The New Freedom was Woodrow Wilson's campaign platform in the 1912 presidential election, and also refers to the progressive programs enacted by Wilson during his time as president. First expressed in his campaign speeches and promises, Wilson later wrote a 1913 book of the same name. After the 1918 midterm elections, Republicans took control of Congress and were mostly hostile to the New Freedom. As president, Wilson focused on various types of reform, such as the following:

Campaign slogan in 1912

Wilson's position in 1912 stood in opposition to Progressive party candidate Theodore Roosevelt's ideas of New Nationalism, particularly on the issue of antitrust modification. According to Wilson, "If America is not to have free enterprise, he can have freedom of no sort whatever." In presenting his policy, Wilson warned that New Nationalism represented collectivism, while New Freedom stood for political and economic liberty from such things as trusts (powerful monopolies). Wilson was strongly influenced by his chief economic advisor Louis D. Brandeis, an enemy of big business and monopoly. Although Wilson and Roosevelt agreed that economic power was being abused by trusts, Wilson and Roosevelt were split on how the government should handle the restraint of private power as in dismantling corporations that had too much economic power in a large society. Wilson wrote extensively on the meaning of "government" shortly after his election.

Wilson in office

Once elected, Wilson rolled out a program of social and economic reform. Wilson appointed Brandeis to the US Supreme Court in 1916. He worked with Congress to give federal employees worker's compensation, outlawed child labor with the Keating–Owen Act (the act was ruled unconstitutional in 1918) and passed the Adamson Act, which secured a maximum eight-hour workday for railroad employees. Most important was the Clayton Act of 1914, which largely put the trust issue to rest by spelling out the specific unfair practices that business were not allowed to engage in. The legislative environment was favourable to Wilson, with progressive Democratic majorities in Congress during his first term in office. By the end of the Wilson Administration, a significant amount of progressive legislation had been passed, affecting not only economic and constitutional affairs, but farmers, labor, veterans, the environment, and conservation as well. The reform agenda actually put into legislation by Wilson, however, did not extend as far as what Roosevelt had called for but had never actually passed, such as a standard 40-hour work week, minimum wage laws, and a federal system of social insurance. This was possibly a reflection of Wilson's own ideological convictions, who according to Elizabeth Warren and Herbert Hoover, was an adherent of Jeffersonian Democracy (although Wilson did champion reforms such as agricultural credits during his presidency, and championed the right of Americans to earn a living wage and to live and work "in sanitary surroundings" in his 1919 State of the Union Address). However, Wilson identified himself with progressive politics throughout much of his life. During his time as governor of New Jersey, a number of reform laws were passed by the New Jersey legislature and signed by Wilson. This included laws providing “for at least one-half hour meal time after six continuous hours of labor” and the appointment of commissioners on old age pensions and old age Insurance, together with laws concerning working hours and health and safety. Wilson also spoke out in support of legislation benefiting labor, stating in one of his annual messages: "We have done much toward securing justice and safety for the workingmen of the State in our factory laws, our tenement-house legislation, and our Employers' Liability act, but we have not done enough. Our workmen very justly demand further legislation with regard to the inspection and regulation of factories and workshops, and I recommend legislation of this kind to your very careful and earnest consideration. I recommend, moreover, the passage at an early date of an act requiring the railways operating within this State to provide their trains with adequate crews. Our sister State of Pennsylvania has adopted legislation of this kind, and the railways whose lines cross from Pennsylvania into New Jersey actually carry full crews to the border of this State, and then send their trains on through New Jersey with diminished crews, to the jeopardy, as I believe, of life and property; requiring more of the small crew than it can safely and thoroughly do." In his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Wilson argued in favor of labor legislation, stating that "The working people of America, — if they must be distinguished from the minority that constitutes the rest of it, — are, of course, the backbone of the Nation. No law that safeguards their lives, that improves the physical and moral conditions under which they live, that makes their hours of labor rational and tolerable, that gives them freedom to act in their own interest, and that protects them where they cannot protect themselves, can properly be regarded as class legislation or as anything but as a measure taken in the interest of the whole people, whose partnership in right action we are trying to establish and make real and practical." In his work The State, Wilson had advocated a welfarist role for the state, arguing amongst its functions to be the provision of German-style insurance for workmen and care "for the poor and incapable." Wilson was also a supporter of teacher's pensions and mothers’ pensions (cash allowances for poor mothers), with he and his daughter inviting Henry Nell (“father of mothers’ pensions”) to discuss “means for spreading the mothers’ pension gospel.” Wilson’s views on welfare were expressed on another occasion in his Notes for Five Lectures on Municipal Government (given at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in November and December 1898), in which he described various functions that he said municipal government must undertake, which included welfarist functions like Sanitation (“including parks, housing of poor and labouring classes etc.”) and “Guardianship and relief of destitute and helpless classes ruined by the city pressure”). In the same notes Wilson argued that “Charities, e.g., should be taken from the sphere of private, voluntary organization and endeavour and made the imperative legal duty of the Whole. Relief of the poor, and a bettering of the conditions in which they live is as much a governmental function as Education (coming under the head, not only of human duty, but also of social sanitation). Private charities need not be prohibited.” While serving as governor of New Jersey, Wilson's views on welfare were arguably reflected in the platform adopted by the New Jersey Democratic Party in 1912, the authorship of which has been attributed to Wilson, which included a plank calling for more intervention in the field of health and welfare: "We also favour and endorse the efforts which our State and its various institutions are making for the preservation of the public health, and for the purpose of effectually coping with the problem of tuberculosis we believe in the establishment of a system of expert medical inspection of all schoolchildren and the enlargement under expert supervision of a sanitarium for those affected with incipient tuberculosis. To those unfortunates who by reasons of defect of intellect, poverty or enforced confinement are at the present time wards of the State we favour their maintenance and the bestowal upon them of all care possible, so that their deficiencies may be remedied or their condition at least ameliorated.”" Wilson expressed similar views in 1913, arguing that workers had the right to a living wage and noting: "There can be no equality of opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food laws, and laws determining the conditions of labor which individuals are powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency. One of the most hopeful signs of the times is the fact that we are beginning to hear and to understand this 'solemn moving undertone of our life,' and our social legislation is showing signs of an earnest desire to alleviate the dead burden of misery under which our toilers stagger and groan. The State is gradually growing, through the development of its so-called police power, into the stature and dignity of 'parens patrae,' guardian or custodian of the public welfare." In various campaign speeches in 1912, Wilson spoke of the need for greater social justice in America. In one speech he argued how "we must see to it that there is no overcrowding, that there is no bad sanitation, that there is no unnecessary spread of avoidable diseases, that there is every safeguard against accidents, that women are not driven to impossible tasks and children not permitted to spend their energy before it is fit to be spent, that all the hope of the race must be preserved, and that men must be preserved according to their individual needs and not according to the programs of industry merely." In another speech, Wilson put forward a similar case for greater government intervention in society, arguing that "A government is intended to serve the people that live under it. Now, there are a great many ways in which to serve the people that live under it, and our government has neglected some of those ways. We are only just now beginning to learn how to take care of our people, to prevent accidents, where accidents are obviously apt to occur in a great many employments, to prevent unreasonable hours of labor, to prevent women [from] being overworked, to prevent young children from being worked at all. There are a score of things which nowadays we regard as the function of the government, but government has been neglectful of these things because it has been taking care of the particular groups of people and not thinking of the life of the people as a whole. And now the American people, high and wide, are looking directly at the government, are putting away all notions about it." Wilson also spoke of the need to lift people out of poverty, stating in a speech he made in December 1912 "'God knows that the poor suffer enough in this country already, and a man would hesitate to take a single step that would increase the number of the poor, or the burdens of the poor, but we must move for the emancipation of the poor, and that emancipation will come from our own emancipation from the errors of our minds as to what constitutes prosperity. Prosperity does not exist for a nation unless it be pervasive. Prosperity is not a thing which can be consumed privately or by a small number of persons, and the amount of wealth in a nation is very much less important than the accessibility of wealth in a nation. The more people you make it accessible to the more energy you call forth, until presently, if you carry the process far enough, you get almost the zest of a creative act.”" Also, while not a socialist, Wilson agreed with the socialist program the Labour Party (UK) put forward in 1918, with the exception of its call for a minimum wage due to Wilson’s uncertainty over how this would be maintained. Amongst the program’s many proposals included ending joblessness and an expansion of unemployment benefit coverage. Although the role of government under Wilson did expand in a progressive direction, the New Freedom did not go as far as his rhetoric suggested it would. For instance, while supportive of benefits for workers such as pensions, injury compensation, and profit-sharing plans (noting in his book "The New Freedom" how various companies had introduced such benefits "in good faith" to their employees), Wilson and his administration never pushed legislation through Congress extending these benefits to the entire workforce, while a national health insurance system of the kind advocated by Roosevelt was never established, despite the fact that Wilson, according to one study, "promoted Roosevelt’s policy of universal health insurance coverage when he was elected president." Despite this, the New Freedom did much to extend the power of the federal government in social and economic affairs, and arguably paved the way for future reform programs such as the New Deal and the Great Society.

Legislation and programs

Note: This listing contains reforms drawn up by the Wilson Administration as part of its New Freedom program together with wartime reforms and reforms drawn up by individual Congressmen. The latter two have been included because it is arguable that the progressive nature of these reforms was compatible with the liberalism of the New Freedom.

Farmers

Labor

Health and welfare

Wartime measures

Veterans

Education

Constitutional

Environment and public works

Conservation

Books

In 1913 Woodrow Wilson's book The New Freedom was published, detailing his thoughts about the concepts and program. He had previously written two other books, Congressional Government published in 1900, followed in 1901 by When a Man Comes to Himself.