Woodrow Wilson

Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (28 December 1856 – 3 February 1924) was the 45th state Governor of New Jersey (1911–1913) and later the 28th President of the United States (1913–1921). He was the second Democrat to serve two consecutive terms in the White House, after Andrew Jackson.

Sourced

• It has never been natural, it has seldom been possible, in this country for learning to seek a place apart and hold aloof from affairs. It is only when society is old, long settled to its ways, confident in habit, and without self-questioning upon any vital point of conduct, that study can affect seclusion and despise the passing interests of the day.
  • "Princeton In The Nation's Service" (21 October 1896)

• The object of education is not merely to draw out the powers of the individual mind: it is rather its right object to draw all minds to a proper adjustment to the physical and social world in which they are to have their life and their development: to enlighten, strengthen and make fit.
  • "Princeton In The Nation's Service" (21 October 1896)

• Nothing is easier than to falsify the past. Lifeless instruction will do it. If you rob it of vitality, stiffen it with pedantry, sophisticate it with argument, chill it with unsympathetic comment, you render it as dead as any academic exercise. The safest way in all ordinary seasons is to let it speak for itself: resort to its records, listen to its poets and to its masters in the humbler art of prose. Your real and proper object, after all, is not to expound, but to realize it, consort with it, and make your spirit kin with it, so that you may never shake the sense of obligation off. In short, I believe that the catholic study of the world's literature as a record of spirit is the right preparation for leadership in the world's affairs, if you undertake it like a man and not like a pedant.
  • "Princeton In The Nation's Service" (21 October 1896)

• The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.
  • A History of the American People (1901), describing the Klan as a brotherhood of politically disenfranchised white men. Quoted in The Birth of a Nation

• Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down … Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.
  • Lecture, Columbia University (15 April 1907)

• Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions; with their individuality and independence of choice in matters of business they have lost all their individual choice within the field of morals.
  • Annual address, American Bar Association, Chattanooga (31 August 1910)

• Liberty is its own reward.
  • Speech in New York City (9 September 1912)

• Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.
  • Speech at New York Press Club (9 September 1912), in The papers of Woodrow Wilson, 25:124

• Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one. If I were in his place I would do just as he suggested.
  • As quoted in The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. I (Houghton Mifflin) by Charles Seymour, p. 114-115. Also referenced here. (1912)

• Power consists in one's capacity to link his will with the purpose of others, to lead by reason and a gift of cooperation.
  • From a letter to Mary A. Hulbert (21 September 1913)

• I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.
  • Statement to British envoy William Tyrrell (November 1913), explaining his policy on Mexico

• The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name...We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.
  • Message to the Senate (19 August 1914)

• Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.
  • Conference with members of the National Association for Equal Rights (November 1914), defending the resegregation of federal offices

• You deal in the raw material of opinion, and, if my convictions have any validity, opinion ultimately governs the world.
  • Address to the Associated Press (20 April 1915)

• No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.
  • Speech in New York City (20 April 1915)

• There is such thing as a man being too proud to fight.
  • Address to Foreign-Born Citizens (10 May 1915)

• We are constantly thinking of the great war … which which we think to-day as a war which saved the Union, and it did indeed save the Union, but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before — a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.
  • Memorial Day Address (31 May 1915)

• The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. It represents the experiences made by men and women, the experiences of those who do and live under that flag.
  • Address (14 June 1915)

• We have stood apart, studiously neutral.
  • Message to Congress (7 December 1915)

• America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.
  • Speech at Des Moines (1 February 1916)

• I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans, because I am by instinct a teacher and I would like to teach them something.
  • Speech to the World's Salesmanship Congress (10 July 1916)

• The question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.
  • Address to the Senate (22 January 1917)

• It must be a peace without victory... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.
  • Address to the Senate (22 January 1917)

• A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.
  • Statement (4 March 1917) on the successful filibuster by anti-war Senators against a bill to arm merchant ships

• The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together!
  • Proclamation to the American People (15 April 1917)

• Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.
  • Address at Sioux Falls (8 September 1919)

• Is there any man here... who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? ... This war, in its inception, was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.
  • St. Louis (11 September 1919)

• I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.
  • League of Nations Address (25 September 1919)

• The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people.
  • From Bernard Baruch's American Industry at War: A Report of the War Industries Board (March 1921)

• Of course, like every other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.
  • Letter to Winterton C. Curtis (29 August 1922)

• The great malady of public life is cowardice. Most men are not untrue, but they are afraid. Most of the errors of public life, if my observation is to be trusted, come not because men are morally bad, but because they are afraid of somebody. God knows why they should be: it is generally shadows they are afraid of.
  • As quoted in American Chronicle (1945) by Ray Stannard Baker, quoted on unnumbered page opposite p. 1.

• If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.
  • As quoted in The Wilson Era; Years of War and After, 1917–1923 (1946) by Josephus Daniels, p. 624. Referenced in "Bartleby.com"

The New Freedom (1913)

The New Freedom : A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People (Full text online)

• I have not written a book since the campaign. I did not write this book at all. It is the result of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their right sequences the more suggestive portions of my campaign speeches.
  And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. It is a discussion of a number of very vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken words. I have left the sentences in the form in which they were stenographically reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform, in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of their very lack of pruning and recasting.
  • Preface

• 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.
• 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. 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.
• Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak.
• No country can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class. 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.
  • Section I : The Old Order Changeth

• 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.
  • Section II : What Is Progress?

• 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. This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men.
  • Section VIII : Monopoly, Or Opportunity?; Note that this remark has been used as the basis for a fake quotation discussed below.

• Let me say again that I am not impugning the motives of the men in Wall Street. They may think that that is the best way to create prosperity for the country. When you have got the market in your hand, does honesty oblige you to turn the palm upside down and empty it? If you have got the market in your hand and believe that you understand the interest of the country better than anybody else, is it patriotic to let it go? I can imagine them using this argument to themselves.
  The dominating danger in this land is not the existence of great individual combinations, — that is dangerous enough in all conscience, — but the combination of the combinations, — of the railways, the manufacturing enterprises, the great mining projects, the great enterprises for the development of the natural water-powers of the country, threaded together in the personnel of a series of boards of directors into a "community of interest" more formidable than any conceivable single combination that dare appear in the open.
  • Section VIII Monopoly, Or Opportunity?

• 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.
  • Section IX Benevolence, Or Justice?

Address to Congress on War (1917)

Address asking for a declaration of war (2 April 1917)

• Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best.

• The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

• It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.

The Fourteen Points Speech (1918)

The Fourteen Points Speech (8 January 1918)

• All the peoples of the world are in effect partners in this interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us.

• 1. Open covenants of peace must be arrived at.

• 2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war.

• 5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims.

• 14. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.

Misattributed

• It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.
  • Attributed by playwright Thomas Dixon after White House screening of The Birth of a Nation, which was based on Dixon's The Clansman. Wilson later said that he disapproved of the "unfortunate film."

    The President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it.

    • Wilson aide Joseph Tumulty, in a letter to the Boston branch of the NAACP

• I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.… We have come to be one of the worst ruled … Governments in the civilized world.…
  • Attributed in Aaron Russo (2006), America: Freedom to Fascism and elsewhere as an expression of regret for creating the Federal Reserve. The quotation is fabricated from remarks Wilson made on separate occasions and two leading sentences that have no clear source.
    • I have ruined my country.
      • No known source from Wilson, but possibly a misattribution of remarks by Sidney Sonnino at the Paris Peace Conference (1919), criticizing Wilson's treaty framework as unfair to Italy. See Margaret Macmillan (2002), Paris 1919.
    • A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.…
      • "Monopoly, Or Opportunity?" (1912), criticizing the credit situation before the Federal Reserve was created.
    • We have come to be one of the worst ruled… Governments….
      • "Benevolence, Or Justice?" (1912)
  • The quotation has been analyzed in Andrew Leonard (2007-12-21), "The Unhappiness of Woodrow Wilson" Salon:
    • I can tell you categorically that this is not a statement of regret for having created the Federal Reserve. Wilson never had any regrets for having done that. It was an accomplishment in which he took great pride.
      • John M. Cooper, professor of history and author of several books on Wilson, as quoted by Andrew Leonard

Quotes about Wilson

• Wilson's principles survived the eclipse of the Versailles system and that they still guide European politics today: self-determination, democratic government, collective security, international law, and a league of nations. Wilson may not have gotten everything he wanted at Versailles, and his treaty was never ratified by the Senate, but his vision and his diplomacy, for better or worse, set the tone for the twentieth century. France, Germany, Italy, and Britain may have sneered at Wilson, but every one of these powers today conducts its European policy along Wilsonian lines. What was once dismissed as visionary is now accepted as fundamental. This was no mean achievement, and no European statesman of the twentieth century has had as lasting, as benign, or as widespread an influence.
  • Walter Russell Mead in Special Providence (2001)