“Blogiquotes” Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States, is the subject of today’s Blogiquote, words that appeared in his 1913 writings on “The New Freedom.”

President Wilson centered his successful 1912 presidential campaign around the concept of “the new freedom.” In speeches and writings, he argued that government must play a larger role in the national life in order to preserve the economic and political freedoms that Americans had historically enjoyed.

After the election Wilson published a compilation of speeches in a book of the same name; it won a wide audience and was considered the central philosophical expression of Wilson’s version of progressivism. Wilson was instrumental in the formation of the League of Nations, the United Nations’ predecessor. During his administration, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was passed – establishing the formation of a third central bank [of the United States].

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 to-day, if he enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him.
(Section I: “The Old Order Changeth”)

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations, chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.
(Section VIII: “Monopoly, Or Opportunity?)