CREDO
By
Rose Wilder Lane
March
7th,
1936
Sixteen years ago I was a
Communist. My Bolshevik friends of those days are scattered; some are
bourgeois, some are dead, and, by chance, I have not met the present
American chiefs of the Third International. They would repudiate me
even as a renegade comrade, for I was never a member of The Party.
But it was an accident that I was not. I had a cold.
Jack Reed was organizing
the Communist Party in America. I forget the precise locale of that
historic scene, but I was there. Somewhere in the slums of New York,
a dirty stairway went up from the filthy sidewalk. Haggard urchins at
the doorway offered Communist publications for sale. The usual gaunt
women were asking for help for someone’s legal defense. “A dime,
comrade? A nickel? Every penny counts now.” We went up through the
sluggish jostling on the stairs to the usual dingy room with the
rented chairs, the slightly crooked posters, the smell of poverty and
the hungry, lighted faces.
All those meetings were
the same, that winter. Their illumination seemed to come, not from
the grudging bulbs, but from the faces. Our police were shouting that
Communists were foreigners, and it was true that most of the faces
were foreign, and many of the voices. But these people had a vision
that seemed to me the American dream. They had followed it to America
and they were still following it—a dream of a new world of freedom,
justice and equality.
They had escaped from
oppression in Europe, to exist in New York’s slums, to work endless
hours in sweatshops and wearily study English at night. They were
hungry and exhausted and exploited by their own people in this
strange land, and to their dream of a better world which they did not
hope to see, they gave the dimes they needed for food.
I remember the room as a
small room, with, perhaps, sixty people in it. There was an almost
unbearable sense of expectancy, and a sense of danger. The meeting
had not begun. A few men were talking urgently, intensely, to Jack
Reed. He turned from them and said to my escort, “Are you with us?”
He was eager. But the
question itself was a challenge. This was a risky enterprise. Jack
Reed, as every Communist knows, did not leave his own country later;
he escaped from it. Federal agents, raiding police, might break in
upon us at that moment. We knew this, and because I shared the
Communist dream I was prepared to face danger and also to submit to
the rigorous party discipline. But the man beside me began a vague
discussion of tactics; evaded; hesitated; finally, with a disarming
smile, doubted whether he should take the risks, his safety was so
valuable to the cause. Jack Reed turned on his heel, saying, “Oh,
go to hell, you damn coward!”
This brief scene had
shown me my unimportance; I represented no group, carried no weight
in that complex of theories. I was a useless individual, just then
furiously in sympathy with Jack Reed’s words and dazed by a
headachy cold. I went home. The cold proved to be influenza, and
before I fully recovered I was in Europe. By so narrow a margin I was
not a member of the party. Nevertheless, I was at heart a Communist.
Many regard Communism, as
I did, as an extension of democracy. In this view, the picture is one
of progressive steps to freedom. The first step was the Reformation;
that won freedom of conscience. The second was the political
revolution; our American Revolution against England was part of that.
This second step won for all western peoples some degree of political
freedom. Liberals have continued to increase that freedom by
transferring increasing political power to the people. American
Liberals gained, for example, equal suffrage, popular election of
nearly all public officials, initiative, referendum, recall. But now,
it was maintained, we confront economic tyranny. Stating this in its
simplest terms, no man is free whose very livelihood depends upon
another man’s will. The final revolution, then, must capture
economic control.
I now see a dominant fallacy in that picture, and I shall point it
out. But let it pass for the moment. In this view there is another
picture. This:
Since the progress of
science and invention enables us to produce more goods than we can
consume, no one should lack anything. Yet we see, on the one hand,
great wealth in the hands of a few who, owning and controlling all
means of production, own all the goods produced; on the other hand,
we see multitudes always relatively poor, lacking goods they should
enjoy.
Who owns this great
wealth? The Capitalist. What creates wealth? Labor. How does the
Capitalist get it? He collects a profit on all goods produced. Does
the Capitalist produce anything? No, Labor produces everything. Then,
if organized workers could compel capitalists to pay in wages the
full value of their labor, they could buy all the goods produced? No,
because the Capitalist adds and collects his profit.
From this point of view,
it is clear that the profit system causes the injustice we see. We
must eliminate profit system—that is to say, we must eliminate the
Capitalist. We will take his current profits, distribute his
accumulated wealth, and ourselves administer his former affairs. The
workers who produce the goods will then enjoy all the goods, there
will no longer be any economic inequality, and we shall have such
general prosperity as the world has never known. When the Capitalist
is gone, who will manage production? The State. And what is the
State? The State is the mass of toiling workers.
It was at this point that
the first doubt pierced my Communist faith. I was in Transcaucasian
Russia at the time, drinking tea with cherry preserves in it and
trying to hold a lump of sugar between my teeth while I did so. It’s
difficult. My plump Russian hostess and her placid, golden-bearded
husband beamed at me, and a number of round-cheeked children stared
in wonder at the American. Their house was a century old, and
charming. Bright icons hung on thick walls whiter than snow;
featherbeds were spread in the bed niche of the large stove, which
was also whitewashed. Almost everything seemed embroidered; my host’s
collar and his wife’s gown were works of art. There was an American
sewing machine, and the samovar was a proud samovar.
The village was
Communist, of course; it had always been Communist. The sole source
of wealth was land, and it had never occurred to these villagers that
land could be privately owned. Each family tilled an allotted
acreage. When, in the course of natural events, the size of families
altered so that the division of land was unsatisfactory, all the
villagers assembled in town meeting and wrangled out a new division.
This happened every ten years or so, depending on marriages, births
and deaths.
Crops had been good that
year; the cattle were fat, the granaries overflowed, and all the open
house lofts held piles of red-gold pumpkins. Of course, there was not
a poor man in the town. No Communist could have desired better proof
of Communism’s practical worth than the prosperous well-being of
those villagers. The Bolsheviks had then been nearly four years in
power, and the village taxes had not been increased, nor any more
young men taken for the army than during the Czar’s regime. Tiflis,
the nearest city, was reviving under NEP, the Soviet’s New Economic
Policy of temporary retreat toward capitalism.
My host astounded me by
the force with which he said he did not like the new government. He
repeated that he did not like it. “No! No!”
His complaint was
government interference with village affairs. He protested against
the growing bureaucracy that was taking too many men from productive
work. He predicted chaos and suffering from the centralizing of
economic power in Moscow. Those were not his words, but that was what
he meant.
“It is too big,” he
said. “Too big. And at the top, too small. It will not work. In
Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s
head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great head. Only
God can know Russia.”
A westerner among
Russians often suddenly feels that they are all slightly mad. At
other times, their mysticism seems plain common sense. It is quite
true that many heads do not make one great head; in fact, they make a
session of Congress. What, then, I asked myself dizzily, is the
State? The Communist State—does it exist? Can it exist?
I wonder now whether that
ancestral home, that village, have yet been wiped from the soil of
Russia to make way for a communal farm, worked in three daily
eight-hour shifts, plowed by tractors and harvested by combines,
illuminated at night by great arclights. Do my host and his wife eat,
perhaps, in a communal dining hall and sleep in communal barracks?
Certainly their standard
of living was primitive. They had no electric lights, no plumbing.
They bathed, I supposed, only once a week, in the village bathhouse,
and perhaps it wasn’t sanitary. How many germs were in their
drinking water, nobody knew. Their windows were not screened. Their
dusty roads must have been mud in rainy weather. They had no
automobiles, nor even horses; only ox wagons. Possibly their standard
of living has already been raised. It may be that in time every tooth
in Russia will be brushed thrice daily and every child fed spinach.
But if this is done for the people in former Russia, it will not be
done by them, but to them, and what will do it? The State?
The
Touchstone of Actuality
The picture of the
economic revolution as the final step to freedom was false as soon as
I asked myself that question. For, in practical fact, the State, the
Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful,
perhaps, in their place, as the theory of minus numbers is useful in
mathematics. In actual living experience, however, it is impossible
to subtract anything from nothing; and when a purse is empty, it is
empty; it cannot contain a minus ten dollars. On this same plane of
actuality, no state, no government, exists. What does, in fact, exist
is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.
The Reformation reduced
the power of priests, so that common men were free to think as they
pleased. Political revolution reduced the power of the rulers, so
that common men were more free to do as they pleased. But economic
revolution concentrated economic power in the hands of the rulers, so
that the livelihood, the lives, of multitudes of men were once more
at their rulers’ disposal.
Government
by Economics
When I considered facts,
I could not see how it could be otherwise. The Communist village was
possible because there a few men, face to face, struggled each for
his own self-interest, and arrived at a reasonably satisfactory
balance. Every family does that. But the government of men in
hundreds of millions is another thing. Time and space prevent a
personal conflict of so many wills, each in personal encounter with
all the others arriving at a common decision. The government of
multitudes of men must be in the hands of a few men.
Americans blamed Lenin
because he did not establish a republic. But had he done so, the fact
that a few men held power would not have been changed. Representative
government cannot express the will of the mass of the people; the
people is a fiction, like the State. You cannot get a will of the
mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The
only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a
temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a
multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of desires
and fluctuating wills.
In a republic a majority
of the population from time to time directs, checks or changes its
rulers. From time to time, an action of a majority can alter the
methods by which men get power, the extent of that power or the terms
upon which they are allowed to keep it. But a majority does not
govern; it acts as a check on its governors. Any government of
multitudes of men, anywhere, at any time, must be a man or a few men
in power. There is no way to escape from that fact.
A republic is not
possible in the Soviet Union because the aim of its rulers is an
economic aim. Economic power differs from political power. Politics
is a matter of broad principles, which, once adopted, may stand
unchanged indefinitely; such principles as, for example, that
government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.
From such principles are drawn general rules; as, no taxation without
representation. Such rules are embodied in law governing action; as,
Congress has the sole right to levy taxes, Congress alone may spend
public money. This most concrete application of political principles
does not touch intimate details of the individual’s life.
Economics, however, is
concerned, not with abstract principles and general laws, but with
material things; it deals with actual carloads of coal, yields of
grain, output of factories. Economic power in action is subject to an
infinite number of immediate unpredictable crises affecting material
things; it is subject to storm, flood, earthquake; to weather and
pestilence; to fashion, and plant diseases, and insects, and the
wearing out of machinery. And economics enters into the minute detail
of each individual’s existence—into his eating, drinking,
working, playing and personal habits.
The whole economic
circulation system of a modern country is affected by the number of
its population who wash behind the ears. This somewhat private matter
affects the import or production of vegetable oils; the use of fat
from farm animals; the manufacture of chemicals, perfumes, colors;
the building or closing of soap factories, with attendant changes in
employment in these factories and in the building trades and heavy
industries, and in their demand for raw materials and for labor, and
freight-car loadings, and use of fuel, with its effects on mines and
oil fields. All these economic factors and many more change with
changing habits of personal cleanliness. A Hollywood diet or a
passion for jigsaw puzzles has prodigious results in the most
unexpected, remote places. Whether the hungry child eats bread or
candy is a matter of international economic importance.
Centralized economic
control over multitudes of human beings must, therefore, be
continuous and, perhaps, superhumanly flexible, and it must be
autocratic. It must be government by a swift flow of edicts, and it
will be compelled to use compulsion. In the effort to succeed, it
must become such minute and rigorous supervision of details of
individual life as no people will accept without compulsion. It
cannot be subject to the intermittent checks, reversals and removals
of men in power that majorities cause in republics.
In Russia, then, our hope
was realized; the economic revolution had occurred. The Communist
Party had captured power with the cry, “All power to the
councils!”
Russia’s embryo
capitalism was in reality vanquished, and the people controlled the
national wealth. That is, in actual fact, a sincere and extremely
able man was in power, devoted to the stupendous task of forcing
multitudes of human beings into a new economic order, for what this
man and his followers believed to be the ultimate material welfare of
those multitudes.
And what I saw was not an
extension of democracy, but the establishment of tyranny on a new,
widely extended and deeper base.
The historical novelty of
the Soviet Government was its motive. Other governments have existed
to keep peace among their citizens, or to amass money from them, or
to use them in trade and war for the renown and glory of the men
governing. But the Soviet Government exists to do good to its people,
whether they like it or not.
And I felt that, of all
the tyrannies to which men have been subject, that tyranny would be
the most ruthless and the most agonizing to bear. There is some
refuge for freedom under other tyrannies, since they are less
thorough and not so remorselessly armed with righteousness. But from
benevolence in economic power I could see no refuge whatever.
Every report I have since
heard from the Soviet Union has confirmed this opinion, and I listen
only to reports from its friends, for I believe that Communists best
understand what is happening there. For eighteen years the men who
rule that country have toiled prodigiously to create precisely the
society we dreamed of; a society in which insecurity, poverty,
economic inequality, shall be impossible. To that end they have
destroyed personal freedom; freedom of movement, of choice of work,
freedom of self-expression in ways of life, freedom of speech,
freedom of conscience.
The
Rule of the Iron Hand
Given their aim, I do not
see how they could have done otherwise. Producing food from the earth
and the sea, making goods from assembled raw materials, and their
storing, exchanging, transporting, distributing and consuming by vast
multitudes of human beings, are activities so intricately
inter-related and interdependent that it is not possible efficiently
to control part of them without controlling of the whole. No man can
so control multitudes of men without compulsion, and that compulsion
must increase.
It must increase because
human beings are naturally diverse. It is the nature of men to do the
same thing in different ways, to waste time and energy in altering
the shape of things, to experiment, invent, improvise, make mistakes,
depart from the past in an infinite variety of directions. Plants and
animals repeat routine, but men who are not restrained will go into
the future like explorers into a new country, and great numbers of
explorers accomplish nothing and many are lost.
Economic compulsion is,
therefore, constantly threatened by human willfulness; it must
constantly overcome that willfulness, crush all impulses of egotism
and independence, destroy variety of human desires and behavior.
Centralized economic power is under a necessity, either to fail or to
tend to become absolute power in every province of human life.
“It doesn’t matter
what happens to individuals,” the Communists say. “Individuals
don’t count. The only thing that matters is the collectivist
state.”
The Soviet hope of
economic equality rests now on the death of all men and women who are
individuals. A new generation, they tell me, has already been so
schooled and shaped that a human mass is actually being created;
millions of young men and women do, in veritable fact, have the
psychology of the bee swarm, the ant hill.
This does not seem so
incredible to me as it once did. There may yet be a human bee swarm
in Russia. It would not be unique in history; there was Sparta.
I came out of the Soviet
Union no longer a Communist, because I believed in personal freedom.
Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to
which I had been born. It seemed as necessary as the air I breathed;
it seemed the natural element in which human beings lived. The
thought that I might lose it had never remotely occurred to me. And I
could not conceive that multitudes of human beings would ever
willingly live without it.
The
Tinge of Medievalism
It happened that I spent
many years in the countries of Europe and Western Asia, so that at
last I learned something, not only of the words that various peoples
speak, but of the real meanings of those words. Everywhere I
encountered the living facts of medieval caste and of the static
medieval social order. I saw them still resisting, and vitally
resisting, democracy and the industrial revolution.
It was impossible for me
to know France without, I thought, knowing that the French demand
order, discipline, the restraint of traditional forms, and that the
fierce French democracy is less a cry for individual liberty than an
insistence that no class of citizens shall unduly exploit another
class.
I thought I saw in
Germany and in Austria scattered and leaderless sheep running this
way and that, longing for the lost security of the flock and the
shepherd.
Doggedly resisting, step
by step, I was finally compelled to admit to my Italian friends that
I had seen the spirit of Italy revive under Mussolini. And it seemed
to me that this revival was based on a separation of democracy from
the industrial revolution that had accompanied the rise of democracy,
and that in Italy, as in Russia, an essentially medieval, planned and
controlled economy was taking over the fruits of the industrial
revolution without yielding to the principle of the rights of the
individual.
“Why will you talk
about the rights of the individual?” Italians said. “Individuals
don’t matter. As individuals we have no importance. I will die, you
will die, millions will live and die, but Italy will not die. Italy
is important. Nothing matters but Italy.”
I began at last to question the value of this personal freedom which had seemed so
inherently right. I saw how rare it is. From Brittany to Basra lay
the ruins of brilliant civilizations that never glimpsed the idea
that all men are born free. In sixty centuries of human history that
idea did not appear. It has been a familiar idea to only a few men on
earth, for little more than two centuries. Asia did not know it,
Africa did not know it, Europe had never wholly accepted it, and was
now rejecting it.
Sweet
Land of Liberty
What is individual
liberty?
When I asked myself, “Am
I truly free?” of course, I saw at once that I am not. The most
that can be said is that, being American, I have a relative freedom.
Americans have had more
freedom of thought, of choice, and of movement than other peoples
have ever had. We inherited no ideas of caste to restrict our range
of desires and ambition to the class in which we were born. We had no
bureaucracy to watch our every move, to search our cars and measure
the gasoline in the tanks when we entered and left American cities,
to make a record of friends who called at our homes and the hours at
which they arrived and left.
We are not obliged, as
Continental Europeans are, to carry at all times a police card,
renewed at intervals, bearing our pictures, properly stamped, and
stating our names, ages, addresses, parentage, religion and
occupation. American workers are not classified; they do not carry
police time cards on which employers record each day they work; their
places of amusement are not subject to raids of policemen inspecting
those cards and acting on the assumption that any workingman is a
thief whose card shows he had not worked recently. In America,
commercial decrees a hundred years old do not hamper every clerk and
customer, as they do in France, so that an extra half hour is
consumed in every department-store purchase. There is no universal
military service in America, to take something from each young man's
life.
An American may look at
the whole world around him and take what he wants from it, if he can.
Only criminal law and his own character, abilities and luck restrain
him.
But anyone whose freedom
has been, as mine has always been and today most urgently is, freedom
to earn a living, if possible, knows that that independence is
another name for slavery without security. This is a slavery in which
one is one’s own master, bearing a double burden of toil and of
responsibility. The American pioneers phrased this clearly and
bluntly. They said, “Root, hog, or die.”
There can be no third
alternative for the shoat let out of the pen, to go where he pleases
and do what he likes. Individual liberty is individual
responsibility. Whoever makes decisions is responsible for results.
When common men were slaves and serfs, they obeyed and they were fed.
Free men paid for their freedom by leaving that security.
The question is whether
personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted
burden and the risks of self-reliance.
For each of us the answer
is a personal one. But the final answer cannot be personal, for
individual liberty cannot long exist, except among multitudes of
individuals who choose it and are willing to pay for it. Multitudes
of human beings will not do this unless their freedom is worth more
than it costs, not only in value to their own souls but also in terms
of the general welfare and the future of their country.
The test of the worth of
personal freedom, then, can only be practical results in a country
whose institutions and ways of life and of thought have grown from
individualism. The only such country is the United States of
America.
Here, on a new continent,
people with no common tradition founded this republic on the rights
of the individual. This country was the only country in the western
world whose territory was settled and whose culture is still
dominated by those northwestern European races from whom the idea of
universal individual liberty came into the world's history.
The
Pioneer Spirit
When one thinks of it,
that’s an odd fact. Why did half this continent become American?
Spaniards were in Missouri before Raleigh sailed from England. French
settlements were old in Illinois, French mines in Missouri were
shipping lead down the Mississippi, French trading posts were solidly
built in Arkansas, half a century before farmers fired on the British
at Lexington.
Why did Americans,
spreading westward, not find a populated country, a vigorous colony
to protest in France against the sale of Louisiana?
I think it significant
that Americans were the only settlers who built their houses far
apart, each on his own land. America is the only country I have seen
where farmers do not live today in close, safe village groups. It is
the only country I know where each person does not feel an essential
solidarity with a social group. The first Americans came from such
groups in Europe, but they came because they were individuals
rebelling against groups. Each in his own way built his own house at
a distance from others in the American wilderness. This is
individualism.
There was no plan that
America should cover half this continent. The thought of New York and
Washington lagged far behind that surge. It was the released energies
of individuals that poured westward at a speed never imagined,
sweeping away settlements of more cohesive peoples and reaching the
Pacific in the time that Jefferson thought it would take to settle
west of the Alleghanies.
I have no illusions about
the pioneers. My own people for eight generations were American
pioneers, and when, as a child, I remembered too proudly an ancestry
older than Plymouth, my mother would remind me of a
great-great-uncle, jailed for stealing a cow.
The pioneers were by no
means the best of Europe; in general they were trouble makers of
the lower classes, and Europe was glad to be rid of them. They
brought no great amount of intelligence or culture. Their principal
desire was to do as they pleased, and they were no idealists. When
they could not pay their debts, they left the town between two days.
When their manners, their personal habits or their loud opinions
offended the gently bred, they remarked, “It’s a free country,
ain’t it?” A frequent phrase of theirs was, “Free and
independent.” They also said, “I’ll try anything once,” and
“Sure, I’ll take a chance!”
They were riotous
speculators; they gambled in land, in furs, in lumber and canals and
settlements. They were town-lot salesmen for towns that didn’t
exist. They were ignorant peasants, prospectors, self-educated
teachers and lawyers, printers, lumberjacks, horse thieves and cattle
rustlers, workers and grafters. Each was out to get what he could for
himself, and devil take the hindmost. At every touch of adversity
they fell apart, each on his own; there was human pity and kindness,
but not a trace of community spirit. They were individualists. And
they did stand the gaff.
This was the human stuff
of America. It was not the stuff one would have chosen to make a
nation or an admirable national character. And Americans today are
the most reckless and lawless of peoples. We are also the most
imaginative, the most temperamental, the most infinitely varied
people. We are the kindest people on earth; kind every day to one
another, and sympathetically responsive to every rumor of distress.
Only Americans ever made millions of small personal sacrifices in
order to pour wealth over the world, relieving suffering in such
distant places as Armenia and Japan. Everywhere, in shops, streets,
factories, elevators, on highways and on farms, Americans are the
most friendly and courteous people. There is more laughter and more
song in America than anywhere else. Such are some of the human values
that grew from individualism while individualism was creating
America.
The
American Phenomenon
Look at this phenomenon:
The United States of America. For one hundred and fifty years, Europe
colonizes this continent. Then Spain holds the Gulf and Florida,
Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Russia is in the
north. France controls the waterways of the Mississippi valley, the
fur trade and the Missouri mines. Along the Atlantic coast, between
wilderness and sea, are scattered little English colonies.
Not all the English
colonies rebel against England. Those that do have not much heart for
the fight. The war drags along, a little wilderness war fought with
valor by a few rebels and neglected by England, whose vital interests
are elsewhere. An excursion of French gunboats helps decide the
issue. Peace is signed, and thirteen colonies without a common
interest do not know whether to unite or to be separate nations.
At this point, what would
seem likely to be the future of this continent? Does it seem probable
that these colonies, quarreling with one another, divided by
religion, social structure and economic interests, will prevail
against the great powers already in possession of this soil? Does it
not appear that, if they are to survive, they must be united under a
most powerful government?
Precisely the opposite
occurred. The men who met in Philadelphia to form a government
believed that all men are born free. They founded this government on
a new principle: All power to the individual.
How can such a principle
be embodied in government? There is no escape from the fact that any
government must be a man, or a few men, in power over the multitude
of men. How is it possible to transfer the power of the ruler to each
man in this multitude? It is not possible.
This was not a problem
merely of allowing common men some voice in the councils of their
rulers, some power to stop their rulers in the act of using authority
to the injury of common men. The intent was actually to give the
governing power to each common man equally. So that in effect, the
political result would be the same as in the Communist village, where
each man has equal power and struggles for his own self-interest
until a satisfactory balance is arrived at. The governing power of
this new republic was actually to reside in the multitudes. Common
men were to govern themselves. But how is it possible to embody this
intent in the mechanisms of government, since any government of
multitudes of men must be a man or a few men in power over the many?
It is not possible.
The problem was solved by
destroying power itself, so far as this could possibly be done. Power
was diminished to an irreducible minimum. Governing power was broken
into three fragments, so that never could any man possess whole
power. The function of government was cut into three parts, each
checked in action by the other two. And over these three parts was
set a written statement of political principles, to be the strongest
check on them all, an impersonal restraint upon the fallible human
beings who must be allowed to use these fragments of authority over
the multitudes of individuals.
The
Casual Birth of a Nation
Not without reason,
Europeans cried out that this government was anarchy let loose in the
world. Not without reason, older governments refused to recognize it.
Nearer to anarchy than this, no government can come and be a
government. Never before had multitudes of men been set free to do as
they pleased.
And the first Congress,
with unscrupulous chicanery, robbed the Revolutionary common soldiers
of their meager pay and put it in the pockets of congressmen and New
York bankers.
What future could be
predicted for such a lack of government, in such a situation?
In less than a hundred
years, France and Russia had vanished from this continent. Spain had
yielded Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. England had
been pushed back on the north. The whole vast extent of this country
had been covered by one nation, a tumultuous multitude of men under
the weakest form of government in the world. How did this happen?
The characteristic of
American history is that everything appears to happen by accident.
Nothing seems planned or intended. Other nations adopt policies and
pursue them; their history is formed by the clash of these policies
with other planned policies elsewhere. But America moves by a kind of
indirection. Always in American history the unintended, the
apparently irrational, happens.
Consider a question as
vital as slavery. Everywhere else in the western world, human slavery
was abolished by deliberate, well-considered legislation or by
decree. Whenever the question was submitted to Americans, an
overwhelming majority voted against abolishing slavery. Then Lincoln
was elected on a platform promising free land and a railroad to the
Pacific. An old quarrel about division of power between state and
Federal governments blazed at last into a war that had been narrowly
averted for a half a century, and, as a war measure, slavery was
abolished.
Chaos
That Works
No one intended to drive
the Indians from the Middle West. Again and again, in good faith,
Indian tribes were established forever as permanent buffer states.
That was a rational policy. Again and again, Federal soldiers evicted
white settlers from lands secured by treaty to the Indians. But there
was no control over individualism, and the Indians vanished.
California was torn from
Mexico, almost as a personal adventure, at a time when no one dreamed
there was gold in those foothills and thoughtful men knew the soil
was worthless because America already had far more land than
Americans could use, and for centuries to come California’s
population could not be large enough to be a market for farm
products.
Aroused by private,
selfish propaganda and inspired by democratic ideals, Americans
rushed to war to free Cubans from imperial tyranny, and found that
they were fighting the Filipinos to keep them from freeing
themselves. Thus America became an empire and a world power. Such
instances are multiplied by hundreds, by thousands. Everywhere you
look at American history you see them. There is no plan, no
intention, no fixed policy anywhere; this is anarchy, this is chaos.
It is individualism. In less than a century, it created America.
For seven years I have
been looking at America. I had spent more than thirty years in my own
country, before, and I had traveled over it everywhere and lived in
many of its states, but I had never seen it. Americans should look at
America. Look at this vast, infinitely various, completely
unstandardized, subtle, complex, passionate, strong, weak, beautiful,
inorganic and intensely vital land. How could we be so bemused by
books and by the desire of our own minds to make a pattern, as to
apply to America the ideology of Europe?
With some rough
approximation to fact, Europeans can think in terms of Labor,
Capital, System, and the State. One can speak of Labor in Paris,
where the working class is rigidly distinct from other classes; in
England, where their very speech sets them apart; in Venice, where
only the son of a gondolier may become a gondolier.
“Capitalist” is a
word of some meaning in those countries, where, within a social
framework only slightly shaken, men with money have won those upper
levels held yesterday by the aristocrat. There is a profit system,
where business has replaced the feudal system. The state is a
shorthand symbol for many facts, where dictators control a regimented
social and economic order by means of a bureaucracy.
In America a man works,
but he is not Labor. A hundred million men, working, are not Labor.
They are a hundred million individuals with a hundred million
backgrounds, characters, tastes, ambitions and degrees of ability.
Each of them, amid the uncertainties, catastrophes and opportunities
of an inorganic society, creates his own life and finds his own
status as best he can.
The
Scattering of Ownership
An American raised wheat,
but he was not the Wheatgrower. In every state of this Union, men of
every race and circumstance and mind, by every possible variety of
method and with many varying needs and many ends in views, raise
wheat. All of them are not the Wheatgrower. Men raise cotton, men
grow oranges, men plant soybeans; they are not Agriculture.
The Capitalist cannot be
found; he does not exist. Men of many different minds and for many
purposes, or by accident or luck, create huge business and financial
organizations, and fight to draw profits from them. But here
everything is fluid, changing and uncertain; nothing is static and
secure. Here is no solidly established class, holding lower classes
steady like cows to be milked. To capture control over these American
multitudes is not possible, because no control exists to be captured.
As long as our form of government stands, there can be no such
control. Every business or financial undertaking must serve these
unpredictable multitudes and swiftly change to serve their changing
desires, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, or rivals will rise from
the multitudes and destroy it.
Ownership must constantly
be fought for and defended, and in this very struggle ownership has
melted away; it has become so scattered and diffused through the
multitudes that no one can say where it begins or ends, and the
ultimate destination of profits from industry, if there be one,
cannot be discovered. Economic interests intermingle, the debtor is
also the creditor, the producer is the consumer, the insurance
company raises wheat, the farmer is selling short on the Board of
Trade.
The
Boundaries of Wealth
A few thousand men in
this struggle and confusion apparently possess enormous sums of
money. But look for this money and it is not there, it is not solid
actuality; it is not the tangible property of a rentier class, or the
Junker’s hold on vast stretches of earth. It is dynamic power
pouring through business and industry, and like the power that drives
a machine, if it is stopped it vanishes. These vast fortunes exist
only as dynamic power, and this power, too, must serve the desires of
the multitudes. American wealth is innumerable streams of power, fed
by small sources and great ones, flowing through the mechanisms that
produce the vast quantities of goods consumed by the multitudes, and
the men who are called the owners can hardly be said even to control
the wealth that stands recorded as theirs, for its very existence
depends upon satisfying chaotic wants and pleasing unpredictable
tastes. Fortunes that were making good hairpins vanished when
American women cut their hair.
Some thousands of men in
America direct fragments of economic power as best they can, and
these men draw out of the streams of this dynamic power as much
tangible wealth as they and their families can consume. Many of them
draw out vast sums, beyond any man’s power to consume, and use
these sums to build hospitals, libraries, museums, or for unique and
inestimable service to music, science, public health. Many of them
spend stupidly and wastefully as much as can possibly be spent in the
most luxurious and decadent manners of living, and this spectacle is
infuriating.
All these men who, in
their various ways and for various purposes, struggle to direct
American industry are expensive, in that they draw large sums of
actual money from the streams of productive power and pour these sums
back into the streams again by spending them for their own individual
purposes—often purely selfish purposes. But a bureaucracy is
expensive too. The bureaucracy that is necessary to controlling in
detail, and according to a plan devised by men possessing centralized
economic power, all the processes of business, industry, finance and
agriculture, is stupendously expensive.
Such a bureaucracy is
costly not only in ever-mounting pay rolls but in human energy. For
it must take great and ever-increasing numbers of men from productive
activity and set them to dreary work amid coils of red tape and
masses of papers recording what other men have done or may be
permitted to do. Also, bureaucracies are stupid and sluggish
impediments to the whole range of human activities, as anyone knows
who has struggled to move under their clogging weight in Europe.
Bureaucracies slow down, impede and postpone the realization of the
multitude’s desires because they are not compelled, as in this
American chaos business and industry were compelled, to serve those
desires or perish.
This American chaos of
released human energies has been going on for little more than a
century, less than half of this country’s past. In that time it had
created America and made America the richest country in the world.
Where has this wealth come from?
Americans have been
exploiting the natural resources of half a continent. And this
exploitation is continuing now and should resume its accelerating
rate of speed, for our untouched natural wealth is enormous. But
natural resources alone do not explain our relatively greater wealth,
for while Americans have been exploiting America, Europeans have been
exploiting Asia, Africa, South America, the West Indies, the East
Indies and the South Seas.
No such riches poured
into American hands as Mexico gave Spain. There are mines in Burma,
China and Australia as well as in Nevada. California’s gold did not
outweigh South Africa’s diamonds. There are coal and iron in
Britain and in the Saar, inexhaustible oil in Persia, Mosul,
Azerbaijan and Venezuela. The great forests of the world were not in
America. No soil on earth is as productive as Egypt and the Sudan.
Coffee, rubber, sugar, rum, spices and copra and tin paid dividends.
India returned some profit, and Indo-China was not a loss to France,
nor the East Indies to the Netherlands. I find it difficult to see
that Americans exploited more natural resources than Europeans did.
Land
Plus Labor
Free land will not
explain our wealth. Wealth comes not from land, but from labor on the
land, and subject populations toil, perhaps, even more industriously
than free men. Incidentally, there was little free land in America.
Speculators got most of good land and held it for good prices. The
Homestead Act was passed in 1862, when only the supposedly
uninhabitable Great American Desert remained, and twenty-eight years
later the last of the Great American Desert was settled. Two decades
after that, I, myself helped to sell the virgin land of California
for prices ranging to $600 an acre.
Perhaps America is the
richest country because it is one country with no trade barriers
drawn across it. Perhaps it is the richest country because Americans
welcomed and exploited the industrial revolution as no other people
did, and perhaps they were able to do this because they were not
hampered by frontiers, class distinctions or the weight of
bureaucracy. The fact that America is the richest country is not
alone so important; England is rich, and so are France and the
Netherlands. It is more important that America is the country of the
richest population in the world.
Unrestrained selfishness
should logically build up vast wealth of a few and submerge the
multitudes into deeper poverty. The rich should grow richer and the
poor, poorer. There is less disparity, now, today, between the
richest American and the common American in enjoyment of wealth than
there was between Jefferson at Monticello and the Far Western settler
in Kentucky.
A
Share the Wealth Experiment
It appears that
individualism tends to a leveling of wealth, a destroying of economic
inequality. This brief experiment in individualism, certainly, has
not only created great wealth and an unimaginable multiplication of
wealth in forms of goods and services, but it has also distributed
wealth to an unprecedented and elsewhere unparalleled degree. We
express this by saying that America has the highest standard of
living in the world.
This, too, seems to have
happened by accident. Certainly it was not planned; no one intended
it. Each of us has been out to get all he could, “upon the good old
plan that he shall get who has the power and he shall keep who can.”
Only once have any large
number of Americans wanted to distribute wealth, and they did not
intend to raise the standard of living. The standard of living had
already risen too high and come down too sickeningly. They wanted to
return to the prosperity of the 80’s.
This happened forty years
ago. I remember it well. Hard times had ended, it seemed forever, an
age of tremendous expansion in business, invention and wealth. Within
the memory of my parents, who were not old, living conditions had
been utterly transformed. The kerosene lamp had replaced candles; the
spinning wheel was gone, the loom was used now only for making rag
carpets. Machine-made cloth, machine-made shoes, factory-made brooms
and soap had revolutionized housekeeping. Wire nails, wire fence,
riding plows, mowing machines and binders, eight-horse-powered
threshers, had made farming easy—easier, in fact, than it is today
in Europe. Railroads ran from coast to coast, postal service was fast
and cheap, the telegraph had gone almost everywhere. Business boomed.
On Fifth Avenue rose the gas-lit palaces of millionaires. In the
Middle West women wore silks on Sundays; men smoked good cigars and
drove fast teams. Then suddenly, crash! The panic.
Some blamed the tariff,
more blamed the railroads. In 1860, a majority at the polls had
demanded subsidies for railroads. In 1890 and thereafter, railroads
were bitterly hated because they were subsidized. Everyone was in
debt, of course. There had been no time since the founding of this
republic when Americans were not deeply in debt. Mortgages were
foreclosed, banks failed, factories shut down. Charitable ladies
opened soup kitchens in the cities. Farmers, after creditors took the
cows, could live on potatoes and turnips until the mortgage took the
farm.
A population shaken from
the soil moved along the roads in covered wagons pulled by hungry
horses. Organized bands of unemployed swarmed from the cities,
shouting, “We have the bone and sinew! We demand our rights as
working men!” City police and militia had driven them out. They
terrorized smaller cities and towns. From the Rockies to the
Mississippi they captured trains, crowded the cars, and cheered the
unemployed train crews that took them full speed eastward. Traffic
was demoralized. East of the Mississippi, dispatchers cleared all
trains off their divisions, Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marched
on foot to Washington.
It is all in the files of
old newspapers, for those who do not remember those days. I was
riding in a covered wagon and listening by the campfires, and I
remember them.
Meanwhile most families
went on living undramatically, as they always do everywhere, through
depression, inflation, revolution and war. No one starved. Someone in
America will always divide food with the desperately hungry. It may
be that American kindness has grown from each American’s own sense
of insecurity.
The
Trust-Busting Era
But starvation is not the
worst of poverty among an individualistic people. Poverty, with us,
is not the chronic state of certain classes, to be borne as animals
bear cold, so that it is a physical thing. Normal Americans feel an
individual responsibility to think, to act, to achieve; poverty from
which we can find no immediate escape is an agony of mind and spirit.
After three years of that agony, most Americans knew what they
wanted. They wanted to smash the trusts.
The trusts were the
grandparents of our present huge corporations. We saw them as
combinations in restraint of trade. A few men actually owned and
controlled them, for they were new and the melting away of ownership
had hardly begun. It seemed clear that the trusts caused our misery,
for everyone had been prosperous while the trusts were forming, and
now that the trusts were solidly there, everyone was poor.
“Bust the Trusts!” we
shouted. Our champion against them was the silver-tongued orator,
William Jennings Bryan; his weapon was free coinage of silver at a
ratio to gold of 16-to-1. We wanted to destroy the trusts and
distribute their wealth, and it was quite true that currency
inflation would have distributed wealth and destroyed it.
That was the fiercest
political battle in the history of this republic. Rich men had actual
power then, and, naturally they defended their money. They fought for
it openly and furiously, and by the narrowest margin they saved it.
They defeated Bryan. The multitudes of Americans had made their one
effort to distribute wealth, and had failed.
Yet wealth has so
increasingly been created and distributed that today, harassed as we
are by personal anxieties and seriously alarmed by the public debt,
few Americans would refuse help from public funds to any family as
destitute of proper food, clothing, shelter, medical care and
financial safety as the majority of American families were then.
Today America, and only
America, offers every child free schooling to the gates of college.
Only America has a free public-library system, with an extension
service to villages and farms. Only America has free radio programs
and unlicensed, untaxed radios. Common men elsewhere would hardly
expect to own a radio. Except the British Empire, only America has an
uncensored press.
The telegraph, the
electric light, the silk stocking, lipstick and rouge, fresh
vegetables and fruits in winter, the icebox, and the milk bottle, the
gas range, ready-made clothes, the sanitary mattress, the seamless
sheet, wallpaper, the toothbrush, the leather shoe, moving pictures,
ice cream, and a thousand other things to which Americans are so
accustomed that we do not see them, all testify to such a
distribution of wealth in this individualistic country as no other
people have dreamed of enjoying.
The
Closing Gap
Twenty-five years ago,
the automobile was a rich man’s prerogative; it still is,
everywhere but here. In America, the anarchy of individualism had so
distributed automobiles that California is overwhelmed by scores of
thousands of penniless families arriving in them, and hunger marchers
do not march but travel in trucks. And these people should have
automobiles; that is my point. They should have them, and
individualism has somehow, without plan or any such definite purpose,
seen to it that they do have them.
Twenty-five years ago a
majority of Americans bathed in the washtub on Saturday nights and
lighted their way to bed with a kerosene lamp; today our
intellectuals point indignantly to an America that has left more than
2,000,000 farm houses without modern bathrooms or electric lights.
Something, they say, must be done about this.
There must be more than
2,000,000 American families that still use the washtub and the
kerosene lamp. They should have plumbing and electricity. They should
have automatic central heat, electric refrigeration, air
conditioning, and every other form of material wealth that may be
imagined and created to serve them in the future. There is still far
too much economic inequality; the gap between the rich and poor has
not been sufficiently narrowed. Something certainly should be done to
distribute wealth, to raise the general standard of living, to
improve living conditions for the poor and to give everyone a more
abundant life. But that is precisely what this anarchy of
individualism has been doing, increasingly doing for more than a
century. After looking at this unique American experiment, I think it
can stand on its record.
We look too much at
charts and figures. We should look at America. My farmhouse is near a
village of 800 people, in a submarginal farming community technically
known as rural slums in the Ozarks. Not sixty persons in this town
would appear in statistics above the “line of subsistence.” Yet
this village has electric lights, a water and a sewer system, a paved
main street. It offers a free high-school education to every child
and brings the country children to it in free buses. With not twenty
exceptions, the houses are pretty houses, well cared for, with lawns
and flowers, plumbing, iceboxes, telephones, radios. Nearly every
family has an automobile. The washerwomen use electric washing
machines. Most of the men wear overalls, except when they dress up,
but you’ll find no more charming or more smartly worn clothes than
the women’s inexpensive dresses. They all wore silk stockings.
This village is no
exception. Drive along the highways and you see them every few miles.
The greater part of most of them is below the statistical line of
subsistence.
There is nothing new in
planned and controlled economy. Human beings have lived under various
forms of it for 6000 years. The new thing is in the anarchy of
individualism, which has been operating freely only in this country
for less than a century and a half.
I look at it now, and ask
myself whether individualism has enough social vitality to survive in
a world turning back to the essentially medieval, static forms. Can
individualism, which by its very nature has no organization and no
leader, stand against the attack of an organized, disciplined and
controlled group?
The spirit of
individualism is still here. Not half the reported unemployed have
ever appeared on the reported relief rolls; somewhere those millions
who have not been helped are still fighting through this depression
on their own. Millions of farmers are still lords on their own land;
they are not receiving checks from the public funds to which they
contribute their taxes. Millions of men and women have quietly been
paying debts from which they asked no release, and somehow being
cheerful in the daytime and finding God knows what strength in
themselves during the black nights. Americans are still paying the
price of individual liberty, which is individual responsibility and
insecurity.
These unnoticed Americans
are defending the principle on which this republic was founded, the
principle which created this country and has, in fact, brought the
greatest good to the greatest number. By such personal courage and
endurance, the American principle has been successfully defended for
more than a century. But during that century, the western world was
turning toward democracy. The test of strength comes now, when half
of Europe has turned back from democracy to the old stability in
which the multitudes, having no authority, have no responsibility,
but leave both the power and the burden to a few men in control.
