Jefferson said in those early days of simplicity which marked the beginnings of our government was that the best government consisted in as little governing as possible. And there is still a sense in which that is true.
It is still intolerable for the government to interfere with our individual activities except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order to free them. But I feel confident that if Jefferson were living in our day he would see what we see: that the individual is caught in a great confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let him alone is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the assistance of the individual.
It must come to his assistance to see that he gets fair play; that is all, but that is much. Without the watchful interference, the resolute interference, of the government, there can be no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the trusts.
Freedom to-day is something more than being let alone. The program of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely. To demonstrate to the people and to the government just how seriously he felt about the issue, Wilson announced his plans to revise the tariff law in front of a joint session of Congress—an action no President since the early s had taken.
The President's plan worked: Congress took immediate action and soon produced the Underwood Act, which reduced the tariff on all imported goods to nearly twenty-five percent.
The new legislation outright eliminated the tariff on many essentials such as clothing, sugar, wool, and steel. The Underwood Act also created a federal income tax, which had become legal with the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution only months before. After months of heated political fighting, and after much pressure from Wilson, the House and Senate both finally enacted the bill into law in Its passage was Wilson's first political victory as President and encouraged him to continue his New Freedom reforms.
With the Underwood Act successfully passed into law, Wilson then turned to reforming the national banking system—a battle that proved much more difficult. The federal banking system prior to Wilson's election was horribly inefficient, plagued with failures and near-collapses ever since its creation during the Civil War.
Ironically, the central bank had little real power over the nation's money, and had no means of effectively monitoring the country's financial system. Nearly everyone in both parties agreed that changes had to be made, but proposals for such changes were greatly disputed. One of the most promising proposals called for the establishment of a federal bank to control the nation's reserve money. Unlike the national banks of the past, though, this new central bank would be controlled by smaller banks throughout the country that would choose to hold their reserve funds in the national bank.
Many in both parties opposed this proposal. Some Democrats denounced the plan as too weak because the federal government had no clear roll in operating the national bank. Other Democrats thought the plan too strong because it seemed to only favor the growing plutocracy in America.
Populists and Midwest agrarians wanted the bank to be controlled directly by the people. Republicans, supported by the wealthy bankers and financiers, denounced the bank as socialistic. Wilson himself approved of the idea, and proposed that a board of overseers appointed by the President should govern the new bank. Saying he was robbed of the nomination, Roosevelt and his supporters walked out of the convention, forming the Progressive Party.
The Progressive Party held a nominating convention in Chicago in August. In , while running as the Progressive Party candidate for President, Theodore Roosevelt was the victim of an assassination attempt. At a campaign stop in Wisconsin, a gunman shot Roosevelt once with a revolver. His speech papers, folded in his breast pocket, slowed the bullet. Woodrow Wilson was a southerner who had served as president of Princeton University. He had earned an impressive record as a progressive leader in his two years as governor of New Jersey.
This plan advocated three reforms:. Wilson contended that if these three reforms passed, control by monopolies would end and freedom would be restored.
0コメント