The new freedom

by Woodrow Wilson

One of the valuable lessons of my life was due to the fact that at a comparatively early age in my experience as a public speaker I had the privilege of speaking in Cooper Union in New York. The audience in Cooper Union is made up of every kind of man and woman, from the poor devil who simply comes in to keep warm up to the man who has come in to take a serious part in the discussion of the evening. I want to tell you this, that in the questions that are asked there after the speech is over, the most penetrating questions that I have ever had addressed to me came from some of the men who were the least well-dressed in the audience, came from the plain fellows, came from the fellows whose muscle was daily up against the whole struggle of life. They asked questions which went to the heart of the business and put me to my mettle to answer them. I felt as if those questions came as a voice out of life itself, not a voice out of any school less severe than the severe school of experience. And what I like about this social centre idea of the schoolhouse is that there is the place where the ordinary fellow is going to get his innings, going to ask his questions, going to express his opinions, going to convince those who do not realize the vigor of America that the vigor of America pulses in the blood of every true American, and that the only place he can find the true American is in this clearing-house of absolutely democratic opinion.

No one man understands the United States. I have met some gentlemen who professed they did. I have even met some business men who professed they held in their own single comprehension the business of the United States; but I am educated enough to know that they do not. Education has this useful effect, that it narrows of necessity the circles of one's egotism. No student knows his subject. The most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know with regard to it. That is also the position of a statesman. No statesman understands the whole country. He should make it his business to find out where he will get the information necessary to understand at least a part of it at a time when dealing with complex affairs. What we need is a universal revival of common counsel.

I have sometimes reflected on the lack of a body of public opinion in our cities, and once I contrasted the habits of the city man with those of the countryman in a way which got me into trouble. I described what a man in a city generally did when he got into a public vehicle or sat in a public place. He doesn't talk to anybody, but he plunges his head into a newspaper and presently experiences a reaction which he calls his opinion, but which is not an opinion at all, being merely the impression that a piece of news or an editorial has made upon him. He cannot be said to be participating in public opinion at all until he has laid his mind alongside the minds of his neighbors and discussed with them the incidents of the day and the tendencies of the time.

Where I got into trouble was, that I ventured on a comparison. I said that public opinion was not typified on the streets of a busy city, but was typified around the stove in a country store where men sat and probably chewed tobacco and spat into a sawdust box, and made up, before they got through, what was the neighborhood opinion both about persons and events; and then, inadvertently, I added this philosophical reflection, that, whatever might be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least could be said for it: that it gave a man time to think between sentences. Ever since then I have been represented, particularly in the advertisements of tobacco firms, as in favor of the use of chewing tobacco!

The reason that some city men are not more catholic in their ideas is that they do not share the opinion of the country, and the reason that some countrymen are rustic is that they do not know the opinion of the city; they are both hampered by their limitations. I heard the other day of a woman who had lived all her life in a city and in an hotel. She made a first visit to the country last summer, and spent a week in a farmhouse. Asked afterward what had interested her most about her experience, she replied that it was hearing the farmer "page his cows!"

A very urban point of view with regard to a common rustic occurrence, and yet that language showed the sharp, the inelastic limits of her thought. She was provincial in the extreme; she thought even more narrowly than in the terms of a city; she thought in the terms of an hotel. In proportion as we are confined within the walls of one hostelry or one city or one state, we are provincial. We can do nothing more to advance our country's welfare than to bring the various communities within the counsels of the nation. The real difficulty of our nation has been that not enough of us realized that the matters we discussed were matters of common concern. We have talked as if we had to serve now this part of the country and again that part, now this interest and again that interest; as if all interests were not linked together, provided we understood them and knew how they were related to one another.

If you would know what makes the great river as it nears the sea, you must travel up the stream. You must go up into the hills and back into the forests and see the little rivulets, the little streams, all gathering in hidden places to swell the great body of water in the channel. And so with the making of public opinion: Back in the country, on the farms, in the shops, in the hamlets, in the homes of cities, in the schoolhouses, where men get together and are frank and true with one another, there come trickling down the streams which are to make the mighty force of the river, the river which is to drive all the enterprises of human life as it sweeps on into the great common sea of humanity.

I feel nothing so much as the intensity of the common man. I can pick out in any audience the men who are at ease in their fortunes: they are seeing a public man go through his stunts. But there are in every crowd other men who are not doing that,—men who are listening as if they were waiting to hear if there were somebody who could speak the thing that is stirring in their own hearts and minds. It makes a man's heart ache to think that he cannot be sure that he is doing it for them; to wonder whether they are longing for something that he does not understand. He prays God that something will bring into his consciousness what is in theirs, so that the whole nation may feel at last released from its dumbness, feel at last that there is no invisible force holding it back from its goal, feel at last that there is hope and confidence and that the road may be trodden as if we were brothers, shoulder to shoulder, not asking each other anything about differences of class, not contesting for any selfish advance, but united in the common enterprise.

The burden that is upon the heart of every conscientious public man is the burden of the thought that perhaps he does not sufficiently comprehend the national life. For, as a matter of fact, no single man does comprehend it. The whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man, but to depend upon the counsel of all. For only as men are brought into counsel, and state their own needs and interests, can the general interests of a great people be compounded into a policy that will be suitable to all.

I have realized all my life, as a man connected with the tasks of education, that the chief use of education is to open the understanding to comprehend as many things as possible. That it is not what a man knows,—for no man knows a great deal,—but what a man has upon his mind to find out; it is his ability to understand things, it is his connection with the great masses of men that makes him fit to speak for others,—and only that. I have associated with some of the gentlemen who are connected with the special interests of this country (and many of them are pretty fine men, I can tell you), but, fortunately for me, I have associated with a good many other persons besides; I have not confined my acquaintance to these interesting groups, and I can actually tell those gentlemen some things that they have not had time to find out. It has been my great good fortune not to have had my head buried in special undertakings, and, therefore, I have had an occasional look at the horizon. Moreover, I found out, a long time ago, fortunately for me, when I was a boy, that the United States did not consist of that part of it in which I lived. There was a time when I was a very narrow provincial, but happily the circumstances of my life made it necessary that I should go to a very distant part of the country, and I early found out what a very limited acquaintance I had with the United States, found out that the only thing that would give me any sense at all in discussing the affairs of the United States was to know as many parts of the United States as possible.