The impact of Britain's "New Liberalism" on Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson called himself a “progressive” in 1916, and a “liberal” in 1917, Helena Rosenblatt asserts in her book The Lost History of Liberalism (2018). This change of nomenclature, she suggests, happened in part because Wilson “imported” what in Britain is called “the New Liberalism.” While British scholars debate whether there was such a thing as a New Liberalism, the term refers to a sea change between 19^th Century “Classical Liberalism,” which promoted small government, lassiez-faire values and free trade, and 20^th Century “New Liberalism,” which promoted an activist government that provides a social safety net for the poor, the elderly and the working class. Those who argue for the existence of a New Liberalism say it guided the establishment of a safety net by the ruling Liberal Party between 1906 and 1914.

So: what is the evidence Wilson knowingly imported New Liberalism? It certainly would seem to make sense that Wilson would be influenced by the trend. For one thing, he was more a fan of British government as a young man than he was of American government. When he was a college student Wilson wrote in his diary on July 4, 1876, “One hundred years ago America conquered England in an unequal struggle and this year she glories over it. How much happier … she would be if she had England’s form of government instead of the miserable delusion of a republic.” Secondly, it’s indisputably true that Wilson followed the Brits into progressive politics, becoming governor of New Jersey in 1910 on a progressive platform and then president in 1912 in large measure because he went out of his way to be perceived as progressive.

What is surprising, however, is the paucity of evidence that the Wilson of 1906-1914 thought very much at all about changes in either Britain’s domestic policy or the meaning of the word “liberal.” A review of all the references to Great Britain in the exhaustive Woodrow Wilson Papers in the years before the war shows zero references to the domestic policies that anchored New Liberalism under the Liberal Party between 1906 and 1914, such as Britain’s 1909 People’s Budget, which established a British version of our social security program, and other social initiatives.

Wilson did make one statement, however, to identify himself with the Liberal Party of Britain after he became governor of New Jersey, contrary to Rosenblatt’s claim that Wilson didn’t identify himself as a liberal until 1917. In an article on April 30, 1911 in Virginia’s Norfolk Landmark, the future president is quoted as saying: “We do not find any one kind of Democrats or any one kind of Republicans—they are progressives or standpatters, and there are standpatter Democrats as well as standpatter Republicans. There are Liberals, who believe that because there is to be a change things are not going to be torn down, and there are Tories who are satisfied with the deterioration of the past.” Then he asked a question people were unaccustomed to being asked: ‘Are you a Liberal, allied with the future of the race, or a Tory, satisfied with the deterioration of the past?”

What type of liberalism – whether what we today call “classical liberalism” or “modern liberalism” – Wilson does not say. When Wilson was in college, he wrote glowing essays endorsing the liberalism of William Gladstone, symbol of the classical style. When Wilson’s influences (like fellow Gladstone fan Edwin Godkin, founder of The Nation) excoriated the new liberalism, however, Wilson did not do it with them. He continued to write as though liberalism had never changed. One scholar of Wilson’s thought, William Diamond in The Economic Thought of Woodrow Wilson (1943), once speculated that Wilson’s own thinking was somewhat confused as to the distinction between two liberalisms. Though Diamond called them “American liberalism” and “economic liberalism” they appear to basically be the same as modern and classical liberalism:

“Although it is theoretically possible to draw such a distinction, it is obvious that the two ‘liberalisms’ had enough in common to permit them to become confused and frequently indistinguishable in American thought. The confusion and conflict between these two sets of doctrine may be seen in Wilson’s thought, too. During his academic years, the competitive rigors of economic individualism were frequently attenuated by Wilson’s insistence upon social responsibility and equality of opportunity. If the two were in conflict, it was because the impact of social conditions made laissez faire seem sometimes inconsistent with equality. In the years that followed, sometimes one tradition, the entrepreneurial, and sometimes the other, the equalitarian, seemed to predominate in Wilson’s thought. At all times both were present, and Wilson would have made no distinction between the two.”

I’m not the only one to find it difficult to establish a direct connection between British New Liberalism and American progressivism. In 1956 Arthur Mann wrote an essay titled “British Social Thought and American Reformers of the Progressive Era.” While the purpose of the paper is to catalog the influence of the British on American progressivism, Mann ends up despairing of being able to chart that very thing:

“But the influence of an idea eludes mathematical measurement, and the historian cannot formulate in decimal points the impact of British social criticism on the American Progressive Era. It is frustrating, for example, to attempt to measure the influence of Robert Blatchford's Merrie England on Eugene Debs's conversion to socialism, when we know that he read other socialistic books while in Woodstock jail, and when we recall that he came out of jail more Populist than Socialist. … The historian of ideas must fall back on the statement that British criticism was but one factor in the Progressive equation.”

Mann does come up with some evidence of influence from British Liberalism on American Liberalism, however. To establish that the People’s Budget had an impact on Progressive thinkers in the USA, Mann cites the 1911 autobiography of the then-mayor of Cleveland, Ohio: “When [then-Chancellor of the Exchequer] Lloyd George's budget completed the British assault on laissez faire,” Mann writes, ‘“Mayor Tom L. Johnson of Cleveland said: ‘We of the United States are interested in that struggle over there, not as outsiders but as insiders.’” It’s interesting that Mann has to go as far from Washington politics as the mayor of Cleveland to establish American interest in the revolution of what liberalism meant that was solidified in England in Lloyd George’s budget.

The literature in such transatlantic studies has produced few books, and the ones that have been written tend to comment on the relative lack of related literature. When Robert Kelly wrote The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (1969), which makes a case that British politics were heavily influential on American politics in the second half of the 19th Century, he said he planned to write a sequel that covered the same kind of influence during the Wilson years. He never wrote the sequel, perhaps in part because he failed to find the kind of direct evidence for which he was looking. The most respected book on the flow of ideas across the ocean seems to be Daniel Rodgers' Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (2000), which does a great job covering the influence of European social thought on the United States — especially through Theodore Roosevelt, as one might expect — but which finds little more establishing a direct connection between New Liberalism on Woodrow Wilson before World War One than is acknowledged here. After the war Wilson’s “secretary” Joe Tumulty did propose old-age pensions, health insurance and other measures very much like what Britain passed before the war. And both Rodgers and Rosenblatt identify the influence of new liberalism on The New Republic, which was influential on Roosevelt before the war and Wilson after. But before the war Wilson appears to have been surprisingly quiet about Britain’s influence. Rodgers does spot an interesting anecdote from the presidential campaign of 1912, when Wilson praised the government of the city of Glasgow, Scotland as being “way ahead of us.” But that’s the closest pre-war Wilson comes to acknowledging his debt to Britain in Rodger’s book.

Adam Tooze, in his book The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order (2014), implies that Wilson seemed almost uninformed of Lloyd George’s liberal accomplishments: “Wilson was no doubt more comfortable with the British than the French and wrote eloquently about the merits of the British constitution,” Tooze writes. “But precisely because Britain was the nation from which America's own political culture had historically derived, it was essential for Wilson that Britain itself must remain fixed in the past. The thought that it might be advancing along the path of democratic progress, alongside rather than behind America, was deeply unsettling. The fact that the Prime Minister who took office weeks after Wilson's re-election, Lloyd George, was perhaps the greatest pioneer of democracy in early twentieth-century Europe, was lost on the White House. Wilson was only too happy to fall in with radical critics who denounced the Prime Minister as a reactionary warmonger.” This may have been because Lloyd George achieved the Prime Minister’s office in large measure by trying to appeal to warmongers, but Tooze’s analysis casts the president’s relationship to Lloyd George’s liberal policies in an interesting light.

The word “liberalism” came to the USA quite late, Rosenblatt says:

“The word only came to the United States in the 1910s.  According to the intellectual and political commentator Walter Lippmann, it acquired common currency thanks to a group of reformers who identified as Republican Progressives in 1912 and Wilsonian Democrats by around 1916. By then the term had evolved significantly from its century-long association with French political developments, and the ideas of German “ethical” economists such as Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, and Karl Knies had made their mark—especially in England, where a “new liberalism” advocated for government intervention. Thanks largely to the travails of the British Liberal Party, liberal newspapers, and liberal theorists such as Leonard Hobhouse, this new form of liberalism spread, and by the second decade of the twentieth century, its advocates felt secure enough to drop the “new” and just call it liberalism. It was this liberalism that was imported into the United States after the war.”

Daniel Yergin agrees with her assessment in his 1998 book The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, and notes that the battle over the meaning of the word extended into the FDR years:

 “During the First World War, some of the leading Progressive writers began to use the word liberalism as a substitute for progressivism, which had become tarnished by its association with their fallen hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who had run and lost on a Progressive third party ticket. Traditional liberals were not happy to see their label transformed. In the 1920s, the New York Times criticized “the expropriation of the time-honored word ‘liberal’ and argued that ‘the Radical-Red school of thought … hand back the word liberal to its original owners. During the 1930s, Herbert Hoover and FDR duked it out as to who was the true liberal. Roosevelt won, adopting the term to ward off accusations of being left-wing. He could declare that liberalism was ‘plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of the government toward economic life.’ And since the New Deal, liberalism in the United States has been identified with an expansion of government’s role in the economy.”

In Britain, of course, the effort to reclaim the word “liberalism” by libertarians continues. But in America liberalism remains what Woodrow Wilson — inadvertently or with intention — played a major role in making it.