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Welcome to U.S. history!
Woodrow Wilson's First Inaugural Address:
| 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! Back to
Woodrow Wilson
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Executive Oath of Office
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of
President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and
defend the Constitution of the United States."
United States Constitution, Article II,
Section 1, Clause 8
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Monroe, 6John Quincy Adams, 7Andrew Jackson, 8Martin
Van Buren,9William H Harrison,10John Tyler,11James K
Polk, 12Zachary Taylor, 13Millard Fillmore,14Franklin
Pierce,15James Buchanan,16Abraham Lincoln, 17Andrew
Johnson, 18Ulysses S Grant,19Rutherford B Hayes, 20James A Garfield, 21Chester
A. Arthur, 22Grover
Cleveland,23Benjamin Harrison, 24Grover Cleveland, 25William
McKinley,26Theodore Roosevelt, 27William H. Taft,28Woodrow Wilson, 29Warren
G. Harding,30Calvin Coolidge,31Herbert Hoover,32Franklin
D Roosevelt,33Harry S.
Truman, 34Dwight D Eisenhower,35John F Kennedy, 36Lyndon
B Johnson, 37RichardN. Nixon, 38Gerald R Ford, 39James E
Carter,40Ronald
W. Reagan, 41George
HerbertW. Bush, 42Bill Clinton,
43George Walker Bush 44
Barack H. Obama last updated
07/14/09
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