Wilson, Henry James and anti-German bias: Did Wilson's youthful attitude towards Germans influence his foreign policy?

Woodrow Wilson famously tried to insist on neutrality in the early days of World War One, refusing to declare a side between the Allies and Germany. But was he really neutral himself? Some speculate that his seeming neutrality was a cover for a dislike for Germans. But other writers argue that, far from being biased against them, he was heavily influenced by specifically German thought. Biographer Patricia O’Toole, author of the book The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made, was asked the question “Do we know if Wilson, before the war, was determinedly anti-German?” in an interview on CSPAN from the New York Historical Society on May 16, 2018.

O’Toole: “Oh yes, he’s anti-German I think from the time he is young … He’s a big Anglophile from his childhood on and he goes to Johns Hopkins where the scholarship is much influenced by German methods and he doesn’t like that--at all--so he contrives to get out of some of his classes and write this book Congressional Government. So he’s anti-German from the beginning. But in neutrality he’s trying to steer a pretty strict straight line – although American banks are lending so much more money to the Allies then they are to the Germans, that it’s neutrality, that’s the official policy, but the tilt is really to the Allies, the Americans are manufacturing a lot of goods for the Allies, so there is no question about whose side we’re going to enter. He was just trying to delay the entry into the war.”

Despite some evidence that Wilson may have had mixed attitudes towards Germans, the full picture, when a collection of sometimes amusing anecdotes in the Wilson papers and elsewhere are examined, does not support the notion that Wilson’s feelings about Germans were so strong that his foreign policy was mastered by his prejudices.

First, while Wilson did in fact have a preference for all things English from his boyhood days, he knew what he was doing when he signed up for the program at Johns Hopkins, which was not only based on German methods but also studied heavily the German political thinkers. Wilson boasted about this before he started the program in a May 1883 letter to a friend who was studying in Berlin, Richard Heath Dabney. Woodrow confessed “one could not help envying a man whose [sic] is taking, under the most favorable circumstances imaginable, the very course that one longs to take himself. I am, however, (let me tell you with rejoicings) about to do what is the next best thing, for a fellow who is confined to the limits of this continent: for I have about made up my mind to study, at Johns Hopkins University, the very subjects which you are now studying in Germany under the great masters with unpronounceable names. In doing this I am, beyond all reasonable doubt, following the natural bent of my mind.”

The model for PhD programs came from the Germans, and if one wanted to participate in advanced study one wanted to study in or after the model of the German education system. Johns Hopkins was one of the first universities to follow this model. A debate about the Germanness versus the Britishness of Woodrow Wilson was fought in American Mind in 2019 between Paul Gottfried and Ronald Pestritto:

“Paul Gottfried questions the connection between the American Progressives and German political thought—Hegel’s in particular,” wrote Pestritto. “Gottfried is correct in pointing us to Wilson’s admiration for things British; he was an Anglophile in certain important respects, especially on matters of constitutionalism, which led him to a fierce criticism of separation of powers. But Wilson was at least as taken with the Germans. His educational pedigree was decidedly more German than it was British, for starters. Wilson did his graduate work at Johns Hopkins, which was founded in 1876 for the express purpose of bringing the German educational model to the United States, and which featured a faculty educated in Germany.” 

So, given this debate and Wilson’s desire to study as a German student studies, it is naturally interesting when Wilson offers evidence of what his view of a German scholar is. He did that, oddly enough, when he gave his opinion of a Henry James short story that featured a German scholar, on March 8, 1884. Wilson wrote in a letter to his wife that the “ponderous German” character in James’s 1879 story “Bundle of Letters” was what “we all suppose a German student to be without having seen him.” This implies it is also what Wilson himself supposed a German student to be, at least before meeting one. He wasn’t the only reader to find this character distasteful. Literary critic Edward Wagenknecht said in his book The Tales of Henry James that the character, Dr. Rudolph Staub, “embodies everything James did not like about the Germans and … thinks as Allied war propaganda tried to make all Americans believe all Germans thought in 1914.” It was of course Wilson’s propagandists who disseminated that point of view about Germans during the war. Other critics were even more negative about Staub, with one critic during World War Two going so far as to say the character represented all that was wrong with Germans.   

Dr. Staub, who has taken up like all the characters in the story in a boarding house in Paris, expresses what might be considered bellicose and nationalistic thoughts in a letter to a German friend; he expected the French to carry a grudge from the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and is disappointed that they don’t.

“I mentioned to you before that my expectation of rough usage, in consequence of my German nationality, had proved completely unfounded. No one seems to know or to care what my nationality is, and I am treated, on the contrary, with the civility which is the portion of every traveller who pays the bill without scanning the items too narrowly. This, I confess, has been something of a surprise to me, and I have not yet made up my mind as to the fundamental cause of the anomaly. My determination to take up my abode in a French interior was largely dictated by the supposition that  I should be substantially disagreeable to its inmates. I wished to observe the different forms taken by the irritation that I should naturally produce; for it is under the influence of irritation that the French character most completely expresses itself. My presence, however, does not appear to operate as a stimulus, and in this respect I am materially disappointed. They treat me as they treat everyone else; whereas, in order to be treated differently, I was resigned in advance to be treated worse. I have, as I say, fully explained to myself this logical contradiction; but this is the explanation to which I tend. The French are so exclusively occupied with the idea of themselves, that in spite of the very definite image the German personality presented to them by the war of 1870, they have at present no distinct apprehension of its existence. They are not very sure that there are any Germans; they have already forgotten the convincing proofs of the fact that were presented to them nine years ago. A German was something disagreeable, which they determined to keep out of their conception of things. I therefore think that we are wrong to govern ourselves upon the hypothesis of the revanche: the French nature is too shallow for that large and powerful plant to bloom in it.”

Staub also criticizes the national characteristics of all the other European characters. He insults the French for being too pro-woman (“I need not remind you what an abnormally-developed part this sex has played in French history”), calls a Frenchman a “simian,” and predicts the demise of English speaking nations and the rise of the German homeland:

“You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that, between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family is destined to consume itself, and that with its decline the prospect of general pervasiveness, to which I alluded above, will brighten for the deep-lunged children of the Fatherland!”

An even more cartoonish portrait of bellicose Germanness finds its way into a book of anecdotes about Woodrow by his sister-in-law, Margaret Axson Elliott. That book relates one tale in which Woodrow and Ellen hire a German maid who does not get along with Margaret. She feels the need to rationalize Woodrow’s hiring a German maid: “The leading writers of the day in Woodrow’s field were German, and Ellen had long read widely in the German philosophers,” Elliott explains. The maid allegedly tells Margaret that “if my Kaiser” ordered her, she would kill the Wilson family. This story reveals more about Margaret Axson Elliott than it does about Woodrow and Ellen, but the anecdote is interesting in the context of the debate about Wilson’s attitudes towards Germans.

Overall the evidence does not support the idea that Wilson was so anti-German that he stacked the deck in World War One for England. The entertaining anecdotes we’ve examined here fill in some gaps in our picture of Wilson’s attitudes but don’t suggest that someone so excited about studying German thought was hiding a rabid anti-German perspective. 

***

Given the debate over Wilson’s true feelings about Germans, I find it disappointing Wilson had no more to say about Dr. Staub than he did. But in case any other readers find the literary reviews of significant statesmen to be of interest, I’ll close with the full commentary of Wilson on “Bundle of Letters.”

Here is the text of Wilson’s letter to his wife about Henry James’s short story:

“I can’t say that I think Henry James’s ‘Bundle of Letters’ more than clever. The conception might have been anyone’s: private letters written from the same boarding house in Paris by two Yankee girls of very pronounced types, by a Boston ‘aesthete’ of the most extravagant sort, by an unsophisticated English maiden, by a conceited, shallow Frenchman, and by a ponderous German. There is of course very considerable skill of style in the execution of the plan; but each of the letter-writers personifies only what may be said to be everybody’s ideas as to the different national characteristics. The German is what we all suppose a German student to be without having seen him, the Boston youth is just a litter bigger ass than young Bostonians are supposed to be by those who laugh at Boston, the New England girls have the hard, angular, unattractive characteristics usually supposed to be typical of women of their nativity, &c., &c. Any clever, observant, satirical, cynical traveler who had hobnobbed with numberless representatives of various nationalities might have wiled away his leisure by writing letters such as these, and could have published them without fear of being suspected of possessing anything more than a surface acquaintance with human nature. Mr. James’s art in these letters is admirable, but the pictures are commonplace—one is not certain that they are not meant for caricatures. I can imagine Macauley writing such letters for his dear sister Hannah; but I cannot imagine his publishing them a serious literary work, as part of his contribution to literature—though sister Hannah’s son would doubtless have spread them before the public without hesitation. But—“being as how” I have very uncompromising opinions of my own as to the sort of literary work that is worth while, and am nothing if [not] critical, I’d better let you off from any further expression of my views upon this very popular bit of Mr. James’ writing.”

A previous letter to his then-fiancee Ellen makes it clear he had not read anything else by James.

“Mr. Shinn, who is constantly manifesting great solicitude regarding my entertainment and the advancement of my acquaintance with ‘light’ literature, has just brought me in Henry James’s ‘Bundle of Letters,’ insisiting that I can read them ‘in a few minutes’: for I a few moments ago confessed to him, very indiscreetly, that I had never read anything of James’s. But I think—don’t you?—that the perusal of this budget of letters ‘from Miss Miranda Hope, in Paris,’ &c. may very well be postponed to the present and much more inviting pleasure of writing a letter of my own to my little queen; away down South in Dixie.’”

Ellen responded:

“By-the-way, I am curious to know what you think of Henry James, when you finish your ‘Bundle of Letters’; though I have never read that book, and don’t know whether it is a fair specimen of his style. So you didn’t examine ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ when it was ‘all the rage,’—have never made the acquaintance of ‘Miss Archer,’ ‘the spontaneous young woman from Albany’!”