In ‘The Moralist,’ Woodrow Wilson and the Hazards of Idealism

Instead of “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made,” Patricia O’Toole could have titled her new book “The Hypocrite.”

After all, as she herself points out, to lay claim to the moral high ground as often and as fervently as Wilson did during his eight years in the White House was to court charges that he failed to live up to his own principles. He called for an end to secret treaties while negotiating secretly with the Allies in World War I. He declared himself unwilling to compromise with belligerents abroad while showing himself very willing to compromise with segregationists at home. He pursued a progressive economic agenda while approving a regressive racial one. He spoke of national self-determination in the loftiest terms while initiating the American occupation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

派翠西亞．奧圖若將她的新書命名為「偽善者」，而非《道德主義者：威爾遜與他締造的世界》，亦無不可。

畢竟，正如她自己所點出的，威爾遜總統在白宮八年期間頻繁且熱切地標榜自己的道德高度，卻招來未能遵守自身所宣示原則的指控。他呼籲終結密約，卻又跟第一次世界大戰盟國進行秘談；他對外宣稱不願跟交戰國妥協，對內卻又表現出非常願意跟種族隔離主義者妥協；他奉行進步的經濟政策，但又贊成開倒車的種族政策；他以最崇高的措辭提及民族自決，卻又展開美國對海地與多明尼加的占領行動。

O’Toole’s is the third major biography of Wilson in the last decade, coming on the heels of substantial works by John Milton Cooper Jr. (2009) and A. Scott Berg (2013), an output of Wilsoniana that attests to the 28th president’s complicated — and contested — legacy. O’Toole’s book doesn’t purport to be as exhaustive as Cooper’s or Berg’s; her project was born from her interest in World War I, and as she persuasively shows, American foreign policy throughout the 20th century adopted Wilson’s war-forged liberal internationalism, in word if not always in deed.

President Richard M. Nixon cynically used the rhetoric of Wilsonian idealism to escalate the war in Vietnam, saying that his plan would bring the United States closer to Wilson’s “goal of a just and lasting peace.” Wilson’s principle of national self-determination — a phrase that his own secretary of state deemed “loaded with dynamite” — has since been enshrined in the charter of the United Nations.

奧圖的新書是近10年第三部威爾遜主要傳記，緊接在2009年約翰．米爾頓．庫珀跟2013年史考特．柏格重要作品後出現，是證明這位第28位總統複雜且具爭議性遺緒的又一作品。奧圖的書並無意如庫珀或柏格那樣詳盡，她的研究寫作計畫源於她對第一次世界大戰的興趣，且一如她令人信服地呈現的那樣，整個20世紀美國外交政策採取了威爾遜的戰爭式自由國際主義，行為上容或偶有例外，言詞上則始終如此。

尼克森總統犬儒地用威爾遜理想主義言辭來升高越戰戰事，聲稱他的計畫將使美國更接近威爾遜的「公正與持久和平的目標」。 威爾遜的民族自決原則後來被載入聯合國憲章，而這個詞語被他自己的國務卿視為「裝滿了炸藥」。

And by declaring that “the world must be made safe for democracy” in 1917, Wilson articulated how the American people, from World War I to Iraq, would prefer to imagine their military incursions abroad: as high-minded acts of pure altruism, imbued with benevolence and devoid of mercenary self-interest.

A biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, O’Toole is a lucid and elegant writer (her book about Adams was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and “The Moralist” is a fluid account that feels shorter than its 600-plus pages. Despite its length, there isn’t a passage that drags or feels superfluous.

威爾遜1917年宣稱的「使世界安全以確保民主」，闡述了從第一次世界大戰到伊拉克戰爭，美國人民如何願意將他們在國外的軍事入侵行動，想像成純粹利他主義的高尚行為，滿懷仁慈且全無自私自利之念。

奧圖寫過老羅斯福與亨利．亞當斯的傳記，是位頭腦清楚與優雅的作家（她的亞當斯一書曾入圍普立茲獎決選），而《道德主義者》行文流暢，讓人覺得篇幅並沒600多頁這麼長。儘管篇幅很長，文中並無任何一段拖泥帶水或顯得多餘。

文／Jennifer Szalai　譯／陳韋廷