination. This matters for the Promethean parallel in a specific way. The fire Prometheus gives is given to humanity in the abstract, which means the gift is universal in its conception, whatever its distribution in practice. Wilson's internationalism had a similar universalist rhetoric: national self-determination, the right of peoples to govern themselves, the equality of nations before the mechanisms of collective security. These were principles stated in terms that admitted no racial exception. And yet the man who stated them had resegregated the federal government, and at Paris he would accommodate the colonial claims of the European powers in ways that denied self-determination to most of the non-European world, including the peoples of Asia and Africa whose representatives had traveled to Paris with genuine hope that Wilson's principles might apply to them.

The tension cannot be resolved cleanly, because it was not a clean tension. Wilson was a man whose vision of human possibility was, in the international sphere, genuinely expansive and, in the domestic sphere as it related to Black Americans specifically, genuinely diminished. Both things were true simultaneously, and the tragedy of his career is partly the tragedy of a man whose most important gifts were inextricable from limitations that caused real suffering to real people and that complicate, without negating, the achievement they accompanied.

What the world became without the fire is not, as historical counterfactuals usually are, a matter of pure speculation. We know what happened, and the knowledge is not comfortable to sit with. Germany was burdened with a peace settlement that its population experienced as humiliating, the stab-in-the-back mythology taking root in exactly the soil that Wilson's vision, had it been realized, was designed to prevent such mythologies from finding. The League that came into existence without American membership was a League that lacked the institutional authority and the material weight to enforce its resolutions against determined great power aggression. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, the League responded with the paralysis of an institution designed for a world that had not materialized, staffed by nations that were not willing to pay the costs that enforcement would have required.

The Second World War killed, by most careful estimates, somewhere between seventy and eighty-five million people. It produced the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of others, an event that the collective security mechanisms Wilson envisioned were specifically designed to make impossible by ensuring that no nation could conduct campaigns of aggression against its own population or its neighbors without triggering collective international response. It produced the atomic bomb and the world the atomic bomb made, which is the world we still inhabit, with its permanent background condition of existential risk that humanity has been managing, with variable skill and considerable luck, for eight decades. Whether American participation in the League would have prevented all of this, or most of it, or some meaningful portion of it, cannot be stated with the precision that historical argument prefers. History is not a controlled experiment. But the argument that a functioning collective security system, backed by American power and credibility, would have made the specific sequence of events that produced the Second World War considerably less likely is not a frivolous argument. It is, in fact, the argument that the architects of the United Nations made after 1945, explicitly and with direct reference to what the League's failure had cost, and they made it because they believed it, and because they had just watched the evidence accumulate across six years of global war.

FDR's construction of the United Nations is the episode in this larger story that most directly connects the Wilson essay to what will eventually be an essay on Roosevelt himself, and it deserves a moment's attention here because it illuminates something important about the nature of Wilson's legacy. Roosevelt had served as Wilson's Assistant Secretary of the Navy; he had watched the League fight from a position close enough to understand exactly what had gone wrong and why; and he spent the years of the Second World War determined to build the postwar international order in a way that would not repeat Wilson's failure. The UN he built was a more modest institution than the League Wilson had envisioned, its collective security provisions qualified by the veto power of the permanent Security Council members in ways that made the enforcement mechanism considerably less automatic than Article X had contemplated. FDR made these concessions deliberately, because he understood that the perfect international order that Wilson had refused to compromise was less valuable than an imperfect one that the Senate would actually ratify. The United States joined the United Nations, which is the basic condition that Wilson's League never achieved; whether the UN has worked in the deeper sense that Wilson intended, whether it has actually changed the fundamental logic of great power relations, is a question the history of the subsequent eight decades answers only ambiguously.

Wilson died in February of 1924, in the house on S Street in Washington where he had spent his post-presidential years, three years removed from the White House and from any meaningful political influence. He had outlived his usefulness and most of his public standing, but not his conviction; those who knew him in his final years describe a man who continued to believe, with the same certainty that had always characterized his deepest commitments, that he had been right and that history would eventually confirm it. He was not wrong about that. The confirmation came in the form of the Second World War, which was precisely the confirmation he had been trying to prevent, and it came at a cost in human life that dwarfed anything he had been asking the Senate to risk by ratifying the Treaty.

His reputation has fluctuated considerably across the century since his death, in ways that track the broader American ambivalence about internationalism and about the progressive tradition more generally. It was high during the optimistic years of the UN's founding, lower during the various disillusions of the Cold War, and then, beginning in the 1960s and gathering force in subsequent decades, complicated in a different and more fundamental way by the belated reckoning with his racial record. In June of 2020, Princeton University, the institution he had led as its president and whose public policy school had borne his name, voted to remove his name from that school. The decision was not wrong; his racial record is serious enough to warrant the consequence, and the argument that an institution devoted to public policy and public service ought not to honor a man who used the power of the federal government to degrade the working conditions and the dignity of Black Americans is a serious argument that deserves to be taken seriously.

And yet the removal illustrates something worth noting about the peculiar afterlife of the Promethean figure in American historical memory. We have stripped his name from the school because of what he did to Black Americans, and we have thereby made it considerably easier not to think about what his failure at Paris did to the tens of millions of people who died in the war his success might have prevented. Both reckonings are necessary. The difficulty is that American historical memory tends to conduct them sequentially rather than simultaneously, which means that at any given moment we are either honoring Wilson for his internationalism and eliding his racism, or condemning him for his racism and eliding the genuine importance of what he was trying to build. He does not fit comfortably into any of the categories American historical memory prefers, and the discomfort that produces is, I would argue, exactly the discomfort that genuine engagement with his career should produce and ought not to be resolved prematurely.

The Prometheus parallel holds most firmly, in the end, at the level of structure and at the level of temperament. The structure is the visionary who gives a gift the world is not ready to receive, who is punished for the giving, who refuses to recant from the position of punishment, and whose vindication arrives too late and at too great a cost to constitute anything recognizable as justice. The temperament is the rigidity that made Wilson unable to compromise with Lodge, which is the same quality that made Prometheus unable to submit to Zeus, and in both cases the quality that produces the punishment is inseparable from the quality that produced the achievement in the first place.

Where the parallel complicates is at the level of the gift itself, and I want to be honest about this before concluding. Prometheus gives fire, which is an instrument of unambiguous civilizational value whose misuse by humanity does not diminish the value of its proper use. Wilson's gift was an institution, and institutions are more contingent things than fire; they depend for their value on the quality of the people who operate them and the political will of the nations that sustain them, and the League of Nations, even had the Senate ratified it, would have been only as good as the willingness of its member nations to use it honestly and to pay the costs that honest use required. Whether it would have prevented the Second World War is genuinely uncertain, and the essay would be doing its reader a disservice to assert the counterfactual with more confidence than the evidence supports.

What can be asserted with confidence is that Wilson saw something real, that the world order he envisioned would have been, on balance and in the aggregate, better than the world that developed in its absence, and that the people who prevented its realization, whatever the partial merit of their specific objections, bear some portion of the moral weight of what followed. That is a serious claim, and I intend it as one, with the evidence and the qualifications it requires rather than as a verdict delivered in the language of tragedy to avoid the harder work of argument.

The fire went unlit. The rock was real, and the chains, and the eagle, and the defiance that sustained the man who was chained there through the years of his political dying. What might have been, had the Senate ratified the Treaty in 1919 or had Wilson found it within himself to accept the modifications that might have secured ratification, is one of the genuinely important unanswered questions in the history of the republic and of the modern world. It deserves the full weight of our attention, and it deserves the honesty to acknowledge that the man at the center of it was simultaneously more right than his opponents and more limited than his vision, which is, in the end, exactly the combination that makes for genuine tragedy rather than simple heroism or simple failure. He was Prometheus. He gave the fire. He was left on the rock. And the world that burned in the absence of what he tried to give has not yet fully reckoned with what that cost.