Woodrow Wilson

“ Good temper, the wisdom that comes of sober counsel, the energy of thoughtful and unselfish men, the habit of cooperation and of compromise which has been bred in us by long years of free government in which reason rather than passion has been made to prevail by the sheer virtue of candid and universal debate, will enable us to win through to still another great age without violence. ”

“ There is a sense in which in our day the individual has been submerged. In most parts of our country men work for themselves, not as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but as employees — in a higher or lower grade — of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of corporations.
You know what happens when you are the servant of a corporation. You have in no instance access to the men who are really determining the policy of the corporation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If somebody puts a derrick improperly secured on top of a building or overtopping the street, then the government of the city has the right to see that that derrick is so secured that you and I can walk under it and not be afraid that the heavens are going to fall on us. Likewise in these great beehives where in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the government, whether of the State or of the United States, as the case may be, to see that human life is properly cared for, and that human lungs have something to breathe. ”

“ You can not begin such an enterprise as those that have made America until you are so authenticated, until you have succeeded in obtaining the good-will of large allied capitalists. Is that freedom? That is dependence, not freedom.
We used to think, in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple, that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman's uniform and say, "Now don't anybody hurt anybody else." We used to say that the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ A little group of working men, seeing their employer every day, dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and the modern body of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that spread all over the country, dealing with men of whom they can form no personal conception, is another thing. A very different thing. You never saw a corporation, any more than you ever saw a government. Many a working man to-day never saw the body of men who are conducting the industry in which he is employed. ”

“ 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." ”

“ The modern corporation is not engaged in business as an individual. When we deal with it we deal with an impersonal element, a material piece of society. A modern corporation is a means of cooperation in the conduct of an enterprise which is so big that no one can conduct it, and which the resources of no one man are sufficient to finance. ”

“ If the corporation is doing the things that it ought not to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must obey the orders, and you have, with deep mortification, to cooperate in the doing of things which you know are against the public interest. Your individuality is swallowed up in the individuality and purpose of a great organization. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Our development has run so fast and so far along the line sketched in the earlier days of constitutional definition, has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has piled upon them such novel structures of trust and combination, has elaborated within them a life so manifold, so full of forces which transcend the boundaries of the country itself and fill the eyes of the world, that a new nation seems to have been created which the old formulae do not fit or afford a vital interpretation of. ”

“ The originative part of America, the part of America that makes new enterprises, the part into which the ambitious and gifted working man makes his way up, the class that saves, that plans, that organizes, that presently spreads its enterprises until they have a national scope and character — that middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity. ”

“ The employer is now generally a corporation or a huge company of some kind; the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands brought together, not by individual masters whom they know and with whom they have personal relations, but by agents of one sort or another. Working men are marshaled in great numbers for the performance of a multitude of particular tasks under a common discipline. They generally use dangerous and powerful machinery, over whose repair and renewal they have no control. ”

“ We are in a temper to reconstruct economic society, as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modification in the process. I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or more unanimously desirous of radical and extended changes in its economic and political practise. ”

“ In the Republican party, the strife between conservatism and progress was so bitter as to produce a complete split; and the progressives nominated a candidate of their own, preferring, if they could not control the government themselves, to hand it over to the progressive element among the Democrats. The former political parties in the United States seem to have been so completely disrupted by recent events that even though they continue to hold some power under the old names, they now stand for wholly different things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that can not be restricted to a special, favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.
There has come over the land that un-American set of conditions which enables a small number of men who control the Government to get favors from the Government ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is true that, while most men are thus submerged in the corporation, a few, a very few, are exalted to power which as individuals they could never have wielded. Through the great organizations of which they are the heads, a few are enabled to play a part unprecedented by anything in history in the control of the business operations of the country and in the determination of the happiness of great numbers of people. ”

“ Revolution will come in peaceful guise, as it came when we put aside the crude government of the Confederation, and created the great Federal Union which governed individuals, not States, and which has been these one hundred and thirty years our vehicle of progress. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So that when courts hold that working men can not peaceably dissuade other working men from taking employment, and base the decision upon the analogy of domestic servants, they simply show that their minds and understandings are lingering in an age which has passed away. This dealing of great bodies of men with other bodies of men is a matter of public scrutiny, and should be a matter of public regulation. ”

“ We must not pit power against weakness. The employer is generally, in our day, as I have said, not an individual, but a powerful group; and yet the working man when dealing with his employer is still, under our existing law, an individual. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who did not care for the Nation, could put this whole country into a flame? Don't you know that this country from one end to another believes that something is wrong? ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”