To look at the politics of the day from the viewpoint of the laboring man is not to suggest that there is one view proper to him, another to the employer, another to the capitalist, another to the professional man, but merely that the life of the country as a whole may be looked at from various points of view and yet be viewed as a whole. The whole business of politics is to bring classes together, upon a platform of accommodation and common interest. In a political campaign the voters are called upon to choose between parties and leaders. Parties and platforms and candidates should be frankly put under examination to see what they will yield us by way of progress, and there are a great many questions which the working man may legitimately ask and press until he gets a definite answer. The predictions of the leader of the new party are as alarming as the predictions of the various stand-patters. He declares that he is not troubled by the fact that a very large amount of money is taken out of the pockets of the general tax payer and put into the pockets of particular classes of protected manufacturers, but that his concern is that so little of this money gets into the pockets of the laboring man, and so large a proportion of it into the pockets of the employer. I have searched his program very thoroughly for an indication of what he expects to do in order to see to it that a larger proportion of this prize money gets into the pay envelope, and I have found only one suggestion. There is a plank in the program which speaks of establishing a minimum or a living wage for women workers, and I suppose that we may assume that the principal is not in the long run meant to be confined in its application to women only. Perhaps we are justified in assuming that the third party looks forward to the general establishment, by law, of a minimum wage. It is very likely, I take it for granted, that if a minimum wage were established by law, the great majority of employers would take occasion to bring their wage scale as nearly as might be down to the level of that minimum, and it would be very awkward for the working man to resist that process successfully, because it would be dangerous to strike against the authority of the federal government. Moreover, most of his employers, at any rate practically all of the most powerful of them, would be wards and protégés of that very government which is the master of us all, for no part of this program can be discussed intelligently without remembering that monopoly as handled by it is not to be prevented, but accepted and regulated. When you have thought the whole thing out, therefore, you will find that the program of the new party legalizes monopoly and of necessity subordinates working men to them, and to the plans made by the government both with regard to employment and with regard to wages. Take the thing as a whole and it looks strangely like economic mastery over the very lives and fortunes of those who do the daily work of the nation, and all this under the overwhelming power and sovereignty of the national government. What most of us are fighting for is to break up this very partnership between big business and the government.

Biography:

Like Roosevelt before him, Woodrow Wilson regarded himself as the personal representative of the people. "No one but the President," he said, "seems to be expected ... to look out for the general interests of the country." He developed a program of progressive reform and asserted international leadership in building a new world order. In 1917 he proclaimed American entrance into World War I a crusade to make the world "safe for democracy."

Wilson had seen the frightfulness of war. He was born in Virginia in 1856, the son of a Presbyterian minister who during the Civil War was a pastor in Augusta, Georgia, and during Reconstruction a professor in the charred city of Columbia, South Carolina.

After graduation from Princeton (then the College of New Jersey) and the University of Virginia Law School, Wilson earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and entered upon an academic career. In 1885 he married Ellen Louise Axson.

Wilson advanced rapidly as a conservative young professor of political science and became president of Princeton in 1902.

His growing national reputation led some conservative Democrats to consider him Presidential timber. First they persuaded him to run for Governor of New Jersey in 1910. In the campaign he asserted his independence of the conservatives and of the machine that had nominated him, endorsing a progressive platform, which he pursued as governor.

He was nominated for President at the 1912 Democratic Convention and campaigned on a program called the New Freedom, which stressed individualism and states' rights. In the three-way election he received only 42 percent of the popular vote but an overwhelming electoral vote.

Wilson maneuvered through Congress three major pieces of legislation. The first was a lower tariff, the Underwood Act; attached to the measure was a graduated Federal income tax. The passage of the Federal Reserve Act provided the Nation with the more elastic money supply it badly needed. In 1914 antitrust legislation established a Federal Trade Commission to prohibit unfair business practices.

Another burst of legislation followed in 1916. One new law prohibited child labor; another limited railroad workers to an eight-hour day. By virtue of this legislation and the slogan "he kept us out of war," Wilson narrowly won re-election.

But after the election Wilson concluded that America could not remain neutral in the World War. On April 2,1917, he asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany.

Massive American effort slowly tipped the balance in favor of the Allies. Wilson went before Congress in January 1918, to enunciate American war aims--the Fourteen Points, the last of which would establish "A general association of nations...affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike."

After the Germans signed the Armistice in November 1918, Wilson went to Paris to try to build an enduring peace. He later presented to the Senate the Versailles Treaty, containing the Covenant of the League of Nations, and asked, "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?"

But the election of 1918 had shifted the balance in Congress to the Republicans. By seven votes the Versailles Treaty failed in the Senate.

The President, against the warnings of his doctors, had made a national tour to mobilize public sentiment for the treaty. Exhausted, he suffered a stroke and nearly died. Tenderly nursed by his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt, he lived until 1924.