Give Me Liberty

The telephone, the electric light, the silk stocking, fresh vegetables and fruits in winter, sanitary meat markets, the ice box, and the milk bottle, the gas range and the kerosene cookstove, ready-made clothes, the seamless sheet, wall paper the toothbrush, the leather shoe, moving pictures, ice cream, and a thousand other things to which Americans are so accustomed that we do not see them, all testify to such a distribution of wealth in this individualistic country as no other people have dreamed of enjoying.

Twenty-five years ago, the automobile was a rich man’s prerogative. It still is, everywhere but here. In America, the anarchy of uncontrolled individualistic selfishness has so distributed automobiles that in the worst misery of the 1930’s California was overwhelmed by scores of thousands of penniless families arriving in them, and hunger marchers did not march but traveled in trucks. And these people should have automobiles; that is precisely my point. They should have them, and individualism has somehow, without plan or any such definite purpose, seen to it that they got them.

Thirty years ago a majority of Americans bathed in the washtub on Saturday nights and lighted their way to bed with a kerosene lamp. The English are still renowned throughout the world for their extraordinary personal cleanliness, because in every English middle-class home or upper middle-class London hotel a bath can be had in a tin tub carried to the bedroom. Today our American intellectuals point indignantly to an America which has left more than two million farm houses without modern bathrooms or electric lights. Something, they say, must be done about this.

There must be more than two million American families who still use the washtub and the kerosene lamp. They should have plumbing and electricity. They should have automatic central heat, electric refrigeration, air-conditioning, television, and every other form of material wealth that may be imagined and created to serve them in the future.

There is still far too much economic inequality; the gap between rich and poor has not been sufficiently narrowed. Something certainly should be done to distribute wealth, to raise the general standard of living, to improve living conditions for the poor and to give everyone, particularly the rich, a more abundant life.

But that is precisely what this anarchy of individualism has been doing, increasingly doing for the brief time in modern history during which it has been operating. When I look as this unique American experiment which has barely begun, which has been progressing for hardly a century and a half, I think it can stand on its record.