Woodrow Wilson's Constitution
by Robert Curry
Issue 112 - July 23, 2008

Justly revered as our great Constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws. ... Woodrow Wilson

Justly revered, but not by Wilson. He really did want to cast it aside, writing “no doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle…”

Our Presidents take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Lincoln believed that he was bound by that oath to “face the arithmetic” of a bloody Civil War. Yet only a few decades later, Wilson is eager to rid America of the Constitution of the Founders. How did this, how could this, happen?

You can go a long way toward understanding the history of our Constitution by examining the lives of just two men, John Witherspoon and Woodrow Wilson. Both men were powerful agents of change and, at the same time, great symbols of the intellectual currents of their times. In addition, they have story lines with astonishing parallels. Both were president of Princeton, transforming it by importing a model of the university from Europe, both had a powerful impact on the direction of American politics by their writing and speaking, and for both Princeton was a springboard to positions of political eminence.

As a teacher and a political leader, John Witherspoon had an impact on the original Constitution that is almost impossible to overemphasize; if his only contribution to American history was the education of James Madison, he would still deserve to be considered one of the most important of the Founders. In the words of John Adams, “he is as high a Son of Liberty, as any man in America.” A Scot, educated at Edinburgh, and a student of Adam Smith, David Hume and Thomas Reid, he brought the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to Princeton, and re-made Princeton on the Scottish model of the university. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and a hard-working member of the Continental Congress, he is the perfect symbol of the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the Founders and the Founding.

If you want to understand how the Constitution was rewritten in the 20th century by the Progressive movement, the place to start is with Woodrow Wilson. Wilson too re-made Princeton, this time on the model of the German university. At a time in which German scholarship was in fashion, he was a champion of Hegelianism, helping to introduce a strain of thought into the American body politic that was fundamentally opposed to the natural rights philosophy of the Founders. Hegel’s historicism—the belief that all thought is historically conditioned—was the intellectual foundation of Progressivism and of Wilson’s belief that the Constitution was an antique absurdity. Wilson championed the idea of “the living Constitution” which enables activist judges to re-write the Constitution according to the Progressive notions of the day.