Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.: The Decline of American Liberalism. New York: Atheneum, 1969 [1955].
By ‘liberalism,’ Ekirch means not progressivism—which defines individual liberty as the right to thoughts and actions deemed legal within, and by, a substantial administrative state—but as an attempt “to limit the authority of both church and state, and to protect certain fundamental individual rights from interference by governing power.” These rights include individual and political rights to self-government: for the individual, freedom of conscience and property; for a nation, independence or self-determination. Liberalism does not mean democracy, inasmuch as majority rule might repress these rights, nor does it mean “philosophical anarchism,” as a liberal might well advocate republicanism or representative government. Liberalism endorsed “the idea of a universe governed by natural laws” and the corollary “faith in human reason and in the ability of the educated individual to understand the laws of nature and guide himself accordingly.” This inclines liberals to accept ‘religion within the limits of reason,’ that is, religious conduct that does not impinge the natural duties and rights of the believer or of anyone else. The original liberals limited the powers of the state, inasmuch as “arbitrary state regulations not only interfered with the operation of natural laws, but also curbed the natural rights of the individual,” as established by natural laws. “Political economy was a science devoted to the discovery and better understanding of natural laws” as they pertain to the natural human inclination to truck and to barter. “The state was limited in its scope of operations to the preservation and protection of the natural rights of its citizens,” as the Declaration of Independence does indeed declare. Liberals intend all of this to advance “the perfectibility of mankind,” not in any grand, utopian sense but in the sense of giving human beings the best practicable chance to realize their natures, as individuals and as political societies.
Ekirch won his most enduring support among libertarians or, as they came to call themselves, “classical liberals.” As a conscientious objector during World War II who worked as a self-described “political prisoner” in government-assigned civilian occupations for the duration of that conflict, he turned to the study of intellectual history in an attempt better to understand how such things could have happened with the enthusiastic support not only of government officials but of the American people. He received his doctoral degree in history (studying under Merle Conti), and published The Decline of American Liberalism in the aftermath not only of the war but of the Army-McCarthy hearings in the United States Senate, an investigation in which one formidable part of America’s central-state apparatus faced off against an elected representative deploying methods that did little to advance the cause of civil liberties. In a preface to the book’s second edition, published fifteen years later, Ekirch insists that “individual freedom continues to be threatened by the forces of nationalism and war—and the resultant concentration of ever greater powers in the institutions of the modern stat and its corporate adjuncts.” The newer, ‘progressive’ liberalism “becomes more and more identified with the mass or the group and with the rights and privileges associated with large-scale organizations and their aggregation of private or public power.” Progressives argue that “if certain traditional individual rights are lost in the process, compensation… will come in the form of new privileges offered by the modern welfare state.” Perhaps so, Ekirch concedes, but “what the government grants it can also withdraw.” Hence “what were considered natural rights at the time of the Declaration of Independence proceeds apace.” And “something of real value has been lost” in a political order in which wiretapping, government secrecy, and travel restrictions have become routine. It is true that there has been one substantial victory for liberty since 1955: civil rights for African-Americans. But even these are limited, since American blacks remain subject to the same legal obligations as whites, such as conscription.
Under such conditions, “I do not think many of the traditional freedoms will remain in any effective sense. Instead of fundamental liberties we will have privileges granted or taken away as the occasion permits.” This will be the culmination of a “gradual and cumulative” erosion of American liberties, an erosion made possible by a sort of deception: “What frequently passes for liberalism today is too often an opportunistic philosophy which, by its extreme relativist definition of terms, effectively conceals the disintegration of the liberal tradition.” Progressives have used a philosophic doctrine, historical relativism, to undermine a natural-rights doctrine, liberalism. And as a historian, Ekirch seeks to expose the ‘use and abuse of history’ for that erosive purpose.
Ekirch thus earns credit as one of the earliest scholars to identify the historicist, specifically Hegelian, source of liberal anti-liberalism. In the nineteenth century, he observes, economic nationalism and imperialism amounted to the thin end of the wedge that pried loose the forces of “the totalitarian nationalisms” (and internationalisms?) “of the twentieth century.” “Plans for state education and social security were advanced side by side with the conscription of individuals for military service,” especially in Bismarck’s Prussia but also in England. “During these years certain English intellectuals became admirers of Bismarck’s state socialism, while Hegel, according to the French historian Halévy, had more avowed followers in Britain than in Germany.” Limited government under the rule of law seemed much too slow and inefficient to ardent reformers, who “were prepared to welcome a coming era of strong executive administration.” By 1900, English liberals were caught between “two extremes”: ‘Left’ demands for social legislation and economic reforms; ‘Right’ demands for protective tariffs to finance a bigger navy, defending the empire for formidable rivals—very much including Wilhelmine Germany, successfully united by Bismarck and the first Wilhelm and now ruled by Wilhelm’s unruly son in association with military aristocrats. Under Liberal Party leader Lloyd George, “Liberals gave up their individualism and instead turned to new taxes”; the First World War would “wreck the Liberal party and fatally undermine English liberalism.” This would serve not as a warning to Americans but as a model. By the 1912 election, the forlorn sitting president, William Howard Taft, would come in a distant third to progressives Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
America had been settled by men and women “fleeing absolutism.” Such persons were welcome to go, as far as the European regimes of absolute monarchy were concerned. Except for slaves and indentured servant, American colonists were substantially free if not civilly and socially equal; even slaves and servants were intended for liberty, subjects of “educating and Christianizing” preparation “for eventual freedom.” Whether Deists or evangelical Christians, Americans affirmed “the importance of the individual in religion and his emancipation from older and more conservative”—read ‘hierarchical’ or ‘authoritarian’—”forms of worship.”
In philosophy, Americans turned away from Calvinist determinism and toward John Locke’s view (as Ekirch not-so-accurately depicts it) of a “plastic theory of human nature” whereby “man’s nature was subject to change and that reform could be achieved through an improvement of the environment.” This confuses Locke theory of the human mind as a tabula rasa with his much less “plastic” account of human passions, which Locke considered both innate and selfish. It would be better to say that Locke comes down somewhere between Calvin and Rousseau. But he does indeed reject the assumption that subjects must never rise up to make citizens out of themselves, forthrightly asserting a right to revolution unseen in his liberal philosophic predecessor, Thomas Hobbes.
“The American Revolution was an event of transcendent importance in the history of the liberal tradition,” asserting self-government on the basis of the natural rights of individuals. “Better than any other single document, the Declaration of Independence stated the liberal political philosophy on which the ideology of the Revolution was based,” and did so in the “mild and dignified” language of Thomas Jefferson’s syllogism, which “argued the cause of revolution in a rational and restrained manner.” Showing that the imperial state and monarchic regime of Great Britain waged war against them, not the other way around, the revolutionaries did not so much as call Americans to arms (as the French would do, later) but “appealed to world opinion to recognize the justice and merits of the American position.” This resulted in a commercial republic governed initially and only in part by General Washington, not a military republic followed by a military despotism ruled by General Bonaparte.
Ekirch imagines that most of the Founders “probably thought in terms of freedom and equality only for those already free or of freedom for political man as he existed in the eighteenth century.” In this dubious assumption he anticipates the ‘Left’ criticisms of the Declaration and the Constitution familiar today. But unlike these latter-day polemicists, he observes that “the question… was at least left open,” and even if (for example) “only a quarter of the adult male population was able to vote,” this “moderate concession to popular rule was regarded as a real advance toward democracy,” given the political conditions prevailing everywhere else in the world at that time. Even during the Revolutionary War itself, “many Americans, despite the state of hostilities, were able to carry on their normal peacetime interests and pursuits.”
It should be added that many were not: Loyalists eventually were driven out and their property confiscated—an omission that tells on Ekirch’s argument very quickly. He calls the Constitution produced by the 1789 Constitution convention the product of “conservative reaction.” But of course the real ‘conservatives’ had been driven out; the politics of throne and altar, even in its mild, unwritten-constitution British form, no longer had any real partisans in America. What Ekirch calls “the shift in thought in the period between the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution” could not have been a fundamental shift, as there was no one among the Framers who denied the natural right to liberty. To appropriate the formulation of an early American progressive, it wasn’t that progressives wanted to use Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends (in fact, as Ekirch rightly observed, progressive ends weren’t Jeffersonian at all, and their means weren’t simply Hamiltonian). Rather, Hamilton wanted to use Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends, that is, to use government to secure natural rights, rights he never failed to endorse in The Federalist and on every other relevant occasion. A stronger federal government, the national bank, the protective tariff, and internal improvements were all so intended. The quarrel with Jefferson and his followers centered on whether such means advanced or instead threatened the agreed-upon end.
As Ekirch remarks, following Henry Adams, by the beginning of the next century “the defeated Federalists… had the grim satisfaction of seeing their Jeffersonian opponents embrace many of the same consolidating principles”—more accurately, means—”that they had earlier bitterly denied.” Jefferson’s “liberalism and radicalism fell mainly within the periods when he was not holding an administrative public office.” Just so, and rightly so, one might comment, as the president “came to grips with the heart of the liberal’s dilemma,” namely, “there was danger that any government entrusted with authority would degenerate into one of force and tyranny,” and yet governmental authority must have recourse to force, if not tyranny, if it is to govern those persons, foreign and domestic, that seek to ruin it and the liberalism animating it. This is tantamount to admitting what should be obvious: liberalism needs a political regime to instantiate its philosophic and religious principles. Loyalists, ‘Tories,’ monarchists, eventually fascists and communists likely will not go quietly; their liberties, even at times their lives, may well be violated by the elected representatives of the people in a liberal regime in defense of the lives and liberties of the citizens of that regime. Ekirch wants to warn that in such efforts of self-defense, liberals may encroach upon their own liberal principles by altering their liberal practices, and so they may. But that is not to say that the Founding-era liberals, whether Federalist or Anti-Federalist, later Hamiltonian or Jeffersonian, truly ‘anticipated’ or paved the way for the administrative state. They made such a state possible only in the sense that they did in fact preserve a state in America, the federal union that served as part of the centerpiece of American political controversy, along with slavery and the increasingly anti-republican, oligarchic regimes of the Southern states, from Washington to Lincoln.
And so, for example, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase was indeed an extra-Constitutional move but, as Jefferson wrote at the time, control of the Mississippi River was geopolitically and economically indispensable to the safety and prosperity of Americans. Such vagaries were not merely “related to the fatal dilemma posed by the long drawn-out war in Europe,” but a recognition that what Jefferson called the Empire of Liberty was indeed imperial, that is, a form of rule exercised over a territory that ought to be configured in such a way as to secure the natural rights of the citizens of the American regime. The question in such circumstances will always be a matter of prudential not theoretical reasoning, of means to an end. Citizens will need to remain vigilant in those circumstances, but it is when the end changes that they may need to reach for their muskets.
One of Ekirch’s merits is that he does see this, intermittently. “In contrast to a policy of economic nationalism which [Jeffersonian] Republicans had proposed after the War of 1812, the Jacksonians revived in realistic and practical fashion much of the old Jeffersonian individualist philosophy.” Less “optimistic than the Jeffersonian apostles of the Enlightenment had been about the nature of man and the possibility of his achieving Utopia,” the Jacksonians accepted industrialism and forged an alliance between urban workers and farmers—”a program for the lower middle class, or the plain people” which guarded their rights, including their liberty to be capitalists. Jacksonians frowned on internal improvements sponsored by the federal government, but they didn’t try to stop the states from undertaking them, and they did. “Economic liberalism of an agrarian, laissez-faire nature was as much a part of the states’ policies as it was of the national government’s from the 1830s until the Civil War,” always with the vicious exceptions of mistreatment of slaves and Indians. In fact, Ekirch underestimates the Jackson Administration’s Indian policy, taking the now-exploded view that the president intended the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes from Georgia as an attack on their rights rather than as a (botched, catastrophic) attempt to protect them from the Georgians. Ekirch returns to firmer ground in observing that western expansion, including the Mexican War, amounted to a sort of “agricultural imperialism” that “linked democracy to expansionism” (as later seen in Senator Stephen Douglas’s unbridled version of popular sovereignty) that made the Civil War “possible.” What it really did was to make the Civil War even more likely, although a regime-based analysis of the Southern states would indicate that such a war was quite possible with or without expansion, since the Northern republicanism and Southern oligarchy didn’t really ‘mix.’
Slavery was “the greatest single factor in the decline of nineteenth-century American liberalism.” Ekirch gives the standard economics-based account of Southerners’ newly ardent defense of slavery—the industrial revolution in general, the cotton gin in particular—but also gives prominence to decline in “the older faith of the Enlightenment in the natural rights of man,” bringing on attacks on “the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence with its assertion of the equality and natural rights of man.” Even in the North, segregation of the races increased, and the proposal to emancipate and resettle blacks in Africa replaced the earlier intention to educate and Christianize them. Nat Turner’s armed revolt in Virginia spurred anxieties; as Southern prejudices hardened, the small but vocal Abolitionist movement contributed to the climate of polarization which led to civil war. Although Ekirch cites Calhoun and James Fitzhugh as critics of the Founders’ principles, he makes no attempt to link their opinions to the historicist doctrines he cited previously.
The “incompatibility of war and liberalism becomes even more true in the case of a vast internal conflict such as the American Civil War.” He cites President Lincoln’s assumption of such extraconstitutional powers as troop call-ups and suspension of habeas corpus without Congressional approval, and conscription (initiated by the Confederacy, but enacted by Lincoln soon afterward). He also objects to the expansion of military training, which continued after the war, along with the pensions granted to Union military veterans, whose lobbying organization, the Grand Army of the Potomac, also enabled “a host of ambitious Republican politicians” who “would be able to refight the Civil War in their election campaigns.” The need to pay for these postwar programs caused Republicans to turn the Whig Party’s policy of higher tariffs. “The downfall of the lost cause was not the real tragedy of the Civil War, for the South in its perfervid defense of slavery had long since ceased to be the champion of liberalism. The essential tragedy of the Civil War was rather the failure of free society in the North to follow up the liberal ends implied by its wartime goals of the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery” by inculcating a “new nationalism, involving a frank repudiation of a former American liberalism.” By this, Ekirch means first of all the failure and corruption of Reconstruction, which “encourage[ed] the freedman to believe that he was a privileged ward of the Federal government.” Second, Reconstruction gave full civil rights to freedmen immediately, before the needed period of civic education; Republicans wanted black votes in order “to stay in power” in the South. This, coupled with eventually successful Southern resistance to Reconstruction, set liberalism back.
Once again, however, Ekirch misses the regime issue, writing that “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the rights of all individuals and groups were regarded as inferior to the overriding demands of a victorious nationalism and statism.” What if Republicans needed to stay in power precisely because they —were republicans, politicians who intended to prevent the antebellum oligarchies of the Southern states from reconstituting themselves? While claiming that “the remnants of the older natural rights and state rights philosophies of government were now replaced by the new teachings of nationalism,” he fails to cite any examples of this, and, as Forrest Nabors has shown, the Radical Republicans consistently explained their policies in terms of natural rights and republican regime change, not nationalism. [1] If “the Reconstruction policy of the North, based on force and military occupation of the former Confederacy, was the opposite of liberal,” then why was the Revolutionary War not the opposite of liberal? Liberalism without a regime is only a theory, and a regime that will not enforce its principles will not survive.
Nor is there much evidence that Republicans assumed that the United States Constitution was “a permanent contract”; Lincoln and others instead maintained that popular sovereignty was limited by natural rights and constitutional consent, the latter rejecting secession only as unconstitutional if the other parties to the contract did not consent. In the sentence immediately following his assertion that Unionists understood sovereignty to reside “in the people as a whole and not in the states or in the people of the separate states,” he claims that “northern writers on politics now located sovereignty in the Federal government.” But sovereignty can’t rest in the people and the government at the same time. It must be one or the other. He is right to remark the way in which such writers as Elisha Mulford replaced “John Locke and other philosophers of the natural rights and compact theories of government” with “Hegel and the German idealists, whose philosophy glorified the role of the state,” “following Hegel in giving the state the human characteristics of personality and conscience,” but Mulford was an academic, not a Radical Republican in the Reconstruction-era Congress.
Ekirch notes the tendency of the renewed Southern oligarchy, led by the “Redeemers,” as they were called, to brandish state rights with one hand while holding out the other for protective tariffs and internal improvements, a habit which would persist into the 1930s Tennessee Valley Authority projects and beyond. In the North, civil service reformers urged the replacement of party-selected bureaucrats with professionals: “Generally overlooked, however, in the American enthusiasm for civil service reform, were those few individuals [E. L. Godkin among them] who complained that a class of Federal officeholders, guaranteed permanent tenure, might become an insolent aristocracy comparable to the bureaucracies of the Old World.” In addition, the Homestead Act, intended to help small farmers settle the West, was mis-crafted, enabling speculators to purchase large tracts for development by large railroad corporations and forcing “authentic homesteaders” further west. With the exception of Henry George, whose agrarianism recalled Jeffersonian individualism and agrarianism, “doctrines of laissez-faire and of the limited state were being twisted and distorted from their original meaning,” toward the defense of corporations re-defined as ‘persons,’ even as the nation-state increasingly was re-defined. The Supreme Court now extended the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to corporate ‘persons,’ and such Congressional enactments as the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Antitrust Act of 1890 (which “actually encouraged monopoly in the new form of the holding company”) extended governmental centralization, establishing nonpartisan regulatory bodies “with quasi-judicial authority”—effectively the beginnings of a new branch of government. Indeed, the political struggles of subsequent decades featured corporate ‘persons’ against the ‘person’ of the national state, with real persons, individuals with natural rights, left behind as spectators, diminished as citizens.
“The abandonment of liberalism was to be made explicit in the 1900s, when the reformers adopted the name Progressives and accepted much more than the liberals or Populists a frank nationalism and centralization under the aegis of the Federal government.” Although usually animated by an intention to curb corporate abuses, Progressives established federal bureaucracies that the corporate oligarchs often captured. As corporation attorney Richard Olney shrewdly argued, respecting the Interstate Commerce Commission, “the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things.” Therefore, “the part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.” Progressivism, Ekirch remarks, drily, was “not primarily a liberal movement,” but “was based on a new philosophy, partly borrowed from Europe, which emphasized collective action through the instrumentality of government”; in Wisconsin, where “German influences were powerful,” the famous reforms of Robert La Follette rested squarely on his “great admiration for the social legislation of the German states.” For his part, University of Wisconsin president Charles R. Van Hise maintained that “The United States cannot successfully compete in the world’s markets without large industrial units,” which therefore deserved federal-government protection along with regulation—an arrangement corporate executives found not entirely uncongenial. “American reformers and scholars” had turned “to Bismarck’s Germany and to the Fabian Socialists in England as models for their political and economic theories.” Reformers even redefined the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (itself ontologically identical, if economically opposite, to Progressivism) as a call not for competition but cooperation and social control: “governments and reform agencies, the progressives believed, could help reshape the environment to meet the needs of individuals or of the species. Darwinian evolution, expressed in social terms, became reformism”—a democratized, materialist Hegelianism sometimes calling itself ‘pragmatism,’ as in the writings of John Dewey. [2]
Ekirch depicts the nationalist side of Progressivism less convincingly, amalgamating the military preparedness doctrine of Theodore Roosevelt with the imperialism of Senator Albert J. Beveridge—”big navy and dollar diplomacy” men. That they were, but Beveridge was a real imperialist who advocated the military conquest and colonial rule of Latin America, whereas Roosevelt wanted no part of real imperialism, preferring to extend the American defensive perimeter by establishing naval bases located at geopolitical chokepoints around the world, typically with the consent of the local government (although admittedly defining ‘consent’ rather loosely, in some cases). Ekirch also badly misreads the Progressive internationalism of Woodrow Wilson—quite distinct from either the Beveridge or the Roosevelt policies—as nationalistic, adding erroneously that Wilson only began to “embrace the nationalistic and progressive currents of his time” when he left academia for politics; as a matter of fact, Wilson made his academic reputation with his article “The Administrative State,” while still a professor at the Johns Hopkins University, and whatever nationalist sentiments he may have harbored were powerfully qualified by his advocacy of a Kantian League to Enforce Peace among nations, with its obvious diminution of national sovereignty. Predictably, Ekirch deplores Wilson’s decision to lead America into the First World War (conscription, war-spirit fed by propaganda, curbs on free speech and press) on the grounds “that a German victory posed a greater threat to American democracy than the illiberalism and militarism that he expected would accompany American belligerency.” But he does not show that Wilson was mistaken. Also predictably, he dismisses the postwar moves against Communism as an overblown attempt at “stamping out so-called radical activities.” Overblown that attempt may have been, but “so-called”? Surely regime of tyranny at the alleged service of economic and social equality must strike Americans, even Progressives as well as liberals, as a tad on the extreme side? That kind of regime was, after all, what the “activities” of the American Communist Party aimed at. “Although much of the radical movement was liberal in neither its methods nor its goals, the toleration of dissenting minorities and the free expression of dissenting opinion had always been cardinal liberal tenets.” True, but not unqualifiedly so—as American Loyalists and Confederates had learned, much more harshly, when they ran afoul of the American regime.
The same problem arises in Ekirch’s critique of the National Origins Act of 1924, which he finds illiberal on the grounds of racism and economic protectionism; under the Act, most legal immigrants came from Northern and Western Europe, and nearly half from Great Britain. And he is a hundred times right to despise the likes of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, contemporary writers who wrung their hands over “the rising tide of color against white world supremacy,” as Lothrop graphically called it in his principal tome. However awkward it may be to say so, however, any regime, even a liberal regime, is still a regime, with a way of life to maintain. British immigrants in the 1920s may well have been admitted rightly, even if for the wrong reason; their ‘racial’ or ethnic identity should have been irrelevant (though I have no doubt that it was relevant to the legislators of the day) but their way of life was indeed more amenable to that of, for example, my own maternal grandparents, who had arrived from Galicia at the turn of the century. Their children readily adapted to the American way of life, in large measure because those running the public school system set out to ‘Americanize’ first- and second-generation students. But it is understandable to think that such a system could have been overwhelmed by a very large number of students who didn’t speak English at home and whose parents had grown up under such despotic regimes as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had ruled Galicia in the years before the First World War. To say so is not to endorse the resurgence of the inane if dangerous Ku Klux Klan, a well-known excrescence of the 1920s.
Ekirch justly recurs to the writings of V. L. Parrington to summarize the political problem of the 1920s, looking ahead to the next decade and the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. In a letter to a friend written just before he died in 1929, Parrington lamented, “We must have a political state powerful enough to deal with corporate wealth, but how are we going to keep that state with its augmenting power from being captured by the force we want it to control?” Just so, and Ekirch adds that in his 1932 campaign speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco Democratic Party candidate Franklin Roosevelt betrayed no such qualms, more or less openly calling for a new regime to replace the old republic. Such counter-attacks as Herbert Hoover’s The Challenge to Liberty and Walter Lippmann’s Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society had little practical effect on a people stunned first by economic depression and then by another world war. Even FDR himself considered changing course, toward “a program of encouraging competition and enforcing the antitrust laws,” but the war (and perhaps an already entrenched bureaucracy) put a stop to that. In the run-up to the war, conscription and restrictions free speech returned. Indeed, “After 1914… the swift succession of two world wars, interspaced with the depression of the thirties, put a strain on liberalism that the new crises of cold war and Korean struggle did nothing to alleviate.” Ekirch goes so far as to write, “The new totalitarian liberals argued that [the old liberalism] had become outmoded,” that what the polemicist Max Lerner called “democratic collectivism” had, and should, prevail. A “permanent war economy” emerged, with the Cold War against the Soviet Union, along with peacetime conscription and a substantial national security apparatus. Government and private corporations interlocked more and more; if postwar prosperity blunted criticisms of the new regime, Ekirch (following such economists as Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises) observes that American prosperity might have been even greater if less public-private collaboration had occurred.
Ekirch goes too far in endorsing C. Wright Mills, who claimed (in Ekirch’s words) that “labor could be forced to cooperate with the conservatives’ views” on an anti-Soviet foreign policy, “in order to prove its innocence of communist connections.” As a matter of fact, the AFL-CIO was well aware that no free trade unions were allowed to exist under the Soviet tyranny (and later oligarchy). Its leaders had seen what had happened to social democrats under Communist rule, and they had every reason to prevent that from happening in the United States. To argue that President Truman’s failed attempt to keep nuclear-weapons technology away from the Soviets “quite naturally intensified Soviet fears of American power” by signaling U. S. “distrust of Russia” somehow does not quite capture the not-so-innocent character of Josef Stalin. With similar overenthusiasm for his libertarianism, Ekirch goes along with Senator Paul H. Douglas’s claim that “if it were not for war the government colossus could be trimmed to almost pygmy stature.” But of course domestic social programs were already substantial in the 1950s, and President Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programs pushed such expenditures to well over fifty percent of the federal government’s total outlays in the next decade.
Writing in the aftermath of the McCarthy hearings, Ekirch criticizes its excesses. American Communists’ “essential loyalty to the United States was certainly open to question,” he wisely concedes. But “the dilemma” facing Americans “was how to handle the communist problem without destroying fundamental American liberties,” a dilemma they addressed poorly because “the actual number of Communists in the United States after World War II was small”—”somewhat over fifty thousand persons” in a nation of millions. Therefore, he concludes, “communism represented no threat to the American way of life that could not be met in the free market place of ideas.” True, “there were undoubtedly among American Communists some who stood ready to work in conjunction with Soviet agents to do damage to the United States,” but “this damage would be of a criminal sort that could be detected by the American police and intelligence systems and prosecuted under the laws forbidding such conduct.” Concede all that, and the argument still doesn’t quite work. Well-placed Communist operatives could readily influence American policy, without breaking any criminal laws whatsoever. One sees this even in the slippage noticeable in this sentence: “The danger rather lay [not in ‘McCarthyism’ but] in the assumption that there was a minority class or group of political lepers guilty of so-called wrong thinking.” But to accuse adherents of Communism merely of wrong thinking “so-called” wasn’t to “censorship of ideas”; it was censure of those ideas. Ekirch backtracks: “the whole problem of disloyalty among government employees would have been far better handled by an extension of the practice of allowing supervisors to dismiss, without prejudice and without record, those individuals whose conduct, or even whose views, they had reason to suspect.” Very well, then, one must concede, as he does, that “if liberalism is to remain viable… liberals had to face the unpleasant fact that liberty and security were not always compatible, either for the individual or for society.”
On a wider level, Ekirch objects to the “growing nationalization and centralization of all values” seen during the early 1950s. In public education, for example, “there had not been any direct control exercised by the Federal government” before then. “But in the battle for men’s minds, which was one of the more important features of modern integral nationalism, the educational system was a natural object of increasing official attention and interference”; under anti-Communist pressures initially, but under other pressures subsequently, “the school and the college became the adjunct of the nation,” and this was especially true of higher education, as universities and research professors succumbed to the temptation of chasing federal grant monies. Although the teacher loyalty oaths required by some thirty states eventually disappeared, the grants didn’t, and what could be used by anti-Communists to promote ‘Americanism’ in one generation could be used to promote other leftist ’causes’ in the following generations, once illiberal or (in Ehrlich’s terms) progressive convictions took hold among federal ‘educrats’ and their university-based sympathizers and (in many cases) teachers.
Ekirch views matters with a refreshing refusal to entertain any serious hope for reversing illiberal trends, ending his book with an invocation of “the subversion of the ideals of the Republic of Rome in the new concepts of the Empire,” which, as we all know, ended badly. He will only say that such “decline need not blot out the great achievements already recorded.” “Liberals will at least be able to look back with some satisfaction into the distant past, while they do their best to challenge the fate held out by an increasingly illiberal future.”
What have we here, then? A cri de coeur from a Left-libertarian (Quaker-influenced?) soul, undoubtedly. But also a pioneering work of scholarship. Although American writers (such as Emerson), politicians (such as Wilson), philosophers (Dewey most prominently) and social scientists (again, Wilson, and a legion of others) never concealed their indebtedness to German philosophy, and especially to doctrines deriving the ideas of moral and political right from history, not God or nature, several generations of scholars obscured that fact, maybe because they wanted to appropriate the term ‘liberalism’ for historicist/’progressive’ purposes and (in later generations) to obscure the intellectual origins of their historicism from a nation which had fought two world wars against Germans and a ‘Cold War’ against a regime animated by one version of that historicism. By the mid-1970s, such scholars as Paul Eidelberg and John Marini had picked up the trail, but Ekirch had got on it nearly twenty years earlier. And for all the criticisms one might raise concerning his assessment of such genuine natural-rights thinkers as Hamilton and Lincoln, some dubious ‘policy’ judgments on banks, immigration, and war (among others), and above all his lack of clarity about the exigencies of establishing not simply liberalism as a doctrine but a regime animated by liberalism as he defines it, both his recovery of American intellectual and political history from historicist distortions and the heft that work gives to his Tocqueville-like warnings against despotism ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ deserve recognition and appreciation, more than half a century after he wrote.
Notes
- See Forrest Nabors: From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017.
- Ekirch writes that Dewey rejected “the absolutist philosophy of Hegel and the German idealists, imposed upon him while he was a graduate student” and adapted by German nationalists prior to World War I. He had turned to pragmatism, and viewed “the war as a conflict of ideas in which the German mind was quite incompatible with the American mind.” Aside from the fact that President Wilson had by no means abandoned the historicist idealism imposed upon him while he was a graduate student, it must be said that Dewey never abandoned historicism—only idealism. To his credit, he didn’t turn to Marxian historicism, which produced worse tyrannies than the absolutism of the Kaiser, preferring a more modest historicism founded on social experimentation with no ‘end of history’ assumed. But the laws of nature and of nature’s God, as the Founders understood them, and which Ekirch defends, are not invited to the pragmatist party.
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