The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson

W >> Woodrow Wilson >> The New Freedom

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

I have listened to some very honest and eloquent orators whose sentiments
were noteworthy for this: that when they spoke of the people, they were
not thinking of themselves; they were thinking of somebody whom they were
commissioned to take care of. They were always planning to do things _for_
the American people, and I have seen them visibly shiver when it was
suggested that they arrange to have something done by the people for
themselves. They said, "What do they know about it?" I always feel like
replying, "What do _you_ know about it? You know your own interest, but
who has told you our interests, and what do you know about them?" For the
business of every leader of government is to hear what the nation is
saying and to know what the nation is enduring. It is not his business to
judge _for_ the nation, but to judge _through_ the nation as its spokesman
and voice. I do not believe that this country could have safely allowed a
continuation of the policy of the men who have viewed affairs in any other
light.

The hypothesis under which we have been ruled is that of government
through a board of trustees, through a selected number of the big business
men of the country who know a lot that the rest of us do not know, and who
take it for granted that our ignorance would wreck the prosperity of the
country. The idea of the Presidents we have recently had has been that
they were Presidents of a National Board of Trustees. That is not my
idea. I have been president of one board of trustees, and I do not care to
have another on my hands. I want to be President of the people of the
United States. There was many a time when I was president of the board of
trustees of a university when the undergraduates knew more than the
trustees did; and it has been in my thought ever since that if I could
have dealt directly with the people who constituted Princeton University I
could have carried it forward much faster than I could dealing with a
board of trustees.

Mark you, I am not saying that these leaders knew that they were doing us
an evil, or that they intended to do us an evil. For my part, I am very
much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is
bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I
think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery,
because harder to fight and dislodge. If a man does not know enough to
know what the consequences are going to be to the country, then he cannot
govern the country in a way that is for its benefit. These gentlemen,
whatever may have been their intentions, linked the government up with the
men who control the finances. They may have done it innocently, or they
may have done it corruptly, without affecting my argument at all. And they
themselves cannot escape from that alliance.

Here, for example, is the old question of campaign funds: If I take a
hundred thousand dollars from a group of men representing a particular
interest that has a big stake in a certain schedule of the tariff, I take
it with the knowledge that those gentlemen will expect me not to forget
their interest in that schedule, and that they will take it as a point of
implicit honor that I should see to it that they are not damaged by too
great a change in that schedule. Therefore, if I take their money, I am
bound to them by a tacit implication of honor. Perhaps there is no ground
for objection to this situation so long as the function of government is
conceived to be to look after the trustees of prosperity, who in turn will
look after the people; but on any other theory than that of trusteeship
no interested campaign contributions can be tolerated for a moment,--save
those of the millions of citizens who thus support the doctrines they
believe and the men whom they recognized as their spokesmen.

I tell you the men I am interested in are the men who, under the
conditions we have had, never had their voices heard, who never got a line
in the newspapers, who never got a moment on the platform, who never had
access to the ears of Governors or Presidents or of anybody who was
responsible for the conduct of public affairs, but who went silently and
patiently to their work every day carrying the burden of the world. How
are they to be understood by the masters of finance, if only the masters
of finance are consulted?

* * * * *

That is what I mean when I say, "Bring the government back to the people."
I do not mean anything demagogic; I do not mean to talk as if we wanted a
great mass of men to rush in and destroy something. That is not the idea.
I want the people to come in and take possession of their own premises;
for I hold that the government belongs to the people, and that they have a
right to that intimate access to it which will determine every turn of its
policy.

America is never going to submit to guardianship. America is never going
to choose thralldom instead of freedom. Look what there is to decide!
There is the tariff question. Can the tariff question be decided in favor
of the people, so long as the monopolies are the chief counselors at
Washington? There is the currency question. Are we going to settle the
currency question so long as the government listens only to the counsel of
those who command the banking situation?

Then there is the question of conservation. What is our fear about
conservation? The hands that are being stretched out to monopolize our
forests, to prevent or pre-empt the use of our great power-producing
streams, the hands that are being stretched into the bowels of the earth
to take possession of the great riches that lie hidden in Alaska and
elsewhere in the incomparable domain of the United States, are the hands
of monopoly. Are these men to continue to stand at the elbow of government
and tell us how we are to save ourselves,--from themselves? You can not
settle the question of conservation while monopoly is close to the ears of
those who govern. And the question of conservation is a great deal bigger
than the question of saving our forests and our mineral resources and our
waters; it is as big as the life and happiness and strength and elasticity
and hope of our people.

There are tasks awaiting the government of the United States which it
cannot perform until every pulse of that government beats in unison with
the needs and the desires of the whole body of the American people. Shall
we not give the people access of sympathy, access of authority, to the
instrumentalities which are to be indispensable to their lives?

IV

LIFE COMES FROM THE SOIL

When I look back on the processes of history, when I survey the genesis of
America, I see this written over every page: that the nations are renewed
from the bottom, not from the top; that the genius which springs up from
the ranks of unknown men is the genius which renews the youth and energy
of the people. Everything I know about history, every bit of experience
and observation that has contributed to my thought, has confirmed me in
the conviction that the real wisdom of human life is compounded out of the
experiences of ordinary men. The utility, the vitality, the fruitage of
life does not come from the top to the bottom; it comes, like the natural
growth of a great tree, from the soil, up through the trunk into the
branches to the foliage and the fruit. The great struggling unknown masses
of the men who are at the base of everything are the dynamic force that
is lifting the levels of society. A nation is as great, and only as great,
as her rank and file.

So the first and chief need of this nation of ours to-day is to include in
the partnership of government all those great bodies of unnamed men who
are going to produce our future leaders and renew the future energies of
America. And as I confess that, as I confess my belief in the common man,
I know what I am saying. The man who is swimming against the stream knows
the strength of it. The man who is in the melee knows what blows are being
struck and what blood is being drawn. The man who is on the make is the
judge of what is happening in America, not the man who has made good; not
the man who has emerged from the flood; not the man who is standing on the
bank looking on, but the man who is struggling for his life and for the
lives of those who are dearer to him than himself. That is the man whose
judgment will tell you what is going on in America; that is the man by
whose judgment I, for one, wish to be guided.

We have had the wrong jury; we have had the wrong group,--no, I will not
say the wrong group, but too small a group,--in control of the policies of
the United States. The average man has not been consulted, and his heart
had begun to sink for fear he never would be consulted again. Therefore,
we have got to organize a government whose sympathies will be open to the
whole body of the people of the United States, a government which will
consult as large a proportion of the people of the United States as
possible before it acts. Because the great problem of government is to
know what the average man is experiencing and is thinking about. Most of
us are average men; very few of us rise, except by fortunate accident,
above the general level of the community about us; and therefore the man
who thinks common thoughts, the man who has had common experiences, is
almost always the man who interprets America aright. Isn't that the reason
that we are proud of such stories as the story of Abraham Lincoln,--a man
who rose out of the ranks and interpreted America better than any man had
interpreted it who had risen out of the privileged classes or the educated
classes of America?

The hope of the United States in the present and in the future is the same
that it has always been: it is the hope and confidence that out of unknown
homes will come men who will constitute themselves the masters of industry
and of politics. The average hopefulness, the average welfare, the average
enterprise, the average initiative, of the United States are the only
things that make it rich. We are not rich because a few gentlemen direct
our industry; we are rich because of our own intelligence and our own
industry. America does not consist of men who get their names into the
newspapers; America does not consist politically of the men who set
themselves up to be political leaders; she does not consist of the men who
do most of her talking,--they are important only so far as they speak for
that great voiceless multitude of men who constitute the great body and
the saving force of the nation. Nobody who cannot speak the common
thought, who does not move by the common impulse, is the man to speak for
America, or for any of her future purposes. Only he is fit to speak who
knows the thoughts of the great body of citizens, the men who go about
their business every day, the men who toil from morning till night, the
men who go home tired in the evenings, the men who are carrying on the
things we are so proud of.

You know how it thrills our blood sometimes to think how all the nations
of the earth wait to see what America is going to do with her power, her
physical power, her enormous resources, her enormous wealth. The nations
hold their breath to see what this young country will do with her young
unspoiled strength; we cannot help but be proud that we are strong. But
what has made us strong? The toil of millions of men, the toil of men who
do not boast, who are inconspicuous, but who live their lives humbly from
day to day; it is the great body of toilers that constitutes the might of
America. It is one of the glories of our land that nobody is able to
predict from what family, from what region, from what race, even, the
leaders of the country are going to come. The great leaders of this
country have not come very often from the established, "successful"
families.

I remember speaking at a school not long ago where I understood that
almost all the young men were the sons of very rich people, and I told
them I looked upon them with a great deal of pity, because, I said: "Most
of you fellows are doomed to obscurity. You will not do anything. You will
never try to do anything, and with all the great tasks of the country
waiting to be done, probably you are the very men who will decline to do
them. Some man who has been 'up against it,' some man who has come out of
the crowd, somebody who has had the whip of necessity laid on his back,
will emerge out of the crowd, will show that he understands the crowd,
understands the interests of the nation, united and not separated, and
will stand up and lead us."

If I may speak of my own experience, I have found audiences made up of the
"common people" quicker to take a point, quicker to understand an
argument, quicker to discern a tendency and to comprehend a principle,
than many a college class that I have lectured to,--not because the
college class lacked the intelligence, but because college boys are not in
contact with the realities of life, while "common" citizens are in contact
with the actual life of day by day; you do not have to explain to them
what touches them to the quick.

There is one illustration of the value of the constant renewal of society
from the bottom that has always interested me profoundly. The only reason
why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the
aristocratic system which then prevailed was that so many of the men who
were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the church,--from
that great religious body which was then the only church, that body which
we now distinguish from other religious bodies as the Roman Catholic
Church. The Roman Catholic Church was then, as it is now, a great
democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a
priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of
Christendom; and every chancellery in Europe, every court in Europe, was
ruled by these learned, trained and accomplished men,--the priesthood of
that great and dominant body. What kept government alive in the Middle
Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and
file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the
priesthood. That, it seems to me, is one of the most interesting and
convincing illustrations that could possibly be adduced of the thing that
I am talking about.

The only way that government is kept pure is by keeping these channels
open, so that nobody may deem himself so humble as not to constitute a
part of the body politic, so that there will constantly be coming new
blood into the veins of the body politic; so that no man is so obscure
that he may not break the crust of any class he may belong to, may not
spring up to higher levels and be counted among the leaders of the state.
Anything that depresses, anything that makes the organization greater than
the man, anything that blocks, discourages, dismays the humble man, is
against all the principles of progress. When I see alliances formed, as
they are now being formed, by successful men of business with successful
organizers of politics, I know that something has been done that checks
the vitality and progress of society. Such an alliance, made at the top,
is an alliance made to depress the levels, to hold them where they are, if
not to sink them; and, therefore, it is the constant business of good
politics to break up such partnerships, to re-establish and reopen the
connections between the great body of the people and the offices of
government.

To-day, when our government has so far passed into the hands of special
interests; to-day, when the doctrine is implicitly avowed that only select
classes have the equipment necessary for carrying on government; to-day,
when so many conscientious citizens, smitten with the scene of social
wrong and suffering, have fallen victims to the fallacy that benevolent
government can be meted out to the people by kind-hearted trustees of
prosperity and guardians of the welfare of dutiful employees,--to-day,
supremely, does it behoove this nation to remember that a people shall be
saved by the power that sleeps in its own deep bosom, or by none; shall be
renewed in hope, in conscience, in strength, by waters welling up from its
own sweet, perennial springs. Not from above; not by patronage of its
aristocrats. The flower does not bear the root, but the root the flower.
Everything that blooms in beauty in the air of heaven draws its fairness,
its vigor, from its roots. Nothing living can blossom into fruitage unless
through nourishing stalks deep-planted in the common soil. The rose is
merely the evidence of the vitality of the root; and the real source of
its beauty, the very blush that it wears upon its tender cheek, comes from
those silent sources of life that lie hidden in the chemistry of the soil.
Up from that soil, up from the silent bosom of the earth, rise the
currents of life and energy. Up from the common soil, up from the quiet
heart of the people, rise joyously to-day streams of hope and
determination bound to renew the face of the earth in glory.

I tell you, the so-called radicalism of our times is simply the effort of
nature to release the generous energies of our people. This great American
people is at bottom just, virtuous, and hopeful; the roots of its being
are in the soil of what is lovely, pure, and of good report, and the need
of the hour is just that radicalism that will clear a way for the
realization of the aspirations of a sturdy race.

V

THE PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE

For a long time this country of ours has lacked one of the institutions
which freemen have always and everywhere held fundamental. For a long time
there has been no sufficient opportunity of counsel among the people; no
place and method of talk, of exchange of opinion, of parley. Communities
have outgrown the folk-moot and the town-meeting. Congress, in accordance
with the genius of the land, which asks for action and is impatient of
words,--Congress has become an institution which does its work in the
privacy of committee rooms and not on the floor of the Chamber; a body
that makes laws,--a legislature; not a body that debates,--not a
parliament. Party conventions afford little or no opportunity for
discussion; platforms are privately manufactured and adopted with a whoop.
It is partly because citizens have foregone the taking of counsel
together that the unholy alliances of bosses and Big Business have been
able to assume to govern for us.

I conceive it to be one of the needs of the hour to restore the processes
of common counsel, and to substitute them for the processes of private
arrangement which now determine the policies of cities, states, and
nation. We must learn, we freemen, to meet, as our fathers did, somehow,
somewhere, for consultation. There must be discussion and debate, in which
all freely participate.

It must be candid debate, and it must have for its honest purpose the
clearing up of questions and the establishing of the truth. Too much
political discussion is not to honest purpose, but only for the
confounding of an opponent. I am often reminded, when political debate
gets warm and we begin to hope that the truth is making inroads on the
reason of those who have denied it, of the way a debate in Virginia once
seemed likely to end:

When I was a young man studying at Charlottesville, there were two
factions in the Democratic party in the State of Virginia which were
having a pretty hot contest with each other. In one of the counties one of
these factions had practically no following at all. A man named Massey,
one of its redoubtable debaters, though a little, slim,
insignificant-looking person, sent a messenger up into this county and
challenged the opposition to debate with him. They didn't quite like the
idea, but they were too proud to decline, so they put up their best
debater, a big, good-natured man whom everybody was familiar with as
"Tom," and it was arranged that Massey should have the first hour and that
Tom Whatever-his-name-was should succeed him the next hour. When the
occasion came, Massey, with his characteristic shrewdness, began to get
underneath the skins of the audience, and he hadn't made more than half
his speech before it was evident that he was getting that hostile crowd
with him; whereupon one of Tom's partisans in the back of the room, seeing
how things were going, cried out: "Tom, call him a liar and make it a
fight!"

Now, that kind of debate, that spirit in discussion, gets us nowhere. Our
national affairs are too serious, they lie too close to the well-being of
each one of us, to excuse our talking about them except in earnestness and
candor and a willingness to speak and listen with open minds. It is a
misfortune that attends the party system that in the heat of a campaign
partisan passions are so aroused that we cannot have frank discussion. Yet
I am sure that I observe, and that all citizens must observe, an almost
startling change in the temper of the people in this respect. The campaign
just closed was markedly different from others that had preceded it in the
degree to which party considerations were forgotten in the seriousness of
the things we had to discuss as common citizens of an endangered country.

There is astir in the air of America something that I for one never saw
before, never felt before. I have been going to political meetings all my
life, though not all my life playing an immodestly conspicuous part in
them; and there is a spirit in our political meetings now that I never
saw before. It hasn't been very many years, let me say for example, that
women attended political meetings. And women are attending political
meetings now not simply because there is a woman question in politics;
they are attending them because the modern political meeting is not like
the political meeting of five or ten years ago. That was a mere
ratification rally. That was a mere occasion for "whooping it up" for
somebody. That was merely an occasion upon which one party was denounced
unreasonably and the other was lauded unreasonably. No party has ever
deserved quite the abuse that each party has got in turn, and nobody has
ever deserved the praise that both parties have got in turn. The old
political meeting was a wholly irrational performance; it was got together
for the purpose of saying things that were chiefly not so and that were
known by those who heard them not to be so, and were simply to be taken as
a tonic in order to produce cheers.

But I am very much mistaken in the temper of my fellow-countrymen if the
meetings I have seen in the last two years bear any resemblance to those
older meetings. Men now get together in a political meeting in order to
hear things of the deepest consequence discussed. And you will find almost
as many Republicans in a Democratic meeting as you will find Democrats in
a Republican meeting; the spirit of frank discussion, of common counsel,
is abroad.

Good will it be for the country if the interest in public concerns
manifested so widely and so sincerely be not suffered to expire with the
election! Why should political debate go on only when somebody is to be
elected? Why should it be confined to campaign time?

* * * * *

There is a movement on foot in which, in common with many men and women
who love their country, I am greatly interested,--the movement to open the
schoolhouse to the grown-up people in order that they may gather and talk
over the affairs of the neighborhood and the state. There are schoolhouses
all over the land which are not used by the teachers and children in the
summer months, which are not used in the winter time in the evening for
school purposes. These buildings belong to the public. Why not insist
everywhere that they be used as places of discussion, such as of old took
place in the town-meetings to which everybody went and where every public
officer was freely called to account? The schoolhouse, which belongs to
all of us, is a natural place in which to gather to consult over our
common affairs.

I was very much interested in the remark of a fellow-citizen of ours who
had been born on the other side of the water. He said that not long ago he
wandered into one of those neighborhood schoolhouse meetings, and there
found himself among people who were discussing matters in which they were
all interested; and when he came out he said to me: "I have been living in
America now ten years, and to-night for the first time I saw America as I
had imagined it to be. This gathering together of men of all sorts upon a
perfect footing of equality to discuss frankly with one another what
concerned them all,--that is what I dreamed America was."

That set me to thinking. He hadn't seen the America he had come to find
until that night. Had he not felt like a neighbor? Had men not consulted
him? He had felt like an outsider. Had there been no little circles in
which public affairs were discussed?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13