Coue and the Liberals

...Why then this tortuous attempt to prove that we've never had it so good...

...The point is also made, of course, in quantitative terms: "corn pared with the segment of American society that lived in a rightless limbo half a century ago, the segment that is today maltreated is minute, and this segment has a good chance of receiving at least the elements of due process of law...

...People like Sidney Hook reacted to this, and often they had a case, as when they objected to Bertrand Russell's description of an American "reign of terror...

...Today, it is chiefly located in the Southern White Citizen's Councils, a serious enough matter to be sure, but in other areas it has just about vanished...

...But how are we to assess the significance of this change...

...Indeed, the old vigilantes could learn something about effectiveness from our new species who, clutching their copies of congressional hearings and reports of administrative boards, demand their own kind of political conformity...

...Very amusing...

...But this is hardly an event for congratulation, for its potential is terrifying and its present reality serious enough...

...So far, so good...

...Strangely enough, Roche's entire case is based upon a genuine insight into the civil liberties problem...

...Talking about radicals today, he writes, "Compared with the treatment handed out to authentic radicals in 1918, they have merely attended a compulsory tea party...

...Actually, this point does not apply to Roche, who would seem to be more critical of Amer ican policy than Hook...

...But let's stick to the first point...

...What happens is that Hook's need to score points with the Europeans as a propagandist for American policy leads him—one would guess, quite un consciously—to minimize the threat to civil liberties at home...

...This second factor is immediately to be seen in Hook's approval of the Roche articles...

...The agent of this metamorphosis is John Roche, an historian at Haverford College and a director of the Pennsylvania Civil Liberties Union...

...Hook and others like him were motivated by two factors: a distaste for the excesses of their opponents and a desire to score some "points" for America in Europe...

...And this anti-libertarianism, Roche points out, is on the decline...

...His series of three articles is straightforwardly titled "We've Never Had More Freedom," and his central thesis is "that American freedom has never been as firmly established or as broadly shared as is the case today...

...But the argu ments of the Hook point of view have be come so prevalent in America that peo ple like Roche employ them even when they do not, apparently, accept their motivation...

...The answer to this question is, I think, that Roche is part of a general tendency in America which is fast developing its own particular momentum...

...To be sure, less than a hundred Stalinists were convicted, but because of the way in which they were convicted, machinists are not working in Detroit, actors are barred from employment in New York and lawyers face disbarment proceedings for invoking the Fifth Amendment...

...In fact, they are probably holding a protest meeting against the "police state" there this week, for most of the convicted are out on bail...

...There is no question that this kind of vigilantism has diminished...

...Roche's curiously unhistorical comparison completely misses this whole point of potential, of relationship...

...But then he compares the situation in America of fifty to seventy-five years ago with that of today and measures them against each other as if one could multiply donkeys by elephants and come up with a conelusion about the forest...

...Now it is true that our current centralized authoritarianism is more polite, it does not bloody heads...

...downright hilarious...

...But has Roche thought about the fact that the conspiracy doctrine which was legitimized in the Smith Act cases has ramified throughout our culture...

...This has not yet issued into totalitarianism in America, but it provides the basis for such a de velopment, it is a potential for anti-libertarianism which exceeds the wildest dreams of the most intransigeant frontier bigot...

...IN HIS TIME the "psychologist" Coue may have seemed a mere passing fad, yet he struck deep roots in America...

...He realizes that there has been a shift in the locus of the attack on freedom and that this fact is the heart of the matter...

...What first brought it into existence was the appearance of anti-Americanism in Europe where intellectuals sometimes crudely equated a McCarthy hearing with a slave labor camp...

...Thus: Few people have fallen under the arm of the Smith Act—probably about enough to fill Tom Mooney Hall...

...His main therapeutic technique—the repetition of the sentence, Day by Day, In Every Way, I am Getting Better and Better— summoned up a persistent American capacity for optimism which survives not merely in the preaching of Norman Vincent Peale but, more surprisingly, in some recent articles on civil liberties that appeared in the New Republic...

...ROCHE ATTACKS the notion that there was once a "Golden Age of American Freedom" and that we are in a retrogression from it...

...Roche does it by his donkeys times elephants mathematics...

...Behind this change, Roche finds "the increasing power and jurisdiction of national government over national life which has taken place as a concomitant, if not as a consequence, of the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the nation...

...He also advances a second factor which is questionable, if not downright wrong: the success of "civil liberty elites" in packaging the Bill of Rights and selling it to the American people...

...There are few broken and bloody heads, tarring and feathering is a thing of the past, therefore We've Never Had More Freedom...

...Indeed, he shows himself to be quite sensitive to most of the specific injustices of the last decade, so much so that one of his pieces almost contradicts the other two...

...To welcome, as Roche does, the appearance of a centra lized authoritarianism is simply Coue for the liberals...

...But more serious attention is required...

...I would argue that Roche's insight is crucial to an understanding of the civil liberties problem...

...We must indeed recognize with Roche that there has been a shift in the locus of the attacks on freedom...

...It reminds one of Ches terton's sally against the historians: that sometimes one must show them obvious things, such as earthquakes and ele phants jumping out of skylights...

...Bur wHY does Roche miss this relationship...

...The bloody struggle that took place, during the IWW era, in the streets of the Northwest for the irst First Amendment has been replaced by the less dramatic fight before the quasi-judicial boards of the federal government...

...His articles make it clear that he is genuinely concerned with civil liber ties...

...Unless this momentous political fact is understood—that the locus of the attack upon freedom has been shifted —one completely misses the complexity of the present situation...

...Yet in terms of a threat to freedom it represents the growth of the power of the state over millions, over all those in Government employ, all those in defense work, and many in state, municipal and private, non-sensitive jobs...

...Within the month, Roche had the distinction of being quoted approvingly by Sidney Hook in a New Leader article demonstrating that teachers, also, never had it so good...

...It was a consequence of the "decentralized authoritarianism" of a growing America...

...There is a temptation to treat the whole thing facetiously, to oppose Roche's fabulous title to anyone's knowledge of the American reality, and let it go at that...

...But in dealing with this view—one would like to know who is naive enough to maintain it—he calls attention to a crucial fact, The American past, he points out, is filled with a sorry record of vigilantism which struck out at "The Non-Partisan League organizer in Minnesota, the Wobbly in Colorado, the abolitionist in Georgia, the Socialist in Oklahoma, the Catholic in Know-Nothing territory...

...One might even play the numbers game and argue that it has not directly effected as many lives as the old vigilantism...

...And this must be seen as a measure of Hook's success—I use his name not as a King Charles's head but as a immediately understandable mne monic for a line of thought—and of the impact he has had upon our thinking...