Back in 1913
during his first year in office as president of the United States, Woodrow
Wilson published a book, The New Freedom. Concerned about the growing power of
corporations and trusts and the abuses of human rights that accompanied it,
Wilson contended that the power of the giant organizations must be reined in. After all, he needed something to convince
the electorate that they hadn’t made too
big of a mistake in electing him instead of Theodore Roosevelt. . . .
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| Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. |
This, of course,
was nothing more than what right-thinking people had been saying from the dawn
of the Industrial Revolution. It had
been one of the key issues of the 1912 presidential campaign. Few people except the financial interests
that had backed William Howard Taft (and, er, Wilson. . . .) disagreed that
something had to be done. The difficulty
comes in how Wilson decided the problem should be solved. He wanted to abolish private property in capital.
He didn’t put it
quite that way, of course. That would
have been too dangerous, especially after Karl Marx declared in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that “The
theory of the communists can be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of
private property.” Worse, Pope Leo XIII
had agreed with Marx — in the definition of socialism, anyway (communism is “merely”
scientific socialism) — and condemned “the chief tenet of socialism: community
of property.”
No, what Wilson
did was first contradict the first principle of reason by declaring that “private
property” meant substantially different things depending on whether it was a
consumer item owned by a human being, or a productive asset owned by a
corporation. That which was true was no
longer true if the circumstances changed — according to Wilson. As he said,
There are other tracts of modern life where jungles have
grown up that must be cut down. Take, for example, the entirely illegitimate
extensions made of the idea of private property for the benefit of modern corporations
and trusts. A modern joint stock corporation cannot in any proper sense be said
to base its rights and powers upon the principles of private property. Its
powers are wholly derived from legislation. It possesses them for the
convenience of business at the sufferance of the public. Its stock is widely
owned, passes from hand to hand, brings multitudes of men into its shifting
partnerships and connects it with the interests and the investments of whole
communities. It is a segment of the public; bears no analogy to a partnership
or to the processes by which private property is safeguarded and managed, and
should not be suffered to afford any covert whatever to those who are managing
it. Its management is of public and general concern, is in a very proper sense
everybody's business.
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| Woodrow Wilson |
Translation? If the form of ownership changes from a sole
proprietorship or partnership to a corporation, then the concept of ownership
itself changes. Property is no longer
private, but public. What was formerly
private property is no longer private property because the manner in which it
is owned changed. Truth is no longer true
due to changing circumstances . . . at least, according to Woodrow Wilson.
Abuses of individual rights by corporations must cease (no argument there), and
the way to do that — according to Wilson — is to put people before things. Again, no argument.
The only way to
do that, however — according to Wilson — is not to define the exercise of
private property in such a way as to protect individual rights, but to abolish
individual rights! That is, take away
private ownership of corporations and vest it in government. Put all control of capital under the State,
and All Will Be Well. As he explained,
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.
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| Walter Bagehot |
These are
certainly fine-sounding words, but they boil down to one thing: let government
take care of every aspect of life and turn people into slaves of the State, and
Utopia will be here. Of course, it comes
as no surprise that Wilson did his doctoral thesis on Walter Bagehot’s
constitutional theories as detailed in The
English Constitution (1867) . . . in which an élite, a “chosen people” (Bagehot’s words) have the responsibility
of running the country and controlling everyone else’s lives for the greater
good.
And the
justification for this great change to a “new freedom”? As Wilson declared, “What I am interested in is having the government of the
United States more concerned about human rights than about property rights.
Property is an instrument of humanity; humanity isn't an instrument of
property.”
Again, no argument with
Wilson’s specific words . . . just with what he meant by them. He evidently didn’t realize that it is not a
question of property rights versus human rights, but of people with property
(which is a right, not a thing) versus people without property — of people with
rights abusing people without rights.
Wilson’s idea of how to deal with abuse of a right by one individual or
group was to abolish it for everyone, i.e.,
to throw the baby out with the bath.
Not surprisingly,
the real solution to abuse of corporate power came from a man who had supported
Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 campaign, Judge Peter Stenger Grosscup. Nor was Grosscup’s program a lot of empty
rhetoric or campaign promises, but a well-thought-out proposal that took
essential human rights of life, liberty, and — yes — private property into
account.
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