It is now thirty-two years since the death of Woodrow Wilson, one hundred years since his birth, and still the place in history of this Southerner who became president of Princeton University and later President of the United States remains somewhat uncertain. Wilson will rank among the great American presidents, but precisely where his reputation will come to rest is at present difficult to say. His public life has been the subject of intense scholarly investigation. College professors of history and political science have found his career fascinating (perhaps, one suspects, because he was the only college professor to reach the White House). But they have been unable to make up their minds about him. There is a passionate air in the historians' appraisals of Wilson, and more than a hint of assertion and argument, and beneath even the most calm and apparently measured accounts there is intellectual heat of a sort that betrays uncertainty about the stature of the man.

Few Presidents in American history established so complete and far-reaching a control over his party as did Woodrow Wilson during the first years of his tenure in the White House.* Indeed, before the end of his first term he had become almost the absolute master of his party, able to effect revolutionary changes in party policy without the previous knowledge and consent of Democratic leaders in Congress and the country. He attained this stature in part by his methods of public leadership—his bold representation of public opinion and his incomparable strategy in dealing with the legislative branch. He won this position of authority also through less obvious and more subtle means—a systematic use of the immense patronage at his command as an instrument by which to achieve effective and responsible party government. Confronted by no entrenched national party organization and no body of officeholders loyal to another man, he was able to build from the ground up and to weld the widely scattered and disparate Democratic forces into something approximating a national machine. Let us see how he used his power to mold the character of his party, and with what consequences.

The international Communist movement is commonly described as a conspiracy and so, in part, it is. It is a conspiracy in the sense that the national Communist parties are members of a coordinated international political movement which attempts to undermine the present social and economic order and replace it with the Soviet brand of collectivism. It is also a conspiracy in the sense that Communist parties, unlike other national parties, would, if given power, deliberately place their countries under the domination of, or at least align them with the USSR. The Communist parties with their clandestine organization and their addiction to violence when they think they stand to gain by its use, simply cannot be put on a par with other political parties. All this is well known and needs no retelling.

While our subject is the very broad one of “History and Diplomacy,” I thought I would narrow it somewhat and attempt merely to describe something of the aspect in which diplomatic history presents itself to a diplomatist who has turned late in life to the study and writing of history.* In doing so, I hope that I have not taken too great a liberty with the subject our hosts had in mind.

Diplomacy has changed so greatly since the beginning of the twentieth century that the diplomatic historian is driven to wonder whether his subject has any relevance to the contemporary world.* Then and now—let us set them against each other. Then Europe was the center of diplomatic action; now the diplomat's mind must compass the globe. Then he need take account of a few powers, all with settled traditions of policy. Now he must try to estimate the direction of policy in states with no settled traditions, like Indonesia, while even in older states like Italy and Germany tradition is not a safe guide. Then the diplomat was, for the most part, concerned with narrowly political subjects; now he must study and report on many and diverse subjects. Then information was easy to come by; now, over much of the earth's surface, heroic efforts are made to conceal essential facts and figures. Then there was intimacy and confidence within the group concerned with diplomacy in any country; now discussion is carefully kept within the scope of the lowest security clearance in the room. Then diplomacy was a leisurely business—Bismarck buried in the country for months on end, Salisbury deep in chemical experiments at Hatfield House, Grey feeding his beloved ducks. Today incessant activity is the mark of the statesman. “I spent 350 of my 562 days as Secretary of State at international conferences,” boasts Governor Byrnes. Secretary Dulles' air mileage over the last three years surely exceeds that of any traveling salesman.

Since the end of World War II, Great Britain has provided a happy hunting ground for students of politics, whose chief prey has been the British Labour movement. Perhaps it is because some considered the Labour Government of 1945–51 to be an “experiment,” and experiments of any sort ought to be watched closely. Or it may be that here was a party with a mass backing which, at the same time, had a corpus of theory which it professed to be implementing; hence the consistency between the words of the ideologues and the actions of the politicians could be measured. Yet for all the consideration of Socialist theory, Labour ideology, and Transport House practice, scholars have tended to neglect the psychological and metaphysical bases of the movement's approach to politics. An examination of the presuppositions regarding the nature of man is vital to the understanding of any political theory—or, for that matter, any practical program of action. While studies of nationalized industries, foreign policy, the bureaucracy, and the internecine warfare of party factions are desirable and of interest, if we are to put our observations in philosophical perspective we must base our investigation of British Socialism and the British Labour movement on its views of human nature.

When a gulf develops between the men concerned with the practice of a subject and their brethren concerned with research in that subject, the explanation usually offered by the practitioner is that the scholars have become “too theoretical.” A gulf now separates students of international affairs from men concerned with the development and execution of foreign policy but, strangely enough, one of the principal factors helping to create this situation is that the concerns of the student are not theoretical enough.