The Purpose of Government
On Tuesday, March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson delivered his first inaugural address. The day “dawned cloudy,” Irwin Hoover recalled, “but the weather cleared and by mid-morning it was warm and comfortable.”
The address contained themes expected of a progressive figure. In one campaign speech, Wilson reminded the nation that “life comes from the soil,” that the American people, “just, virtuous, and hopeful,” would emerge “from the silent bosom of the earth” and purify government from “the hands of special interests” and “select classes.”
Wilson expanded on this thinking in his inaugural. “Our life contains every great thing, and contains it in rich abundance,” he said. But America had yet to stop “thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken.” Government, Wilson said, had for too long “been made use of for private and selfish purposes.”
It had, in sum, “forgotten the people.” It was time that government returned to “the service of humanity,” to “safeguarding the health of the nation,” to aspiring toward justice. “This is no sentimental duty,” Wilson concluded. “The firm basis of government is justice.”
The New York Times reported that no president “ever sounded a higher or clearer note of aspiration and of idealism.” The address, the Woman’s Journal wrote, “sounded a high moral note,” although it neglected the issue of equal suffrage.
To Wilson, as for the founders, government is an extension of the people, a machine created by them for their ultimate benefit. The Virginia Constitution of 1776 declared that “government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit.” Maryland stated that “all government of right originates from the people, is founded in compact only, and [is] instituted solely for the good of the whole.”
Massachusetts in 1780 put it best: “The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government is to secure the existence of the body politic, to protect it, and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying in safety and tranquility their natural rights, and the blessings of life.”
To Boston minister Abraham Williams in 1762, “the nature and end of government is not so mysterious” then: It is an institution “designed for good to the people.”
At its core, the state is “a moral person, having an interest and will of its own,” Samuel Adams admitted. Yet this interest and will, framed as nature intended, must rise above private or group interests. They cannot be anything other than the interest of the welfare of the people and the will to see to its protection and betterment.
By 1913, Wilson’s notion that government is a machine created for the people’s benefit was “progressive.” In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt defined what this word, so ominous to some, meant: “Our aim is to secure the real and not the nominal rule of the people,” TR said. “We propose to do away with whatever in our government tends to secure privilege, and to the great sinister special interests, the rampart from behind which they can beat back the forces that strive for social and industrial justice, and frustrate the will of the people.”
To TR and Wilson, American government had for too long been a passive thing, deaf to the “groans and agony,” “the solemn, moving undertone… coming up out of the mines and factories,” a soulless machine “lacking social sympathy.” The eloquent though withered words of the founding parchments didn’t seem to translate into reality.
Americans, Wilson concluded, were in 1913 “stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument [not of good, but] of evil.”
In 1966, A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr., proposed the Freedom Budget, an ambitious 10-year plan to combat poverty in America. Beyond a “political necessity,” King wrote, “It is a moral commitment to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded.”
In the decades that followed, America spent $16 trillion on three controversial wars while poverty rose, and infrastructure declined. America’s focus away from its purpose (the people), King predicted, echoing Wilson, could only end in “spiritual death.” Time has proven him unnervingly right.