The social center : $b a means of common understanding. An address delivered by the Hon. Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New Jersey, before the First National Conference on Civic and Social Center Development, at Madison, Wis., October 25, 1911Wilson, Woodrow
General
The social center : $b a means of common understanding. An address delivered by the Hon. Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New Jersey, before the First National Conference on Civic and Social Center Development, at Madison, Wis., October 25, 1911
Wilson, Woodrow
Recreation centers
And so you know that changes are impending because what was a body
of scattered sentiment is now becoming a concentrated force, and so
with sympathy and understanding comes control, for, in place of this
control of enlightened and sovereign opinions, we have had in the field
of politics as elsewhere, the reign of management, and management is
compounded of these two things, secrecy plus concentration.
You cannot manage a nation, you cannot manage the people of a state,
you cannot manage a great population, you can manage only some central
force; what you do, therefore, if you want to manage in politics or
anywhere else is to choose a great single force or single group of
forces, and then find some man or men sagacious and secretive enough to
manage the business without being discovered. And that has been done
for a generation in the United States.
Now, the schoolhouse among other things is going to break that up. Is
it not significant that this thing is being erected upon the foundation
originally laid in America, where we saw from the first that the
schoolhouse and the church were to be the pillars of the Republic? Is
it not significant that as if by instinct we return to those sources
of liberty undefiled which we find in the common meeting place, in the
place owned by everybody, in the place where nobody can be excluded, in
the place to which everybody comes as by right?
And so what we are doing is simply to open what was shut, to let the
light come in upon places that were dark, to substitute for locked
doors, open doors, for it does not make any difference how many or how
few come in provided anybody who chooses may come in. So as soon as you
have established that principle, you have openings, and these doors are
open as if they were the flood gates of life.
Faith In People Justified
I do not wonder that men are exhibiting an increased confidence in the
judgments of the people, because wherever you give the people a chance
such as this movement has given them in the schoolhouse, they avail
themselves of it. This is not a false people, this is not a people
guided by blind impulses, this is a people who want to think, who want
to think right, whose feelings are based upon justice, whose instincts
are for fairness and for the light.
So what I see in this movement is a recovery of the constructive and
creative genius of the American people, because the American people as
a people are so far different from others in being able to produce new
things, to create new things out of old.
This Movement Fundamentally American
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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