Ted Widmer has an excellent New York Times op-ed on President Woodrow Wilson, World War I and American idealism. At the start of the Great War, Wilson aligned himself with established presidential tradition in holding both that the US should steer clear of foreign entanglements, and that grandiose schemes for human betterment were best avoided. Throughout his first term, he therefore made scant public mention of the carnage unfolding in Europe. However, once the slogan “He kept us out of war” had propelled him to a slim victory in the 1916 presidential election (277-254 in the electoral college), he changed course dramatically. This is how Widmer puts it:

“But Wilson’s silence would eventually give way to a different voice, the one that we remember him for. In the spring of 1917, after three horrific years, the world had changed greatly, and so had he. As he brought the United States to the precipice of war, he began to speak in a way that has defined the American presidency ever since. It was not merely that the United States would enter a European theater for the first time, in huge numbers. Wilson also asked that Americans fight to make the world ‘safe for democracy.’ In a sense, he asked the United States to become the world’s judge as well as its sheriff, with an evangelical optimism that has brought both inspiration and exasperation to the 96 percent of the world that is not American.”

Widmer’s interest is how Wilson steered the US onto an idealistic, interventionist path from which it has never really deviated throughout the century to today. Additionally, that path of course led directly, though also falteringly, to the formation of contemporary international society – through the League of Nations after World War I, the United Nations after World War II, and everything else subsequently placed in that rarified sphere. Furthermore, 1917 must count as a critical year in the process. For the second book of his multivolume life of President Herbert Hoover, George H Nash chose the title The Humanitarian: 1914-1917. Why 1917? Because by then Hoover’s Commission of Relief in Belgium had shown that humanitarian action can pay spectacular dividends, and had built a reputation that would lift Hoover himself to the White House little more than a decade later. (His fabulous presidential library just off I-80 in West Branch, Iowa tells the full story.)

In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Samuel Moyn argues that only quite recently did human rights register with significant numbers of (elite) people as the proper cause of justice. Here he is on page 3: “The drama of human rights, then, is that they emerged in the 1970s seemingly from nowhere.” In particular, 1977 was a key year. Jimmy Carter assumed office as America’s first “human rights” president, Amnesty International was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the New York Times printed the term “human rights” five times more frequently than in any previous year. All this was clearly important in shaping our global order.

In plotting the history of what exists today as international society, however, we need to look not only to 1977, when human rights came of age, but also to 1917, when global idealism found iconic articulation in the speeches of Woodrow Wilson.