Masters level assignment 510

EXPERTISE, DISCRETION , AND DEFINITE L AW : PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN WOODROW WILSON’S

PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN SPEECHES OF 1912

Brian J. Cook Clark University

ABSTRACT

The presidential election of 1912 was the defining political contest of the Progressive Era. Woodrow Wilson’s speeches from that campaign produced a remarkable synthesis of political thought and evocative rhetoric. A close look at several key speeches shows that Wilson developed further his thinking about the place and purposes of public administration in a progressive democracy. Careful and precise law as a constraint on the power of expertise and on the reach of administrative discretion was at the heart of Wilson’s thinking. Students of public administration should consider what ideas Wilson the politician offers that could help advance current endeavors to refine and enrich the theory and practice of public administration in a liberal-democratic regime.

Scholarly scrutiny of Woodrow Wilson’s political thought has grown substantially in the past three decades, following in the wake of the serial publication of the complete Wilson papers beginning in 1966. Wilson’s ideas about public administration have received substantial attention in this regard. One important component of published findings is that Wilson continued to probe the subject even after publication of “The Study of Administration.” Disagreement prevails, however, on whether Wilson extended his ideas or departed from the path-breaking essay, and on whether further development, in Wilson’s ideas, have any current relevance to public administration theory and practice. The perspective that appears dominant in the literature is that Wilson’s thinking was rather muddled, and not very original (e.g., Miewald, 1984; Stillman, 1973). Furthermore, some scholars not only question attribution of the now discredited politics-administration dichotomy to Wilson, but also his more general influence on administrative theory and practice (e.g., Martin, 1988; Van Riper, 1984; but see Thorsen, 1988).

Yet the scholarship on Wilson’s ideas about public administration remains incomplete. It has focused almost exclusively on Wilson’s views about

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administration fashioned and articulated during his academic and literary Scholars appear to have assumed that in political life Wilson found little inclination or opportunity to give the matter careful thought (see Thorsen, 1988). I contend, however, that active pursuit of elective office reinvigorated and stretched Wilson’s thinking about administration. The impetus was the challenge he faced, as he might have portrayed it, of interpreting and giving persuasive voice to a mass electorate’s unarticulated inclinations regarding the place of administration in progressive democratic governance.

Previously I examined Wilson’s early political rhetoric (Cook, 1998). I found recurring arguments and important insights about the structure and purposes of administration in a modern democracy reflecting further development in Wilson’s political thought, especially in the context of his efforts to align himself with the cause of progressive reform. I now turn my attention to Wilson’s 1912 campaign for the presidency. A focus on Wilson’s 1912 political rhetoric speaks directly to questions about the meaning and importance of the Progressive Era for public administration today in a number of ways. First, the 1912 election, including Wilson’s speeches, was a crucial step in determining the meaning of progressivism then, and what it means to us now. Second, in several of his most important 1912 speeches, Wilson articulated particular notions about the proper role of public administration in a liberal-democratic regime. Third, the arguments Wilson espoused continued the evolution of his ideas in ways that current scholars ought to consider as they endeavor to refine and enrich public administration theory and practice.

PROGRESSIVISM AND THE 1912 ELECTION

Historians have debated extensively whether progressivism actually ever amounted to a coherent and sustained political movement, and what, whether coherent or not, one might take to be the meaning of progressive reform. Broderick (1989), in his detailed study of the 1912 election, characterized progressivism as a “complex, multi-faceted movement,” which “searched out ways to deal with the new industrial America that a nationwide economy . . . hadcreated under a Constitution written for a remote agrarian age” (p. 1). Furthermore the “lines of battle” among business, labor, social justice advocates, political machines, and electoral reformers that emerged in the wake of progressivism’s surge “were never clearly drawn” (p. 4).

In his sweeping review of progressive era historiography, Rodgers (1982) reported helpfully that the “progressive” political label “came into vogue during the 1910 electoral campaigns. The phrase ‘progressive movement’ was a product of 1912. But the modern label ‘progressivism,’ launched in 1912 as an antonym to toryism and socialism, was never a common term of self- identification, and did not come into widespread use until picked up, sometime after the fact, by journalists and historians” (p. 127, note 1). Rodgers sifted out from the work of historians covering a wide spectrum of

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methods, styles, and ideological perspectives the conclusion that “those who called themselves progressives did not share a common creed or a string of common values” (p. 123). Instead, they “possessed an ability to draw on three distinct clusters of ideas—three distinct social languages—to articulate their discontents.” Rodgers labeled these clusters antimonopolism, social cohesion, and social efficiency. Again, Rodgers stressed that the three idea sets “did not add up to a coherent ideology we can call ‘progressivism,’” but they all tended to focus “discontent on arbitrary, unregulated individual power” (p. 123).

More recently, from a political science perspective, Milkis (1999) attempted to distill what progressives, past and present, have stood for. In the early 20th century, progressives were committed to “strengthening the national government to prepare the country to address the growing complexity and diversity of political life in the United States” (p. 5). More specifically, echoing Rodgers’s trilogy of idea sets, Milkis pointed to three elements, discernable to the present day, that stand at the core of progressivism: “a concern with the power of business, a commitment to ‘pure democracy,’ and the dedication to new rights as a bulwark against the uncertainties and injustices of the marketplace” (p. 9). Milkis labeled “[m]ost significant” the progressive effort “to dissolve the concentration of wealth, specifically the power of giant trusts, which, according to reformers, constituted uncontrolled and irresponsible units of power in American society” (p. 6). Closely tied to this was the progressive push “championing governmentof the People directly by the People,” to be accomplished by “strengthening the federal government’s authority to regulate the society and economy.” The road to this result involved “hitching the will of the people to…new national administrative power” (p. 7; also see Skowronek, 1982). The divergence of views on how exactly to accomplish this formed the centerpiece of the electoral battles of 1912.

Milkis drew his crystallization of progressive principles primarily from the platform and rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) Party. The “robust debate [the Progressive Party] aroused about the future course of constitutional government is what defines the 1912 election as a critical episode in American political development” (1999, p. 11). More generally, the 1912 election “was more critical than the 1896 contest in sanctioning the major transformation of the ideas, institutions, and policies that shaped political life in the United States at the turn of the century” (p. 3). Milkis and Tichenor (1993) have also called the 1912 election the “climactic battle of the Progressive era” (p. 2).

Other scholars have similarly endorsed the centrality of 1912. Link (1954) contended that the “election of 1912 marked the culmination of more than twenty years of popular revolt against a state of affairs that seemed to guarantee perpetual political and economic control to the privileged few in state, and nation” (p. 1). He further discerned far-reaching change and dramatic political significance in the 1912 election outcome. “What was the

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meaning of Wilson’s election, what did it signify for the future of the country? Certainly it was as much a political revolution as Jefferson’s election had been.” Link’s Jefferson reference meant in part a sectional shift in power back to the South because of Wilson’s roots in the region. More important, however, was that whatever the weaknesses in Wilson’s New Freedom as a progressive program, Wilson was in many ways a true progressive political leader because he “had made no binding commitments to any important economic interests. He would be embarrassed by no important political bargains. Few presidents have entered office so completely free to serve the general interest” (p. 24).

Finally, Broderick (1989) contended that “the lines of argument developed in 1912 had staying power for two full generations; not until the 1970s was there a discernible reversal of the thrust.” More pointedly, “the campaign of 1912 offered the moment of decision on the future of progressivism” (p. 5). Indeed, as Rodgers pointed out, the 1912 election was itself central to developing whatever coherent sense we have of the meaning of progressivism. The election of 1912 is, therefore, a worthy object for close examination to understand the development of progressivism and its impact in the present on political, and administrative, theory and practice. Because Woodrow Wilson’s speeches were a defining component of the 1912 election, they deserve careful assessment for the ideas and insights they hold.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN WOODROW WILSON’S 1912 POLITICAL RHETORIC

In the four months before he had secured the Democratic Party nomination on July 2, 1912, Wilson delivered approximately 30 speeches, making few if any direct references to administration. He did articulate several themes indirectly related to the relationship between public administration and democratic governance. Carried forward from speeches of the previous two years, these themes found their way into later speeches of greater significance for understanding Wilson’s evolving ideas about administration. I first examine some of these primary and nomination campaign speeches briefly, and then provide a more extensive description and assessment of the Wilson speeches from the 1912 general election campaign.

The Primary and Nomination Campaign

Two characteristics of Wilson’s preconvention speeches stand out. First, the speeches are filled with imagery and pronouncements that leave no doubt about Wilson’s intention to cement his progressive credentials. Second, Wilson keyed on several issues and themes—the tariff, corporate trusts, monopoly, private control of government, and referendum and recall—that he carried forward from the many speeches delivered during the initial phase of

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his active political life. As with that prior set of speeches, it was in his attention to the problems of the trusts and monopoly that Wilson explored themes most relevant to questions about the proper role of public administration in democratic governance. These themes concerned the public responsibility of officials in both public and private organizations, government structure, and the central importance of public law. They formed the foundation for Wilson’s specific treatment of public administration in his New Freedom speeches for the 1912 general election campaign.

Wilson’s rhetoric brandishing his progressive credentials was remarkably consistent with key characteristics of progressivism identified by scholars. For example, in a campaign address delivered in Atlanta on April 17, 1912, Wilson praised “the great Virginia Declaration of Rights” (Link, 1977, p. 330). He stressed, “One of the first principles laid down there is that all magistrates, all elected officers, are trustees of the people, at all times responsible to them” (p. 330). Articulating even more directly the progressive doctrine of pure democracy in a April 30, 1912 Baltimore campaign address, Wilson attacked the leaders of the Republican Party for accepting the thesis of Alexander Hamilton that:

the only safe guides in public policies are those persons who have the largest material stake in the prosperity of the country. They believe in a government by trustees, and they do not trust the judgment of the people with regard to great and complicated affairs.…They believe in government for the people, but they do not believe in government by the people. (1977, p. 374)

Wilson also articulated prominently the progressive assault on special privileges, especially of business, and tapped into the discontent about arbitrary, unregulated power. During after-dinner remarks Wilson offered on February 19, 1912 to the Sussex Society of New Jersey, for example, he declared:

therefore it [is] important that there should be a system of laws by which the gates of opportunity should always remain open.…No scruple of delicacy ought to stand in the way. The key of the gates has got to be found, no matter if some “special interest” should be shy about a personal search. (Link, 1977, p. 181)

In a March 7, 1912 address to the General Assembly of Maryland, Wilson quoted Thomas Jefferson to the effect that “there must be ‘equal opportunities for all and special privileges for none’” (1977, p. 181). Wilson pointed out, however, that:

special privilege has sprung up in this country. Special privilege will spring up in any country, but what created our present state of mind is that special privilege does not merely exist, but is organized, and we are not certain that the Government is sufficiently organized against it. (p. 228)

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In the Atlanta speech in April, Wilson contended that “the business of this country is being dominated by small bodies of selfish men, and we have now to contrive thoughtful policy and to contrive a government which will emancipate this country from private control, and put it back into the hands of the people” (p. 342).

Wilson’s most elaborate and studious treatment of these various and interconnecting themes came in a February 24, 1912 political address to the Woodrow Wilson Club in Nashville. This was in many respects his first major speech of the 1912 campaign. Wilson wove together several themes to showcase his progressivism while also trying out a set of arguments that he would build on in the campaign ahead. Consistent with his Sussex Society remarks, Wilson also used several rhetorical devices in the speech— references to search, looking inside, turning upside down—that he would later elaborate on and employ in his portrayals of public administration’s proper scope and function in a progressive democracy.

Wilson argued, for example, that “with the necessary legislation, we can say that a corporation, so long as it acts within its charter, or is within the limits of the law, is something we won’t look inside of…, and into the details of whose organization we won’t pry” (Link, 1977, p. 197). Corporate inviolability no longer holds, however, “the minute somebody inside begins to use it for purposes he has no right to use it for; then we are going to turn it inside out and see who is inside.” The responsibility principle then would be “that with regard to breaches of the law we will deal not with corporations but with individuals.” A particular administrative structure would then follow.

We can oblige every corporation to file with the proper officer of the law a sworn analysis of the way its business is done.…Then when a wrong is committed we will turn to the analysis and find the [corporate] officer who…ordered that particular thing done, and we will indict him not as an officer of the corporation but as an individual who used that corporation for something that was illegal. (p. 198)

The needs and aims of this approach were far-reaching. “[Y]ou have got to disentangle the puzzle; you have got to find where the lines of personal responsibility interlace…for the purpose of saving the country and saving its business” (p. 199).

The General Election Campaign

Roughly simultaneous with his ascension to the presidency of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson had emerged as one of the leading public speakers in the nation, highly sought after across the country. Wilson consistently delivered speeches notable for their intellectualism, illumination, gentle and sometimes deprecating humor, and erudition. On occasion, a Wilson speech or public lecture reached a deeper level of insight. But something even more profound happened in the fall of 1912. Pursuing the

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highest elective office, and facing a highly charged issue agenda before a nationwide constituency, Wilson increased the quantity, intensity, and depth of his public speech dramatically.

Across the four months between his July nomination and election day on November 4, 1912, Wilson delivered 66 major speeches, addresses, talks, and formal public remarks. This was a monthly rate five times the notable rhetorical effort of his first three years in politics (see Cook, 1998). Wilson “also delivered about one hundred shorter speeches,” including “remarks from the rear platform of his special [railroad] car” used for the cross-country swings in his campaign (Link, 1978, p. viii). It is the major campaign speeches, however, that the editors label “Wilson’s greatest forensic achievement (indeed, we think that they are among the greatest speeches of modern history)” (Link, 1978, p. ix). The editors stress that “while Wilson usually highlighted the same themes, he rarely ever developed them in the same way, and each speech contains unique passages that shed new light.” And, as others have recounted, the editors point out that Wilson delivered all his speeches, even the most important, extemporaneously, using at most “one- page outlines to remind himself of the points he wanted to develop.”

By my count, it is in ten of his major speeches especially (a little more than fifteen percent), that Wilson articulated themes and ideas touching directly on questions about the proper foundation, function, and overhead structure of administration for a democratic polity. In one or two instances, this was the primary theme of the speech. In most instances, however, Wilson’s treatment of ideas about administration and democratic governance was woven into a tapestry of themes that he developed and refined as the campaign progressed. The proportion of Wilson’s speeches in which administration is a subject may seem relatively meager. Yet his ability to sustain at all the attention of general public audiences, while speaking on a subject that today most citizens would at best think tedious and obscure, must be regarded as a triumphant synthesis of the public intellectual and political orator.

Again, the nucleus of Wilson’s treatment of administration in his 1912 campaign speeches was the problem of monopolies and large corporate trusts. The Sherman Act, aimed at business “combinations” in restraint of trade, was already on the books, having been passed in 1890. Supreme Court decisions had weakened the scope and impact of the law considerably, however. Also, the extent of the law’s influence was at the mercy of the discretion of the Attorney General, and therefore the President of the United States, to decide how frequently and with how much vigor to pursue prosecutions under the statute.

In his four years as president, William Howard Taft had pursued about 90 prosecutions of antitrust violations under the Sherman Act, in comparison with 45 under Theodore Roosevelt in seven and one-half years (Broderick, 1989). Although a candidate in 1912, Taft was on the sidelines, leaving Roosevelt to define the terms of the debate. Rejecting judicial regulation and

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enforcement, Roosevelt committed himself “to administrative remedies for the trust problem, that is, supervision of large-scale corporate operations by expert bodies that drew their authority from the executive” (p. 35). Furthermore, Roosevelt “favored expanded powers for the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Bureau of Corporations rather than fruitless efforts to prohibit combinations.…Extending his idea of administrative agencies as regulators of corporate capitalism, he called for a nonpolitical expert tariff commission” (p. 38).

The scholarly consensus on the 1912 Roosevelt-Wilson debate over monopolies, trusts, and government regulation is that Roosevelt set the agenda with his commission proposals and Wilson had to react. Furthermore, response was muddled until Louis Brandeis arrived on the scene late in the summer of 1912 to provide Wilson with a more coherent framework— regulating competition—for articulating an alternative to Roosevelt’s regulated monopoly scheme. In “contrast to his chief opponent, Wilson had no…well-defined program or philosophy when the campaign began” (Link, 1954, p. 20). Wilson:

seemed to be searching for an issue…when he met Louis D. Brandeis for the first time.… And it was Brandeis who clarified Wilson’s thought and led him to believe the most vital question confronting the American people was preservation of economic freedom in the United States. (p. 21)

Stated more bluntly, “Wilson bought Brandeis’s position whole hog, filling a gap for which Wilson’s previous experience offered scant preparation” (Broderick, 1989, p. 134).

It would be a mistake to conclude on the basis of the prevailing assessment that Wilson had given little thought to the trust problem or that he had no ideas of his own that he could bring to bear on the issue. During the primary campaign Wilson had articulated relatively clearly the conceptual approach he would take in addressing the problem of monopolies and corporate trusts. He had developed his ideas into a relatively coherent framework over the preceding three years, grounded in notions of fixing personal responsibility through simple, clear, and definite law. The major threats to democratic government and good administration, Wilson had come to conclude, were complex and convoluted statutes and organizational structures that obscured the accountability of officials, public and private. This in turn allowed special interests to insinuate themselves into government and gain control of it for their selfish ends.

Furthermore, Wilson’s attention to the challenges modern business practices posed for American society was rooted in his long-standing recognition that the emergence of an industrial society required adjustments in the designs and practices of democratic government, especially administration. He observed in 1887 that the modern democratic state “in some way…must make itself master of masterful corporations” (Wilson,

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1941, p. 485). A quarter-century later, at a February 19, 1912, address to the Universal Peace Union in Philadelphia he stated, “Our life is complex and our morals are simple. What we must do is to bring up our moral bookkeeping to the complexity of business” (Link, 1977, p. 181). Through his focus on two intertwined aspects of Roosevelt’s plan for regulating monopoly—expertise and discretion—Wilson brought to bear on the trusts and monopolies question ideas and arguments he had developed and modified at several points over the preceding years. He broadened and extended them further in 1912.

The Problem of Administrative Expertise

Wilson launched his general election foray into the thick of the debate about business regulation in his Labor Day speech delivered at Buffalo, New York. Aiming directly at Roosevelt’s ideas for regulating monopolies through an expert commission, Wilson made a series of pointed attacks. The Bull Moose Party platform, “proposes that [monopolies] shall be adopted and regulated, and that looks to me like a consummation of the partnership between monopoly and government, because once the government regulates the monopoly, then monopoly will have to see to it that it regulates the government” (Link, 1978, p. 73).

Showing the influence of Brandeis, Wilson contrasted the position of the Democratic Party, which was not to regulate monopoly, but to “regulate competition.” Anticipating the New Freedom, Wilson announced that:

ours is a program of liberty and theirs is a program of regulation. Ours is a program by which we can say we know the wrongs that have been committed and we can stop those wrongs, and we are not going to adopt into the governmental family the men who have done the wrongs and license them to do the whole business of the country. (p. 75)

Already having warned that Roosevelt’s scheme would mean regulation in the hands of “experts in destructive competition” (p. 74), Wilson then issued a more general condemnation:

What I fear, therefore, is a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job? Because if we don’t understand the job, then we are not a free people. (p. 78)

In The Study of AdministrationWilson had referred to administration as a developing science, and to the need for the United States to improve its administrative expertise to serve popular government. But administration could not produce or preserve liberty, Wilson had insisted. That was the province of constitutions and public law, which were separate, distinct, and superior to administration. Although separate and distinct, administration and

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policy, or law, were not disconnected. The study and practice of administration could inform constitutional and public law about such large questions as “the best principle for the distribution of authority” (Wilson, 1941, p. 497), and “the proper relations between public opinion and administration” (p. 498). Thus, administration was a “practical science” (p. 481). Although it was necessary “to rescue executive methods from the confusion and costliness of empirical experiment and set them upon foundations laid deep in stable principle” (p. 494), that effort must ultimately come from comparative study of methods, and practical experience. “Doctrinaire devices must be postponed to tested practices. Arrangements…sanctioned by conclusive experience…must be preferred without hesitation to theoretical perfection” (p. 504).

Wilson continued to explore this relationship between practical experience and expert knowledge in politics and administration over the subsequent decades. In his lectures on administration, he argued that:

Administration, therefore,sees government in contact with the people. It rests its whole form along the line which is drawn in each State between InterferenceandLaissez faire. It thus touches, directly or indirectly, the whole practical side of social endeavor.Its Questions are questions of adjustment, the adjustment of means to ends, not only, but of governmental functionto historical conditions, to liberty. (Link, 1969, p. 116)

In later notes on constitutional government, Wilson saw policy making as combining “the knowledge of experts and the more subtle inferences of special observation and experience” (quoted in Thorsen, 1988, p. 230).

In his presidential address to the American Political Science Association in December 1910,The Law and the Facts, Wilson characterized law as “obedient to experience.” He defined “the science of politics” as “the accurate and detailed observation of these processes by which the lessons of experience are brought into the field of consciousness, transmuted into active purposes, put under the scrutiny of discussion, sifted, and at last given determinate form in law” (Link, 1976, p. 264). He insisted that there were “no experts in human relationships,” and he urged his audience “not to classify men too symmetrically; you must not gaze dispassionately upon them with scientific eye” (p. 270). Drawing the speech to a close, he urged his audience to study people “not as congeries of interests,…life. In such an atmosphere of thought and association even corporations may seem instrumentalities, not objects themselves, and the means may presently appear whereby they may be made the servants, not the masters, of the people” (pp. 271-272).

Wilson continued his sharper assault on theoreticians and scientific experts in positions of governmental authority in a Sioux City, Iowa speech on September 17, 1912. He warned “the people of this country to beware of commissions of experts” (Link, 1978, p. 151). Experts “ don’t see anything except what is under their microscope, under their eye. They don’t even

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perceive what is under their nose. And an expert feels honor bound to confine himself to the particular question which you have asked” (p. 151). Taking a final swipe, Wilson declared that “I don’t want a lot of smug experts to sit down behind closed doors in Washington and play providence to me. I want to have a voice in this mundane providence that concerns our affairs” (p. 154).

Wilson’s attack on expertise in administration during the 1912 election might be dismissed as election-inspired populism. Yet the evidence of Wilson’s long-term attention to the problem of formal versus informal knowledge suggests that there were more stable principles at the heart of Wilson’s rhetoric on this score. Wilson’s position thus may be surprising to many students of public administration today, who are steeped in the theory and practice of an administrative edifice in which technical and issue-specific knowledge and expertise are the foundations of administration’s legitimate public authority and practical political power. To be sure, Wilson did not completely deny a role for expertise. Instead, he attacked the vesting of too much importance, and unaccountable authority and power, in administrative expertise. His underlying concern was thus two-fold. First, he was obviously concerned that the experts who would hold seats on Roosevelt’s commission to regulate monopoly would come from the very monopolies the commission was supposed to regulate. His second and more important concern was that the combination of scientific theory and technical expertise not be accepted as the appropriate foundation for administrative legitimacy, nor, even more importantly, as the purpose of public administration in a liberal-democratic regime.

Wilson saw good public law and good public administration as dependent on and built up from practical experience, not formal expertise and theoretical perfection. More important, law and administration were meant to be in the service of popular rule, and to aid in the preservation and enhancement of It through experience that political leaders and public administrators would find the best ways to fashion and administer law for these purposes. Wilson saw public law and public administration, rightly understood, as key elements in his call “to make conquest of anew freedom[italics added] for America” (Link, 1978, p. 327).

Restraining Administrative Discretion with Definite Law

Wilson’s more extensively developed and evocative treatment of public administration in his 1912 speeches centered on the relationship between law and administrative discretion. In the 1887 essay he observed that “large powers and unhampered discretion” were at the heart of responsible administration (Wilson, 1941, p. 497). He appears subsequently to have abandoned that formulation, however, calling instead for limits on discretion through definite law. Wilson began to articulate this new formulation while holding what most historians regard as relatively conservative political beliefs

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(but see Thorsen, 1988). He maintained and further elaborated it, however, even with his increasing embrace of progressive ideals.

In the 1912 campaign, Wilson first sounded the alarm about executive discretion inadequately delimited by law in a New York Press Club address on September 9. He attacked the Progressive Party’s commission proposal as preserving monopoly power at the expense of free competition, pointing out that:

if you will read the [party’s] plank in its candid statement . . . youwill find that it rejects regulation by law and proposes a commission which shall have the discretion itself to undertake what the plank calls “constructive regulation.” It shall make its rules as it goes along. (Link, 1978, p. 123)

In a speech delivered in Scranton, Pennsylvania on September 23, Wilson first used imagery to articulate more concretely the conception from his lectures on administration that in a liberal-democratic regime public administration stands at the very point where the public and private spheres intersect, institutionalizing what was “interference,” and what was “laissez faire.” Wilson evoked Glasgow, Scotland, “one of the model cities of the world,” and pointed out that citizens and officials there “made up their minds that the entries, the hallways, of great tenements are public streets.” This decision led to a particular positioning of administration in the local polity.

[T]he policeman goes up the stairway and patrols the corridors. The lighting department of the city sees to it that the corridors are abundantly lighted, and the staircases. And the city does not deceive itself into supposing that the great building is a unit from which the police are to keep out and the city authority to be excluded, but it says, ‘These are the highways of human movement, and wherever light is needed, wherever order is needed, there we will carry the authority of the city. (Link, 1978, p. 223)

Wilson then drew a parallel with “modern industrial enterprise,” arguing that it:

is just as much a public business as a great tenement house is a public highway. When you offer the securities of a great corporation to anybody who wishes to purchase them, you must open that corporation to the inspection of everybody who wants to purchase. There must…be lights along the corridor; there must be police patrolling the openings; there must be inspection wherever it is known that men may be deceived with regard to the contents of the premises.” (Link, 1978, p. 23)

Wilson concluded the imagery by declaring, “I want to light and patrol the corridors of these great organizations in order to see that nobody who tries to traverse them is waylaid and maltreated” (Link, 1978, p. 226).

Wilson also repeated in the Scranton speech his warning of September 9 that Progressive Party leaders were promoting unbridled administrative

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discretion in their proposals for how to treat monopolies. “These gentlemen say that the commission, which they wish to set up should not be bound too much by laws, but they should be allowed to indulge in what they call constructive regulation, which amounts to [federal] administration [of the monopolies]” (Link, 1978, p. 226). Yet Wilson never synthesized in this speech his concept of administration as defining the line between interference and laissez faire with his warning about the need to anchor administration strongly in law. On September 25 in New Haven, Connecticut and September 26 in Fall River, Massachusetts, however, Wilson achieved this synthesis in especially compelling oratory.

In New Haven, Wilson declared that there:

is not a Democrat that I know who is afraid to have the powers of government exercised to the utmost, but there are a great many of us who are afraid to see them exercised at the discretion of individuals.… Therefore, we favor as much power as you choose, but power guided by knowledge, power extended in detail. Not power given out in the lump in a commission set up…, unencumbered by the restrictions of law…. (Link, 1978, pp. 250-251)

Regulation properly guided by law,

takes its searchlight and casts its illuminating rays down the secret corridors of all the processes by which monopoly has been established, and polices its corridors so that highway robbery is no longer committed on it…, so that the liberty of individuals to compete is no longer checked by the power of combinations stronger than any possible individual can be. (pp. 250-251)

Wilson admitted:

that merely to make laws and leave their application to the present courts with their present procedures is not a very likely way of reform…. Therefore, I am ready to admit that we may have to have special tribunals, special processes.…But I am absolutely opposed to leaving it to the choice of those tribunals what the processes of law shall be and the means of remedy. (Link, 1978, p. 251)

Lampooning Republican Party divisions, he reemphasized his central point. “[T]he Republican parties, or rather…those various other groups that are masquerading under all sorts of names…are willing to accept the discretionary power of individuals, and we are not willing to accept anything except the certainty of law” (p. 251).

At Fall River, Wilson invoked the Glasgow model again, stressing in particular that “the part of the authority that keeps order and sees after sanitation and everything of that sort—has free access to everything except the actual residences…, just as it ought to be” (p. 251). This time, however, he

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drew out of it a more general principle of administration, law, and social justice.

I want the law in respect of all our matters to do something very much like that—to send the representatives of the law inside the house, through the corridors, up the staircases, into everything except individual men’s private business. And then let us see if we can’t understand one another better by knowing the conditions under which we live and what it is that we ought to do in order to help one another. (p. 251)

He called on his audience “to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create the conditions under which we live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live. And the reason that you have now to be very careful in that way that you are going to vote…is that you are going to choose a method of justice” (pp. 259-260).

Wilson was wrestling intellectually and rhetorically with a number of forces in these passages, and in the speeches more generally. He was responding to the attacks of Roosevelt and other Progressive Republicans that he “opposed an extension of the federal powers in the interest of the people,” (Davidson, 1958, p. 90). He was responding also to the most biting of the Roosevelt attacks, that Wilson’s paeans to individual freedom amounted to a retrograde Jeffersonian fantasy of small town simplicities and virtues that had no place in a modern industrial society. Wilson was also responding to the advice of Louis Brandeis that the extension of governmental power farther into the private sphere was permissible so long as it was aimed at regulating competition, not monopoly. And Wilson was responding to the force of progressivism, with its complex interplay of populism, moralism, and pragmatism in its message of social reform. In contending with and responding to these forces, Wilson managed to bring his long, intimate, and sophisticated association with the subject of administration to bear on the matter of trusts and monopolies. He responded to his own call of a quarter- century before by rhetorically anchoring administration deep in those most stable principles—liberty and justice—to which political communities have always aspired. In doing so, Wilson produced in the heat of a political campaign a remarkable public statement about administration’s place in the regime.

Wilson reinforced the essential message of the New Haven and Fall River speeches with one additional metaphor in a campaign address in Cleveland, Ohio on October 12. He stressed again the subordination of discretion to law. “Now, when you talk about power, all that I have to say is this: power is something which, according to the Democratic [Party] theory, ought to be exercised by law and not by personal discretion” (Link, 1978, p. 411). Law, then was the buttress for liberty against irresponsible discretion.

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Under the Democrats, you will find this social structure of ours penetrated and sustained by the structural steel of law, wherever law is necessary, but you won’t find that we are going to put in the hands of individuals or commissions the right to build the house according to their own plans and specifications. We are going to insist upon an architecture so certain, so definite, so based upon the right engineering principles of liberty, that we can be sure we can live there and not have the roof fall in. (p. 411)

At Madison Square Garden more than two weeks later, Wilson returned to his arguments about addressing the monopoly problem by fixing individual responsibility in law, and stressing the oppressive paternalism and dangers to liberty of excessively centralized administrative power. He stated what he regarded as a universally accepted principle, “that when a man breaks the law, he must personally take the penalty” (Link, 1978, p. 496). Wilson contrasted this with Roosevelt’s proposals, which allowed that:

just so soon as a trust ceases to observe the letter and the spirit of the law, the government is to take charge of it and administer its affairs.… [A]fter the corporation has been brought to its senses by being administered by a receiver appointed by the government, it is then to be returned to its owners in their chastened and rectified consciences. The government is to administer business for the sake of chastening the owners of the business. (p. 496)

Wilson then generalized his attack into a warning about the need to maintain the proper distribution of power within the whole of government itself.

My friends, it is a very serious matter to propose to reverse all the processes of law. And it is a very futile matter to propose to change all the centers of energy and origination in the Government of the United States from the combined organs of the government to the discretionary action of the executive. I do not believe that it is safe to put the disciplining of business in the hands of any officer of government whatever. (Link, 1978, p. 496)

Similarly, in his “Statement to Voters” published on election day, Wilson assured Americans that the Democratic Party would not shift “the whole energy and initiative of the law to the executive branch of the government” (p. 512).

INTERPRETING WILSON: THE POLITICAL PURPOSES OF ADMINISTRATION

The electoral rhetoric I have highlighted marked the pinnacle, I believe, of Wilson’s decades-long theorizing about public administration and the American regime. Is this such an extraordinary claim? After all, the totality of

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the evidence seems to indicate that the very vehicle of conveyance was a major stimulus for Wilson to broaden and extend his ideas. Dissatisfied with his nomination acceptance speech, Wilson abandoned speaking from a prepared text. “The rest of my speeches…will be delivered as I like to deliver a speech—right out of my mind as it is working at the time” (Davidson, 1956, p. 37). This son of a Presbyterian minister cum college lecturer, university president, self-styled “literary politician,” and proponent of “government by discussion” found many public forums that stimulated his intellect and connected him to his audience. The interlink between mind, voice, and listener was strongest for Wilson, however, when his oratory had to address real issues affecting real lives, when it confronted competing ideas from another strong intellect, and when the object was securing the highest elective office in the land.

For scholars and practitioners in public administration, and thoughtful citizens generally, what, then, did Wilson bequeath in his 1912 speeches? With respect to matters of practical political choice associated with a national election, Wilson was clearly trying to pinpoint for his audiences the right place to draw the line on the expansion of administrative power. The effort to fashion a national state, untethered from the localism of traditional American politics and government and possessing autonomous administrative power, was, as already noted, one of the central drivers of the political tumult of the progressive era. The choice between the New Nationalism and the New Freedom in 1912 was not merely one of style or minutiae, but a choice between distinct philosophies about the place, power, and purposes of administration in a modernized American democracy. Wilson was uneasy with the Progressive Party commitment to greatly expanded administrative autonomy checked only by an independent elected executive and reliance on “neutral” expertise. As Wilson intimated in several speeches, these checks were in fact insulators, suppressing the influence on administration of parties and legislatures, the traditional conduits of public opinion in the regime.

Despite some of his subsequent actions as president with respect to patronage, Wilson was no more a lover of party hacks and political machines or the congressional power structure than the Bull Moosers. The kind of democracy he envisioned—what he called government by discussion—could only succeed through partyleaderswho operated in the “pure air” of public scrutiny, rather than behind the scenes as partybosses. Wilson contended that Roosevelt’s design for an autonomous and expert administration would fail because it would lead government under cover, and thus exacerbate a tendency toward paternalism and special interest rule. Wilson offered an alternative, which I believe was grounded in his earlier conception that administration occupied the institutional space in a liberal-democratic regime where the public and private spheres intersected. Indeed, how political leaders conceived of and consequently structured administration would go a long way toward situating the boundary between public and private in the regime. It

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seems reasonably clear that Wilson saw Roosevelt’s “constructive regulation” as an unholy intermixing of those two spheres, to the detriment of popular rule.

Wilson further insisted that the structure of administration must be anchored securely in “definite” law. This had two interrelated meanings for him. First, statutes should define with sufficient detail what acts by private persons were or were not permissible and who would be held to account if such standards of action were not met. Private actors would know that they would be held personally to account for breaches of the public law. This would, second, constrain the discretion of administrators to determine what was permissible or impermissible, not only limiting their exposure to private interests, and but also clarifying their responsibilities as well. Administrative regulation under definite law would therefore create the conditions and imperatives in both private and public organizations that would fix the responsibilities of their respective officials, clarifying the distinctions in their obligations and social roles. Administration anchored in the right structure of law, and thus properly organized to fix the individual responsibilities of men who held responsible positions, could then fulfill its purposes in the regime: to serve popular rule, and preserve and enhance liberty.

Wilson’s arguments and imagery in the 1912 speeches I have highlighted portray American public administration as giving organized expression to the aspirations of a people with both liberal and democratic roots. It is clear that he understood administration as the operational expression of the law, which meant that it was not the expression of abstract, academic theory, but of the fact and experience of social, economic, and political life. In this respect, administration could also instruct, or at least guide, the making of definite law. But administration was not an instrument of tutelage and paternalism. Instead, it was a vehicle for enhancing popular rule and realizing greater liberty in an age of potentially extensive economic oppression. And, consistent with another facet of progressivism, Wilson saw administration as helping to facilitate progress in both the practical and moral development of society.

The idea of law as a restraint on administrative discretion is a central tradition in American governmental and administrative theory. Few scholars or practitioners, however, are likely to trace its lineage to, or even merely through, Wilson. And like progressivism generally, the idea has a mixed legacy. Warnings that vesting relatively open-ended discretionary power in administration would ultimately lead to administrators serving the interests of those they were supposed to be policing have sounded at least since the debates on the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission (see Cook, 1996, pp. 80-81). Such warnings, including Wilson’s, seemingly were vindicated by the scholarly literature on regulatory capture that began to emerge in the 1950s (e.g., Bernstein, 1955). Theodore Lowi’s devastating critique of “interest-group liberalism” followed. He called for a return to the rule of law and limits on administrative discretion, insisting pungently that

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“the institutions of government ought to say what they are going to do to us before they do it; and if they cannot say they cannot act” (Lowi, 1979, p. 299).

The responses to the revelations and critiques, however, have not necessarily been more precise statutes or more effective policy and administration. One could conclude from the evidence that the spirit of Lowi’s critique was hijacked in favor of statutory specificity to control administration that serves political strategies seeking to protect allies, punish enemies, and generate constituent benefits, rather than in support of good public policy design and effective administration (e.g., Moe, 1989; Schoenbrod, 1993). Alternatively, one might conclude that it is the very regime design of the Constitution, and the nature of democratic politics itself, that makes for the incapacity of Congress to craft effective, that is, careful and precise, legislation (e.g., Wilson, 1990). In either case, to promote constraints on the expansion of administrative capacity through “definite law” would appear to be mere folly. Even worse, such endeavors would appear to pose a threat to the progressive commitment to a more protective, nurturing, and just society.

To follow this line of argument and critique is, however, to severely misunderstand the message we should take from Wilson on this score. That message might best be understood as saying that discretion is not the same as capacity. Whatever his subsequent actions as president that may in fact have undermined the improvement in national administrative capacity by preserving patronage and localism (see Noble, 1985; Skowronek, 1982), Wilson in his 1912 speeches was warning not against giving administrators the tools to do their jobs, but against giving administrators jobs they should not, and perhaps could not, do. In essence, Wilson contended that the Progressive Party scheme to regulate monopoly would give administration a job not just beyond its capacity, but beyond its proper place in the regime. As Wilson clearly signaled at the end of the campaign, it would “derange” the Constitution (Lowi, 1993) and the power relationships set forth therein.

This is itself a sufficiently powerful message to ponder. It was, however, only the most practical motif in a broader theoretical suite that Wilson composed ad hoc, but with a firm and deep conceptual foundation, in his 1912 oratory. Wilson sought to articulate a conception of administration in a progressive regime distinct from the Progressive Party notion of an autonomous and technically expert administration. Wilson knew that the idea of neutral expertise was not to be taken lightly. He accepted that it should be one of the principles guiding the organization of administration in a democratic polity. But Wilson contended that limits should be placed on the principle, and that it should not lead to confusion of means and ends. He did not reject administrative expertise per se. Instead, he objected “to the determination of government policy by experts isolated from public opinion, or to the uncritical acceptance of the advice of experts without regard to the totality of a given problem” (Davidson, 1958, p. 93). In Wilson’s broad theoretical composition, the purpose of administration was not to be expert

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and neutral, but to be in service to and a part of democratic politics and popular rule.

As the culmination of all his thinking, writing, and public speaking on democratic government and public administration over 25 years, Wilson’s 1912 speeches successfully harmonized and sounded his core ideas. That synthesis stressed that the proper structure and function of public administration in a progressive democracy rested on a successful concordance the rule of law, and administrative effectiveness. Public administration theorists have been struggling to achieve this concordance ever since. Careful consideration of Woodrow Wilson’s ideas, especially as articulated during his years in politics, may move the struggle along. This would not only strengthen the imprint of Wilson and the Progressive Era on public administration in our time, it might also enrich administrative theory and practice for years to come.

REFERENCES

Bernstein, M. H. (1955).Regulating business by independent commission. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Broderick, F. L. (1989).Progressivism at risk: Electing a president in 1912. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Cook, B. J. (1996).Bureaucracy and self-government: Reconsidering the role of public administration in American politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cook, B. J. (1998). Efficiency, responsibility, and law: Public administration in the early political rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson.Administrative Theory & Praxis, 20, 43-54.

Davidson, J. W. (Ed.). (1956).A crossroads of freedom: The 1912 campaign speeches of Woodrow Wilson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Davidson, J. W. (1958). Wilson in the campaign of 1912. In E. Latham (Ed.),The philosophy and policies of Woodrow Wilson(pp. 85-99). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Link, A. S. (1954).Woodrow Wilson and the progressive era: 1910-1917. New York: Harper & Row.

Link, A. S. (1969).The papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Link, A. S. (1977).The papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 24. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Link, A. S. (1978).The papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 25. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lowi, T. J. (1979).The end of liberalism, (2nd ed.). New York: W. W. Norton.

Lowi, T. J. (1993). Two roads to serfdom: Liberalism, conservatism, and administrative power. In S. L. Elkin & K. E. Soltan, (Eds.),A new constitutionalism: Designing

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political institutions for a good society(pp. 149-173). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Martin, D. W. (1988). The fading legacy of Woodrow Wilson.Public Administration Review, 48, 631-636.

Miewald, R. D. (1984). The origins of Wilson’s thought: The German tradition and the organic state. In J. Rabin & J. S. Bowman (Eds.),Politics and administration: Woodrow Wilson and American public administration(pp. 17-30). New York: Marcel Dekker.

Milkis, S. M. (1999). Introduction: Progressivism, then and now. In S. M. Milkis & J. M. Mileur (Eds.),Progressivism and the new democracy(pp. 17-30). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Milkis, S. M., & Tichenor, D. J. (1993, September).The progressive party and social reformers: The “critical” election of 1912. Prepared for delivery at the 1993 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the Washington Hilton.

Moe, T. M. (1989). The politics of bureaucratic structure. In J. E. Chubb & P. E. Peterson, (Eds.),Can the government govern?(pp. 267-329). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Noble, C. (1985). Wilson’s choice: The political origins of the modern American state. Comparative Politics, 18, 313-336.

Rodgers, D. T. (1982). In search of progressivism.Reviews in American History, 10, 113-132.

Schoenbrod, D. (1993).Power without responsibility: How Congress abuses the people through delegation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Skowronek, S. (1982).Building a new American state: The expansion of administrative capacities, 1877-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Stillman, R. J. (1973). Woodrow Wilson and the study of public administration: A new look at an old essay.American Political Science Review, 67, 582-588.

Thorsen, N. A. (1988).The political thought of Woodrow Wilson: 1875-1910. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Van Riper, P. P. (1984). The politics-administration dichotomy: Concept or reality? In J. Rabin & J.S. Bowman (Eds.),Politics and administration: Woodrow Wilson and American public administration(pp. 203-218). New York: Marcel Dekker.

Wilson, J. Q. (1990). Juridical democracy versus American democracy.PS: Political Science and Politics, 23, 570-572.

Wilson, W. (1941). The study of administration (1887). Reprinted inPolitical Science Quarterly, 56, 481-506.

Brian J. Cook is Professor of Government at Clark University. He is the author of Bureaucracy and Self-Government: Rethinking the Role of Public Administration in American Politics.

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