Rapprochement With Realpolitik
Chapter 4 (Part 3 of 4) of the book
The Discovery of First Principles, Volume 3
Edward J. Dodson
Dictatorships -- of the Proletariat, of the State,
of Agrarian and Industrial Landlords,
and of Other Assorted Despots
Armies of Chinese under communist leadership had driven Chiang
Kai-shek and the remnant of his Kuomintang party off of the Asian
mainland. One of Chiang Kai-shek's generals, Chen Yi, had been
dispatched to the island of Formosa, where under his direction
Japanese colonial rule was replaced by an equally brutal and sadly
corrupt regime. Within days of the Japanese surrender, the secret
police ostensibly working in service of Chiang Kai-shek arrived
(accompanied by a few U.S. military aides). While Chiang's
representatives investigated suspected collaborators and communists,
the U.S. soldiers engaged in black market profiteering. Formosans had
hoped that with the defeat of the Japanese their opportunity for
sale-rule had finally arrived. They assumed the United States (and the
United Nations) would firmly support their desire for status as a
liberated people. That was not to be the case.
Chen Yi arrived in October to formally accept the Japanese surrender.
Already there were tensions building between the Kuomintang
mainlanders and Formosans. Civilians soon learned that their only
protection from the Chinese military and Chen Yi's despotic reach was
the presence of the U.S. military, whose primary function -- the
repatriation of the Japanese internees -- was completed by the end of
March, 1946. With the departure of the U.S. forces, the Chinese
engaged in a systematic pillaging of Formosa and imposed a reign of
terror against the Formosan people. In 1966, George H. Kerr, who
served in Formosa as U.S. Assistant Naval Attache from 1945-47
detailed this step-by-step destruction of the society Formosans had
built (restricted as it was by Japanese rule) in his book
Formosa Betrayed. Once again, another people liberated from
colonialism had fallen into the grasp of a new tyranny. What troubled
Kerr was the extent to which officials in the U.S. State Department
refused to acknowledge that anything ought to be done on behalf of the
interests of the Formosans. And yet, the consequences of the manner in
which the mainland Chinese asserted their right to govern were
enormous. As Kerr concludes:
Here, on Formosa, clearly defined and well reported, was
a demonstration of the fundamental reasons Chiang Kai-shek and his
Nationalist Party Government and Army were unable to secure popular
support on the mainland, and so lost China.[105]
Early in 1946 the details of what was taking place on Formosa began
to reach the U.S. public. Journalist William H. Newton wrote a series
of news articles from Formosa condemning Chen Yi and the Chinese
administration. Much of this criticism was lost in the midst of the
escalating civil war on the Chinese mainland. The United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (with U.S. contributions) was
in the process of wasting a half billion dollars to pay for food and
other materials diverted by Chiang's subordinates into the black
markets. On Formosa, organized resistance began to appear. When Chiang
Kai-shek visited the island late in October, 1946, the Formosan people
greeted him with cool silence. Then, in February, 1947, a popular
uprising spontaneously erupted. Again, the Formosan people looked to
the United States to support their quest for self-rule. Again, they
were rebuffed. The Kuomintang's answer was to send a large detachment
of Nationalist Army units to Formosa to silence the dissident
population by unleashing a program of random violence against the
indigenous people. Chiang Kai-shek publicly condemned the Formosan
uprising as the work of non-existent communists. U.S. agents and other
foreign observers knew otherwise but said little. Refugees who made
their way to the United States were also reporting the truth about the
Chinese occupation. Among the Chinese who had come to Formosa with
good intentions, most decided to leave (for the United States and
elsewhere) rather than have to live under a Kuomintang regime.
Under pressure from the world press, Chen Yi was finally removed from
office and replaced by Wei Tao-ming, whose credentials included a U.S.
education and fluency in English. He and his well-connected spouse
soon picked up where Chen Yi left off. As Chiang Kai-shek's mainland
regime disintegrated, so did conditions on Formosa. From Australia, an
UNRRA official broadcasted a strong condemnation of the Chinese
government's treatment of the Formosan people. None of this mattered
to Dulles and others absorbed by the larger Cold War struggle against
communism. Chiang Kai-shek had to be supported regardless of how
corrupt, how despotic or how anti-democratic was his regime. From the
middle of December on, more than two million Chinese refugees,
Nationalist Army military officers and political officials arrived on
Formosa seeking sanctuary. Wei Tao-ming was replaced General Chen
Cheng, and the situation for the Formosans worsened. Taipei was
established as the new, temporary Chinese capital. Chiang Kai-shek,
who had opportunistically stepped down as president in favor of
General Li Tsung-jen, now arrived on Formosa to consolidate his power
on this last remaining Kuomintang foothold.
Chiang Kai-shek, realizing at last that the Formosans might in
desperation take up arms against him, appointed Wu Kuo-chen to the
position of island Governor. "Wu [a graduate of Princeton
University] was a genuine liberal, a man of highest personal
integrity, and an accomplished administrator,"[106] as
described by George Kerr. Despite Wu's appointment and other decisions
announced for the sake of appearances, Chiang Kai-shek proceeded to
create a deeply-corrupt police state. Anyone who was even remotely
suspected of opposing his directives was arrested and executed. Even
Chen Yi, the person to whom he had entrusted establishing Nationalist
control over the island, suffered this fate. Eight million Formosans
were now forced to turn over control of their society and their future
to an oligarchy forced from the mainland because of its lust for
personal wealth without regard to the well-being of the Chinese people
as a whole. In the United States, Truman and his advisers, finally
reconciled to Chiang's failings, were on the verge of withdrawing U.S.
support from Chiang when the war in Korea intervened to attach
strategic value to Formosa.
On the Asian mainland, the communists established Peking as capital
of the Central People's Government. They succeeded in large measure
because the Kuomintang offered the people of China little hope for a
better future and virtually no hope for an end to the centuries old
system of agrarian landlordism and rule by petty warlords. To the
extent the principles espoused by Sun Yat-sen were embraced as the
cornerstones of a new China, the small number of intellectuals to whom
such things mattered were drawn to socialism and the communists
because there was no hope of a democratic alternative. Rather than
foster a truly social democratic and nationalist movement in China (as
the Soviets fostered a communist movement), U.S. leaders had continued
the policy of putting their economic and military assistance at the
disposal of despots. The communist strategy was to enlist the peasants
in every village and town, although only a small minority of Chinese
understood or accepted communism. Most were hopeful that with defeat
of the warlords by one dominant faction life might get a bit better.
As a result, the Chinese people offered almost no resistance to the
communists once the Kuomintang armies retreated. The stage was then
set for the communists to systematically destroy the private economy.
Widespread corruption and bribery was replaced by direct government
controls over production and distribution of wealth. Business owners
were required to pay workers even when there was no work for them to
do. Government interference intensified, confiscatory taxation was
imposed and many businesses were required to convert into cooperative
enterprises. China's agrarian landlords were humbled and many
eliminated. European and U.S. imperialists were expelled. And, the
last vestiges of the old system held on by a thread on Formosa, where
- even there -- civil war threatened to destroy Chiang Kai-shek once
and for all. From the point of view of other revolutionaries around
the globe (and particularly on the Asian continent) the time of the
people seemed to have finally arrived.
At decade's end, well before the U.S. sank into the quagmire of war
in Southeast Asia, William J. Lederer -- one of a small number of U.S.
citizens who had spent most of the 1950s in Asia (Lederer as special
assistant to the commander of all U.S. military forces in the Pacific)
tried desperately to awaken the U.S. public to the folly of their
government's foreign policies:
In a period of history when the people -- especially the
young people -- in the so-called backward lands are striking for
freedom (in a period of revolution against tyranny unparalleled
since the eighteenth century), we are assured by our government that
our support of oppressive oligarchies in South Vietnam, Laos,
Indonesia, Formosa, Guatemala, Jordan, Iran, and Nicaragua is
constructive and successful. Yet in each of those countries revolt
has already shown its violent beginnings; and in each only the
United States stands between the people and the overthrow of a
corrupt, dictatorial regime. In each, as it already has come in
Cuba, Iraq, North Vietnam, Turkey and Korea, the upheaval will come
full-blown, and hanging happily on to its coattails will be the
Communists -- almost as though by our invitation.[107]
In the seven years between 1950-1957, the U.S. Congress approved more
than $2 billion in military and economic assistance for the
Nationalist regime on Formosa. One aspect of the Formosan experiment
received attention by remaining group of Georgists and Neo-Georgists
functioning within the Remnant; namely, the introduction of a
program to redistribute Formosan land and a law that limited the
ground rent payments made by tenant-farmers to a maximum of 37.5% of
the value of crops produced on the leased land. Ironically, the
Chinese version of land reform on Formosa had much the same result as
MacArthur's program of land redistribution on the Japanese. Modern
methods of agriculture were prevented from being introduced because of
the large number of small plots of land individually farmed. Moreover,
taxes on production more than absorbed what farmers saved in ground
rents no longer paid to absentee landlords. Thus, the core of the
Kuomintang's land tenure program was empty and largely
counter-productive, its related tax policies punitive and
confiscatory. What can be said is that rural families survived even if
they did not prosper.
By this time in the United States only those who looked for
communists behind every tree and treason throughout government
continued to sing the praises of Chiang Kai-shek. Although Truman
never met with Chiang, he formed a strong, negative opinion of him,
his wife and their regime. Long after his retirement, Truman recalled:
You used to hear a lot about the Communist Party Line,
but the China Lobby Line ... had a lot more people going along,
powerful people, too. And what they wanted, they wanted to put old
Chiang back in power. And the first step in that direction was
getting ... was trying to get Chiang's army into the war in Korea,
which I was not about to let happen in any way. ...
Whatever they did, they'd be more trouble than they were worth, and
any money spent to support them would end up ... a good deal of it
would end up in the pockets of Chiang and the Madame and the Soong
and Kung families.
They're all thieves, every damn one of them.[108]
Unfortunately for the Formosan people, Truman made no attempt to
intervene; their fate became inextricably linked to Cold War foreign
policy necessities. United States leaders did not want to risk an
all-out war with the Communist Chinese. Truman ordered MacArthur to
convey to Chiang Kai-shek that the United States would not assist the
Nationalists in any offensive on the Asian mainland, eliminating any
possibility in the near term of the Nationalists voluntarily
abandoning Formosa. Nor, as Truman indicates above, was the U.S.
interested in utilizing Nationalist forces in the Korean conflict.
Eisenhower shared many of these same concerns but felt compelled to
guarantee the integrity of Formosa by treaty, which was signed on
December 2, 1953. More tragically, Cold War expediencies demanded that
the Nationalist facade as an anti-communist bastion of democracy not
be challenged by U.S. policy analysts. Decades would pass before
meaningful improvement in the method of governance over the Formosan
people would begin to arise. We have wonder that Eisenhower would in
his own memoirs continue the charade by referring to Chiang Kai-shek
as "one of America's staunchest personal allies" and
to Formosa as "the remaining remnant of Free China."[109]
George Kennan later wrote that "the Chinese had made fools of
us all -- a thousand times."[110] With regard to Formosa, he
thought the United States ought to press for "a properly
conducted plebiscite offering to the people of the island a choice
between submission to the regime on the mainland, return to Japan, or
independence -- provided only that we could be assured that the island
would remain demilitarized, that it would not be armed as a platform
for amphibious power in the Pacific, and that, whatever solution was
arrived at, those who were opposed to it would be granted an amnesty
and an opportunity to emigrate if they so wished."[111] But,
Kennan was now out of the government and away from the councils where
foreign policy decisions were being made. In the scheme of things, the
fate of eight million Formosans was of minor importance.
Elsewhere on the Asian continent there were increasing rumblings
against the continued presence of Old World imperialist regimes. Onto
the world stage appeared Ho Chi Minh, an ethnic nationalist strongly
influenced by the socialism of France's radical dissidents and now
being pulled into the communist bloc following Mao Tse-tung's stunning
and total victory over Chiang Kai-shek. In 1951, the new Vietnamese
Workers' Party (the Viet Nam Dang Lao Dong) was formed by Ho with the
stated objectives being "to drive out the imperialist
aggressors, to win independence and unify the nation, to abolish the
colonial regime, to obliterate feudal and semifeudal vestiges, to give
the land to the peasants, [and] to develop popular democracy as a
basis for Socialism."[112] Even as Ho's troops were moving
closer to victory against the French, however, he continued to look
for a negotiated settlement, recognizing that behind the French could
increasingly be seen the determination of the United States to do
whatever was necessary to stop the spread of communism. Once again in
the so-called developing world, the protective hand of U.S. economic
and military power chose one form of oligarchy, dictatorship,
despotism and tyranny over that promised by communism. MacArthur's
experience and accomplishments in Japan, flawed as they were, could
not be replicated without the presence of police powers sufficient to
protect the stability and growth of democratic socio-political
institutions. With the U.S. poised to come to the rescue of France in
Indochina, George Kennan made very much the same point to those who
sincerely wished to assist in the improvement of living conditions of
the hundreds of millions of oppressed people in the world who barely
survived from day to day:
Any message we may try to bring to others will be
effective only if it is in accord with what we are to ourselves, and
if this is something sufficiently impressive to compel the respect
and confidence of a world which, despite all its material
difficulties, is still more ready to recognize and respect spiritual
distinction than material opulence.[113]
Kennan later wrote that during the period of negotiation over
creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization he opposed
inclusion of Greece and Turkey on the grounds that: (a) neither were
in the North Atlantic; and (b) neither "qualified for
membership on the standard of association with our ideas of democracy
and individual liberty."[114] To be consistent, he added that
Portugal failed this test as well. On the eve of massive U.S. military
intervention in Southeast Asia, Kennan delivered a series of
CFR-sponsored lectures at Princeton in which he called for a fresh
approach to U.S. foreign policy, suggesting that all that had been
gained by treating communist nationalists as parts of a monolithic
whole was to "affect the terms of the argument which goes on
within the Communist camp and to forego the advantage which a division
of opinion there provides."[115] One example of the "rigidly
unreceptive Western attitude"[116] to which Kennan pointed at
this early date was the "commitment to the Nationalist
Government on Taiwan, with all its far-reaching political ambitions."[117]
Others at or beyond the Establishment fringe were even less generous
in their condemnation of how thoroughly far U.S. policy makers had
drifted from the principles of the Democracy (or the Just
Society) in their anti-communist fervor. I.F. Stone was one of
those in the United States extremely troubled by the institutionalized
attack on dissent that seemed remarkably similar to what, in other
countries, had foreshadowed the loss of fundamental liberties:
It is true that the American, unlike the Russian, can
still buy a Compass, a Nation or a New Republic,
or even a Daily Worker, but the small circulation of this
nonstandardized opposition press speaks for itself, and many
Americans are getting as nervous about buying a radical paper or
magazine as a Russian is about being seen with a foreigner. "There
is no room," Justice Douglas said of Russia, "for a
crusading journalist." There is also little room for a
crusading journalist in America. On this, I can testify from
experience. Five more years of the present trend and it will be as
impossible for a dissident voice to be heard in Washington as it is
in Moscow. ...
Peace abroad as at home can only be achieved by reconciling the "irreconcilable,"
as in practice they have been reconciled for generations. The
principles of Russian czarism were also "irreconcilable"
with American principles. So are the principles of Franco or for
that matter those of Chiang Kai-shek, a great believer in the
one-party state, the secret police, terror, and enforced conformity
in the name of reaction...
History teaches us that not all changes are brought about by
counting ballots. History teaches us that sometimes revolutions are
necessary. There will not be peace in the world until Americans are
prepared to recognize this. ...There are times when force and
violence can alone end abuses. There are times when revolutionary
terror and the police state are necessary to remake an old and
rotten society.
I am not advocating revolution or dictatorship. I hate cruelty and
I love liberty. Nor am I palliating the crimes, stupidities, and
evils which inevitably accompany revolutionary transformations of
society. All I am saying is that in societies like czarist Russia
and Kuomintang China which leave the people no other recourse this
is what happens, and that the good outweighs the evil, as I believe
the good outweighed the evil in all the great revolutions of modern
times, from the English to the Chinese.
The best we can do when confronted by such convulsions is to set an
example from which the new societies may learn and to create an
atmosphere in which they may move back without fear of war or
intervention to more normal and free standards. ...
History shows us that wars against revolutionary movements in major
countries only push the revolutions to greater extremism while
destroying liberty at home. ...[118]
Stone reminds us that the war of independence out of which the United
States of America were created failed, in the final analysis,
to establish socio-political arrangements and institutions to which
revolutionaries could look for guidance in their own quest for
liberation from oppression. Privilege had proven more powerful than
ethics in the life of the Democracy. Over the century and a
half during which the socio-political teachings of Paine had been
buried under the weight of a wholesale commitment to the defense of
vested interests, expediency and the tendency of those acquiring power
to embrace monopolies had become the dominant ethic. All but a handful
of transnationals clinging to the principles of cooperative
individualism had been carried away by moral relativism. In the face
of the new Sino-Soviet threat to the West, those who competed for
power in the United States were hardly willing to trouble themselves
with the analytical process of evaluating their decisions and actions
against objectively-derived moral principles. To those who today might
still wonder how landless peasants or terribly paid factory workers --
to say nothing of intellectuals -- could be fooled by the hollow
promises of communism, the words of Che Guevara provide one part of
the answer:
Our great master who teaches us most has always been
imperialism. Every time that our soul flags, or that we think of
resting, imperialism shows us ... that in a Revolution one can never
rest.[119]
Formosa and Korea became distinct object lessons to leaders of
indigenous groups struggling to obtain independence from foreign
domination or the grip of long-standing domestic oligarchies. Despite
the rhetoric of U.S. politicians and the constant references to heroes
past, the Democracy now stood beside rather than against
reactionary forces linked to the past. Many insiders recognized the
contradictions but were powerless to slow the momentum of U.S. foreign
policy driven by narrowly-defined objectives and the interests of
agrarian and industrial landlords. Dean Acheson, for one, worried that
in a world becoming increasingly unstable, U.S. actions suffered from
an inconsistent application of principle that would end up creating
serious problems. Containment as a long-term objective meant keeping
the Soviets out of northern and western Europe, denying them a
presence in the Mediterranean, maintaining large naval and air forces
in Japan and the Philippines and guaranteeing the independence
of South Korea and Formosa. On the other hand, the U.S. had inherited
from Roosevelt an obligation to work for the liberation of people from
oppression. In some arenas, therefore, the values held by those
charged with something closer to the rightful energy and spirit of
the Democracy brought them into conflict with their Old World
counterparts -- as well as with U.S. multi-national business
interests. Only the economic and military power of the United States
was sufficient, it seemed to the privileged, to prevent the wholesale
loss of monopolistic control of natural resource holdings throughout
the colonial and imperial enclaves of the Old World powers in Asia,
Africa and the southern Americas. Once again, George Kennan was one of
the first to publicly raise the moral dilemma. The immediate source of
his despair was a tour of Latin American countries completed during
1950:
When I got back to Washington, I wrote a long report for
the Secretary on the impressions of this trip. In it, I grappled
with many aspects of the problem presented in the shaping of our
relations with these countries, and found myself obliged, in doing
so, to work out in my own mind and to enunciate in the report views
on fundamental questions of political philosophy which I had never
before tried to formulate. ...[T]he report came as a great shock to
people in the operational echelons of the department, so much so
that the Assistant Secretary for Latin America immediately persuaded
[Dean Acheson] ... to forbid its distribution within the department
and to have all copies of it locked away and hidden from innocent
eyes, which was promptly done. I was never told just what passages
had occasioned this drastic measure; but I have an idea they were
ones in which I dwelt on what seemed to me to be the tragic nature
of human civilization in all those countries to the south of
us.[120]
...[I]n the very fact that I, traveling around and reacting to
stimuli, could not help but write such passages, whereas the
Department of State, being what it was and facing the tasks it
faced, could not help but reject them and refuse to take cognizance
of them, there lay an excellent example of the logic that was now
bringing to an end the usefulness of my career as a Washington
official and forcing me out into a life where the deeper and more
painful ranges of analysis and speculation could be more easily
tolerated and more safely indulged.[121]
From the excerpts reprinted in his memoirs, Kennan seems not to have
made the historical connection between the highly centralized system
of agrarian landlordism of sixteenth century Spain and Portugal and
the conditions he found in those societies of the southern Americas
where the concentrated control over locations and natural
resource-laden lands remained entrenched and oligarchies ruled by
force. Land hunger had sparked revolution in Russia, China, Korea and
the Philippines, societies in which communists promised peasants an
end to agrarian landlordism in order to pull them into their grip.
Western policy analysts were beginning to recognize landlessness as a
problem, but one that could be solved rather easily by incremental
programs of land redistribution (with compensation paid to
titleholders). This was the approach taken in Japan, which had quieted
the demands of peasants but aggravated other societal problems such as
under-utilization of prime locations and the stimulation of urban
sprawl into the hinterland. The communists condemned the private
ownership of land as one of the great evils of capitalism. They were,
of course, thinking mostly in terms of agricultural and natural
resource-laden lands and did not give much consideration to the
locational value of building sites in towns and cities. And, their
solutions consisted of either State ownership or the establishment of
cooperatives. By destroying the normal flow of goods and services
associated with the exchange economy, the communists removed whatever
opportunities there were to collect from users what they would pay in
an open market for the privilege of exploiting natural resource-laden
lands, cultivating fertile agricultural land or developing sites for
the conduct of commerce or providing services to consumers. In the
West, political leaders simply continued to ignore the calls of
Georgists from the wilderness to collect rent and leave wages
and interest in the hands of producers.
TRANSNATIONALS FACE A DARK DECADE
By the beginning of the 1950s,
the Remnant just barely held onto a place at the bottom of the
marketplace for ideas. Statism was everywhere in ascendancy, and
individualists - cooperative and otherwise - were forced to work in
the background, waging a policy-by-policy campaign against disjointed
incrementalism. Advocates of the national security state within the
social democracies went on the attack against those who challenged
their orthodox doctrines. At the fringes of the interventionist
Establishment, recalcitrants hammered away with fulminations against
the radical or reactionary tendencies each saw in the other.
Ex-Marxists and ex-communists congregated in both the radical Left and
the reactionary Right, armed with their tales of personal seduction
and warnings of impending doom.
All of the social democracies were experiencing internal pressures to
deepen government intervention into the private arrangements between
of individuals and groups, for the ostensible purpose of assuring that
economic well-being finally include all or most citizens. Thus, while
Stalinist and Maoist successes provided a convenient justification for
transition of the social democracies into national security states,
order and stability required of those in control of wealth and power
some level of commitment to increase participation in the political
system and economic pie. In some societies more than others, this also
meant a measurable redistribution of purchasing power to those
traditionally denied a sufficient share. Regular employment at wages
sufficient to meet basic needs would quiet the masses, particularly
when supplemented by a safety net of social welfare benefits. A
parallel reward system for those intellectuals, academics or public
figures who supported the agenda of the national security state would
assure that only a minority of the extremely brave or foolish would
challenge domestic and foreign policy decisions made by the
Establishment elite.
The task of silencing opposition proved, for a time, far easier than
most had anticipated. The majority of people lined up willingly on the
side of more security, worrying very little about the degree of
liberty lost with every concession to the national security state.
Those who ought to have understood best what was at risk were among
the first to capitulate. Nowhere was this more the case than in the
United States. After attending the annual convention of the American
Political Science Association in January of 1950, I.F. Stone wrote of
his great dismay at the proceedings:
It was curious to see how much attention was paid to the
problem of setting some limit on freedom of expression as a
safeguard against subversive ideas. If one looks at contemporary
American politics objectively it is clear that America is suffering
not from too many radical ideas but from too few. The danger lies in
the tidal wave of conformity engulfing the country. Writers,
teachers, and journalists who dissent from dominant attitudes have
rarely been in a more precarious situation. The process of free
debate grows more theoretical than real.[122]
Independent thinking was being attacked by what Stone saw as "an
ultra-right point of view" coming out of establishment think
tanks such as the Brookings Institution. Leo Pasvolsky, for example,
who was now the director of international studies at Brookings (and a
CFR member), was given an award by the "inner clique"
of political scientists for his work on foreign policy issues.
Pasvolsky had departed from the State Department in 1946, bringing to
Brookings a small group of his close collaborators. With funding from
the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Corporation and the Mellon Trust,
he established the International Studies Group (ISG). Pasvolsky and
the ISG played a major role in working out the administrative details
of the Marshall Plan; yet, Stone detected in Pasvolsky's proposals a
commitment to return to a laissez-faire form of
interventionism and the protection of traditional privilege. From a
policy standpoint, said Stone, the result would be "to fight
revolutionary movements by fighting correction of the abuses which
breed them."[123] For Stone, such a policy ran in the face of
common sense and against the true tradition of the Democracy.
Providing advice to others that he should have himself given more
consideration to, William F. Buckley, Jr. added that "[a]
disregard for enduring principle delivers a society, eviscerated, over
to the ideologists."[124]
From both left and right of center, truth could still occasionally
emerge, although the moral sense of thoughtful individuals was less
frequently translated into right action. This was equally true whether
one looked at the outpourings of intellectuals published in the New
Republic, the Nation, Partisan Review, Commentary
or most any other opinion journal. The two things they had in common
were a virulent rejection of Stalinism and a failure to understand the
true meaning of liberty. Some were blinded by a socialist impulse,
others by a romanticized view of the past. Powerful books appeared,
such as Hanna Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),
challenging conventional wisdoms espoused by those on the Left and
Right. In Arendt's case, she traced the rise of the totalitarian
instinct to ethnic nationalism and the transformation of anti-Semitism
(and, by extension, an anti-foreigner attitude) into a mobilizing
force. Applied to the Soviets, the rhetoric of universal communism
represented little more than a shallow attempt by Stalin to legitimize
his bid for global domination.
Other intellectuals followed with calls to arms against the communist
menace and for a broad campaign to champion the virtues of social
democracy. They joined with European intellectuals in 1950 to
establish the Congress for Cultural Freedom in an effort to counter
communist propaganda. This was the era during which the number of
intellectuals contributing to socio-political and economic commentary
mushroomed, as did the number of book titles published and articles
written for scientific and professional journals and periodicals.
Surrounded by improved living and working conditions for an increasing
majority, most now accepted Liberalism as the cornerstone of
an expanding social democracy. In their rush to defend incremental
change as the only rational agenda for public policy, however, many
intellectuals abandoned the quest to uncover the socio-political
principles upon which the just society might emerge. As the decade
closed, sociologist Daniel Bell summarized the wrenching of ideology
that had occurred among American intellectuals:
In the last decade, we have witnessed an exhaustion of
the nineteenth-century ideologies, particularly Marxism, as
intellectual systems that could claim truth for their views
of the world. In reaction to these ideologies -- and their
compulsions to total commitment of intellect and feeling -- many
intellectuals have begun to fear "the masses," or any form
of social action. This is the basis of neo-conservatism and the new
empiricism. Inevitably one shares some of these fears. But a
repudiation of ideology, to be meaningful, must mean not only a
criticism of the utopian order but of existing society as well.
...What is left for the critic is the hardness of alienation, the
sense of otherness. The claims of doubt are prior to the claims of
faith. One's commitment is to one's vocation.
Alienation is not nihilism but a positive role, a detachment, which
guards one against being submerged in any cause, or accepting any
particular embodiment of community as final. Nor is alienation
deracination, a denial of one's roots or country. Some unofficial
ideologues fear that a critical view of America would influence
intellectuals in Asia and Africa to be anti-American, or to reject
democratic values. This is a parochial view of the intellectual
life. A society is most vigorous, and appealing, when both partisan
and critic are legitimate voices in the permanent dialogue that is
the testing of ideas and experience. One can be a critic of one's
country without being an enemy of its promise.[125]
Many intellectuals seemed to have arrived at the same conclusion at
roughly the same time. Viewed in the context of history and
contemporary experience, there was no better hope for improving the
human condition than that offered by the Democracy -- flawed
as it might be. Roosevelt and Truman had demonstrated the potential of
government to intervene on the side of progress. The natural next step
was to gain control of the Establishment from within.
Real power in the United States was being distributed within the
higher echelons of business, finance and government - supported by the
work of economists and policy analysts associated with the research
conducted on their behalf. Through their efforts, the postwar era of
think tank influence over the public policy agenda was firmly
established. The inter-connectedness among the major foundations,
research institutes, with business and government, added to the degree
of influence exerted. The Brookings Institution is a case in point.
John J. McCloy, CFR member and President of the World Bank, was
brought on as a Brookings trustee around the same time as Leo
Pasvolsky. In 1952, economist Robert D. Calkins took over as president
at Brookings. Calkins, in turn, recruited a group of young economists
from Harvard that included Paul Samuelson. Samuelson's presence and
that of other Harvard-educated intellectuals assured that the policies
of interventionism would have an increasingly strong voice in forming
the national agenda and obtain support from the center within both
major U.S. political parties. To advance Liberalism as the
accepted brand of interventionism, extremists of all stripes had to be
discredited and pushed to the sidelines. Truman proved to be more than
a willing agent of Liberalism.
The first and easiest group to subdue were openly-declared
communists. Under the Smith Act, eleven leaders of the U.S. Communist
Party in New York were tried and convicted for treason against the
United States. Other than Robert M. Hutchins and his circle of close
friends and colleagues, few within the Establishment were much
concerned that the civil rights of communists were being violated.
What they did care about was that the public would continue to accept
their leadership and direction. Populist extremists, such as Senator
Joseph McCarthy, were recognized as serious liabilities who had to be
discredited and their public stage taken from them. The most
celebrated informers available to the communist-hunters -- Whitaker
Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz -- were also dangerous
because they implicated and attacked individuals who lived and worked
within the circles of power. One could see, for example, that the
evidence against Alger Hiss was contradictory and circumstantial.
There was the microfilm buried inside a pumpkin that contained little
of importance and could have come from anywhere. Charges against Harry
Dexter White seemed, to virtually everyone who knew him, outrageous,
even after more thorough investigation disclosed that a number of
individuals brought into the U.S. Treasury Department by White (most
notably Harold Glasser) were identified by Chambers as communists.
McCarthyites were also trying to implicate Roosevelt and Truman
adviser Owen Lattimore.
Lattimore, viewed by many as one of the top experts on Asia, served
as an adviser to the State Department under Cordell Hull and James
Byrnes before moving on to Johns Hopkins University. What made him a
communist in the eyes of McCarthy was that he had recognized in Chiang
Kai-shek (to whom he had served as political adviser in 1941 and 1942)
all of the elitist and none of the republican leadership qualities the
U.S. public had been sold. Even more telling, Lattimore urged that the
U.S. leave the destiny of Asians to the Asians to work out rather than
risking war with the Soviets. In 1948 his reputation was sufficiently
strong to be invited by the Council on Foreign Relations to chair a
session on the democratization of postwar Japan. His book warning of
the growing Soviet presence in Asia, The Situation in Asia,
appeared early the next year. The problem he created for himself was
in his criticism of how those Americans who thought much at all about
the U.S.-Soviet confrontation were misreading the situation:
...Americans are inclined to insist that the ideology of
Russian politics is absolute, rigid, and driven on by a conviction
of fate and predestination. People in Europe and Asia, every very
conservative people, are much more inclined to accept ... relativity
in Russian and Communist ideology...[127]
...Russian policy, for decades to come, may be guided by the belief
that it is possible for any part of Asia to break away from European
or American control, but not possible to bring it either under
Russian control or into a federation dominated by Russia, then it is
wisest to settle for an Asia out of control.[128]
Later in 1949, Senator McCarthy named Lattimore as the most important
Soviet agent in the United States, and on March 30, 1950 presented his
case in the Senate. Upon objective analysis, McCarthy's speech was
determined to contain over a hundred errors and fabrications.
Lattimore was, at the time, ending a UN assignment in Afghanistan; he
arrived back in the United States the day following McCarthy's attack.
His direct response came within days in the form of testimony before
the Tydings committee in the U.S. Senate. CBS and Edward R. Murrow
brought the drama into millions of homes. Senator Tydings disclosed
that the FBI file on Lattimore contained nothing to suggest he was a
communist or communist sympathizer. Lattimore indignantly described
his attackers as a "motley crew of crackpots, professional
informers, hysterics, and ex-Communists who McCarthy would have
[people] believe represent sound Americanism."[129] He also
reminded everyone involved of that fact that McCarthy, not he, had
been charged with criminal acts, with violation of professional
ethics, of tax evasion, of destroying official records and using his
official position to advance his own interests.
McCarthy backed off his initial charges of treason against Lattimore,
absorbed by other targets and his own troubles. In 1951, Lattimore was
called before a U.S. Senate committee investigating communist
domination of the Institute of Pacific Relations, of which Lattimore
had long been an officer. Lattimore provided extensive testimony to
the committee on the reasons for Chiang Kai-shek's defeat and
suggested the U.S. accept the reality of communist rule in China and
try to prevent a Sino-Soviet alliance against the social democracies.
A parade of Asian scholars testified on behalf of Lattimore's
professional objectivity. Evidence eventually presented by former
State Department officials further demonstrated that whatever its
leanings the Institute's influence over U.S. policy was insignificant.
The negative publicity nevertheless seriously affected Lattimore's
career. Biographer Robert P. Newman concludes that "Lattimore
did not realize at the time the extent to which geopolitics had lost
ground to ideology in the United States. He had always been
non-ideological, more pragmatic than crusading."[130] He was
facing persons lusting for blood and vindication of their
self-righteous intolerance of independent thinking. Late in 1952, a
Federal grand jury initiated an investigation of Lattimore's ideas (as
opposed to his actions) and the extent to which they served communist
interests. He was indicted on seven counts of perjury in connection
with his testimony before the Congressional committees. Lattimore was
represented in all this by Abe Fortas, who warned that the government
had bet so much on this case they would undoubtedly attempt to frame
him, encourage witnesses to lie and create documents out of thin air
and introduce them as evidence against him. With Lattimore's fate
still in doubt late in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated in a
memorandum to Attorney General Herbert Brownell his grasp of what was
happening to the credibility of the Federal government, writing:
The Communists are a class set apart by themselves.
Indeed, I think they are such liars and cheats that even when they
apparently recant and later testify against someone else for his
Communist convictions, my first reaction is to believe that the
accused person must be a patriot or he wouldn't have incurred the
enmity of such people.[131]
In any event, after consuming huge amounts of public revenues, the
government prosecutors could make none of the charges stick. They
nonetheless decided to spend even more money ordering a summary of
everything Lattimore had ever written or spoken about so find evidence
that his views were consistent with those of Soviet or Chinese
communists. In May of 1955, Lattimore journeyed to Europe for a series
of well-received lectures; the indictments against him were dismissed
while he was still outside the United States.
Lattimore's experience was no doubt a terrible and demoralizing
experience for him and his family. His victory does point, however, to
the possibility in the United States of the determined individual --
when supported by counsel willing to devote sufficient resources --
prevailing against the aggregated police powers of the State.
Lattimore remained at Johns Hopkins University under less than ideal
circumstances until 1962 (Milton Eisenhower, who was hardly likely to
think warmly of Lattimore, became president of the university in
1957), when he was offered a professorship in Chinese studies at Leeds
University in England. Although gone from the United States, Lattimore
did not simply fade away into academic oblivion. As the course of
events unfolded during the 1960s, the debate continued over U.S.
foreign policy mistakes in dealing with communism. Lattimore remained
on the attack, as evidenced by the following exchange between I.F.
Stone and Lattimore in 1972, Lattimore responding to a commentary ("The
New Shape of Nixon's World") by Stone appearing June 29 in The
New York Review of Books:
To the Editors:
Despite my deep respect for I. F. Stone as an acute political
analyst, I find myself disagreeing with his conclusions ("The
New Shape of Nixon's World," NYR, June 29) that Nixon
has pulled off a "successful gamble in Vietnam" and that
Moscow and Peking have "acquiesced" in it.
I suggest that another interpretation is possible and preferable.
The Vietnamese patriots, Northerners and Southerners, have knocked
the Nixon "Vietnamization" program to bits, and with it
the infrastructure of the Thieu government. Even in America it is
more and more obvious that only terrorization from the air keeps
that government from collapsing. The idea that it can successfully
take the offensive, except in territory where the noise of the bombs
has been succeeded by the stillness of death, is hopeless. It is
more and more obvious that Nixon can do nothing but kill. He cannot
build a society, an economy, a state that will work.
In the meantime, there are certain problems, unconnected with
Vietnam, that can be successfully negotiated, at least to a certain
extent. In these circumstances, it seems to me that both the Soviet
Union and China are following a sound policy. They are demonstrating
that on reasonable matters they are ready to negotiate reasonably.
At the same time they are letting the world see and hear that it is
Nixon who relies on bombing the Vietnamese to the negotiating table
(or "back to the Stone Age"), and that all the savage
words of bluster and bombast come out of Washington. The Vietnamese
are saying, "Let us alone, to mind our own business."
Nixon is saying, "I will not let you alone. I insist on minding
your business."
One of the rules of successful diplomacy is that when you are
negotiating with an adversary whom you cannot convince, you should
aim to convince the bystanders that it is the adversary, not you
yourself, who is being unreasonable, brutal, savage, uncivilized.
This diplomacy the Vietnamese, aided by the diplomacy of the Soviet
Union, is pursuing with patience and heroism. The world is being
convinced that the danger to civilization comes from America. The
tragedy is that the American people, their senses dulled by years of
slaughter and body-counting, are behind all the other peoples of the
world in realizing this terrible truth.
I.F. Stone's response appeared on September 21:
These tortuous apologetics remind me of those which
followed the Nazi Soviet pact in 1939. China could have responded to
the mining and bombing of Hanoi by opening its ports to Soviet
supply ships and closing ranks with Moscow in support of Hanoi.
Moscow, by postponing the summit in protest, would have raised
pressure here and abroad upon Nixon to stop a bombing and blockade
so severe Hanoi terms it an escalation to a war of extermination.
Neither great power cared enough to interrupt its own "business"
negotiations with Nixon, for all the fresh blood on his dirty
hands.[132]
Victor Navasky accurately describes (in his 1980 book, Naming
Names) the foreign policy conflict of these years as a "domestic
civil war," in which there was "no room ... for the
neutral patriot."[133] Ex-communists were coming out of the
woodwork to capitalize on the publicity and attention others were
gaining on the back of the McCarthy witch hunt. Investigative
committees assembled a cadre of professional witnesses whose memories
of names, dates and places -- as predicted by Eisenhower -- expanded
with each appearance. On the other side of the scale, many of those
who abandoned communism after years or decades of adherence - as "true
believers" - were well-positioned to understand the lengths to
which Stalinists were willing to go to gain control over the future.
In writing about the small number of ex-communists he came to know
very well, Henry Regnery reminds us:
They did not play with Communism by joining front
organizations, peace sit-ins, protest demonstrations, and the like;
they went all the way and joined the party, not because they saw it
as a path to power and influence, but because, in their youthful
idealism, they believed it offered the only way out of the dilemma
of modern life. When they realized that they had made a hideous
mistake, their commitment to anti-Communism was also total.[134]
The brutality of Stalinism turned many others off to communism as a
system but not to the egalitarian objectives they believed were to be
found in the writings of Marx and Engels. What was true then and is
true today is that neither the statist support of laissez-faire
interventionism, imbibed with privilege, nor state socialism --
attempting to pass for some type of communitarian collectivist system
-- contained the seeds of creating the just society. Among those
Americans who continued to adhere to Marxist ideology, most left the
Communist Party in order to distance themselves from charges of being
controlled by Stalinists working as agents of the Soviet Union. Even
the American Civil Liberties Union denounced communism and chose not
to defend the rights of accused communists removed from government
employment or otherwise denied their constitutional rights.
From within the Remnant, a small number of courageous
individualists formed an emergency committee to fill the void left by
what they viewed as the ACLU's surrender to political correctness.
Another, rather unlikely, source of support for the right of dissent
also emerged out of a Ford Foundation report prepared by attorney H.
Rowan Gaither, Jr. (chairman of Rand Corporation), a key
recommendation of which was that the Foundation should use its
resources toward "[t]he elimination of restrictions on
freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression ... and the development of
policies and procedures best adapted to protect these rights in the
face of persistent international tension."[135] To pursue
this and other Foundation objectives, Paul Hoffman (Economic
Cooperation Administrator of the Marshall Plan) was elected President
of the Ford Foundation in 1951. Hoffman, in turn, recruited Robert M.
Hutchins from the University of Chicago.
From the very beginning, Hoffman and Hutchins were committed to an
aggressive program that was rather unsettling to Henry Ford II and
those on the Foundation's board who were largely satisfied with the
status quo. One of Hoffman's signal achievements before departing two
years later was to nurture into existence and independence the Fund
for the Republic, whose own trustees were recruited because of their
well-known concerns over the state of civil liberties in the United
States. Speaking at Harvard University early in 1951, Hutchins
suggested what was then at stake in the nation:
I recognize that these are dangerous times and that the
state must take precautions against those who would subvert it. I do
not suggest that those who want to force conformity upon academic
bodies do so from any but the most patriotic motives. I do say that
they are misguided. The methods they have chosen can not achieve the
results they seek. They will, on the contrary, imperil the liberties
we are fighting for, the most important of which are freedom of
thought, speech, and association.[136]
All across the United States, the challenge of McCarthyism aroused
individualist instincts within otherwise very mainstream scholars,
writers and teachers. At Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, for example, guest lecturers were invited during 1951 to
express their views on the state of liberty in the United States.
Henry Steele Commager told his audience, "Our very politics,
even our international relations, are coming to be a vulgar
competition in eloquence about loyalty and rhetoric about patriotism,"[137]
to which he added his fear that freedom of inquiry and the potential
for discovery of truth were severely threatened by the demand for
conformity. A colleague of Commager at Columbia University, Walter
Gellborn, warned that the current environment of fear and obsession
with security was destroying the substance of what made the United
States the greatest of social democracies:
[The loyalty program] has thrown the weight of the
government of the United States behind the dangerous theory that
entertaining an unsound opinion or advocating an abhorrent idea is
in itself an offense against society. Acceptance of that theory
discourages bold speculation by making it dangerous to dissent, for
in nervous times dissent is too readily mistaken for disaffection.
When diversity of opinion becomes personally disastrous, most people
simply avoid peril by suddenly avoiding opinions.[138]
James P. Baxter III, President of Williams College in New York, took
the opportunity to defend academic freedom from the advance of
statism. "There have always been large numbers of men who
prefer 'thought control' to freedom," declared Baxter, "men
who are eager -- as Walter Bagehot has pointed out -- to use the
'immense engine' of the State 'to crush the errors which they hate,
and to replace them with the tenets they approve'."[139] With
the memory of the McCarthy hearings still strong, historian Richard
Hofstadter traced the long history of the struggle for intellectual
and academic freedom in the nation, ending with this warning:
No one can follow the history of academic freedom in
this country without wondering at the fact that any society,
interested in the immediate goals of solidarity and
self-preservation, should possess the vision to subsidize free
criticism and inquiry, and without feeling that the academic freedom
we still possess is one of the remarkable achievements of man. At
the same time, one cannot but be appalled at the slender thread by
which it hangs, at the wide discrepancies that exist among
institutions with respect to its honoring and preservation; and one
cannot but be disheartened by the cowardice and self-deception that
frail men use who want to be both safe and free.[140]
Earlier, in 1949, Felix Morley (who joined with William F. Buckley,
Jr. and other national security state interventionists to attack the
integrity and sympathies of Owen Lattimore[141] ) had suggested that
the real strength of the Democracy was neither material nor
cultural; rather, many generations of people living without government
to direct individual behavior or financial decisions had nurtured
within a considerable minority a "deep-rooted mistrust of
governmental planning."[142] More recent migrations of
peoples from statist societies added another layer of complexity.
Peasants, unemployed workers, aristocrats and intellectuals had come
across the oceans to escape various forms of oppression. Nurtured by
the memory and experience of life under extreme forms of agrarian and
industrial landlordism, most political activists sought to combine the
egalitarian promise of socialism with the participatory nature of
democracy. Individualists within the Remnant were
philosophically drawing in the sand the line beyond which they could
not tolerate interventionism. At the same time, the most powerful
agrarian and industrial landlords (i.e., those who enjoyed the
greatest extent of economic privilege and political influence) worked
systematically to prevent any substantive loss of privilege. In
defending their position, they did their best to link any attack on
the status quo as subversive and to uncover evidence that the
reform-minded were leftists who adhered to Marxist ideology
and communist control. In these tense times, those who sincerely
wished to improve the living conditions of all people everywhere but
who disagreed over the promise of the State as a vehicle for achieving
this objective became objects of character assassination.
R.H. Tawney, at the center of Britain's postwar moves toward
democratic socialism, pointed out that in virtually all of the Old
World only a small portion of the people had ever enjoyed the benefits
of owning the means of production. Yet, I have been able to find no
socialist-oriented intellectuals or activists who advocated as a
public policy option assisting workers (i.e., those receiving their
currency wages in exchange for their labor) in an effort to bring
them, to some limited extent, into the group of agrarian and
industrial landlords. To do so would, others were now suggesting,
broaden the benefits of ownership to the overwhelming majority of
citizens and thereby mitigate the historical problem of wealth
concentration. For Tawney and the democratic socialists, there existed
only one road down which public policy had to travel:
The truth is that, at the present stage of its history,
the economic system is necessarily a power system. It is a hierarchy
of authority; and those who hold its levers exercise, consciously or
unconsciously, a decisive influence on countless human lives. Such a
power is too great to be entrusted to private persons, actuated
primarily -- and, in present conditions, inevitably actuated -- by
considerations of their own and their shareholders' pecuniary gain
or loss. It cannot, for technical reasons, be abolished or broken
up; but it can cease to be arbitrary and autocratic. It can, in
short, be converted into a responsible public or semi-public
function in the traditional English manner, by its submission to
public control, whether in the form of regulation or ownership.[143]
The assumption, proven incorrect by events of the second half of the
twentieth century, was that the State would somehow act in the
interest of society as a whole, where individuals never could or
would. By failing to understand the true nature of either privilege or
of equality of opportunity, the solutions advanced by Tawney called
upon citizens to relinquish what was left of their inherent rights to
property (i.e., what they produced or legitimately acquired in
exchange) in return for a vague promise of economic security. With
Labour in power and many of Britain's political leaders committed to a
progressive social agenda, Tawney was confident the State could
undergo a permanent metamorphosis and begin to serve the broad public
interest.
The inherently bureaucratic nature of government decision-making has
been demonstrated all too clearly in every society that has -- even
with the best of intentions -- pursued strongly interventionist
policies. Democratic socialism, social democracy and Liberalism
all failed in their promise to bring full employment without
inflation. Within the expanding government sector, far too many
managers and workers saw little reason to do more than what was
minimally acceptable. Advancement has had more to do with Party
loyalty and political connectedness than ability or achievement. Great
risk and little reward have been attached to innovation and change.
And, as had always been the case, where government programs are funded
by taxation and borrowing, rather than service generated revenue and
the collection of rent, the results have been widespread
inefficiency, corruption, fraud, theft and other unforeseen
consequences. Descriptions of conditions finding their way out of
societies dominated by state socialism should have provided ample
warning against aggrandizing the social and economic functions of the
State. Among interventionists, however, arrogance and confidence were
simultaneously expanding during a period of extraordinarily unusual
market conditions. Producers based in the United States had
temporarily been in the position of being able to meet much of the
global demand for goods, while the U.S. government provided dollars to
foreign governments to acquire what they needed. And, this occurred in
an environment where nominal household incomes (for an expanding
majority) were rising nearly as fast as prices.
What sincere social democrats always feared more than an enlarged
bureaucratic State was the power of vested interest inherent in the
concentrated control over the means of production. Einstein, who
championed the integration of political democracy with economic
socialism, described the status quo as a state of "economic
anarchy" within which "[t]he worker is constantly in
fear of losing his job."[144] In the quest for first
principles, Einstein's scientific mind nonetheless failed him. As an
individual he accomplished so much by abandoning conventional wisdom
and forging his own paradigm of how the universe was structured. Where
socio-political arrangements were concerned, he did, however,
recognize that success under socialism involved a delicate balance
between individual liberty and societal responsibility:
The achievement of socialism requires the solution of
some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it
possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political
and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming
all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual
be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power
of bureaucracy be assured?[145]
Others within the transnational intellectual community carried on a
dialogue that attempted to find the solution to the apparent enigma
identified by Einstein. No subject received greater attention than the
proposals for global confederation, or world government, as
the only rational means by which peace could be secured. Mortimer
Adler, for one, saw the internationalism of the Truman-Eisenhower era
as a first stage in the subordination of the nation-state to law based
on universal principles and values. He hoped and believed that after
an indefinite (perhaps very long) transitional stage, the sovereignty
of the individual would emerge to displace the sovereignty of the
nation-state. The rights of the individual would -- ultimately -- be
protected by a global federal government granted powers to enforce the
rules established and enumerated constitutionally. In order to ensure
that as much government as possible would be kept close to people,
Adler recommended that local governments be granted charters and the
responsibility for providing most public services. The adoption and
effective implementation of these changes, Adler predicted, might
require not decades but centuries. The political means had to be both
democratic and incremental.
Tracing the first decade of debate between internationalists and
world federalists, political scientist Inis Claude joined Adler in
warning against committing too soon and without experiential evidence
to support idealistic solutions. "The maintenance of a decent
respect for the bounds of our own ignorance is compatible with the
observation that it is illogical to cite the relative failure of the
United Nations as evidence of the need for world government and to
fail to cite it as evidence of the improbability that mankind is now
capable of creating and sustaining a more ambitious institutional
structure,"[146] he offered in somber reflection. To those
who in their zeal for a new world order ignored much of the history of
hierarchical government, Claude declared:
The most that can be said for government -- and this is
saying a great deal -- is that it sometimes contributes greatly to
the stability of a society and the security of its members, and
that, more rarely, it may even promote order without doing violence
to the values that many men place above order. Given the right
social conditions and the right kind of regime, government may work
reasonably well. This is a far cry from the proposition that the
establishment of a government is anything like a certain means of
solving the most critical problems that beset any human group,
including the largest possible human group. The world might be
better served by a frank exploration of the limits and difficulties
of government on a global scale than by a campaign of persuasion
which presents a glorified picture of government.[147]
Adler certainly agreed. Government could, under the best of
circumstances and intentions, facilitate cooperative behavior between
individuals who accepted such behavior as key to a more satisfying
human existence. However, one had only to view the world in an
objective manner to see that the overwhelming majority of people in
most societies and a large minority in the remainder had few or none
of the goods of a decent human existence. The struggle for
day-to-day survival left most of humanity unable to contribute to the
progress of civilization. Adler believed he had learned from a young
attorney named Louis O. Kelso how, at least for the social
democracies, the lingering problem of the underclass could be finally
resolved. Kelso's study of the history and nature of capitalism
(what I have described as a fusion of agrarian and industrial
landlordism) convinced him that the Democracy that was the
United States and social democracy elsewhere could be preserved only
under conditions where virtually all citizens became recipients of
rent, wages and interest. In 1958, Adler
collaborated with Kelso on their first detailed presentation of a plan
to accomplish this objective, published as The Capitalist
Manifesto. Adler wrote the preface, explaining how he came to
embrace Kelso's solution to the great problem of unjust wealth
concentration. Many of Western civilization's most influential social
philosophers and reformers of the last hundred years (a group he
identifies as including Henry George) had articulated the case against
the status quo, offering their own - non-communist -- solutions. Not
until meeting Kelso, however, did Adler feel he had found "the
means of giving full strength to the rights of private property in
capital while at the same time harmonizing those rights with the
applicable principles of economic justice."[148] Liberalism,
greatly assisted by the deceptive simplicity of Neo-Keynesian economic
prescriptions, was pulling the social democracies along the path
toward democratic socialism and the trading of liberty for the
illusion of security:
What appears to be the increasing productiveness of
labor is not the increasing productiveness of labor but the
increasing productiveness of capital.
What appears to be the preservation of private property in the
means of production, particularly in the capital wealth of
corporations, is characterized by only a fraction of the rights that
would justify its being called private property.
What appears to be justice in the distribution of incomes is in
fact gross injustice.
What promises to free men from unnecessary toil is of such a nature
that it must unavoidably saddle them with unnecessary toil.
What seems at first glance to be an economic order consistent with
the American system of separated and balanced powers, as the most
dependable safeguard of human freedom, is in fact creating a
centralization of power that would have brought our ancestors to
arms.
Though it is fashionable today to believe that we are advancing
toward a sound capitalism, an understanding of the principles of
capitalism will disclose that we are retreating from it and,
instead, advancing toward a socialistic state.[149]
Kelso and Adler venture into the realm of political economy in an
effort to substantiate these claims. They begin, to their credit, with
a recognition that "natural resources" are a factor
of production separate and distinct from "human labor"
and "inanimate instruments made by man."[150]
Unfortunately, they accept as principle without critical analysis
Locke's assertion that "a man's right to acquired property
derives from the productive use of such property as he already owns,
whether that is his own labor power, his land, or his stock of
workable materials and working instrumentalities."[151] By
conveniently sidestepping the socio-political ramifications of
treating nature (i.e., what we know to be the source of all wealth) in
the same realm of property as production, Adler and Kelso fall victim
to the same diversion from classical political economy as those who
did so deliberately in defense of the status quo. Land ceases
to exist as a distinct factor of production in their analysis. From a
socio-political standpoint, they abandon the ought and simply
accept what is; namely, the practice of economists of that era
to define capital as "all forms of acquired property
in productive factors."[152] From the perspective of someone
holding the same views as Henry George or a cooperative individualist,
their other crucial intellectual error is a willingness to accept as
principle the relativistic view that "wealth is anything that
is regarded as wealth by a significant number of persons."[153]
By this reasoning, any and all privileges granted by the State to
individuals or groups or entities would have to be accepted as
legitimate forms of private property; and, if such assets yielded an
exchange value in the market place, that value must be wealth
to theorists and beneficiaries alike. Adler's own deep concern for the
rights of the individual is put at risk by such thinking. How can the
individual be said to possess an unalienable and equal right to the
opportunity for survival if denied the right of equal access to nature
under laws that protect the monopolistic control over nature by some
to the exclusion of others? Neither Adler nor Kelso rise to the moral
and intellectual challenge on this critical question.
Kelso's efforts would eventually help to turn a respectable number of
propertyless workers into owners of the corporate shares of stock. A
small number of companies even have been wholly acquired by managers
and employees. Those who have in this manner become joint owners of
businesses controlling land or other forms of economic
licenses - as well as capital goods -- have thereby shared in the
unearned income previously monopolized by a smaller number. Employee
ownership does, in fact, mitigate for some the problems created by
agrarian and industrial landlordism. Even under the best of scenarios,
however, far too many people will forever remain in positions of
virtual domination by those who control nature, enjoy the privileges
of monopolistic licenses and wield the bureaucratic powers of the
State. Moreover, the nominal price of all types of land continues to
escalate, so that landlords - whether agrarian or industrial - claim
an increasingly large share of wealth being produced by others. To be
fair, the measures advocated by Kelso have received only about as much
experimental support as has the Georgist incremental measure of
capturing the annual rental value of locations in our cities and
towns. Logic suggests some improvement in the opportunity for those
excluded from the rentier class to exchange their labor for a
living wage under conditions of widespread employee ownership of
businesses. The broader the distribution of purchasing power, the
greater will be the demand for labor. What this suggests is that
employee ownership has a firm place in any holistic approach to
maximizing both wealth production and a just distribution thereof.
What remains as the core problem to be solved is how to implement
measures to capture the rent of nature and the exchange value of other
forms economic license while freeing from taxation the earned income
individuals derive from engaging in wealth production.
What was absent during the 1950s and continues to be missing from the
intellectual and political debates is a clear and logically-consistent
extension of John Locke's distinctions between liberty and
license. On this important matter, the Marxist-inspired
justification for transforming the social democracies into national
security states blurred the thinking even of those within the
Remnant. One of those who considered his beliefs to be true to
conservative ideals was philosopher Peter Viereck. In 1953, he
suggested to Western intellectuals that a common ground had developed
upon which they could conserve the best tradition offered while ever
moving toward the just society:
Civilization is an infinitely fragile bundle of
accumulated habits and restraints. The necessary conservative
function of any generation is not just to enjoy itself but to pass
on this bundle in good condition to the next generation.
Radicalism and revolt are just as valuable as conservatism so long
as they really do correct social defects. But not when their
insurgency accentuates, instead of corrects, social defects. In the
past, when society had too much laissez faire, the thunder
from the left was a valuable corrective to social defects. Today,
when the world is afflicted by too much statism, the left
accentuates, rather than corrects, social defects. ...[155]
To Americans, in particular, Viereck urged patient study of the great
ideas in a search for truth. "By being more contemplative
than activist, by asking all those basic questions the activists
ignore...," Viereck believed the nation would gradually
experience "a conservative return to values..."[156]
Viereck retains in his vision of society overseen by minimally
interventionist government the cooperative individualist requirement
that ethics displace exploitation, that human rights act as a check on
the freedom of action by corporate, entrepreneurial and government
decision-makers and that privilege is supplanted by equality of
opportunity.
Some of the same concerns had long been on the mind of Robert
Hutchins and were the driving forces behind his struggle to reorganize
the University of Chicago into a model environment for return to and
expansion of liberal education. Sadly, in just the same manner as the
Remnant had entered its long isolation in the wilderness, so was
Hutchins forced to abandon his quest and step down from the University
to devote his time and energy to other projects. One of his
accomplishments during the last half of the 1940s was to assist (with
funds provided by Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke) in
establishing the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. Then, after
Paul Hoffman called on Hutchins to join him at the Ford Foundation,
they distributed more than thirty million dollars in grants over the
next two years for educational programs. Of this amount, nearly $1.5
million went to fund the Great Books project and another of Mortimer
Adler's projects, the Institute for Philosophical Research.
Over the next few years, Hutchins became one of the strongest and
most controversial defenders of the U.S. Constitution and the
guarantees to civil liberties incorporated therein. Given the times,
his defense of intellectual freedom is remarkably consistent and
deserving of our deep respect. Although personally critical of Marxist
assertions about the historical inevitability of socialism, Hutchins
asserted to audiences that there was nothing wrong in having Marxists
in government or as teachers -- so long as they were competent in
their work and did not attempt to substitute propaganda for objective
presentations of fact. Reactionary architects of the national security
state responded with unrelenting attacks on Hutchins, Hoffman and the
Ford Foundation. After little more than a year, Hoffman was tiring of
having to defend his programs and spending decisions to Henry Ford II
and the Foundation's other fearful and indecisive board members.
Hoffman's future was chosen for him when Eisenhower asked for his help
in running the 1952 Presidential campaign, which took Hoffman away for
four months. He returned after the election but remained at the Ford
Foundation for only a few months more, resigning in February 1953 to
head an economic policy study committee appointed by Eisenhower.
Hutchins remained at the Ford Foundation, isolated and largely
stripped of influence. He worked sparingly out of the Foundation's
Pasadena, California office (which Hoffman had established when the
two of them first came on board). He would soon be called on to guide
the Fund for the Republic through its traumatic years as guardian of
the flame of individual liberty against attacks by the advancing
national security state.
The role of extremists such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and journalist
Fulton Lewis, Jr. in creating an atmosphere of fear was real but must
be placed in the proper perspective of the times. Marxists, communists
and communist sympathizers in the United States were being threatened
not with imprisonment but with ostracism and the potential loss of
their opportunity to earn a living. The overwhelming majority of
Americans, having come through the years of economic depression and
war with a renewed belief in the Democracy, discarded whatever
radicalism they once might have possessed. This was increasingly true
of intellectuals, as well, although their past beliefs, documented in
writing, were more difficult to shed. Institutional patriotism
demanded the purging of anyone who did not aggressively admit they had
been taken in by communist rhetoric and denounce communism as
inherently evil. The real crime is that the selling of fear turned out
to be a very effective tool in the hands of those interested in
preserving ancient privileges under the guise of building a strong
national security state. Even within the Remnant there arose
misguided defenses of McCarthy based on who his targets were. In the
pages of the Freeman, now being published by Leonard Read, he
and other writers lamented the socialist orientation of most
intellectuals and their often long-standing and naive attraction to
Marxist ideology in the face of Stalinist realities. Richard
Hofstadter would later include Read, Chodorov and others within the
Remnant as somewhat minor players in a broad anti-intellectualist
drama, ostensibly proving his point by reminding us that "Henry
George advis[ed] his son that since college would fill his head with
things which would have to be unlearned, he should go directly into
newspaper work to put himself in touch with the practical world."[157]
Where political economy was concerned, Henry George had been
convinced that the overwhelming majority of university professors were
incapable of independent investigation and objective presentation of
how socio-political arrangements and institutions advanced or thwarted
liberty and equality of opportunity. This accounts, in part, for the
fact that although George came to have millions of admirers and
thousands of dedicated followers, only a very few of that generation
came from within the academic community[158] or opted to pursue the
credentials of a formal education that would have enabled them to
compete in the intellectual arena of the twentieth century. Fewer
still managed to gain positions where they might materially influence
either public policy or the overall thinking of new generations. This
small group struggled to overcome the stigma of attachment to a failed
political movement the remaining proponents of which were viewed as
out of touch with the modern world.
In the pages of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology
-- still quite activist in tone even though targeted to the audience
of professional social scientists -- Francis Neilson was given
considerable latitude by the editorial board to state the case of the
Remnant. Neilson decried the degree to which ignorance prevailed,
allowing proponents of the national security state to employ the
banner of anti-communism in their quest. He urged the thoughtful to go
back and read Bastiat, Proudhon, Max Hirsch and Franz Oppenheimer as
primers on democracy and individualism. Stalinism could not in
Neilson's view long prevail, being "nothing more or less than
bureaucratic control of the workers [become] slaves of the State."[159]
Although most sincere reformers had come to recognize Stalinism for
what it was, even those who also rejected revolutionary Marxism
continued to believe in the ideals of democratic socialism and the
promise of incremental intervention by the State. Neilson warned that
the more government was relied on as a service provider, the greater
the danger of corruption and injustice -- with the system of taxation
becoming the means by which privilege is dispensed:
All the nostrums of so-called reform, that flutter about
in the minds of politicians, are tainted with the desire to
perpetuate the system of taxation of wealth, so long as the people
will permit them to do so. They will promise reform of it, but even
the sincerest finds, once he becomes a member of a legislature, he
is hedged about by a thousand and one other claims that crowd in
upon his desire for the lifting of burdens. ...The demands for
expenditures on the great services, as sops and doles, are so vast
that reform of the system of taxation of wealth seems an impossible
goal to be reached.[160]
Too few were listening. With the Remnant facing
near-extinction, the only hope of survival was to commit resources to
education. Chodorov wanted to target college students, those destined
to become leaders in education, science, business and government. His
proposals fell on deaf ears. A handful of college professors did their
best to pass on the intellectual legacy of cooperative individualism
to their students, but their efforts were lost in a sea of apathy.
Only within the Henry George School of Social Science (in New York and
the dozen or so locations where extensions existed around the country)
was there hope for the survival of cooperative individualism.
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