Woodrow Wilson's Retreat

"Woodrow Wilson and Administrative Reform" by Kendrick A. Clements, in Presidential Studies Quarterly (Spring 1998), 208 E. 75th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.

During his career as a political scientist at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton, Woodrow Wilson emerged as one of the more important progressive figures urging a dramatic expansion of the federal government’s administrative powers. Presiding over such an expansion from the White House after 1912, however, he had second thoughts.

Like other progressives, Wilson (1856–1924) hoped to overcome what he saw as the paralysis of American government caused by the constitutional separation of powers, notes Clements, a historian at the University of South Carolina. Usually credited with having pioneered the academic study of public administration in the United States, Wilson argued in an 1887 article for adoption of the administrative methods of European monarchies. In The State (1889), he warned that industrialization was allowing "the rich and the strong to combine against the poor and the weak." A stronger state, he believed, would be a less dangerous remedy for America’s problems than more direct popular rule. He believed in the people, "in their honesty and sincerity and sagacity," Wilson stated in 1891, "but I do not believe in them as my governors." He feared "tyranny of the majority [more] than dictatorship," Clements says.

Yet while professing to believe that the government regulators of labor and industry would be apolitical, Wilson knew better, Clements says. Administrators, Wilson admitted in 1891, did not merely execute public law, they, in effect, made it—and sometimes acted in their own selfish interests. "He was not entirely comfortable with his own proposals," Clements writes.

That may have been why Wilson then turned his thoughts to a different cure: enlarging presidential power, an expansion already begun with the Spanish-American War (1898). By 1908, he said he was convinced that the Constitution was "thoroughly workable" and that the president had become "the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and the nation." Wilson’s experience as governor of New Jersey (1911–12) further dampened his enthusiasm for administrative reform when the state legislature—realizing it would be surrendering power to his administrators—refused to go along with his ambitious proposals.

By the time he became president, in 1913, Wilson was more convinced than ever of the importance of vigorous presidential leadership. Yet, Clements notes, virtually all the major Wilsonian reforms, such as creation of the Federal Trade Commission, relied on professional administrators, with wide discretion, for their implementation. "As Wilson had pointed out many years before, the more government was asked to do, the more it must depend on an active administration."

This proved even truer after America’s entry into World War I in 1917, when the War Industries Board and other special agencies were set up. The danger of an expanded state now seemed much more serious to Wilson than it had when he was an academic. He feared that the government would not be "returned to the people" when the war ended: "Big Business will be in the saddle." In part to prevent that, he abolished the wartime agencies when the conflict ended, even though, Clements says, he favored "many of the things [the agencies] wanted to do in the postwar world."