Woodrow Wilson’s The Author and Signers of the Declaration | A Primary Source Close Read w/ BRI

0:02 Hello, and welcome to another Primary Source Close Read with the Bill of Wright Institute. My name is Kirk Higgins. I’m the Director of Content here at the Bill of Rights Institute, and I am joined by my colleague Tony Williams. Everyone you’re how are you, Kirk? I’m doing well, tony, how about you? We’re great in Williamsburg here. Yeah, I think we’re all making our way through the summer here as best we can.

0:25 Well, today we have an interesting document. I think this summer we’ve kind of made our way through American history at a sort of a very high level, and today we’re sort of at the turn of the 20th century, and we’re going to look a little bit at progressive and progressivism, and specifically Woodrow Wilson’s address the authors and signers of the Declaration.

0:48 Sounds good. Let’s get started. All right, so I will pull up our PowerPoint here. So Woodrow Wilson, who becomes President United States, right in 1912, right? Am I right on that one, Tony?

1:09 Yes. And he’s known as a progressive president even though he’s part of the Democratic Party, but he’s a part of this overall progressive movement, which I think was really around the 1880s, 1890s, and then into the early one nine hundred s. And he gives his address in September of 1907, so before he was in public office.

1:31 So tell me, just by way of context, what can you tell me about the progressives and about Woodrow Wilson specifically? All right, well, in general, I think we need to know the vast changes that are going on in American society. This is post Civil War into the late Gilded Age and turn in the century.

1:51 You have vast changes economically with industrialization, huge migrations of people to America from around the world. So you have immigration, and you also had vast urbanization as well. Just these cities become very large,

2:12 especially in the Northeast and Midwest in the United States. And so there’s these vast social changes going on. And the progressives were a mixed lot. Some of them had different goals, there are different strains of progressivism. But in general, it’s a reform movement that wants to address a lot of these

2:34 changes going on, try to bring some sense of social order, of efficiency in managing a lot of these changes that were going on in society. Progressive is also very much a view of the interest in society, particularly big business, against

3:00 the little guy, the average citizen or farmers or workers and so forth. So they wanted to address some of those imbalances of economic and political power between the people and interests. Woodrow Wilson was an academic for several years now

3:20 and was very influenced by a lot of German thinking about education. And he is the president of Princeton University right now, and he’ll soon become in the governor of New Jersey and launch a pretty audacious progressive program there and then, as you said, become president in 1912.

3:44 Great. So the nature of life is changing in the United States is kind of the sentiment. Right. So there’s economic growth, there’s changing demographics. And so I think the Progressives see that. At least that’s what came across to me. And reading through this, that the fact that that change is occurring is requiring now a response

4:05 from the government essentially in its role in society. Is that pretty close? Yeah, certainly Wilson sees it that way, and he’s proposing his vision for using the government to manage that change. And he’s also explaining his view of American constitutional government created during the Founding and how

4:30 that might inform progressivism in certain interesting ways. So diving into document here, what I think is really interesting about this document in particular, there’s a lot of different documents you could choose to look at the Progressive Era. But for this one in particular, what I think is interesting is, A, that it’s Woodrow Wilson before he’s in public office. So it’s really him outlining

4:52 his views, which he had done, I think, even from the very beginning. His PhD thesis, I think, had to do or his first book had to do with the nature of Congress and government. So this is something he’s been thinking about and writing about for a long time. But this document in particular, I think is interesting, both because what he calls upon and also sort of where he wants to head

5:12 and looking at it here, diving right in the title, is the author and signer of the Declaration of Independence. And he uses both of those throughout this to sort of guide his commentary on what he thinks the government needs to do to respond to these changes. And starting out, he outlines this idea of the Declaration as a highly speculative document, like making these claims about

5:38 equality and really about the rights that it asserts. And he calls it a strong rhetorical statement of grievances against the English government. So I think it’s interesting he’s framing this up very deliberately at the beginning of this document. It seems that he’s calling it speculative

5:59 and philosophical, but it seems like he wants to really nail down that it’s a proscriptive document, in a sense, it seems like, to me. Right. Because Wilson is very skeptical, and that’s why he calls it a highly speculative document. He’s very skeptical about natural rights.

6:19 He believes that the Founders believed in natural rights, but he’s not a guy who puts a lot of stock in the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, where they talk about the source of our rights and the purposes of government. He really dials down more specifically on what the Declaration of Independence

6:40 specifically did for the people of that time of the Founding. And it’s really going to inform his whole understanding of the nature of government and constitutional government and what the government should be allowed to do today.

7:01 Yeah, and it seems that he really wants that door to be left open. I mean, he concludes this section saying, they did not attempt to dictate the aims and objects of any generation but their own. To me, that’s very much a function of progressive ideology. Right. Like that it’s, okay, that was the past. We’re moving beyond that. And perhaps the genius of the American system to Wilson would have been that you

7:25 can form it and formulate it to meet the needs of the present day. Right. So sort of the argument of and it comes back to this later on, but the argument of it was great for them. They knew it was good for them. They’re thinking about how they’re imagining governments functioning. And the thing that we need to remember from the Declaration is that they left it open ended. They didn’t prescribe what the government would be within that document.

7:50 Yeah, exactly right. And that’s well put. This document was great for stay. It talked about liberty and self government. It was really important to them because they were founding a new government, they were creating a new nation. And so this is what was needed at the time.

8:13 But you can see his language right here indicates that he doesn’t think it lasts beyond their generation, that every generation is going to have their own struggles, and so they’re going to have to make their own principles and make their own government. And he’s saying that the progressive is living what he would consider a more

8:34 complex age, and there’s a lot of changes going on, and they’re facing new challenges that the founding generation didn’t face. And so they need to basically, almost in a Darwinian way, kind of adapt to those changes and show progress in their thinking.

8:57 They are in some ways more enlightened in terms of how to manage these ideas of change. Yeah, I think it’s interesting because it’s an interesting balance that he’s taking, too, because he seems to need to root his arguments in the assertions of the past, and yet he wants to depart from them.

9:17 And so it almost feels like you say, hey, this was great. It was a positive thing that happened. But by the way, because of these new circumstances, we’re now evolving past it. And I wonder if, Tony, you could just touch a little bit on I mean, you mentioned Hagel and some others at the beginning, but what is it about the sense of progress? Because I think we get that throughout this document that there’s something inherently good about what’s taking place?

9:40 Is that a part of sort of the progressive philosophy that as we’re moving forward, we’re automatically moving towards something that is inevitably going to be better for people? Right. I think that was Wilson’s view. And many of the progressive that influenced by Darwinism, by a German thinker,

10:03 they believed almost scientifically in this idea that not only that history would progress in technology, but that learning, enlightenment, and even human nature itself would change and get better and get more

10:23 enlightened and get more peaceful sort of thinking about foreign policy and the world and that history is inevitably kind of moving towards these sort of preordained ends and we’re going to evolve right into something better.

10:44 Yeah, and I think he gets to that when he starts talking about the Constitution here because he says eleven years later among the men who framed the Constitution of the United States by practical capacity, thoughtful indeed and holding at its heart clear cut, unmistakable conceptions of what government of freemen ought to be, but not fanciful a thing of action rather

11:04 than of theory suited to meet an exigency, not a meter turn and debate. That stands out to me too, again thinking about Wilson because if we are on this path to progress, then it seems that what Wilson is saying here is we need to allow that progress to take place. And what is fundamentally important is not

11:28 simply this sort of preservation of liberty, but action. Action rather than theory. So that we need to ensure that the way that our government is structured is allowing for that action to take place and that it’s happening as efficiently as it can happen.

11:49 Yeah, I think he’s saying, look, we’re in a new age, we have new attitudes towards government. They did things that were great for their age, but we have new challenges. And so we need to be men of action too, and not just look to the past, but even reshape the institutions themselves, create new constitutional structures,

12:15 new relationships between the branches of government. We need to use our enlightened understanding of politics and of political science to manage this change and like I said, to reshape the institutions to meet the challenges, the contingencies of the day.

12:36 Yeah, and he goes on to say that too. He says, the situation which we stand is in many ways more difficult than that which they attempted, the remedies to be applied less obvious to our choice. Right. So that’s the complexity that you’re talking about. Right. The world in which we operate now is more complex again because of this change in situation, the urbanization,

12:59 the growth of population, the sort of increasingly complex economic environment that these individuals are now living in. And it’s interesting too, he seems to be arguing against somebody that’s not in the room because he says, we owe it to them. So that’s not an empty eulogy by sincere flattery of imitation, it seems like.

13:23 What do you know about people who would have been pushing back against this kind of move at this time? Are there people who are saying, hey, this is a radical move that’s going to impinge on liberty or what other arguments he’s trying to assuage there? Yeah, I think that the people who adopted

13:45 more of the Lincolnian view of preserving the constitutional principles and the timeless kind of eternal principles of the founders of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. There are still many of those believers around. And so I think he is arguing in time,

14:06 I think he’s really arguing against just those who would stand in the way of change, those who would stand in the way of progress. Right. I think he is steadily addressing his critics who would be hesitant to adopt these changes and to adopt these new ways of thinking or even new kind

14:29 of government structures and ways of doing things. He’s pushing society towards progress. Yeah. And in that progress, he seems to come back to individual liberty as being the thing that was the core of the American Revolution, says that here with the principle

14:53 of the American Revolution was it was the principle of individual liberty. So that seems to be the core at which government is aiming to it seems to me, though, advance, as opposed to because you used the word preserve when you were talking about the Lincoln view. It seems that he thinks that we need to push in order to accomplish that thing to preserve that not preserve,

15:18 but to realize that principle of individual liberty. Is that fair? Yes, but I think he’s even going more than that. I think what he’s saying here in the next few paragraphs is that, yes, the Founders believe that individual liberty was the core principle.

15:39 Yes. They believed in self-government, one of consent, one privacy for the legislative branch. But I think what he’s really getting at is that was great for the Founders, that was great for their generation, that was great for a simpler, agrarian time.

16:02 But now, in our modern, industrial, urban age, we need new structures, we need new principles, we need new ways of thinking about liberty and equality that the past generation may be what you might say, more simple generation in his eyes.

16:26 That’s what they believe, and they could get by with that. But we live in a modern age, and so we really need to adapt. We really need to evolve. Yeah. And he, again, is sort of following along that line of thinking. He had talked about the signers earlier on. Now here we come to the author of the Declaration of Independence,

16:46 and he sort of gives his description of Thomas Jefferson, which is interesting. I think he’s trying to show that he was complex in thinking about the future, but it seems that he wants Jefferson to be portrayed also as the same kind of progressive that he is.

17:06 Right. That Jefferson was concerned about this. And again, that is the core thing that we should be taking away from their work and everything else. And then we get to this point, after having talked about the signers and declaration in the author at the outset, to say, we are not here to worship men or a document, but neither are we here

17:29 to indulge in a mere rhetorical noncritical eulogy. And so now we’re turning to examine our standards, our purpose, and determine afresh what principles. So here we’ve set up this rhetorical argument, like you said, sort of rooting it in on what they saw. But now it seems like Wilson is taking the next step and saying, all right, now that we understand the core

17:51 of what this was about, let’s now figure out how to apply these things to what it is that we ought to do in this new age. Right? I mean, I think you see here he’s in many ways rejecting the Declaration of Independence in the way that Lincoln might have understood it to be these sort of immutable and changing timeless

18:14 principles, and to say, we’re not here to worship this document. And of course, I don’t think we should uncritically worship the document either. But he’s basically saying we need to determine afresh, what principles, what forms of power, or we think most likely to affect our safety and happiness. In other words,

18:35 the Declaration really applied to the people living in 1776, but we’re going to think about how those principles and forms of power, what’s going to make our society happy and safe and effectively govern our society.

18:57 And so there’s a real dichotomy here, a real difference between what was going on, what was great for those people in 1776 as opposed to 1907. Yeah, and I think he continues with that here, too, talking about, so we’re going to make a change. We need to make a change because of this new, complex society that we live in.

19:19 That seems to be something that is beyond question. Right? Like. That because we’ve already agreed that that’s happening now, then it’s about what that change ought to be and how we do that effectively. Even says that that is not a question

19:41 about the novel nature of the artist independence, that all of this needs to occur in order to best meet our needs. It seems to be a given, right? Yeah, I think for him it is. And so he’s going to touch a lot more on what that looks like.

20:01 What does that mean for government regulation and individual liberties and so forth, the relationship between the individual and government and the scale and scope of the federal government. He’s looking for the spirit of the nation too, I think is interesting.

20:24 But again, I think through this entire section here, everything he’s pointing towards is getting back at the same kind of thing. What is critically important is that we understand that the essence of what is preserved here is key, but it needs to adapt. So the essence of change needs to occur.

20:44 So it’s about what it is that’s actually going to be changing. Right. And so to get to that point, Wilson really starts to talk about what it is that is seemingly off balance, that needs to be corrected. And the rule of law sort of sits at the very heart of this form.

21:05 And one thing that really stood out for me in this piece in particular let me see which line it was here. Then he says, liberty consists in the best possible adjustment between the power of the government and the privilege of the individual, and only law can affect the adjustment.

21:26 Earlier he had said that our new definition of liberty needs to differ. I guess in what ways does that kind of conception of liberty differ from how the Founders may have defined liberty, or how even Abraham Lincoln may have defined liberty? Yeah, I think the Founders are more thinking within the bounds of natural law,

21:47 that you have civil and religious liberty and the individual liberty to live your life how you see fit, free of government intrusion, as long as that freedom does not impinge upon the freedom of others. This starts to shade that, right?

22:08 It’s an adjustment between the power of state. Now, the government is not just merely protecting your rights, but somehow is kind of managing that liberty. It is somewhere between that and what he calls the privilege rather than the rights of the individual.

22:28 So it’s a lot more obscure, it’s not very straightforward, but there is some what he says, adjustment management of that liberty. And clearly with the power of government, you have an increasing public interest. Right. You have a collective interest in what the individual is doing,

22:49 rather than just an expression of individual freedom, individual liberty. Now, there’s some sense of the public interest in that, right? And he goes on to dig into that a little bit more both here. He talks about no more favorable to control than was necessary to make

23:12 safeguard of individual privilege and a guarantee of equal rights. But then he talks about sort of the nature of the individual now in this complex world in which we live. And he seems to say that, hey, the individual is disappearing, right, and seemingly dangerous because that individual privilege that I just talked about is seeming to be quashed.

23:35 That I’m assuming, is why he defined liberty in the way that he did. And so here he’s sort of drawing that out to try to say why the government needs to now make a correction or I guess that the government needs to be sort of reframed and how it acts within society in order to best protect individuals within this now more complex framework.

23:59 Is that about what he’s trying to get out here? Yeah, I think that as well. See, in his new Freedom, he’s very concerned about the effects of urbanization, industrialization, immigration on the individual, on competition, on small business, these institutions in society, big business and big labor

24:23 and particularly corporations and their ties to politicians, politics, that they were gaining an outsized political and economic power and really sort of they were squashing that individual and his or her freedom.

24:45 And this was very troubling. This line of thinking will really shape his new Freedom platform on which he runs for President in 1912. He really wants to control that right, and not only to regulate, but then to also break up large businesses, large corporations, large institutions,

25:08 so that we get back to ironically sort of an earlier America where the individual can thrive but he really sees the interests in society, quote unquote interest, as really destroying that individual liberty. And there’s a new role of government. The government needs to come in and really

25:30 manage those relationships so that the individual can remain free. Yes, and he says that pretty explicitly here. He says neither can we depend upon individuals, they are now too minute and weak. So I think about the that this is where he’s outlying corporations, the morals of business and of law.

25:52 We frankly accept corporate morals and we will not set these corporations, these new individuals or our modern law to watch and sue one another for infractions of the law they might combine. And there’s no sufficient motive for them to check one another in illegal practices. So if these corporations are grown outsized beyond the control of our

26:12 government’s capacity to regulate them, and individuals can’t stand up against them because of these mammoth institutions that now need intervention by someone on their behalf in order to protect their rights. And I think he then goes even more into that a little bit later on actually here this is an interesting spot

26:37 where he says talk about returning to our old standards, strange and altered day when all the face of circumstances seems changed and nothing remains as it was in the time when government was hopefully set up. Can we return right here? He’s saying, like you just said, by involving us in more of these

27:00 regulations in a way that is thoughtful and useful and run by people who know how it is that they can do this, then through that sort of more careful professional maybe is the way to think about it, form of government, we can sort of put in protections that protect us from these corporations

27:25 which would otherwise just completely demolish the individual completely. Right? I think he envisions not only a new scale and scope of the role, especially the federal government, but also a different government, sort of a changed reform, the government in which the old principles and he would think

27:46 of them old and kind of outdated principles of separation, of powers, of checks and balances, of the privacy of the legislative branch and so forth, that these things are kind of outdated, right? Even sort of popular consent and just representative government. He really thinks that instead that

28:09 there was an emerging kind of national will, a national outlook emerging among the people and that it was really the role of the executive branch, particularly of experts of scientific and academic experts in the executive branch, whether they’re regulatory

28:31 agencies or just administrative agencies or what we just might simply call the bureaucracy to determine what that national. And he would see that national will of one of reform, of one of desire to regulate and control the interest in the public good, in the public interests

28:52 and that this new way of doing government, this new regulatory state, if you will, was going to be a new way of doing things right and was going to be able to control and manage society and the economy and all these complex relationships in society

29:13 in an efficient way, in an orderly way, one that would cut down on conflict, cut down on political and economic manipulation and monopoly. It was going to bring America into a new age, really. Yeah. And he touches on that here, talking about having

29:34 I think he calls it it is the task of finding the individual in the maze of modern social, commercial and industrial conditions, finding him with the probe of morals and the probe of law. Right? So I think he’s pointing to we now have the capacity to do this and our goal is to get it so that people are responsible for their actions once again.

29:56 And he’s warning about what the loss of the individual would be. But here he really is hitting right on what he sees I think is the problem. Right. The elaborate secret manipulations by means of which some of our so called financiers get control of the voting majority of the stock of a grail road manufacturer and it goes on to affect a lot of people.

30:17 Right? So I think he’s essentially saying these corporations that now exist, these big businesses that exist, the decisions they make have significant impacts on life broadly for many, many people. And so they need to be held responsible if they’re taking actions that are negatively impacting those individuals.

30:38 And I think this is coming sort of right on the heels of a lot of trust-busting that Teddy Roosevelt was involved in or attempting to do and sort of the breakup of a lot of those monopolies. Is that kind of everything he’s talking about? Or is there more going on here that we should be paying attention to? I think the context you mentioned is really important, right?

31:00 You start to have the Interstate Commerce Act and you have the Sherman Act of 1890. I mean, you have increasing regulation, a lot more regulatory agencies created during Roosevelt administration in which this is delivered, and the lawsuits, the trust-busting, if you will. But I even think what he’s getting at in this document is that it’s

31:25 even worse because it’s not just the corporations, it’s the one or two sort of power brokers, the Financiers, the JP Morgans and the Rockefellers and the Carnegies of the world. They are the ones really pulling the levers here and with their control of politics and the Senate and Congress,

31:50 that they’ve really manipulated everything politically and economically and there’s no way to go after them, right? They are shielded by corporations and shielded by limited liability and they can’t personally be

32:12 held responsible for all the manipulative dealings going on. And so he really wants to get at that and really wants to find new ways, right? Because the old constitutional modes of trying to control that are just sort

32:33 of outdated and don’t really address the core problem. We need new ways of doing it right? We need those new regulatory agencies. We need new laws. When he’s President, he’ll get the Clayton Antitrust Act and other ways of controlling big business and regulating them and so finding ways

32:54 to break them up and really get it who’s responsible? Yeah. And he says here on line 274 275, let every corporation exactly define the obligations and powers of its directors and then let the law fix responsibility upon them accordingly. So I think that gets right to the core of what he wants to do. He wants to make it so that these

33:16 corporations are not nefarious, or not nefarious is the wrong word, but not anonymous groups, but show who they are, show the decisions they’re making and allow for transparency to occur. And with that transparency comes a need for the government to enforce that again, given the complexities that he sees existing.

33:43 And he goes on the other line coming back again to liberty. He says there could be no liberty if the individual was not free. There is no such thing as a corporate liberty. I thought summed up what he’s arguing here pretty well and that he’s trying to get it. He’s trying to build off of the legacy of the Declaration

34:08 and the founding generation, but he’s trying to improve it. Right. Or what he would argue is an improvement of it, which is to say their conception of government was too limited, in a sense, and that we need to expand that role in scope for government action in order to

34:29 control, as he says here, clearly not as a superintendent. Government must regulate, not as a superintendent does, but as a judge does. It must safeguard, it must not direct. So it’s saying it should come in, it should weigh in on a lot of aspects of society that would have been probably seen as outside of the bounds

34:50 of government action for founding generation. But it needs to do so because of this complex world in which we now find ourselves. It’s really interesting that line about the communal liberty of the individual is not free. Right. And so you’ll see FDR build on this later on, right? And so there’s sort of this train of thought running through progressivism, if you will, throughout the early to mid

35:15 20th century, which FDR says necessitous men are not free. Right. So if you’re impoverished, if you don’t have the same education as everyone, then you’re not truly free. What FDR proposes, that the government is going to come in and provide positive rights for people, rather than just negative liberty.

35:37 It’s one of positive rights in which the government is going to act to ensure that all are in fact truly free. And it’s not just a matter of protecting rights, but it’s determining an outcome, really, in many ways. Yeah. It’s in that vein that he concludes,

35:59 the future, like the past, is for individual energy initiative for men, not for corporations or for governments. And the law that has this ancient principle at its heart is the law that will endure. And so what he’s saying there is we need to be innovative and we need to be energetic. And the government needs to be energetic in ensuring

36:21 that individuals are able to live freely with liberty within the nation. Which I think shows pretty well, I think, what direction Wilson wants to take the government in, the direction that he works to take the country after he’s elected in 1912.

36:41 Yeah, and he does. All right. We mentioned the Clayton Antitrust Act and the tariff reform, which lowered a lot of the revenue coming to the government. But it was an attack on monopoly and an attack on the interests, if you will, that wanted higher tariffs. But then the government would be funded through the 16th Amendment and through

37:07 the federal income tax and a number of other reforms. Right. Reforms are working hours and the new Federal Reserve. And a lot of this comes to its great fruition, of course. The government takes over the railroads and manages the war effort. It manages information with the Committee on Public Information during the war.

37:31 All of these agencies during the war are going to manage a particular aspect of the economy or American society and really try to institute that orderly and efficient and managed and planned

37:52 economy and society to sort of achieve his end goals of a more perfect society. Great. Well, thank you, Tony, for joining me. This has been fun working through this document. I hope all of you who tuned in found this to be an interesting document.

38:12 They may not have looked at before, maybe you have, but I do think it’s really an insightful one to look at for sort of seeing Woodrow Wilson’s platform, sort of his views and how it is that the Progressive sort of stood on this, the turn of the century here, looking backwards at the way the government had been handled in the 18th and 19th century towards what they saw as a new future in the 20th

38:37 century and the changes that had to occur and how they went about articulating that and sort of grappling with some of these big questions. Great. Well, thank you all for joining us, and we’ll look forward to seeing you again next time. Thank you.