A DARWINIAN CONSTITUTION

The Taft–Roosevelt schism almost guaranteed the election of Woodrow Wilson. This most enigmatic of the three candidates appears in retrospect the most constitutionally radical. In his long academic career he had absorbed a good deal of German historicism. Wilson earned a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University, the institution founded to bring German research methods to the United States. He wrote in his first book, in 1885, that “We are the first Americans to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which it was intended; the first to entertain any serious doubts about the superiority of our own institutions as compared with the systems of Europe; the first to think of remodeling the administrative machinery of the federal government, and of forcing new forms of responsibility upon Congress.” A year later, Wilson observed the “contempt everywhere felt and expressed, outside of French national conventions, for a priori constitutions.” Much better was the unwritten English constitution, which had evolved gradually in response to changing circumstances. He credited the American founders for their attention to experience rather than to reason. But they still wrote a constitution, and ours “illustrates the congenital weakness of its family.” The real constitution was the internal, cultural “constitutional morality of our race,” he observed. “In one sense, all governments must be governments of men, not of laws.” He frequently emphasized the pragmatism of the American founders, and their responses to contingent circumstances rather than their devotion to abstract ideas. He said of the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence in 1911, “I am constantly reminding audiences. . . that the rhetorical introduction to the Declaration of Independence is the least part of it. . .. If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not read the preface.”