Democracies' Hari-Kari Seen in Civil Rights to Nazis, Reds
LUNDBERG, FERDINAND
Democracies' Hari-Kari Seen in Civil Rights to Nazis, Reds By FERDINAND LUNDBERG Once again we are entering a turbulent, cyclical phase of alarmist public agitation about civil rights and free...
...If it promotes tyranny then it should be fought, implacably, without mercy, just as tyranny itself would be fought, for in such a case it becomes the reverse side of tyranny...
...From the standpoint of doing business in the financial world, having an office in Pine Street, William Street, Broad Street or Nassau Street is just as good for your headquarters as in the Street called Wall...
...This firm represents Eastman Kodak Co., E.gin Watch, General Cigar, Johns-Manville, Kellogg Co., Swift and Co., and scores of other large concerns...
...A loan may continue to move United States products to Argentina, but unless Germany wins soon ft does not move any of the Argentine wheat and earn, Which must continue t^ pile up in surpluses...
...Such cases may well be given the benefit of any doubt compatible with public security...
...The English democrats steadily throughout the centuries took away the right of the nobility to assert prerogatives over the commons, and at times harshly put the advocates of absolutism and repression to the sword...
...As a matter of public policy it may well be that it is better for the present to permit Communists, Nazis, Fascists and Shirt-Fronters to work in the open, where they can be kept under surveillance...
...On the contrary, they have a positive duty to discourage such misuse of a great right by refusing to condone the perversion...
...No citizen, just because he has the right to free speech, has the right to advocate arson, the dissemination of disease germs among the populace, or the impairing of the morals of children...
...The fact of the matter is that never before, not even excepting the ease of the nomination of Morgan's lawyer, John W. Davis, by the Democratic Party in 1924, has an individual, with such close ties to Wall Street as Willkie, had the courage to offer himself as a candidate for the presidency...
...Boeing Aircraft, Bordens, Consolidated Edison, Crowell Publishing (Collier's), Curtis Publishing (Saturday Evening Post), Ford Motors, New York Trust Co., various Standard Oil companies, Zonite, etc...
...Such an argument, which has been made by the American Civil Liberties Union and which one can also find...
...that he has never fraternized with the Wall Street community...
...It is erected, indeed, upon a framework of very complicated restraint and control...
...The sole object of free speech is to protect freedom in general, not to imperil it...
...So, it is seriously argued, in the face of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Spain, Norway, Holland—all weakened from within, in different ways, by perverted theories about democracy sedulously spread by agents of totalitarianism, all stampeded into the arms of Hitler...
...Acceptance of this great fallacy is, as current history shows, merely a prelude to the acceptance of tyranny and dictatorship...
...1*0 insure the success of the Willkie campaign, Wall Street has enlisted the * support of the leading /advertising agencies to put Willkie over...
...The French democrats did not permit the Bourbons to go about rallying the masses with anti-democratic slogans...
...echoed many times' over In the pages of publications like The Nation and The New Republic, is wholly invalid, both logically and politically as well as historically...
...Frenzied Finance Wall St...
...Now if there were a Pulitzer prize for tall and fancy misrepresentation in the public press we would unreservedly recommend the Herald Tribune for this honor...
...I » * * VET, a share' in a Nazi reorganization of the world would not yet be popular * in Argentina...
...To certain liberals it may seem that a dangerous sphere of sophistical construction is opened by this formulation of the problem...
...This firm has as clients Continental-Illinois Bank of Chicago, Phillips Chemical, Proctor and Gamble, Pullman Co., Sears, Roebuck, Swift and Co., Wyeth Chemical Co...
...And there has oeen so much inept talk about this right for many years that its liberal defenders have become hopelessly befogged...
...Better permit the agents of tyranny to speak freely and sow confusion, weakly reason these liberals, for they will do no harm...
...Westbrook Pegler, in one of the most trenchant lines he has ever written, once said that democracy was won by killing...
...WHEN freedom of speech is used to undermine civil freedom, both in general and in specific cases—as it is used by Communists, Nazis and Fascists _it is being misused, perverted.* And no duty devolves upon defenders of freedom to defend such misuse...
...J * • Ft the Argentine Government had formally announced an embargo against United States products the news would have shattered the aplomb of this nation...
...And the board is :now refusing these licenses for importations from the.United States...
...The proponents of tyranny may be countered by argumentation, it is said, the assumption here being that in a time of crisis the citizenry has time to make up its mind by rational processes...
...One must examine the United States asnvell as Argentina in order to understand the drift of the Hemisphere...
...In all candor it must be submitted that the liberals have lost sight of the central democratic aim, whieh is simply: freedom...
...Another Thompson executive has taken a three-month leave of absence to devote' his advertising skill—fn= the promotion of the Associated Willkie Clubs...
...This makes the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, oh, so mad...
...No duty devolves upon any democrat, therefore, to defend its "right" to free speech...
...It is interesting, in passing, to notice that the Communist, Nazi and Fascist press freely uses the technique of slander with the aim of isolating critics, limiting their social freedom by making them pariahs...
...But when Candidate ^illkie promised the cattle raisers of Texas that if *k*ted president he would prevent Argentine beef from interfering with their "»*rYet, he was cheered...
...The Bolsheviks, too, constantly agitated for freedom of speech, freedom of assemblage, and civil rights in general, although upon attaining power they struck at all such supposed inherent rights of mankind and suppressed all agitation for them...
...In itself, such agitation does no harm and probably has some public J^damentals...
...And a million dollars,^ spent that way, helping our own people, would <*use more rejoicing and pro-Pan-Americanism in Argentina than a loan of fifty times as much...
...Such liberals have obviously landed themselves in a dilemma...
...The negotiations are being conducted with Nationalist Spain's first ambassador to Argentina, Admiral Marquis Magaz, whose representations have been made to the fascist-minded Castillo rather than to the democratic .(but ill) President Ortiz...
...Maybe the suckers who bought C and S stock and lost some $750,000,000 in paper profits can tell us what this means...
...The truth is, of course, that Mr...
...John Orr Young, private agency man, is conducting the pro-Willkie campaign in the New Yorker and other magazines, soliciting small contributions...
...Paper Go*, American Gas Association, Bank of California...
...The test is to be found simply in the concrete programs that the speakers advocate...
...The Commonwealth and Southern was organised under the financial direction of J. P. Morgan and Company with the assistance of the Wall Street investment house known as Bonbright and Company...
...Shall we then dump the Argentine products in the ocean or dump them on the home market and start a revolution by our own farmers...
...Freedom of speech, and freedom in general, is supported, paradoxically, by a structure of restraint...
...Much of the present agitation centers about the "right of free speech...
...If this isn't being in Wall Street, what is it...
...because American exporters understand that the Nazis soon hope to be exporting again to Argentina, possibly through Spain...
...But this is...
...The Ku Klux Klan, however, stands for tyranny in its expressed program...
...f; All of which is good sarcasm but somewhat unrealistic...
...The dilemma is brought about by fallaciously treating "freedom of speech" as an absolute and unique right in itself...
...That is a question of administrative expediency, to be decided by those legffily and morally responsible for the public safety...
...One may, of course, uphold anyone's right tq criticize Catholics, Jews and Negroes without at the same time upholding their right to advocate their relegation to a civil purgatory...
...rT*0 this school the flat denial of freedom of speech to agents of tyrants and * of tyrannical programs seems unpleasant and harsh...
...Prance also took action agajinst fifth columnists before the blow fell...
...But what is to be the standard of judgment, the yard-stick...
...It isn't every day that one comes across such unvarnished twisting of known facts, than the above quotation taken from the newspaper's editorial of Friday, September 6, 1940...
...The operational results of the programs of these various subversive forces in other countries show that freedom is not their goal...
...To be concluded next week) Hispanic Barter Deals Argentina [Embargoes U. S. Goods to Force Trade Loans 4 BRYCE OLIVER News Commentator at WEVD, New York TBERE has been so much written, and so •much said in explanation of the destruction of France (and now we are beginning to find esoteric reasons fa the resistance of the British) that almost every American by now must ]^ve at least some sociological explanation for the trend of the war...
...Stanley Resbr, president of J. Walter Thompson, is another...
...The indictment in Uruguay of Nazi fifth columnists, so comforting to those vh» have viewed the Uruguajhwi situation with alarm, does not prove that the Brer Plate region is becoming safer far Western democracy...
...We have several hundred thousand school children in the United States who receive government aid^to the amount of about fifteen cents a day for school teaches...
...At no tima in the earlier history of the movement for free speech have^ we ever found democrats advocating free speech for tyrants...
...Barton was the floor manager at the Philadelphia convention...
...The Buenos Aires Government has made Be inch announcement but the fact is accomplished just the jame...
...The answer is "buy...
...It is expected to cause the industrialists, like Thomas Watson of American Business Machines and the jauto manufacturers, to rush to Washington with a demand that the loan be granted immediately...
...If you gave these children beef three times a week, not a .United States farmer wouldf...
...If the law did not forbid slander it would be possible by means of free public utterance unwarrantably to deprive the victims of the confidence of their fellowmen, tending to make them into social pariahs...
...The avowed goal of the speaker, and the tangible effect of his utterances, contain the whole problem...
...Free speech is valid /and historically justified from the libertarian point of view only as an instrumental means of promoting freedom...
...This country would be,pretty much alone in -that case, and the adhesion of Spain and Portugal to the Axis opens the way more clearly to the approaching menace...
...asks the good)editor...
...Argentina has a very convenient method of effecting such embargos without formal government promulgation...
...Obviously it could happen if Britain falls gui the entire Hispanic portion of the Hemisphere, with characteristic Latyi jejHnn, should lean toward the Axis and its Oriental partner...
...But there is no intention here of advocating the straining of borderline cases...
...Some upholders of the logically untenable absolute right to freedom of speech assert that inquiry into the intent of the speaker has nothing to do with the matter...
...But the argument should not follow, on philosophical or legal grounds, that the free speech accorded the open agents of tyranny is an absolute right to be enjoyed by them merely because they are citizens or come under the protection of a constitution they are seeking to undermine...
...First and foremost,is Bruce Barton, the Congressman, and president of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn...
...Almost unnoticed by the press of the United 'States, the Argentine Government has taken sensational action against the Umted States...
...Not yet...
...IF having an office in the Chase National Bank building at 20 Pine Street, New York, isn't having an office in "Wall Street," what is it...
...And the United States Government could, for aboui^four cents of the fifteen now handed out, provide a child with a whole can of wholesome, nourishing Argentine corned beef...
...The sterile position taken by the liberals, and especially by such a generally useful organization as the American Civil Liberties Union, is that the right of free speech is an absolute right to be enjoyed, without qualification, by Communists, Fascists and Nazis, even" though they support the abolition of free speech by political regimes of their own making...
...After taking a look at Germany, Russia and Italy, what is actually being advocated when free speech is exercised by Bundists, Communists and Shirt-Frontiers, no longer has any element of mystery behind it...
...If democracy is the .valuable stake in question, and if it is the plain purpose of the speaker to undermine democracy by advocating racial intolerance or by making a farce of democratic processes, he may on sound democratic grounds be denied any "right" to speak...
...lose a cent on the deal...
...Pays for Willkie's 'Man-of-the-People' Drive By IRVING B. ALT MAN Editor of Dynamic America A IN'T it a shame the way the New Deal press is smearing poor Wendell Willkie, the barefoot Hoosier boy who aspires to be president of these United States...
...As the hand of democratic government is subtly weakened from within—as in Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Denmark, Norway and Holland—the forces of anti-democratic totalitarianism are proportionately strengthened throughout the world...
...It was won by killing tyrants, not by inviting them to make speeches of self-rationalization...
...Both Hitler and Mussolini attained power by the free exercise of democratic freedom of speech, which they openly scorned as they made use of it...
...How are we to tell when speech should be permitted and when not...
...But what about the stage pow being set for the coming defeat of the Amer-ias, including the United States...
...On the one hand we see concretely what tyranny these groups approve...
...Free speech by itself is of no value...
...As the average Argentine sees the situatibn, it is now hopeless for Argentine planters and cattle men io look to the United States for a market...
...Members of the Government and Congress— alio many business leaders— still believe that money from the United States would be as good as selling: Argentine products to the United States...
...But what could the United States do other than what it is doing...
...All exports frorn the United States to Argentina have been embargoed...
...However, it is not nearly so difficult as many liberals suppose (many of them "Trojan Horse" liberals who are in reality disguised Communists) to ascertain the real direction of activity by Communists, Nazis, and leaders of various native Shirt and Front groups...
...THE great fallacy for which the liberals have fallen is the proposition that * freedom of speech by itself is something precious, and worth defending at all costs...
...The operational effects of such advocacy clearly shows that it injures individual and social freedom...
...Yet today many liberal proponents of free speech are found insisting upon the right of the avowed agents of tyrannical forms of government—agents such as Earl Browder and Fritz Kuhn and Father Coughlin—to exercise free speech to the full in proselytizing for their programs and parties...
...Willkie takes his orders from Wall Street, has his office in Wall Street, looks to Wall Street as the gathering place of the nation's brains and plans to place a direct pipe line from Wall Street to the White House if he is elected...
...He is covering the advertising field soliciting campaign -contributions for Willkie...
...Here, this typical American boy who might have stepped from between the covers of a Horatio Alger story book, throws away a swell job paying a measly $75,000 a year, and other very worthwhile connections, to lead the American people on the road to permanent prosperity, and how is he repaid for his noble effoits...
...When free speech is exercised so that it endangers the fabric of freedom itself it becomes, obviously, a contradiction in terms and an abomination to the democratic hypothesis...
...even De ot positive benefit in reminding citizens of their constitutional blessings in a world of dictators, and in stimulating them to think about political kiS^ce^^vS to°^H?0t hVmu ,U8 -t0,the fact that a g0od deal of ^^ oi is M*** by adherents of the Communist Party-once again on the alert for fresh irpSrldI dominion between the de^ScS^^^S^3^0,18 ^ Amakmn PC°plc md *° *awfit dcmocaAic P"*esse« with a view to immobilizing the United States in the present struggle . ^^V^^A^^n^Ai^A* J^d ?Pression thf the.Communists are fanatically devoted to civil rights, even though the Russian Constitution contains no Bill of Rights, even though the personal ngms ot the individual m Russia have no legajexistehce^t all...
...If we follow the tea-party precepts of this school, which is afflicted with a form of political syphilis, we are surely lost in a world overrun by dictators...
...How can people say such things...
...There are enough other examples of the kind to show "What is the matter with the Hemisphere...
...They believe that the imposition of this informal embargo, with the implied threat of business with German-controlled Europe, will force the United States to grant loans with which to finance imports to Argentina...
...wholly wrong...
...Aren't Dillon, Read and Company, 28 Nassau Street and Kuhn, Loeb and Company, 52 William Street, in Wall Street...
...Not one of these children is able to provide a market for United States *»ttle raisers...
...that he has never shown either admiration or respect for its wishes and that he is the most completely and genuinely free and untrammeled candidate that has headed any ticket in many years...
...Without such a license, it is impossible for Argentine importers to pay for imports on a competitive price basis...
...They have become worshippers of an empty form, blind to the actual content of democracy...
...s . The transaction he referred to was a purchase <rf $8,000 worth of Argentine corned beef for the U. S. Marine Corps...
...And such injury may be worked by any means that bring the victim into unjustified public obloquy...
...And liberals in Germany and Italy defended the Fascists' right to freedom of speech, disregarding the possibility that they were helping the coming dictators to undermine human freedom in general...
...For all the great tyrannies of today have arisen, not at all strangely, on the shoulders of freedom of speech...
...i If contusion, doubts and dissension are promoted by cynical agitators about civil rights and related matters, an atmosphere may be created wherein orderly democratic processes become difficult if not impossible, wherein the United States ceases to be an effective --------- ----------military factor on the world stage...
...So do Mussolini and Stalin...
...During the heyday of frenzied finance, when the suckers were taken in by the Wall Street manipulators, Wendell Willkie was the holding company's legal counsel, later becoming its president...
...The Communist press in this country has more or less effectively transformed anti-Communist liberals and radicals into pariahs, who are regarded with intense suspicion by liberals whose anti-Communist bias is not very highly developed...
...on the other hand we see these selfsame groups clamoring for free speech here—in order to stab freedom in the back, in order to enthrone tyranny...
...I * x njach clearer indication of the drift—and a lesson which iouldle taken to heart by the United States—was furnished the other day by the Argentine Government...
...Adolf Hitler speaks freely...
...The Bolsheviks had to agitate for free speech, because their new-style despotism was competing for power with the Czarist despotism...
...We have, for example, laws against libel, slander and defamation of character that, far from hindering freedom of speech, make it possible by defining its social limits...
...that he has never had an office in Wall Street...
...Hill Blackett of Blackett-Sample-Hummert, who was active in the 1936 Landon campaign, is now riding the Willkie bandwagon...
...And whether Vice President Castillo's hand-picked government intended it that way br^not, the move edges Argentina much closer to the Axis...
...Democracies' Hari-Kari Seen in Civil Rights to Nazis, Reds By FERDINAND LUNDBERG Once again we are entering a turbulent, cyclical phase of alarmist public agitation about civil rights and free speech...
...People call attention to his business connections in Wall Street...
...This is the threat— and the bait—held out to our United States industrialists...
...Britain Cannot take up the Argentine meat and corn surplus, and the only hope is that German-controlled Europe will soon furnish a market...
...Thus freedom of speech is supported by all true democrats not because of any inherent value in free speech but as a means of protecting the whole of civil freedom...
...Sharp distinction is here also very much in order...
...They would then buy from Germany more readily than they would buy on a loan from the United States...
...Johnson cooperates with , Henry* J. Taylor, president of Package Advertising, Inc., and Fred Rahter, Willkie's personal secretary, is running the candidate's personal headquarters at the Hotel Commodore...
...Castillo is known to be toying with a Spanish barter agreement—Argentine corn for steel rails...
...Thus, it is only necessary for the Exchange Control Board to refuse exchange licenses for the purchase of American products in order to effect an embargo...
...Some big accounts handled by the Barton firm are: Carborundum Co., Chase National Bank, Coming Glass, Du Pont, General Baking, General Electric, Koppers Co., National City Bank, Niagara Hudson Power, Pittsburgh Plate Glass and U. S. Steel, to mention but a few...
...Robert L. Johnson, head of his own company, represents a number of hotel' magazines...
...This is one of the largest advertising agencies in the nation and has among its hundreds of clients such well-known concerns as: A.P.W...
...And the ascertainable dii jction and avowed intent behind the activity is what determines whether it serves freedom or jeopardizes it...
...And it should be noticed that in the agitation the emphasis falls on freedom of speech, not on freedom in general...
...To a new school of namby-pamby liberalism these will seem like harsh words, but this school seems upon close examination less a school of democratic liberalism than a school for avoiding the facing of hard facts, a school for evading the painful processes of thought...
...Willkie has never had any connection with Wall Street...
...f . , To the average "Man on :the Street," the United States embargo is a purely Argentine defense measure...
...And if Germany does win— ioon or late—the loan will hot prevent Argentine farmers and cattlemen from demanding the right to sell to Germany...
...This is true...
...Upon examination the complex of freedom we enjoy in a constitutional state is found to be composed of a multiplicity of inner balances and restraints, prohibitions and commands...
...In its anxiety to avoid trouble with militant totalitarian elements, in its desire to promote socially undesirable and positively mischievous "unity" with such elements, this school, for example, had no difficulty in condoning such grim spectacles as the Moscow trials and purges...
...IF to say that a man who was until a few weeks ago president of the largest * public utility holding company, the Commonwealth and Southern, and furthermore, was a director of the Morgan-Baker First National Bank in New York, "never had any connection with Wall Street" isn't falsification— then what is it...
...The war has wrecked Argentina's export trade, and for the first time in yehrs the value of imports outweighs the value of the exports...
...It is accomplished through what is known «s the Exchange Control Board, which licenses importers to purchase controlled exchange at low cost...
...As for a native group like the Ku Klux Klan, we see that its program is directed to bringing Catholics, Jews and Negroes under a special form of tyranny...
...What the liberal defenders of absolute freedom of speech do not seem to understand—or do not want to understand in some cases—is that freedom of speech is merely part of a great complex of civil freedoms and restraints...
...For they are committed to defending the free speech of persons who would abolish free speech if their political programs were to be put into effect...
...Or maybe the editor of the Herald Tribune is just being cute...
...As the sole aim of freedom of speech is the promotion of as much social freedom as is compatible with social orcfek", the law forbids the use of any speech that injures social freedpm as enjoyed by any individual or association...
...The term "Wall Street'' as the Herald Tribune editor knows as well as anyone, is not used merely to designate a street by that name, but is employed to label the New York financial community...
...H. K. McCann, president of McCann-Erickson, is another volunteer...
...We have, too, many constitutional restraints upon the government itself, without which free speech by other than government officials would be impossible...
...We shall be told," says the Herald Tribune, "that Mr...
...And here is one example from which the understanding may he possible...
...And then what...
...Social freeddm, contrary to the belief of naive libertarians, does not by any means imply "absence of restraint and control...
Vol. 23 • September 1940 • No. 39
