'So Conceived and So Dedicated'

VOLUME 155

NUMBER 5

MAY 1935

BY WILLIAM F. RUSSELL

IN a recent publication Mr. Hoover states that the American people are faced by the ‘issue of human liberty.’ ‘The whole philosophy of individual liberty is under attack,’ he says. ‘In haste to bring under control the sweeping social forces unleashed by the political and economic dislocations of the World War, by the tremendous advances in productive technology during the last quarter century, by failure to march with a growing sense of justice, people and governments are blindly wounding, even destroying, those fundamental human liberties which have been the foundation and inspiration of progress since the Middle Ages. . . . Men and women have died . . . that the human spirit might be free ... at Plymouth Rock, at Lexington, at Valley Forge, at Yorktown, at New Orleans, at every step of the Western Frontier, at Appomattox, at San Juan Hill, in the Argonne.’

‘Liberty,’ continues Mr. Hoover, ‘is freedom to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear, to choose one’s own calling, to develop his talents, to win and keep a home sacred from intrusion, to rear children in ordered security, to earn, to spend, to save and accumulate property honestly.’

This is an expression of a political faith, and to-day ‘voices of discouragement join with voices of other political faiths to assert that an irreconcilable conflict has arisen in which liberty must be sacrificed on the altar of the Machine Age. . . . Once again the United States of America faces the test whether a “nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”’ Although he does not say so directly, Mr. Hoover implies that recent governmental measures have gone so far toward national regimentation that they violate the liberties of the American people, and hence are in conflict with the American tradition.

But Mr. Hoover is not the only critic of the New Deal. There are cannons to the right and cannons to the left, and they all volley and thunder. Some view the future through redcolored spectacles, and some through blue, and the administration turns the other cheek. The New Deal is too radical; the New Deal is too conservative. It has gone too far; it has not gone far enough. In the club car, in the locker room, and at the nineteenth hole there is one opinion; over the dinner pail there is another. To one group President Roosevelt is almost a communist; to the other, the epitome of capitalism.

Copyright 1935, hy The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

To illustrate the opposition of the left wing, I turn to the publications of a movement known as New America. The origin is given as Chicago. I know nothing of the organization, save that some of its directors are members of the Continental Committee on Technocracy. It has a Youth Section. Many of its statements are reminiscent of those of certain professors that I know. In its publications it has adopted the pamphleteering technique used by the Jacobin Clubs during the French Revolution.

At the outset the argument of this school of thought agrees with that of Mr. Hoover. ‘The American nation now stands facing the greatest crisis in its history.’ But there the similarity ceases. ‘Have you lost your job?’ New America asks. ‘Is your child through high school, through college, and now can’t get a job, or a decent kind of a job? Have you lost your savings? Has your mortgage been foreclosed? The economic machine has broken down. Millions have been deprived of security . . . they are losing their savings, their homes, their farms, the opportunity to educate their children.’ ‘We stand,’ it says, ‘confused and baffled . . . between disastrous economic and social breakdown on the one hand, and unheard-of economic and social possibilities on the other.’ The American people have had ‘their heritage taken away from them,’ and they are now being ‘denied their future’ by the profit system, which we are urged to destroy, and to inaugurate in its stead a new social order. ‘The change must be adequately prepared for, but it must be speedy and thorough.’ The goals, reminding one of those of Technocracy, are (1) to ‘adjust production to measured consumption requirements,’ (2) to ‘eliminate private ownership — [making] profit, rent, and interest both unnecessary and impossible,’ (3) to ‘reduce the time and energy spent in necessary economic pursuit to a minimum,’ and (4) to ‘end unemployment and crises; abolish poverty; enable maximum prevention of crime and disease, and stimulate the arts and sciences.’

‘New America stands for the continuous development of the social order in which there shall be no class divisions or distinctions and no discriminations on account of race or sex; in which all able-bodied persons participate in some necessary function of society; in which the principle of maximum and minimum income obtains.’ ‘New America springs from American needs — continues the American Revolutionary tradition and plans to realize the American dream of equalitarian social democracy.’

To Mr. Hoover the philosophy of ‘National Regimentation’ is ‘the very negation of American liberalism.’ To New America, unless ‘the profit system ... be replaced with a planned and democratically controlled social economy,’ we shall not have realized the American dream. Mr. Hoover would ‘recall our American heritage.’ New America, by drawing the ‘plans and blueprints of the new society,’ would restore the ‘ideals which are our American heritage.’

Here we find repeated reference to the same ideals, and at the same time plans for realizing them which are as far apart as the poles. Here we are confronted with diametrically opposed social philosophies which nevertheless appeal to the same justification in history. Is it simply oratory? Are both sides merely waving the flag? Surely we could not accuse Mr. Hoover of a false interpretation of American history; nor am I convinced that the New America pamphlets are written by ignorant men. Can it be possible that both are right?

II

If one were to ask the thinking American for the ideals of his country, the reply would include such statements as ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ ‘give me liberty or give me death,’ ‘our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain,’ ‘no taxation without representation,’ ‘all men are created free and equal,’ and ‘all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ Lincoln summed up American ideals when he said, ‘Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ Could liberty and equality as ideals require such diverse means for their realization? To examine this possibility it would be necessary to study the history and relation of the two ideals.

We could begin with the ideal of liberty among the ancients. We could follow the progress toward political liberty through Magna Charta, the Petition of Right, the Bill of Rights, and the Habeas Corpus Act. We could show the development of freedom of worship, thought, and speech; and the gradual realization of the possibility of liberating the powers of man from superstition, disease, and ignorance through the work of Roger and Francis Bacon, Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot. We could trace the extension of the idea of liberty to industry, agriculture, and commerce by following the physiocrats, Quesnay and Turgot, and later on Adam Smith, who developed the idea of laissez faire; and we should certainly assess the contributions of Condorcet, who not only advocated liberty in all its aspects, but in his report to the National Convention in 1792 revealed the role of education — universal, lay, public education — and even adult education as necessary to the achievement of liberty. These ideas were brought to America by some of the first settlers, who wanted liberty for themselves but not for others; and were sponsored in their broader conception by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, John Adams, and many more. It is interesting to trace the influence of English and French thought upon Washington, Hamilton, and De Witt Clinton, upon Madison, John Marshall, and Monroe. ‘ Sweet land of liberty ’ was no accident. The ‘land of the brave and the free’ did not ‘just grow.’ It was the culmination of the aspiration and the sacrifice of many generations.

Similarly, the ideal of equality has its roots deep in the past. There is the reference to the camel and the needle’s eye. Consider the account of the Peasants’ Revolt in England in 1381 and the following extract from a sermon which Froissart attributed to John Ball: —

A ye good people, the maters gothe nat well to passe in Englande, nor shall nat do tyll euery thyng be comon; and that there be no villayns nor gentylmen, but that we may be all vnyed toguyder, and that the lordes be no greatter maisters than we be. What haue be deserued, or why shulde we be kept thus in seruage? We be all come fro one father and one mother, Adam and Eue; whereby can they say or shewe that they be gretter lordes than we be? sauynge by that they cause vs to wyn and labour, for that they dispende; they ar clothed in veluet and chamlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with pore clothe; they haue their wynes, spyces and good breed, and we haue the drawyng out of the chaffe, and drinke water; they dwell in fayre houses, and we haue the payne and traueyle, ravne, and wynde in the feldes; and by that that cometh of our labours they kepe and maynteyne their estates.

John Ball, Wat Tyler, and Jack Straw gave their lives for equality, but the ideal went marching on. Sometimes it flamed into open revolt; more often it smouldered behind closed doors. John Locke gave it a great advance when he announced not only that the mind at birth was an empty tablet, but that in consequence all distinctions and discriminations were the result of what went on in the world. Men were unequal only because men themselves made them so. This was taken up by Helvetius and d’Holbach and by that most eloquent moulder of public opinion, Jean Jacques Rousseau. At the time when, in Europe, equality had so many champions, in America it had a home only on the frontier, and in the minds of a few leaders like Thomas Jefferson. Certainly it was not welcome among the planters of the South, the patroons, or among the holders of patents from the king.

III

Liberty and equality sound well together. Liberté and Égalité grace as an inscription many buildings in France. Lincoln coupled the two ideas in the Gettysburg Address. But they have never liked each other. Liberty and equality have always been locked in a struggle of life and death. Voltaire was caustic in his comments on Helvetius and Rousseau. Turgot ridiculed d’Holbach’s ideas. Hamilton, the exponent of liberty, and Jefferson, the advocate of equality, fought all their lives.

The French Revolution admirably illustrates the conflict. The National Assembly, first in control of the liberals, the believers in liberty, men like Mirabeau and Camille Desmoulins, drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to guarantee freedom of the person, freedom of worship, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press; and it tried to liberate commerce and industry, by legislating the government out of business. Then came the National Convention, and Marat and Robespierre with their passion for equality, which not only put the government back, but even guillotined the wealthy. ‘The deepest cause which made the French Revolution so disastrous to liberty,’ says Lord Acton, ‘was its theory of equality.’

The struggle between liberty and equality is equally apparent in our own history. Equality loomed large in 1776 and stood first in the Declaration of Independence. By 1787 it had waned, Jefferson was in France, and liberty was supreme in the Constitutional Convention. The Federalist papers, written by Hamilton, Jay, and Madison, in justifying the proposed constitution to the people, made not a single reference to equality.

If we were to paint the canvas with broad swift strokes, I should say that the equalitarians drafted the Declaration of Independence, and the Ordinance of 1785; the liberals drafted the Constitution, and held the power until the time of Andrew Jackson. The liberals founded the colleges and fostered the local control of schools, but it was the equalitarians who built up school funds, demanded state departments of education, and developed our system of public schools. It was workingmen’s societies and fraternal organizations that formed the support of Horace Mann, Gideon Hawley, and Henry Barnard.

We have always had organizations in the United States that preferred equality to liberty. There have been Coxey’s Armies, I. W. W.’s, Nonpartisan Leagues, and Single Taxers. They say with New America, ‘Why must millions go undernourished and underclad? Why must 90 per cent of farm homes, 80 per cent of those in villages, and 35 per cent in towns be without sanitary plumbing? Why must millions be deprived of the sports, the travel, the scientific knowledge which the few now enjoy?’

These are the same questions which John Ball asked 554 years ago. Can’t we have equality? Certainly, say the technologists. Assuredly, say the ‘Frontier Thinkers,’ but we must have a new social order. Why? This depression is not like any other depression. Technology, particularly since the World War, has made such changes that we may term our times the Second Industrial Revolution or the Power Age. Just as the invention of the spinning jenny and the power loom once changed the whole fabric of English society, so modern technology is forcing profound alterations in our social structure. The present situation is different from any that has gone before, because modern business enterprise for the first time is able to bring ‘under one central control all necessary raw materials and fuel resources, the mechanism of transport and communication, the mechanism of fabrication and assembling of parts to produce the completed article of consumption.’

Formerly this unification was impossible. Capitalists had to wait until four developments had been achieved: great central generating stations capable of ‘transmitting power over long distances,’ ‘machines of great force and cleverness,’ ‘vast and precise machine tools with which to make these machines,’ and ‘precise measuring instruments,’ without which quantity production would be confined to products of the cruder sort. With these four essentials the great organizations of industry, operated according to new techniques, can produce by straightline methods the necessities of man in great quantities at little cost, and with little human labor. ‘Stuart Chase now estimates,’ — I again quote from New America two years ago, — ‘allowing for new machines and methods, with a forty-hour week, 12,200,000 will be out of work in 1934.’ These Frontier Thinkers claim that we can produce faster than we can secure the means to purchase, that the present price system, private ownership, and all the economy of a capitalistic society based upon laissez faire have broken down, and that technology will destroy us. With Rugg they view the past and state: ‘This depression is not a mere fourteenth installment paying time [referring to thirteen previous depressions]. It is a day of inventory and final reckoning.’

But, say the Technocrats, we can save this society. We can give everybody an equal treatment. We will provide everybody, not with a happy hunting ground, not with ten acres and a mule, but with everything he could buy if he had an income of $20,000 a year (Howard Scott) or $4000 a year (Goodwin Watson). We will give you equality. To be sure, we must have a planned economy. Considering America as a unit from the Panama Canal to Hudson Bay, we will organize the entire social and industrial life. We will determine by techniques that we have mastered the capacity for consumption of the American people and we will plan production to match it. We will keep the machinery of production and consumption running evenly. We will readjust at intervals when necessary. We will tell people what work they are to do, and provide everybody with everything that it is good for him to have. All this can be done, say the Technocrats, by adults of twenty-one to forty-five working for a few hours a day for a few days a week. There will be no depressions, no money, prices, debts, taxes, bankers, lawyers, insurance, poor relief, or charity.

And there will be no liberty, either, say the liberals. This is the social order they are trying to establish in Russia, in Italy, and in Germany. The Frontier Thinkers, the Technocrats, the Communists, can talk all they like about democratic control. It will not work that way. Even the slight efforts in this direction under the New Deal show that orders go with control. True, it may bring a little more equality, but, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ True Americans, as contrasted with New Americans, would rather live without a bathtub and be free.

IV

So to come back to our original argument. When Mr. Hoover refers to America in Lincoln’s words as ‘a nation so conceived and so dedicated,’ he is thinking more of ‘conceived in liberty’ than of ‘dedicated to equality.’ New America, in referring to American ideals, is thinking more of equality than of liberty. In fact, it dismisses freedom with a few generalities. Nevertheless, both are in the American tradition.

The trouble is that the American Dream is double, and liberty and equality harmonize only in speech. The words look well together, but the ideas behind the words have always been in conflict. If you have liberty to the full, you cannot have equality. If you have equality to the full, you cannot have liberty. If you have more liberty, you will have less equality. If you have more equality, you will have less liberty. Up to now America has adopted the policy of the middle course. We say we want just as much liberty as we can have with some equality; or just as much equality as we can have with some liberty. During some periods the pendulum swung toward liberty; at others toward equality. Never was the trend toward liberty strong enough to satisfy a Hamilton. Never was the trend toward equality powerful enough to satisfy a Norman Thomas or an Upton Sinclair. We pursued a middle course.

And in this case a middle course, a synthesis, a compromise, if you will, is the strong ‘position. We have seen extremists in either direction bring destruction in their wake. For men are so constituted that they want both liberty and equality; and they cannot eat their cake and have it too. Hence, half a loaf is better than no bread.

The political economist in the United States has no pattern to follow; so we cannot aim at either extreme. We want as much liberty as we can get, but only so much as will be consistent with the equality we want. This will demand the delicate sense of balance of the artist or philosopher. It will require a process of feel and fumble, of trial and error, of adjustment and readjustment, and gradual approximation. This is what we have had for one hundred and fifty years. It is the only road to success.

V

When Americans come generally to realize the double characteristic of their national aims, they will see more clearly and be more charitable to the similar division in the ranks of our educators. There we have liberals and equalitarians, too. Educators who hold more to liberty are not advocating radical changes in our school system. They do not think that we need a new social order, hence education does not have to build one. It is their belief that the future citizen should be trained upon well-recognized precedents. They will give him a liberal education, — that is, an education fit for a liber, a free man, — and they will try to make him resourceful and independent. They will do their best to promote simplicity, probity, charity, and patriotism, and to provide that curb on selfishness and greed which only a good education can provide.

Cut there are also cqualitarians in education. They believe that education has a new function to perform in this world. Education must lead the way. Professors and teachers must envision the new social order, and, in the schools and through the schools, lead our country toward it. ‘ If the school is to justify its maintenance and assume its responsibilities,’ says the Report of the Social Studies Commission of the American Historical Association, ‘it must recognize the new order and proceed to equip the rising generation to cooperate effectively in the increasingly interdependent society and to live rationally and well within its limitations and possibilities. As education continues to emphasize the philosophy of individualism in economy, it will increase the accompanying social tensions. If it organizes a programme in terms of a philosophy which harmonizes with the facts of a closely integrated society, it will ease the strains of a transition taking place in actuality. The making of choices cannot be evaded, for inaction in education is a form of action.

‘From this point of view, a supreme purpose of education in the United States, in addition to the development of rich and many-sided personalities, is the preparation of the rising generation to enter the society now coming into being through thought, ideal, and knowledge, rather than through coercion, regimentation, and ignorance; and to shape the form of that society in accordance with American ideals of popular democracy and personal liberty and dignity.’

Thus in education we also have two groups, one for a continuation and gentle amelioration of the past, one for a new social order; one to improve the present economic system, one to substitute for it something radically different. One speaks of recovery and regeneration, the other of ‘a whole new civilization one thinks of liberty more than equality, the other of equality more than liberty.

I suppose that most schoolmasters belong to one camp or the other — and, having made their choice, they wonder how anyone of good sense could belong to the other. In a university known to me, where there are many professors and students divided into these two schools, with all sorts of gradations from right to left, much light has been generated, and considerable heat. Hardly a day passes but some student, professor, alumnus, citizen, or journal requests me to curb the speech and thought of some professor. As one alumnus wrote me: ‘Everyone was greatly distressed at what happened at Cleveland. I was told it was a current expression to say, “We have been talking a good while about the little red schoolhouse; now we shall have to talk about the Big Red University.” The Frontier Thinkers seem to think that schoolmen can lead this nation in the political-economic sense. That is to laugh. They have their part to contribute, to be sure, but the nation is not looking to them for the rôle of Moses.’ And in cases like these it is always suggested by the ardent exponent of either extreme that the other extreme be forced to ‘cease firing.’ To this I think I might agree, if it were perfectly plain that one extreme was right.

But in the search for social justice and the good life the social ideals of liberty and equality must both be considered, and must both have a part. If John Ball or Jean Jacques Rousseau or Karl Marx or other advocates of equality had had full power, it is possible that we should have had more bathtubs in the remaining 90 per cent of the farm homes, 80 per cent of village homes, and 35 per cent of town homes; but we should probably have orders from Washington as to when to take these baths. If Voltaire, or Mirabeau, or Hamilton, or John Adams had had full sway, we should probably have had lords, dukes, and barons, college preparatory schools for the few, and the rest of the pupils in CCC Camps. It required the constant conflict of the two ideas to reach the Golden, or, should I say, the Goldenand-Silver Mean.

The easiest thing in the world is to go to an extreme. The next easiest is to make a compromise, to effect an average, to blow neither hot nor cold. But in this case the middle course is the st rong course. This is not the first time that men and women thought the world was entering upon a new civilization. It has happened over and over again. There are two kinds of waves on the ocean, the little waves that we see, and the great waves, the results of which are the tides. The period since the World War is a little wave. The period since John Locke and Voltaire down to the present is the big wave, and we must not confuse the little with the big. During this period of time, in Europe and the United States, and in some measure elsewhere, men have been trying to achieve the ideals of liberty and equality. The leaders in this movement are not only John Dewey but also John Ball and John Locke. Not only Thomas and Tugwell, but also Turgot; Montesquieu, Mill, and Moley; Counts and Condorcet. These leaders have been opposed by kings and princes, and are being opposed by merchant kings and merchant princes. Some thinkers were exiled, others spent years in prison; but their ideas winged free.

Our safety in the United States, and the progress of our people toward a happy life, depend upon the degree to which we can effect a compromise between our desires. No philosopher is going to think it through to our satisfaction. No political scientist will suit us with a plan. Our only hope is full, free, frank, open discussion from all sides, open propaganda, open influence upon the press, upon public opinion, upon our Congress and legislators, and upon our governors and President. Whoever thinks, let him speak. Whoever would muzzle another, let him stay his hand. Bring on the opposition. Let it be heard. Then shall we have all the forces in full play. Where we have too much liberty and too little equality, we can readjust. Where we have too much equality and too little liberty, we can modify. There may be areas where we have neither. Then we can abolish and create. Let the whole orchestra sound forth. Then in time we can hope that this nation, ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,’ may begin to achieve here on earth that happy combination of the opposing ideals which will yield the best of each — and at long last reach the goal for which our ancestors have sacrificed and struggled and prayed these many years.