We deemed ourselves rank democrats, whereas we were in fact only progressive Englishmen.
Woodrow Wilson
The Public Record
Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, he was born in Virginia and raised in Georgia before moving to New Jersey, where he became a prominent political figure. Wilson was a key leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for reforms such as antitrust legislation and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. His presidency is also noted for significant events such as the United States' involvement in World War I and his efforts to promote the League of Nations, an international organization aimed at preventing future conflicts.
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The truth is that we long imagined ourselves related in some unexplained way to all ancient republicans.
Strangely enough, too, we at the same time accepted the quite incompatible theory that we were related also to the French philosophical radicals.
We claimed kinship with democrats everywhere,--with all democrats.
We are no longer wont to refer to the ancients or to the French for sanction of what we do.
They were afraid of catching revolution, as old women of catching cold.
Almost equally incredible to us is the ardor of revolution that filled the world in those first days of our national life,--the fact that one of the rulers of the world’s mind in that generation was Rousseau, the apostle of all that is…
For us who stand in the dusty matter-of-fact world of to-day, there is a touch of pathos in recollections of the ardor for democratic liberty that filled the air of Europe and America a century ago with such quickening influences.
We may sometimes catch ourselves regretting that the inoculations of experience have closed our systems against the infections of hopeful revolution.
It seems to some that our enthusiasms have become tamer and more decorous because our sinews have hardened; that as experience has grown idealism has declined.
If we are suffering disappointment, it is the disappointment of an awakening: we were dreaming.
If we began the first century of our national existence under a similar impression ourselves, there is the greater reason why we should start out upon a new century of national life with more accurate conceptions.
They are freedom of thought and the diffusion of enlightenment among the people.
The progress of popular education and the progress of democracy have been inseparable.
Learning was turning its face away from the studious few towards the curious many.
The intellectual movement of the modern time was emerging from the narrow courses of scholastic thought, and beginning to spread itself abroad over the extended, if shallow, levels of the common mind.
Yet organized popular education is only one of the quickening influences that have been producing the general enlightenment which is everywhere becoming the promise of general liberty.
But through the mighty influences of commerce and the press the world itself has become a school.
The air is alive with the multitudinous voices of information.
Steady trade winds of intercommunication have sprung up which carry the seeds of education and enlightenment, wheresoever planted, to every quarter of the globe.
All the world, so far as its news and its most insistent thoughts are concerned, is fast being made every man’s neighbor.
Carlyle unquestionably touched one of the obvious truths concerning modern democracy when he declared it to be the result of printing.
Nothing could give surer promise of popular power than the activity and alertness of thought which are made through such agencies to accompany the training of the public schools.
The activity may often be misdirected or unwholesome, may sometimes be only feverish and mischievous, a grievous product of narrow information and hasty conclusion; but it is none the less a stirring and potent activity.
It makes men conscious of the existence and interest of affairs lying outside the dull round of their own daily lives.
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