From Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, 1912

IX

BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE?


The doctrine that monopoly is inevitable and that the only course open to
the people of the United States is to submit to and regulate it found a
champion during the campaign of 1912 in the new party, or branch of the
Republican party, founded under the leadership of Mr. Roosevelt, with the
conspicuous aid,--I mention him with no satirical intention, but merely to
set the facts down accurately,--of Mr. George W. Perkins, organizer of the
Steel Trust and the Harvester Trust, and with the support of more than
three millions of citizens, many of them among the most patriotic,
conscientious and high-minded men and women of the land. The fact that its
acceptance of monopoly was a feature of the new party platform from which
the attention of the generous and just was diverted by the charm of a
social program of great attractiveness to all concerned for the
amelioration of the lot of those who suffer wrong and privation, and the
further fact that, even so, the platform was repudiated by the majority of
the nation, render it no less necessary to reflect on the significance of
the confession made for the first time by any party in the country's
history. It may be useful, in order to the relief of the minds of many
from an error of no small magnitude, to consider now, the heat of a
presidential contest being past, exactly what it was that Mr. Roosevelt
proposed.

Mr. Roosevelt attached to his platform some very splendid suggestions as
to noble enterprises which we ought to undertake for the uplift of the
human race; but when I hear an ambitious platform put forth, I am very
much more interested in the dynamics of it than in the rhetoric of it. I
have a very practical mind, and I want to know who are going to do those
things and how they are going to be done. If you have read the trust plank
in that platform as often as I have read it, you have found it very long,
but very tolerant. It did not anywhere condemn monopoly, except in words;
its essential meaning was that the trusts have been bad and must be made
to be good. You know that Mr. Roosevelt long ago classified trusts for us
as good and bad, and he said that he was afraid only of the bad ones. Now
he does not desire that there should be any more bad ones, but proposes
that they should all be made good by discipline, directly applied by a
commission of executive appointment. All he explicitly complains of is
lack of publicity and lack of fairness; not the exercise of power, for
throughout that plank the power of the great corporations is accepted as
the inevitable consequence of the modern organization of industry. All
that it is proposed to do is to take them under control and regulation.
The national administration having for sixteen years been virtually under
the regulation of the trusts, it would be merely a family matter were the
parts reversed and were the other members of the family to exercise the
regulation. And the trusts, apparently, which might, in such
circumstances, comfortably continue to administer our affairs under the
mollifying influences of the federal government, would then, if you
please, be the instrumentalities by which all the humanistic, benevolent
program of the rest of that interesting platform would be carried out!

I have read and reread that plank, so as to be sure that I get it right.
All that it complains of is,--and the complaint is a just one,
surely,--that these gentlemen exercise their power in a way that is
secret. Therefore, we must have publicity. Sometimes they are arbitrary;
therefore they need regulation. Sometimes they do not consult the general
interests of the community; therefore they need to be reminded of those
general interests by an industrial commission. But at every turn it is the
trusts who are to do us good, and not we ourselves.

Again, I absolutely protest against being put into the hands of trustees.
Mr. Roosevelt's conception of government is Mr. Taft's conception, that
the Presidency of the United States is the presidency of a board of
directors. I am willing to admit that if the people of the United States
cannot get justice for themselves, then it is high time that they should
join the third party and get it from somebody else. The justice proposed
is very beautiful; it is very attractive; there were planks in that
platform which stir all the sympathies of the heart; they proposed things
that we all want to do; but the question is, Who is going to do them?
Through whose instrumentality? Are Americans ready to ask the trusts to
give us in pity what we ought, in justice, to take?

The third party says that the present system of our industry and trade has
come to stay. Mind you, these artificially built up things, these things
that can't maintain themselves in the market without monopoly, have come
to stay, and the only thing that the government can do, the only thing
that the third party proposes should be done, is to set up a commission to
regulate them. It accepts them. It says: "We will not undertake, it were
futile to undertake, to prevent monopoly, but we will go into an
arrangement by which we will make these monopolies kind to you. We will
guarantee that they shall be pitiful. We will guarantee that they shall
pay the right wages. We will guarantee that they shall do everything kind
and public-spirited, which they have never heretofore shown the least
inclination to do."

Don't you realize that that is a blind alley? You can't find your way to
liberty that way. You can't find your way to social reform through the
forces that have made social reform necessary.

The fundamental part of such a program is that the trusts shall be
recognized as a permanent part of our economic order, and that the
government shall try to make trusts the ministers, the instruments,
through which the life of this country shall be justly and happily
developed on its industrial side. Now, everything that touches our lives
sooner or later goes back to the industries which sustain our lives. I
have often reflected that there is a very human order in the petitions in
our Lord's prayer. For we pray first of all, "Give us this day our daily
bread," knowing that it is useless to pray for spiritual graces on an
empty stomach, and that the amount of wages we get, the kind of clothes we
wear, the kind of food we can afford to buy, is fundamental to everything
else.

Those who administer our physical life, therefore, administer our
spiritual life; and if we are going to carry out the fine purpose of that
great chorus which supporters of the third party sang almost with
religious fervor, then we have got to find out through whom these purposes
of humanity are going to be realized. It is a mere enterprise, so far as
that part of it is concerned, of making the monopolies philanthropic.

I do not want to live under a philanthropy. I do not want to be taken care
of by the government, either directly, or by any instruments through which
the government is acting. I want only to have right and justice prevail,
so far as I am concerned. Give me right and justice and I will undertake
to take care of myself. If you enthrone the trusts as the means of the
development of this country under the supervision of the government, then
I shall pray the old Spanish proverb, "God save me from my friends, and
I'll take care of my enemies." Because I want to be saved from these
friends. Observe that I say these friends, for I am ready to admit that a
great many men who believe that the development of industry in this
country through monopolies is inevitable intend to be the friends of the
people. Though they profess to be my friends, they are undertaking a way
of friendship which renders it impossible that they should do me the
fundamental service that I demand--namely, that I should be free and
should have the same opportunities that everybody else has.

For I understand it to be the fundamental proposition of American liberty
that we do not desire special privilege, because we know special privilege
will never comprehend the general welfare. This is the fundamental,
spiritual difference between adherents of the party now about to take
charge of the government and those who have been in charge of it in recent
years. They are so indoctrinated with the idea that only the big business
interests of this country understand the United States and can make it
prosperous that they cannot divorce their thoughts from that obsession.
They have put the government into the hands of trustees, and Mr. Taft and
Mr. Roosevelt were the rival candidates to preside over the board of
trustees. They were candidates to serve the people, no doubt, to the best
of their ability, but it was not their idea to serve them directly; they
proposed to serve them indirectly through the enormous forces already set
up, which are so great that there is almost an open question whether the
government of the United States with the people back of it is strong
enough to overcome and rule them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shall we try to get the grip of monopoly away from our lives, or shall we
not? Shall we withhold our hand and say monopoly is inevitable, that all
that we can do is to regulate it? Shall we say that all that we can do is
to put government in competition with monopoly and try its strength
against it? Shall we admit that the creature of our own hands is stronger
than we are? We have been dreading all along the time when the combined
power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government.
Have we come to a time when the President of the United States or any man
who wishes to be the President must doff his cap in the presence of this
high finance, and say, "You are our inevitable master, but we will see how
we can make the best of it?"

We are at the parting of the ways. We have, not one or two or three, but
many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have,
not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult,
if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. We have restricted
credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development,
and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely
controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a
government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the
vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of
small groups of dominant men.

If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business,
then don't you see that big business men have to get closer to the
government even than they are now? Don't you see that they must capture
the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? Must capture
the government? They have already captured it. Are you going to invite
those inside to stay inside? They don't have to get there. They are there.
Are you going to own your own premises, or are you not? That is your
choice. Are you going to say: "You didn't get into the house the right
way, but you are in there, God bless you; we will stand out here in the
cold and you can hand us out something once in a while?"

At the least, under the plan I am opposing, there will be an avowed
partnership between the government and the trusts. I take it that the firm
will be ostensibly controlled by the senior member. For I take it that the
government of the United States is at least the senior member, though the
younger member has all along been running the business. But when all the
momentum, when all the energy, when a great deal of the genius, as so
often happens in partnerships the world over, is with the junior partner,
I don't think that the superintendence of the senior partner is going to
amount to very much. And I don't believe that benevolence can be read into
the hearts of the trusts by the superintendence and suggestions of the
federal government; because the government has never within my
recollection had its suggestions accepted by the trusts. On the contrary,
the suggestions of the trusts have been accepted by the government.

There is no hope to be seen for the people of the United States until the
partnership is dissolved. And the business of the party now entrusted with
power is going to be to dissolve it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Those who supported the third party supported, I believe, a program
perfectly agreeable to the monopolies. How those who have been fighting
monopoly through all their career can reconcile the continuation of the
battle under the banner of the very men they have been fighting, I cannot
imagine. I challenge the program in its fundamentals as not a progressive
program at all. Why did Mr. Gary suggest this very method when he was at
the head of the Steel Trust? Why is this very method commended here,
there, and everywhere by the men who are interested in the maintenance of
the present economic system of the United States? Why do the men who do
not wish to be disturbed urge the adoption of this program? The rest of
the program is very handsome; there is beating in it a great pulse of
sympathy for the human race. But I do not want the sympathy of the trusts
for the human race. I do not want their condescending assistance.

And I warn every progressive Republican that by lending his assistance to
this program he is playing false to the very cause in which he had
enlisted. That cause was a battle against monopoly, against control,
against the concentration of power in our economic development, against
all those things that interfere with absolutely free enterprise. I believe
that some day these gentlemen will wake up and realize that they have
misplaced their trust, not in an individual, it may be, but in a program
which is fatal to the things we hold dearest.

If there is any meaning in the things I have been urging, it is this: that
the incubus that lies upon this country is the present monopolistic
organization of our industrial life. That is the thing which certain
Republicans became "insurgents" in order to throw off. And yet some of
them allowed themselves to be so misled as to go into the camp of the
third party in order to remove what the third party proposed to legalize.
My point is that this is a method conceived from the point of view of the
very men who are to be controlled, and that this is just the wrong point
of view from which to conceive it.

I said not long ago that Mr. Roosevelt was promoting a plan for the
control of monopoly which was supported by the United States Steel
Corporation. Mr. Roosevelt denied that he was being supported by more than
one member of that corporation. He was thinking of money. I was thinking
of ideas. I did not say that he was getting money from these gentlemen; it
was a matter of indifference to me where he got his money; but it was a
matter of a great deal of difference to me where he got his ideas. He got
his idea with regard to the regulation of monopoly from the gentlemen who
form the United States Steel Corporation. I am perfectly ready to admit
that the gentlemen who control the United States Steel Corporation have a
perfect right to entertain their own ideas about this and to urge them
upon the people of the United States; but I want to say that their ideas
are not my ideas; and I am perfectly certain that they would not promote
any idea which interfered with their monopoly. Inasmuch, therefore, as I
hope and intend to interfere with monopoly just as much as possible, I
cannot subscribe to arrangements by which they know that it will not be
disturbed.

The Roosevelt plan is that there shall be an industrial commission charged
with the supervision of the great monopolistic combinations which have
been formed under the protection of the tariff, and that the government of
the United States shall see to it that these gentlemen who have conquered
labor shall be kind to labor. I find, then, the proposition to be this:
That there shall be two masters, the great corporation, and over it the
government of the United States; and I ask who is going to be master of
the government of the United States? It has a master now,--those who in
combination control these monopolies. And if the government controlled by
the monopolies in its turn controls the monopolies, the partnership is
finally consummated.

I don't care how benevolent the master is going to be, I will not live
under a master. That is not what America was created for. America was
created in order that every man should have the same chance as every other
man to exercise mastery over his own fortunes. What I want to do is
analogous to what the authorities of the city of Glasgow did with tenement
houses. I want to light and patrol the corridors of these great
organizations in order to see that nobody who tries to traverse them is
waylaid and maltreated. If you will but hold off the adversaries, if you
will but see to it that the weak are protected, I will venture a wager
with you that there are some men in the United States, now weak,
economically weak, who have brains enough to compete with these gentlemen
and who will presently come into the market and put these gentlemen on
their mettle. And the minute they come into the market there will be a
bigger market for labor and a different wage scale for labor.

Because it is susceptible of convincing proof that the high-paid labor of
America,--where it is high paid,--is cheaper than the low-paid labor of
the continent of Europe. Do you know that about ninety per cent. of those
who are employed in labor in this country are not employed in the
"protected" industries, and that their wages are almost without exception
higher than the wages of those who are employed in the "protected"
industries? There is no corner on carpenters, there is no corner on
bricklayers, there is no corner on scores of individual classes of skilled
laborers; but there is a corner on the poolers in the furnaces, there is a
corner on the men who dive down into the mines; they are in the grip of a
controlling power which determines the market rates of wages in the United
States. Only where labor is free is labor highly paid in America.

When I am fighting monopolistic control, therefore, I am fighting for the
liberty of every man in America, and I am fighting for the liberty of
American industry.

It is significant that the spokesman for the plan of adopting monopoly
declares his devoted adherence to the principle of "protection." Only
those duties which are manifestly too high even to serve the interests of
those who are directly "protected" ought in his view to be lowered. He
declares that he is not troubled by the fact that a very large amount of
money is taken out of the pocket of the general taxpayer and put into the
pocket of particular classes of "protected" manufacturers, but that his
concern is that so little of this money gets into the pocket of the
laboring man and so large a proportion of it into the pockets of the
employers. I have searched his program very thoroughly for an indication
of what he expects to do in order to see to it that a larger proportion
of this "prize" money gets into the pay envelope, and have found none. Mr.
Roosevelt, in one of his speeches, proposed that manufacturers who did not
share their profits liberally enough with their workmen should be
penalized by a sharp cut in the "protection" afforded them; but the
platform, so far as I could see, proposed nothing.

Moreover, under the system proposed, most employers,--at any rate,
practically all of the most powerful of them,--would be, to all intents
and purposes, wards and protégés of the government which is the master of
us all; for no part of this program can be discussed intelligently without
remembering that monopoly, as handled by it, is not to be prevented, but
accepted. It is to be accepted and regulated. All attempt to resist it is
to be given up. It is to be accepted as inevitable. The government is to
set up a commission whose duty it will be, not to check or defeat it, but
merely to regulate it under rules which it is itself to frame and develop.
So that the chief employers will have this tremendous authority behind
them: what they do, they will have the license of the federal government
to do.

And it is worth the while of the workingmen of the country to recall what
the attitude toward organized labor has been of these masters of
consolidated industries whom it is proposed that the federal government
should take under its patronage as well as under its control. They have
been the stoutest and most successful opponents of organized labor, and
they have tried to undermine it in a great many ways. Some of the ways
they have adopted have worn the guise of philanthropy and good-will, and
have no doubt been used, for all I know, in perfect good faith. Here and
there they have set up systems of profit sharing, of compensation for
injuries, and of bonuses, and even pensions; but every one of these plans
has merely bound their workingmen more tightly to themselves. Rights under
these various arrangements are not legal rights. They are merely
privileges which employees enjoy only so long as they remain in the
employment and observe the rules of the great industries for which they
work. If they refuse to be weaned away from their independence they
cannot continue to enjoy the benefits extended to them.

       *       *       *       *       *

When you have thought the whole thing out, therefore, you will find that
the program of the new party legalizes monopolies and systematically
subordinates workingmen to them and to plans made by the government both
with regard to employment and with regard to wages. Take the thing as a
whole, and it looks strangely like economic mastery over the very lives
and fortunes of those who do the daily work of the nation; and all this
under the overwhelming power and sovereignty of the national government.
What most of us are fighting for is to break up this very partnership
between big business and the government. We call upon all intelligent men
to bear witness that if this plan were consummated, the great employers
and capitalists of the country would be under a more overpowering
temptation than ever to take control of the government and keep it
subservient to their purpose.

What a prize it would be to capture! How unassailable would be the
majesty and the tyranny of monopoly if it could thus get sanction of law
and the authority of government! By what means, except open revolt, could
we ever break the crust of our life again and become free men, breathing
an air of our own, living lives that we wrought out for ourselves?

You cannot use monopoly in order to serve a free people. You cannot use
great combinations of capital to be pitiful and righteous when the
consciences of great bodies of men are enlisted, not in the promotion of
special privilege, but in the realization of human rights. When I read
those beautiful portions of the program of the third party devoted to the
uplift of mankind and see noble men and women attaching themselves to that
party in the hope that regulated monopoly may realize these dreams of
humanity, I wonder whether they have really studied the instruments
through which they are going to do these things. The man who is leading
the third party has not changed his point of view since he was President
of the United States. I am not asking him to change it. I am not saying
that he has not a perfect right to retain it. But I do say that it is not
surprising that a man who had the point of view with regard to the
government of this country which he had when he was President was not
chosen as President again, and allowed to patent the present processes of
industry and personally direct them how to treat the people of the United
States.

There has been a history of the human race, you know, and a history of
government; it is recorded; and the kind of thing proposed has been tried
again and again and has always led to the same result. History is strewn
all along its course with the wrecks of governments that tried to be
humane, tried to carry out humane programs through the instrumentality of
those who controlled the material fortunes of the rest of their
fellow-citizens.

I do not trust any promises of a change of temper on the part of monopoly.
Monopoly never was conceived in the temper of tolerance. Monopoly never
was conceived with the purpose of general development. It was conceived
with the purpose of special advantage. Has monopoly been very benevolent
to its employees? Have the trusts had a soft heart for the working people
of America? Have you found trusts that cared whether women were sapped of
their vitality or not? Have you found trusts who are very scrupulous about
using children in their tender years? Have you found trusts that were keen
to protect the lungs and the health and the freedom of their employees?
Have you found trusts that thought as much of their men as they did of
their machinery? Then who is going to convert these men into the chief
instruments of justice and benevolence?

If you will point me to the least promise of disinterestedness on the part
of the masters of our lives, then I will conceive you some ray of hope;
but only upon this hypothesis, only upon this conjecture: that the history
of the world is going to be reversed, and that the men who have the power
to oppress us will be kind to us, and will promote our interests, whether
our interests jump with theirs or not.

After you have made the partnership between monopoly and your government
permanent, then I invite all the philanthropists in the United States to
come and sit on the stage and go through the motions of finding out how
they are going to get philanthropy out of their masters.

I do not want to see the special interests of the United States take care
of the workingmen, women, and children. I want to see justice,
righteousness, fairness and humanity displayed in all the laws of the
United States, and I do not want any power to intervene between the people
and their government. Justice is what we want, not patronage and
condescension and pitiful helpfulness. The trusts are our masters now, but
I for one do not care to live in a country called free even under kind
masters. I prefer to live under no masters at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

I agree that as a nation we are now about to undertake what may be
regarded as the most difficult part of our governmental enterprises. We
have gone along so far without very much assistance from our government.
We have felt, and felt more and more in recent months, that the American
people were at a certain disadvantage as compared with the people of other
countries, because of what the governments of other countries were doing
for them and our government omitting to do for us.

It is perfectly clear to every man who has any vision of the immediate
future, who can forecast any part of it from the indications of the
present, that we are just upon the threshold of a time when the systematic
life of this country will be sustained, or at least supplemented, at every
point by governmental activity. And we have now to determine what kind of
governmental activity it shall be; whether, in the first place, it shall
be direct from the government itself, or whether it shall be indirect,
through instrumentalities which have already constituted themselves and
which stand ready to supersede the government.

I believe that the time has come when the governments of this country,
both state and national, have to set the stage, and set it very minutely
and carefully, for the doing of justice to men in every relationship of
life. It has been free and easy with us so far; it has been go as you
please; it has been every man look out for himself; and we have continued
to assume, up to this year when every man is dealing, not with another
man, in most cases, but with a body of men whom he has not seen, that the
relationships of property are the same that they always were. We have
great tasks before us, and we must enter on them as befits men charged
with the responsibility of shaping a new era.

We have a great program of governmental assistance ahead of us in the
co-operative life of the nation; but we dare not enter upon that program
until we have freed the government. That is the point. Benevolence never
developed a man or a nation. We do not want a benevolent government. We
want a free and a just government. Every one of the great schemes of
social uplift which are now so much debated by noble people amongst us is
based, when rightly conceived, upon justice, not upon benevolence. It is
based upon the right of men to breathe pure air, to live; upon the right
of women to bear children, and not to be overburdened so that disease and
breakdown will come upon them; upon the right of children to thrive and
grow up and be strong; upon all these fundamental things which appeal,
indeed, to our hearts, but which our minds perceive to be part of the
fundamental justice of life.

Politics differs from philanthropy in this: that in philanthropy we
sometimes do things through pity merely, while in politics we act always,
if we are righteous men, on grounds of justice and large expediency for
men in the mass. Sometimes in our pitiful sympathy with our fellow-men we
must do things that are more than just. We must forgive men. We must help
men who have gone wrong. We must sometimes help men who have gone
criminally wrong. But the law does not forgive. It is its duty to equalize
conditions, to make the path of right the path of safety and advantage, to
see that every man has a fair chance to live and to serve himself, to see
that injustice and wrong are not wrought upon any.

We ought not to permit passion to enter into our thoughts or our hearts
in this great matter; we ought not to allow ourselves to be governed by
resentment or any kind of evil feeling, but we ought, nevertheless, to
realize the seriousness of our situation. That seriousness consists,
singularly enough, not in the malevolence of the men who preside over our
industrial life, but in their genius and in their honest thinking. These
men believe that the prosperity of the United States is not safe unless it
is in their keeping. If they were dishonest, we might put them out of
business by law; since most of them are honest, we can put them out of
business only by making it impossible for them to realize their genuine
convictions. I am not afraid of a knave. I am not afraid of a rascal. I am
afraid of a strong man who is wrong, and whose wrong thinking can be
impressed upon other persons by his own force of character and force of
speech. If God had only arranged it that all the men who are wrong were
rascals, we could put them out of business very easily, because they would
give themselves away sooner or later; but God has made our task heavier
than that,--he has made some good men who think wrong. We cannot fight
them because they are bad, but because they are wrong. We must overcome
them by a better force, the genial, the splendid, the permanent force of a
better reason.

The reason that America was set up was that she might be different from
all the nations of the world in this: that the strong could not put the
weak to the wall, that the strong could not prevent the weak from entering
the race. America stands for opportunity. America stands for a free field
and no favor. America stands for a government responsive to the interests
of all. And until America recovers those ideals in practice, she will not
have the right to hold her head high again amidst the nations as she used
to hold it.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is like coming out of a stifling cellar into the open where we can
breathe again and see the free spaces of the heavens to turn away from
such a doleful program of submission and dependence toward the other plan,
the confident purpose for which the people have given their mandate. Our
purpose is the restoration of freedom. We purpose to prevent private
monopoly by law, to see to it that the methods by which monopolies have
been built up are legally made impossible. We design that the limitations
on private enterprise shall be removed, so that the next generation of
youngsters, as they come along, will not have to become protégés of
benevolent trusts, but will be free to go about making their own lives
what they will; so that we shall taste again the full cup, not of charity,
but of liberty,--the only wine that ever refreshed and renewed the spirit
of a people.