[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book II)]
[October 5, 2000]
[Pages 2037-2045]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Conference on the Progressive Tradition
in Princeton, New Jersey
October 5, 2000

    Thank you very much. Thank you for the wonderful welcome. Thank you, 
President Shapiro, for your distinguished 
leadership here and the vital work you did during the course of our 
common Presidencies. It occurred to me that this might be the only place 
in America where people thought Woodrow Wilson got a demotion when he 
was elected President of the United States. [Laughter]
    Thank you, Dean Rothschild. And thank 
you, Ruth Miller, for putting off your 
retirement so I could come here today. I want to thank Professor Sean 
Wilentz for putting on this conference and for 
his many acts of generosity and kindness and support for our efforts 
over the last 8 years.
    I'd like to thank the Congressman from Princeton, Representative 
Rush Holt, for coming here. Thank you. I know 
this is not really a political event, but I can't help noting that Rush 
Holt is the only bona fide scientist in the Congress, and Lord knows, we 
need at least one.

[[Page 2038]]

    Another Member of Congress wanted to come here today, Senator John 
Edwards from North Carolina, a good friend of 
mine, whose daughter Katherine is in the 
freshman class. And I promised to give his excuses to his daughter and 
the rest of you, but they are voting in the Senate today. And part of 
the Progressives' tradition is showing up. [Laughter] And so he's 
showing up down in Washington.
    And I thank you, Katharine Strong Gilbert, for giving me this Whig-Clio Award.
    You know, James Madison is a very important figure to every American 
and every President who cares, in particular, about the framework and 
history of the Constitution. But it's interesting to me that he actually 
participated in debates here in the 18th century, including one with 
Aaron Burr, where Madison was the Whig and Burr was the Clio. It was 
that debate that produced a memorable line that is too often attributed 
to me: The era of Whig Government is over. [Laughter]
    I must say, when I first saw the program for this conference, I felt 
some ambivalence. The student in me wanted to come here and stay for the 
whole thing. But the politician in me wondered what in the living 
daylights I was doing here. I'm supposed to lead off a group of people 
whose books I have read, who know more about the subject I'm supposed to 
address than I ever will.
    I can say that I had some unique experience in carrying on the 
progressive tradition. I always felt that the work we did the last 8 
years made us the heir of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson--Al Gore 
and me, our entire administration. And I have a fascination with that 
period of history.
    I own a lot of Theodore Roosevelt's books in the first edition, 
including a fascinating account of how he organized the Rough Riders. 
I've also got a wonderful book that Owen Wister, the writer of westerns, 
wrote about his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, when, like many of 
you, they were undergraduates together at Harvard. The other day I 
acquired Joseph Tumulty's book--he was Woodrow Wilson's private 
secretary--about his relationship with President Wilson, both as 
Governor and as President. It's a fascinating account of the time, by 
someone who was admittedly biased but still had a unique perspective.
    So I've thought a lot about this period. And I suppose as a 
politician, I should give myself the leeway of quoting Theodore 
Roosevelt, who said in his speech on the new nationalism, ``I do not 
speak merely from a historical standpoint. It is of little use for us to 
pay lip service to the mighty men of the past, unless we sincerely 
endeavor to apply those qualities to the problems of the present.''
    It is in that spirit that I would like to say a few words today, 
about the Progressive tradition, about what it means for today and how 
it is part, I believe, of a larger ongoing debate in American history 
about the whole idea of America. What does the Nation mean? What does it 
mean to be an American?
    The Progressives thought we could only keep faith with the past by 
keeping faith with the future. Their time had much in common with ours, 
and therefore, our responsibilities have much in common with theirs, to 
preserve what is enduring but to adapt our Nation time and again to what 
is new.
    Woodrow Wilson said, ``It behooves us once again to stand face to 
face with our ideals, to renew our enthusiasm, to reckon again our 
duties, to take fresh views of our aims, and fresh courage for their 
pursuit.'' These words ring with relevance for your time. Not simply 
because we stand at the dawn of a new century, as Wilson and Roosevelt 
did, but because this time, like theirs, is characterized by swift and 
stunning change.
    Like the industrial revolution, this information revolution is a 
true seismic shift. It alters forever the way we work, live, relate to 
each other and those beyond our borders. The consequences of the digital 
chip, nano-technology, the Internet, and the sequencing of the human 
genome will be every bit as profound, if not more profound, than those 
of the telephone, the assembly line, and the vast migration of Americans 
to the cities and the opening of America to its first great wave of 
immigrants.
    But these are only the most obvious parallels between the 
Progressive Era and what I call this time, the last time I came to 
Princeton, a new progressive era. I also believe in a larger sense the 
Progressive Era and this time represent two of the five pivotal points 
in American history, when we have been called upon to reaffirm and to 
redefine not just the role of Government for new times but the very idea 
of the American Nation. That debate has gone on from the beginning.

[[Page 2039]]

    First there was the debate which George Washington, Alexander 
Hamilton, and John Marshall won over Thomas Jefferson and his friends, 
about whether we were preeminently going to be one Nation or a just a 
little bit stronger confederation of States. I have to say out of 
deference to Mr. Jefferson that after he became President, I suspect he 
was glad he lost the argument, as he sent out Lewis and Clark, imposed 
the infamous embargo, and bought Louisiana, which at the time cost the 
equivalent of one full year's budget of the Federal Government.
    Can you imagine what would happen if I came to the Congress and 
said--[laughter]--``Have I got a deal for you.'' [Laughter] ``Just $1.9 
trillion. What difference does it make?'' [Laughter]
    The second great debate we had about the idea of the Nation occurred 
obviously in the days leading up to and during and immediately after the 
Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln saved the Union by moving it closer to 
the true ideals of the Declaration of Independence and, as Gary Wills 
has so brilliantly argued, literally redefining the Constitution closer 
toward those ideals, in the Gettysburg Address.
    The third great point was in the Progressive Era, when Woodrow 
Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt presided over an America fully entering 
the industrial revolution.
    Then the fourth time was during the New Deal, the Second World War, 
and its immediate aftermath with the dawn of the cold war, when Franklin 
Roosevelt and Harry Truman gave us our first comprehensive social safety 
net and an institutionalized commitment to American leadership for peace 
and freedom in the world.
    Now, at the dawn of this global information age, Al Gore and I have 
been working to adapt all of the domestic and foreign policies of the 
United States to these sweeping changes in science and technology, in 
social diversity and pluralism, and in increasing global 
interdependence.
    History has taught Americans not to stand passively in the face of 
change. What the Progressive Presidents understood so clearly, from 
Teddy Roosevelt to Wilson to FDR and Truman to Kennedy and Johnson, is 
the understanding that America either will shape change or be shaped by 
it. As I've already said, I believe the time in which we live bears the 
most resemblance to the Progressive Era. But there are also elements of 
those other great hingepoints in American history in this time, too.
    You can see it in the fight we had with the Republican Congress that 
led to the shutdown of the Government. You can see it in our efforts to 
build one America across all the lines that divide us. You can see it in 
our struggle to end genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and to 
build binding ties to Africa, Latin American and Asian nations with whom 
we have not been closely aligned in the past.
    The central lesson of the progressive is that you either have to 
shape change consistent with your values, or you will be shaped by it in 
ways that make it more difficult for you to live by your values. To 
retreat from responsibility is to invite instability. To embrace the 
obligation of leadership has consistently under progressive times led to 
better lives for all Americans.
    Wilson and Roosevelt made an enemy of outdated orthodoxy, replacing 
them with what Teddy's famous cousin Franklin Roosevelt called ``bold, 
persistent experimentation.'' As many of the scholars here have argued, 
and doubtless will argue with greater clarity than I can, the 
progressive legacy is not primarily a set of programs that no longer 
have great relevance to us but a vital set of principles: the idea that 
new conditions demand a new approach to Government.
    When Teddy Roosevelt became President, few Americans looked to him, 
to his office, or even to their Government to solve their problems. At 
the end of the 19th century, the White House was weak; the Congress was 
at the mercy of special interests. Roosevelt's genius was to redefine 
the role of Government and the role of the President, to protect the 
public interest and to act as an accountable agent of change. This is an 
ideal as old as Madison, but Roosevelt and Wilson gave it new meaning 
for a new era. What is its meaning today?
    When I ran for President in 1992, our Government was discredited. In 
fact, you could hardly run for President unless you had something bad to 
say about the Government. Indeed, part of the political genius of the 
ascendency of President Reagan and his associates was to attain power by 
discrediting the very idea of Government. They basically were able to 
say things like, ``Government couldn't run a bake sale. The Government 
would mess up a two-car parade.'' And they found huge majorities of 
Americans sort of nodding their heads.

[[Page 2040]]

    Those in the progressive tradition, I believe, had given them some 
ammunition by clinging to old programs, bureaucracies, and approaches 
that no longer worked. Then the conservatives used the failures as an 
excuse to do nothing on the domestic front. Some of our leaders 
literally made a virtue of their endless capacity to tell the American 
people how bad the Government was. And then when those who were reacting 
against the progressive tradition took power, they seemed determined to 
prove it by digging us a huge budgetary hole, quadrupling the Nation's 
debt in 12 years. So our economy sank; our society became considerably 
more divided; and predictably, public confidence in our democratic 
Government collapsed.
    That's why, when I ran in 1992, I said that it would be necessary to 
change our party, change our national leadership, and change our Nation. 
Al Gore and I believed that we had to find a new way, something now 
popularly called around the world, ``a third way,'' a way back to 
enduring values, a way beyond a Government profoundly indifferent to 
people's problems, a way forward to meet the challenges of today and 
tomorrow.
    We committed to reinvent Government so it could function as it does 
best in an information society, as a catalyst, a partner to the private 
sector in creating opportunity, jobs, and hope and providing our 
citizens with the tools they need to make the most of their own lives. 
That, too, of course, is a principle as old as our Republic, opportunity 
for all.
    And whether we're talking about the information age, the industrial 
age, or the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, economic growth and 
opportunity have always gone hand in hand. That's why we set out to 
build an economic strategy that would work for this time, rooted in 
fiscal discipline, investment in our people and our future, and 
expanding our economic ties with the rest of the world. Well, lucky for 
us, or I wouldn't be here talking today, it's worked out pretty well.
    We've gone from record deficits to record surpluses. Our economy has 
created 22 million jobs. We're in the midst of the longest economic 
expansion in history. But in the progressive tradition, to use President 
Kennedy's words, the rising economy is lifting all boats. The Census 
Bureau reports that in the last year, typical household income rose to 
the highest level ever recorded, breaking $40,000 for the first time--up 
since 1993 by $6,300, after inflation. The poverty rate has fallen to 
11.8 percent, the lowest in 20 years. Senior poverty is below 10 percent 
for the first time ever. Child poverty dropped by the largest amount 
since 1966. Hispanic and African-American poverty are the lowest since 
separate statistics have been kept. Since 1993, 7 million Americans have 
moved out of poverty, over 2 million last year alone.
    Now, a century ago, economic growth was generated by large 
industrial organizations, popularly called the trust then. Today, 
economic growth is largely generated by big ideas, which is why there 
are so many young people like you making a fortune in dot-com companies.
    The antitrust provisions and worker provisions that were developed 
in the Progressive Era to make the economy work and to give more people 
a chance to share in it still matters today. And they have been built 
on, modified, and changed, but they still matter today. But today we 
need even more focus on boosting ideas and innovation, creating the 
conditions for prosperity, and again, giving everybody the tools they 
need to succeed in a very different and, in some ways, much less 
organized world.
    You can see our efforts there, just for example in the 
Telecommunications Act of 1996, where the Vice President and I fought 
for the E-rate so that the poorest schools and hospitals and libraries 
could all afford to be hooked into the Internet and where we fought for 
a framework that favored competition from new companies over giving all 
the business of the new information economy to existing big enterprises. 
Again, it's worked reasonably well. There are hundreds of thousands of 
new jobs, thousands of new companies out there, and it's an example of 
how we tried to change the laws and the framework to meet what was best 
for opportunity for the largest number of Americans, and to give all of 
our people, especially our young people, the tools they need to take 
advantage of the age in which we live.
    So, in that sense, the nature of opportunity, a constant value, is 
changing. At the time our Nation was founded, opportunity most of all 
meant the freedom to carve a farm and an existence out of the forest 
frontier. In the industrial age, the progressives saw that it meant 
something different. It meant a high school education, a vocational 
training, preserving competition, protecting American workers from 
abuses,

[[Page 2041]]

and keeping children out of the workplace when appropriate.
    Today it means mastering new tools and technologies, being able to 
think broadly, adjust quickly, and being able to keep learning for a 
lifetime. This morning, for example, at the White House, I met with 
House and Senate Democrats to push the Congress again to adopt our 
educational proposals, because I think they are more than ever before at 
the core of the concept of opportunity and at the core of our ability to 
keep changing and building an ever more progressive society.
    Even though we balanced the budget these last 8 years and run a 
surplus and we've eliminated hundreds of programs, we've also doubled 
investment in education and training. More than 10 million Americans 
this year will take advantage of the HOPE scholarship and lifelong-
learning tax credit. We reorganized the student loan program to save 
students $8 billion in student loan repayments since 1993. We raised the 
minimum wage, an old tool that I think is still very important in new 
times, and I hope we can raise it again before the Congress goes home.
    But we took a new tool, the earned-income tax credit, and doubled it 
so that it's helping this year alone 15 million families to work their 
way into the middle class. We adopted an empowerment zone program that 
the Vice President ran so ably, which has 
enabled thousands of jobs to be created in communities that otherwise 
would have been totally left behind in this economic recovery because 
they were remote or poor, because they didn't have people with a lot of 
skills that were well-suited to the trends of the times.
    We created community development financial institutions to get 
capital to people who couldn't go into a normal bank and produce a 
record that would generate a loan. We also did as much as we could to 
try to help people move from welfare to work and to take maximum 
advantage of the new economy by investing in education, child care, and 
transportation, recognizing that we live in a place where very often the 
pool of available workers is here, usually in a city, and the pool of 
available jobs at their skill level is here, usually in the suburbs, 
usually with no public transport in between.
    To try to help people balance work and family, the United States 
began to join what most other industrial nations have been doing for 
years, by adopting the family and medical leave law, which now over 20 
million Americans have used to take some time off when a baby is born or 
when a family member is sick without losing their job.
    And I just predict to you, all of you young people out here, this 
will be one of the big debates over the next decade, because we're the 
best country in the world at keeping the hassles of starting a business 
down, providing capital to start businesses, providing an environment in 
which people can flourish, but we lag way behind a lot of other nations 
in the progressive tradition in simply saying that the most important 
work of any society is raising children and that work will be more 
productive if people who are working who have kids don't have to worry 
about the welfare of their children.
    That's why we have to do more for child care. That's why we should 
expand family leave. That's why we should work more on flexible leave. 
When I became President, only 3 million people were making a living 
primarily in their own home. When I ran for reelection, 20 million 
people were making a living primarily in their own home. By the time you 
vote in November for the first President of the 21st century, we may be 
up to 30 million people. I don't have the latest figures, but it's 
stunning.
    Part of the reason is technology makes it possible; the Internet 
makes it possible. But part of the reason is we haven't done as much as 
we should have to help people succeed at society's enduring work, 
raising children, and all the new work we're doing and the fact that 
more people than ever want to work or have to work and ought to be able 
to do so.
    I am very glad that more and more Americans are sharing in our 
prosperity. But the other thing I want to say is that still a lot of 
folks have been left behind. Most of them live in inner cities or small 
rural towns or on or around Native American reservations. And one of the 
big challenges now to sort of perfect this progressive movement is to 
figure out how to bring those people into the circle of opportunity.
    I hope very much that, before I leave office, the Congress will pass 
the new markets initiative that I worked on with the Speaker of the 
House in a bipartisan fashion. I won't go through all the details, but 
essentially what it says is we ought to give wealthy Americans with 
money the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America we provide 
to invest in poor areas

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around the world, because we believe that we can do this. And we ought 
to put the infrastructure there.
    For those of you who have never been on an American Indian 
reservation, let me tell you, just for example, at the Pine Ridge 
Reservation in South Dakota, one of the most historic parts of American 
history, the home of the Lakota Sioux, who were the tribe led by an 
Indian chief named Crazy Horse that dispatched General Custer in the 
late 19th century--the unemployment rate is 73 percent.
    I was at Shiprock in northern New Mexico, one of the most beautiful 
places in our country, the other day at the Navaho Reservation, where 
the unemployment rate is over 50 percent; 70 percent of the people don't 
have homes--telephones in their homes. I was introduced by a young woman 
who won a contest, an academic contest at her school, the prize was a 
computer, and she couldn't log onto the Internet because there was not a 
phone line in her home. In our country, at our level of wealth, that is 
unconscionable. And this cannot rightly be called a full Progressive Era 
until we have addressed these challenges.
    We still have to be constantly, restlessly searching for ways to 
expand the circle of opportunity. This, too, is a principle rooted 
firmly in the Progressive Era but also in our Nation's founding. 
Remember what the Framers said: They were committed to forming ``a more 
perfect Union.'' They never said the Union would be perfect, that we 
would ever reach complete harmony in our living with our ideals, but 
that we had a constant, endless lifetime obligation to perfect the 
Union.
    And if I could leave any of you with a thought that I hope you will 
have in your mind as you, as citizens, go to the polls, and then as you, 
as citizens, build your own lives, it is that we get a chance like we've 
got today maybe once every 50 years, maybe even more seldom, where we 
have both prosperity, social progress, coupled with national self-
confidence and the absence of serious crisis at home or threat abroad, 
to really imagine the future we would like to build and then go about 
building it. And in my view, one of the most important things we have 
achieved is not any of these specific things people always talk about 
but just giving you the chance to build the future of your dreams. And I 
hope that decision will be made consistent with the values, the vision, 
and the record of the Progressive Era in America.
    Theodore Roosevelt said, ``The people have emphatically expressed 
their desire that our principles be kept substantially unchanged, 
although, of course, applied in a progressive spirit to meet changing 
conditions.'' That's what you have to do.
    I just want to make one other point that I think is of equal 
importance. I believe that in order to preserve a new Progressive Era, 
we must go much further than we have in our own national consciousness 
in understanding that our continued prosperity, as well as our security, 
requires us to continue to be involved in the world, to lead in the 
world, and to cooperate in the world.
    Almost a century ago, Woodrow Wilson described the vision of 
collective peacekeeping, global security, the rights of nations against 
the backdrop of the looming threat, and then the fact, of a brutal 
modern, all-consuming war, a war that is difficult for young people to 
imagine. In one European battle in World War I, 900,000 people were 
lost, because they had modern technology and they were stuck in old 
patterns of fighting--digging trenches and shooting each other and 
moving up, line after line after line, that might have worked fine if 
they'd had bows and arrows or even Civil War era rifles and cannons but 
was an absolute disaster when modern technology was married to old 
ideas--both geopolitical ideas, which led to the war, and the ideas of 
military strategy with which it was carried out. You should remember 
that today and try to make sure that the ideas you have are equal to the 
technology and the realities of modern life.
    When Woodrow Wilson painted this idealistic vision few of his fellow 
countrymen and women listened. A lot of people thought he was an 
idealist who'd passed his prime. And after he was no longer on the scene 
and the reaction prevailed, as it always does after periods of 
progressivism, Professor Schlesinger has told us in his writings on the 
cycles of history, we had to learn in a very hard way that America could 
not safely or responsibly withdraw from the world.
    Now we've had two cold wars and a long and bitter--two World Wars--
excuse me--and a long and bitter cold war. We live in a time when new 
democracies are emerging around the world. When you walk out of here, if 
you turn

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on CNN, you'll see the emergence--I hope--in Serbia, with a lot of young 
people like you fighting for the future you take for granted. More 
people live under free governments of their own choosing today than ever 
before. For the first time in history, more than half of the people on 
this planet live under governments of their own choosing, throwing off 
the yoke of oppression. Many of them, but not all, are also enjoying 
newfound prosperity.
    We are closer than ever to redeeming the vision of Woodrow Wilson, 
of reaching his dream of a world full of free markets, free elections, 
and free peoples working together. But we're still not there. And there 
are a lot of obstacles in the way, not least of which is the continuing 
bedrock of reluctance in our own society to pay our fair share and do 
our fair part, on the part of some conservatives, and on the part of 
some progressives who embrace the change that is the global economy and 
shape it, instead of denying it and pretending that as if we were 
Luddites that we can make it go away.
    And you have to think about that. What does it mean to you what 
Wilson said and what Roosevelt said. They understood at the start of 
what has been called the American Century, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry 
Truman understood when they created the U.N. and NATO and the Breton 
Woods institutions, that the United States simply cannot be partly in 
the world, dipping in when it suits our purpose, hunkering down when it 
doesn't--that we can't relate to our friends in fits and starts; we 
can't lead just when it suits us and then tell people we're too busy 
when it doesn't.
    We have not made that decision yet. You can see it in the 
ambivalence the Congress has felt when they supported me on NAFTA and 
the World Trade Organization and bringing China into the WTO and when 
they wouldn't go along with giving me the same trade authority that 
Presidents have had for nearly 30 years now, to negotiate comprehensive 
trade agreements with other countries, and have them voted up or down. 
You can see it in the fact that a strong conservative bloc in the Senate 
and in the House have actually spent 8 years demanding--8 years--the 
most prosperous years in our country's history, saying that the most 
important thing to do at the U.N. is to lower America's share of 
peacekeeping and lower our percentage of the total dues of the United 
Nations. You can see it in the breathtaking, and I think horribly 
shortsighted defeat in the U.S. Senate of the Comprehensive Test Ban 
Treaty, the first major treaty to be defeated since the Senate defeated 
Woodrow Wilson with the League of Nations Treaty. I must say, for my 
country's sake, I certainly hope it doesn't have a life-risk 
consequence, and I don't think it will, if the American people decide 
that these matters are important.
    We live in a time when people have lots of opinions on lots of 
things. They're absolutely flooded with information. So if you took a 
survey in America and you said, ``Should America pay its fair share to 
the U.N.; should America responsibly participate in peacekeeping, 
because other people share the load; should we have the Comprehensive 
Test Ban Treaty and have a cooperative approach to reducing the nuclear 
threats and other threats of weapons of mass destruction in the 
future?'' you'd get big majorities that would say yes. But most 
Americans don't understand how important this is and what a significant 
piece it is of building a new era of progress. So it doesn't tend to be 
a voting issue.
    And whenever important new things are not voting issues in a free 
society, then entrenched, old interests tend to prevail, and we get in 
trouble. So I ask you all to think about that. The challenges of this 
new century are far more diverse than our predecessors could have 
foreseen. But all the good things that we have don't make all the bad 
problems go away.
    Information technology will not resolve all conflicts between 
nations. Indeed, it creates some new challenges. It enables, for 
example, networks of terrorists, narcotraffickers, international 
criminals to communicate with each other with greater speed, clarity, 
and often with less chance of being caught.
    New technology allows people to imagine weapons of mass destruction 
that are made smaller, just like computers, encased in small plastic 
containers that don't show up on airport metal detectors, that present 
new threats in the ongoing historical battle between the organized 
forces of destruction and the organized, and sometimes not so well-
organized, forces of civilization.
    So, for all the good things that are happening, we can't make all 
the problems go away. Therefore, the expansion of global commerce, the 
growth of democracy, the rise of other centers

[[Page 2044]]

of economic activity does not diminish our responsibility to lead. It 
heightens it, and it requires that we do so in a more cooperative 
fashion.
    As American interests evolve, I believe we can stay rooted to the 
principles of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. I think we stay 
true to those principles when we change. For example, I think we're 
being true to the principles of the Progressive Era when we provide debt 
relief to the world's poorest countries. It's unconscionable that these 
countries are making interest payments that are often half or more of 
their annual Government budget, instead of spending the money on 
education and health care and the development of their nation. And they 
can't pay the money back to us anyway. Why are we doing this? It doesn't 
make any sense.
    So we have a new idea. Don't just give uncritical debt relief. Give 
debt relief to countries that can demonstrate they're not putting the 
money in Swiss bank accounts or building military or other instruments 
of oppression but only putting the money into education, health care, 
and responsible development. That is, in my judgment, a critical 
component of progressivism in a global age, just as I think it's 
important to fight maladies like AIDS, TB, and malaria. Those three 
things claim one fourth of the lives that are lost in the world every 
year today. One quarter of all the people who will die in the year 2000 
will die of AIDS, TB, or malaria. And we have it within our power to do 
something about it and also to lead the world toward the development of 
an AIDS vaccine and to make the drugs more widely available and to do 
more about TB and malaria. We ought to do that.
    In an interdependent world, we'll be better off if people who are 
plagued have their plagues alleviated. We ought to do more, in my 
judgment, to support poor villagers in remote countries by giving them 
loans so they can start businesses and build a self-sustaining life, to 
reinforce democracy, and to build from the grassroots up, countries that 
can be good partners with us in the future. We ought to do more to 
insist that a more open economy also be a more fair one or, in the 
common parlance, to put a human face on the global economy.
    We also stay true to the vision of Wilson and Roosevelt when we do 
our part to keep the peace and to support brave people struggling for 
the quiet miracle of a normal life, whether they're in the Middle East, 
Northern Ireland, in a small place like East Timor, a long way from 
here, in a poor country like Haiti or a country plagued by 
narcotraffickers and civil war like Colombia, and especially in the 
Balkans, where the First World War began. There especially, the fight 
for freedom should still be our own.
    Freedom has made steady advances in Bosnia and Croatia and Romania 
and Bulgaria and, today, as I said earlier, in Serbia, where a decade 
ago the forces of destruction began their march across the Balkans. Now 
the march of freedom is gaining new ground. Yesterday, the Serbian 
police went into the coal mines and refused to fire on the coal miners. 
Today, in the Parliament building, there are, as I said, thousands of 
young people, like you, and not so young people, like me, standing up 
there, saying they want their country back. They want to be free. They 
voted, and they want their vote respected.
    The people of Serbia have spoken with their ballot; they have spoken 
on the street. I hope the hour is near when their voices will be heard 
and we can welcome them to democracy, to Europe, to the world's 
communities. When they do, we will move as quickly as possible to lift 
the sanctions and build the kind of responsible partnership that the 
people there deserve.
    We have made the world, I believe, more safe against force and 
selfish aggression. But we know, like Roosevelt and Wilson before us, 
that no peace is lasting unless it is backed by the consistent, 
dedicated leadership of nations that have the wealth, size, and power to 
do the right thing. Here in America and in more and more nations around 
the world, progressive parties are in power. Every now and then, we all 
get together and have dinner and try to help each other. And we try to 
figure out how to keep this going, how to keep up the fight for reform, 
for justice, for opportunity for all, for freedom.
    I believe that the continuation of this legacy in our time depends 
as much as anything else on whether we actually believe in our common 
humanity and the primary importance of acting on our increasing 
interdependence.
    There's a fascinating book that's been published sometime in the 
last year, I think, by Robert Wright, called ``Non Zero.'' Some of you 
have perhaps read it. The title refers to game

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theory. A zero-sum game is one that in order for me to win, you have to 
lose. A game like the Presidential election. A non-zero-sum game is one 
where in order for me to win, you have to win, too. And Wright attempts 
to make a historical argument through all the tragedies, travesties, 
brutalities of human history, including the gross abuses of science and 
medicine under the Nazis and the gross abuses of organization under 
totalitarian regimes of the 20th century--attempts to prove Martin 
Luther King's moral assertion that the arc of history is long, but it 
bends towards justice, by arguing that, we are consistently growing more 
interdependent; and that the more interdependent we become, the more we 
are forced to look for solutions in which in order for me to win, you 
have to win, too--non-zero-sum solutions.
    The whole idea of the Progressive Era was that everybody should be 
treated with dignity; everybody deserves certain minimal things in life; 
that the power of government should be arrayed against private power, so 
that individual people who are equal under the law, all had at least a 
fair chance at life. In this era, I often say, in my sort of Arkansas 
way, that everybody counts; everybody ought to have a chance; and we all 
do better when we work together. That's what I believe.
    That, I think, is an enduring truth of the American dream, going 
back to the Founders, going back to all the voluntary societies that de 
Toqueville chronicled so eloquently, almost 200 years ago. In this time, 
we can have a progressive era that outlasts the one you came here to 
study, if we are faithful to its values, if we understand we have to 
change even more rapidly and perhaps even more profoundly than they did, 
and if we acknowledge that a precondition of true independence, in the 
old-fashioned American way in this very new age, is having some humility 
and compassion and understanding of our interdependence, which is 
founded on an acknowledgement, an acceptance, a celebration of our 
common humanity.
    That, after all, is what led to the Declaration of Independence and 
the Constitution. It's what led Abraham Lincoln to lay down his life to 
hold the country together. And it's what gave us the Progressive Era, 
the sense that we all matter, that we were all connected, and that we 
were all entitled, each in our own way, to have a chance to play a part 
in the endless effort to create ``a more perfect Union.''
    The progressives have been important to America. They have redefined 
the idea of a nation in ways that were sorely needed. But you are in the 
middle of what could be the longest and most significant Progressive Era 
in American history. I ask you to study the one that happened before but 
to fully live the one that is unfolding before your eyes.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 3:23 p.m. in Richardson Auditorium at 
Princeton University. In his remarks, he referred to Harold Shapiro, 
president, Princeton University; Michael Rothschild, dean, and Ruth 
Miller, assistant dean, Woodrow Wilson School; Sean Wilentz, director, 
Program in American Studies, and Katharine Strong Gilbert, president, 
American Whig-Cliosophic Society, who presented the President with the 
James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service; and historian 
Arthur Schlesinger. The conference was entitled ``The Progressive 
Tradition: Politics, Culture, and History.''