He learned it from his Dad: Woodrow Wilson's opposition to inalienable rights

It may be shocking to modern ears to hear Woodrow Wilson did not agree with the founders about the inalienable rights of all men. But he did not: "We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence," Wilson said in 1907. "We are not here to worship men or a document."

“No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual,” Wilson wrote a year later, “and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle. The rights of man are easy to discourse of … but they are infinitely hard to put into practice. Such theories are never ‘law.’ … Only that is ‘law’ which can be executed, and the rights of man are singularly difficult to execute.”

Nowhere in the copious literature about Woodrow Wilson, it would seem, does anyone suggest that this surprisingly derisive view of the Declaration was bequeathed to him by his dad, a Presbyterian minister who preached in the South during the Civil War. Wilson’s idiosyncratic dislike of the philosophy of natural rights has mostly been discussed by conservative scholars, who have implied that Wilson’s aversion to the preface betrayed a xenophilic streak. Wilson is portrayed, not unjustly, as a lover of German and English forms of governance rather than an admirer of the American founders. But an early piece of writing by Wilson’s father suggests the distaste for natural rights was in the family well before the young student began reading foreign opponents of natural law like Edmund Burke – and was a symptom of his early brand of southern conservatism, not his eventual progressivism.

In an 1861 sermon, Wilson’s dad Joseph Ruggles Wilson argued that slavery was endorsed by the Bible, and that in Biblical times there had been an “abolition party” that argued, like the Republicans during the Civil War, that there are natural rights against slavery. Ruggles Wilson, like his son, said this notion of natural rights was too abstract to be enforced:    

“In the days of the Apostles, it is proper for me to remind you, there was a party, whose numbers were scattered throughout the empire, which constituted the ‘abolition party’ of that period. It is known that the Pharisees gave a special prominence to political freedom, joined with them were the Essenes, and binding together the whole, were certain philosophers who inculcated unattainable notions of universal liberty. These persons were in the habit of condemning Roman masters as unjust, impious, and destroyers of a law of nature. They inculcated the same abstract doctrines as those which have proceeded from mistaken philanthropy in our own distracted country, and which, at the time when Paul wrote to the Ephesians, were threatening the world with discord and bloodshed, as now, by the permissive wrath of God again they threaten.” (Emphasis added.)

Thus for Wilson's father, and perhaps Wilson himself, the position against natural rights is part of a history of racism. Much has been written about Wilson's racism in recent years, but this aspect has not been examined. While the future president never endorsed slavery like his father, he vehemently opposed the vote for African Americans in his youth and repeatedly used the phrase "ignorant and inferior race" to describe Blacks. As president, he allowed his subordinates to segregate the federal government. As late as 1919 there are stories of Wilson telling derogatory "negro stories," and that year he worked against the addition of a statement in the Versailles Treaty that all races are created equal. We will see here that for Wilson, though not for everyone who shared his view, the rejection of the idea of natural rights was rooted in his southern background.  

The position against natural rights was not a youthful fancy for Wilson. As late as 1911, the year before he was elected president, Wilson again put down the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface,” he said in a speech at the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles, while he was still governor of New Jersey. “The question is not whether all men are born free and equal or not. Suppose they were born so, you know they are not.” 

Nor was this position a sign of crusty old age. In fact, Wilson made similar statements very early in life – as early as July 4, 1876, when he was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Princeton University. 

“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. A republic too founded upon the notion of abstract liberty! I venture to say that this country will never celebrate another centennial as a republic.”

By “too founded upon the notion of abstract liberty,” Wilson meant the founders’ notion of natural rights, including the inalienable rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence. 

In between those two statements, in 1893, Wilson also wrote that Thomas Jefferson is “not a thorough American” because “of the strain of French philosophy that permeated and weakened all his thought” – meaning those natural law ideas found in the preface of the Declaration of Independence. “It is his speculative philosophy that is exotic, and that runs like a false and artificial note through all his thought. It was un-American in being abstract, sentimental, rationalistic, rather than practical.”

This point of view, so strange to our ears, is usually explained by scholars as rooted in Wilson’s love for the 18th century English statesman Burke, often known as the father of conservatism, or for the 19th century philosopher Hegel. But it was years before Wilson would read Hegel, and his acquaintance with Burke was just beginning. In the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Wilson writes in his diary:

“[October] 6th [1876] Friday. … This afternoon and evening read a portion of [Henry Lord] Brougham’s sketch of Burke’s character. It is a very well written piece, but I will not pronounce upon its merits as a piece of criticism until I know more of the subject with which it deals. Knowing little of the French Revolution and the history of the latter part of the 18th century I cannot say whether Burke’s actions at the time were consistent or not.” 

So Wilson’s exposure to Burke was new when he was 19, but he was already passionately against the “too abstract” notions of natural law. He also quoted this new acquaintance, Mr. Burke, in a collection of favorite quotations sometime between 1876 and 1877, as saying “Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.” By 1877 he owned a copy of John Morley’s biography of Edmund Burke, which in its fourth chapter includes a section on the “unsound metaphysical abstraction” of America’s belief in natural rights during and after the American revolution. 

Why did Wilson connect so emotionally with the words of this long-dead British lawmaker? Where did this passion come from? His dad’s sermon indicates it may have been a family passion, born of the southern identity of the Wilson family, which has not been noted in the extensive literature about Wilson — even in the debates about his southern origins, and the argument over whether he was or was not a southern partisan (see prior posts on this blog on “The two arguments about Woodrow Wilson’s racism” and Wilson’s “Calhoun views”). The closest I've seen any Wilson scholar come to identifying a kind of southern thinking as the origin of Wilson’s thought on abstraction is a line in a paper by Terry Bimes and Stephen Skowronek in the journal Polity entitled “Woodrow Wilson's Critique of Popular Leadership: Reassessing the Modern-Traditional Divide in Presidential History.” In it Bimes and Skowronek write: 

“Of course, southern reactionaries as far back as John Randolph had blasted Jefferson for embracing 'exotic' ideas that sowed the seeds of populism. But this fact itself alerts us to an important aspect of the change that Wilson underwent in the writing of his histories: the rediscovery of his southern roots. Exposure to northern, proto-progressive intellectuals in the 1880s and to the Populist and labor upheavals of the 1890s left Wilson uneasy. The French doctrines of the "rights of man" that "crept in through the phrases of the Declaration of Independence" offered indigenous institutions little protection from popular reform movements, and the social and economic unrest of the day was bringing to the fore Wilson's concern for the preservation of traditional institutional arrangements. This instinctive protection of institutions is evident throughout Wilson's histories, and it lays a firm foundation for his defense of the Constitution, the Democratic party, the courts, and local- ism in Constitutional Government, as well as for the regressive racial policies of his presidency.”

But Wilson didn’t start writing this way about the nation being founded on ideas that were too abstract in the 1890s. As we have seen, this kind of thinking was present in Wilson’s writing as early as 1876 and in his father’s as early as 1861, when Wilson was a toddler. It has been argued that Wilson individuated from his father’s southern identity in certain respects, but this appears to be one respect in which he did not. 

In fact, the argument against natural rights became very common in the South after Jefferson’s death in 1826, say scholars who study southern thinking before the Civil War. Clement Eaton in his 1940 book Freedom of Thought in the Old South says that as the South became more dependent on cotton for economic survival, as other crops faltered, southern intellectuals were less likely to oppose slavery, and with that philosophical difference came a new rejection of natural rights:

“A turning point came in Southern liberalism shortly after the death of Jefferson in 1826–a change preceded by a profound economic revolution. The old Tidewater aristocracy, mellowed by age, sank in importance as exhausted tobacco fields and rice plantations became less productive. Cotton was enthroned as king on the rich black loam of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. ‘Cotton capitalism’ became a strident, aggressive force in politics and the intellectual life of the section. A new political philosophy arose that discarded much of the idealism of Jefferson. In 1829 Thomas Cooper was teaching to his classes a doctrine that repudiated the theory of natural rights—'Rights are what society acknowledges and sanctions, and they are nothing else.’” 

Louis Hartz documents the same trend in his classic 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America, in a chapter about Southern Reactionaries called “The Reactionary Enlightenment: Southern Political Thought Before the Civil War.” In it Hartz writes: “American Southerners ... began to break with their Jeffersonian past around 1830.” 

One of the first southern thinkers to separate from Jefferson on natural rights was John Randolph of Roanoke, according to conservative historian Russell Kirk. In fact Kirk called Randolph “the American Burke”:         

“It is in the speeches of Randolph of Roanoke that we first encounter a thorough expression, in America, of opposition to the assumptions of the Declaration of Independence. Randolph was not alone, it is true; by the time of the Virginia Convention of 1829, the new system of thought—or, perhaps, the revived old system of thought, long dormant—was strong in lower Virginia and developing in power elsewhere but Randolph was the ablest spokesman of this opposition.”

Wilson's father, his correspondence shows, was a fan of John Randolph. He approved of his view of state's rights, and could also have gleaned his language about natural rights from him. 

In his book America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism (2021), Ronald J. Pestritto of Hillsdale College outlines the various different oppositions to natural rights among early American progressives like Wilson, John Dewey, Frank Goodnow, Charles Beard and Theodore Roosevelt. He does not emphasize the differences in their thought, however, and fosters the impression that progressivism was a single force against the American founders’ theory of natural rights. But Beard, Roosevelt and Dewey took aim at the right to property, and Wilson did not. In fact, the latter’s reasons for opposing the notion of natural rights was rooted in an argument for the protection of property rights against the dangers of the French Revolution, which was founded on the principle of the “Rights of Man.” While Pestritto acknowledges this was Wilson’s thinking, he does not note that these philosophies come fundamentally from opposite ends of the political spectrum. 

The opposition to natural rights came from both ends of the political spectrum in the 18th and 19th centuries. Enemies of natural rights included not only Burke, the so-called father of modern conservatism, who was concerned about the specter of the French Revolution occurring in England, but also Jeremey Bentham, the Utilitarian whose ideas were so influential on liberals in the 19th Century. Bentham called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts” and was also concerned about a recurrence of the French Revolution.  The idea of natural law was in fact quite out of favor in Europe for most of the 19th Century, as Thomas J. Donahue-Ochoa notes in an excellent essay published on his web site online. He  emphasizes that this opposition was not the province of one side or another:

“After the final defeat of Napoleon, natural rights theory and individualistic social contract theory both came under sustained attack in Europe: not just by conservative defenders of the status quo and reactionaries who yearned for the extinct old order, but also by liberal reformers and even republican and socialist revolutionaries. Two objections were especially important to the reformers' criticisms of natural rights and the contract. The first was against metaphysical natural rights: the idea that there were some objective, universal, and perennial moral rights possessed by human beings in virtue of a common human nature. Utilitarian Positivists like Bentham, the Philosophic Radicals, and J. S. Mill challenged the existence of such rights on the positivist grounds that no one could possibly experience such a right.”

 Jeremy Waldron also spells out “The Decline of Natural Right” in an essay of that name. He opens with a passage from an 1894 preface to David G. Ritchie’s Natural Rights: A Criticism of Some Political and Ethical Conceptions: 

“When I began, some three years ago, to write a paper on ‘Natural Rights,’ I had a certain fear that in criticizing that famous theory I might be occupied in slaying the already slain. Recent experience has, however, convinced me that the theory is still, in a sense, alive, or at least capable of mischief. Though disclaimed by almost all our more careful writers on politics and ethics, it yet remains a commonplace of the newspaper and the platform, not only in the United States of America, where the theory may be said to form part of the national creed, but in this country, where it was assailed a century ago by both Burke and Bentham.”

Such was the state of things in Europe in the 19th century, that the surprising position was for natural right and not against it. Pestritto describes the progressives as having followed Germans, most notably Hegel, to this perspective, but Waldron says Hegel’s influence can be overstated: “We should be careful how much direct influence we attribute to Hegel, particularly as the nineteenth century wore on. The celebrity of his work was largely a matter of fashion and Hegel was unfashionable in Germany by mid-century.” For his part, Wilson did not read Hegel until well after his first passionate statements against the abstraction of natural rights.

In the end, Pestritto’s implication that this all lies somehow at the heart of modern progressives like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (the latter of whom Pestritto notes identified herself in a presidential run as a progressive in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) falsely suggests that this 19th Century opposition to natural rights still lingers. Pestritto is not alone in this error. Rogers M. Smith in his paper “The Constitutional Philosophy of Barack Obama: Democratic Pragmatism and Religious Commitment” attempts to tie Obama to Dewey’s distrust of natural rights, without much success. Obama was hardly speaking out against inalienable rights, as did Wilson. Instead, he was embracing the philosophy as a building block of his own. As Obama said on January 16, 2013: 

“This is the land of the free, and it always will be.  As Americans, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights that no man or government can take away from us.  But we've also long recognized, as our Founders recognized, that with rights come responsibilities.  Along with our freedom to live our lives as we will comes an obligation to allow others to do the same.  We don’t live in isolation.  We live in a society, a government of, and by, and for the people.  We are responsible for each other.”   

The basic assumptions of natural right are the foundation for the idea of “human rights,” which lies beneath modern liberal philosophy and in some respects united both left and right until only recently. As Wilson's dream of a "League of Nations" became reality in the United Nations, his resistance to naming all men as created equal passed away. The United Nations' universal charter now reads, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."