Character of Democracy in the United States

Character of Democracy in the United States

In "Character of Democracy in the United States," Woodrow Wilson argues that Americans have long misunderstood their own political origins, imagining themselves heirs to the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome or to the revolutionary radicalism of Rousseau and the French philosophes. In fact, Wilson insists, the founders were not doctrinaire democrats but "progressive Englishmen," and the government they established in 1787 was not an experiment in abstract democratic theory but a natural, unbroken extension of English constitutional government, adapted to American soil. The essay's purpose is to correct this century-old self-deception as the nation begins its second century, and Wilson organizes his argument around four propositions. First, he examines the genuine democratizing forces at work across the nineteenth-century world: popular education, the spread of cheap printing, the newspaper press, steam travel, and commerce. Drawing on Carlyle's dictum that democracy is "the result of printing," Wilson describes how these forces diffuse knowledge and awaken ordinary people to affairs beyond their own neighborhoods, making exclusive privilege and secretive kingship increasingly untenable. Yet he stresses that these forces are merely critical and corrosive, not constructive — they can question and unsettle old orders but cannot by themselves build a working government. Second, Wilson contrasts this European-style democracy, born of rebellion and discontent, with the American variety, born of habit, training, and "organic growth." American self-government was not created by doctrine or sudden aspiration but slowly cultivated through generations of local self-direction, particularly in the English tradition of town and county governance. He memorably characterizes democracy as a mature institution — "poison to the infant, but tonic to the man" — arguing that only peoples long schooled in temperate self-command, such as the English race and the Swiss, have successfully sustained it. He faults scholars like Sir Henry Maine for failing to distinguish this habituated, evolutionary English-American democracy from the revolutionary, discontent-driven democracy of continental Europe. Third, Wilson acknowledges that modern conditions — the sheer continental scale of the United States, made governable only through steam, telegraph, and representative institutions, plus massive immigration from Europe — have begun to alter the American character itself. While the nation's vastness confers strength (no single "plot" or demagogue can seize the whole country, as the containment of Andrew Jackson's popularity illustrated), it also dilutes the homogeneous, temperate stock that originally sustained self-government, introducing the "feverish humors" and speculative political philosophy of the Old World. Finally, Wilson turns to what he considers the pressing problem of his own day: the need for concentrated legislative leadership. A vast, heterogeneous democracy cannot govern by mass sentiment alone; public opinion is "judicial," not "creative" — it can ratify or reject but cannot originate policy. Because representatives now sit at a distance from the people who elect them, unlike the face-to-face civic life of ancient Athens, American democracy risks disintegration unless it cultivates visible, trusted leaders who can organize scattered opinion into coherent national policy. Wilson closes by praising the disciplined, cohesive quality of monarchy's leadership while insisting democracy can achieve the same unity through strong, principled leaders — for, as he puts it, Americans became a nation by once obeying a king, and will remain one only by learning to obey leaders of their own making.

By Woodrow Wilson · First published 1889 · Genre: Political Essay, Political Philosophy, Historical Analysis · 8,108 words

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Everything apprises us of the fact that we are not the same nation now that we were when the government was formed. In looking back to that time, the impression is inevitable that we started with sundry wrong ideas about ourselves. We deemed ourselves rank democrats, whereas we were in fact only progressive Englishmen. Turn the leaves of that sage manual of constitutional interpretation and advocacy, the _Federalist_, and note the perverse tendency of its writers to refer to Greece and Rome for precedents, -- that Greece and Rome which haunted all our earlier and even some of our more mature years. Recall, too, that familiar story of Daniel Webster which tells of his coming home exhausted from an interview with the first President-elect Harrison, whose Secretary of State he was to be, and explaining that he had been obliged in the course of the conference, which concerned the inaugural address about to be delivered, to kill nine Roman consuls whom it had been the intention of the good conqueror of Tippecanoe publicly to take into office with him. The truth is that we long imagined ourselves related in some unexplained way to all ancient republicans. Strangely enough, too, we at the same time accepted the quite incompatible theory that we were related also to the French philosophical radicals. We claimed kinship with democrats everywhere, -- with all democrats. We can now scarcely realize the atmosphere of such thoughts. We are no longer wont to refer to the ancients or to the French for sanction of what we do. We have had abundant experience of our own by which to reckon.

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democracy · political-philosophy · american-government · constitutional-law · political-institutions · federalism · separation-of-powers · citizenship · political-theory · liberty · democratic-values · american-ideals

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