Give Me Liberty

IX

For years now, I have been looking at America. I had spent more than thirty years in my own country, before; I had traveled over it everywhere and had lived in many of its States, but I had never seen it. Americans should look at America. Look at this vast, infinitely various, completely unstandardized, complex, subtle, passionate, strong, weak, beautiful, inorganic and intensely vital land.

How could we be so bemused by books and by the desire of our own minds to make a pattern, as to apply to these United States the ideology of Europe?

With some rough approximation to fact, Europeans can think in terms of Labor, Capital, System, and The State. One can speak of Labor in Paris, where the working class is rigidly distinct from other classes; in England, where their very speech, their clothing and their schooling set them apart; in Rome, where workingmen are proud to know that even a workingman’s ordained life serves Italy; and in Venice, where only the son of a gondolier has ever been permitted to become a gondolier.

Capitalist is a word of some meaning in those countries where, within a social framework only slightly shaken, men with money have climbed to those upper levels held yesterday by the aristocrat. There is a profit system where business has seeped into and replaced the feudal system. The State is a shorthand symbol for many facts where bureaucracies control a regimented social-economic order.

In America a man works, but he is not Labor. A hundred million men, working, are not Labor. They are a hundred million individuals with a hundred million backgrounds, characters, tastes, ambitions and degrees of ability. Each of them, amid the uncertainties, dangers, risks, opportunities and catastrophes of a free society, has been creating his own life and his own status as best he could.

An American raised wheat, but he was not The Wheatgrower. In every State of this union, men of every race and circumstance and mind, by every possible variety of method and with many varying needs and many ends in view, raise wheat. All of them together are not The Wheatgrower. Men raise cotton, men grow oranges, men plant soybeans; they are not Agriculture.

Agriculture, used as a word applied to human beings, means a class of men attached to the soil. There is no such class in America. Excepting only the old landed aristocracy of the South, which was already vanishing when Lincoln was born, there has never been such a class in this country. From the first, Americans were gamblers, speculators. They gambled in land when the gambling was good in land; they were never genuinely attached to the soil, to one bit of earth, these fields, this woodland, this stream, this sky, these changing seasons that became their own because they loved them and their life was in them. There is the European Peasant; there has never been the American Peasant.

An American farmed if he hoped to make money farming. He sold his land when he could sell it at a profit. He mortgaged it, if he thought he could buy more land on a rising market, or get into a good gamble in wheat, oil, mines, livestock or Wall Street. On a falling market, he got out from under if he could, and ran a filling station, sold automobiles, started a grocery store or a restaurant. His son might become anything from a Dillinger to a Henry Ford.

The Capitalist cannot be found; he does not exist. Men of many different minds and for many purposes, or by accident or luck or the skill of a pirate, created huge business and financial organizations and fought to make them bigger and to draw bigger profits from them. But here everything was fluid, changing and uncertain; nothing was static and secure. Here was no solidly established class, placed in a social order and holding lower classes steady like cows to be milked. To capture control over the American multitudes was not possible because no control existed to be captured.

As long as our form of government stands, there can be no such control. Every business and financial undertaking must serve the unpredictable multitudes of common men and swiftly change to serve their changing demands and desires, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, or rivals will rise from those multitudes and destroy it.

Ownership must constantly be fought for and defended, and in this very struggle ownership of the great corporations has melted away; it has become so scattered and diffused through the multitudes that no one can say where it begins or ends, and the ultimate destination of profits from industry, if there be one, cannot be discovered.

Economic interests intermingle, the debtor is also the creditor, the producer is the consumer, the insurance company raises wheat, the farmer is selling short on the Board of Trade. Everything meets itself coming and going; no one can understand it, and every picture made neat and orderly against this chaos is false.

A few thousand men in this struggle and confusion apparently possess enormous sums of money. But look for this money and it is not there; it is not solid actuality; it is not the tangible property, unmortgaged and secure, of a rentier class, nor the Junker’s hold on vast stretches of earth and many villages. It is dynamic power pouring through business and industry, and like the power that drives a machine, if it is stopped it vanishes.

These vast fortunes exist only as dynamic power, and this power, too, must serve the multitudes. American wealth is innumerable streams of power, fed by small sources and great ones, flowing through the mechanisms that produce the vast quantities of goods consumed by the multitudes, and the men who are called the owners can hardly be said even to control the wealth that stands recorded as theirs, for its very existence depends upon satisfying chaotic wants and pleasing unpredictable tastes. Fortunes that were making good hairpins vanished when American women cut their hair.

Some thousands of men in America directed fragments of economic power as best they could, and these men drew out of the streams of this dynamic power as much tangible wealth as they and their families could consume. Many of them drew out huge sums, beyond any man’s power to consume, and used these sums to build libraries, hospitals, museums, or for unique and inestimable service to music, science, public health.

Many of them spent stupidly and wastefully as much as can possibly be spent in the most luxurious and decadent manners of living, and this spectacle is infuriating. Many a time when my bills and my debts have been piling up and my most frantic efforts have failed to dig a dollar or any hope out of this chaos, so that the nights were harder to live through that the desperate days, I have thought of those jeweled women carelessly dripping handfuls of gold pieces on the tables at Monte Carlo, of those quite charming necklaces worth a hundred thousand dollars and the fur coats for only $25,000. Did I say infuriating? The word is mild.

I was once at heart a revolutionist, and you can tell me nothing about poverty, nothing about the suffering, the injustices, the hunger, the apparently needless cruelties that exist from coast to coast of this country. But you can tell me no longer that they are the result of a capitalist system, because there is no system here.

All these men who in various ways, for various purposes and with widely varying results to the welfare and happiness of others, struggle to direct American industry, are expensive. They are expensive in that they draw large amounts of actual money from the streams of productive power and pour these sums back into the streams again by spending them for their own individual purposes.

But if this chaos were replaced by a system, a social order so perfect that there would be no trace of selfishness in it, an order perfectly functioning for the sole purpose of serving the public good, these men must be replaced by a bureaucracy. And a bureaucracy is expensive, too.

The bureaucracy that is necessary to controlling in detail, and according to a plan devised by men possessing centralized economic power, all the processes of business, industry, finance and agriculture in a modern state is stupendously expensive.

Such a bureaucracy is costly not only in ever-increasing payrolls but in human energy. For it must take great and ever-increasing numbers of men from productive activity and set them to dreary work amid coils of red tape and masses of papers recording what other men have done and may perhaps be permitted to do, and ordered to do.

Also bureaucracies are stupid and sluggish impediments to the whole range of human activities, as anyone knows who has struggled to move under their clogging weight in Europe. Bureaucracies slow down, impede and postpone the realization of the multitude’s desires because they are not compelled, as in this American chaos business and industry were compelled, to serve those desires or perish.