Woodrow Wilson, the South, Neoconservatism and Lincoln Bashing

Grant Havers, Daniel Larison and Paul Gottfried all seem to agree that, while they can see where someone like Henry Jaffa is coming from, it is still essentially wrongheaded to claim Lincoln as the father of Wilsonianism or neoconservatism. Something Gottfried mentioned but didn't explain is that, far from likening Wilson to Lincoln, the early twentieth century South identified American involvement in World War I with the legacy of the Confederacy.

Wilson, son of a Confederate chaplain, had the enthusiastic endorsements of Southern preachers and politicians—and songwriters, as these lyrics make clear:

What a legacy to carry to the battle fields of France!
O Virginia, old Virginia, let your shadows point the way
To immortal paths of honor for the children of the gray

and

The cause of Lee and Jackson, though 'twas trampled in the dust
By overwhelming odds, has risen, commanding world-wide trust;
'Tis now the cause of Pershing and our brave boys o'er the sea,
The cause upheld by Dixie's knights with Jackson and with Lee.

Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 throws out an interesting explanation for why the South embraced Wilsonianism so eagerly:

. . . World War I also vindicated the Lost Cause, the ministers said, because American participation in it had validated the same principles the Confederacy had fought for: belief in liberty and democracy. The Southern churches and preachers committed themselves to Woodrow Wilson's definition of the war as a holy crusade. "This is not a war of conquest or retaliation," said the Baptist Standard. "It is a conflict between liberty and autocracy—between democracy and monarchism, a protest against the spirit of despotism and militarism."

Identifying the Southern cause with "making the world safe for democracy" is odd (although it might make sense in the context of the shift from aristocratic to populist agrarianism), but, whether attributable to their desire to repudiate technological materialism or to redeem the Lost Cause, Southerners rallied behind Wilson and voted out politicians like Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi and House Majority Leader Claude Kitchin of North Carolina who did not. It might be cold comfort, but paleoconservatives who are baffled at the warm welcome neoconservative foreign policy has received in the South should remember that this wouldn't be the first time.