On March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated as President of the
United States, and thus became the central figure of a new and
tremendously important movement. He was, it is true, elected as the
candidate of what is known as the Democratic party, which has existed
since the days of Thomas Jefferson. But the ideas advanced by President
Wilson as being democratic were so different from the original theories
and policies of Jefferson that President Wilson himself felt called on
to formulate his principles in a now celebrated work entitled "The New
Freedom." From the opening pages of this, as originally published in
_The World's Work_, we here, by permission of both the President and
the magazine, give his own statement of the ideas of the new era.
The voting body of Americans who stand behind President Wilson are
obviously of the type now generally called progressive. In the
convention which nominated him, the conservative element of the old
Democracy struggled long and bitterly against the naming of any
"progressive" candidate. In the Republican party, the strife between
conservatism and progress was so bitter as to produce a complete split;
and the progressives nominated a candidate of their own, preferring, if
they could not control the government themselves, to hand it over to
the progressive element among the Democrats. The former political
parties in the United States seem to have been so completely disrupted
by recent events that even though they continue to hold some power
under the old names, they now stand for wholly different things. The
two parties which in the triangular presidential contest polled the
largest numbers of votes were both "progressive."
So it seems settled that we are to "progress." But whither--and into
what? Is there any clear purpose before our new leaders, and how does
it differ from mankind's former purposes? That is what President Wilson
tries to tell us.
There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that
are discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That
singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done
twenty years ago.
We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has
broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it
was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We
have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom;
and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old
political formulae do not fit the present problems; they read now like
documents taken out of a forgotten age. The older cries sound as if
they belonged to a past age which men have almost forgotten. Things
which used to be put into the party platforms of ten years ago would
sound antiquated if put into a platform now. We are facing the
necessity of fitting a new social organization, as we did once fit the
old organization, to the happiness and prosperity of the great body of
citizens; for we are conscious that the new order of society has not
been made to fit and provide the convenience or prosperity of the
average man. The life of the nation has grown infinitely varied. It
does not center now upon questions of governmental structure or of the
distribution of governmental powers. It centers upon questions of the
very structure and operation of society itself, of which government is
only the instrument. Our development has run so fast and so far along
the line sketched in the earlier days of constitutional definition, has
so crossed and interlaced those lines, has piled upon them such novel
structures of trust and combination, has elaborated within them a life
so manifold, so full of forces which transcend the boundaries of the
country itself and fill the eyes of the world, that a new nation seems
to have been created which the old formulae do not fit or afford a
vital interpretation of.
We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us. We
have come upon an age when we do not do business in the way in which we
used to do business--when we do not carry on any of the operations of
manufacture, sale, transportation, or communication as men used to
carry them on. There is a sense in which in our day the individual has
been submerged. In most parts of our country men work for themselves,
not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but as
employees--in a higher or lower grade--of great corporations. There was
a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business
affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the
servants of corporations.
You know what happens when you are the servant of a corporation. You
have in no instance access to the men who are really determining the
policy of the corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that
it ought not to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must
obey the orders, and you have, with deep mortification, to cooperate in
the doing of things which you know are against the public interest.
Your individuality is swallowed up in the individuality and purpose of
a great organization.
It is true that, while most men are thus submerged in the corporation,
a few, a very few, are exalted to power which as individuals they could
never have wielded. Through the great organizations of which they are
the heads, a few are enabled to play a part unprecedented by anything
in history in the control of the business operations of the country and
in the determination of the happiness of great numbers of people.
Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one
another as individuals. To be sure there were the family, the Church,
and the State, institutions which associated men in certain limited
circles of relationships. But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the
ordinary work, in the daily round, men dealt freely and directly with
one another. To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with
great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other
individual men.
Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human
relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.
In this new age we find, for instance, that our laws with regard to the
relations of employer and employee are in many respects wholly
antiquated and impossible. They were framed for another age, which
nobody now living remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from our life
that it would be difficult for many of us to understand it if it were
described to us. The employer is now generally a corporation or a huge
company of some kind; the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands
brought together, not by individual masters whom they know and with
whom they have personal relations, but by agents of one sort or
another. Working men are marshaled in great numbers for the performance
of a multitude of particular tasks under a common discipline. They
generally use dangerous and powerful machinery, over whose repair and
renewal they have no control. New rules must be devised with regard to
their obligations and their rights, their obligations to their
employers and their responsibilities to one another. New rules must be
devised for their protection, for their compensation when injured, for
their support when disabled.
There is something very new and very big and very complex about these
new relations of capital and labor. A new economic society has sprung
up, and we must effect a new set of adjustments. We must not pit power
against weakness. The employer is generally, in our day, as I have
said, not an individual, but a powerful group; and yet the working man
when dealing with his employer is still, under our existing law, an
individual.
Why is it that we have a labor question at all? It is for the simple
and very sufficient reason that the laboring man and the employer are
not intimate associates now, as they used to be in time past. Most of
our laws were formed in the age when employer and employees knew each
other, knew each other's characters, were associates with each other,
dealt with each other as man with man. That is no longer the case. You
not only do not come into personal contact with the men who have the
supreme command in those corporations, but it would be out of the
question for you to do it. Our modern corporations employ thousands,
and in some instances hundreds of thousands, of men. The only persons
whom you see or deal with are local superintendents or local
representatives of a vast organization, which is not like anything that
the working men of the time in which our laws were framed knew anything
about. A little group of working men, seeing their employer every day,
dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and the modern body
of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that spread all
over the country, dealing with men of whom they can form no personal
conception, is another thing. A very different thing. You never saw a
corporation, any more than you ever saw a government. Many a working
man to-day never saw the body of men who are conducting the industry in
which he is employed. And they never saw him. What they know about him
is written in ledgers and books and letters, in the correspondence of
the office, in the reports of the superintendents. He is a long way off
from them.
So what we have to discuss is, not wrongs which individuals
intentionally do--I do not believe there are a great many of those--but
the wrongs of the system. I want to record my protest against any
discussion of this matter which would seem to indicate that there are
bodies of our fellow citizens who are trying to grind us down and do us
injustice. There are some men of that sort. I don't know how they sleep
o' nights, but there are men of that kind. Thank God they are not
numerous. The truth is, we are all caught in a great economic system
which is heartless. The modern corporation is not engaged in business
as an individual. When we deal with it we deal with an impersonal
element, a material piece of society. A modern corporation is a means
of cooperation in the conduct of an enterprise which is so big that no
one can conduct it, and which the resources of no one man are
sufficient to finance. A company is formed; that company puts out a
prospectus; the promoters expect to raise a certain fund as capital
stock. Well, how are they going to raise it? They are going to raise it
from the public in general, some of whom will buy their stock. The
moment that begins, there is formed--what? A joint-stock corporation.
Men begin to pool their earnings, little piles, big piles. A certain
number of men are elected by the stockholders to be directors, and
these directors elect a president. This president is the head of the
undertaking, and the directors are its managers.
Now, do the working men employed by that stock corporation deal with
that president and those directors? Not at all. Does the public deal
with that president and that board of directors? It does not. Can
anybody bring them to account? It is next to impossible to do so. If
you undertake it you will find it a game of hide and seek, with the
objects of your search taking refuge now behind the tree of their
individual personality, now behind that of their corporate
irresponsibility.
And do our laws take note of this curious state of things? Do they even
attempt to distinguish between a man's act as a corporation director
and as an individual? They do not. Our laws still deal with us on the
basis of the old system. The law is still living in the dead past which
we have left behind. This is evident, for instance, with regard to the
matter of employers' liability for working men's injuries. Suppose that
a superintendent wants a workman to use a certain piece of machinery
which it is not safe for him to use, and that the workman is injured by
that piece of machinery. Our courts have held that the superintendent
is a fellow servant, or, as the law states it, a fellow employee, and
that, therefore, the man can not recover damages for his injury. The
superintendent who probably engaged the man is not his employer. Who is
his employer? And whose negligence could conceivably come in there? The
board of directors did not tell the employee to use that piece of
machinery; and the president of the corporation did not tell him to use
that piece of machinery. And so forth. Don't you see by that theory
that a man never can get redress for negligence on the part of the
employer? When I hear judges reason upon the analogy of the
relationships that used to exist between workmen and their employers a
generation ago, I wonder if they have not opened their eyes to the
modern world. You know, we have a right to expect that judges will have
their eyes open, even though the law which they administer hasn't
awakened.
Yet that is but a single small detail illustrative of the difficulties
we are in because we have not adjusted the law to the facts of the new
order.
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me
privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field
of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of
something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so
subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that
they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in
condemnation of it.
They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it
used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just so
far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he
enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means
against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do
not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the
ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him. For if
he begins to sell to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the
monopoly will refuse to sell to those dealers, and those dealers will
be afraid and will not buy the new man's wares.
And this is the country which has lifted to the admiration of the world
its ideals of absolutely free opportunity, where no man is supposed to
be under any limitation except the limitations of his character and of
his mind; where there is supposed to be no distinction of class, no
distinction of blood, no distinction of social status, but where men
win or lose on their merits.
I lay it very close to my own conscience as a public man whether we can
any longer stand at our doors and welcome all newcomers upon those
terms. American industry is not free, as once it was free; American
enterprise is not free; the man with only a little capital is finding
it harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete
with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not
prevent the strong from crushing the weak. That is the reason, and
because the strong have crushed the weak, the strong dominate the
industry and the economic life of this country. No man can deny that
the lines of endeavor have more and more narrowed and stiffened; no man
who knows anything about the development of industry in this country
can have failed to observe that the larger kinds of credit are more and
more difficult to obtain, unless you obtain them upon the terms of
uniting your efforts with those who already control the industries of
the country; and nobody can fail to observe that any man who tries to
set himself up in competition with any process of manufacture which has
been taken under the control of large combinations of capital will
presently find himself either squeezed out or obliged to sell and allow
himself to be absorbed.
There is a great deal that needs reconstruction in the United States. I
should like to take a census of the business men--I mean the rank and
file of the business men--as to whether they think that business
conditions in this country, or rather whether the organization of
business in this country, is satisfactory or not. I know what they
would say if they dared. If they could vote secretly they would vote
overwhelmingly that the present organization of business was meant for
the big fellows and was not meant for the little fellows; that it was
meant for those who are at the top and was meant to exclude those who
are at the bottom; that it was meant to shut out beginners, to prevent
new entries in the race, to prevent the building up of competitive
enterprise that would interfere with the monopolies which the great
trusts have built up.
What this country needs, above everything else, is a body of laws which
will look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are
already made. Because the men who are already made are not going to
live indefinitely, and they are not always kind enough to leave sons as
able and as honest as they are.
The originative part of America, the part of America that makes new
enterprises, the part into which the ambitious and gifted working man
makes his way up, the class that saves, that plans, that organizes,
that presently spreads its enterprises until they have a national scope
and character--that middle class is being more and more squeezed out by
the processes which we have been taught to call processes of
prosperity. Its members are sharing prosperity, no doubt; but what
alarms me is that they are not _originating_ prosperity. No country can
afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class.
The treasury of America does not lie in the brains of the small body of
men now in control of the great enterprises that have been concentrated
under the direction of a very small number of persons. The treasury of
America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that can not be
restricted to a special, favored class. It depends upon the inventions
of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the
ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of
the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful
and in control.
There has come over the land that un-American set of conditions which
enables a small number of men who control the Government to get favors
from the Government; by those favors to exclude their fellows from
equal business opportunity; by those favors to extend a network of
control that will presently drive every industry in the country, and so
make men forget the ancient time when America lay in every hamlet, when
America was to be seen on every fair valley, when America displayed her
great forces on the broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up
over the mountain sides and down into the bowels of the earth, and
eager men were everywhere captains of industry, not employees; not
looking to a distant city to find out what they might do, but looking
about among their neighbors, finding credit according to their
character, not according to their connections, finding credit in
proportion to what was known to be in them and behind them, not in
proportion to the securities they held that were approved where they
were not known. In order to start an enterprise now, you have to be
authenticated, in a perfectly impersonal way, not according to
yourself, but according to what you own that somebody else approves of
your owning. You can not begin such an enterprise as those that have
made America until you are so authenticated, until you have succeeded
in obtaining the good-will of large allied capitalists. Is that
freedom? That is dependence, not freedom.
We used to think, in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple,
that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman's uniform
and say, "Now don't anybody hurt anybody else." We used to say that the
ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not
interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that
the best government was the government that did as little governing as
possible. That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson's time. But we
are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not
dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and
create the conditions under which we live, the conditions which will
make it tolerable for us to live.
Let me illustrate what I mean: It used to be true in our cities that
every family occupied a separate house of its own, that every family
had its own little premises, that every family was separated in its
life from every other family. That is no longer the case in our great
cities. Families live in tenements, they live in flats, they live on
floors; they are piled layer upon layer in the great tenement houses of
our crowded districts, and not only are they piled layer upon layer,
but they are associated room by room, so that there is in every room,
sometimes, in our congested districts, a separate family. In some
foreign countries they have made much more progress than we in handling
these things. In the city of Glasgow, for example (Glasgow is one of
the model cities of the world), they have made up their minds that the
entries and the hallways of great tenements are public streets.
Therefore, the policeman goes up the stairway and patrols the
corridors; the lighting department of the city sees to it that the
halls are abundantly lighted. The city does not deceive itself into
supposing that that great building is a unit from which the police are
to keep out and the civic authority to be excluded, but it says: "These
are public highways, and light is needed in them, and control by the
authority of the city."
I liken that to our great modern industrial enterprises. A corporation
is very like a large tenement house; it isn't the premises of a single
commercial family; it is just as much a public affair as a tenement
house is a network of public highways.
When you offer the securities, of a great corporation to anybody who
wishes to purchase them, you must open that corporation to the
inspection of everybody who wants to purchase. There must, to follow
out the figure of the tenement house, be lights along the corridors,
there must be police patrolling the openings, there must be inspection
wherever it is known that men may be deceived with regard to the
contents of the premises. If we believe that fraud lies in wait for us,
we must have the means of determining whether our suspicions are well
founded or not. Similarly, the treatment of labor by the great
corporations is not what it was in Jefferson's time. Whenever bodies of
men employ bodies of men, it ceases to be a private relationship. So
that when courts hold that working men can not peaceably dissuade other
working men from taking employment, and base the decision upon the
analogy of domestic servants, they simply show that their minds and
understandings are lingering in an age which has passed away. This
dealing of great bodies of men with other bodies of men is a matter of
public scrutiny, and should be a matter of public regulation.
Similarly, it was no business of the law in the time of Jefferson to
come into my house and see how I kept house. But when my house, when my
so-called private property, became a great mine, and men went along
dark corridors amidst every kind of danger in order to dig out of the
bowels of the earth things necessary for the industries of a whole
nation, and when it came about that no individual owned these mines,
that they were owned by great stock companies, then all the old
analogies absolutely collapsed, and it became the right of the
government to go down into these mines to see whether human beings were
properly treated in them or not; to see whether accidents were properly
safeguarded against; to see whether modern economical methods of using
these inestimable riches of the earth were followed or were not
followed. If somebody puts a derrick improperly secured on top of a
building or overtopping the street, then the government of the city has
the right to see that that derrick is so secured that you and I can
walk under it and not be afraid that the heavens are going to fall on
us. Likewise in these great beehives where in every corridor swarm men
of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the government, whether of
the State or of the United States, as the case may be, to see that
human life is properly cared for, and that human lungs have something
to breathe.
These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions. We are in a new
world, struggling under old laws. As we go inspecting our lives to-day,
surveying this new scene of centralized and complex society, we shall
find many more things out of joint.
One of the most alarming phenomena of the time--or rather it would be
alarming if the Nation had not awakened to it and shown its
determination to control it--one of the most significant signs of the
new social era is the degree to which government has become associated
with business. I speak, for the moment, of the control over the
Government exercised by Big Business. Behind the whole subject, of
course, is the truth that, in the new order, government and business
must be associated, closely. But that association is, at present, of a
nature absolutely intolerable; the precedence is wrong, the association
is upside down. Our Government has been for the past few years under
the control of heads of great allied corporations with special
interests. It has not controlled these interests and assigned them a
proper place in the whole system of business; it has submitted itself
to their control. As a result, there have grown up vicious systems and
schemes of governmental favoritism (the most obvious being the
extravagant tariff), far-reaching in effect upon the whole fabric of
life, touching to his injury every inhabitant of the land, laying
unfair and impossible handicaps upon competitors, imposing taxes in
every direction, stifling everywhere the free spirit of American
enterprise.
Now this has come about naturally; as we go on, we shall see how very
naturally. It is no use denouncing anybody or anything, except human
nature. Nevertheless, it is an intolerable thing that the government of
the Republic should have got so far out of the hands of the people;
should have been captured by interests which are special and not
general. In the train of this capture follow the troops of scandals,
wrongs, indecencies, with which our politics swarm.
There are cities in America of whose government we are ashamed. There
are cities everywhere, in every part of the land, in which we feel
that, not the interests of the public, but the interests of special
privileges of selfish men, are served; where contracts take precedence
over public interest. Not only in big cities is this the case. Have you
not noticed the growth of socialistic sentiment in the smaller towns?
Not many months ago I stopped at a little town in Nebraska while my
train lingered, and I met on the platform, a very engaging young
fellow, dressed in overalls, who introduced himself to me as the mayor
of the town, and added that he was a Socialist. I said, "What does that
mean? Does that mean that this town is socialistic?" "No, sir," he
said; "I have not deceived myself; the vote by which I was elected was
about 20 per cent. socialistic and 80 per cent, protest." It was
protest against the treachery to the people and those who led both the
other parties of that town.
All over the Union people are coming to feel that they have no control
over the course of affairs. I live in one of the greatest States in the
Union, which was at one time in slavery. Until two years ago we had
witnessed with increasing concern the growth in New Jersey of a spirit
of almost cynical despair. Men said, "We vote; we are offered the
platform we want; we elect the men who stand on that platform, and we
get absolutely nothing." So they began to ask, "What is the use of
voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the
same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction."
It is not confined to some of the State governments and those of some
of the towns and cities. We know that something intervenes between the
people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at
Washington. It is not the people who have been ruling there of late.
Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a
revolution? Because we are profoundly disturbed by the influences which
we see reigning in the determination of our public life and our public
policy. There was a time when America was blithe with self-confidence.
She boasted that she, and she alone, knew the processes of popular
government; but now she sees her sky overcast; she sees that there are
at work forces which she did not dream of in her hopeful youth.
Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience,
who did not care for the Nation, could put this whole country into a
flame? Don't you know that this country from one end to another
believes that something is wrong? What an opportunity it would be for
some man without conscience to spring up and say: "This is the way.
Follow me!"--and lead in paths of destruction.
The old order changeth--changeth under our very eyes, not quietly and
equably, but swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult of
reconstruction.
I suppose that all struggle for law has been conscious, that very
little of it has been blind or merely instinctive. It is the fashion to
say, as if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness,
that every age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more
full of change than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the
struggle for change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so
great a scale as in this in which we are taking part.
The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and
normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into
another, its natural heir and successor. Society is looking itself
over, in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical
analysis of its very elements; is questioning its oldest practises as
freely as its newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its
life; and it stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical
reconstruction, which only frank and honest counsels and the forces of
generous cooperation can hold back from becoming a revolution. We are
in a temper to reconstruct economic society, as we were once in a
temper to reconstruct political society, and political society may
itself undergo a radical modification in the process. I doubt if any
age was ever more conscious of its task or more unanimously desirous of
radical and extended changes in its economic and political practise.
We stand in the presence of a revolution--not a bloody revolution,
America is not given to the spilling of blood--but a silent revolution
whereby America will insist upon recovering in practise those ideals
which she has always professed, upon securing a government devoted to
the general interest and not to special interests.
We are upon the eve of a great reconstruction. It calls for creative
statesmanship as no age has done since that great age in which we set
up the government under which we live, that government which was the
admiration of the world until it suffered wrongs to grow up under it
which have made many of our own compatriots question the freedom of our
institutions and preach revolution against them. I do not fear
revolution. I have unshaken faith in the power of America to keep its
self-possession. Revolution will come in peaceful guise, as it came
when we put aside the crude government of the Confederation, and
created the great Federal Union which governed individuals, not States,
and which has been these one hundred and thirty years our vehicle of
progress. Some radical changes we must make in our law and practise.
Some reconstructions we must push forward, which a new age and new
circumstances impose upon us. But we can do it all in calm and sober
fashion, like statesmen and patriots.
I do not speak of these things in apprehension, because all is open and
above-board. This is not a day in which great forces rally in secret.
The whole stupendous program must be publicly planned and canvassed.
Good temper, the wisdom that comes of sober counsel, the energy of
thoughtful and unselfish men, the habit of cooperation and of
compromise which has been bred in us by long years of free government
in which reason rather than passion has been made to prevail by the
sheer virtue of candid and universal debate, will enable us to win
through to still another great age without violence.