The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson

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You know that the great melting-pot of America, the place where we are all
made Americans of, is the public school, where men of every race and of
every origin and of every station in life send their children, or ought to
send their children, and where, being mixed together, the youngsters are
all infused with the American spirit and developed into American men and
American women. When, in addition to sending our children to school to
paid teachers, we go to school to one another in those same schoolhouses,
then we shall begin more fully to realize than we ever have realized
before what American life is. And let me tell you this, confidentially,
that wherever you find school boards that object to opening the
schoolhouses in the evening for public meetings of every proper sort, you
had better look around for some politician who is objecting to it; because
the thing that cures bad politics is talk by the neighbors. The thing that
brings to light the concealed circumstances of our political life is the
talk of the neighborhood; and if you can get the neighbors together, get
them frankly to tell everything they know, then your politics, your ward
politics, and your city politics, and your state politics, too, will be
turned inside out,--in the way they ought to be. Because the chief
difficulty our politics has suffered is that the inside didn't look like
the outside. Nothing clears the air like frank discussion.

One of the valuable lessons of my life was due to the fact that at a
comparatively early age in my experience as a public speaker I had the
privilege of speaking in Cooper Union in New York. The audience in Cooper
Union is made up of every kind of man and woman, from the poor devil who
simply comes in to keep warm up to the man who has come in to take a
serious part in the discussion of the evening. I want to tell you this,
that in the questions that are asked there after the speech is over, the
most penetrating questions that I have ever had addressed to me came from
some of the men who were the least well-dressed in the audience, came from
the plain fellows, came from the fellows whose muscle was daily up against
the whole struggle of life. They asked questions which went to the heart
of the business and put me to my mettle to answer them. I felt as if those
questions came as a voice out of life itself, not a voice out of any
school less severe than the severe school of experience. And what I like
about this social centre idea of the schoolhouse is that there is the
place where the ordinary fellow is going to get his innings, going to ask
his questions, going to express his opinions, going to convince those who
do not realize the vigor of America that the vigor of America pulses in
the blood of every true American, and that the only place he can find the
true American is in this clearing-house of absolutely democratic opinion.

No one man understands the United States. I have met some gentlemen who
professed they did. I have even met some business men who professed they
held in their own single comprehension the business of the United States;
but I am educated enough to know that they do not. Education has this
useful effect, that it narrows of necessity the circles of one's egotism.
No student knows his subject. The most he knows is where and how to find
out the things he does not know with regard to it. That is also the
position of a statesman. No statesman understands the whole country. He
should make it his business to find out where he will get the information
necessary to understand at least a part of it at a time when dealing with
complex affairs. What we need is a universal revival of common counsel.

I have sometimes reflected on the lack of a body of public opinion in our
cities, and once I contrasted the habits of the city man with those of the
countryman in a way which got me into trouble. I described what a man in a
city generally did when he got into a public vehicle or sat in a public
place. He doesn't talk to anybody, but he plunges his head into a
newspaper and presently experiences a reaction which he calls his opinion,
but which is not an opinion at all, being merely the impression that a
piece of news or an editorial has made upon him. He cannot be said to be
participating in public opinion at all until he has laid his mind
alongside the minds of his neighbors and discussed with them the incidents
of the day and the tendencies of the time.

Where I got into trouble was, that I ventured on a comparison. I said that
public opinion was not typified on the streets of a busy city, but was
typified around the stove in a country store where men sat and probably
chewed tobacco and spat into a sawdust box, and made up, before they got
through, what was the neighborhood opinion both about persons and events;
and then, inadvertently, I added this philosophical reflection, that,
whatever might be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least could
be said for it: that it gave a man time to think between sentences. Ever
since then I have been represented, particularly in the advertisements of
tobacco firms, as in favor of the use of chewing tobacco!

The reason that some city men are not more catholic in their ideas is that
they do not share the opinion of the country, and the reason that some
countrymen are rustic is that they do not know the opinion of the city;
they are both hampered by their limitations. I heard the other day of a
woman who had lived all her life in a city and in an hotel. She made a
first visit to the country last summer, and spent a week in a farmhouse.
Asked afterward what had interested her most about her experience, she
replied that it was hearing the farmer "page his cows!"

A very urban point of view with regard to a common rustic occurrence, and
yet that language showed the sharp, the inelastic limits of her thought.
She was provincial in the extreme; she thought even more narrowly than in
the terms of a city; she thought in the terms of an hotel. In proportion
as we are confined within the walls of one hostelry or one city or one
state, we are provincial. We can do nothing more to advance our country's
welfare than to bring the various communities within the counsels of the
nation. The real difficulty of our nation has been that not enough of us
realized that the matters we discussed were matters of common concern. We
have talked as if we had to serve now this part of the country and again
that part, now this interest and again that interest; as if all interests
were not linked together, provided we understood them and knew how they
were related to one another.

If you would know what makes the great river as it nears the sea, you must
travel up the stream. You must go up into the hills and back into the
forests and see the little rivulets, the little streams, all gathering in
hidden places to swell the great body of water in the channel. And so with
the making of public opinion: Back in the country, on the farms, in the
shops, in the hamlets, in the homes of cities, in the schoolhouses, where
men get together and are frank and true with one another, there come
trickling down the streams which are to make the mighty force of the
river, the river which is to drive all the enterprises of human life as it
sweeps on into the great common sea of humanity.

I feel nothing so much as the intensity of the common man. I can pick out
in any audience the men who are at ease in their fortunes: they are seeing
a public man go through his stunts. But there are in every crowd other men
who are not doing that,--men who are listening as if they were waiting to
hear if there were somebody who could speak the thing that is stirring in
their own hearts and minds. It makes a man's heart ache to think that he
cannot be sure that he is doing it for them; to wonder whether they are
longing for something that he does not understand. He prays God that
something will bring into his consciousness what is in theirs, so that the
whole nation may feel at last released from its dumbness, feel at last
that there is no invisible force holding it back from its goal, feel at
last that there is hope and confidence and that the road may be trodden as
if we were brothers, shoulder to shoulder, not asking each other anything
about differences of class, not contesting for any selfish advance, but
united in the common enterprise.

The burden that is upon the heart of every conscientious public man is the
burden of the thought that perhaps he does not sufficiently comprehend the
national life. For, as a matter of fact, no single man does comprehend it.
The whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one
another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man, but to
depend upon the counsel of all. For only as men are brought into counsel,
and state their own needs and interests, can the general interests of a
great people be compounded into a policy that will be suitable to all.

I have realized all my life, as a man connected with the tasks of
education, that the chief use of education is to open the understanding to
comprehend as many things as possible. That it is not what a man
knows,--for no man knows a great deal,--but what a man has upon his mind
to find out; it is his ability to understand things, it is his connection
with the great masses of men that makes him fit to speak for others,--and
only that. I have associated with some of the gentlemen who are connected
with the special interests of this country (and many of them are pretty
fine men, I can tell you), but, fortunately for me, I have associated with
a good many other persons besides; I have not confined my acquaintance to
these interesting groups, and I can actually tell those gentlemen some
things that they have not had time to find out. It has been my great good
fortune not to have had my head buried in special undertakings, and,
therefore, I have had an occasional look at the horizon. Moreover, I found
out, a long time ago, fortunately for me, when I was a boy, that the
United States did not consist of that part of it in which I lived. There
was a time when I was a very narrow provincial, but happily the
circumstances of my life made it necessary that I should go to a very
distant part of the country, and I early found out what a very limited
acquaintance I had with the United States, found out that the only thing
that would give me any sense at all in discussing the affairs of the
United States was to know as many parts of the United States as possible.

* * * * *

The men who have been ruling America must consent to let the majority into
the game. We will no longer permit any system to go uncorrected which is
based upon private understandings and expert testimony; we will not allow
the few to continue to determine what the policy of the country is to be.
It is a question of access to our own government. There are very few of us
who have had any real access to the government. It ought to be a matter of
common counsel; a matter of united counsel; a matter of mutual
comprehension.

So, keep the air clear with constant discussion. Make every public servant
feel that he is acting in the open and under scrutiny; and, above all
things else, take these great fundamental questions of your lives with
which political platforms concern themselves and search them through and
through by every process of debate. Then we shall have a clear air in
which we shall see our way to each kind of social betterment. When we have
freed our government, when we have restored freedom of enterprise, when we
have broken up the partnerships between money and power which now block us
at every turn, then we shall see our way to accomplish all the handsome
things which platforms promise in vain if they do not start at the point
where stand the gates of liberty.

I am not afraid of the American people getting up and doing something. I
am only afraid they will not; and when I hear a popular vote spoken of as
mob government, I feel like telling the man who dares so to speak that he
has no right to call himself an American. You cannot make a reckless,
passionate force out of a body of sober people earning their living in a
free country. Just picture to yourselves the voting population of this
great land, from the sea to the far borders in the mountains, going
calmly, man by man, to the polls, expressing its judgment about public
affairs: is that your image of "a mob?"

What is a mob? A mob is a body of men in hot contact with one another,
moved by ungovernable passion to do a hasty thing that they will regret
the next day. Do you see anything resembling a mob in that voting
population of the countryside, men tramping over the mountains, men going
to the general store up in the village, men moving in little talking
groups to the corner grocery to cast their ballots,--is that your notion
of a mob? Or is that your picture of a free, self-governing people? I am
not afraid of the judgments so expressed, if you give men time to think,
if you give them a clear conception of the things they are to vote for;
because the deepest conviction and passion of my heart is that the common
people, by which I mean all of us, are to be absolutely trusted.

So, at this opening of a new age, in this its day of unrest and
discontent, it is our part to clear the air, to bring about common
counsel; to set up the parliament of the people; to demonstrate that we
are fighting no man, that we are trying to bring all men to understand
one another; that we are not the friends of any class against any other
class, but that our duty is to make classes understand one another. Our
part is to lift so high the incomparable standards of the common interest
and the common justice that all men with vision, all men with hope, all
men with the convictions of America in their hearts, will crowd to that
standard and a new day of achievement may come for the liberty which we
love.

VI

LET THERE BE LIGHT

The concern of patriotic men is to put our government again on its right
basis, by substituting the popular will for the rule of guardians, the
processes of common counsel for those of private arrangement. In order to
do this, a first necessity is to open the doors and let in the light on
all affairs which the people have a right to know about.

In the first place, it is necessary to open up all the processes of our
politics. They have been too secret, too complicated, too roundabout; they
have consisted too much of private conferences and secret understandings,
of the control of legislation by men who were not legislators, but who
stood outside and dictated, controlling oftentimes by very questionable
means, which they would not have dreamed of allowing to become public. The
whole process must be altered. We must take the selection of candidates
for office, for example, out of the hands of small groups of men, of
little coteries, out of the hands of machines working behind closed doors,
and put it into the hands of the people themselves again by means of
direct primaries and elections to which candidates of every sort and
degree may have free access. We must substitute public for private
machinery.

It is necessary, in the second place, to give society command of its own
economic life again by denying to those who conduct the great modern
operations of business the privacy that used to belong properly enough to
men who used only their own capital and their individual energy in
business. The processes of capital must be as open as the processes of
politics. Those who make use of the great modern accumulations of wealth,
gathered together by the dragnet process of the sale of stocks and bonds,
and piling up of reserves, must be treated as under a public obligation;
they must be made responsible for their business methods to the great
communities which are in fact their working partners, so that the hand
which makes correction shall easily reach them and a new principle of
responsibility be felt throughout their structure and operation.

What are the right methods of politics? Why, the right methods are those
of public discussion: the methods of leadership open and above board, not
closeted with "boards of guardians" or anybody else, but brought out under
the sky, where honest eyes can look upon them and honest eyes can judge of
them.

If there is nothing to conceal, then why conceal it? If it is a public
game, why play it in private? If it is a public game, then why not come
out into the open and play it in public? You have got to cure diseased
politics as we nowadays cure tuberculosis, by making all the people who
suffer from it live out of doors; not only spend their days out of doors
and walk around, but sleep out of doors; always remain in the open, where
they will be accessible to fresh, nourishing, and revivifying influences.

I, for one, have the conviction that government ought to be all outside
and no inside. I, for my part, believe that there ought to be no place
where anything can be done that everybody does not know about. It would be
very inconvenient for some gentlemen, probably, if government were all
outside, but we have consulted their susceptibilities too long already. It
is barely possible that some of these gentlemen are unjustly suspected; in
that case they owe it to themselves to come out and operate in the light.
The very fact that so much in politics is done in the dark, behind closed
doors, promotes suspicion. Everybody knows that corruption thrives in
secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair
presumption that secrecy means impropriety. So, our honest politicians and
our honorable corporation heads owe it to their reputations to bring their
activities out into the open.

At any rate, whether they like it or not, these affairs are going to be
dragged into the open. We are more anxious about their reputations than
they are themselves. We are too solicitous for their morals,--if they are
not,--to permit them longer to continue subject to the temptations of
secrecy. You know there is temptation in loneliness and secrecy. Haven't
you experienced it? I have. We are never so proper in our conduct as when
everybody can look and see exactly what we are doing. If you are off in
some distant part of the world and suppose that nobody who lives within a
mile of your home is anywhere around, there are times when you adjourn
your ordinary standards. You say to yourself: "Well, I'll have a fling
this time; nobody will know anything about it." If you were on the desert
of Sahara, you would feel that you might permit yourself,--well, say, some
slight latitude in conduct; but if you saw one of your immediate neighbors
coming the other way on a camel,--you would behave yourself until he got
out of sight. The most dangerous thing in the world is to get off where
nobody knows you. I advise you to stay around among the neighbors, and
then you may keep out of jail. That is the only way some of us can keep
out of jail.

Publicity is one of the purifying elements of politics. The best thing
that you can do with anything that is crooked is to lift it up where
people can see that it is crooked, and then it will either straighten
itself out or disappear. Nothing checks all the bad practices of politics
like public exposure. You can't be crooked in the light. I don't know
whether it has ever been tried or not; but I venture to say, purely from
observation, that it can't be done.

And so the people of the United States have made up their minds to do a
healthy thing for both politics and big business. Permit me to mix a few
metaphors: They are going to open doors; they are going to let up blinds;
they are going to drag sick things into the open air and into the light of
the sun. They are going to organize a great hunt, and smoke certain
animals out of their burrows. They are going to unearth the beast in the
jungle in which when they hunted they were caught by the beast instead of
catching him. They have determined, therefore, to take an axe and raze the
jungle, and then see where the beast will find cover. And I, for my part,
bid them God-speed. The jungle breeds nothing but infection and shelters
nothing but the enemies of mankind.

And nobody is going to get caught in our hunt except the beasts that
prey. Nothing is going to be cut down or injured that anybody ought to
wish preserved.

You know the story of the Irishman who, while digging a hole, was asked,
"Pat, what are you doing,--digging a hole?" And he replied, "No, sir; I am
digging the dirt, and laying the hole." It was probably the same Irishman
who, seen digging around the wall of a house, was asked, "Pat, what are
you doing?" And he answered, "Faith, I am letting the dark out of the
cellar." Now, that's exactly what we want to do,--let the dark out of the
cellar.

* * * * *

Take, first, the relations existing between politics and business.

It is perfectly legitimate, of course, that the business interests of the
country should not only enjoy the protection of the law, but that they
should be in every way furthered and strengthened and facilitated by
legislation. The country has no jealousy of any connection between
business and politics which is a legitimate connection. It is not in the
least averse from open efforts to accommodate law to the material
development which has so strengthened the country in all that it has
undertaken by supplying its extraordinary life with its necessary physical
foundations.

But the illegitimate connections between business and legislation are
another matter. I would wish to speak on this subject with soberness and
circumspection. I have no desire to excite anger against anybody. That
would be easy, but it would do no particular good. I wish, rather, to
consider an unhappy situation in a spirit that may enable us to account
for it, to some extent, and so perhaps get at the causes and the remedy.
Mere denunciation doesn't help much to clear up a matter so involved as is
the complicity of business with evil politics in America.

Every community is vaguely aware that the political machine upon which it
looks askance has certain very definite connections with men who are
engaged in business on a large scale, and the suspicion which attaches to
the machine itself has begun to attach also to business enterprises, just
because these connections are known to exist. If these connections were
open and avowed, if everybody knew just what they involved and just what
use was being made of them, there would be no difficulty in keeping an eye
upon affairs and in controlling them by public opinion. But,
unfortunately, the whole process of law-making in America is a very
obscure one. There is no highway of legislation, but there are many
by-ways. Parties are not organized in such a way in our legislatures as to
make any one group of men avowedly responsible for the course of
legislation. The whole process of discussion, if any discussion at all
takes place, is private and shut away from public scrutiny and knowledge.
There are so many circles within circles, there are so many indirect and
private ways of getting at legislative action, that our communities are
constantly uneasy during legislative sessions. It is this confusion and
obscurity and privacy of our legislative method that gives the political
machine its opportunity. There is no publicly responsible man or group of
men who are known to formulate legislation and to take charge of it from
the time of its introduction until the time of its enactment. It has,
therefore, been possible for an outside force,--the political machine, the
body of men who nominated the legislators and who conducted the contest
for their election,--to assume the role of control. Business men who
desired something done in the way of changing the law under which they
were acting, or who wished to prevent legislation which seemed to them to
threaten their own interests, have known that there was this definite body
of persons to resort to, and they have made terms with them. They have
agreed to supply them with money for campaign expenses and to stand by
them in all other cases where money was necessary if in return they might
resort to them for protection or for assistance in matters of legislation.
Legislators looked to a certain man who was not even a member of their
body for instructions as to what they were to do with particular bills.
The machine, which was the centre of party organization, was the natural
instrument of control, and men who had business interests to promote
naturally resorted to the body which exercised the control.

There need have been nothing sinister about this. If the whole matter had
been open and candid and honest, public criticism would not have centred
upon it. But the use of money always results in demoralization, and goes
beyond demoralization to actual corruption. There are two kinds of
corruption,--the crude and obvious sort, which consists in direct bribery,
and the much subtler, more dangerous, sort, which consists in a corruption
of the will. Business men who have tried to set up a control in politics
through the machine have more and more deceived themselves, have allowed
themselves to think that the whole matter was a necessary means of
self-defence, have said that it was a necessary outcome of our political
system. Having reassured themselves in this way, they have drifted from
one thing to another until the questions of morals involved have become
hopelessly obscured and submerged. How far away from the ideals of their
youth have many of our men of business drifted, enmeshed in the vicious
system,--how far away from the days when their fine young manhood was
wrapped in "that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound!"

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