Woodrow Wilson
First Inaugural Address
Tuesday, March 4, 1913

THERE has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the 
House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It 
has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be 
Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put 
into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? That is the 
question that is uppermost in our minds to-day. That is the question I 
am going to try to answer, in order, if I may, to interpret the 
occasion.

It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of a 
party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a 
large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which 
the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to 
interpret a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old things 
with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the 
very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect 
as we have latterly looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened 
eyes; have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and 
sinister. Some new things, as we look frankly upon them, willing to 
comprehend their real character, have come to assume the aspect of 
things long believed in and familiar, stuff of our own convictions. We 
have been refreshed by a new insight into our own life.

We see that in many things that life is very great. It is incomparably 
great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity 
and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived 
and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless 
enterprise of groups of men. It is great, also, very great, in its 
moral force. Nowhere else in the world have noble men and women 
exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy 
and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, 
alleviate suffering, and set the weak in the way of strength and hope. 
We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has 
stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek 
to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous 
change, against storm and accident. Our life contains every great 
thing, and contains it in rich abundance.

But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been 
corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a 
great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve 
the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise 
would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, 
shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient. We have been proud 
of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped 
thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed 
out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and 
spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead 
weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. 
The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the 
solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and 
factories, and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate 
and familiar seat. With the great Government went many deep secret 
things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with 
candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been 
made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had 
forgotten the people.

At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see 
the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and 
vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to 
cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without 
impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common 
life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something 
crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. 
Our thought has been "Let every man look out for himself, let every 
generation look out for itself," while we reared giant machinery which 
made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of 
control should have a chance to look out for themselves. We had not 
forgotten our morals. We remembered well enough that we had set up a 
policy which was meant to serve the humblest as well as the most 
powerful, with an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play, 
and remembered it with pride. But we were very heedless and in a hurry 
to be great.

We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of 
heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to 
square every process of our national life again with the standards we 
so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our 
hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.

We have itemized with some degree of particularity the things that 
ought to be altered and here are some of the chief items: A tariff 
which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, 
violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a 
facile instrument in the hand of private interests; a banking and 
currency system based upon the necessity of the Government to sell its 
bonds fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and 
restricting credits; an industrial system which, take it on all its 
sides, financial as well as administrative, holds capital in leading 
strings, restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of labor, 
and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of 
the country; a body of agricultural activities never yet given the 
efficiency of great business undertakings or served as it should be 
through the instrumentality of science taken directly to the farm, or 
afforded the facilities of credit best suited to its practical needs; 
watercourses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, 
fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste 
heaps at every mine. We have studied as perhaps no other nation has the 
most effective means of production, but we have not studied cost or 
economy as we should either as organizers of industry, as statesmen, or 
as individuals.

Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government may be 
put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the 
Nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well 
as their rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental 
duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are 
matters of justice. There can be no equality or opportunity, the first 
essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children 
be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the 
consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can 
not alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it 
does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. 
The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary 
laws, pure food laws, and laws determining conditions of labor which 
individuals are powerless to determine for themselves are intimate 
parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency.

These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the others 
undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental 
safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high 
enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life as 
a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man's 
conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should 
do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance 
of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not 
destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may 
be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to 
write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the 
spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and 
knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of 
excursions whither they can not tell. Justice, and only justice, shall 
always be our motto.

And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The Nation has been 
deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge 
of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an 
instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of 
right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out 
of God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the 
judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of 
politics but a task which shall search us through and through, whether 
we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether 
we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure 
heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of 
action.

This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, 
not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait 
upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to 
say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares 
fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all 
forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, 
if they will but counsel and sustain me!

Woodrow Wilson
Second Inaugural Address
Monday, March 5, 1917

My Fellow Citizens:

THE four years which have elapsed since last I stood in this place have 
been crowded with counsel and action of the most vital interest and 
consequence. Perhaps no equal period in our history has been so 
fruitful of important reforms in our economic and industrial life or so 
full of significant changes in the spirit and purpose of our political 
action. We have sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order, 
correct the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial life, liberate 
and quicken the processes of our national genius and energy, and lift 
our politics to a broader view of the people's essential interests.

It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I 
shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself and will be of 
increasing influence as the years go by. This is not the time for 
retrospect. It is time rather to speak our thoughts and purposes 
concerning the present and the immediate future.

Although we have centered counsel and action with such unusual 
concentration and success upon the great problems of domestic 
legislation to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, other 
matters have more and more forced themselves upon our attention - 
matters lying outside our own life as a nation and over which we had no 
control, but which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn 
us more and more irresistibly into their own current and influence.

It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the life of 
the whole world. They have shaken men everywhere with a passion and an 
apprehension they never knew before. It has been hard to preserve calm 
counsel while the thought of our own people swayed this way and that 
under their influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan people. We 
are of the blood of all the nations that are at war. The currents of 
our thoughts as well as the currents of our trade run quick at all 
seasons back and forth between us and them. The war inevitably set its 
mark from the first alike upon our minds, our industries, our commerce, 
our politics and our social action. To be indifferent to it, or 
independent of it, was out of the question.

And yet all the while we have been conscious that we were not part of 
it. In that consciousness, despite many divisions, we have drawn closer 
together. We have been deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have not 
wished to wrong or injure in return; have retained throughout the 
consciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an interest 
that transcended the immediate issues of the war itself.

As some of the injuries done us have become intolerable we have still 
been clear that we wished nothing for ourselves that we were not ready 
to demand for all mankind - fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live 
and to be at ease against organized wrong.

It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have grown more and 
more aware, more and more certain that the part we wished to play was 
the part of those who mean to vindicate and fortify peace. We have been 
obliged to arm ourselves to make good our claim to a certain minimum of 
right and of freedom of action. We stand firm in armed neutrality since 
it seems that in no other way we can demonstrate what it is we insist 
upon and cannot forget. We may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not 
by our own purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of our rights 
as we see them and a more immediate association with the great struggle 
itself. But nothing will alter our thought or our purpose. They are too 
clear to be obscured. They are too deeply rooted in the principles of 
our national life to be altered. We desire neither conquest nor 
advantage. We wish nothing that can be had only at the cost of another 
people. We always professed unselfish purpose and we covet the 
opportunity to prove our professions are sincere.

There are many things still to be done at home, to clarify our own 
politics and add new vitality to the industrial processes of our own 
life, and we shall do them as time and opportunity serve, but we 
realize that the greatest things that remain to be done must be done 
with the whole world for stage and in cooperation with the wide and 
universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for 
those things.

We are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the thirty months of 
vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens 
of the world. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a 
nation are involved whether we would have it so or not.

And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We shall be the 
more American if we but remain true to the principles in which we have 
been bred. They are not the principles of a province or of a single 
continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the 
principles of a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the things we 
shall stand for, whether in war or in peace:

That all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and 
in the political stability of free peoples, and equally responsible for 
their maintenance; that the essential principle of peace is the actual 
equality of nations in all matters of right or privilege; that peace 
cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of power; that 
governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the 
governed and that no other powers should be supported by the common 
thought, purpose or power of the family of nations; that the seas 
should be equally free and safe for the use of all peoples, under rules 
set up by common agreement and consent, and that, so far as 
practicable, they should be accessible to all upon equal terms; that 
national armaments shall be limited to the necessities of national 
order and domestic safety; that the community of interest and of power 
upon which peace must henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the 
duty of seeing to it that all influences proceeding from its own 
citizens meant to encourage or assist revolution in other states should 
be sternly and effectually suppressed and prevented.

I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow countrymen; they 
are your own part and parcel of your own thinking and your own motives 
in affairs. They spring up native amongst us. Upon this as a platform 
of purpose and of action we can stand together. And it is imperative 
that we should stand together. We are being forged into a new unity 
amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world. In their ardent 
heat we shall, in God's Providence, let us hope, be purged of faction 
and division, purified of the errant humors of party and of private 
interest, and shall stand forth in the days to come with a new dignity 
of national pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that the 
dedication is in his own heart, the high purpose of the nation in his 
own mind, ruler of his own will and desire.

I stand here and have taken the high and solemn oath to which you have 
been audience because the people of the United States have chosen me 
for this august delegation of power and have by their gracious judgment 
named me their leader in affairs.

I know now what the task means. I realize to the full the 
responsibility which it involves. I pray God I may be given the wisdom 
and the prudence to do my duty in the true spirit of this great people. 
I am their servant and can succeed only as they sustain and guide me by 
their confidence and their counsel. The thing I shall count upon, the 
thing without which neither counsel nor action will avail, is the unity 
of America - an America united in feeling, in purpose and in its vision 
of duty, of opportunity and of service.

We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the 
necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for 
the building up of private power.

United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to 
perform it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the 
great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your 
tolerance, your countenance and your united aid.

The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and 
we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to 
ourselves - to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels 
of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and 
justice and the right exalted.

