Love Goddess

Abstract

Woodrow Wilson began his presidency with the hope of American renewal. It was his dream to reassert the meaning of America for both the American people and the world. For him the symbol of America as a sanctuary and asylum for the belief in the American mission as a model of freedom were still pertinent to human needs and hopes. Prior to becoming President, he had said, ‘We are chosen to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty’. As James MacGregor Burns says, ‘Wilson revived the Jeffersonian theme of America as a beacon star of democracy for the world, an exemplar and — with its newfound power in the twentieth century—promoter of human rights and social development’.¹ Of course, by the end of the decade, Wilson would see that consensus collapse for himself and for much of America. The symbols of unity and freedom that he hoped to dramatize, the revivification of spirit and the arousal of social progress that he wanted to inspire, all served as prolegomenon for an extended period of acute alienation and anxiety. In the twenties the forces of fragmentation and separation at the heart of the dialog between desire and consensus erupted. The desire of the decentered ego served as a catalyst to a destabilized culture that was in the process of transforming the very social and ideological structures that kept it together. The symbols for this era are not those emblems of Jeffersonian liberalism that Wilson averred in hopes of sparking a resurgence of democratic idealism for a new generation; rather, they are symbols of the severance of self and society, of a culmination of the destructive drives of desire and of fractured consensus.