The American Spirit
Mayer, Milton
The American Spirit by MILTON MAYER We were once said (by the elder Holmes) to threaten every government in Europe by our very existence. This ascription of moral power would hardly be made...
...the true aristocracy of the best and ablest men would be recognized and elevated to rule by an egalitarian electorate sobered by the diffuse possession of property, by the privilege of participation in local government, and by three years of voluntary (not compulsory) schooling available to every child at public expense...
...The remaining cracks and crevices in its structure, such as the already narrowed right of conscientious objection, will be filled...
...The statement may be a non sequitur, but the cheered throng cheers its banality to the echo...
...observation team there said, drily, that now that law had been replaced by force no further purpose could be served by the team...
...And what would happen to this America in another century...
...The traitors to the new American spirit came to include those party-poops who held that human happiness was still possible to a one-car family...
...but we know that he wasn't trying to save his own life...
...In the tyranny of all will there be a few men left who, in the words of the late Ralph Ingersoll, "pluck at our sleeve while we take aim at our enemies...
...This ascription of moral power would hardly be made nowadays...
...We don't admire them, nor are we afraid of them...
...John Foster Dulles would call agonizing...
...Is this maturity...
...Were we cradled to be what we are...
...Jefferson had lived through the French Revolution and had seen it miscarry...
...They had both pointed with horror at what they both called the canaille of the cities of Europe—the millions of uneducated and unpropertied men pressed so close together as to be a homogeneous mob, a monstrous body wanting only a head...
...From being non-philosophical—like any raw people confronted with practical obstacles and practical opportunities—we proceeded aggressively and defensively to being anti-philosophical...
...an amiable fellow like ourselves who prefers articles to books, digests to articles, bridge to digests, and golf to bridge...
...Including the free individual...
...We don't like to think that in doing so it confronted us with the choice be: tween a Hitler and a Hindenburg and extended the military domination over the civil power...
...The Communists, too, pursue a durable balance between liberty and equality...
...Is it any wonder that the hungry do not hate Communist dictatorship any more than they hate capitalist democracy...
...This is the way the Hungarians and others, who never had liberty, seem to feel...
...As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other...
...We never have, and we won't like it...
...At least that's what they say in the World Council of Churches...
...But the rising tide of equality, engendered by the romantic and anti-ecclesiastical faith in the perfectibility of man, beginning in Jefferson's time swept every objection before it...
...Harry and Ike take the words right out of our mouths...
...If to talk like this is to be blackly pessimistic or, still worse, anti-intellectual, we may ponder the warning of Rabelais, long ago, that science without conscience is the ruin of the soul...
...But I soon found that I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined...
...We may be fearful to our enemies...
...You can damn the torpedoes, but you can't damn mankind...
...and survival depends upon passing the ammunition, not upon praising the Lord (as witness the fate of the prophets...
...Are we what we would like to be...
...But the past several years have yielded an habitual succession of such incidents, beginning no later, certainly, than August 6, 1945, when, like Hermann Goering after the shameful raid on Coventry, we justified what we did by saying that we did it to shorten the war...
...Switzerland, which did not exploit them for anti-communism, accepted the most...
...Columbus was stone sober when he said that he wanted to sail because the prophet Isaiah had promised a new heavens and a new earth...
...Nor can you make yourself loved and trusted as long as you love only them which love you and put your trust in violence while you say you put your trust in God...
...The Supreme Court can equalize liberties, but it can not rescue them from their destruction by the whole American people...
...Both believed in government by an aristocracy of the wisest and most virtuous...
...We can not eat them, we can not sell them, and we can not give them away without wrecking the world market, by which we mean the "free" or capitalist market...
...But Jefferson believed that the people could be educated to choose such an aristocracy to govern them...
...Militarism equalizes men by giving them each and all a tangible stake in its conformity...
...Adams and Jefferson would be just as astonished as we are...
...Our defense of these acts is juvenile: We say that other people are even more shameful than we are or that others' shameless-ness compels us to be just as shameful as they are (and strategically sooner, if possible...
...only those that are unpopular...
...But a people bent upon the destruction of their own liberties do not need laws to help them achieve it...
...The American voter," said James Reston in the New York Times Nov...
...But for the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 a whole class of Americans are without effective American rights...
...Some of our Southern brethren are less passionate for equality than the rest of us would like them to be, but, with some slight nudging, they are eliminating the crime of segregation at least as fast as the rest of us are eliminating the sin of discrimination...
...If we, equal and equally rich, do not love liberty so much that we will sacrifice our riches to it and go for broke to keep it, and if we have never thought much about liberty anyway, it would be no wonder that we didn't see our liberties being lost...
...The throng across the street is cheering itself in front of Harry...
...the American generation which has been taught liberty by drill sergeants is only now beginning to assert itself...
...The century passed...
...The tempo of technology, besides equalizing our intelligences at the NBC-CBS level, equalized our hearts by spreading before us an ever-increasing abundance of goods within (or just beyond) the reach of all of us...
...What if Jefferson was right...
...as if we were children or subjects and not free adult citizens whose officials are their mere ministers...
...Now we have the Pentecostal kick, along with "Pray for Peace" on our postage cancellation machines...
...they call for equality in freedom, and, if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery...
...We shall have to go back a bit...
...We have already seen what the tyranny of almost all has been able to do in the past ten years of hot peace...
...Of course we went right on printing In God We Trust on our currency...
...If we will have a tyranny, we ourselves will be the tyrant...
...the censor is the whole American people...
...Who can any longer doubt that 50 years from now new generations will no more hanker after overt racism than the present generation hankers after overt slavery...
...Nobody knows...
...The Mayflower's passengers were stone sober when they dedicated themselves and their adventure to the glory of God...
...The other two are the equalization of economic and of racial opportunity...
...The only instructive war in our history ended on July 4, 1826, in a draw...
...So, too, when Morton Sobell was called upon by strangers in his apartment in Mexico City, accused of being a man named Jones who had robbed a bank in Acapulco, and, as he reached for his identity papers, slugged and kidnaped and delivered to FBI agents waiting for him at the border 600 miles away...
...We take the shameful act of state indifferently...
...But he voted the straight ticket, as did everybody he knew or ever would know...
...The Greeks were fond of saying that man is schooled in suffering...
...The reason is that nobody cared...
...We, who liberated them with plenty of shooting, somehow lost some of our liberties in the process...
...We were a new kind of people, hopeful and bold...
...we will have no tyrant other...
...The "peculiar institution" of chattel slavery may have contributed, too, to a conception of liberty as corporeal...
...But if I am a fool, and in my folly abdicate my liberty, and my plumber and my Negro get to be like me, just where will we be, besides being equal fools...
...Our folk heroes were Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford, none of whom was preeminently virtuous...
...How far had this "passion" affected the individualistic spirit of America in 1835?—"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America...
...The puny effort to introduce philosophy into our equalized educational system has been wiped out over night by the Russian Sputniks...
...We have emasculated the American's right not to incriminate himself and, in addition, we have incriminated him not just for what he does and says, but for what he thinks...
...Would we be unafraid if the Soviet Union did not exist in a hungry world...
...less than a decade after Jefferson was in his grave...
...Shameful act of state piles upon shameful act...
...The transportation has enabled us all to huddle together for a weekday in town or a Sunday in the country...
...Do we suppose that the next McCarthyism will be milder than the last...
...Economic liberty should have nourished political liberty here...
...General Jackson was a do-it-yourself man...
...The American spirit is not only Jackson on his feet, but Lincoln on his knees...
...Or if only our own kind of people, the rich, existed...
...The New York Times reports that the prices paid by the Pentagon have risen three to five per cent every year...
...Their epitomic resemblance to us all...
...That means the Communists...
...Are we mature when we say that it is not we, the American people, who do these things, but our rulers...
...two things equal to a third are equal to each other...
...We know we are gorged after Sunday dinner, but how gorged we are we can not imagine...
...This naturally gives the men of democratic periods a lofty opinion of the privileges of society and a very humble notion of the rights of individuals...
...After Alger Hiss was convicted on the testimony of a self-confessed sinner whose confession exhausted the entire calendar of sins except perjury in Baltimore, it wasn't necessary to suppress the new evidence of the Woodstock typewriter and the FBI's finagling therewith...
...But we could not imagine the need...
...Certainly my father, if anyone had told him 50 years ago that he had to take an oath purging himself of treason before he could et or keep a job, would have said, "Where do you think you are—Russia...
...Jefferson's hedges against totalitarian democracy have grown higher than ever Jefferson dreamed...
...Why, alone among the Western Nations, and the strongest and richest and most remote of them all, have we let liberty go for security and forged upon ourselves the shackles of fear represented by our unique pursuit of un-Americanism...
...We are fully militarized now—ready, willing, and in some quarters eager to defend or attack the world...
...Sobell hadn't been accused of anything...
...My father did not know, or care, whether Korea was in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean...
...But Jefferson's God said, "I have refined thee, but not with silver...
...When we take snuff, they sneeze...
...9, 1958, "is immune to ideological talk about everything except communism," with "a tendency to prefer personality"—Jefferson would have said "demagoguery"—"to anything else...
...So, too, when the Rosenbergs were executed on testimony like that of Chambers...
...Fifty years ago in America a soldier was not to be seen, except in the Skid Row recruiting stations...
...Instead of the noble leadership which Jefferson hoped for or the ignoble leadership which Adams feared, we have no leadership at all...
...Who did...
...Lincoln thought that free Negroes shouldn't vote because they were not then competent...
...Maybe, in order to escape worldly authoritarianism—of the one or the many—we have got to learn something that our silver-spooned experience has not taught us...
...And what do the rich dream of...
...In Jefferson's time, as in Aeneas', a Stentor could reach only a few thousand people with his voice, and a man with a missive or a missile could travel only a few miles a day...
...While our illimitable surpluses eat up our moral status abroad, our unlimited commitment to violence eats up our moral intentions at home...
...In the profit system profit is the compelling motive, they say in Moscow...
...We are not becoming more philosophical...
...Up to Jefferson's time men had not thought seriously of society itself as the tyrant, if for no other reason than that they had thought of social change as circular, with democracy as both successor and precursor of tyranny...
...the Pope and some other cranks protested, but the American people weren't interested...
...We like to think that the Army saved us from Senator McCarthy...
...In the totalitarian democracy the tyrant is all, or almost all...
...Liberty is a luxury of the rich, and that is why our talk of liberty in the world today falls upon deaf ears, on the ears of those who, if they ever dream of liberty, always struggle for bread...
...they have heard tell that nobody loves the rich...
...You can't get a man—or a world —with a gun...
...still less so, wise...
...In our time there has been the Prohibition kick, and the automobile kick, and the stock-market kick, and the Roosevelt kick, and the liberation kick, and vitamin kick, and the psychiatry kick, and the un-American kick, and the tranquilizer kick...
...There are men still living who remember free land...
...My plumber is now equaler than I am...
...Visiting Moscow, Walter Lippmann reported with dismay "the universal dogma that profits are the compelling motive in American armament...
...We were isolated, with our fetid friends, by the reprobation of the people we call mature...
...Forget the radicals (try and find them, 38 years after Debs in prison got near a million votes for President...
...We used to say that the difference between us and Nazi Germany was that here a knock on the door at dawn meant the milkman...
...It was once an American axiom, spelled out in the Virginia and Vermont constitutions and elsewhere, that a great militarized nation was a totalitarian nation and that militarism was, by definition, immediately inimical to liberty and, ultimately, even to equality...
...Jefferson crying up equality and Adams crying it down...
...These are the scamps who opened the floodgates of progress and inundated the Rousseau-ian woods forever, in India and China and Russia no less (if a little later) than in America...
...What can be expected," said de Tocqueville, "of a man who has spent 20 years of his life in making heads for pins...
...What of the young Jeffersonian dream...
...Once a man is exposed thinking any such thought, the whole American people will starve him to death instantly...
...From 1942 to 1945, while we passed the ammunition, we sang Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition...
...turns out to be: Maybe, and maybe not...
...is this what we would call maturity...
...he has only to keep us watching him...
...We are one great city of 170,000,000, governed by those equalizers known as mass media of communication and mass means of transportation...
...Where, with all their wisdom and foresight, did they go wrong...
...What are we afraid of...
...And if we, then certainly those we would like to feed...
...Understandably...
...We may say we have come of age, but what do we mean...
...The Americans who did not like a town or an occupation went somewhere else or got another...
...A couple of random examples may be taken in point...
...But the defense of liberty, not of one's own but of one's Communist neighbor's, is a matter of principle...
...It looks as if we might...
...Even the Pilgrimage from Leyden was a matter of moving, and we have been moving around ever since...
...6.25...
...Shameful-ness grown customary transcends historical niggling and carries us into the realm of principles...
...But Mr...
...and everybody is a Republican or a Democrat...
...They are said to dream bad dreams of losing their riches...
...We may prefer Christianity to communism, but the only way to be concrete is to be abstract...
...an appropriate occasion, in the light of those 50 years, to ask whether we bit off more than we could chew, and whether Holmes was premature...
...Then the revolution—at least the Communist revolution—will fail for want of the superhuman means proportionate to the superhuman end of conceiving a nation in liberty and dedicating it to the proposition that all men are created equal...
...but five years afterward the need had barely been touched and we had forgotten Korea...
...Maybe we have got to suffer...
...Have we so little confidence in our love of liberty that we must sacrifice liberty to security lest, once we have chains, we will come to love them...
...But God's justice sleeps, and the man who warned us that it would not sleep forever was not Billy Graham, but Thomas Jefferson...
...We cried liberty in 1776 while we maintained a slave society, and the offenses charged against George III in the Declaration make him sound, by comparison with the tyrants we have heard of since, like Peck's Bad Boy...
...In Europe, Asia, Africa, it was different and always had been...
...Neither Jefferson, nor Lincoln, nor even the LaFollette of 1909 imagined the true magnificence of these two achievements in 50 years...
...We Americans could, to be sure, afford to be free...
...When Christians were deprived of their liberties in Rome, the Romans saw no loss of liberty, since there were only a handful of Christians, who, in the Roman view, were all traitors anyway...
...Since what we want is technological superiority, liberty becomes superfluous, or a positive hindrance to be relegated from desuetude to destruction...
...Perhaps that is why we don't undertake it...
...He found equality "the fundamental fact about America from which all others seem to be derived . . . All men and all powers seeking to cope with this irresistible passion will be overthrown and destroyed by it...
...We will have state and national legislatures unanimous on all mortal issues of liberty (on which we ourselves are unanimous), interchangeable swarms of interchangeable bureaucrats doing the actual governing, and as chief executive (the dreadful despot of yore...
...Dulles, who used to represent American Christendom in the World Council of Churches, told a Congressional committee, "The purpose of the State Department is to look out for the interests of the United States...
...They have only to lower the big wet blanket of social pressure over the errant spark of individuality and put it out...
...The last time I heard about our surplus food commodities—they have since increased —they were costing us almost one million dollars a day for storage...
...Reappraisal of this sort is bound to be what Mr...
...The traitor to totalitarian democracy is the man who suggests that anybody is abler than anybody else...
...Like many generals, General Jackson turned religious after he was too old to fight, and after the preacher had preached his funeral sermon, one of the mourners turned to one of the general's slaves and asked him if he thought his master would go to heaven...
...The good are spurned as do-gooders, the wise as egg-heads, and the rulers, so far from being, as Adams predicted, the rich, the cunning, and the cruel, are the spit-tin' images of the people...
...How can we imagine what it is to be hungry, to have had parents and grandparents who were hungry, and to know that unless we do something revolutionary, anything revolutionary, our children and our grandchildren will be hungry...
...Under the old Comstock Act, which makes it a crime to read any book the postmaster doesn't read, one man in the Port of New York decides what foreign films Americans may see...
...These are the unintending authors of the characteristic process of our time—the liberation of peoples and the enslavement of persons...
...More than 90 per cent of all our foreign aid is military, "extended indiscriminately," says Senator Fulbright, "to governments which serve the needs of the people and alike to those which do not...
...Jefferson thought that a free press was integral to the preservation of our liberties, but our press, apart from its other interesting characteristics, is as freely and unanimously in favor of militarism as you and I are...
...Its optimistic author hoped that it would save liberty from equality...
...If our representatives misrepresented us, we would at least protest...
...When we smile, they smile...
...How close to this condition are we...
...no hope there, or in songs or mottoes or names of wars, of determining what we are supposed to believe in...
...The scandalous un-Americanism of the Grand Army of the Republic was so long remembered that until President Wilson made his Preparedness appeal in their behalf, men in uniform were not admitted to respectable public places...
...I do not care whether they like us or hate us...
...Is America possible, or are we, like France, going to come a cataclysmic cropper, this century or next, no matter how effective or ineffective our callous behavior...
...What is there about Harry and Ike that looks alike...
...He will," said the slave, "if he wants to...
...We are all merchants of death now, under 26 or over...
...An American, said de Tocqueville, if he is addressing you alone is liable to begin by saying, "Gentlemen...
...a happy tyranny, where the tyrant and the tyrannized are one...
...The flood of technological progress ensued almost immediately after Jefferson and Adams...
...Maybe we have got to get ourselves afflicted...
...Neither of them believed that democracy would ever achieve liberty or preserve it...
...This, then, was America, where, he said, everyone talked and almost no one conversed, where equality produced conformity and conformity identity...
...Still less do we like to think that we have not been saved from McCarthy at all, that McCarthy, though he killed himself winning, won...
...It is impossible to defend liberty concretely without being abstract about it and seeing that it is applicable everywhere or nowhere...
...But it is 50 years since LaFollette, who, like Lincoln, accepted the Jeffersonian faith implicitly...
...Adlai Stevenson would not be likely today to maintain the right of Communists to be teachers, but Robert Taft maintained it in McCarthy's heyday...
...Perfect love was once said to be capable of driving out fear...
...Older than any of us are likely to live to be, they went on fighting as patiently and persistently as only good friends can fight, until they could fight no more...
...It was not alone that we got rich...
...they let one more of their liberties go by the boards because it was a liberty that didn't interest them...
...Let us then," said William Penn, "try what love will do, for if men see that we love them they will not wish to injure us...
...The two most illiberal statutes we have do not require due process of law to be effective...
...There were never enough men for jobs except in depressions...
...Liberty, to our first American ancestors, seemed to consist in the individual's freedom from oppression by the king...
...We know how the "strong government" Constitution barely squeaked through—a Constitution so weak (Jefferson thought it too strong) that it could not hold our people together for a century...
...Our Secretary of Commerce tells us (not knowing that he is quoting Rudolf Hess verbatim) that we must have more guns and less butter...
...It can enact and repeal every imaginable and unimaginable amendment to the Constitution—including the first ten—but it does not need to...
...It was Fair Deal Harry who said, "I put my Communists in jail," and the most generally enlightened state in the Union that displaced one of the best Senators in our history with the worst...
...And so we approach the point where, to our great astonishment, equality, the proposition to which we are dedicated, is the enemy of the liberty in which we are conceived, and the answer to our first question, Can any nation so conceived and dedicated long endure...
...Roosevelt suggested, in a grisly contest to "name" the war, that we call it the War for Survival...
...If the one is the same as the other, then the loss of the first means the loss of the second...
...They don't represent us...
...We are the "garrison state" we shuddered at 20 years ago...
...But there are some things you can't do yourself...
...If they were misled at all in their surmises, it may have been by their preoccupation with the single form of tyranny they knew so well—the tyranny of an absolutist government over the people...
...We called for a "separate and equal station" among the powers of the earth...
...Where everybody is free and equal, and nobody wants to be anything but equal, the destruction of liberty, not by invasion or subversion, but by deliquescence, is a breeze...
...Certainly a pattern of brutal expediency has begun to appear in our national behavior...
...If Henry Ford could get a billion dollars together and still maintain that history is bunk, why should anyone else who wanted a billion dollars study history...
...here we have the state, alone among all human institutions, assigning no character to merit, counting men instead of weighing them...
...The American press, which is so venal that it will print anything anybody wants to read, didn't print the evidence about the typewriter because nobody wanted to read it...
...Totalitarian democracy, the ineluctable consequence of equal foolishness, will, instead of being rampant and dominant, be absolute...
...But we don't...
...It is not the way the Danes felt in 1940...
...in the equalitarian society the big man says what the little man says...
...Of course neither one of them believed in democracy...
...Will you want to argue with the Pentagon in the meantime...
...are we less afraid now that we have our own secret police who take men from their beds...
...No danger of their being dictators over us...
...All of our subsequent immigration fortified this single focus...
...But Americans don't want to see foreign films unless they have naked women in them...
...he knew that the first did not necessarily follow from the second, however lightly he may have let the Declaration imply that it did...
...If the Negroes and the Communists would go away, the tyranny of almost all would be the tyranny of all...
...Jefferson had this faith, in restrained measure, as Adams and all of the older Christian and pre-Christian philosophers had not...
...And if he turned out to be wrong—even if he died jobless— his hope was undimmed...
...And the preponderance of what we have done to ourselves is yet to be felt...
...A month after we and the Chinese between us had burned down 65 per cent of the habitations of South Korea we were moved greatly to help...
...In the name of security—the summum bonum of rabbits and turnips—we have embraced the militarism which Adams and Jefferson dreaded and from which so many of our ancestors fled Europe in despair of the past and hope of the future...
...Jefferson believed in both...
...The statement (intended to arouse the hatred in people's hearts) may be false, but its banality cheers the throng...
...So he hedged...
...One man, one vote...
...If a man lost a job he might never find another...
...they are ready to admit that the interests of the former are everything, and those of the latter nothing...
...nearly all of our people came from societies ruled by such tyrants...
...When reporters asked the Pentagon officials whether they had appealed to the business men to try to pare their prices on military goods, Assistant Defense Secretary McNeil laughed...
...Maybe we aren't trying to save our own liberties...
...But the Mexican government says that it did not deport him or send Mexican officers to see him, slug him, kidnap him, or deliver him to the FBI...
...Whether we make friends I do not care...
...Fear intensifies our equality, erasing from our faces all of our individuality and replacing it with the stricken visage of the girl on the colored cover of the paper-back whodunits...
...The military caste, implacable enemy of both liberty and equality, is just barely discernible in its beginnings...
...We could afford to be generous, and we meant to be...
...Can a nation be both conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...
...All of us together...
...Ours is a do-it-yourself spirit...
...All is won save honor...
...As the conditions of men become equal amongst a people, individuals seem of less, and society of greater, importance...
...We are certainly trying to save our lives—an effort that is not peculiarly American, or peculiarly human, or peculiarly heroic in a people who like to say that they would rather die on their feet than live, like the Danes for a while, on their knees...
...The acid test of liberty in the United States today is the liberty of its most unpopular citizens to be what makes them unpopular...
...The demoralization of our national practice calls for a reappraisal of our national precept...
...When we landed troops in Lebanon, the Swedish chief of the U.N...
...The answer to oppression was democracy...
...So, too, with the Humphrey-Dies Act, which makes it a crime to think any thought that the two Hoovers don't think...
...But the Communists are over the fence...
...And for all of our expediency, we still seem unable to manage effectively...
...All unsuspected by Jefferson or Adams, the real villains of the egalitarian piece are Euclid, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Lavoisier, and Boyle, and their handmaidens, Watt, Whitney, Stephenson (George, not Robert Louis or Adlai), Bell, Morse, Marconi, Edison, and Ford...
...Ours is not the soil in which revolution grows...
...they reflect us...
...We're all making a profit on guns and deploring juvenile delinquency...
...This same de Tocqueville wrote, a century and a quarter ago, about America and Russia: "Their starting-point is different, their ways are diverse, yet each of them seems called by the secret design of Providence to control, some day, the destinies of half the world...
...Nor have we any idea how rich we are...
...The question at the time was whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated could long endure...
...The founding fathers, obsessed with monarchal absolutists, may rest in peace...
...The censoring is done at the box office...
...This new nation was (1) conceived in liberty and (2) dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...
...Neither the poor nor the rich necessarily dream of liberty...
...The communication is one-way communication...
...If Communist China did not exist...
...Its mere weight in every issue and in every locality is sufficient to suppress every deviation and smother every unpopular liberty that comes to its attention...
...A tyranny without a tyrant...
...Jesus was taunted on the Cross with being able to save others' lives but not his own...
...But in . . . the United States there is but one authority, one element of strength and success, with nothing beyond it . . . the omnipotence of the majority...
...In any constitutional state in Europe, every sort of religious and political theory may be freely preached and disseminated...
...Nor will all they that shout, "Lord, Lord," enter the Kingdom...
...Nobody cares...
...Huggins, the American immgiration inspector on duty, with an FBI man at his elbow made the notation, "Deported from Mexico," on his manifest...
...When we scowl, they scowl...
...Our achievements since Jefferson have been so remarkable that we are tempted to the worship of the work of our hands, like the Communists in Russia, and, like them, to the supposition that we can do anything...
...It is a hundred years since Lincoln...
...Through our representatives—a few of whom have said publicly, and many privately, that they are afraid to defy us—we have circumscribed the right to radical dissent, the right to associate with circumscribed people, the right to get or keep a job on the basis of competence, and the right to travel...
...And these circumstances, emasculations, and incriminations have all been upheld (however regretfully) by the Nine Young Men...
...What do we really believe in...
...This was the democratic gimmick...
...In the inequalitarian society the little man says what the big man says...
...The monologue will be monolithic...
...Since the law does not say anything about the way an American outside the country can be brought into its criminal jurisdiction, there was nothing that the lawyers could do about the liberty we lost with Sobell...
...nor to ourselves...
...But they believe that life and society are human experiments and that there is no God...
...Again, at the last session of the United Nations political committee we succeeded, by the smallest majority yet, in preventing discussion of the recognition of Communist China, and our majority depended upon a dwindling cluster of satellite satraps who had shot themselves into power...
...And even then a man knew he'd get a job soon...
...The Danes surrendered to the invaders in 1940 without firing a shot, but they declined to deliquesce...
...On that famous day Adams and Jefferson both died, and the war between them was over...
...But within a decade after his death a young French aristocrat, freshly seeing America, and accepting democracy as the most just form of government, thought he detected a fatal flaw in the democratic dream: "Democratic communities"—this is de Tocque-ville, De la democratic en Amerique —-"have a natural taste for freedom . . . But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, and invincible...
...apparently, in his time, and to him, white skin was a guarantee of competence...
...What (as the children say) were we going to be when we grew up...
...But abstraction is philosophy, and we are an anti-philosophical people...
...What will their fate be...
...But the aristocracy he dreamed of has not materialized...
...In another century the industrial revolution would have matured...
...I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction...
...two years ago we thought we had opened our hearts and our homes to the Hungarian refugees, but in the end we accepted the fewest (in terms both of our population and our national income) of any receiving country...
...This handful of conspirators have enabled us to get together whether or not we have anything to do, to talk to each other whether or not we have anything to say, and to act in effective concord whether or not we should act at all...
...What will set us free from the prison of fear to redress the imbalance between equality and liberty...
...or even at the value our representatives put upon it, as a national triumph...
...Parlous questions, these...
...in ours, and to us, skin is...
...The cocky Harry and the pontifical Ike are each of them in each of us...
...Big Brother, in all his guises of print, picture, and voice, does not have to watch us, any more than the snake-charmer has to watch the snake...
...The only thing that can save liberty is the love of liberty...
...The hungry cry out for bread, and we give them iron...
...A hundred years later the villains, their villainy mass-produced, have made a contiguous and contented canaille of us all...
...I wished to live without committing any fault at any time: I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into...
...Wiser than any of us are likely to be, they fought a 50-year war of the intellect...
...It is 150 years since Jefferson, and the question is just as insistent as it was when the British government dismissed the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration as self-evident nonsense...
...Under the emergency powers of our unrepealed Constitution the Supreme Court could not protect the Nisei from us in 1942, any more than the German Court could protect the victims of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 under the emergency powers of the unrepealed Weimar Constitution...
...They have enabled us, like our present model, the Russians, to construct things that are so amazing that we forget to wonder whether they should be constructed...
...But what if there is one...
...You can't drive out your own fear by getting there fastest with the most-est...
...And for the past ten years we have done everything we have done on the ground that we do not believe in communism...
...The Communists can arouse the hatred in people's hearts," Ike departs from his text to tell a cheering throng of 85,000, "but they are unable to satisfy the hunger in people's stomachs...
...Harry sticks to his text, which he has written himself...
...he was going to be accused of something a few months later, and that was enough for the whole American people...
...If what we are supposed to believe in is wrong, it is high time we found out...
...In 40 years we have deracinated the Prussian evil twice—in Prussia—and now we have peacetime conscription here...
...perhaps we were thinking about national independence when we talked about liberty...
...Dictators never settle down," says Harry, "they always want more . . . Communist China must first abandon her ways of conquest," that is, settle down and never want more...
...The first began with the federal income tax—that Bolshevik institution —in 1914 and ended, I hope, with the bill I got from my plumber last month for 2 hrs...
...it was the way we got rich that prevented the rise of Jefferson's aristocracy of virtue and wisdom...
...We became the first people in modern history among whom poverty was only marginal, and the first society whose producers of luxury articles could own the articles they produced...
...Is it possible that Adams and Jefferson overestimated our love of liberty in the first place...
...If you are under 26 and will get into line full-time for two years, and stay there part-time for seven, you get a GI home loan with no down payment...
...But is there any use talking about perfect love if we no longer believe either in the perfectibility of man or in the power of God...
...and a Republican or a Democrat is anything, except for the Democratic tenet that the Republicans are pacifists who will not spend enough money on guns and bombs...
...There is this side of the American spirit, classically represented by the story of Andrew Jackson's funeral...
...And in one American commonwealth it worked...
...Each such historical incident is only an incident and only historical, subject, like all incidents and all history, to aberration and contingency...
...When Communists are deprived of their liberties in America, the rest of us do not see that we are losing ours, because there are only a handful of Communists who, in our view, are all traitors anyway...
...Neither, when they were rich and equal enough, did the Romans, and they were learned in liberty...
...The massive mass society goes— as de Tocque-ville observed—on one big kick after another...
...The foundation of civil liberty is the devotion to civil society...
...There is no use arguing with Euclid...
...He did not, and we can not, imagine how hungry people could be...
...But the Communists were never here, and the Negroes want the right to be exactly like everybody else...
...The same people who believed that the only good Negro was a lynched Negro —or that the only good Jew was a gassed Jew—used to believe that the only good Indian was a dead Indian...
...So has yours if you're lucky enough to be near a new military post or Defense Department contractor...
...This is phariseeism, and, like the Pharisees of old, who made long prayers for a pretense, ours will be the greater damnation than theirs who do not pray at all...
...We hinted a bit,' he said...
...And when this same President Wilson, preparing for peace three years later, proclaimed peacetime conscription to be the root evil of Prussianism, nobody outside the American Legion said him nay...
...To illuminate this question there must be laid alongside it another: What are we really supposed to believe in...
...We have discovered that liberr does not produce technological su periority...
...provided, of course, that their rulers chant the anti-Communist catechism...
...The more bombs we have, the more frightened we are...
...And unless everybody winds up doing the same thing himself, there is still there the vestigial sign of the love of liberty...
...The militarization of our country, itself a temporary equalizer, is one of the three great changes since LaFollette...
...It looks as if we are trying...
...Adams believed that the people would always be the dupes—and, in their folly, the willing dupes—of the rich, the cunning, and the cruel, and would choose no others...
...Our advance against racial inequality has been still more phenomenal, coming to a spectacular, and certainly only temporary, culmination on May 17, 1954...
...They acted accordingly, but their fear abided...
...There is no use talking about pacifism, because pacifism means saying No to the tyrannical many, not, as in colonial India, to the tyrannical one, and any independent people who would seriously think of saying No would already be free...
...We can not still...
...We like Ike (or Harry) because we are narcissists...
...So he lets them all in (unless they have naked women in them), no matter how subversive they are, because Americans can not be got interested in subversion...
...If we threaten any government nowadays, we threaten it by military power...
...The third author of the Declaration wrote an autobiography, and in it he speaks of his youth: "About this time," he says, "/ conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection...
...Liberties that are popular need no saving...
...they kept their liberties on ice, and when they were liberated, five years later, their liberties were found to be perfectly preserved...
...We are no longer wonderful, not even to our friends...
...or, rather, every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd, and nothing stands conspicuous but the great and imposing image of the people at large...
...The value of my house has doubled in the past ten years...
...Our situation had made of us the most open-hearted people the world had ever seen...
...Incapable as we are of even imagining what it is like to be poor, we can only hazard a guess that when such people dream, they dream, not of liberty, but of bread...
...The only thing the "All We Want Is the Truth as We See If" lawyers can do is look up the law...
...In their innocence they have created all the Golems that rule us all equally...
...So he was mighty careful not to lose a job, and to do and say whatever was required of him to find or hold one...
...When the three scientifically-minded authors of the Declaration sought a refuge for their heady doctrine of equality combined with liberty, they found it in the endowment by the Creator of all men...
...Adams did not...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
