By WOODROW WILSON

THE NEW FREEDOM

A CALL FOR THE EMANCIPATION
OF THE GENEROUS ENERGIES
OF A PEOPLE

WOODROW WILSON, DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY, 1913

Extract from: Chapter VIII MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY?

There is another matter to which we must direct our attention… I do not talk about [the Money Trust] because I want to attack anybody or upset anything; I talk about [it] because only by open speech … shall we learn what the facts are.
You will notice from a recent investigation (Aldrich) that things like this take place: A certain bank invests in certain securities. It appears from evidence that the handling of these securities was very intimately connected with the maintenance of the price of a particular commodity. Nobody ought, and in normal circumstances nobody would, for a moment think of suspecting the managers of a great bank of making such an investment in order to help those who were conducting a particular business in the United States maintain the price of their commodity; but the circumstances are not normal. It is beginning to be believed that in the big business of this country nothing is disconnected from anything else… take any investment of an industrial character by a great bank. It is known that the directorate of that bank interlaces in personnel with ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty boards of directors of all sorts, of railroads which handle commodities, of great groups of manufacturers which manufacture commodities, and of great merchants who distribute commodities; and the result is that every great bank is under suspicion with regard to the motive of its investments. It is at least considered possible that it is playing the game of somebody who has nothing to do with banking, but with whom some of its directors are connected and joined in interest. The ground of unrest and uneasiness … is the growing knowledge that many large undertakings are [connected] with one another, are indistinguishable from one another in personnel.
Therefore, when a small group of men approach Congress in order to induce the committee concerned to concur in certain legislation, nobody knows the ramifications of the interests which those men represent; there seems no frank and open action of public opinion in public counsel, but every man is suspected of representing some other man and it is not known where his connections begin or end.
I am one of those … that I have had the opportunity to study the way in which these things come about … and I do not suspect that any man has deliberately planned the system. I [do not believe] that there is a deliberate and malevolent combination somewhere to dominate the government of the United States. I merely say that, by certain processes, now well known, and perhaps natural in themselves, there has come about an extraordinary and very sinister concentration in the control of business in the country.
However it has come about, it is more important still that the control of credit also has become dangerously centralized. It is the mere truth to say that the financial resources of the country are … at the command of those who … submit to the direction and domination of small groups of capitalists who wish to keep the economic development of the country under their own eye and guidance. The great monopoly in this country is the monopoly of big credits. So long as that exists, our old variety and freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who… are necessarily concentrating upon the great undertakings in which their own money is involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations …destroy genuine economic freedom. This is the greatest question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of men.
This money trust, or, as it should be more properly called, this credit trust, of which Congress has begun an investigation, is no myth; it is no imaginary thing …I have seen men who, as they themselves expressed it, were put "out of business by Wall Street," because Wall Street found them inconvenient and didn't want their competition. Woodrow Wilson, in referring especially to the currency, wrote
Are we going to settle the currency question so long as the government listens only to … those who command the banking situation?...There is a sense in which a democratic country forces statesmanship upon every man of initiative, every man capable of leading anybody; and this I believe to be the particular period when statesmanship is forced upon bankers and upon all those who have to do with the application and use of the vast accumulated wealth of this country. We should, for example, not only seek the best solution for our currency difficulties, not only the safest and most scientific system of elastic currency to meet the convenience of the country in which the amount of cash needed at different times fluctuates enormously and violently; but we should also seek to give the discussions of such matters such publicity and such general currency and such simplicity as will enable men of every kind and calling to understand what we are talking about and take an intelligent part in the discussion. We cannot shut ourselves in as experts to our own business. We must open our thoughts to the country at large, and serve the general intelligence as well as the general welfare. Carter Glass: An Adventure in Constructive Finance. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1927, pp. 76-81.
What do you think he means? Simplify what he is saying.