Many students of U.S. history and politics are likely familiar with
President Woodrow Wilson’s famous pledge to make the world “safe for democracy” during World War I. Far fewer are aware that Wilson viewed the
cooperation of the United States and international labor movements as critical
to achieving this goal. To win domestic and international labor support for
his foreign policies, Wilson solicited the help of the leaders of the American
Federation of Labor (AFL). This book traces the partnership that developed
between President Wilson and AFL leaders from its tentative beginnings
during policy deliberations over how the United States should respond to
the Mexican Revolution, through World War I, to its culmination with the
creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO) as an affiliate to the
League of Nations at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Equally important, it details the significant opposition that developed to Wilson’s and
the AFL’s foreign policies among a shifting array of U.S., transnational, and
international labor, Socialist, and diaspora Left groups. This opposition helped
to stimulate, to shape, and ultimately to undermine Wilson’s efforts to create
a permanent role for labor in international governance.
Recent years have witnessed a renaissance in scholarship on President
Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policies. Much of this literature has concerned
itself with conventional state-to-state relations during the Wilson years and
with the ever-popular subject of the creation of the League of Nations. But
Erez Manela, in The Wilsonian Moment, broke the traditional mold in which
much diplomatic history about Wilson is cast by moving beyond U.S. relations
with the major European powers to explore the role of a transnational flow of
Wilsonian ideas about self-determination in igniting anticolonial movements
in the Middle East and Asia.1