Theodore Roosevelt’s NEW NATIONALISM vs. Woodrow Wilson’s
NEW FREEDOM
Theodore Roosevelt
Woodrow Wilson
Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism Speech (August 31, 1910)
A Speech Delivered at the Dedication of the John Brown Memorial Park in Osawatomie, Kansas
We come here to-day to commemorate one of the epoch-making events of the long struggle for the rights of man —
the long struggle for the uplift of humanity. Our country — this great republic — means nothing unless it means the
triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under
which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. That is why the history of
America is now the central feature of the history of the world; for the world has set its face hopefully toward our
democracy; and, O my fellow citizens, each one of you carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well
for the sake of your country, but the burden of doing well and of seeing that this nation does well for the sake of
mankind.
There have been two great crises in our country’s history: first, when it was formed, and then, again, when it was
perpetuated; and, in the second of these great crises — in the time of stress and strain which culminated in the Civil
War, on the outcome of which depended the justification of what had been done earlier, you men of the Grand
Army, you men who fought through the Civil War, not only did you justify your generation, but you justified the
wisdom of Washington and Washington’s colleagues. If this Republic had been founded by them only to be split
asunder into fragments when the strain came, then the judgment of the world would have been that Washington’s
work was not worth doing. It was you who crowned Washington’s work, as you carried to achievement the high
purpose of Abraham Lincoln.
Now, with this second period of our history the name of John Brown will forever be associated; and Kansas was the
theatre upon which the first act of the second of our great national life dramas was played. It was the result of the
struggle in Kansas which determined that our country should be in deed as well as in name devoted to both union
and freedom; that the great experiment of democratic government on a national scale should succeed and not fail. In
name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the
Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts. This is
true everywhere; but, O my friends, it should be truest of all in political life. A broken promise is bad enough in
private life. It is worse in the field of politics. No man is worth his salt in public life who makes on the stump a
pledge which he does not keep after election; and, if he makes such a pledge and does not keep it, hunt him out of
public life. I care for the great deeds of the past chiefly as spurs to drive us onward in the present. I speak of the men
of the past partly that they may be honored by our praise of them, but more that they may serve as examples for the
future.
It was a heroic struggle; and, as is inevitable with all such struggles, it had also a dark and terrible side. Very much
was done of good, and much also of evil; and, as was inevitable in such a period of revolution, often the same man
did both good and evil. For our great good fortune as a nation, we, the people of the United States as a whole, can
now afford to forget the evil, or, at least, to remember it without bitterness, and to fix our eyes with pride only on the
good that was accomplished. Even in ordinary times there are very few of us who do not see the problems of life as
through a glass, darkly; and when the glass is clouded by the murk of furious popular passion, the vision of the best
and the bravest is dimmed. Looking back, we are all of us now able to do justice to the valor and the
disinterestedness and the love of the right, as to each it was given to see the right, shown both by the men of the
North and the men of the South in that contest which was finally decided by the attitude of the West. We can admire
the heroic valor, the sincerity, the self-devotion shown alike by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore
the gray; and our sadness that such men should have to fight one another is tempered by the glad knowledge that
ever hereafter their descendants shall be fighting side by side, struggling in peace as well as in war for the uplift of
their common country, all alike resolute to raise to the highest pitch of honor and usefulness the nation to which they
all belong. As for the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, they deserve honor and recognition such as is
paid to no other citizens of the republic; for to them the republic owes it all; for to them it owes its very existence. It
is because of what you and your comrades did in the dark years that we of to-day walk, each of us, head erect, and
proud that we belong, not to one of a dozen little squabbling contemptible commonwealths, but to the mightiest
nation upon which the sun shines.
I do not speak of this struggle of the past merely from the historic standpoint. Our interest is primarily in the
application to-day of the lessons taught by the contest a half a century ago. It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty
to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the
qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises. It is half melancholy and half
amusing to see the way in which well-meaning people gather to do honor to the men who, in company with John
Brown, and under the lead of Abraham Lincoln, faced and solved the great problems of the nineteenth century,
while, at the same time, these same good people nervously shrink from, or frantically denounce, those who are
trying to meet the problems of the twentieth century in the spirit which was accountable for the successful solution
of the problems of Lincoln’s time.
Of that generation of men to whom we owe so much, the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln. Part of
our debt to him is because he forecast our present struggle and saw the way out. He said: —
“I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in
ameliorating mankind.”
And again: —
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have
existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher
consideration.”
If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a Communist agitator than I shall
be anyhow. It is Lincoln’s. I am only quoting it; and that is one side; that is the side the capitalist should hear. Now,
let the working man hear his side.
“Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. … Nor should this lead to a
war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; … property is desirable; is a positive good
in the world.”
And then comes a thoroughly Lincolnlike sentence: —
“Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for
himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”
It seems to me that, in these words, Lincoln took substantially the attitude that we ought to take; he showed the
proper sense of proportion in his relative estimates of capital and labor, of human rights and property rights. Above
all, in this speech, as in many others, he taught a lesson in wise kindliness and charity; an indispensable lesson to us
of to-day. But this wise kindliness and charity never weakened his arm or numbed his heart. We cannot afford
weakly to blind ourselves to the actual conflict which faces us today. The issue is joined, and we must fight or fail.
In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve
in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to
civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. One of the chief
factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always
been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or
position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in
the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.
At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned
and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the
struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the
methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all
circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and
citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing
new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War. I ask that civil life be carried on according to the
spirit in which the army was carried on. You never get perfect justice, but the effort in handling the army was to
bring to the front the men who could do the job. Nobody grudged promotion to Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or
Sheridan, because they earned it. The only complaint was when a man got promotion which he did not earn.
Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man
will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities,
unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to
get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the
commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the
burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.
I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play
under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more
substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning, which, I think, is
hardly necessary in Kansas. When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square
deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a
chance will not make good, then he has got to quit. And you men of the Grand Army, you want justice for the brave
man who fought, and punishment for the coward who shirked his work. Is that not so?
Now, this means that our government, national and state, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of
special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the
Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of
government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day.
Every special interest is entitled to justice — full, fair, and complete — and, now, mind you, if there were any
attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, that I most dislike,
and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and
you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but
not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The
Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right
of suffrage to any corporation.
The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the
master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master
of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces
which they have called into being.
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be
neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.
We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond
peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence
of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly
for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate
expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public service corporations, have supplied
one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public
service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business. I do not
wish to see the nation forced into the ownership of the railways if it can possibly be avoided, and the only alternative
is thoroughgoing and effective legislation, which shall be based on a full knowledge of all the facts, including a
physical valuation of property. This physical valuation is not needed, or, at least, is very rarely needed, for fixing
rates; but it is needed as the basis of honest capitalization.
We have come to recognize that franchises should never be granted except for a limited time, and never without
proper provision for compensation to the public. It is my personal belief that the same kind and degree of control
and supervision which should be exercised over public-service corporations should be extended also to
combinations which control necessaries of life, such as meat, oil, or coal, or which deal in them on an important
scale. I have no doubt that the ordinary man who has control of them is much like ourselves. I have no doubt he
would like to do well, but I want to have enough supervision to help him realize that desire to do well.
I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when
any corporation breaks the law.
Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political
legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to
prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare. For that purpose
the Federal Bureau of Corporations is an agency of first importance. Its powers, and, therefore, its efficiency, as well
as that of the Interstate Commerce Commission, should be largely increased. We have a right to expect from the
Bureau of Corporations and from the Interstate Commerce Commission a very high grade of public service. We
should be as sure of the proper conduct of the interstate railways and the proper management of interstate business
as we are now sure of the conduct and management of the national banks, and we should have as effective
supervision in one case as in the other. The Hepburn Act, and the amendment to the act in the shape in which it
finally passed Congress at the last session, represent a long step in advance, and we must go yet further.
There is a wide-spread belief among our people that, under the methods of making tariffs which have hitherto
obtained, the special interests are too influential. Probably this is true of both the big special interests and the little
special interests. These methods have put a premium on selfishness, and, naturally, the selfish big interests have
gotten more than their smaller, though equally selfish, brothers. The duty of Congress is to provide a method by
which the interest of the whole people shall be all that receives consideration. To this end there must be an expert
tariff commission, wholly removed from the possibility of political pressure or of improper business influence. Such
a commission can find the real difference between cost of production, which is mainly the difference of labor cost
here and abroad. As fast as its recommendations are made, I believe in revising one schedule at a time. A general
revision of the tariff almost inevitably leads to logrolling and the subordination of the general public interest to local
and special interests.
The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a
small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their
power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not
for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own
power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. Again, comrades over there,
take the lesson from your own experience. Not only did you not grudge, but you gloried in the promotion of the
great generals who gained their promotion by leading their army to victory. So it is with us. We grudge no man a
fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained
without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents
benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social
and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an
increase in governmental control is now necessary.
No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a
dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the
swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from
what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes,
and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective — a graduated inheritance tax on big
fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.
The people of the United States suffer from periodical financial panics to a degree substantially unknown to the
other nations, which approach us in financial strength. There is no reason why we should suffer what they escape. It
is of profound importance that our financial system should be promptly investigated, and so thoroughly and
effectively revised as to make it certain that hereafter our currency will no longer fail at critical times to meet our
needs.
It is hardly necessary to me to repeat that I believe in an efficient army and a navy large enough to secure for us
abroad that respect which is the surest guarantee of peace. A word of special warning to my fellow citizens who are
as progressive as I hope I am. I want them to keep up their interest in our international affairs; and I want them also
continually to remember Uncle Sam’s interests abroad. Justice and fair dealings among nations rest upon principles
identical with those which control justice and fair dealing among the individuals of which nations are composed,
with the vital exception that each nation must do its own part in international police work. If you get into trouble
here, you can call for the police; but if Uncle Sam gets into trouble, he has got to be his own policeman, and I want
to see him strong enough to encourage the peaceful aspirations of other people’s in connection with us. I believe in
national friendships and heartiest good will to all nations; but national friendships, like those between men, must be
founded on respect as well as on liking, on forbearance as well as upon trust. I should be heartily ashamed of any
American who did not try to make the American government act as justly toward the other nations in international
relations as he himself would act toward any individual in private relations. I should be heartily ashamed to see us
wrong a weaker power, and I should hang my head forever if we tamely suffered wrong from a stronger power.
Of conservation I shall speak more at length elsewhere. Conservation means development as much as it does
protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but
I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask
nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That
farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer
who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a
little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation.
Moreover, I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for
the benefit of the few, and here again is another case in which I am accused of taking a revolutionary attitude.
People forget now that one hundred years ago there were public men of good character who advocated the nation
selling its public lands in great quantities, so that the nation could get the most money out of it, and giving it to the
men who could cultivate it for their own uses. We took the proper democratic ground that the land should be granted
in small sections to the men who were actually to till it and live on it. Now, with the water power, with the forests,
with the mines, we are brought face to face with the fact that there are many people who will go with us in
conserving the resources only if they are to be allowed to exploit them for their benefit. That is one of the
fundamental reasons why the special interests should be driven out of politics. Of all the questions which can come
before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in
importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and
training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves
the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our
people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the
national government must bear a most important part.
I have spoken elsewhere also of the great task which lies before the farmers of the country to get for themselves and
their wives and children not only the benefits of better farming, but also those of better business methods and better
conditions of life on the farm. The burden of this great task will fall, as it should, mainly upon the great
organizations of the farmers themselves. I am glad it will, for I believe they are all well able to handle it. In
particular, there are strong reasons why the Departments of Agriculture of the various states, the United States
Department of Agriculture, and the agricultural colleges and experiment stations should extend their work to cover
all phases of farm life, instead of limiting themselves, as they have far too often limited themselves in the past,
solely to the question of the production of crops. And now a special word to the farmer. I want to see him make the
farm as fine a farm as it can be made; and let him remember to see that the improvement goes on indoors as well as
out; let him remember that the farmer’s wife should have her share of thought and attention just as much as the
farmer himself.
Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by
reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human
welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing
their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give
way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the
general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.
But I think we may go still further. The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally
admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of
wealth, directly in the interest of the common good. The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a
chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare. Understand
what I say there. Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. Help any man who stumbles; if he
lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to
show the worth that is in him. No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the
bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to
bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men
from being good citizens by the conditions of life by which we surround them. We need comprehensive workman’s
compensation acts, both State and national laws to regulate child labor and work for women, and, especially, we
need in our common schools not merely education in book-learning, but also practical training for daily life and
work. We need to enforce better sanitary conditions for our workers and to extend the use of safety appliances for
workers in industry and commerce, both within and between the States. Also, friends, in the interest of the working
man himself, we need to set our faces like flint against mob-violence just as against corporate greed; against
violence and injustice and lawlessness by wage-workers just as much as against lawless cunning and greed and
selfish arrogance of employers. If I could ask but one thing of my fellow countrymen, my request would be that,
whenever they go in for reform, they remember the two sides, and that they always exact justice from one side as
much as from the other. I have small use for the public servant who can always see and denounce the corruption of
the capitalist, but who cannot persuade himself, especially before election, to say a word about lawless mob
violence. And I have equally small use for the man, be he a judge on the bench or editor of a great paper, or wealthy
and influential private citizen, who can see clearly enough and denounce the lawlessness of mob violence, but whose
eyes are closed so that he is blind when the question is one of corruption of business on a gigantic scale. Also,
remember what I said about excess in reformer and reactionary alike. If the reactionary man, who thinks of nothing
but the rights of property, could have his way, he would bring about a revolution; and one of my chief fears in
connection with progress comes because I do not want to see our people, for lack of proper leadership, compelled to
follow men whose intentions are excellent, but whose eyes are a little too wild to make it really safe to trust them.
Here in Kansas there is one paper which habitually denounces me as the tool of Wall Street, and at the same time
frantically repudiates the statement that I am a Socialist on the ground that that is an unwarranted slander of the
Socialists.
National efficiency has many factors. It is a necessary result of the principle of conservation widely applied. In the
end, it will determine our failure or success as a nation. National efficiency has to do, not only with natural resources
and with men, but it is equally concerned with institutions. The State must be made efficient for the work which
concerns only the people of the State; and the nation for that which concerns all the people. There must remain no
neutral ground to serve as a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can hire the
vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both jurisdictions. It is a misfortune when the national
legislature fails to do its duty in providing a national remedy, so that the only national activity is the purely negative
activity of the judiciary forbidding the State to exercise power in the premises.
I do not ask for the over centralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism
where we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad
as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital
problems are those which affect us all alike. The National Government belongs to the whole American people, and
where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the National
Government. The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the National
Government.
The American people are right in demanding that New Nationalism, without which we cannot hope to deal with new
problems. The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the
utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more
impatient of the impotence which springs from over division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it
possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a
deadlock. This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the
judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the
representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.
I believe in shaping the ends of government to protect property as well as human welfare. Normally, and in the long
run, the ends are the same; but whenever the alternative must be faced, I am for men and not for property, as you
were in the Civil War. I am far from underestimating the importance of dividends; but I rank dividends below
human character. Again, I do not have any sympathy with the reformer who says he does not care for dividends. Of
course, economic welfare is necessary, for a man must pull his own weight and be able to support his family. I know
well that the reformers must not bring upon the people economic ruin, or the reforms themselves will go down in the
ruin. But we must be ready to face temporary disaster, whether or not brought on by those who will war against us to
the knife. Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national
life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a
sordid and selfish materialism.
If our political institutions were perfect, they would absolutely prevent the political domination of money in any part
of our affairs. We need to make our political representatives more quickly and sensitively responsive to the people
whose servants they are. More direct action by the people in their own affairs under proper safeguards is vitally
necessary. The direct primary is a step in this direction, if it is associated with a corrupt-services act effective to
prevent the advantage of the man willing recklessly and unscrupulously to spend money over his more honest
competitor. It is particularly important that all moneys received or expended for campaign purposes should be
publicly accounted for, not only after election, but before election as well. Political action must be made simpler,
easier, and freer from confusion for every citizen. I believe that the prompt removal of unfaithful or incompetent
public servants should be made easy and sure in whatever way experience shall show to be most expedient in any
given class of cases.
One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours is to make certain that the men to
whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests.
I believe that every national officer, elected or appointed, should be forbidden to perform any service or receive any
compensation, directly or indirectly, from interstate corporations; and a similar provision could not fail to be useful
within the States.
The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable
chiefly so long as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. Just in proportion as the average
man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs, — but, first of all,
sound in their home, and the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well, — just so far, and no
farther, we may count our civilization a success. We must have — I believe we have already — a genuine and
permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything; and,
on the other hand, we must try to secure the social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to
purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent. Let me again illustrate by a reference to the Grand Army. You
could not have won simply as a disorderly and disorganized mob. You needed generals; you needed careful
administration of the most advanced type; and a good commissary — the cracker line. You well remember that
success was necessary in many different lines in order to bring about general success. You had to have the
administration at Washington good, just as you had to have the administration in the field; and you had to have the
work of the generals good. You could not have triumphed without the administration and leadership; but it would all
have been worthless if the average soldier had not had the right stuff in him. He had to have the right stuff in him, or
you could not get it out of him. In the last analysis, therefore, vitally necessary though it was to have the right kind
of organization and the right kind of generalship, it was even more vitally necessary that the average soldier should
have the fighting edge, the right character. So it is in our civil life. No matter how honest and decent we are in our
private lives, if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration of the law, we cannot go
forward as a nation. That is imperative; but it must be an addition to, and not a substitute for, the qualities that make
us good citizens. In the last analysis, the most important elements in any man’s career must be the sum of those
qualities which, in the aggregate, we speak of as character. If he has not got it, then no law that the wit of man can
devise, no administration of the law by the boldest and strongest executive, will avail to help him. We must have the
right kind of character — character that makes a man, first of all, a good man in the home, a good father, and a good
husband — that makes a man a good neighbor. You must have that, and, then, in addition, you must have the kind of
law and the kind of administration of the law which will give to those qualities in the private citizen the best possible
chance for development. The prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship, and, to get it,
we must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.
Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Genrous
Energies of a People (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913)
The following is the first two chapters from a collection Wilson published of his presidential campaign
speeches
CHAPTER 1. THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH.
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 formulas 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
centre now upon questions of governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers. It centres 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 lines sketched in the earlier day 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 formulas 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, not for themselves, not
as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally 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 oftentimes 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 a 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 wide circles of relationship. 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. Workingmen 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. 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
workingman 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 workingmen of the time in which our laws were framed knew anything about. A
little group of workingmen, 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 workingman today 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 a 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, an immaterial piece of society. A modern corporation is a means of co-operation in the conduct
of an enterprise which is so big that no one man 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 stock- holders 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 workingmen 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 responsibility. 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 workingmen’s injuries. Suppose that a
super[i]ntendent 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. Some of our courts have held that the superintendent is a fellowservant, or, as the law states it, a fellow-employee, and that, therefore, the man cannot 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 as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because today, 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, afraid, 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 enterprises 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 workingman 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 cannot 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 dominate 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
in every fair valley, when America displayed her great forces on the broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up
over the mountainsides 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
cannot 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 new conditions under which we may 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 workingmen cannot
peaceably dissuade other workingmen from taking employment, as was held in a notable case in New Jersey, 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 protected, 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 today, 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 g[r]own 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, and while my train lingered 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 of 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.”
This 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 the other 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 practices 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 co-operation 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 practice.
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 practice 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 governs individuals, not States, and
which has been these hundred and thirty years our vehicle of progress. Some radical changes we must make in our
law and practice. 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 co-operation 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.
CHAPTER 2. WHAT IS PROGRESS?
In that sage and veracious chronicle, “Alice Through the Looking-Glass,” it is recounted how, on a noteworthy
occasion, the little heroine is seized by the Red Chess Queen, who races her off at a terrific pace. They run until both
of them are out of breath; then they stop, and Alice looks around her and says, “Why, we are just where we were
when we started!” “Oh, yes,” says the Red Queen; “you have to run twice as fast as that to get anywhere else.”
That is a parable of progress. The laws of this country have not kept up with the change of economic circumstances
in this country; they have not kept up with the change of political circumstances; and therefore we are not even
where we were when we started. We shall have to run, not until we are out of breath, but until we have caught up
with our own conditions, before we shall be where we were when we started; when we started this great experiment
which has been the hope and the beacon of the world. And we should have to run twice as fast as any rational
program I have seen in order to get anywhere else.
I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason, because we have not kept up with our changes of
conditions, either in the economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as other nations have.
We have not kept our practices adjusted to the facts of the case, and until we do, and unless we do, the facts of the
case will always have the better of the argument; because if you do not adjust your laws to the facts, so much the
worse for the laws, not for the facts, because law trails along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe which runs
ahead of the facts and beckons to it and makes it follow the will-o’-the-wisps of imaginative projects.
Business is in a situation in America which it was never in before; it is in a situation to which we have not adjusted
our laws. Our laws are still meant for business done by individuals; they have not been satisfactorily adjusted to
business done by great combinations, and we have got to adjust them. I do not say we may or may not; I say we
must; there is no choice. If your laws do not fit your facts, the facts are not injured, the law is damaged; because the
law, unless I have studied it amiss, is the expression of the facts in legal relationships. Laws have never altered the
facts; laws have always necessarily expressed the facts; adjusted interests as they have arisen and have changed
toward one another.
Politics in America is in a case which sadly requires attention. The system set up by our law and our usage doesn’t
work,—or at least it can’t be depended on; it is made to work only by a most unreasonable expenditure of labor and
pains. The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the
special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.
There are serious things to do. Does any man doubt the great discontent in this country? Does any man doubt that
there are grounds and justifications for discontent? Do we dare stand still? Within the past few months we have
witnessed (along with other strange political phenomena, eloquently significant of popular uneasiness) on one side a
doubling of the Socialist vote and on the other the posting on dead walls and hoardings all over the country of
certain very attractive and diverting bills warning citizens that it was “better to be safe than sorry” and advising them
to “let well enough alone.” Apparently a good many citizens doubted whether the situation they were advised to let
alone was really well enough, and concluded that they would take a chance of being sorry. To me, these counsels of
do-nothingism, these counsels of sitting still for fear something would happen, these counsels addressed to the
hopeful, energetic people of the United States, telling them that they are not wise enough to touch their own affairs
without marring them, constitute the most extraordinary argument of fatuous ignorance I ever heard. Americans are
not yet cowards. True, their self-reliance has been sapped by years of submission to the doctrine that prosperity is
something that benevolent magnates provide for them with the aid of the government; their self-reliance has been
weakened, but not so utterly destroyed that you can twit them about it. The American people are not naturally standpatters. Progress is the word that charms their ears and stirs their hearts.
There are, of course, Americans who have not yet heard that anything is going on. The circus might come to town,
have the big parade and go, without their catching a sight of the camels or a note of the calliope. There are people,
even Americans, who never move themselves or know that anything else is moving.
A friend of mine who had heard of the Florida “cracker,” as they call a certain ne’er-do-well portion of the
population down there, when passing through the State in a train, asked some one to point out a “cracker” to him.
The man asked replied, “Well, if you see something off in the woods that looks brown, like a stump, you will know
it is either a stump or a cracker; if it moves, it is a stump.”
Now, movement has no virtue in itself. Change is not worth while for its own sake. I am not one of those who love
variety for its own sake. If a thing is good today, I should like to have it stay that way tomorrow. Most of our
calculations in life are dependent upon things staying the way they are. For example, if, when you got up this
morning, you had forgotten how to dress, if you had forgotten all about those ordinary things which you do almost
automatically, which you can almost do half awake, you would have to find out what you did yesterday. I am told by
the psychologists that if I did not remember who I was yesterday, I should not know who I am today, and that,
therefore, my very identity depends upon my being able to tally today with yesterday. If they do not tally, then I am
confused; I do not know who I am, and I have to go around and ask somebody to tell me my name and where I came
from.
I am not one of those who wish to break connection with the past; I am not one of those who wish to change for the
mere sake of variety. The only men who do that are the men who want to forget something, the men who filled
yesterday with something they would rather not recollect today, and so go about seeking diversion, seeking
abstraction in something that will blot out recollection, or seeking to put something into them which will blot out all
recollection. Change is not worth while unless it is improvement. If I move out of my present house because I do not
like it, then I have got to choose a better house, or build a better house, to justify the change.
It would seem a waste of time to point out that ancient distinction,—between mere change and improvement. Yet
there is a class of mind that is prone to confuse them. We have had political leaders whose conception of greatness
was to be forever frantically doing something,—it mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, without sense of the
energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession. Now, life does not consist of eternally running to a
fire. There is no virtue in going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there. The direction is just as
important as the impetus of motion.
All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going, and I fear there has been too much of this
thing of knowing neither how fast we were going or where we were going. I have my private belief that we have
been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those things that in my boyhood days we called
“treadmills,” a treadmill being a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule was forced
to walk forever without getting anywhere. Elephants and even other animals have been known to turn treadmills,
making a good deal of noise, and causing certain wheels to go round, and I daresay grinding out some sort of
product for somebody, but without achieving much progress. Lately, in an effort to persuade the elephant to move,
really, his friends tried dynamite. It moved,—in separate and scattered parts, but it moved.
A cynical but witty Englishman said, in a book, not long ago, that it was a mistake to say of a conspicuously
successful man, eminent in his line of business, that you could not bribe a man like that, because, he said, the point
about such men is that they have been bribed—not in the ordinary meaning of that word, not in any gross, corrupt
sense, but they have achieved their great success by means of the existing order of things and therefore they have
been put under bonds to see that that existing order of things is not changed; they are bribed to maintain the status
quo.
It was for that reason that I used to say, when I had to do with the administration of an educational institution, that I
should like to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible. Not because
their fathers lacked character or intelligence or knowledge or patriotism, but because their fathers, by reason of their
advancing years and their established position in society, had lost touch with the processes of life; they had forgotten
what it was to begin; they had forgotten what it was to rise: they had forgotten what it was to be dominated by the
circumstances of their life on their way up from the bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy
with the creative, formative and progressive forces of society.
Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word comes more often or more naturally to
the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men through
many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They thought in the other direction. Their stories of
heroisms and glory were tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the larger spear. “There
were giants in those days.” Now all that has altered. We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in
comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development, those are modern words. The modern idea is
to leave the past and press onward to something new.
But what is progress going to do with the past, and with the present? How is it going to treat them? With ignominy,
or respect? Should it break with them altogether, or rise out of them, with its roots still deep in the older time? What
attitude shall progressives take toward the existing order, toward those institutions of conservatism, the Constitution,
the laws, and the courts?
Are those thoughtful men who fear that we are now about to disturb the ancient foundations of our institutions
justified in their fear? If they are, we ought to go very slowly about the processes of change. If it is indeed true that
we have grown tired of the institutions which we have so carefully and sedulously built up, then we ought to go very
slowly and very carefully about the very dangerous task of altering them. We ought, therefore, to ask ourselves, first
of all, whether thought in this country is tending to do anything by which we shall retrace our steps, or by which we
shall change the whole direction of our development?
I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not
native to it. I believe that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a tabula rasa upon which
to write a political program. You cannot take a new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be tomorrow.
You must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old garment without ruining it; it must be not
a patch, but something woven into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture and intention. If
I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a
progressive.
One of the chief benefits I used to derive from being president of a university was that I had the pleasure of
entertaining thoughtful men from all over the world. I cannot tell you how much has dropped into my granary by
their presence. I had been casting around in my mind for something by which to draw several parts of my political
thought together when it was my good fortune to entertain a very interesting Scotsman who had been devoting
himself to the philosophical thought of the seventeenth century. His talk was so engaging that it was delightful to
hear him speak of anything, and presently there came out of the unexpected region of his thought the thing I had
been waiting for. He called my attention to the fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend
to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example, after the Newtonian Theory of the
universe had been developed, almost all thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian Theory,
and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody is likely to express whatever he wishes to
expound in terms of development and accommodation to environment.
Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under
the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of The Federalist to see that fact written
on every page. They speak of the “checks and balances” of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile
of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,-how by the attraction of gravitation the
various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as
a sort of imitation of the solar system.
They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its modern constitution. Not that those
Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a Frenchman,
Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had copied Newton’s description of the mechanism of the
heavens.
The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in
their way,—the best way of their age,-those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of “the laws of Nature,”—and then
by way of afterthought,—”and of Nature’s God.” And they constructed a government as they would have
constructed an orrery,—to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a variety of mechanics. The
Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy
of “checks and balances.”
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of
the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its
environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have
its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose.
Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our
modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare
fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and
action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track.
Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must
obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.
All that progressives ask or desire is permission-in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word-to
interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is
a living thing and not a machine.
Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July
4th, 1776. Their bosoms swell against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom that is
going on today.
The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we
can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the
examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstanc[e]s of the day in which it was
conceived and written. It is an eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a thesis for
philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action. Unless we can translate it
into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of the sires who acted in response to
its challenge.
What form does the contest between tyranny and freedom take today? What is the special form of tyranny we now
fight? How does it endanger the rights of the people, and what do we mean to do in order to make our contest
against it effectual? What are to be the items of our new declaration of independence?
By tyranny, as we now fight it, we mean control of the law, of legislation and adjudication, by organizations which
do not represent the people, by means which are private and selfish. We mean, specifically, the conduct of our
affairs and the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special bodies of capital and those who organize their use.
We mean the alliance, for this purpose, of political machines with selfish business. We mean the exploitation of the
people by legal and political means. We have seen many of our governments under these influences cease to be
representative governments, cease to be governments representative of the people, and become governments
representative of special interests, controlled by machines, which in their turn are not controlled by the people.
Sometimes, when I think of the growth of our economic system, it seems to me as if, leaving our law just about
where it was before any of the modern inventions or developments took place, we had simply at haphazard extended
the family residence, added an office here and a workroom there, and a new set of sleeping rooms there, built up
higher on our foundations, and put out little lean-tos on the side, until we have a structure that has no character
whatever. Now, the problem is to continue to live in the house and yet change it.
Well, we are architects in our time, and our architects are also engineers. We don’t have to stop using a railroad
terminal because a new station is being built. We don’t have to stop any of the processes of our lives because we are
rearranging the structures in which we conduct those processes. What we have to undertake is to systematize the
foundations of the house, then to thread all the old parts of the structure with the steel which will be laced together in
modern fashion, accommodated to all the modem knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, and then slowly
change the partitions, relay the walls, let in the light through new apertures, improve the ventilation; until finally, a
generation or two from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building
whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a
perfected, co-ordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature, not afraid of any artificial storm, any imitation of
thunder and lightning, knowing that the foundations go down to the bedrock of principle, and knowing that
whenever they please they can change that plan again and accommodate it as they please to the altering necessities
of their lives.
But there are a great many men who don’t like the idea. Some wit recently said, in view of the fact that most of our
American architects are trained in a certain École in Paris, that all American architecture in recent years was either
bizarre or “Beaux Arts.” I think that our economic architecture is decidedly bizarre; and I am afraid that there is a
good deal to learn about matters other than architecture from the same source from which our architects have
learned a great many things. I don’t mean the School of Fine Arts at Paris, but the experience of France; for from the
other side of the water men can now hold up against us the reproach that we have not adjusted our lives to modem
conditions to the same extent that they have adjusted theirs. I was very much interested in some of the reasons given
by our friends across the Canadian border for being very shy about the reciprocity arrangements. They said: “We are
not sure whither these arrangements will lead, and we don’t care to associate too closely with the economic
conditions of the United States until those conditions are as modern as ours.” And when I resented it, and asked for
particulars, I had, in regard to many matters, to retire from the debate. Because I found that they had adjusted their
regulations of economic development to conditions we had not yet found a way to meet in the United States.
Well, we have started now at all events. The procession is under way. The stand-patter doesn’t know there is a
procession. He is asleep in the back part of his house. He doesn’t know that the road is resounding with the tramp of
men going to the front. And when he wakes up, the country will be empty. He will be deserted, and he will wonder
what has happened. Nothing has happened. The world has been going on. The world has a habit of going on. The
world has a habit of leaving those behind who won’t go with it. The world has always neglected stand-patters. And,
therefore, the stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he excites my sympathy. He is going to be so lonely
before it is all over. And we are good fellows, we are good company; why doesn’t he come along? We are not going
to do him any harm. We are going to show him a good time. We are going to climb the slow road until it reaches
some upland where the air is fresher, where the whole talk of mere politicians is stilled, where men can look in each
other’s faces and see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they have to talk about they are willing to talk about in
the open and talk about with each other; and whence, looking back over the road, we shall see at last that we have
fulfilled our promise to mankind. We had said to all the world, “America was created to break every kind of
monopoly, and to set men free, upon a footing of equality, upon a footing of opportunity, to match their brains and
their energies.” and now we have proved that we meant it.
William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very
Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, Delivered by Ex-Senator
George Washington Plunkitt, The Tammany Philosopher, From His
Rostrum – The New York County Court-House Bootlblack Stand –
And Recorded by William L. Riordon. (New York McClure,
Phillips, & Co., 1905).
Title Page of Original 1905 Edition
Title Page of Original 1905 Edition
PREFACE
This volume discloses the mental operations of perhaps the most thoroughly practical politician of the day
— George Washington Plunkitt, Tammany leader of the Fifteenth Assembly District, Sachem of the Tammany
Society and Chairman of the Elections Committee of Tammany Hall, who has held the offices of State Senator
Assemblyman, Police Magistrate, County Supervisor and Alderman and who boasts of his record in filling four
public offices in one year and drawing salaries from three of them at the same time.
The discourses that follow were delivered by him from his rostrum, the bootblack stand in the County
Court-house, at various times in the last half-dozen years. Their absolute frankness and vigorous unconventionality
of thought and expression charmed me. Plunkitt said right out what all practical politicians think but are afraid to
say. Some of the discourses I published as interviews in the New York Evening Post, the New York Sun, the New
York World, and the Boston Transcript. They were reproduced in newspapers throughout the country and several of
them, notably the talks on "The Curse of Civil Service Reform" and "Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft" became
subjects of discussion in the United States Senate and in college lectures. There seemed to be a general recognition
of Plunkitt as a striking type of the practical politician, a politician, more-over, who dared to say publicly what
others in his class whisper among themselves in the City Hall corridors and the hotel lobbies.
I thought it a pity to let Plunkitt's revelations of himself — as frank in their way as Rousseau's
"Confessions" — perish in the files of the newspapers; so I collected the talks I had published, added several new
ones and now give to the world in this volume a system of political philosophy which is as unique as it is refreshing.
No New Yorker needs to be informed who George Washington Plunkitt is. For the information of others,
the following sketch of his career is given. He was born, as he proudly tells, in Central Park; that is, in the territory
now included in the park. He began life as a driver of a cart, then became a butcher's boy, and later went into the
butcher business for himself. How he entered politics he explains in one of his discourses. His advancement was
rapid. He was in the Assembly soon after he cast his first vote and has held office most of the time for forty years. In
1870, through a strange combination of circumstances, he held the places of Assemblyman, Alderman, Police
Magistrate and County Supervisor and drew three salaries at once — a record unexampled in New York politics.
Plunkitt is now a millionaire. He owes his fortune mainly to his political pull, as he confesses in "Honest
Graft and Dishonest Graft." The character of his business he also describes fully. He is in the contracting,
transportation, real estate, and every other business out of which he can make money. He has no office. His
headquarters is the County Court-house bootblack stand. There he receives his constituents, transacts his general
business and pours forth his philosophy.
Plunkitt has been one of the great powers in Tammany Hall, for a quarter of a century. While he was in the
Assembly and the State Senate he was one of the most influential members and introduced the bills that provided for
the outlying parks of New York City, the Harlem River Speedway, the Washington Bridge, the 155th Street Viaduct,
the grading of Eighth Avenue north of Fifty-seventh Street, additions to the Museum of Natural History, the West
Side Court, and many other important public improvements. He is one of the closest friends and most valued
advisers of Charles F. Murphy, leader of Tammany Hall.
-
William L. Riordon.
INTRODUCTION
A TRIBUTE TO PLUNKITT BY THE LEADER OF TAMMANY HALL
SENATOR PLUNKITT is a straight organization man. He believes in party government; he does not
indulge in cant and hypocrisy and he is never afraid to say exactly what he thinks. He is a believer in thorough
political organization and all-the-year-around work and he holds to the doctrine that, in making appointments to
office, party workers should be preferred if they are fitted to perform the duties of the office. Plunkitt is one of the
veteran leaders of the organization, he has always been faithful and reliable and he has performed valuable services
for Tammany Hall.
-
Charles F. Murphy.
PLUNKITT OF TAMMANY HALL
HONEST GRAFT AND DISHONEST GRAFT
''EVERYBODY is talkin' these days about Tammany men growin' rich on graft, but nobody thinks of
drawin' the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There 's all the difference in the world between the
two. Yes, many of our men have grown rich in politics. I have myself. I 've made a big fortune out of the game, and
I 'm gettin' richer every day, but I 've not gone in for dishonest graft — blackmailin' gamblers, saloon-keepers,
disorderly people, etc. — and neither has any of the men who have made big fortunes in politics.
"There 's an honest graft, and I 'm an ex- ample of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin':
'I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.'
"Just let me explain by examples. My party's in power in the city, and it's goin' to undertake a lot of public
improvements. Well, I 'm tipped off, say, that they're going to lay out a new park at a certain place.
"I see my opportunity and I take it. I go to that place and I buy up all the land I can in the neighborhood.
Then the board of this or that makes its plan public, and there is a rush to get my land, which nobody cared
particular for before.
"Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight? Of
course, it is. Well, that's honest graft.
"Or, supposin' it's a new bridge they're goin' to build. I get tipped off and I buy as much property as I can
that has to be taken for approaches. I sell at my own price later on and drop some more money in the bank.
"Wouldn't you? It's just like lookin' ahead in Wall Street or in the coffee or cotton market. It's honest graft,
and I 'm lookin' for it every day in the year. I will tell you frankly that I 've got a good lot of it, too.
"I'll tell you of one case. They were goin' to fix up a big park, no matter where. I got on to it, and went
lookin' about for land in that neighborhood.
"I could get nothin' at a bargain but a big piece of swamp, but I took it fast enough and held on to it. What
turned out was just what I counted on. They couldn't make the park complete without Plunkitt's swamp, and they
had to pay a good price for it. Anything dishonest in that?
"Up in the watershed I made some money, too. I bought up several bits of land there some years ago and
made a pretty good guess that they would be bought up for water purposes later by the city.
"Somehow, I always guessed about right, and shouldn't I enjoy the profit of my foresight? It was rather
amusin' when the condemnation commissioners came along and found piece after piece of the land in the name of
George Plunkitt of the Fifteenth Assembly District, New York City. They wondered how I knew just what to buy.
The answer is — I seen my opportunity and I took it. I haven't confined myself to land; anything that pays is in my
line.
"For instance, the city is repavin' a street and has several hundred thousand old granite blocks to sell. I am
on hand to buy, and I know just what they are worth.
“How? Never mind that. I had a sort of monopoly of this business for a while, but once a newspaper tried to
do me. It got some outside men to come over from Brooklyn and New Jersey to bid against me.
"Was I done? Not much. I went to each of the men and said: 'How many of these 250,000 stones do you
want?' One said 20,000, and another wanted 15,000, and another wanted 10,000. I said: 'All right, let me bid f...
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