In 1912, Woodrow Wilson made the following quote:
Originally Posted by
Woodrow Wilson
'Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U. S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, 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."
What power, in your opinion, was Wilson talking about?
I finally had the chance to read the whole book
The New Freedom, available here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14811.
In the preface, Wilson explains that it isn't his own book but rather a collection of his speeches put together and published by someone else. The context of the quote is within a speech about the trusts.
There are over a dozen speeches collected in
The New Freedom, and the content and style are distinctly late nineteenth-century. Wilson worries about the changed relationship between the worker and the capitalist, similar to any garden variety liberal (in the 19th century sense) of his time. He quotes Gladstone in one of the speeches.
The sense you get is that Wilson is about 40 years too late to be considered a radical and many years too early to be considered a modern politician. He refers, literally, to "crackers" in Florida and "******* in the woodpile" in another speech. None of this would be considered liberal these days but it was at the time. Recall that DW Griffith's motion picture of the same era demonstrated that the KKK was the true protector of American virtue and his production was generally well received at the time.
Wilson displays further liberalism (hardly naivety as is commonly supposed) when decrying the tariff. He was about 20 years too late for that, since the USA became a net exporter in the final decade of the nineteenth-century. However, American producers tried vainly to maintain tariffs well after their purposes were accomplished. He says that the tariffs were a tax by the monopolists and he is right about that. When American comparative advantage in industries such as steel production were already proved, there was no sense in maintaining a tariff on steel imports.
When you consider how recently the science of economics had been developed (it was called Political Economy at the time) or that Thorstein Veblen had only recently published his critiques, Wilson's perspective was probably considered cutting edge at the time that he wrote and spoke.
You will find, in the writings of any democratic politicians of the early twentieth century, quotes similar to those in Wilson's speeches. As politics follows reality, the new forms of capitalism, banking, and corporate structures came before any attempts to understand their impact in a world in which private property and private initiative had only just come into existence.
I encourage people who are interested in the era to read Barbara Tuchman's
The Proud Tower. It's hard for us to imagine, but the leading intellectuals and politicians of the turn of the twentieth century figured that they had already ascended to the pinnacle of human accomplishment. Economics had scarcely been invented as a science. Those of us who are accountants wouldn't even recognise the classifications they used back then.
Moreover, this era of liberalism, embodied in Wilson and Gladstone, is not quite the Nirvana promised by libertarians. Read Wilson's speeches and you will find a lot of problems he inherited from the 19th Century and tried to address in the best way that he could.
