Russell Kirk in an essay blamed Wilson for being the primary cause of collective rights being accepted into the American Civil Religion lexicon. He mentions this in an analysis of the term "Human Rights" which he believed Wilson used as a collective trump to individual Property Rights.
As we all know, the duel between the right of an individual and the collective right of the many is always decided in favor of the many by the rationalist or the utilitarian mindset. Sowell in the Conflict of Visions deals with this issue as well in some interesting ways.
The false collective or group right is very subject to General Will or Government as being the champion, guarantor, representative or claimant.
...this Government being a safeguard of human rights.Madison spoke it, as well, as did Monroe and Jackson. Lincoln seems not to have used "human rights" and instead spoke of "personal rights of men" and the such.
McKinley in his fourth Message to Congress wrote,
Popular government has demonstrated in its one hundred and twenty-four years of trial here its stability and security, and its efficiency as the best instrument of national development and the best safeguard to human rights.No where do these men conceive of "human rights" in the collective sense. While Lincoln famously said,
The Democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man's right of property; Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.he was speaking in terms of the natural rights of the indivudual. It is not until that peak moment of the Progressive Era, 1912, that "human rights" takes on the collective sense that you say Kirk saw in Woodrow Wilson -- only the chief culprit was not Wilson but Theodore Roosevelt.
As President, TR seems to have avoided the words "human rights." Typical of his presidential rhetoric was such this-or-that damnation of extremes as,
It is well to keep in mind that exactly as the anarchist is the worst enemy of liberty and the reactionary the worst enemy of order, so the men who defend the rights of property have most to fear from the wrongdoers of great wealth, and the men who are championing popular rights have most to fear from the demagogues who in the name of popular rights would do wrong to and oppress honest business men, honest men of wealth; ...As President, "Mr. Facing Both Ways," as General Otis called him, placed himself as arbiter of the extremes of both capital and labor. Nothing yet on collective rights. It is into his post-presidency that TR both picks up on the words "human rights" and gives them that frightful odor of class politics with which he saddled and rode the Bull Moose:
We Progressives believe that the people have the right, the power, and the duty to protect themselves and their own welfare; that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that wealth should be the servant, not the master, of the people.... and ...
Our democracy is now put to a vital test; for the conflict is between human rights on the one side and on the other special privilege asserted as a property right.It was a progressive disease, and I'd say TR suffered at least as much as Wilson. In any case, TR set the rhetorical lead.
Btw, long before then Jackson settled the supposed "conflict" (in the progressives' way of seeing it) between liberty and equality with this lovely, simple statement of national purpose, from his Fourth Annual Message:
Limited to a general superintending power to maintain peace at home and abroad, and to prescribe laws on a few subjects of general interest not calculated to restrict human liberty, but to enforce human rights, this Government will find its strength and its glory in the faithful discharge of these plain and simple duties.I also like Dubya's latest:
... there can be no human rights without human liberty.