CONTEXT: Originally posted online, October 15, 2018: I composed this shortly before U.S. Congressional elections in 2018 to suggest the duty Americans have to follow our ideals, evoked exactly a century earlier, when a world numbed by grief and horror might have collapsed beyond restoring without the example we then offered.  I felt it urgent to point out how the centennial of America’s first having global influence was coinciding with elections that might – considering those who craved power in 2018 – have irretrievably impaired our Democracy.

[Image: Rapturous crowds in Paris’ Place de la Concorde greet U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 as a virtual Savior after the end of the First World War (in which France herself had suffered beyond reckoning). Wilson had come to help negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending the war with Germany and trying to build ‘a just and lasting peace.’]

‘That the world be made safe for Democracy’

By November 1918, after four years of unimaginable violence in The Great War (now known as World War I), much of Europe had been bled white, wrecked, bankrupted and entire societies were disintegrating. Exhausted and gripped by despair, Europeans looked to America – the vigorous, visionary “New World” that had joined the War on the side of the western Allies in mid-1917 – to save the Old World.

President Wilson had said his country’s mission in sending its young men to prevent the defeat of France and Britain by militarist Imperial Germany was that “the world be made safe for Democracy.” American arms were crucial to the Allies’ eventual triumph, forcing the Germans to cease fighting by the Armistice of November 11, 1918.

(An unapologetic racist whose concern for equality and personal liberty was only for Caucasians, Wilson is less revered in our era. But ideals are often more inspiring than coarse reality, and the ones he promoted might help pull us all beyond his backward, disappointing underlying attitudes: A fitting irony.)

It was arguably the first time America had ever commanded the global stage, having been summoned to rescue Europe from the calamity of miscalculations by its traditional rulers. And even more than U.S. military help, many dazed, desperate Europeans (from both sides of the war) hoped for an advent of American-style governance: That ordinary people might be able to lead themselves better than those ‘traditional rulers’ ever could, with wisdom, justice and decency.

So this November, 2018, Americans should proudly recall the optimism that our great experiment in freedom offered 100 years ago to a continent prostrate with catastrophe. And we can show again, in deeds, the same luminous promise our nation once represented for humanity by acting consistent with our hopes of what we might build together, rather than have our passions, resentments and fears exploited by those who would control us (from the shadows) for reasons of their own.

Please reflect on this precious mission – Democracy made safe, again, by Americans – if you vote this November, 2018. You may help to reinvigorate the ideals for which the world once looked so urgently to us.
(Reposted in July 2022, as a still-relevant reminder of the importance of civic engagement)