Give Me Liberty

XV

Ten years ago I wrote: The test comes now.

Americans were singing, “Happy Days are here again!” Dorothy Thompson published I Saw Hitler, reporting that the little man was a false alarm because his illogical program could not influence the logical German mind, and to me she exclaimed exultantly, “Rose! we’re actually seeing the end of capitalism!” American capitalists quickly made her America’s favorite oracle.

From the parrot-intellectuals came a din, “Everything’s changed now, there’s no more free land,” and “Freedom—for what? Freedom to starve?”

A farmer in Kansas looked across his dusty fields, five years barren, and said to me slowly, “People pull through hard times. Back in the ’90’s I shoveled wheat over to keep the weevils out, shoveled forty bushels over with a hand shovel, once a week all winter, and hauled it to town in the spring, sixteen miles through the mud in a lumber wagon, and sold if for forty cents a bushel. People pull through. People make a country. What I can’t understand is, how can anybody figure now that the government can support us, when we support the government.”

In a lonely country schoolhouse, a sleek politician labored to arouse the shabby audience. “So that’s what we’ve done for you farmers. We went down to Washington for you folks and we’ve brought you back a Ford. This time we’re going down there and we’re going to get you a Cadillac!” Obstinate silence clamped down on the room. To me the orator said privately, “These dumb hicks! We’ve got to teach ’em with a club.”

Mr. Henry Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture, announced that farmers must be compelled to obey orders. “Horse and buggy” became a term of contempt, and now and then, in filling stations or truckers’ all-night lunchrooms, you heard, “Well, that’s so, the Constitution’s getting pretty old now, maybe it’s time to have something new.” Double, triple, and Jumbo cones for a nickel; cigarettes appeared in cellophane, and under the summer stars young voices sang, “Till I grow too old to dream, your name will live in my heart.”

In Des Moines, I listened while eight influential businessmen discussed facts. Congress had abdicated. The Federal executive power, by decree, was looting the banks; bankers were silent. Political power, consolidated and unrestrained, was wrecking the American political structure. Civil law no longer protected human rights. They said, “There is no refuge. We had the only protection for human rights on earth, and it is gone. The world will go back to the Dark Ages.”

I said, “How can you men know this, and do nothing? Is this possible? You know that our country is being destroyed, and you do nothing to save it? You actually understand that your own property, your liberty, your lives, are in danger, and you do nothing?”

“That’s it,” they said.

It was a nightmare. When I found anyone who understood the situation as I did, he had no hope, and pessimism itself is not American. Americans hold the truths that all men are born equal and endowed by the Creator with inalienable liberty. Freedom is the nature of man; every person is self-controlling and himself responsible for his thoughts, his speech, his acts. That is a fact; we know it; Americans established this Republic upon that fact. And to doubt that knowledge of any fact must dispel ignorance of that fact is to deny the plain reality of all human experience. To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.

My friends said, “There’s no use, nothing can be done. Americans don’t want liberty any more.”

The answer to that is, “Do you? What are YOU doing to defend your liberty?”

They relied wearily, as Europeans do, “An individual is nothing. You can’t resist history.”

“Resist history?” I said. “You and I make history. History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past. Americans make history, and America is not dead. There is the farmer in Kansas.”

“And what is he voting for?” they retorted.

That was a shallow view. The issue is not one of party politics. The issue at stake is the survival of American constitutional law, the American political structure. This is a real political issue, and the major political parties have not represented a real political issue since the 1860’s. These parties have not stood for opposite political principles; they have differed only about methods. For example: one has stood for higher tariffs; the other, for lower tariffs. They have not presented to voters the real political issue between tariffs and free trade.

Meanwhile, during half a century, reactionary influences from Europe have been shifting American thinking onto a basis of socialistic assumptions. In cities and states, both parties began to socialize America with imitations of the Kaiser’s Germany: social welfare laws, labor laws, wage-and-hour laws, citizens’ pension laws, and so-called public ownership.

Eleven years ago this creeping socialism sprang up armed with Federal power, and Americans—suddenly, it seemed—confronted for the first time in their lives a real political question: the choice between American individualism and European national socialism.

Will an American defend the Constitutional law that divides, restricts, limits and weakens political-police power, and thus protects every citizen’s personal freedom, his human rights, his exercise of those rights in a free, productive, capitalist economy and a free society?

This is the choice that every American must make. There is no escape from this choice; the present situation puts it before us and requires a decision.

Every American is living today in the first political crisis he has ever known, and upon his decision and his action depend his right to own property, his exercise of his natural freedom, and the safety of his own life. For nothing whatever but the constitutional law, the political structure, of these United States protects any American from arbitrary seizure of his property and his person, from the Gestapo and the Storm Troops, from the concentration camp, the torture chamber, the revolver at the back of his neck in a cellar. I am not an alarmist; that is plain fact.

The major political parties do not yet represent this political issue.

In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.

The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle. It does not stand for American individualism. Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics.

Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles therefore have no means of peaceful political action. A vote for the New Deal approves national socialism, but a vote for the Republican Party does not repudiate national socialism.

Defeating the New Deal at the polls might possibly check our country’s back-sliding, but it is not enough to set America on its forward way again. The collectivist state was not invented in 1932. The New Deal’s political principle comes from Plato through the Dark and Middle Ages to various developments, by Machiavelli, Rousseau, Fourier, Hegel—who defines freedom as “submission to The State.”

Karl Marx adopted this ancient lie from Hegel, and founded the First Socialist International upon it. Marx wanted Hegel’s “freedom” for “the working classes.” Bismarck took the idea from Hegel and Marx, used it to crush the German liberals, and founded upon it his Socialpolitik, which is now called Social Security here.

Lenin agreed with Marx in principle, but not in method. In 1903, at a conference in London, Lenin split the Second Socialist International on a question of method, and thus began the conflict between factions of collectivists which became warfare between communists and fascists. Europeans and Asiatics from the Volga to the Mediterranean are killing each other, not for opposing principles of liberty and tyranny, but for different methods of using the same principle of tyranny.

After crushing the attempt to establish human rights in Germany, Bismarck built the centralized, socialized, despotic German State, and the world’s statesmen and reactionary thinkers fervently admired it. Forty years ago, America’s parrot-intellectuals were ceaselessly repeating, “Germany is fifty years ahead of us in social legislation.”

Blind to America and worshipping Europe, these reactionary pseudo-thinkers shifted American thought into reverse, in an effort to catch up with the Kaiser’s Germany. They called it “liberal” to suppress liberty; “progressive” to stop the free initiative that is the source of all human progress; “economic freedom,” to obstruct all freedom, and “economic equality” to make men slaves.

They taught my generation that the American Revolution was only a war that ended in 1782. We never heard that these United States are a political structure unique in all history, built upon a natural fact never before used as a political principle: the fact that individual persons are naturally free, self-controlling and responsible.

In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser’s Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World’s reaction against the new, the American, principle of individual liberty and human rights. American leaders of thought, whom we respected, told us that the Communist reaction was the world revolution.

That was the lie that deceived us. Americans are world-revolutionists. These United States stand for a political principle that must conquer and change the whole world, because it is true. Three generations of Americans have been creating a new world, the modern world. It is our tradition, our heritage, the unconscious impulse of our lives, to destroy the old, to create the new. Our ignorance betrayed us; we believed labels. We wanted the ancient thing that was marked “New.”

The New Deal took root twenty-five years ago in American colleges and in the New York slums where, in danger of police violence, we listened to such ignorant idealists as Jack Reed. We dreamed that we were world-revolutionists. We were reactionaries, undermining the real world revolution at its source, in our own country.

Since 1933, that reaction has gone fast and far. (Though even yet, the United States have not caught up with Germany “in social legislation.” Today, Federal administrative agencies have nearly destroyed those divisions of the political power which alone protect the property, liberty and lives of American citizens. Administrative political-police power cannot be divided, it cannot even be subject to civil law, because a state that dictates men’s action in producing and distributing goods must have undivided and absolute power.

Congress can no longer be the law-maker, when many chiefs of departments and bureaus are daily issuing orders which the police enforce as if they were laws.

The States are invaded by swarms of Federal tax collectors and Federal agents dictating to citizens and gnawing away the last powers of the States, and the civil rights of the citizen must vanish as the self-ruling power of his community and his State is usurped by a centralized National power.

Today, American farmers are compressed into a peasant class, subject to orders and punishments decreed by a ruling class. Today, in America, there is a working class; by order of July 1, 1944, fifty-eight million Americans are tied to the assembly lines as serfs in the Middle Ages were tied to the land. Now, at this moment, no American may work, nor stop working, nor choose his work nor his hours of work nor his wages in any industry; nor make nor sell nor buy nor consume the necessities of human life, without some autocrat’s permission.

But this is an emergency. Indeed, it is. It is an emergency fifty years old, an emergency that has been acute since 1933, and it grows more dangerous hourly. An election will not end it, nor will victory in this world war. For here and in England, in all Europe and Asia, leading statesmen assume that this suppression of liberty is good for mankind, and that these new forms of an old tyranny are here to stay. The question they discuss is: How shall they extend these so-called “controls” to the whole world?

They assume that the modern world will continue to exist. But this modern world, modern civilization, does exist only where men have been, for a short two centuries, free from these ancient state tyrannies, called controls. Free thought, free speech, free action, and freehold property are the source of the modern world. It cannot exist without them. Its existence depends upon abolishing these reactionary state controls and destroying the socialist State.

The task before Americans is to end these police-controls of peaceful, productive American citizens, to repeal all the reactionary legislation and rescind the Executive orders that established the national socialist regime, to abolish the Federal corporations, departments, bureaus and agencies that dictate and enforce these State controls, to return three million Federal tax-eaters to useful, tax-paying work, to release American farmers from Bismarck’s socialization and to lift from American industrial workers the burden of Bismarck’s Socialpolitik, called here “Social Security,” and to require men in public office to recognize again every American’s natural right, as a free person, to own and sow and reap his own land, to manage and to profit or lose by his own business enterprise, to own and to save or spend his own money, to join or not to join a labor union, to sign or not to sign a contract, to choose his own work and to do his own bargaining for wages earned or paid, either individually or as a member of any group of other free men.

No politician, yet, has asked American voters to give him the power to strip any State of the powers it has usurped from its citizens, nor to strip the Federal Government of the powers it has usurped from the States; to restore the rights of the citizens, the rights and powers of the States, and the political structure of this Union of States; nor to add to the original list of restrictions upon political power—the list known as the Bill of Rights—further restrictions that will adequately protect the property, liberty and lives of persons living in the modern world and make the United States again the world-champion of human rights and the leader of the world-liberating revolution.

The Americans who already are undertaking this task, and will do it, are individuals—the individual who is called “nothing” and patronized as “the little man” in Germany, and as “the common man” here, the individual who makes and re-makes the world.

They are a printer in Texas, who printed a letter that twenty million Americans have read, though it appeared in no newspaper; the farmer in Nebraska who refused to pay a fine for raising wheat and went to jail “for the principle”; the businessmen who signed the Declaration of Fifty Citizens of Wichita; the farmers in New Jersey who refuse to permit Federal agents to grade New Jersey eggs and to lower their own standards of quality; the employer in Ohio who spends his fortune and stakes the existence of his business in resistance to the Federal tyranny that would force him to reduce the wages he pays; the hundreds of thousands of men and women in all these states who are aroused and acting in defense of their rights.

A half-century of back-sliding makes our country less than it might have been. But a world revolution cannot be won without encountering a reaction against it. This last decade of reactionary national socialism hampers all Americans now. Yet in the test of war, this most-individualistic, still least-socialized people supports or defeats the whole Old World. As Stalin said at Teheran, American capitalist production is winning this world war. The men unprepared and untrained for war have the economic and military energy that defeats in war the most socialized of all peoples, well trained for war by compulsory military service.

Already, in all these States, Americans are uniting in groups to defend freedom in peace. These groups of free individuals, organizing and acting for a mutual purpose, are the instruments of individualism. Americans are skilled in their use. Our free society is an active complex of innumerable groups, acting mutually for innumerable purposes—Rotary, Lions, Elks, Ladies’ Aids, all churches, Parent-Teacher Associations, women’s clubs, D.A.R., Daughters of the Confederacy, Daughters of 1812, Chambers of Commerce, Librarians’ Associations—the list is endless. Now Americans are uniting in groups to stand for liberty and human rights. Already an American who takes that stand in his community, his business, his work, finds that he is not alone.

Individual Americans are ending the reactionary period here. Americans are thinking politically again, as they have not thought for eighty years, and they have not forgotten that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. They are answering the question I should have known better than to ask, ten years ago. They are answering it now in Europe and Asia, and tomorrow they will answer it at home. The answer is: Yes, individualism has the strength to resist all attacks.

1 “The Presidential campaign is at that quiet moment after the whistle blows and before the ball goes zooming down the field.”—Raymond Moley in News-Week, September 11, 1944.

2 I take this definition from Ludwig von Mises’ book, “Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War.” Yale University Press.

• 1The two major parties have contended only for public office. American politics, so-called, has been a professional sport, a matter of organization, team-play, and getting votes. Elections have been sporting events, as baseball games are; and Americans, accurately, have regarded them as sport.
• 2Or will he permit the political structure of these United States to be replaced by a socialist state, with its centralized, unrestricted police power regimenting individuals into classes, suppressing individual liberty, sacrificing human rights to an imagined “common good,” and substituting for civil laws the edicts, or “directives,” once accurately called tyranny and now called administrative law?