LEFT AND RIGHT:

A Journal of Libertarian Thought

The Complete Edition, 1965–1968

Edited and largely written by

Murray N. Rothbard

Ludwig von Mises Institute

Auburn, Alabama

2007

Ludwig von Mises Institute

ISBN: 9781610165334

LEFT AND RIGHT: THE COMPLETE EDITION

Edited and Largely Written

By Murray N. Rothbard

Volume 1, Number 1; Spring 1965

Editorial: The General Line

Murray N. Rothbard: Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty

Leonard P. Liggio: Why the Futile Crusade?

Alan Milchman: D.F. Fleming on “The Origins of the Cold War”

Volume 1, Number 2; Autumn 1965

Editorial: Fortune and American “Idealism”

Editorial: Discovering the Ninth Amendment

Conrad J. Lynn: The Case of David Mitchell versus the United States

Murray N. Rothbard: Liberty and the New Left

Daniel Webster: On Conscription

Volume 2, Number 1; Winter 1966

Editorial: Old Right/New Left

Editorial: New Right: National Review’s Anniversary

Editorial: New Right: Future?

Editorial: From Georgia With Love: The case of Julian Bond

Editorial: The Mitchell Case

Leonard P. Liggio: Isolationism, Old and New, Part I

Garet Garrett: The American Empire

Volume 2, Number 2; Spring 1966

Editorial: The Irish Revolution

Editorial: The Power of the President

Editorial: Labor Unionism, Two Views

Editorial: Cold War Revisionism: The Major Historical Task

Editorial: Our First Anniversary

William L. Neumann: Hiroshima Reconsidered

Lenard P. Liggio: Early Anti-Imperialism

Russell D. Stetler, Jr.: The Freedom to Travel

Herbert Spencer: On Moral Education

Volume 2, Number 3; Autumn 1966

Editorial: Why Be Libertarian?

Editorial: The Cry for Power: Black, White, and “Polish”

Editorial: The Martyrdom of Earl Francis

Editorial: Pearl Harbor: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

Yale Brozen: Automation: The Retreating Catastrophe

Eric Dalton: Private Property and Collective Ownership

Leonard P. Liggio: Palefaces or Redskins: A Profile of Americans

Volume 3, Number 1; Winter 1967

Editorial: Frank Chodorov, RIP

Editorial: SDS: The New Turn

Editorial: Ronald Reagan as Educator

Editorial: Is There a Nazi Threat?

Editorial: Liberalism and the CIA

Janet McCloud and Robert Casey: The Last Indian War

Lysander Spooner: Natural Law, or the Science of Justice

Volume 3, Number 2; Spring-Summer 1967

Gordon Tullock: The Economics of Slavery

Frederick C. Kreiling: Science and Society

Murray N. Rothbard: The Communist as Bogey-Man

Leonard P. Liggio: Vietnam: Teach-Ins

Leonard P. Liggio: Vietnam and the Republicans

Leonard P. Liggio: Isolationism Reconsidered

Letters: Alms for the Aged!

Volume 3, Number 3; Spring-Autumn 1967

Editorial: Ernesto Che Guevara, RIP

Editorial: The Black Revolution

Editorial: On Desecrating the Flag

Editorial: War Guilt in the Middle East

Ronald Radosh: The Case of F.D.R. and America’s Entry into World War II

Laurence S. Moss: The Power Elite Revisited

Marvin E. Gettleman: A Vietnam Bibliography

Leonard P. Liggio: A Bernard Fall Retrospective

Leonard P. Liggio: First Thoughts on the Announcement of the Death of Bernard Fall

Marvin E. Gettleman: A Frenchman’s Viewpoint

Volume 4, Number 1; 1968

Editorial: Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP

A Note to Our Subscribers

Harry Elmer Barnes: Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century

LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

Spring 1965

No. 1

The General Line

Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty Murray N. Rothbard

Why the Futile Crusade? Leonard P. Liggio

D. F. FLEMING on The Origins of the Cold War Alan Milchman

Left and Right is published three times yearly by Left and Right, Inc., Box 395, Cathedral Station, New York, N.Y. 10025. Subscription price: $2.50. Single issues: 85c

The General Line

A new journal of opinion must justify its existence; our justification is a deep commitment to the liberty of man. Our aim is to present articles that embody scholarship; but not a scholarship random, unfocussed, or devoted to minute examination of trivia. Ours will be a scholarship finely honed for use as a weapon in expanding, deepening, and refining the knowledge of and commitment to liberty in all its critical aspects and ramifications. It will cut across the insularity of disciplines. Above all, it will not remain on the level of glittering generalities, for anyone can pay lip-service to liberty if it entails no specific consequences in policy or action. General principles remain cloudy verbiage if they are not made systematic and applied to specific problems; and responses to such problems must stay hopelessly confused if they remain ad hoc and unsubsumed under guiding principle. This journal proposes to advance the integration of the general and the specific, the unity of the theory and practice of liberty. While each contributor is of course solely responsible for articles under his name, and we do not expect to agree with every point in every article, we intend each article to be fully consistent with our aims.

Liberty, then, is our thesis; reason shall be our method. Only reason can build a valid and consistent ideology, and only reason can strip unsparingly the veil of custom and habit and myth from dominant ideas and institutions and hold them up to the harsh light of truth. That reason is cold, impersonal and unconcerned is a widespread myth; indeed, nothing is stronger than reason for redoubling one’s passionate commitment and devotion to the cause of truth.

Our title, Left and Right, reflects our concerns in several ways. It reveals our editorial concern with the ideological; and it also highlights our conviction that the present-day categories of “left” and “right” have become misleading and obsolete, and that the doctrine of liberty contains elements corresponding with both contemporary left and right. This means in no sense that we are middle-of-the-roaders, eclectically trying to combine, or step between, both poles; but rather that a consistent view of liberty includes concepts that have also become part of the rhetoric or program of right and of left. Hence a creative approach to liberty must transcend the confines of contemporary political shibboleths.

There is a ferment abrewing in America, and the smug apathy of the 1950’s is now virtually forgotten. And yet conservative and profoundly anti-intellectual views born amidst that apathy, linger on to hamper innovations of thought and action. Such view, for example, that an end has been put to ideology, and that doctrine and ideology can no longer have an impact on American life. The upsurge of new forms of ideology and activism since the end of the ’fifties has been increasingly refuting this counsel of passivity. Out of its confrontation with harsh reality, this new ferment has instinctively spurned the old and faulty categories; it sees that the old doctrines and the old leaders have led the world astray. This upsurge needs to develop an ideology which will be consistent with its keen insight into the realities of our time. Hopefully, the new dimensions of Left and Right’s creative thought will contribute substance and rigor to this decisive awakening.

Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty

by MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore Time itself, is against him, and hence the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and Communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative’s rather bizarre short-run optimism; for since the long-run is given up as hopeless, the Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the current moment. In foreign affairs, this point of view leads the Conservative to call for desperate showdowns with Communism, for he feels that the longer he waits the worse things will ineluctably become; at home, it leads him to total concentration on the very next election, where he is always hoping for victory and never achieving it. The quintessence of the Practical Man, and beset by long-run despair, the Conservative refuses to think or plan beyond the election of the day.

Pessimism, however, both short-run and long-run, is precisely what the prognosis of Conservatism deserves; for Conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien regime of the pre-industrial era, and, as such, it has no future. In its contemporary American form, the recent Conservative Revival embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, Fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America. What, however, of the prospects for liberty? For too many libertarians mistakenly link the prognosis for liberty with that of the seemingly stronger and supposedly allied Conservative movement; this linkage makes the characteristic long-run pessimism of the modern libertarian easy to understand. But this paper contends that, while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the libertarian to take is that of unquenchable lone-run optimism.

The case for this assertion rests on a certain view of history: which holds, first, that before the 18th century in Western Europe there existed (and still continues to exist outside the West) an identifiable Old Order. Whether the Old Order took the form of feudalism or Oriental despotism, it was marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population. In sum, life was “nasty, brutish, and short”; here was Maine’s “society of status” and Spencer’s “military society”. The ruling classes, or castes, governed by conquest and by getting the masses to believe in the alleged divine imprimatur to their rule.

The Old Order was, and still remains, the great and mighty enemy of liberty; and it was particularly mighty in the past because there was then no inevitability about its overthrow. When we consider that basically the Old Order had existed since the dawn of history, in all civilizations, we can appreciate even more the glory and the magnitude of the triumph of the liberal revolution of and around the 18th century.

Part of the dimensions of this struggle has been obscured by a great myth of the history of Western Europe implanted by anti-liberal German historians of the late 19th century. The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the King and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord re-imposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The King superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before. Capitalism, indeed, flourished earliest and most actively precisely in those areas where the central State was weak or non-existent: the Italian cities, the Hanseatic League, the confederation of 17th century Holland. Finally, the Old Order was overthrown or severely shaken in its grip in two ways. One was by industry and the market expanding through the interstices of the feudal order (e.g., industry in England developing in the countryside beyond the grip of feudal, State, and guild restrictions.) More important was a series of cataclysmic revolutions that blasted loose the Old Order and the old ruling classes: the English Revolutions of the 17th century, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, all of which were necessary to the ushering in of the Industrial Revolution and of at least partial victories for individual liberty, laissez-faire, separation of church-and-state, and international peace. The society of status gave way, at least partially, to the “society of contract”; the military society gave way partially to the “industrial society”. The mass of the population now achieved a mobility of labor and place, and accelerating expansion of their living standards, for which they had scarcely dared to hope. Liberalism had indeed brought to the Western world not only liberty, the prospect of peace, and the rising living standards of an industrial society, but above all perhaps, it brought hope, a hope in ever-greater progress that lifted the mass of mankind out of its age-old sink of stagnation and despair.

Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: the one was Liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order. Since liberalism admittedly had reason on its side, the Conservatives darkened the ideological atmosphere with obscurantist calls for romanticism, tradition, theocracy, and irrationalism. Political ideologies were polarized, with Liberalism on the extreme “Left”, and Conservatism on the extreme “Right”, of the ideological spectrum. That genuine Liberalism was essentially radical and revolutionary was brilliantly perceived, in the twilight of its impact, by the great Lord Acton (one of the few figures in the history of thought who, charmingly, grew more radical as he grew older). Acton wrote that “Liberalism wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is.” In working out this view, incidentally, it was Acton, not Trotsky, who first arrived at the concept of the “permanent revolution”. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote, in her excellent study of Acton:

his philosophy develop (ed) to the point where the future was seen as the avowed enemy of the past, and where the past was allowed no authority except as it happened to conform to morality. To take seriously this Liberal theory of history, to give precedence to “what ought to be” over “what is”, was, he admitted, virtually to install a “revolution in permanence.”

The “revolution in permanence”, as Acton hinted in the inaugural lecture and admitted frankly in his notes, was the culmination of his philosophy of history and theory of politics...This idea of conscience, that men carry about with them the knowledge of good and evil, is the very root of revolution, for it destroys the sanctity of the past... “Liberalism is essentially revolutionary,” Acton observed. “Facts must yield to ideas. Peaceably and patiently if possible. Violently if not.”[1]

The Liberal, wrote Acton, far surpassed the Whig:

The Whig governed by compromise. The Liberal begins the reign of ideas...One is practical, gradual, ready for compromise. The other works out a principle philosophically. One is a policy aiming at a philosophy. The other is a philosophy seeking a policy.[2]

What happened to Liberalism? Why then did it decline during the nineteenth century? This question has been pondered many times, but perhaps the basic reason was an inner rot within the vitals of Liberalism itself. For, with the partial success of the Liberal Revolution in the West, the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor, and therefore their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo. Two philosophical roots of this decay may be discerned: First, the abandonment of natural rights and “higher law” theory for utilitarianism. For only forms of natural or higher law theory can provide a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo; and only such theory furnishes a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle, by focussing on the necessity of bringing existing criminal rulers to the bar of justice. Utilitarians, on the other hand, in abandoning justice for expediency, also abandon immediacy for quiet stagnation and inevitably end up as objective apologists for the existing order.

The second great philosophical influence on the decline of Liberalism was evolutionism, or Social Darwinism, which put the finishing touches to Liberalism as a radical force in society. For the Social Darwinist erroneously saw history and society through the peaceful, rose-colored glasses of infinitely slow, infinitely gradual social evolution. Ignoring the prime fact that no ruling caste in history has ever voluntarily surrendered its power, and that therefore Liberalism had to break through by means of a series of revolutions, the Social Darwinists looked forward peacefully and cheerfully to thousands of years of infinitely gradual evolution to the next supposedly inevitable stage of individualism.

An interesting illustration of a thinker who embodies within himself the decline of Liberalism in the nineteenth century is Herbert Spencer. Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, indeed virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of sociology and Social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic historical movement, although at first without abandoning it in pure theory. In short, while looking forward to an eventual ideal of pure liberty, Spencer began to see its victory as inevitable, but only after millenia of gradual evolution, and thus, in actual fact, Spencer abandoned Liberalism as a fighting, radical creed; and confined his Liberalism in practice to a weary, rear-guard action against the growing collectivism of the late nineteenth-century. Interestingly enough, Spencer’s tired shift “rightward” in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well; so that Spencer abandoned pure liberty even in theory e.g., in repudiating his famous chapter in Social Statics, “The Right to Ignore the State”.

In England, the classical liberals began their shift from radicalism to quasi-conservatism in the early nineteenth century; a touchstone of this shift was the general British liberal attitude toward the national liberation struggle in Ireland. This struggle was twofold: against British political imperialism, and against feudal landlordism which had been imposed by that imperialism. By their Tory blindness toward the Irish drive for national independence, and especially for peasant property against feudal oppression, the British liberals (including Spencer) symbolized their effective abandonment of genuine Liberalism, which had been virtually born in a struggle against the feudal land system. Only in the United States, the great home of radical liberalism (where feudalism had never been able to take root outside the South), did natural rights and higher law theory, and consequent radical liberal movements, continue in prominence until the mid-nineteenth century. In their different ways, the Jacksonian and Abolitionist movements were the last powerful radical libertarian movements in American life.[3]

Thus, with Liberalism abandoned from within, there was no longer a Party of Hope in the Western world, no longer a “Left” movement to lead a struggle against the State and against the unbreached remainder of the Old Order. Into this gap, into this void created by the drying up of radical liberalism, there stepped a new movement: Socialism. Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the road because it tries to achieve Liberal ends by the use of Conservative means.

In short, Russell Kirk, who claims that Socialism was the heir of classical liberalism, and Ronald Hamowy, who sees Socialism as the heir of Conservatism, are both right; for the question is on what aspect of this confused centrist movement we happen to be focussing. Socialism, like Liberalism and against Conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, Conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc. Or rather, to be more precise, there were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of Conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the Left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism: but especially the smashing of the State apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.” Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the “replacement of the government of men by the administration of things”, can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the “class struggle”; except that for Dunoyer and Comte the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen vs. workers, but the producers in society (including free businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus.[4] Saint-Simon, at one time in his confused and chaotic life, was close to Comte and Dunoyer and picked up his class analysis from them, in the process characteristically getting the whole thing balled up and converting businessmen on the market, as well as feudal landlords and others of the State privileged, into “exploiters.” Marx and Bakunin picked this up from the Saint-Simonians, and the result gravely misled the whole Left Socialist movement; for, then, in addition to smashing the repressive State, it became supposedly necessary to smash private capitalist ownership of the means of production. Rejecting private property, especially of capital, the Left Socialists were then trapped in a crucial inner contradiction: if the State is to disappear after the Revolution (immediately for Bakunin, gradually “withering” for Marx), then how is the “collective” to run its property without becoming an enormous State itself in fact even if not in name? This was a contradiction which neither the Marxists nor the Bakuninists were ever able to resolve.

Having replaced radical liberalism as the party of the “Left”, Socialism, by the turn of the twentieth century, fell prey to this inner contradiction. Most Socialists (Fabians, Lassalleans, even Marxists) turned sharply rightward, completely abandoned the old libertarian goals and ideals of revolution and the withering away of the State, and became cozy Conservatives permanently reconciled to the State, the status quo, and the whole apparatus of neo-mercantilism, State monopoly capitalism, imperialism and war that was rapidly being established and riveted on European society at the turn of the twentieth century. For Conservatism, too, had re-formed and regrouped to try to cope with a modern industrial system, and had become a refurbished mercantilism, a regime of statism marked by State monopoly privilege, in direct and indirect forms, to favored capitalists and to quasi-feudal landlords. The affinity between Right Socialism and the new Conservatism became very close, the former advocating similar policies but with a demagogic populist veneer: thus, the other side of the coin of imperialism was “social imperialism”, which Joseph Schumpeter trenchantly defined as “an imperialism in which the entrepreneurs and other elements woo the workers by means of social welfare concessions which appear to depend on the success of export monopolism...”[5]

Historians have long recognized the affinity, and the welding together, of Right-wing socialism with Conservatism in Italy and Germany, where the fusion was embodied first in Bismarckism and then in Fascism and National Socialism: the latter fulfilling the Conservative program of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, theocracy, and a right-wing collectivism that retained and even cemented the rule of the old privileged classes. But only recently have historians begun to realize that a similar pattern occurred in England and the United States. Thus, Bernard Semmel, in his brilliant history of the social-imperialist movement in England at the turn of the twentieth century, shows how the Fabian Society welcomed the rise of the Imperialists in England.[6] When, in the mid-1890’s, the Liberal Party in England split into the Radicals on the left and the Liberal-Imperialists on the right, Beatrice Webb, co-leader of the Fabians, denounced the Radicals as “laisser-faire and anti-imperialist”, while hailing the latter as “collectivists and imperialists.” An official Fabian manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), drawn up by George Bernard Shaw (who was later, with perfect consistency, to praise the domestic policies of Stalin and Mussolini and Sir Oswald Mosley), lauded imperialism and attacked the Radicals, who “still cling to the fixed-frontier ideals of individualist republicanism (and) non-interference.” In contrast, “a Great Power...must govern (a world empire) in the interests of civilization as a whole.” After this, the Fabians collaborated closely with Tories and Liberal-Imperialists. Indeed, in late 1902, Sidney and Beatrice Webb established a small, secret group of brain-trusters called The Coefficients; as one of the leading members of this club, the Tory imperialist, Leopold S. Amery, revealingly wrote: “Sidney and Beatrice Webb were much more concerned with getting their ideas of the welfare state put into practice by any one who might be prepared to help, even on the most modest scale, than with the early triumph of an avowedly Socialist Party...There was, after all, nothing so very unnatural, as (Joseph) Chamberlain’s own career had shown, in a combination of Imperialism in external affairs with municipal socialism or semi-socialism at home.”[7] Other members of the Coefficients, who, as Amery wrote, were to function as a “Brains Trust or General Staff” for the movement, were: the Liberal-Imperialist Richard B. Haldane; the geo-politician Halford J. Mackinder; the imperialist and Germanophobe Leopold Maxse, publisher of the National Review; the Tory socialist and imperialist Viscount Milner; the naval imperialist Carlyon Bellairs; the famous journalist J. L. Garvin; Bernard Shaw; Sir Clinton Dawkins, partner of the Morgan bank; and Sir Edward Grey, who, at a meeting of the club first adumbrated the policy of Entente with France and Russia that was to eventuate in the First World War.[8]

The famous betrayal, during World War I, of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’ Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, socialists and quasi-socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the State and the Mixed Economy (=neo-Mercantilism=the Welfare State=Interventionism=State Monopoly Capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality). It was in reaction to this collapse that Lenin broke out of the Second International, to re-establish classic revolutionary Marxism in a revival of Left Socialism.

In fact, Lenin, almost without knowing it, accomplished more than this. It is common knowledge that “purifying” movements, eager to return to a classic purity shorn of recent corruptions, generally purify further than what had held true among the original classic sources. There were, indeed, marked “conservative” strains in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves which often justified the State, Western imperialism and aggressive nationalism, and it was these motifs, in the ambivalent views of the Masters on this subject, that provided the fodder for the later shift of the majority Marxists into the “social imperialist” camp.[9] Lenin’s camp turned more “left” than had Marx and Engels themselves. Lenin had a decidedly more revolutionary stance toward the State, and consistently defended and supported movements of national liberation against imperialism. The Leninist shift was more “leftist” in other important senses as well. For while Marx had centered his attack on market capitalism per se, the major focus of Lenin’s concerns was on what he conceived to be the highest stages of capitalism: imperialism and monopoly. Hence Lenin’s focus, centering as it did in practice on State monopoly and imperialism rather than on laissez-faire capitalism, was in that way far more congenial to the libertarian than that of Karl Marx. In recent years, the splits in the Leninist world have brought to the fore a still more left-wing tendency: that of the Chinese. In their almost exclusive stress on revolution in the undeveloped countries, the Chinese have, in addition to scorning Right-wing Marxist compromises with the State, unerringly centered their hostility on feudal and quasi-feudal landholdings, on monopoly concessions which have enmeshed capital with quasi-feudal land, and on Western imperialism. In this virtual abandonment of the classical Marxist emphasis on the working class, the Maoists have concentrated Leninist efforts more closely on the overthrow of the major bulwarks of the Old Order in the modern world.[10]

Fascism and Nazism were the logical culmination in domestic affairs of the modern drift toward right-wing collectivism. It has become customary among libertarians, as indeed among the Establishment of the West, to regard fascism and Communism as fundamentally identical. But while both systems were indubitably collectivist, they differed greatly in their socio-economic content. For Communism was a genuine revolutionary movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew the old ruling élites; while Fascism, on the contrary, cemented into power the old ruling classes. Hence, fascism was a counter-revolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges upon society; in short, fascism was the apotheosis of modern State monopoly capitalism.[11] Here was the reason that fascism proved so attractive (which Communism, of course, never did) to big business interests in the West—openly and unabashedly so in the 1920’s and early 1930’s.[12]

We are now in a position to apply our analysis to the American scene. Here we encounter a contrasting myth about recent American history which has been propagated by current conservatives and adopted by most American libertarians. The myth goes approximately as follows: America was, more or less, a haven of laissez-faire until the New Deal; then Roosevelt, influenced by Felix Frankfurter, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and other “Fabian” and Communist “conspirators”, engineered a revolution which set America on the path to Socialism, and, further on, beyond the horizon, to Communism. The present-day libertarian who adopts this or a similar view of the American experience, tends to think of himself as an “extreme right-winger”; slightly to the left of him, then, lies the Conservative, to the left of that the middle-of-the road, and then leftward to Socialism and Communism. Hence, the enormous temptation for some libertarians to red-bait; for, since they see America as drifting inexorably leftward to Socialism and therefore to Communism, the great temptation is for them to overlook the intermediary stages and tar all of their opposition with the hated Red brush.

One would think that the “right-wing libertarian” would quickly be able to see some drastic flaws in this conception. For one thing, the income tax amendment, which he deplores as the beginning of socialism in America, was put through Congress in 1909 by an overwhelming majority of both parties. To look at this event as a sharp leftward move toward socialism would require treating President William Howard Taft, who put through the 16th Amendment, as a Leftist, and surely few would have the temerity to do that. Indeed, the New Deal was not a revolution in any sense; its entire collectivist program was anticipated: proximately by Herbert Hoover during the depression, and, beyond that, by the war-collectivism and central planning that governed America during the First World War. Every element in the New Deal program: central planning, creation of a network of compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture, inflation and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion of unions within the overall monopoly structure, government regulation and ownership, all this had been anticipated and adumbrated during the previous two decades.[13] And this program, with its privileging of various big business interests at the top of the collectivist heap, was in no sense reminiscent of socialism or leftism; there was nothing smacking of the egalitarian or the proletarian here. No, the kinship of this burgeoning collectivism was not at all with Socialism-Communism but with Fascism, or Socialism-of-the-Right, a kinship which many big businessmen of the ‘twenties expressed openly in their yearning for abandonment of a quasi-laissez-faire system for a collectivism which they could control. And, surely, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Clark Hoover make far more recognizable figures as proto-fascists than they do as crypto-Communists.

The essence of the New Deal was seen, far more clearly than in the conservative mythology, by the Leninist movement in the early 1930’s—that is, until the mid-thirties, when the exigencies of Soviet foreign relations caused a sharp shift of the world Communist line to “Popular Front” approval of the New Deal. Thus, in 1934, the British Leninist theoretician R. Palme Dutt published a brief but scathing analysis of the New Deal as “social fascism”—as the reality of fascism cloaked with a thin veneer of populist demagogy. No conservative opponent has ever delivered a more vigorous or trenchant denunciation of the New Deal. The Roosevelt policy, wrote Dutt, was to “move to a form of dictatorship of a war-type”; the essential policies were to impose a State monopoly capitalism through the NRA, to subsidize business, banking, and agriculture through inflation and the partial expropriation of the mass of the people through lower real wage rates, and to the regulation and exploitation of labor by means of government-fixed wages and compulsory arbitration. When the New Deal, wrote Dutt, is stripped of its “social-reformist ‘progressive’ camouflage”, “the reality of the new Fascist type of system of concentrated state capitalism and industrial servitude remains,” including an implicit “advance to war”. Dutt effectively concluded with a quote from an editor of the highly respected Current History Magazine: “The new America (the editor had written in mid-1933) will not be capitalist in the old sense, nor will it be Socialist. If at the moment the trend is towards Fascism, it will be an American Fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions and the hopes of a great middle-class nation.”[14]

Thus, the New Deal was not a qualitative break from the American past; on the contrary, it was merely a quantitative extension of the web of State privilege that had been proposed and acted upon before: in Hoover’s Administration, in the war collectivism of World War I, and in the Progressive Era. The most thorough exposition of the origins of State monopoly capitalism, or what he calls “political capitalism”, in the U. S. is found in the brilliant work of Dr. Gabriel Kolko. In his Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko traces the origins of political capitalism in the “reforms” of the Progressive Era. Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900-1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly “monopolistic”; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and regulate these evils. Kolko’s great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that big business turned, increasingly after the 1900’s, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both Left and Right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and anti-business. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the Right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free market operations.

Thus, Kolko shows that, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and culminating in Wilson’s New Freedom, in industry after industry, e.g., insurance, banking, meat, exports, and business generally, regulations that present-day Rightists think of as “socialistic” were not only uniformly hailed, but conceived and brought about by big businessmen. This was a conscious effort to fasten upon the economy a cement of subsidy, stabilization, and monopoly privilege. A typical view was that of Andrew Carnegie; deeply concerned about competition in the steel industry, which neither the formation of U. S. Steel nor the famous “Gary Dinners” sponsored by that Morgan company could dampen, Carnegie declared in 1908 that “it always comes back to me that Government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem.” There is nothing alarming about government regulation per se, announced Carnegie, “capital is perfectly safe in the gas company, although it is under court control. So will all capital be, although under Government control...”[15]

The Progressive Party, Kolko shows, was basically a Morgan-created party to re-elect Roosevelt and punish President Taft, who had been over-zealous in prosecuting Morgan enterprises; the leftish social workers often unwittingly provided a demagogic veneer for a conservative-statist movement. Wilson’s New Freedom, culminating in the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, far from being considered dangerously socialistic by big business, was welcomed enthusiastically as putting their long-cherished program of support, privilege, and regulation of competition into effect (and Wilson’s war collectivism was welcomed even more exuberantly.) Edward N. Hurley, Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and formerly President of the Illinois Manufacturers Association, happily announced, in late 1915, that the Federal Trade Commission was designed “to do for general business” what the ICC had been eagerly doing for the railroads and shippers, what the Federal Reserve was doing for the nation’s bankers, and what the Department of Agriculture was accomplishing for the farmers.[16] As would happen more dramatically in European fascism, each economic interest group was being cartellized and monopolized and fitted into its privileged niche in a hierarchically-ordered socio-economic structure. Particularly influential were the views of Arthur Jerome Eddy, an eminent corporation lawyer who specialized in forming trade associations and who helped to father the Federal Trade Commission. In his magnum opus fiercely denouncing competition in business and calling for governmentally-controlled and protected industrial “cooperation”, Eddy trumpeted that “Competition is War, and ‘War is Hell.’”[17]

What of the intellectuals of the Progressive period, damned by the present-day Right as “socialistic?” Socialistic in a sense they were, but what kind of “socialism?” The conservative State Socialism of Bismarck’s Germany, the prototype for so much of modern European—and American—political forms, and under which the bulk of American intellectuals of the late nineteenth century received their higher education. As Kolko puts it:

The conservatism of the contemporary intellectuals,... the idealization of the state by Lester Ward, Richard T. Ely, or Simon N. Patten...was also the result of the peculiar training of many of the American academics of this period. At the end of the nineteenth century the primary influence in American academic social and economic theory was exerted by the universities. The Bismarckian idealization of the state, with its centralized welfare functions...was suitably revised by the thousands of key academics who studied in German universities in the 1880’s and 1890’s...[18]

The ideal of the leading ultra-conservative German professors, moreover, who were also called “socialists of the chair”, was consciously to form themselves into the “intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern”—and that they surely were.

As an exemplar of the Progressive intellectual, Kolko aptly cites Herbert Croly, editor of the Morgan-financed New Republic. Systematizing Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, Croly hailed this new Hamiltonianism as a system for collectivist federal control and integration of society into a hierarchical structure.

Looking forward from the Progressive Era, Gabriel Kolko concludes that

a synthesis of business and politics on the federal level was created during the war, in various administrative and emergency agencies, that continued throughout the following decade. Indeed, the war period represents the triumph of business in the most emphatic manner possible...big business gained total support from the various regulatory agencies and the Executive. It was during the war that effective, working oligopoly and price and market agreements became operational in the dominant sectors of the American economy. The rapid diffusion of power in the economy and relatively easy entry virtually ceased. Despite the cessation of important new legislative enactments, the unity of business and the federal government continued throughout the 1920’s and thereafter, using the foundations laid in the Progressive Era to stabilize and consolidate conditions within various industries...The principle of utilizing the federal government to stabilize the economy, established in the context of modern industrialism during the Progressive Era, became the basis of political capitalism in its many later ramifications.

In this sense progressivism did not die in the 1920’s, but became a part of the basic fabric of American society.[19]

Thus the New Deal. After a bit of leftish wavering in the middle and late ‘thirties, the Roosevelt Administration re-cemented its alliance with big business in the national defense and war contract economy that began in 1940. This was an economy and a polity that has been ruling America ever since, embodied in the permanent war economy, the full-fledged State monopoly capitalism and neo-mercantilism, the military-industrial complex of the present era. The essential features of American society have not changed since it was thoroughly militarized and politicized in World War II-except that the trends intensify, and even in everyday life men have been increasingly moulded into conforming Organization Men serving the State and its military-industrial complex. William H. Whyte, Jr., in his justly famous book, The Organization Man, made clear that this moulding took place amidst the adoption by business of the collectivist views of “enlightened” sociologists and other social engineers. It is also clear that this harmony of views is not simply the result of naiveté by big businessmen—not when such “naiveté” coincides with the requirements of compressing the worker and manager into the mould of willing servitor in the great bureaucracy of the military-industrial machine. And, under the guise of “democracy”, education has become mere mass drilling in the techniques of adjustment to the task of becoming a cog in the vast bureaucratic machine.

Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats remain as bipartisan in forming and supporting this Establishment as they were in the first two decades of the twentieth century. “Me-tooism”—bipartisan support of the status quo that underlies the superficial differences between the parties—did not begin in 1940.

How did the corporal’s guard of remaining libertarians react to these shifts of the ideological spectrum in America? An instructive answer may be found by looking at the career of one of the great libertarians of twentieth-century America: Albert Jay Nock. In the 1920’s, when Nock had formulated his radical libertarian philosophy, he was universally regarded as a member of the extreme left, and he so regarded himself as well. It is always the tendency, in ideological and political life, to center one’s attentions on the main enemy of the day, and the main enemy of that day was the conservative statism of the Coolidge-Hoover Administration; it was natural, therefore, for Nock, his friend and fellow-libertarian Mencken, and other radicals to join quasi-socialists in battle against the common foe. When the New Deal succeeded Hoover, on the other hand, the milk-and-water socialists and vaguely leftish interventionists hopped on the New Deal bandwagon; on the Left, only the libertarians such as Nock and Mencken, and the Leninists (before the Popular Front period) realized that Roosevelt was only a continuation of Hoover in other rhetoric. It was perfectly natural for the radicals to form a united front against FDR with the older Hoover and Al Smith conservatives who either believed Roosevelt had gone too far or disliked his flamboyant populistic rhetoric. But the problem was that Nock and his fellow radicals, at first properly scornful of their new-found allies, soon began to accept them and even don cheerfully the formerly despised label of “conservative”. With the rank-and-file radicals, this shift took place, as have so many transformations of ideology in history, unwittingly and in default of proper ideological leadership; for Nock, and to some extent for Mencken, on the other hand, the problem cut far deeper.

For there had always been one grave flaw in the brilliant and finely-honed libertarian doctrine hammered out in their very different ways by Nock and Mencken; both had long adopted the great error of pessimism. Both saw no hope for the human race ever adopting the system of liberty; despairing of the radical doctrine of liberty ever being applied in practice, each in his own personal way retreated from the responsibility of ideological leadership, Mencken joyously and hedonically, Nock haughtily and secretively. Despite the massive contribution of both men to the cause of liberty, therefore, neither could ever become the conscious leader of a libertarian movement: for neither could ever envision the party of liberty as the party of hope, the party of revolution, or a fortiori, the party of secular messianism. The error of pessimism is the first step down the slippery slope that leads to Conservatism; and hence it was all too easy for the pessimistic radical Nock, even though still basically a libertarian, to accept the conservative label and even come to croak the old platitude that there is an a priori presumption against any social change.

It is fascinating that Albert Jay Nock thus followed the ideological path of his beloved spiritual ancestor Herbert Spencer; both began as pure radical libertarians, both quickly abandoned radical or revolutionary tactics as embodied in the will to put their theories into practice through mass action, and both eventually glided from Tory tactics to at least a partial Toryism of content.

And so the libertarians, especially in their sense of where they stood in the ideological spectrum, fused with the older conservatives who were forced to adopt libertarian phraseology (but with no real libertarian content) in opposing a Roosevelt Administration that had become too collectivistic for them, either in content or in rhetoric. World War II reinforced and cemented this alliance; for, in contrast to all the previous American wars of the century, the pro-peace and “isolationist” forces were all identified, by their enemies and subsequently by themselves, as men of the “Right”. By the end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to consider themselves at an “extreme right-wing” pole with the conservatives immediately to the left of them; and hence the great error of the spectrum that persists to this day. In particular, the modern libertarians forgot or never realized that opposition to war and militarism had always been a “left-wing” tradition which had included libertarians; and hence when the historical aberration of the New Deal period corrected itself and the “Right-wing” was once again the great partisan of total war, the libertarians were unprepared to understand what was happening and tailed along in the wake of their supposed conservative “allies.” The liberals had completely lost their old ideological markings and guidelines.

Given a proper reorientation of the ideological spectrum, what then would be the prospects for liberty? It is no wonder that the contemporary libertarian, seeing the world going socialist and Communist, and believing himself virtually isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action, tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable requisite of modern civilization: the overthrow of the Old Order, was accomplished by mass libertarian action erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility, and rising living standards that we still retain today. Despite the reactionary swings backward to statism, the modern world stands towering above the world of the past. When we consider also that, in one form or another, the Old Order of despotism, feudalism, theocracy and militarism dominated every human civilization until the West of the 18th century, optimism over what man has and can achieve must mount still higher.

It might be retorted, however, that this bleak historical record of despotism and stagnation only reinforces one’s pessimism, for it shows the persistence and durability of the Old Order and the seeming frailty and evanescence of the New—especially in view of the retrogression of the past century. But such superficial analysis neglects the great change that occurred with the Revolution of the New Order, a change that is clearly irreversible. For the Old Order was able to persist in its slave system for centuries precisely because it awoke no expectations and no hopes in the minds of the submerged masses; their lot was to live and eke out their brutish subsistence in slavery while obeying unquestioningly the commands of their divinely appointed rulers. But the liberal Revolution implanted indelibly in the minds of the masses—not only in the West but in the still feudally-dominated undeveloped world—the burning desire for liberty, for land to the peasantry, for peace between the nations, and, perhaps above all, for the mobility and rising standards of living that can only be brought to them by an industrial civilization. The masses will never again accept the mindless serfdom of the Old Order; and given these demands that have been awakened by liberalism and the Industrial Revolution, long-run victory for liberty is inevitable.

For only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system, and the more that population expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered working of such an industrial economy. Laissez-faire and the free market become more and more evidently necessary as an industrial system develops; radical deviations cause breakdowns and economic crises. This crisis of statism becomes particularly dramatic and acute in a fully socialist society; and hence the inevitable breakdown of statism has first become strikingly apparent in the countries of the socialist (i.e., Communist) camp. For socialism confronts its inner contradiction most starkly. Desperately, it tries to fulfill its proclaimed goals of industrial growth, higher standards of living for the masses, and eventual withering away of the State, and is increasingly unable to do so with its collectivist means. Hence the inevitable breakdown of socialism. This progressive breakdown of socialist planning was at first partially obscured. For, in every instance the Leninists took power not in a developed capitalist country as Marx had wrongly predicted, but in a country suffering from the oppression of feudalism. Secondly, the Communists did not attempt to impose socialism upon the economy for many years after taking power: in Soviet Russia until Stalin’s forced collectivization of the early 1930’s reversed the wisdom of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which Lenin’s favorite theoretician Bukharin would have extended onward towards a free market. Even the supposedly rabid Communist leaders of China did not impose a socialist economy on that country until the late 1950’s. In every case, growing industrialization has imposed a series of economic breakdowns so severe that the Communist countries, against their ideological principles, have had to retreat step by step from central planning and return to various degrees and forms of a free market. The Liberman Plan for the Soviet Union has gained a great deal of publicity; but the inevitable process of de-socialization has proceeded much further in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Most advanced of all is Yugoslavia, which, freed from Stalinist rigidity earlier than its fellows, in only a dozen years has de-socialized so fast and so far that its economy is now hardly more socialistic than that of France. The fact that people calling themselves “Communists” are still governing the country is irrelevant to the basic social and economic facts. Central planning in Yugoslavia has virtually disappeared; the private sector not only predominates in agriculture but is even strong in industry, and the public sector itself has been so radically decentralized and placed under free pricing, profit-and-loss tests, and a cooperative worker ownership of each plant that true socialism hardly exists any longer. Only the final step of converting workers’ syndical control to individual shares of ownership remains on the path toward outright capitalism. Communist China and the able Marxist theoreticians of Monthly Review have clearly discerned the situation and have raised the alarm that Yugoslavia is no longer a socialist country.

One would think that free-market economists would hail the confirmation and increasing relevance of the notable insight of Professor Ludwig von Mises a half-century ago: that socialist States, being necessarily devoid of a genuine price system could not calculate economically and therefore could not plan their economy with any success. Indeed, one follower of Mises in effect predicted this process of de-socialization in a novel some years ago. Yet neither this author nor other free-market economists have given the slightest indication of even recognizing, let alone saluting this process in the Communist countries—perhaps because their almost hysterical view of the alleged threat of Communism prevents them from acknowledging any dissolution in the supposed monolith of menace.[20]

Communist countries, therefore, are increasingly and ineradicably forced to de-socialize, and will therefore eventually reach the free market. The state of the undeveloped countries is also cause for sustained libertarian optimism. For all over the world, the peoples of the undeveloped nations are engaged in revolution to throw off their feudal Old Order. It is true that the United States is doing its mightiest to suppress the very revolutionary process that once brought it and Western Europe out of the shackles of the Old Order; but it is increasingly clear that even overwhelming armed might cannot suppress the desire of the masses to break through into the modern world.

We are left with the United States and the countries of Western Europe. Here, the case for optimism is less clear, for the quasi-collectivist system does not present as stark a crisis of self-contradiction as does socialism. And yet, here too economic crisis looms in the future and gnaws away at the complacency of the Keynesian economic managers: creeping inflation, reflected in the aggravating balance-of-payments breakdown of the once almighty dollar; creeping secular unemployment brought about by minimum wage scales; and the deeper and long-run accumulation of the uneconomic distortions of the permanent war economy. Moreover, potential crises in the United States are not merely economic; there is a burgeoning and inspiring moral ferment among the youth of America against the fetters of centralized bureaucracy, of mass education in uniformity, and of brutality and oppression exercised by the minions of the State.

Furthermore, the maintenance of a substantial degree of free speech and democratic forms facilitates, at least in the short-run, the possible growth of a libertarian movement. The United States is also fortunate in possessing, even if half-forgotten beneath the statist and tyrannical overlay of the last half-century, a great tradition of libertarian thought and action. The very fact that much of this heritage is still reflected in popular rhetoric, even though stripped of its significance in practice, provides a substantial ideological groundwork for a future party of liberty.

What the Marxists would call the “objective conditions” for the triumph of liberty exist, then, everywhere in the world, and more so than in any past age; for everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals. What is needed, then, is simply the “subjective conditions” for victory, i.e., a growing body of informed libertarians who will spread the message to the peoples of the world that liberty and the purely free market provide the way out of their problems and crises. Liberty cannot be fully achieved unless libertarians exist in number to guide the peoples to the proper path. But perhaps the greatest stumbling-block to the creation of such a movement is the despair and pessimism typical of the libertarian in today’s world. Much of that pessimism is due to his misreading of history and his thinking of himself and his handful of confreres as irredeemably isolated from the masses and therefore from the winds of history. Hence he becomes a lone critic of historical events rather than a person who considers himself as part of a potential movement which can and will make history. The modern libertarian has forgotten that the liberal of the 17th and 18th centuries faced odds much more overwhelming than faces the liberal of today; for in that era before the Industrial Revolution, the victory of liberalism was far from inevitable. And yet the liberalism of that day was not content to remain a gloomy little sect; instead, it unified theory and action. Liberalism grew and developed as an ideology and, leading and guiding the masses, made the Revolution which changed the fate of the world; by its monumental breakthrough, this Revolution of the 18th century transformed history from a chronicle of stagnation and despotism to an ongoing movement advancing toward a veritable secular Utopia of liberty and rationality and abundance. The Old Order is dead or moribund; and the reactionary attempts to run a modern society and economy by various throwbacks to the Old Order are doomed to total failure. The liberals of the past have left to modern libertarians a glorious heritage, not only of ideology but of victories against far more devastating odds. The liberals of the past have also left a heritage of the proper strategy and tactics for libertarians to follow: Not only by leading rather than remaining aloof from the masses; but also by not falling prey to short-run optimism. For short-run optimism, being unrealistic, leads straightway to disillusion and then to long-run pessimism; just as, on the other side of the coin, long-run pessimism leads to exclusive and self-defeating concentration on immediate and short-run issues. Short-run optimism stems, for one thing, from a naive and simplistic view of strategy: that liberty will win merely by educating more intellectuals, who in turn will educate opinion-moulders, who in turn will convince the masses, after which the State will somehow fold its tent and silently steal away. Matters are not that easy; for libertarians face not only a problem of education but also a problem of power; and it is a law of history that a ruling caste has never voluntarily given up its power.

But the problem of power is, certainly in the United States, far in the future. For the libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set about the road to its attainment. To do this, he must, perhaps first of all, drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological spectrum; he must discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all perhaps, who his enemies are. Armed with this knowledge, let him proceed in the spirit of radical long-run optimism that one of the great figures in the history of libertarian thought, Randolph Bourne, correctly identified as the spirit of youth. Let Bourne’s stirring words serve also as the guidepost for the spirit of liberty:

youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the defenders it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem. . .

Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic...It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail...

Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress—one might say, the only lever of progress...

The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit shall never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate—a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into experience. To keep one’s reactions warm and true is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation.[21]

1.Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 204-205.

2.Ibid., p. 209.

3.Cf. Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books ed., 1958), Chapter VI.

4.The information about Comte and Dunoyer, as well indeed as the entire analysis of the ideological spectrum, I owe to Mr. Leonard P. Liggio. For an emphasis on the positive and dynamic aspect of the Utopian drive, much traduced in our time, see Alan Milchman, “The Social and Political Philosophy of Jean - Jacques Rousseau: Utopia and Ideology,” The November Review (November, 1964), pp. 3-10. Also cf. Jurgen Ruhle, “The Philosopher of Hope: Ernst Bloch,” in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism (New York: Praeger, 1962), pp. 166-178.

5.Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 175. Schumpeter, incidentally, realized that, far from being an inherent stage of capitalism, modern imperialism was a throwback to the pre-capitalist imperialism of earlier ages, but with a minority of privileged capitalists now joined to the feudal and military castes in promoting imperialist aggression.

6.Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).

7.Leopold S. Amery, My Political Life (London, 1953), quoted in Semmel, op. cit., pp. 74-75.

8.The point, of course, is not that these men were products of some “Fabian conspiracy”; but, on the contrary, that Fabianism, by the turn of the century, was Socialism so conservatized as to be closely aligned with the other dominant neo-Conservative trends in British political life.

9.Thus, see Horace B. Davis, “Nations. Colonies, and Social Classes: The Position of Marx and Engels”, Science and Society (Winter, 1965), pp. 26-43.

10.The schismatic wing of the Trotskyist movement embodied in the International Committee for the Fourth International is now the only sect within Marxism-Leninism that continues to stress exclusively the industrial working-class.

11.See the penetrating article by Alexander J. Groth, “The ‘Isms’ in Totalitarianism,” American Political Science Review (December, 1964), pp. 888-901. Groth writes: “The Communists... have generally undertaken measures directly and indirectly uprooting existing socio-economic elites: the landed nobility, business, large sections of the middle class and the peasantry, as well as the bureaucratic elites, the military, the civil service, the judiciary and the diplomatic corps...Second, in every instance of Communist seizure of power there has been a significant ideological-propagandistic commitment toward a proletarian or workers’ state... (which) has been accompanied by opportunities for upward social mobility for the economically lowest classes, in terms of education and employment, which invariably have considerably exceeded the opportunities available under previous regimes. Finally, in every case the Communists have attempted to change basically the character of the economic systems which fell under their sway, typically from an agrarian to an industrial economy...

Fascism (both in the German and Italian versions)...was socio-economically a counter-revolutionary movement...It certainly did not dispossess or annihilate existent socio-economic elites... Quite the contrary. Fascism did not arrest the trend toward monopolistic private concentrations in business but instead augmented this tendency...

Undoubtedly, the Fascist economic system was not a free market economy, and hence not ‘capitalist’ if one wishes to restrict the use of this term to a laissez-faire system. But did it not operate...to preserve in being, and maintain the material rewards of, the existing socio-economic elites?” Ibid., pp. 890-891.

12.For examples of the attractions of fascist and right-wing collectivist ideas and plans for American big businessmen in this era, see Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1963). Also cf. Gaetano Salvemini and George LaPiana, What To Do With Italy (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), pp. 65ff.

Of the fascist economy, Salvemini perceptively wrote: “In actual fact, it is the State, i.e., the taxpayer who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise...Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.” Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), p. 416.

13.Thus, see Rothbard, passim.

14.R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1934), pp. 247-251.

15.See Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1963), pp. 173 and passim. For an example of the way in which Kolko has already begun to influence American historiography, see David T. Gilchrist and W. David Lewis, eds., Economic Change in the Civil War Era (Greenville, Del.: Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, 1965), p. 115. Kolko’s complementary and confirmatory work on railroads, Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) comes too late to be considered here. A brief treatment of the monopolizing role of the ICC for the railroad industry may be found in Christopher D. Stone, “ICC: Some Reminiscences on the Future of American Transportation,” New Individualist Review (Spring, 1963), pp. 3-15.

16.Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism, p. 274.

17.Arthur Jerome Eddy, The New Competition: An Examination of the Conditions Underlying the Radical change That Is Taking place In the Commercial and Industrial World—The Change from A COMPETITIVE TO A COOPERATIVE BASIS (7th Ed., Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1920).

18.Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism, p. 214.

19.Ibid., pp. 286-287.

20.One happy exception is William D. Grampp, “New Directions in the Communist Economies,” Business Horizons (Fall, 1963), pp. 29-36. Grampp writes: “Hayek said that centralized planning will lead to serfdom. It follows that a decrease in the economic authority of the State should lead away from serfdom. The Communist countries may show that to be true. It would be a withering away of the state the Marxists have not counted on nor has it been anticipated by those who agree with Hayek.” Ibid., p. 35. The novel in question is Henry Hazlitt, The Great Idea (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951.)

21.Randolph Bourne, “Youth,” The Atlantic Monthly (April, 1912); reprinted in Lillian Schlissel, ed., The World of Randolph Bourne (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1965), pp. 9-11, 15.

Why the Futile Crusade?

by LEONARD P. LIGGIO

Sidney Lens, by his analysis of the roots of the Cold War in The Futile Crusade, Anti-Communism as American Credo, challenges observers of American politics to a total re-examination of the American political scene. Lens demolishes the anti-Communist crusade’s claim to be the preserver of individual liberty by contrasting the claim with its actual policy of Cold War militarism and political control “which subvert the individualist elan which is the mainspring of democracy.”

But since we are only in a “half-war”, a Cold War, we stand midpoint between the values of individualism and those of the garrison state, continuing to manifest characteristics of the former, but yielding to the demands of the latter. In this Cold War the central government inevitably gains more power over its citizens. Countervailing checks and balances by the people are reduced, and “participative” democracy is subtly transformed into “manipulative” democracy. Citizens are remade in the image of foreign policy—in the image, that is, of militarism. . . The curbing of dissent and individualism is therefore neither an accident nor an incidental feature of modern America, but a sine qua non of Anti-Communist strategy. . . Anti-Communism, though it pays ceaseless obeisance to the virtues of freedom, has made us less, rather than more, free.[1]

This statement by Sidney Lens marks a milestone in the American political scene. That a widely recognized spokesman of the American left should find the Cold War not only evil in itself, but evil because it centralizes political power, destroys constitutional limitations on government, and relies upon control and regulation by government, all of which “subvert the individualist elan which is the mainspring of democracy,” alters the contemporary American political spectrum to an extent which may have fundamental and radical significance.

It is difficult to determine which is more striking: that individualism has such basic importance for Lens, or that he has said what few if any so-called individualists have said during the last decade or more. While the spokesmen of American liberalism, individualism, and constitutionalism, not to mention those who use the word “liberty” as a facade to gain the illiberal ends of anti-Communism, have blessed the Cold War deprivations of constitutional rights and civil liberties, it has been spokesmen of the American left, stigmatized for their use of centralization and government power to eliminate injustices, who have defended the Constitution and struggled to preserve individual rights against the government, and who proclaim individualism as a good in itself. Although sterile rhetoric and false categories have established unreal divisions between libertarians, casting them left and right, it is nothing new that the current American left leads in the struggle to maintain constitutional rights and civil liberties in America. What is new is that spokesmen for American liberalism, individualism, and constitutionalism are not beside them in the forefront of the struggle. Here is a major contrast between the post-World War I period with its relative freedom and relatively limited government, and, as Lens indicates, the current post-World War II era with its suppressions and deprivations of freedom and its increasingly total government. For, in the present epoch, leading liberals and individualists have betrayed their principles and have entered the service of their historic statist and militarist enemies. When the reasons for this phenomenon are clearly understood, much will have been contributed to answering the question posed by Linus Pauling in the introduction to Lens’ book:

Why did our national leaders decide upon this policy of increased nuclear militarism?...And why did the sensible American people permit it to be done?[2]

In his contribution to the solution of that question, Lens provides the answer to this fundamental problem: that the Cold War, the anti-Communist crusade, may have its roots not in European radical thought or Soviet military power or non-Western movements of national liberation, but in a deep flaw in Western society, in the absence of a basic perfection, of which Soviet strength, radical thought and national liberation movements are only the reflection and result.

Is it possible that somewhere along the way America had taken the wrong fork in the road? Has its analysis of world problems, perhaps, been faulty? Is it possible that communism has been misjudged as the cause of Western travail, when in fact it has been its effect?[3]

The class conflict between European peoples and their rulers, between the exploited and the exploiters, was based on the idea of liberty, on eliminating exploitation to permit capitalism, progress, and freedom to flourish. The capitalist revolutions, culminating in the late eighteenth century American-European revolutions, although sustained by the strength of nationalism against counterrevolutions supported by foreign powers, remained far from achieving completion. Instead of the radical reorientation of society implicit in capitalism, the application of capitalism was circumscribed within a narrow range by the pre-capitalist institutional instruments of exploitation which continued in force. Thus, not only was the capitalist revolution thwarted in Western Europe and America, but their ruling classes were able to exploit the feudal conditions existing in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America through the system of imperialism. The imperialist power of the Western countries prevented the overthrow of feudalism by capitalist revolutions in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America and imposed on the world’s peoples a double or reinforced system of exploitation—imperialism—by which the power of the Western governments maintains the local ruling class in exchange for the opportunity to superimpose Western exploitation upon existing exploitation by local states. Imperialism or double exploitation has caused the twentieth century struggle against feudalism and for progress to take a form different from the earlier Western European struggle against feudalism. Lens describes the legacy of the thwarted progress of the capitalist revolutions:

Had this process continued without interruption, it is more than likely that the world would never have known either Leninist, Stalinist, or Khrushchevist communism. But the very nations which liberated themselves during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries prevented the spread of nationalism and capitalism to other areas—China, India, Russia, Egypt, etc.—during the nineteenth century. This self-aggrandizing folly, in which Britain was to play the major role, has become known in history as “imperialism”. In their own interests, the Western nations restored the power of feudal lords when that power was tottering. If it were not for the throttling effect of imperialism, the nationalist revolutions we confront in the twentieth century might very well have been completed in the nineteenth.[4]

But, due to the development of imperialism, the twentieth century capitalist revolutions could not be successful in ending either imperialism or feudalism. Success was thwarted by the incompleteness of capitalist ideology among the nationalist leaders and the publics of the imperialist countries. Thus, the earliest twentieth century nationalist revolutions: in Mexico in 1910 and China in 1911, were unsuccessful under leaders possessing the spirit though not the ideology of revolutionary capitalism.

In place of the thwarted capitalist revolutions, the Soviet Revolution provided the model and support for successful nationalist revolutions, including the partial one in Mexico and the ultimately complete one in China. The Soviet Revolution achieved immediate and complete success because the socialists under the leadership of Lenin supplied both the objectives and the methods of revolutionary capitalism: that destruction of feudalism and imperialism which is the precondition for freedom and progress. Lens indicates that the twentieth century revolutions pursue the same objectives as did the European and American revolutions, and are motivated by the same revolutionary hatred of exploitation:

The communist upsurge, good or bad, aborted or not, is not an isolated phenomenon but an intrinsic link in a chain of events that began four hundred years ago, and is part of the same chain as capitalism itself.

... in point of fact the communist revolution has been a movement away from feudalism, slavery, and tribalism, just as the early capitalist revolutions and the present nationalist revolutions are links on the same historical chain. . . .it is a medicine for the same type of social disease...it is a response to the same challenge as the French Revolution of 1789, or the British Revolution of 1642, or the Indian Revolution of 1947. It is part of a cycle much broader than itself, and if it had not occurred under Bolshevik leadership it would have found some other radical force to guide it to its destiny.[5]

The Soviet Revolution was successful because it alone combined the two necessary revolutionary principles of destruction of feudalism, especially by distribution of feudal land and state industries to the peasants and workers, and of imperialism, by establishing peace and withdrawing from the World War.

The Russian Revolution created not just another strong nation changing the balance of power among the Great Powers, but also a new phenomenon in the twentieth century—a completely successful revolution dedicated to assisting the world-wide eradication of imperialist and feudal exploitation. As Lens notes, this has created a profound fear of communism:

The fact is that communism has caused so pervasive an anxiety because it has altered not only the balance of power among nations, but the very character of our epoch. . .

The Russian Revolution added a new dimension to international affairs—much as the American and French Revolutions did in the nineteenth century. Here, finally, was an organized state that could—and did—offer moral encouragement, material aid, and organized support to radical nationalists. . . . By its very nature it came to be a “third force” in class and colonial conflicts. Whether it gave direct aid to rebellious forces or played a passive role as an example to be emulated, it was an inevitable encouragement to revolutionary aspiration. . . . The emergence of a leftist regime in Russia was not just another problem for Western statesmen, but a problem of a different kind.[6]

The immediate effect of the revolution was Russian withdrawal from the World War and the attempt of the Soviet government to induce the Western powers to negotiate a general peace by making concessions to their adversaries. Rather than make peace, and thus tend to prevent further revolutions, the Western powers determined to meet the revolutionary threat to their world dominance as they had met the threat of the central powers. In fact, they classified the Soviet government as an ally of the central powers and Lenin as a German satellite. The challenge posed by the Soviet Union to imperialist world domination had to be destroyed by the ultimate imperialist weapon: military intervention, including the forces of the American army.

The first reaction of the West to Soviet communism revealed little new insight. In its frustration it could think of no more imaginative policy than the one it had used so frequently in the colonies, military intervention. From 1918 to 1920, fourteen foreign armies occupied parts of the Soviet Union, and Britain and France donated hundreds of millions of dollars to former Czarist officers engaged in civil war against the red regime. It proved, after two and a half years, a futile effort. Equally inept was the wave of repression in the United States that followed the Bolshevik Revolution.[7]

Already, for more than six months before the Soviet Revolution, the United States had experienced suppression of civil liberties and deprivation of constitutional rights through conscription, economic controls, government censorship, propaganda, elimination of freedom of speech, and espionage and sedition acts against opponents of American intervention into World War I. Randolph Bourne, horrified at the support of the war by so-called liberals and progressives, had insisted that an unconditionally defeated Germany would become a greater menace to European peace; the war itself, he charged, was the only real enemy of American freedom. Oswald Garrison Villard, the publisher of the Nation, had warned businessmen against supporting conscription and the war since “militarism is the best friend of the Socialist. . . .”[8] But, it was precisely the socialists in America led by Eugene Debs who, like European socialists from Jaures in France to Lenin in Russia, opposed the war and assumed the leadership of the struggle to preserve civil liberties and constitutional rights, and who suffered most gravely from the war tyranny of persecution, censorship and imprisonment for this commitment to liberal principles. The crucifixion of the socialist bearers of American liberalism was intensified following the Soviet Revolution. The Post Office Department completely excluded socialist journals from the mails as pro-German by definition, and banned single issues of other journals for what was called “pro-Germanism, pacifism, and ‘high-browism’.”[9] The Nation’s September 18, 1918 issue was banned for Albert Jay Nock’s editorial attacking the government’s use of AFL president Samuel Gompers as an agent in Europe. The government insisted that no attacks on Gompers would be permitted because he had aided the government in preventing American workers from seeking their rights during the war. At the end of the World War the United States, of all the belligerents, alone refused amnesty to political prisoners; rather it increased the suppression of American liberties in revenge for the defeats inflicted by the Russian people on the foreign invaders, including the American army.

However, the unity of the American left—individualist and socialist—made this domestic violence only temporary. Lens contrasts the suppression of liberties during the deep conflict over American intervention into World War I followed by post-war restoration of traditional freedoms, with the general conformity to American intervention into World War II and the post-war deprivation of constitutional rights during the Futile Crusade of the Cold War. He emphasizes that this unusual development has been accompanied by the expansion of the anti-Communist right and the disappearance of an American left which would have opposed the right and the Cold War.

It is all the more striking, therefore, that today - when there is so little challenge from the left - there should be so continuing a state of repression. . . Never has there been less pressure from radicalism.[10]

However, in his necessary concentration upon the Cold War, and especially its international developments, Lens does not present a detailed consideration of why a wave of domestic repression followed World War II accompanied by a disappearance of the American left; whereas following World War I, constitutional rights were restored under the influence of a strong and united American left-socialist and individualist. Certainly, the separation of American libertarians into mutually excluding socialist and individualist groupings was an important factor in weakening the American left, in contrast to its strength after World War I. Yet, as indicated by Lens’ views quoted at the beginning of this article, this separation is entirely artificial and unreal. The clear commitment to individualism by spokesmen of the American left requires a re-evaluation of recent American political developments as interpreted by scholars representing individualism and the American left. Although these groups have been assumed to have conflicting views of recent political developments, Lens indicates that they may in fact have corresponding or identical comprehension of the meaning and results of the recent past. Lens’ work suggests a method for such a re-evaluation in his references to the leading historians of the two points of view, William Appleman Williams and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. Their analyses of the crucial developments in recent American history provide important guides to the destruction of mythical stereotypes contributing to the divisions among libertarians that have weakened the American opposition to the Cold War. As with Lens and the American left, Cold War policies have awakened American individualists anew to the basic causes of the loss of American liberty, as indicated most clearly in the works of Ekirch.

In our own era it is difficult to reconcile the militarism left in the wake of two world wars and the prospect of a third, with a philosophy of liberalism.[11]

Senator Robert M. LaFollette, as Ekirch indicates, had recognized that war and militarism would contribute to a decline of American liberalism. Thus, he opposed American intervention both in World War I and in the Russian Revolution, for which he was dubbed the “Bolshevik spokesman in America.” In a war declared under the excuse of democratic aims, LaFollette had questioned whether Germans were less free than Americans if popular support of the war were measured by the violence of the espionage and conscription laws. And LaFollette had asked: “Are we seizing upon this war to consolidate and extend our imperialistic policy?”[12] American intervention, as LaFollette had predicted, lengthened the war by substituting concepts of total war and total victory for a negotiated and reasonable peace. The American left then united in opposition to the peace treaty dictated at the Versailles conference from which Germany and the Soviet Union were excluded. The treaty was recognized as the foundation for an inevitable second world war. The New Republic said of the treaty:

THIS IS NOT PEACE. Americans would be fools if they permitted themselves to be embroiled in a system of European alliances.[13]

Even greater disquiet was caused by the creation of a League of Nations with the power to threaten the use of force in the preservation of the status quo established under the treaty for the benefit of the major imperialist founders of the League. Villard, the publisher of the Nation, wrote to Senator LaFollette on the treaty and the League:

The more I study it, the more I am convinced that it is the most iniquitous peace document ever drawn, that it dishonors America because it violates our solemn national pledge given to the Germans at the time of the Armistice and because it reeks with bad faith, revengefulness and inhumanity. It is worse than the Treaty of Vienna.

... it not only retains the old and vicious order of the world, but makes it worse and then puts the whole control of the situation in the hands of four or five statesmen—and, incidentally, of the International Bankers. To my mind it seals the ruin of the modern capitalistic system and constitutes a veritable Pandora’s Box out of which will come evils of which we have not as yet any conception.[14]

Villard believed that the League would encourage the imperialist powers to refuse to solve international problems by peaceful means because the League would give the imperialist powers the sanctity of legality when countries such as Germany would seek to terminate such deprivations as Danzig, the Polish Corridor, and prohibition of union with Austria. And, for Villard, the League not only contributed to the prevention of peaceful settlement of the injuries of the Versailles system in Europe, but also enshrined the whole imperialist system which the national liberation movements in China, India, Egypt, Africa and Latin America were striving to destroy.[15]

The American left was triumphant in defeating the Versailles treaty and American participation in that guarantor of the imperialist status quo which Lenin trenchantly described as the “League of Bandits”. Williams presents a penetrating analysis of the leadership in the Senate by the American left:

At the other extreme was an even smaller group of men who were almost doctrinaire laissez-faire liberals in domestic affairs and antiempire men in foreign policy. Led by Senator William E. Borah, they made many perceptive criticisms of existing policy . . . . The argument advanced by Borah and other antiempire spokesmen was based on the proposition that America neither could nor should undertake to make or keep the world safe for democracy.

. . . . And even if it were possible to build such an empire, they concluded, the effort violated the spirit of democracy itself. Borah provided a classic summary of these two arguments in one of his speeches attacking the proposal to clamp a lid on the revolutionary ferment in China after 1917. “Four hundred million people imbued with the spirit of independence and of national integrity are in the end invincible.” ... He concluded that a rapprochement with the Soviet Union was “the key to a restored Europe, to a peaceful Europe.” In addition, he thought that the United States could play a crucial role in creating the circumstances in which there could “emerge a freer, a more relaxed, a more democratic Russia.” “. . .So long as you have a hundred and fifty million people outlawed in a sense, it necessarily follows that you cannot have peace.”. . . Of all Americans, the group around Borah most clearly understood the principle and practice of self determination in foreign affairs. For that reason, as well as other aspects of Borah’s criticism, President Wilson singled out Borah as his most important critic—as the man who might turn out to be right.[16]

Borah’s insights constituted the basic principles of the American left in the post-war period; the attempts of the great imperialist powers, victorious in World War I, to oppose and suppress the movements for national liberation, especially the successful Russian Revolution, were resolutely opposed and exposed by American liberalism. Support of the Soviet Union against the attacks of the imperialist powers and opposition to the concepts and provisions of the Versailles treaty, were the inter-connected bases for the unity of the American left. This unity was especially accomplished through revisionist studies of the origins of World War I, to which the Soviet Union had made a major contribution by making public the secret records and agreements of Imperial Russia’s Western allies. Liberal journals, such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the Freeman, and such liberals as John Maynard Keynes, Harry Elmer Barnes, H. L. Mencken, Francis Neilson and Albert Jay Nock provided perceptive studies of the imperialist origins of the war and its imperialist conclusion in the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations.

Despite the American rejection, the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations remained very much in force, and the American left was dedicated to the complete abolition of the horrors of the Versailles system in order to insure a peaceful world. The foundations of the position of the American left on the treaty arid the League were established by John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920), in which he described the role of the League as an instrument of the major imperialist powers to protect the status quo that they had created in the Versailles treaty. The requirement to preserve the existing borders of the members, protected against peaceful change by the prescription of unanimity, insured the undisturbed maintenance of the status quo. According to Keynes:

These two Articles together go some way to destroy the conception of the League as an instrument of progress, and to equip it from the outset with an almost fatal bias towards the status quo. It is these Articles which have reconciled to the League some of its original opponents, who now hope to make of it another Holy Alliance for the perpetuation of the economic ruin of their enemies and the Balance of Power in their own interests which they believe themselves to have established by the Peace.[17]

The Versailles treaty had created or maintained local exploiting groups in the countries of Eastern Europe. As clients of the imperialist powers, these allies of the West preserved their expoitation against the movements for national liberation in Eastern Europe through special economic privileges which, to the exclusion of Russian and German economic and political interests, were granted to the West. Keynes demonstrated that there could not be peace if the major imperialist powers did not negotiate revisions of the treaty, especially with Germany and Russia. Excluded from Eastern Europe by the political and economic privileges of the Western powers, Russia and Germany would become natural allies and the leaders of the movements of national liberation seeking to end the yoke of exploitation exercised by the major imperialist powers and their allies, the Versailles-formed governments.[18]

After two decades during which the Western imperialist powers sought to intensify rather than rectify the evils of the status quo, the events which Keynes and the American left had foreseen did transpire. Germany, in cooperation with the Soviet Union, substituted nationalist governments for the imperialists’ client regimes in Eastern Europe. As indicated by the liberal analysis of the world situation, the alliance of Germany and the Soviet Union was neither an accident nor a great betrayal by one or the other. Rather this alliance was the necessary and natural development of the struggle between the forces of world imperialism defending their status quo, and the revolutionary forces of national liberation and anti-imperialism. Williams provides a clear description of this worldwide revolutionary challenge to the imperialist system:

However they distorted or misused the upsurge of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the leaders of Germany, Japan, and Italy were working with the most powerful weapon available—the determination, born equally of desperation and hope, of large numbers of people to improve, radically and immediately, the substance and tone of their daily lives.[19]

In Asia, the movement against the imperialist status quo was not only newer and more radical but also of more immediate concern to the American government; for more than half of America’s imports of raw materials was derived from exploitation of the colonies of England, France and the Netherlands, and of China, which was viewed as the major growth-area for American imperialism. The system of exploitation of China through privileges and monopoly concessions to American corporations and banks was threatened, both by the desire of the Japanese for free and equal competition in the China market and by the Chinese revolution, which had begun in 1911 by the declaration of a republic. American interests wished to maintain their privileges by “working with and through Chinese conservative nationalists who were dependent upon American aid”[20]to prevent the completion of the Chinese revolution by liberal-radical or left-wing Chinese nationalists. Japan was invited to share in the China market subject to the primacy of American privileges and concessions in China, and in access to colonial raw materials subject to the control of the Western powers. In the struggle of the Japanese against the conservative Chinese government which protected American monopoly privileges and concessions, the United States increasingly applied economic restrictions to Japan and granted loans and military assistance to the conservative government of China. Opposition to American government support of the privileged economic interests in China and of the conservative government attempting to suppress the movement for national liberation in China, was continued by such traditional leaders of the American left as Senator Borah. But they were unsuccessful in the contest with the “China lobby”, which propagandized the glories of the imperialist puppet regime of the Chiang dictatorship.[21]

Of fundamental importance for the history of the Cold War was the development of the Asian movements of national liberation through Japan’s challenge to the Western imperialist powers and its encouragement of anti-imperialist objectives, a challenge described by Lens and others. The Burmese nationalists, influenced by socialism, enlisted the aid of the Japanese to form a Burma Independence Army, and, when the English colonialists were expelled, the Japanese formed a Burmese national government. The radical and socialist elements of the Indian Congress party under the leadership of Subha Chandra Bose looked to Japanese liberation from English imperialism; and when Bose was forced out of the Congress party presidency in favor of the weaker Nehru, the radicals in Bengal assisted the Japanese invasion while Nehru merely declared against cooperation with the English army. In the Philippines, the Japanese granted independence to the government formed by the pre-war nationalist party led by Jose P. Laurel and Claro R. Recto, both formerly justices of the supreme court and post-war members of the Philippine senate; this nationalist party won the presidential election of 1953, and Jose P. Laurel, Jr., who had represented his father’s wartime government in Tokyo, became speaker of the house of representatives. In Indochina the Japanese protected Vietnamese engaged in nationalist activities and ultimately abolished French colonialism and recognized the independence of Vietnam. The Japanese encouraged the national liberation movement in the Dutch East Indies by promising independence and by establishing local and national Indonesian councils in which a leading figure was the pro-Japanese nationalist, Achmed Sukarno. With the completion of independence plans, Sukarno became president of the Indonesian Republic before Japanese rule came to an end.[22]

The function of the Atlantic Charter issued by Churchill and Roosevelt was to counter the rising tide of anti-imperialism and to gain the adherence of the peoples of the world, a role emphasized by Lens as an early aspect of the events that culminated in the Cold War. While for Churchill, the Atlantic Charter’s call for self-government had more than propagandistic application only to England’s allies in Western Europe and their client states in Eastern Europe, President Roosevelt considered the charter a binding commitment to end much if not all of the imperialist status quo, especially in Asia, which had contributed so greatly to the war and to American involvement. For the prosecution of the war this situation further empasized the primacy of Europe.

Most of the energy of the government in India was devoted, however, not to the prosecution of the war but to the maintenance of British rule. What military strength India could spare for the war against the Axis was diverted to the war against Germany, in which there was little danger that Indian troops would be contaminated by dangerous ideas. The British in India, like Chiang K’ai-shek in China, put most of their strength behind maintaining internal stability. . . The British were fighting two separate wars. In Europe they stood with all honor for the

freedom of humanity and the destruction of the Nazi slave system:

in Asia, for the status quo, for the Empire, for colonialism.[23] Roosevelt had realized that the assault on imperialism, represented by the Second World War and the movements of national liberation which the war intensified, could not be prevented or destroyed by force. For conservatives, like Churchill, the war was the means to restore the status quo of exploitation by the traditional imperialist states. To bulwark the imperialist status quo against the spirit of national liberation, which would receive the encouragement of the major center of anti-imperialism, the Soviet Union, Churchill hoped to contain the Soviet Union’s influence by threatening it in Eastern Europe with recreation of the “cordon sanitaire” of Western client states. But Roosevelt intended to gain a permanent peace through the peaceful liquidation of the war-shattered imperialist system by means of American pressure. This would eliminate any threat from the Soviet Union, since the basic revolutionary urge to national liberation would be satisfied, while the security of the Soviet Union from the traditional threat of Western aggression would be protected by the natural development of Eastern European governments friendly to Soviet Russia. Roosevelt concluded that peace could be maintained by a permanent Soviet-American alliance supporting national liberation to replace the imperialist system. “Roosevelt, like most Americans, disliked Stalin’s communism, but he had no pathological fear of it. He recognized its pliability.”[24]

Unfortunately, in the absence of Roosevelt’s personal policy of Soviet-American collaboration in furthering the movements of national liberation, his concept of American leadership in the world could easily be perverted into opposition to the national liberation movements and to the Soviet Union in defense of the conservative policies of imperialism. Indeed, the Second World War policies of Roosevelt established foundations on which such a perversion of his own post-war aims could thrive. Robert M. Hutchins echoed LaFollette’s criticisms when he noted that America’s growing involvement in World War II was based upon the ability of the President to create military commitments without Congressional approval and to dramatize external forces as the cause of world difficulties. Instead of countering the materialism at the root of world difficulties by the peaceful example of American progress, Hutchins declared, an America that persecuted radicals, whether labor, communists, racial minorities or teachers as did the Nazis was making a scapegoat of Hitler just as Hitler had made a scapegoat of the Jews.[25] In this way the proponents of American intervention on the American left separated themselves by a wide gulf from that public which had continued its support of the American left’s traditional anti-imperialist and isolationist policy. This split in the American left permitted revived attacks on civil liberties when the national and state legislatures initiated violations of constitutional rights to destroy those who still defended traditional American neutrality. The peacetime sedition or Smith Act with its guilt-by-association clause, although unsuccessfully applied in suits against’ pro-German opponents of the war, was the successful basis for general persecution of the American left, beginning with the neutralist leaders of the CIO Minneapolis Transport Workers Union.[26] Norman Thomas, answering the question “Who are the Liberals?”, noted that many who called themselves liberals had forgotten that “war is the enemy of liberalism,” and had caused violations of civil liberties in opposition to the very essence of the liberal creed.

In recent years those Americans who most stridently proclaimed their liberalism were usually the most vociferous preachers of a peace of vengeance against Germany and Japan. . . They were far better able to discover seditionists at home than the FBI, and far surer than the Supreme Court that foolish speech constituted sedition.[27]

Thus, insisted Thomas, while so-called liberals in Congress and the press supported or were silent over America’s militarism, conscription, and deportation of one hundred thousand Americans of Japanese ancestry to American concentration camps, the burden of the civil libertarian struggle was borne by such isolationists as “Senator Taft who spoke out most openly concerning various aspects of conscription and the treatment of the Japanese Americans.”[28]

But the domestic violations of civil liberties could be continued, as the post-World War I period had demonstrated, only through the maintenance of a war mentality by failure of the American left to re-unite on its traditional principles. Unfortunately, that disunity was intensified by the long-term economic and political conditions and policies created by the war, especially by the interrelation of economic concentration and the government’s contracts and economic aid programs, and the significant role in decision-making assumed by the military.

While it has long been a commonplace that New Deal policies were shelved in favor of a war economy, recent scholarship holds that the pre-war New Deal benefited big business through government privileges and concentration of economic power as much as had Hoover’s policies, of which the New Deal was basically a continuation. However, the most significant result of the war economy was the increased concentration of economic power which big business derived from government contracts, and the establishment of a close relationship between big business and the military, as has been indicated by Ekirch and by C. Wright Mills.[29] Ekirch describes the importance which American foreign aid, under the guise of internationalism, has played in the post-war economic concentration of big business:

Nationalism in the guise of internationalism was most attractive to the postwar group of business, political, and military leaders whom C. Wright Mills dubbed “the sophisticated conservatives.” . . . the foreign aid program, with its stimulation to American industry, became the “spinal nerve” of the sophisticated conservatives’ postwar plans for the expansion of American export markets. ... Admirably suited to the conservatives’ purposes were the solid ties forged among industry, armed forces, and State Department - ties that were constantly being strengthened under the duress of the cold war and the policy of a permanent war economy. Aided by the widespread propaganda in behalf of a bipartisan foreign policy, these new-type conservatives were able to assume a dominant position in both major political parties.[30]

Similarly, Lens examines the basis for the post-war development of conservatism in America:

Self-interest drove the military-industrial complex, after the war to upgrade the menace of communism and communist Russia. The points of conflict between East and West were enlarged to give the impression of an immediate war danger. To its surprise, this power complex found an ally among certain ex-radicals and . . . among certain liberals who came to Anti-Communism from other motivations. Together with the ultra-Right, which had been relatively dormant, this conjunction of forces pushed the center of gravity in American political life to the right, to a barren defense of the status quo.[31]

Ekirch examines the motivations of those liberals who became allies of the anti-Communism of the new conservatism in the postwar American government:

Accustomed to power and office, New Deal liberals had lost the capacity of self-criticism and vigorous opposition, qualities that might have served them in good stead in the postwar years of hysteria and reaction. . . .

One of the ironies of the postwar period was that anti-revisionist liberals, in their anxiety lest the United States return to a post-World War I intellectual pattern of isolationist pacifism, came to condone and even to abet a resort to the opposite extreme of a militant, interventionist nationalism, masquerading as idealistic internationalism. At the same time, talk of bipartisanship often concealed the essentially conservative nature of American postwar foreign policy. In what was really a turn to the right in American diplomacy, war liberals, who had formerly shared in many a leftist cause or program, now vied with conservatives for leadership in the crusade against communism.[32]

Thus, some liberals became either complete or partial allies of the new conservative establishment on the basis of anti-Communism. Other liberals, eschewing this anti-Communism, became critics of varying effectiveness of the new conservativism in the American government, as did the isolationists who continued to pursue consistently the traditional program of American liberalism.

In his very valuable chapter, “The Alliance of Conservatives and Ex-Radicals,” Lens provides an incisive analysis of the fundamental importance in the development of the Anti-Communist Crusade of the former communists and socialists. The disintegration of the liberal position in America was paralleled by the “concomitant emergence of a segment of ex-radicals as savants of Anti-Communism.”

Perhaps the most interesting development in the United States since World War II, in terms of power alignment, has been the simultaneous decline of the Left and the conversion of some of its adherents into an Anti-Communist phalanx. . . many ex-radicals, whose impact was negligible when they were associated with the Left, have gained a new and impressive status by becoming the most fervid proponents of Anti-Communism... Old friends of the Soviet Union with socialist, communist, Trotskyist, or liberal backgrounds, such as Max Eastman, J. B. Matthews, Eugene Lyons, James Burnham, Sidney Hook, and Jay Lovestone, became the intellectual leavening for Anti-Communism and, in some cases, for ultra-right organizations. Many of these men reflected the factional struggles within the Soviet Union, between Stalin and Trotsky, for the most part, but also between Stalin and Bukharin. . . But in recoiling from such transgressions, many American leftists went far in the opposite direction, centering their new dogma in the primacy of communism as the enemy of mankind, and joining with certain rightists, on occasion, whom they would have eschewed in the past. The establishment, instead of finding resistance to its negative, Anti-Communist policy, was thus reinforced. Where in the first postwar period the establishment’s hysteria was counteracted by liberals and radicals, in the second postwar period it was aided and abetted by many radical defectors. The ex-radical, like the civilian militarist, found a new and exciting place in the sun. The phenomenon was so widespread it prompted the witticism from Ignazio Silone that the next war would be fought between communists and ex-communists.[33]

Like the socialists who moved comfortably into the establishment’s new conservatism, “the nucleus of the ADA was a group of dissident former socialists.”[34] Led by ex-socialists such as Walter Reuther and James Loeb, the Americans for Democratic Action sought to maintain their channels to government power through participation in the Anti-Communist Crusade. Ekirch sketched the dangers of that policy:

What many anti-communist liberals overlooked, in the zeal of their often new-found faith, was that a society could create a class of political untouchables only at the peril of being itself affected by the very virus it sought to isolate. The danger in the anti-radical and anti-communist crusade after World War II did not stem primarily from the irresponsible tactics of the various Congressional investigating committees or individuals like Senator Joseph McCarthy, reprehensible though their methods were. “McCarthyism,” after all, was a result or a symptom, not a cause. The danger rather lay in the assumption that there was a minority class or group of political lepers guilty of so-called wrong thinking. The contention, popular with some liberals, that communism was not heresy but conspiracy, even if true, overlooked the fact that all heresy which went beyond mere academic protest contained the seeds of possible conspiracy and subversion.[35]

In contrast to the socialist-oriented ADA, those New Dealers who had come from a liberal or reform tradition - businessmen and leaders of farmer, labor and civil rights groups - naturally took a position more firmly based on the traditional principles of American liberalism. Important segments of the business community at the end of World War II considered American capitalism’s prosperity dependent on peace and American-Soviet friendship; and the major business figures of the Roosevelt cabinet, Harold Ickes, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and Henry Wallace led in the founding of the Progressive Citizens of America. The PCA sought to act on the principles of American capitalism and to cooperate with the Soviet Union to achieve world peace and prosperity through the liquidation of imperialism and feudalism, and the development of international trade. The ex-radical and anti-communist crusader, Eugene Lyons, recognized the socialist basis of anti-communism and the capitalist basis of Soviet-American cooperation when he noted that “organized labor, being more consciously anti-Communist than some capitalists, has gone sour on Wallace.”[36]However, the enthusiasm of these New Deal businessmen carried them dangerously close to condoning American imperialism through its vanguard, the government’s foreign aid program. Williams directs attention to this flaw in his examination of the opposition to Henry Wallace’s desire to expand his role as secretary of commerce to gaining direct government subsidies for American corporations:

Wallace’s version of the expansionist outlook won him sharp criticism from Senator Robert A. Taft. Along with his repeated warnings that American policy might well provoke the Soviets into even more militant retaliation, and perhaps even war, Taft’s attack on Wallace serves to illustrate the misleading nature of the popular stereotype of the Senator. Taft immediately spotted the contradiction between the rhetoric of the New Deal and the reality of its policies. “Dollar diplomacy is decried,” he commented very pointedly in 1945, “although it is exactly the policy of Government aid to our exporters which Mr. Wallace himself advocates to develop foreign trade, except that it did not (in its earlier forms) involve our lending abroad the money to pay for all our exports.”

Yet despite the perceptiveness of his analysis, Taft stood virtually alone.[37] As indicated by Williams, if the stereotypes of American politics are discarded for the reality, Senator Taft and the isolationists remained the most consistently committed to the traditional principles of American liberalism. This is seen in their opposition to American imperialism and to American support of imperialist regimes abroad through foreign aid, as well as to the American provocations to the Soviet Union which created the Cold War and could cause World War III. Taft strongly opposed the almost four billion dollar loan to Great Britain which permitted the maintenance of its colonial system and of its military interventions in support of Greek rightists and of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. In addition, American capabilities for imperialism would have been drastically reduced by Taft’s proposals for ending the draft, limiting executive power, reducing government revenues, and recalling American troops from centers of friction in Asia and Europe. The American occupation armies particularly provided an excuse for continuing the war-time importance of the military in decision-making and for keeping American forces on the threshold of the Soviet Union.

The World War II policy of total war had given the military unprecedented power. The American conduct of the war repeated the World War I policy of total war, unconditional surrender and application of the concept of “guilty” nations. This policy, including the indiscriminate strategic bombing of civilian populations culminating in the first and only use of atomic weapons in warfare, could not but alienate those who consistently maintained the values of American liberalism. But after the killing ended, more basic military developments continued into the post-war era, especially their new-found role in decision-making and in holding key ambassadorial posts. Along with Lens, Ekirch has emphasized that the very continuation after the war of the military role in decision-making markedly altered American policy:

Such vast military expenditures naturally gave the armed forces increasing influence within the government, and top military men moved into key positions in federal agencies. Admiral William D. Leahy stayed on at the White House as President Truman’s personal military adviser or private chief of staff. General Marshall replaced James Byrnes as Secretary of State, and the department itself came more and more under military control. Abroad in overseas posts, General Walter B. Smith, United States Ambassador to Russia, General Lucius Clay, High Commissioner of the American occupied zone in Germany, and General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commissioner for Japan, gave a militarist cast to our postwar policy. At home, unification of the armed forces in a single department and establishment of the National Security Council enabled the Secretary of National Defense to work with the State Department in determining foreign policy.

The practical results of the new integration of American foreign and military policy was the continued acceptance of the doctrine of peace through strength. The first step in this direction had been the wartime Allied insistence on the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers and the military occupation of their territory. . . . Military control of American foreign policy, as a wide variety of critical observers pointed out, involved not only a sharp break with the American past but also posed a strong threat to peace and democracy. The military’s lifelong identification with the use of force and contempt for the workings of diplomacy was viewed in the long run as likely to lead the United States into war. Even if such a contingency were avoided, there was the danger that the almost exclusive reliance on armed power in the conduct of American foreign relations would go far to stifle the workings of democracy at home.[38]

AS indicated by Ekirch, the total war policy led directly to the post-war policy of occupation by large forces of American troops as the first step to postwar military participation in decision-making. Not only did military government involve a confusion of military and political roles inconsistent with American traditions, but American military leaders gained important influence since American occupation forces were located at the very edge of the Soviet Union’s security zones. To insure proper coordination between the military and civilian authorities, tate epartment officials came to be trained by the National War College. And American foreign policy was partially determined by the Secretary of Defense in the National Security Council advised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as a special national security staff and central intelligence agency which were beyond the regular diplomacy of the State Department.[39]

The role of the military was further aggrandized by the uncritical admiration for military leaders of the first post-war presidential incumbent. Ekirch notes:

Even before relations with Russia descended to the point of an avowed cold war, the armed forces began to exert their influence upon American foreign policy. Somewhat paradoxically, this influence became greater in peace than it had been in war, when President Roosevelt and his civilian advisers had exercised a large measure of control over military strategy as well as over general foreign and domestic policy. In contrast to his predecessor, President Truman seemed peculiarly susceptible to military influence and advice. “No President since Grant,” as Sumner Welles later wrote with some malice, “has had such childlike faith in the omniscience of the high brass as the present occupant of the White House.” “The truth is,” Oswald Garrison Villard wrote to Charles Beard, “we have a highly militaristic, lower middle class, back-slapping American legionnaire in the White House who has given free rein to the Militarists, and we are being made over under our own eyes into a tremendous military imperialistic Power—exactly what we went to war with Germany to prevent their becoming!”[40]

This was borne out on March 5, 1946 when, at the instigation and in the applauding presence of President Truman, Winston Churchill proclaimed America’s world primacy on the basis of its overwhelming military power. Through a theory of racial superiority by which the English-speaking nations were destined to determine the fate of the world’s peoples, Churchill called for the maintenance of the special alliance among the English-speaking states founded on America’s military dominance. This alliance would intervene to prevent conflict and insure the existence of regimes conforming to the rules issuing from the master English-speaking race. Except in English-speaking countries benefiting from this status quo, opposition parties and revolutionary movements had arisen against privilege, feudalism and imperialism (as President Roosevelt had foreseen). In the absence of Roosevelt’s intended liquidation of imperialism under the leadership of the United States with the cooperation of the Soviet Union, the resistance to national liberation by English military intervention supported by American aid, caused these opposition and revolutionary movements to seek the diplomatic guidance and material aid of the Soviet Union (as President Roosevelt had also foreseen). According to Churchill, timely action would defeat the challenge to Christian civilization by the revolutionary movements under absolute obedience to the orders of international Communism, and the Soviet Union in turn would be forced to accept a world system dominated by Anglo-American strength. Since America’s interests in Asia insured its continued attention to China, Churchill emphasized Europe and the Middle East. The English-speaking alliance had to maintain its control of Greece, Turkey and Iran, which dominated the invasion routes to southern Russia and the approaches to the Anglo-American oil concessions in the Middle East. The popularly supported communist parties of Western Europe had to be checked.

However, it was events in Central and Eastern Europe that most aggravated Churchill, and he sought to have the United States reverse the policy of President Roosevelt of recognizing Russia’s security needs in Eastern Europe through the formation of friendly governments in that area. His suggestion that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent” over the security zone granted to the Soviet Union under the Three Power accords, echoed almost to a year Joseph Goebbels’ similar outburst at the temporary failure of the German generals to gain American support of German power aimed at the Soviet Union. On February 23,1945 Goebbels had lashed out at the Allied unity established at Yalta:

the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin would allow the Soviets to occupy all Eastern and Southeastern Europe, together with the major part of the Reich. An iron curtain would at once descend on this territory which, including the Soviet Union, would be of tremendous dimensions. Behind this curtain there would then begin a mass slaughter of peoples, probably with acclamation from the Jewish press in London and New York.[41]

Churchill had only begrudgingly accepted the World War II alliance with the Soviet Union; he had reminded Russia that he considered her an evil equal to the German threat which had to be destroyed, and that he had been a leader in the intervention in Russia and the creation of the “cordon sanitaire” states in Eastern Europe. Churchill knew that his harsh words were supported by more than America’s general military superiority. The American forces of occupation in Germany were located on the very edge of the security zone granted to the Soviet Union and in the very midst of the European cockpit from which the two world wars had been spawned. American military commanders had direct charge of the most significant diplomatic negotiations affecting the vital security of the Soviet Union, and their crucial changes in American policies in Germany immediately following Truman’s applause of Churchill’s speech, were major steps in the development of the Cold War. Williams has described this development:

... on May 3, 1946, the United States abruptly and unilaterally announced that it was terminating reparations to Russia from the Western zones of occupied Germany. These reparations, never large, had been arranged as part of interzone economic rehabilitation after the Potsdam Conference.

This decision, apparently taken on his own responsibility by General Lucius Clay, the Military Governor of the American zone, very probably had a crucial effect on the deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. ... By cutting off reparations so soon thereafter (Churchill’s speech) from the western, industrial zones of Germany, Clay in effect put real and positive, as well as verbal and negative, pressure on the Russians.[42]

Already General Clay had assumed the lead in the creation of a huge radio station in Germany to broadcast American propaganda to Russia and Eastern Europe, when the State Department decided to launch the Voice of America as the continuation of Elmer Davis’ OWI and Nelson Rockefeller’s OIAA. When the Russians criticized Clay’s German policies, Clay encouraged Secretary of State Byrnes to make a major policy declaration in support of his actions in Germany. Clay provided an impressive setting for Byrnes’ Stuttgart speech delivered before the American occupation forces in Germany on September 6, 1946. Byrnes’ proposals added up to an American attempt to use Germany for American military purposes while excluding Russian influence. He rejected controls to prevent German remilitarization based on the Ruhr industries, and declared that American forces would “remain in Germany for along period” after the end of the occupation. Byrnes received immediate personal congratulations for his Stuttgart ultimata from Winston Churchill.[43]

Within a week, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace made a general criticism of American foreign policy, including the German policy of Byrnes and Clay and the growing American support of the British military intervention in the Greek civil war. And the debate on foreign policy quickly became nation-wide when President Truman forced Wallace to resign. Professor Clyde Eagleton suggested that the United States should act properly before complaining about Russia, and that the American government should learn not to seek foreign scapegoats to blame for world problems, especially when the United States had contributed to the development of those problems. He noted that the United States was creating a global sphere of influence extending to Europe and Africa and the Far East. By MacArthur’s monopolization of Allied control in Japan and American intervention in the Chinese civil war, and by the demand that American influence in Europe be increased by joint Allied controls, the United States was creating the conditions for a response from Russia in the form of greater security along its borders in Eastern Europe and Manchuria. Of the major post-war interventions-England in Greece and Indonesia, the United States in China, and Russia in north-western Iran only the Russians in Iran had withdrawn, and in response the Americans might be forced out of their influence in China.[44] In his article, “Isolationism and the Middle West”, Professor William Carleton predicted that the traditional supporters of an American alliance with England would support American imperialism—the natural ally, partner and heir of the objectives and concessions of English imperialism, as for example in the Middle East oil cartel. In contrast, the Americans who were committed to the traditional liberal principles of anti-imperialism and isolationism would continue to oppose the American alliance with England; in this way they would aid rather than combat the inevitable movements of national liberation whose struggles to end imperialist exploitation by allied American and English interests would otherwise turn America away from cooperation with the Soviet Union and toward a possible World War III. Thus, the choice for American foreign policy was whether or not America would accept Churchill’s policy and become for the rest of the world the “citadel of reaction,” supporting through American military and foreign aid the exploitation of the world’s peoples by the feudal landlords, monopolists and war lords.[45]

On October 5, 1946, a month before the important post-war Congressional elections, Senator Taft delivered a widely- publicized speech at the Kenyon College symposium on English-speaking peoples. Under the title “Equal Justice under Law”, Taft offered a strong attack upon the premisses that had formed the basis for Churchill’s declaration of the Cold War and his proclamation of world rule. Taft questioned whether the English-speaking peoples had in fact maintained the traditional principles of liberty and justice, an assumption on which was based the Truman Administration’s adoption of Churchill’s policies. Instead, in domestic and foreign affairs the American government had greatly restricted or denied fundamental civil liberties, and a new philosophy of increased government power had been substituted for traditional liberty and justice:

Of course the new philosophy has been promoted by two world wars, for war is a denial both of liberty and of justice.[46]

An immediate example of the denial of international justice was the ex post facto war trials in Germany and Japan, which had been anticipated by General MacArthur’s summary trial and execution of General Yamashita in which the United States Supreme Court had refused to intervene.[47] But the Truman foreign policy had generally abandoned international law and substituted naked power politics as a so-called world policeman; here it followed in the footsteps of English imperalism, which had also claimed to be the world policeman. Taft noted that the Truman policy had lost sight of the basic truth that the policeman is incidental to the law, and that without adherence to domestic or to international law a domestic or so-called world policeman is a tyrant and creator of disorder or anarchy.

This whole policy is no accident. For years we have been accepting at home the theory that the people are too dumb to understand and that a benevolent Executive must be given power to describe policy and administer policy ... Such a policy in the world, as at home, can only lead to tyranny or to anarchy.[48]

Thus, an Administration which denied the capacity of Americans for self-government would certainly deny the capacity for self-government of other peoples in the world and would intervene to support the paternalism of feudal landlords, monopolists, bureaucrats and war lords. Taft emphasized that the existing problems and American reactions were the direct results of the American intervention in World War II. The American opposition to neutralism during the war had created the attitude that no country could be neutral in the Cold War. The barbarism during the war and the year after its end had caused the grave crisis in American attitudes which had launched the Cold War:

Our whole attitude in the world, for a year after V-E Day, including the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seems to me a departure from the principle of fair and equal treatment which has made America respected throughout the world before the second World War.[49]

Taft concluded with the hope that the English-speaking peoples would recover from the post-war disillusionment caused by the barbarity of World War II and would replace the Churchill-Truman foreign policy of force and imperialist world policeman with a restoration of justice and liberty.

Although the Republicans won the 1946 Congressional elections, the well-known division in that party between the internationalists and the isolationists permitted the Truman Administration to gain the support of the internationalist Republicans for a bipartisan foreign policy and to frustrate attempts to restrict American imperialism. With the power and publicity facilities of the Executive Department, President Truman was able to seize the initiative by declaration of the Truman Doctrine of aid to the Greek and Turkish governments, on March 12, 1947. In place of English imperialism’s collapsing effort to impose an oppressive rightist government and suppress the movement for Greek national liberation, American money, arms, planes and military “advisers” would be rushed to Greece. Lens notes the varied reactions in America to Truman’s challenge to national liberation movements by dividing the world into two camps:

The decisive moment for the pragmatic liberal came in 1947 when Harry Truman promulgated the Truman Doctrine. The Cold War was now formalized. The Progressive Citizens of America immediately denounced the plan as an “invitation to war,” replacing the “American policy based on one world” for one which “divides the world into two camps.” The Nation decried the Doctrine as “a plain declaration of political war against Russia,” and the New Republic said “the U. S. is now ready to excuse unholy alliances of its own by adopting the apology that the end might justify the means.” But the ADA ... endorsed the Doctrine. ... On this, the decisive issue of our time, the gap between the ADA and the conservatives narrowed to derivative and peripheral issues, such as the extent of economic aid.[50]

Against this bipartisan unity of the ADA and the conservatives, the isolationists alone offered an effective challenge in Congress; they opposed American military assistance to support the Truman Doctrine because they viewed it as the formal launching of a war against the Soviet Union. Senator Taft denounced Truman’s intention “to make a loan to set up armies in Greece and Turkey against Russia,”[51] and Truman’s “policy of dividing the world into zones of political influence, Communist and non-Communist.”[52]The isolationists feared that Truman’s program would create a cartellized, monopolistic American economy based on government contracts which, whether or not a Cold War remained, would create an undemocratic domestic atmosphere. Representative George Bender, leading Taft spokesman in the House and later his successor in the Senate, maintained a consistent critique of Truman’s launching of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. In an attack on the corrupt Greek government and the fradulent elections which had kept it in power, Bender declared, on March 28, 1947:

I believe that the White House program is a reaffirmation of the nineteenth century belief in power politics. It is a refinement of the policy first adopted after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 designed to encircle Russia and establish a “Cordon Sanitaire” around the Soviet Union. It is a program which points to a new policy of interventionism in Europe as a corollary to our Monroe Doctrine in South America. Let there be no mistake about the far-reaching implications of this plan. Once we have taken the historic step of sending financial aid, military experts and loans to Greece and Turkey, we shall be irrevocably committed to a course of action from which it will be impossible to withdraw. More and larger demands will follow. Greater needs will arise throughout the many areas of friction in the world.[53]

Bender was among the few Congressional defenders of Henry Wallace when the latter was widely attacked for his proposals, made in England and France, that Europe oppose the Truman Doctrine’s division of the world into two camps and instead act as a balance between them. Wallace’s speeches in Europe led to a bipartisan demand for the revocation of his passport; and in answer to such attacks as Representative Kenneth Keating’s accusation of treason against Wallace, Bender lashed out at the open season on Wallace. Bender replied to Churchill’s attack on Wallace for speaking abroad, that if Churchill could seek to launch the Cold War by speeches in America, Wallace could seek to prevent that war by speeches in Europe.[54]

What appears to be an impossible unity of ‘left’ and ‘right’, a unity contrary to the whole system of stereotypes created for America’s recent history, was well and fearfully understood by the Truman Administration. For the Administration knew that the success of its bipartisan foreign policy depended on division among the groups opposed to American imperialism. Joseph M. Jones, who played an important role in the development of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, has revealed such understanding:

Most of the outright opposition came from the extreme Left and the extreme Right of the political spectrum: from a certain school of “liberals” who had long been strongly critical of the administration’s stiffening policy toward the Soviet Union, and from the “isolationists” who had been consistent opponents of all foreign-policy measures that projected the United States actively into World affairs. Thus Henry A. Wallace, Fiorello La Guardia, Senators Claude Pepper and Glen H. Taylor found themselves in the same bed with Colonel Robert Mccormick, John O’Donnell, Representatives Harold Knutson and Everett M. Dirksen; and the Marshall Field papers (P. M. and the Chicago Sun), the Chicago Daily News, the Nation, the New Republic and the Christian Century found themselves in the same corner with the McCormick-Patterson press. The opposition of the Left emphasized that American aid to the existing Greek and Turkish governments would not promote freedom but would protect anti-democratic and reactionary regimes; and that the proposed action by-passed the United Nations and endangered its future. The opposition of the Right emphasized that the President’s policy would probably, if not inevitably, lead to war; and that the American economy could not stand the strains of trying to stop Communism with dollars. But both Right and Left used the full range of arguments in a bitter attack. “Power politics,” “militarism,” “intervention,” were charged against the administration. “You can’t fight Communism with dollars,” “the new policy means the end of One World,” “the Moscow Conference will be undermined,” “We should not bail out the British Empire” —these were among the arguments used.[55]

The military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey engendered the strongest partisanship of any foreign policy bill before the Congress in that session. While receiving almost unanimous Democratic support, it met the strongest opposition from a deeply divided Republican party. The only comparably strong isolationist action in the Eightieth Congress was the even larger Republican vote against the bipartisan reimposition of Selective Service in 1948; this vote came after the Republicans had honored their campaign commitment to end the draft by letting it expire despite Truman’s militaristic appeals for renewal.

An over-all criticism of the bipartisan foreign policy was presented by Rep. Bender, on June 6, 1947, during the debate on Representative Karl Mundt’s attempt to give a cover of legality to the Voice of America program which the State Department had been operating. Bender said:

The Voice of America broadcasts are just one piece of the Truman Doctrine.

The pieces are beginning to fall into place, and the pattern is becoming clear. It is not a pretty pattern; it is not a pattern which the people of the United States can look on with confidence or with a sense of hope for the future. . . . But we have learned to look behind the titles or labels of measures prepared by the Truman administration.

The Greek-Turkey-aid bill was presented to this Congress as a humanitarian measure, designed to relieve hunger and suffering. The Truman administration attempted to conceal and disguise its true character, which was admitted only after the measure was subjected to searching examination on the floor of the House. Then it was admitted that all of the so-called aid to Turkey was to be military aid, and most of the aid to Greece was to be military aid. The humanitarian purpose turned out to be hypocrisy. No, we must look behind the high-sounding title in the present bill about the interchange of knowledge and seek out the true character of this measure. Its true character is not difficult to discover. The Voice of America program is nothing more or less than the- propaganda arm of the Truman Doctrine. It is just one more piece in the pattern of the Truman adventure in international relations.

What are some of the other pieces in the Truman program which have become apparent in the past few days?

On May 26, Mr. Truman urged the Congress to authorize a program of military collaboration with all the petty and not so petty dictators of South America. Mr. Truman submitted a draft bill which would authorize the United States to take over the arming of South America on a scale far beyond that involved in the $400,000,000 hand-out to Greece and Turkey.

Mr. Truman continued his campaign for universal peacetime military training in the United States . . . .

But military control at home is a part of the emerging Truman program. The Truman administration is using all its propaganda resources in an attempt to soften up the American people to accept this idea.

Yes; the Truman administration is busy in its attempt to sell the idea of military control to the people of America. And hand in hand with the propaganda campaign go secret meetings for industrial mobilization.

This is the kind of thing which is taking place behind barred doors in the Pentagon Building, about which the people of the United States learn only by accident. This is a part of the emerging Truman program.

It is against this backgound that the Voice of America program must be considered. This vast foreign propaganda machine prepared by the administration is a part of this program. It is a part just as Mr. Truman’s friendship with the dictator Per on of South America is a part. It is a part just as Mr. Truman’s eagerness for universal military training in the United States is a part. It is a part just as Mr. Truman’s proposal for arming every South American country to the teeth is a part. It is a part of the whole Truman doctrine of drawing off the resources of the United States in support of every reactionary government in the world.

I am opposed to the Voice of America just as I am opposed to every part of the dangerous and irresponsible Truman doctrine.[56]

Against Rep. Bender and in favor of Rep. Mundt’s Voice of America bill, Representative Walter Judd declared that it was absolutely necessary to combat the belief of the Chinese people that there were still one hundred thousand American troops aiding Chiang’s armies; instead, there were now .only about ten thousand American troops in China. Another common belief held that Chiang’s ‘China Lobby’ in Washington had granted privileges and concessions to Americans who had helped Chiang get American foreign aid; also, that the Sino-American commercial treaty of November, 1946, had opened China to American economic exploitation. From Judd’s wide contacts inside the Chiang regime, he suggested that the Chinese people had been asking such embarrassing questions as:

Is it true that American troops in China number 100,000?. . . .

Is it true that the new Sino-American commercial treaty makes China a vassal of America?[57]

But Rep. Bender and the isolationists in Congress were not unprepared; they had already experienced the strength of the China Lobby in gaining the American loans, American foreign aid, and American economic snactions against Japan which had led to American intervention in World War II. Rep. Bender, in an attack on Truman’s support of the fascist Greek dictatorship, indicated that this aid would become a precedent for the support of other fascist dictatorships, especially the reactionary Chiang regime. Already, the powerful China Lobby in Washington was seeking to get the Administration to struggle against the Congressional isolationists who had slashed foreign aid to Chiang. On May 7, 1947 Rep. Bender warned the Congress of the China Lobby’s “intense pressure placed upon our State Department:”

I charge here on the floor of the House that the Chinese Embassy here has had the arrogance to invade our State Department and attempt to tell our State Department that the Truman Doctrine has committed our Government and this Congress to all-out support of the present Fascist Chinese Government.[58]

Early in 1947, the internationalist Republicans, led by Senator Arthur Vandenburg and State Department Adviser John Foster Dulles, initiated a campaign for heavy American aid to the Nationalist Chinese and against the isolationist Republicans who had opposed aid to Chiang. At that time, American troops in China were being reduced to 12,000 men while an United States Military Advisory Group sought to develop a modern Nationalist army. But, at the end of the war in September, 1945, as an addition to the sixty thousand American troops already in China another fifty-three thousand American marines were sent into North China where the Chinese Communists had wrested control of the countryside from the Japanese. The United States air-lifted and shipped a half million Nationalist troops to North China and Manchuria, where the Russians turned over the cities they had occupied to the Nationalist forces. The Chinese Communists protested the involvement of over one hundred thousand American troops in the internal affairs of China, but withdrew before the American marines and the American-equipped Nationalist armies. It was not until one year later that the American marines began to be withdrawn from North China, and they turned over thousands of tons of their equipment to the Nationalist armies. The arms, however, were eventually lost to the Communists, who were generally equipped with American arms.[59] America’s crucial role against the Chinese Communists in the civil war was described at the time by two American reporters, Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby:

Americans must realize now one of the hard facts of Chinese politics-that in the eyes of millions of the Chinese their civil war was made in America. We were the architects of its strategy; we flew government troops into Communist territory, we transported and supplied Kuomintang armies marching into the Communists’ Yellow River basin and into the no man’s land of Manchuria, we issued the orders to the Japanese garrisons that made the railway lines of the north the spoils of civil war. Our marines were moved into North China and remained there to support Chinag’s regime - though fiction succeeded fiction to explain their continued presence in noble words. . . When the Japanese began to leave and that fiction exploded, they remained to counter the Russian troops in Manchuria. When the Russians evacuated Manchuria and that fiction too exploded, it was announced that the marines were remaining indefinitely merely to “guard” supply lines from coal mines to the coast. These fictions hold only for the American people themselves; in China it is clear to all that the chief duty of our marines there is to preserve, protect, and defend Chiang K’ai-shek’s government in the northern areas where he is under attack. Both parties in China realize this. . . The Communists, too, realize it; all North China and Manchuria might have been theirs long since had it not been for American intervention, and their bitterness has grown with each passing month.[60]

When General George Marshall proposed the Marshall Plan in 1947 as an economic lever upon Western European governments to create the basis for a military system directed against the Soviet Union, Senator Taft undertook a campaign to defeat it.

Taft said that he was “absolutely opposed” to extending $2,657 million in additional foreign aid. . . In his view, granting aid to Europe would only furnish the Communists with further arguments against the “imperialist” policy of the United States.[61]

Taft declared on September 25, 1947:

I have not believed that Russia intends or desires conquest by force of arms of additional territory.[62]

Although the internationalist Republicans supported the bipartisan foreign policy and foreign aid, under the leadership of Senator Vandenburg and Governor Thomas E. Dewey they conditioned their support for the Marshall Plan upon the Administration’s inclusion of aid to Chiang. Faced by a choice between the isolationists and the China Lobby, Truman did not hesitate to support the China Lobby and to commit his Administration to the support of the Chiang regime:

For the greatest danger confronting the global policy of the administration, of which the Marshall Plan was the key, came not so much from the China bloc in Congress, of which Judd and Vorys in the House and Bridges in the Senate were the leading figures, as from the combined forces of the economy bloc and the unreconstructed isolationists, of which Representative John Taber in the House and Taft in the Senate were the spokesmen. Subsequent events show that by making limited concessions to the China bloc, the administration succeeded in averting serious opposition from that quarter to its European program.[63]

Nevertheless, the isolationists maintained their criticism of the Marshall Plan, and were not deterred by the claim that without foreign aid European peoples might elect governments that included Communists. Taft answered that this would only be proof that capitalism, well-developed in America, had hardly received application elsewhere and that America’s granting of funds to the privilege-ridden, cartel-minded European bureaucrats and businessmen would not reduce Communist votes in Italy and France. For the non-capitalist mentality of such governments would prevent the peoples from receiving the benefit of foreign aid. In place of Truman’s threat to use military aggression as it did in Greece to battle Communist opposition, Taft opposed the use of military intervention; he would limit American action to ending American aid when Communists had assumed power. Taft insisted that America’s conflict with the Soviet Union was purely one of ideas and ideology for the minds of men, and not a physical battle as Truman claimed. Characteristic was Taft’s response to the settlement by the leftist majority in the Czechoslovak government of the crisis caused by the resignation of the rightist minority.

Taft held that this was “just a consolidation of the Russian sphere of influence,” and that he “had no knowledge of any Russian intention for initiating aggression.”[64] As Williams indicates, unlike the internationalist Republicans, Senator Taft opposed the attempts of the Truman Administration to proclaim a Russian menace and create a crisis atmosphere whenever it wished to rally support for foreign intervention against the isolationist opposition. When Truman attempted to use domestic political developments in Czechoslovakia to gain passage of the Marshall Plan, Taft declared, on March 12, 1948:

I do not quite understand the statements made yesterday by Secretary Marshall and President Truman. They do not imply that they believe that we do face a war question; and then they seem to use the concern which is aroused to urge the passage of this particular program. I do not believe that the two are connected. . . .

I believe that the tone of the President’s statement that his confidence in ultimate world peace has been shaken is unfortunate. Certainly it is no argument for the passage of the present bill. . . . But let me say that I myself know of no particular indication of Russian intentions to undertake military aggression beyond the sphere of influence which was originally assigned to the Russians. The situation in Czechoslovakia is indeed a tragic one; but the Russian influence has been predominant in Czechoslovakia since the end of the war. The Communists are merely consolidating their position in Czechoslovakia; but there has been no military aggression, since the end of the war.[65]

Charles A. Beard found that the good objectives by which “the advocates of war in the name of perpetual and durable peace” had justified American intervention in World War II remained unfulfilled. The development of a siege or fortress mentality in America, a permanent draft, high arms budgets, high taxes and a huge national debt—all of which the defeat of German dominance in Europe was supposed to prevent—were installed and institutionalized by the war.

Furthermore, it was now claimed by former advocates of war that huge armed forces were necessary in “peacetime” to “secure the fruits of victory” and “win the peace” by extirpating the spirit of tyranny in Germany and Japan, and by restraining the expansion of Russian imperial power. . . .

In 1947, under President Truman’s direction, the Government of the United States set out on an unlimited program of underwriting by money and military “advice,” poverty-striken, feeble, and instable governments (around the Soviet Union). .. Of necessity, if this program was to be more than a brutum fulmen, it had to be predicated upon present and ultimate support by the blood and treasure of the United States... In short, with the Government of the United States committed under a so-called bipartisan foreign policy to supporting by money and other forms of power for an indefinite time an indefinite number of other governments around the globe, the domestic affairs of the American people became appendages to an aleatory expedition in the management of the world.[66]

The Truman Administration’s next global intervention in its Anti-Communist Crusade, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was thoroughly criticized by American isolationists on the ground that America’s re-arming of Europe against the Soviet Union, which had not shown aggressive intent, would increase world tension and would require Soviet moves in self-defense leading to a world war. Against the Truman Administration, Senator Taft insisted that the Soviet Union did not use war as an instrument of national policy; however, in self-defense against American interventions like the Truman Doctrine and NATO, the Soviet Union might be forced to use similar means. NATO “was likely to incite Russia to start a war because of the threat involved to its satellite countries and therefore to its own safety.”[67] Sharing the views of such other critics of Truman’s policies as Walter Lippmann, Taft said:

In Europe the building up of a great army surrounding Russia from Norway to Turkey and Iran might produce a fear of the invasion of Russia or some of the satellite countries regarded by Russia as essential to the defense of Moscow.[68]

Taft shared the concern which President Roosevelt had shown to respect the fears of the Soviet Union about security in its vicinity. Although he did not care for the methods used at Yalta, Taft insisted that the United States was required to observe its international obligations under the Yalta agreement rather than compound the trouble by further treaty involvements in Europe. Along with the growing American tendency to disregard international law, such entanglement would lead to further American betrayals of its treaty obligations, this time to its European allies. The American government’s insincere recourse to treaty built upon treaty was repugnant to Taft’s sense of international law and justice. Taft said:

I voted against it (NATO) because I felt it was contrary to the whole theory of the United Nations charter . . . because I felt that it might develop aggressive features more likely to incite Russia to war than to deter it from war. . . (NATO was) a violation of its (UN’s) spirit if not its language. The pact apparently is not made under Articles 52 to 54, inclusive, because we do not propose to consult the Security Council as there contemplated, we do plan to take enforcement action without the authorization of the Security Council, and we do not plan to keep it fully informed. . . An undertaking by the most powerful nation in the world to arm half the world against the other half goes far beyond any “right of collective defense if an armed attack occurs.” It violates the whole spirit of the United Nations Charter. That charter looks to the reduction of armaments by agreement between individual nations. The Atlantic Pact moves in exactly the opposite direction from the purposes of the charter and makes a farce of further efforts to secure international justice through law and justice. It necessarily divides the world into two armed camps. . . . This treaty, therefore, means inevitably an armament race, and armament races in the past have led to war.[69]

In a major debate over NATO between Senators Taft and John Foster Dulles (July 11-12, 1949), Taft insisted that the alliance was a rejection not only of the United Nations Charter and international law, but also of Soviet-American negotiations. It also reflected dominance over American policy of the soldiers and advisers of the Defense establishment rather than the diplomats and experts of the State Department. Taft said, in the debate of July 11, 1949:

I cannot vote for a treaty which, in my opinion, will do far more to bring about a third world war than it ever will to maintain the peace of the world.[70]

Taft’s speeches received the following welcome in the Daily Worker, July 13, 1949:

Senator Robert Taft’s announced opposition to the Atlantic Pact is a political fact of real significance.[71]

Such support along with such statements by Taft as:

No Russian military attack is threatened in Western Europe. (The Russians) have not moved beyond the borders agreed to at Yalta (July, 1949),[72]

or,

Does the Russian possession of the atomic bomb make a third world war likely? On the whole I do not think so. I certainly do not pretend to understand the Russian mind, but for four years they have shown no intention of making a military advance beyond the zones of influence in Central Europe and Manchuria allotted to them at Yalta (October, 1949),[73]

led to Democratic charges during his re-election campaign in 1950 which renewed the question of Taft’s loyalty that had been raised because of his opposition to intervention in World War II. Taft’s loyalty was attacked because of his opposition to the Cold War against Russia, his refusal to consider the Soviet Union an enemy or a danger to the American people, and his insistence upon settlement of disputes with Russia through ordinary diplomacy rather than military encirclement. Taft was contrasted with Truman, who was praised for his so-called wisdom in torpedoing the Yalta agreement and in supporting the Chiang regime; Taft, on the other hand, was criticized for insisting on American fulfillment of its Yalta obligations and for his lack of support for aid to Chiang against the Chinese Communists.[74]

More than three billion dollars were expended in military aid to Chiang, most of which came quickly into the hands of the Chinese Communists. (General Chu Teh said: “In these operations we have seized much United States equipment. It is very good. We hope to get more of it.”[75]) Yet, the Chiang regime, in December, 1949, fled from China to Formosa which, as a former Japanese possession, was occupied by China until formal settlement by the postponed Japanese peace conference. Preceded by the governments of India, Burma and Pakistan, Britain recognized the Chinese People’s Republic on January 5, 1950, followed rapidly by the Scandinavian countries and some Asian governments (the Soviet bloc countries had done so during October, 1949). On January 8, the Chinese People’s Republic requested the UN Security Council to accept its seating as the legal and effective government, and this was officially moved on January 10 by the Soviet Union. On January 11, Taft addressed himself to the question of America’s relations with China and with Formosa. If the Truman Administration’s commitment to an Anti-Communist Crusade in China was correct, why were huge sums sent to Europe, he asked, where there was never a threat of Russian military activity, but rather the creation of an American threat to Russian security? Taft agreed with the State Department that the United States should not establish American military bases on Formosa,, but disagreed with the policy of supplying American aid to the French army suppressing the Indochinese nationalists. He noted the inconsistency of the State Department’s providing aid to the French in Indochina and the Rhee regime in Korea, but not to Chiang on Formosa, after spending billions of dollars to support him in China. Taft warned that he would not support any Administration commitment to back Chiang in a war against the Chinese government, and he suggested that the Administration consider whether the American government had any special obligation to the people of Formosa, as former subjects of Japan with which no peace treaty had been negotiated, to maintain their free choice of government uninfluenced by the Communist or the Chiang governments. If such an obligation by America existed, Taft asked that the American fleet be placed between Formosa and the mainland, and that Chiang, his mainland bureaucrats, and his army of occupation be removed from Formosa to permit a free vote by the Formosan people on self-determination:

In recent months it has of course been very doubtful whether aid to the Nationalist Government could be effective, and no one desires to waste American efforts. . . . We can determine later whether we ever wish to recognize the Chinese Communists and what the ultimate disposition of Formosa shall be. . . . as I understand it, the people of Formosa if permitted to vote would probably vote to set up an independent republic of Formosa. . . . if, at the peace conference, it is decided that Formosa should be set up as an independent republic, we certainly have the means to force the Nationalists’ surrender of Formosa.[76]

The following day, Secretary of State Acheson answered Taft. He criticized Taft’s rejection of American support for the French in Indochina and his disagreement with the Administration’s direct commitment to maintain the Rhee regime in Korea. Acheson indicated that the American fleet was already in the Formosa Strait, and that he expected the Chinese Communists to espouse a nationalist course by preventing the Russian occupation of Manchuria, Sinkiang and other border regions which he claimed the Russians controlled. He felt that Sino-American relations would be restored on the basis of mutual opposition to the Soviet Union and on China’s need for American economic aid, and, that until then, the United States would refrain from creating military positions on the borders of China. On January 13 the Security Council failed by one vote to seat the Communist delegate in place of Chiang’s delegate, with the United States and France voting against the Communist delegation and Britain abstaining. Immediately, the Soviet delegate announced that he would boycott the Security Council for its failure to seat Communist China and he remained away until a month after the beginning of the Korean war. In response to American and French opposition in the UN, China seized their properties and, on January 18, recognized the Vietnamese nationalists under Ho Chi-minh as the government of Indochina. Within a month, the United States recognized the puppet government established in Indochina by the French and increased aid to the armies fighting Ho Chi-minh.

The Truman Administration assumed a non-committal policy with regard to Communist China. American policy was based on the assumption that China was a passive country on which American policy would be applied by degrees to bring it into line with American objectives through eventual American recognition and American economic aid. This was not necessarily an impossible goal; it was merely impossible in the context of the American role in China, especially after 1945, when American marines held cities and railroads for Chiang, American officers ‘advised’ American-equipped Chiang armies, and American planes and ships transported Chiang’s troops against the Communists. Acheson’s objectives in China could only be gained by America’s seizing the initiative in recognizing China, as Britain had done, in seating China in the UN, and in offering aid without the strings of an anti-Soviet alliance attached. By refusing to seat the Chinese Communists in the UN and by continuing American recognition and aid to Chiang, Acheson only accomplished what his policy was aimed at preventing, namely, Chinese Communist acceptance, in February, 1950, of a Russian alliance. The Chinese, in short, had accepted Truman’s policy of two world camps. China’s fears were confirmed by United States opposition in the UN caused by the Administration’s desire to keep internationalist Republican support for its foreign aid programs; and China responded with activity, instead of passivity, and recognized the government of Ho Chi-minh in Vietnam.[77]

Many internationalist Republicans reacted to this non-committal China policy of Truman by opposing the Administration’s sixty million dollar aid bill for South Korea on the ground that aid to that government was a complete waste and that Korea was beyond America’s defense interest. The one point on which there was truly bipartisan support and a “phenomenal lack of disagreement”[78] between internationalists and isolationists was that American troops must never be used on the continent of Asia, especially within range of the frontiers of China.

The attack on the aid to Korea bill was so intense that Representative Judd, one of the most responsible and level-headed members of the China bloc, found it necessary to plead with his fellow congressmen. . . . Joined by economy-minded and non-interventionist Republicans and Southern Democrats, Vorys and his supporters defeated the bill by a margin of one vote. The Republicans opposed it six to one while only three out of four Democrats supported it. This was the first major setback in Congress for the administration in the field of foreign policy since the end of the war.[79]

Judd acted so that American support of Korea would eventually involve the United States on the Asian mainland to the benefit of Chiang, and he was able to rally the internationalists against the isolationists and restore the Administration’s aid to South Korea.

Upon the outbreak of conflict between North and South Korea, Truman first ordered the American fleet to prevent military action across the Formosa Strait. Then he decreed the use of American naval and air power in Korea, increased aid to the French forces in Indochina, and finally the use of American troops in Korea, thus reversing the Defense Department’s strategic planning as well as MacArthur’s previous position that American troops must not be used on the continent of Asia. To the Chinese Communists, American actions appeared to be a repetition of China’s invasion by Japan of whom the United States had become the heir in East Asia. The permanent American military position in Japan and Okinawa, followed by the extension of American military activity into Korea, Formosa, and Indochina indicated a pattern all too real for the Chinese to take lightly. For it was the Japanese control of Korea and Formosa, and their occupation of Indochina, which had permitted their invasions and bombardments of various parts of China.[80]

Senator Taft criticized the Truman intervention in its totality. He insisted that Korea was not vital to the United States (as had been determined by American military authorities), while intervention could be a threat to the security of the Soviet bloc. And Taft appealed to the Soviet Union not to match Truman’s Korean adventurism. In response to Acheson’s criticism that his January 11th speech was adventurist, Taft said that Truman’s Korean intervention was a more foolish adventure than his own proposal for an independent Formosa without Chiang, which he continued to deem wiser than Truman’s involvement in Korea or Indochina:

It is fairly obvious that it is far easier to defend Formosa without becoming involved in war than it is to defend Korea or Indochina without becoming involved in war.[81]

In his attack on American involvement in the Indochinese war, the Korean war and in the affairs of Chiang, Taft raised basic constitutional questions about the power of the President to involve the American people in war without the prior and specific consent of Congress:

If the President can intervene in Korea without congressional approval, he can go to war in Malaya or Indonesia or Iran or South America.[82]

Truman’s intervention into the Korean conflict exposed the fundamental if often obscured divisions in recent American politics. The liberal opposition to the Truman Doctrine, such as embodied in the Nation and the New Republic, which had matched the traditional isolationists in the strength of its criticisms, had abandoned its rejection for the comfort of the ‘vital center’ and of the rhetoric of Truman’s Fair Deal. Thus, in July, 1950 the New Republic and the Nation, despite occasional warnings about Korea’s becoming a second Spain, welcomed Truman’s intervention in Korea, as did such progressive businessmen as Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes, most especially because Truman’s actions provided the UN with the army and force which the League had lacked. Even Mac-Arthur was criticized for failure to keep the South Korean army modernized and to act without the delay of consultations. In addition, Senator Taft was attacked for his opposition to the Korean Intervention, and the Chicago Tribune and the Daily Worker were singled out for their unity in defeatism.[83]

The senatorial campaign of 1950 is well-known for the violence of the onslaught against Taft, and his emphasis on opposition to Truman’s war in Korea was the basis for predicting his defeat. Taft’s defense of the UN Charter against its abuse for such American policy objectives as the Korean intervention, his refusal to consider the Soviet Union an enemy of the American people, and his insistence that Truman’s policies were increasing tension and threatening war by endangering the security of the Soviet Union, were used by the Truman Administration to question Taft’s political value within the American bipartisan consensus and to imply his softness toward Soviet policy. The New Republic, in its September 4, 1950 analysis of the foreign policy votes of Congressmen, revealed that the Democrats were much more strongly anti-Communist (87%) than the Republicans, whose total was brought down to 62% by their isolationist members. Even this was deceiving, it was noted, since some Republicans exposed their lack of anti-communist commitment by voting for the final bill, like Senator Taft who had a 53% record, while undermining the measures by amendments; a more clear-cut indication of the isolationists failing the anti-Communist test was the 23% mark of the Republican Senate leader, Kenneth Wherry. Such charges, similar to those made against LaFollette for opposing America’s invasion of Siberia, or against Borah and Taft for opposition to America’s aid to Britain against the Soviet-German alliance, contributed to the unfortunate developments in American politics during the final years of Truman’s Administration which resulted from Truman’s adventure in Korea.[84]

The monumental defeat administered by the Chinese to Truman’s policy of Korean unification by means of MacArthur’s and Rhee’s forces, led to a Great Debate on the entire American foreign policy in Asia. For just as Truman’s intervention in Korea had sanctified the previously dubious French campaign in Indochina, so the debacle of his attempt to occupy North Korea provided the vast amount of new American equipment, useless to the Russian-equipped Chinese, that permitted General Vo Nguyen Giap’s Vietnamese forces to launch the final phase of the campaign against the French in 1951. Giap could do so in the confidence that ever-increasing American military assistance in Indochina would supply a never-ending source of ammunition, captured from the French forces, for the weapons captured by the Chinese in Korea.[85] The Truman Administration refused to make peace in Korea on the basis of the 38th parallel and condemned America to years of heavy casualties in challenging China’s national security because negotiations might limit American military positions against China in Japan, Formosa and Indochina. In opposition, Senator Taft, Joseph P. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover insisted that Truman accept the reality, which the defeat of the attempt to unify Korea had exposed, that American military challenges to China in Korea and Indochina were doomed to defeat. Along with the Administration and such internationalist Republicans as Governor Dewey and John Foster Dulles, the Nation and New Republic intimated that the proposal of Hoover and Taft for negotiations and recognition of the security areas of Russia and China were suspiciously close to the Soviet offer to save America from the horrible casualties entailed in continuing the war in Korea. The Nation charged:

The line they are laying down for their country should set the bells ringing in the Kremlin as nothing has since the triumph of Stalingrad. Actually the line taken by Pravda is that the former President did not carry isolationism far enough.[86]

The New Republic had thus summarized the isolationist position following its demonstration of popular support in the Congressional elections:

The Korean War was the creation not of Stalin, but of Truman just as Roosevelt, not Hitler, caused the Second World War.[87]

It now continued the theme by describing the desire of Taft and Hoover to accept Soviet offers of negotiation as an:

opposition who saw nothing alarming in Hitler’s conquest of Europe would clearly grab at the bait. Stalin, after raising the ante, as he did with Hitler, and sweeping over Asia, would move on until the Stalinist caucus in the Tribune tower would bring out in triumph the first Communist edition of the Chicago Tribune.[88]

Whatever were the similarities of judgment of the international realities shown by Moscow and by Senator Taft and his “Stalinist caucus in the Tribune tower”, it was not incorrect for the New Republic to emphasize Taft’s “benign image of the Politburo.”[89]

At the opening of the newly elected Congress, the isolationists, led by Senators Wherry and Taft, launched a strong attack on Truman’s interventionist policies by introducing a resolution forbidding the President’s sending of troops abroad without Congressional approval. They attacked Truman’s refusal to accept a ceasefire or to end the war in Korea and asked where the troops for a bloody stalemate in Korea would come from, as the United States had insufficient troops for a land war on the Asian mainland. Taft also attacked Truman’s assertion of the right to use atomic weapons or to send American troops outside the country without direct approval of Congress. The isolationists “condemned US participation in Korea as unconstitutional and provided that the only funds available for overseas troops shipment should be funds necessary to facilitate the extrication of US forces now in Korea.”[90] In short, the isolationists supplied an answer to the supposedly insoluble riddle of what to do once the President had insinuated American forces into a conflict in the area of Chinese or Russian national security: to have the simple courage to vote no further military funds except the boat fare home from the Asian mainland.

In conjunction with his criticism of Truman’s intervention in Korea as a violation of the American Constitution, Taft protested that in so using the UN for purposes of American imperialism the Charter of the United Nations had been violated as well. For Taft, the essential role of the UN was to provide the means of mediation and conciliation between nations, especially between the United States and the Soviet Union. But the American misuse of the UN had defeated this primary objective and was also illegal. Taft declared:

On June 28, 1950, I questioned the legality of the United Nations’ action, because Article 27 of the charter clearly provides that decisions of the Security Council on all matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of seven members, including the concurring votes of the permanent members. . . . There was no concurring vote by Russia, but we overrode this objection. . . . We have tried to by-pass the limitation on the power of the Security Council by asking for action by the General Assembly when a veto has been exercised in the Council. Under the charter this body has never been intended to have any power to call on government for action or do more than recommend. . . . Those who are blaming the United Nations should much more blame the limitations of the charter and our own Government for forcing United Nations’ action beyond its permanent power to perform.[91]

On the persistent and curious commitment of Taft and the isolationists to legality, whether in supporting the inviolability of the Supreme Court, protesting concentration camps for American citizens or ex post facto war trials, or opposing the violations of the American Constitution and UN Charter by intervention in Korea, the New Republic noted perceptively that:

there has historically been a working affinity between isolationists and legalists—the former attacked Roosevelt’s 1941 destroyer deal as warmongering, the latter as dictatorship. There are signs that this coalition is again tightening.[92]

In his study of Dean Acheson’s foreign policy through 1954, McGeorge Bundy noted that Taft had become the major antagonist of Acheson in a Great Debate: a re-examination of American foreign policy after the failure of the intervention in Asia. Taft’s election victory in 1950 after a campaign of strong opposition to American interventionism, had indicated popular support for limiting the executive’s tendency to insinuate the United States into conflict and then forcing Congressional approval of a fait accompli. Bundy disagreed with Taft’s insistence on limiting foreign crises by eliminating areas of friction, and on refusing to engage in a grand global policy of struggle with Communism. Taft’s preference for negotiations rather than wastage of American blood in military interventions, appeared to Bundy as a failure to assert America’s global leadership against Communism and as a defective attitude of doubt, mistrust and fear toward America’s national purpose in the world.[93] Taft had summarized his attitude toward diplomacy and foreign policy based on military strength as follows:

Nor do I believe we can justify war by our natural desire to bring freedom to others throughout the world. . . . There are a good many Americans who talk about an American century in which America will dominate the world. . . . If we confine our activities to the field of moral leadership we shall be successful if our philosophy is sound and appeals to the people of the world. The trouble with those who advocate this policy is that they really do not confine themselves to moral leadership. They are inspired with the same kind of New Deal planned-control ideas abroad as recent Administrations have desired to enforce at home. In their hearts they want to force on these foreign peoples through the use of American money and even, perhaps, American arms the policies which moral leadership is able to advance only through the sound strength of its principles and the force of its persuasion. I do not think this moral leadership ideal justifies our engaging in any preventive war, or going to the defense of one country against another. . . . I do not believe any policy which has behind it the threat of military force is justified as part of the basic foreign policy of the United States except to defend the liberty of our people.[94]

In two articles in the Reporter, “Appeasement, Provocation, and Policy” (January 9, 1951) and “The Private World of Robert Taft” (December 11, 1951), McGeorge Bundy presented his concept of the future of American foreign relations, a concept of which Senator Taft appeared to be the major foe. Bundy felt that the total war of World War II had failed in its objective of achieving peace but had led rather to a period of Cold War, and he agreed with Taft’s criticism of America’s World War II policies. Taft was necessarily less isolationist than in 1940 because America had become so deeply involved in world affairs by the interventions of the American government that Taft had to seek positive policies of disengagement. But he remained an isolationist nevertheless, and Bundy declared: “I for one have disagreed with him almost constantly on foreign policy.”[95] Taft tended to deny Bundy’s major premise that:

The major fact about our world is that it is in the throes of a great struggle for power between the Kremlin and the field.[96] Taft considered any struggle with the Soviets to be ideological, not military; a struggle for the minds of men, rather than for the control of people and wealth. Since America was strong in wealth and military force and weak in ideas while the Soviets were stronger in ideas and weaker in arms and resources, Taft wanted to reduce American troops and military expenses. For these only weakened America’s long-term wealth and military position while at the same time undercutting whatever strength America had had in ideas. Taft’s constant theme was warning of the grave danger that America would over-extend itself by too much political commitment and too much military intervention, and thereby destroy American liberty in the resulting militarization. Thus, Taft favored the reduction of the army and navy to eliminate temptation for intervention, and a concentration upon an Air Force which would be defensive if American ground forces were not spread about the world to create tension. Taft’s basic aim was to. remove power and the threat of military intervention from international relations and to emphasize ordinary defense, normal diplomacy and American respect for the rules of international law. According to Bundy:

They (Taft and the isolationists) do not arm to deal with power, or even to use power (for Senator Taft is strongly opposed to the notion of preventive war); they arm rather to create a situation in which power is irrelevant and in which the American people can securely proceed to the better realization of the American dream. This is, I think, the basic pattern of thought from which Senator Taft advances to the tough problems of the present world.[97]

For Bundy, however, the statesman’s activity for peace must be discarded during the Cold War and replaced by the unique policymaker who controls diplomacy and military power and applies them in the permanent struggle against Communism in limited wars and limited periods of peace. For him there was no such thing as too much force or too much domination by military factors; but his insistence upon permanent American intervention into the internal affairs of other countries naturally made him fear the American tendency to apply air power to minimize the loss of American life, a loss acceptable to the new policy-maker if not to the American public. While not opposing concessions, negotiations and withdrawals in principle, and accepting them if necessary to end over-commitment and being bogged down in the wrong parts of the world, Bundy considered it appeasement to think that such agreements constituted peace. Thus, while China’s recognition by the United States and the United Nations was indeed a proper basis for peace, Bundy considered such actions “appeasement” if applied to the practical problem of ending the war in Korea. He considered Taft in error for his opposition to the encirclement of the Soviet Union by military alliances, his criticism of the hasty involvement of the United States and the United Nations in Korea, and his willingness to compromise in negotiations with the Chinese Communists to extricate America from the Korean debacle.[98]

Bundy differed with Taft also on the role of public opinion and public debate in foreign policy. Bundy’s concept of the man of policy manipulating diplomatic and military elements in a long-term series of periods of limited peace and limited war was basically an elitist approach which excluded a positive role for public opinion, and thus, for public debate. For the public was not committed to the rigid national purposes established by the policy-maker; it only reacted to the realities of given situations. Bundy insisted that there should be no recriminations or examinations of the decisions of the policy-makers, so that the public may accept their actions without question. It was in opposition to the government’s desire to prevent open debate on an interventionist policy that threatened world war, that Senator Taft launched the Great Debate against which Bundy complained. Taft noted the policymaker’s tendency to insinuate the United States into other countries’ affairs, followed by a conflict in which the President would demand unquestioning support:

After that, if anyone dared to suggest criticism or even a thorough debate, he was at once branded as an isolationist and a saboteur of unity and the bipartisan foreign policy.[99]

Taft insisted that decision-making should be limited to elected officials, the President and the Congress, because they alone were responsible to the American people, and thus responsive to public opinion enlightened by public debate. Taft’s strongly felt commitment to democracy and his belief in the soundness of the well-informed judgment of the American people led him to a basic distrust of policy based on military power or decision-making by military advisers and specialists in the Executive branch. Taft vigorously opposed their insinuation of the United States into commitments and interventions that present the President and Congress with a crisis in which they feel forced to support a military solution. Hence, Bundy was led to call Taft a “Reluctant Dragon” who would not be a President who would wage the permanent Anti-Communist Crusade.[100]

On the eve of the 1952 Presidential elections, Bundy welcomed the nomination of Eisenhower over Taft because Eisenhower’s career indicated a strong commitment, lacking in Taft, to oppose the Soviet Union.[101] Eisenhower was also preferred for being dedicated to the principle that the United States must never undertake military action alone, without the cooperation and approval of its major allies. Taft’s reasonable Asian policy, which ruled out hostilities with Communist China, had insured the lack of support for Taft’s nomination by the China Lobby, especially in the south-western group including Senators Nixon and Knowland of California and Senatorial candidates Goldwater of Arizona and Hurley of New Mexico, all of whom voted against Taft’s candidacy. In the elections, the American people rejected the party that had intervened in Korea, and elected Eisenhower on the basis of his promise—soon to be fulfilled—to end the war in Korea.

In the final statement of foreign policy made before his death, Taft presented, on May 26, 1953, the same criticism which he had directed at Truman, this time aimed at the policies being launched by Secretary of State Dulles: Extending the system of military alliances and aid around the world, especially in Southeast Asia. Not only were these activities “the complete antithesis of the UN Charter itself”, and a threat to Russian and Chinese security, but they would be valueless for the defense of the United States.

Taft’s last speech was particularly concerned with Dulles’ Southeast Asia policy because the United States was increasing to seventy per cent of the costs its support of the French puppet regime against the forces of Ho Chi-minh. Taft feared that Dulles’ policy would lead, upon the eventual defeat of French imperialism, to its replacement in Vietnam by American imperialism and—the worst of all possibilities to Taft—the sending of American forces to Vietnam to fight the guerrillas.

I have never felt that we should send American soldiers to the Continent of Asia, which, of course, included China proper and Indo-China, simply because we are so outnumbered in fighting a land war on the Continent of Asia that it would bring about complete exhaustion even if we were able to win. . . . So today, as since 1947 in Europe and 1950 in Asia, we are really trying to arm the world against Communist Russia, or at least furnish all the assistance which can be of use to them in opposing Communism. Is this policy of uniting the free world against Communism in time of peace going to be a practical long-term policy? I have always been a skeptic on the subject of the military practicability of NATO. . . . I have always felt that we should not attempt to fight Russia on the ground on the Continent of Europe any more than we should attempt to fight China on the Continent of Asia.[102]

In the months immediately following Taft’s death, American support of the armies of France and its puppet government in Vietnam was increased heavily by Dulles with the backing of the China Lobbyists, such as Rep. Judd. While, early in 1954, two hundred U. S. Air Force technicians were sent to Vietnam as the conflict moved to its climax in defeat of France and its puppet government at Dien Bien Phu, Bernard Fall notes:

The President, at his press conference of February 10, declared that he “could conceive of no greater tragedy than for the United States to become involved in an all-out war in Indochina.”... While the President had once more assured the country that American military intervention was unlikely, the Pentagon was feverishly working out the military implications of such an intervention. . . . With two American carriers, the Essex and the Boxer, already operating in the Gulf of Tongking, and with American aircraft stationed in Okinawa and Clark Field in the Philippines, a Guernica-type raid had the added advantage of being feasible on a few days’ notice. It was also likely to be of doubtful military value. General Matthew B. Ridgeway, then Army chief of staff, had sent his own team of experts to Viet-Nam, and their report had been negative; American intervention, to be of any value at all, would have to involve ground forces, and such an operation could very well unleash the Chinese Reds, just as it had done in Korea. Ridgway thus took the forthright position that the price of a Western victory in Indochina would be “as great, or greater than, that we paid in Korea.”[103]

In the face of the demands of Dulles and Nixon for American bombing of Ho Chi-minh’s forces, Eisenhower, with the advice of the Taft supporters in the cabinet, insisted that there would be no direct use of American soldiers, naval forces or bombers without the prior approval of Congress, as Taft had consistently demanded. Moreover, America would intervene only with the approval and cooperation of its major allies, England and France, and of important Asian nations, exactly the way that Bundy had expected the American President to act. Neither England nor France, much less an important Asian nation, would approve or cooperate in the proposal to send American bombers or American troops against the Communist guerrillas in Vietnam. The consultation with Congress resulted in a Great Debate on Vietnam in the Senate, and, as Senator Taft had expected, this debate effectively paralyzed any attempt by the President’s advisers to launch the United States into the civil war in Vietnam. Detailed examinations of the history of the conflict were presented by Senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy, the latter noting that the cause of the conflict was the unreasonable demands placed by the French in 1946 upon the independent national government of Vietnam, established by President Ho Chi-minh when the Japanese occupation had ended. These demands had led to French bombardment of Hanoi and to Ho Chi-minh’s return to guerrilla warfare. Bernard Fall has described the general Congressional reaction:

And while Dirksen, along with Vice-President Nixon, and Senators Knowland and Jenner, did not, in his words, “share the anxiety and concern some feel about the danger of sending American troops to Indochina, other than technicians,” Senator Alexander Wiley probably summed up the feelings of the majority of his Republican colleagues when he said: “Mr. Speaker, if war comes under this Administration, it could well be the end of the Republican Party.” Non-interventionist feelings ran equally high among the often-burned Democrats. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson summed up the view of most of his party by saying that he was “against sending American GI’s into the mud and muck of Indochina on a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man’s exploitation in Asia.[104]

Thus in death Senator Taft’s influence on American foreign policy was greater than it had been in life. When faced with what may have been the crucial question of the decade—another American intervention on the mainland of Asia—President Eisenhower, influenced by the short but deep association he had developed with Senator Taft and by the Taft supporters in the cabinet whom the President respected, followed the Taft proposals of keeping military specialists from decision-making and withholding action until Congress had debated and given prior approval. As Taft realized, prior consultation of Congress for any commitment or intervention tended to prevent American involvement in conflicts short of direct attack on the United States and led to statesmanlike negotiations, which Taft admired. In this case negotiations led to the Geneva Agreement of 1954 by which foreign influences, other than that of France, were forbidden in Indochina; furthermore, general elections were to be held in two years, thus ending the Agreement’s temporary division of Vietnam to allow the French army to evacuate its forces. Thus, Taft, head of the isolationist critics of America’s post-World War II policy of interventions threatening the security of Soviet Russia and the Chinese Republic, might be singled out, as William notes that Borah, the leader of the isolationists and “almost doctrinaire laissez-faire liberals” who had criticized the post-World War I interventions against the revolutionary movements in Russia and China had been singled out, as “the man who might turn out to be right.”[105]

Thus, many on the American left failed to oppose, alongside isolationists like Senator Taft, America’s post-World War II interventions and military adventures, in contrast to the unity alongside Senator Borah after World War I. Whatever the historical reasons for this failure, the unity of American liberals—individualists and socialists alike—is logically required for the present and for the future, as Lens’ fundamental intellectual breakthrough has demonstrated. In his conclusion to The Futile Crusade, Lens provides a standard for such unity:

The most important step we Americans can take to implement a positive strategy is to complete our own revolution begun in 1775. . . . Needless to say, nothing will change in America or in American policy unless there is a severe shift in the power structure, away from the military-industrial complex. Many communists and other leftists argue that this is impossible under the capitalist system, that indeed capitalism must be overthrown before any progress can be made. This is the subject for another book, but we are not convinced that the argument is valid. . . . The process is dual: insofar as a new insurgent impulse in America draws us to co-existence, to joining the world revolution, to completing our own revolution at home, so will the power relationship alter; and insofar as the power relationship changes, momentum will be available for more fulsome coexistence, for joining the world revolution and completing our own.

The United States, sidetracked and repressed by a negative Anti-Communism, is rapidly approaching the most critical moment in its history. It is being called on to respond to the most dire challenge it has ever faced. It can follow the principles of the past, toward futility and eclipse, or it can chart a new, positive course that will renew its vigor. If it chooses business-as-usual, the status quo, militarism, and all the other regressive features of Anti-Communism, there is little hope either for itself or for Western civilization. On the other hand, if it correctly analyzes the national, social, technological, and scientific revolutions now underway, and seeks the path based on this analysis, all of mankind will applaud.[106]

1.Sidney Lens, The Futile Crusade: Anti-Communism as American Credo (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), pp. 143-45.

2.Ibid., p. 8.

3.Ibid., p. 20.

4.Ibid., p. 33.

5.Ibid., pp. 33-34.

6.Ibid., pp. 14-15.

7.Ibid., p. 15.

8.Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1955) p. 212.

9.D. Joy Humes, Oswald Garrison Villard (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1960), pp. 37-38.

10.Lens, op. cit., p. 148.

11.Ekirch, American Liberalism, p. xi.

12.Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., ed., Voices in Dissent, An Anthology of Individualist Thought in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), p. 218; Ekirch, American Liberalism, pp. 215-20.

13.Ibid., p. 228.

14.Humes, op. cit., p. 227; Ekirch, American Liberalism, pp. 226-27.

15.Humes, op. cit., pp. 223-28.

16.William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1962), pp. 118-22.

17.John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), pp. 259-60.

18.Ibid., pp. 267-68, 290-95; Howard K. Smith, The State of Europe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 271-73.

19.Williams, American Diplomacy, p. 163.

20.Ibid., pp. 143, 190-92; William L. Neumann, “Ambiguity and Ambivalence in Ideas of National Interest in Asia,” in Alexander DeConde, ed., Isolation and Security (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1957), pp. 157-58.

21.Williams, American, Diplomacy, pp. 162-200; Marian C. McKenna, Borah (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), pp. 355-85; Orde S. Pinckney, “William E. Borah: Critic of American Foreign Policy,” Studies on the Left (Vol. I, No. 3, 1960), pp. 54-61; William L. Neumann, America Encounters Japan (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 228-89; William L. Neumann, “Determinism, Destiny and Myth in the American Image of China,” in George L. Anderson, ed., Issues and Conflicts, Studies in Twentieth Century American Diplomacy (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1959), pp. 1-20.

22.Lens, op. cit., pp. 94-99, 113-19, 126-39; Smith, op. cit., p. 272. Tneodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder Out of China (New York: William Sloane Associates, Inc., 1946), pp. 82-96.

23.Ibid., pp. 150-52: Lens, op. cit., pp. 21-26.

24.Ibid., p. 24.

25.Ekirch, Voices in Dissent, pp. 275, 281.

26.Ibid., p. 357; Ekirch, American Liberalism, pp. 299-301; Lens, op. cit., pp. 146-48.

27.Norman Thomas, “Who Are The Liberals?”, American Mercury (November, 1947), pp. 550, 553.

28.Ibid., p. 552; Ekirch, American Liberalism, p. 316.

29.Ibid., pp. 308, 327-31; Ekirch, Voices in Dissent, pp. 368-76.

30.Ekirch, American Liberalism, p. 333.

31.Lens, op. cit., p. 78.

32.Ekirch, American Liberalism, pp. 317-20.

33.Lens, op. cit., pp. 65, 72-74.

34.Ibid., p. 27.

35.Ekirch, American Liberalism, p. 343.

36.American Mercury (August, 1947), p. 137.

37.Williams, American Diplomacy, p. 238.

38.Arthur A. Ekrich, Jr., The Civilian and the Military (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 273-75.

39.James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), pp. 244-45.

40.Ekirch, American Liberalism, p. 323.

41.John Lukacs, Decline and Rise of Europe (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1965), p. 47; Smith, op. cit., p. 270.

42.Williams, American Diplomacy, pp. 259-61; Smith, op. cit., pp. 117-21.

43.Byrnes, op. cit., pp. 187-96, 242, 253.

44.Ekirch, Voices in Dissent, pp. 294-95, 299.

45.William Carleton, “Isolationism and the Middle West,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (December, 1946), pp. 377-90.

46.Ekirch, Voices in Dissent, p. 312.

47.Ibid., p. 321; 1946 Britannica Book the Year (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1946), p. 852.

48.Ekirch, Voices in Dissent, p. 319.

49.Ibid., p. 321.

50.Lens, op. cit., pp. 31-32; Smith, op. cit., pp. 224-40.

51.Congressional Record, 80th Congress, 1st Session, p. 3031.

52.Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (New York: The Viking Press, 1955), pp. 174-75.

53.Cong. Record, 80th Congress, pp. 2831-32.

54.Ibid., pp. 3350-54.

55.Jones, op. cit., p. 177.

56.Cong. Record, 80th Congress, pp. 6562-63.

57.Ibid., pp. 6547-6551.

58.Ibid., p. 4694; Felix Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1964), p. 48.

59.Tang Tsou, America’s Failure in China, 1941-50 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 448-49; O. Edmund Clubb, 20th Century China (New York: Columbia University Press 1964), pp. 250-63, 276-79; Herbert Feis, The China Tangle (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 362-63, 396-401, 420-27.

60.White and Jacoby, op. cit., pp. 318-19.

61.Tang Tsou, op. cit., pp. 465-66.

62.United Labor League of Ohio, A Speakers’ Handbook on Robert Alphonso Taft, 1950, p. 166.

63.Tang Tsou, op. cit., p. 470.

64.Labor League, op. cit., p. 167; Smith, op. cit., pp. 343-48.

65.Congressional Record, 80th Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 2643-44.

66.Ekirch, Voices in Dissent, pp. 337-40.

67.Robert A. Taft, A Foreign Policy for Americans (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1951), p. 91.

68.Ibid., p. 113.

69.Ibid., pp. 89-90.

70.Vital Speeches, 15 (August 1, 1949), 610-24.

71.Labor League, op. cit., pp. 168-69.

72.Ibid., p. 169.

73.Ibid., p. 170.

74.Ibid., passim.

75.Lens, op. cit., p. 110.

76.White and Jacoby, op. cit., pp. 320-25; Vital Speeches, 16 (February 1, 1950), 236-37.

77.Tang Tsou, op. cit., pp. 518-23, 534-36, 548.

78.Ibid., pp. 353-59.

79.Ibid., pp. 537-38.

80.Ibid., pp. 306, 558-64.

81.Vital Speeches, 16 (August 1, 1950), 613-17.

82.Taft. op. cit., pp. 32-33.

83.New Republic and Nation, July, 1950 numbers, passim.

84.New Republic (September 4, 1950), p. 9; (October 23, 1950), pp. 10-12.

85.Bernard B. Fall, Street Without Joy (Harrisburg, Pa.: The Stackpole Company, 1964), pp. 17, 33-36, 55.

86.Nation (December 30, 1950), p. 688.

87.New Republic (November 20, 1950), p. 7.

88.Ibid. (January 1, 1951), p. 5.

89.Ibid. (January 15, 1951), p. 7.

90.Ibid. (January 15, 1951), p. 7.

91.Taft. op. cit., pp. 42-43.

92.New Republic (January 15, 1951), p. 7.

93.McGeorge Bundy, The Pattern of Responsibility (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1952), pp. 83-89.

94.Taft. op. cit., pp. 17-18.

95.McGeorge Bundy, “The Private World of Robert Taft,” The Reporter (December 11, 1951), p. 37.

96.Ibid., p. 38.

97.Ibid., p. 38.

98.McGeorge Bundy, “‘Appeasement,’ ‘Provocation,’ and Policy,” The Reporter (January 9, 1951), pp. 14-16.

99.Congressional Record, 82nd Congress, 1st Session, p. 55.

100.Bundy, “Taft”, op. cit., pp. 38-39.

101.McGeorge Bundy, “November 1952: Imperatives of Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs (October, 1952), pp. 2-4.

102.Vital Speeches, 19 (June 15, 1953), 530-31.

103.Bernard B. Fall, The Two Viet-Nams (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), pp. 226-27, 243.

104.Ibid., pp. 227-28.

105.Williams, American Diplomacy, p. 122.

106.Lens, op. cit., pp. 235-36.

D. F. Fleming on “The Origins of the Cold War”

by ALAN MILCHMAN

In the statist world in which we live there is a very real tendency to accept as fact all that the official organs of propaganda emit. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the area of foreign affairs. The power of the State is such that the truth about the last fifty years has easily been suppressed. In allowing the State to write history as well as make it, we run the risk of surrendering all that remains of our fast vanishing freedoms. Are we to march into endless wars because the State has designated this or that nation to be the “enemy”? We have, unfortunately, done just that. Today we are poised on the brink of a new war; it may well be the last. Before we destroy ourselves forever in one vast nuclear holocaust, we should pause and ask ourselves this seemingly obvious question: Is there any reason to fight this war? We will not get a truthful answer from Washington - nor from Moscow either, I venture to say. Only a searching analysis undertaken by countless individuals will produce the right answer. As yet few have attempted such an undertaking. One of the first is D. F. Fleming, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Vanderbilt University, in his The Cold War and its Origins. This work deserves the attention of all who would concern themselves with the facts of the last five decades, not as seen from Washington or Moscow, but as seen by an individual whose first concern is truth.

In his effort to ascertain the origins of the Cold War, Professor Fleming goes back to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here, at the very inception of the Bolshevik regime, are to be found the beginnings of the present conflict between East and West. At this point in their history, the Russian people were in almost unanimous agreement that the Tsarist autocracy had to be overthrown and that withdrawal from the First World War had to be effected. In the March Revolution, their first objective was achieved; but the unwillingness of the new Kerensky government to terminate Russian participation in the war made the subsequent November Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks took power, inevitable. Upon their assumption of power, the Bolsheviks moved quickly to fulfill their pledge to withdraw from the war. In March of 1918, the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed between Russia and Germany. However, Russia was not to know peace for long; three months later Allied troops landed in Siberia. The ostensible reason for Allied intervention was an attempt to restore a second front against Germany and to make certain that the vast stores of war material which the Allies had shipped to the old government did not fall into enemy hands. Yet, March of 1919, four months after the surrender of Germany and the end of World War I, found Allied troops not only in Siberia but occupying key seaports in the North and vast stretches of South Russia as well. In addition to this occupation of Russian territory, the Allies provided the various “White” armies with generous amounts of money and war material. Without this aid the “White” forces could never have undertaken their large scale offensives against the new Bolshevik government. Moreover, it is important to note that the “Whites” did not represent a genuine popular uprising against the Bolsheviks, but rather they represented the very elements who had denied the Russian people the most elementary liberties for centuries past.

The end of the First World War had certainly removed any justification for the intervention as a wartime measure. What then were the real reasons for the Western intervention in Russia?

Professor Fleming offers two basic reasons for the Allied intervention, both of which played an important role in determining the action of the West. First was the imperialistic ambitions of Britain and France - their desire to maintain and extend their economic and financial control of Russia. Second was the fear on the part of the West that the social unrest stirred by Bolshevism would extend to the rest of Europe and perhaps threaten their own regimes, if it were allowed to take firm root in Russia. For both these reasons the West determined to crush the new government by whatever means were necessary. When it became apparent that limited numbers of troops and massive aid in money and war material would not be sufficient to complete the task, the West prepared for all-out war against the Bolsheviks. Yet, this massive intervention never took place. As Professor Fleming points out, the West was “held back and frustrated by the war-weariness of their own people and by the impossibility of inducing their troops to fight a new war.”[1]

The most important point to note regarding the Western intervention in Russia is that “it constituted an official open and avowed attack on the Soviet government.”[2] The new Soviet regime had taken no overt action against the West; moreover, in their war against the “Whites” the Soviets had the support of the overwhelming majority of the Russian people. In view of this, the intervention was an act of blatant aggression against both the Russian government and the Russian people. Is it any wonder, then, that the Soviets fear and distrust the West so much? The Western governments had sought to exterminate the Soviet regime and to reimpose the Tsarist autocracy upon the Russian people; only the extreme war-weariness of their own citizens had prevented them from accomplishing these ends. The origins of the Cold War can thus be traced back to the July of 1918 when the West, without provocation, invaded Russia and landed their troops in Vladivo-stock.

The failure of the West to crush the “Red” regime in its infancy did not lead to any relaxation of tensions between East and West. The Russians had every reason to believe that it would be only a question of time before the Western armies returned to complete their task. The Soviets were determined to waste no time in strengthening their regime so as to be able to withstand the expected Western onslaught. To this end all else was sacrificed, including the aspirations of the Russian people for a higher standard of living and a greater measure of freedom. The West, frustrated in its endeavor at armed intervention, turned to the no less hostile policy of containment. Around the borders of the Soviet Union, a “cordon sanitaire” of hostile states was constructed. If the “Red” regime could not immediately be destroyed, the West was at least determined to encircle it with a ring of states in Eastern Europe, which could be used as a forward base to mount fresh attacks on the Soviets. That Eastern Europe, the invasion route into Russia, should be in unfriendly hands was a constant cause of concern to the Soviet leaders. If Russia was to be secured from invasion, it was essential that the nations of Eastern Europe have governments friendly to the Soviet Union.

An artificial and unprecedented power vacuum had been produced in Eastern Europe by the defeat of both Germany and Russia in World War I, and after 1918 neither was able to exercise its traditional influence in Eastern Europe. Excluded from the peace negotiations at Versailles, the Soviet Union and Germany were natural, if intermittent, allies. Fleming, in a section on “Russo-German Friendship”, describes the basis of this development:

We have never had any experience in the role of an outcast nation. For both Germany and Russia the experience was bitter in the years after 1920.[3]

The victorious Western powers moved into this vacuum in Eastern Europe, and the new cordon sanitaire states created at Versailles were controlled by London and Paris.[4] Supported by the Western powers, the economic, social and nationalities policies of the Eastern European countries provided the conditions from which World War II, and then the Cold War, were to develop. Western monopolies were imposed upon a feudal social structure in which an important aspect was the economic and ethnic oppression of the German, Slovak, Hungarian, Ukrainian and White Ruthenian national minorities.[5] These policies speeded the inevitable regaining by Russia and Germany of their natural influence in Eastern Europe, an event which London and Paris could only forestall by going to war.

The events leading to the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany during the Polish crisis of September, 1939 are examined in detail by Fleming. The rejection by the ruling clique of Polish colonels of Germany’s suggested widening of the German-Polish pact of 1934 led Germany to request negotiations to provide for German defense of East Prussia. For, under the Versailles treaty, East Prussia had been forcibly separated from Germany by the creation of the Polish Corridor. Given a paper guarantee by England against Germany, the Polish colonels declined to negotiate German transport rights to East Prussia. Fleming indicates that “Poland was now the prisoner of her conquests”;[6] for, having aggrandized itself at the expense of Germany and Russia, Poland was forced to acquiesce in the Anglo-French policy of opposition to both of these Great Powers. Fleming indicates the status of the regime for which the Western powers were willing to launch a second World War:

This oligarchy of landlords and colonels also believed itself to be a Great Power. Impressed by its conquests, it adopted the impossible policy of balancing both of its huge neighbors against each other . . . . In this situation Poland might survive by close alliance with one of her great neighbors. Being unable to choose between her hatreds doomed her to sure destruction and in all probability to another partition.

It was the defense of this illiberal, vainglorious and impotent regime which Chamberlain chose as the casus foederis of World War II.[7]

Nothing, Fleming points out, would have pleased London and Paris more than a Russo-German war in which Russia would probably be destroyed.[8] But, if, as Professor Fleming maintains, the West did indeed plan a Russo-German war, then its actions in the Polish crisis of 1939 are truly inexplicable. If Germany were to attack Russia, then a common border with the Soviet Union was essential. This, the Germans did not possess in 1939. Yet, when Germany sought to establish a stronger alliance with the anti-Russian Polish government, the Western powers promptly gave the Poles unconditional promises of support; hence the Poles became totally unwilling to negotiate with Germany. In short, the Western powers wished to prevent Germany from re-establishing its traditional influence in Eastern Europe, while still maintaining its cordon sanitaire against the Soviet Union. The Western powers hoped to re-enact the 1918 defeat of Germany without the aid of Russia, for Russian aid would require the abolition of the cordon sanitaire and the restoration of Russia’s traditional influence in Eastern Europe. The Soviet-German pact of August 23, 1939, based on their common animosity toward Western imperialism, was intended to bring London and Paris to recognize reality and withdraw from the brink; but Neville Chamberlain encouraged Polish intransigence.[9]

After August 23, there was but one hope of preventing the smashing of Poland. That was to fly to Warsaw and bring the extremest pressure to bear upon the Polish colonels to grant “self-determination” to Hitler in Danzig and the Corridor, accept the partition of their country and save it from the terrible rain of death and devastation which could not otherwise be prevented. All the arguments that had been used upon the Czechs now applied triple-strength to the Poles. Instead, British promises to Poland, never put into binding form, were hastily written into a formal Treaty of Mutual Assistance between Britain and Poland and signed in London on August 25. Never were names put to a more hollow instrument. Britain and France had not the slightest power to save the life of a single Pole, or even to fire a shot that would mean anything to Poland. If this treaty had any meaning at all it meant that finally the Allies would enlist the might of the United States to wear down Germany. . . .[10]

Furthermore, when, in 1939, Russia went to war with Finland, the West was prepared to finish what the intervention of 1918-20 had left undone. A powerful expeditionary force was readied to be sent to defend Finland. The French prepared for an all-out attack against Russia in the Black Sea area. As Fleming states, “The two governments were saved from plunging into war with Russia only by the refusal of Norway, Sweden, and Turkey to grant transit privileges across their territories.”[11] The West did not want Germany to destroy Russia; they wanted to do the job themselves! Thus, in order to secure Western domination of Eastern Europe, the Allies were suicidally prepared to fight both Germany and Russia at one and the same time.

When Germany invaded Russia in June of 1941, Britain promptly greeted her as an ally in the common cause. To the British, who had been fighting the Nazis alone for over a year, Russian participation in the war appeared as a godsend. The entrance of the United States into the war in December 1941 made victory over the Germans inevitable. Thus, by the beginning of 1942, it was no longer touch and go for Great Britain; there would be years of heavy fighting, but the outcome was no longer in doubt. Throughout the rest of the war, the British would fight, not with the single-mindedness of purpose that characterized the Battle of Britain, but with at least one eye upon the post-war status of Europe. The consideration which had led Britain into the war - continued control of Eastern Europe - would dominate her wartime thinking as well. Russian participation in the war might hasten the German defeat, but it also raised the specter of Russia as the major influence in Eastern Europe. Thus, Churchill fought the war with a dual purpose: to defeat Germany and at the same time to prevent that Russian hegemony over all of Eastern Europe which would naturally flow from the defeat and rollback of German arms. Rather than open a second front, the British hoped that the Germans would wear out the Russians in years of hard fighting deep in Russia, while the West defeated Germany with a massive air assault and sea blockade. The British managed to delay the opening of a second front in Western Europe for over two years. The “wartime friendship” of Britain and Russia was, from the British point of view, never genuine. As Professor Fleming points out, even at the height of the war, hostility towards the Soviets dominated British strategy. Yet, throughout the course of the war, Churchill was frustrated in his attempt to win American support for his anti-Russian plans. To the very end, Roosevelt turned thumbs down on the creation of an Anglo-American bloc against Russia.

The fundamental war aim of the Russians was control of Eastern Europe. This objective, above all others, dominated Russian thinking during the course of the war. As Professor Fleming points out, “It is not possible to begin to understand Russian motives and feelings without knowing what they think about Eastern Europe.”[12] What are the motives of Russia in Eastern Europe? “Their first driving and continuing motive was, and is, security.”[13] Here, in one sentence, Professor Fleming has summarized the guiding motivation of Russian foreign policy since the Revolution. It must be apparent to all that Russian security cannot be assured if Eastern Europe is in the hands of unfriendly powers. In both World Wars, as well as in the Polish invasion of 1920, Eastern Europe had been the invasion route into Russia. Using bases in this area, hostile powers have been able to invade and lay waste vast stretches of the Soviet Union. Thus, the very existence of the Soviet Union depends upon making certain that the governments of Eastern Europe are friendly towards her. When one realizes that the West also desires to dominate and control this area, and that it precipitated the Second World War in order to maintain its primacy in Eastern Europe, the basis for the Cold War becomes apparent. Yet, Eastern Europe, so vital to the Soviet Union, is in no way essential to the West. For the Russians, control of this area is a matter of life and death; for the West it is but a luxury.

Would the West accept the most important result of the Second World War: Russian control of Eastern Europe? If the Soviet Union, which had suffered so grievously during the war, was to be free of the specter of another invasion, then control of Eastern Europe was essential. In the course of the war, her armies had occupied the area and the West had recognized the Soviet Union’s right to have friendly governments in these states. Yet, events now moved quickly toward an open break between East and West. Wartime expediency had dictated that the Western governments remain on cordial terms with the Soviet Union. Once the war had ended, however, the crusade against Russia could begin anew.

The death of President Roosevelt and the formation of a new Administration ended the wartime cooperation and injected a spirit of hostility toward the Soviet Union which deeply moulded public opinion. Fleming notes the critical role of American socialists and ex-Communists in indoctrinating American audiences with the poison of their own disappointment with the variant of socialism developed in the Soviet Union.

The Left opposition to Russia had two themes: (1) that Soviet Russia is both tyrannical and imperialist, bloody and omnivorous in its appetites; and (2) that American policy under both Roosevelt and Truman has been a long course of appeasement toward this monster.[14]

Fleming points to the regret of Walter Lippmann that the anti-Soviet drift of American policy made it possible for anti-Soviet opinion to gain a wide public hearing. Truman’s policy led the United States to depart from the position of Roosevelt’s foreign policy which had placed America in the role of mediator between London and Moscow. America had now become the major partisan of London’s imperial interests. In place of the wise reserve and self-limitation exercised under Roosevelt, America had now assumed an alarming role; for the difficulties between Britain and Russia extended from Eastern Europe to the oil concessions of the Middle East and Iran.[15]

In March, 1946 Winston Churchill, in his famous Fulton address, called for a close alliance between Britain and the United States. Against whom would this alliance be directed? The menace from the East, the Soviet Union. Churchill, who had attempted to exterminate the “Red” regime during the Western intervention of 1918-20, had, when this failed, sought to encircle the infant Soviet state with a ring of hostile states. During the Second World War, Churchill had attempted the impossible feat of using the Russians to beat Germany while denying them all the fruits of victory. Now Churchill called upon the United States to use her powerful resources to achieve what he had never been able to accomplish before: the destruction of the Soviet Union. What made this event even more ominous, was the presence of the American President, Harry S. Truman, at this occasion. Truman lent the dignity of his office to this blatant attack upon our wartime ally; indeed, he went further and applauded vigorously during Churchill’s speech. The move to construct an Anglo-American alliance against Russia, which President Roosevelt had wisely frustrated during the war, was now in full swing. What was the justification for such an endeavor? The Russians had committed no acts of aggression against the West, and had scrupulously kept all their wartime agreements with us. After the rigors of four years of bloody war, during which much of Russia had been laid waste, the Soviet government wanted nothing more than an era of peace in which to rebuild her war-shattered economy. Yet, powerful elements in the West, the President of the United States included, were determined to impose their will upon the Russians and to frustrate the construction of a durable peace based upon what to them was an unbearable fact: the very existence of a powerful Soviet Russia.

The Cold War can be said to have begun in earnest in March, 1947 when the President issued his now famous Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine was a declaration of war on communism throughout the globe in which encirclement of the Soviet Union was arrogantly proclaimed. This Doctrine in effect made the policy which Churchill had enunciated at Fulton, Missouri, a year earlier, the official policy of the United States Government. Professor Fleming describes the situation in the following words:

... No pronouncement could have been more sweeping. Wherever a communist rebellion develops, the United States would suppress it. Wherever the Soviet Union attempt to push outward, at any point around its vast circumference, the United States would resist. The United States would become the world’s anti-communist, anti-Russian policeman.[16]

This crucial event, the formal declaration of the Cold War by President Truman, receives from Professor Fleming the detailed examination that it deserves. The origin of the Greek civil war in the British attempt to install an unpopular rightist government in the place of the popularly supported resistance forces is thoroughly discussed by Fleming.[17] Direct American intervention in the Greek civil war began in the summer of 1946. On September 9, carrier-based planes from the American fleet, which was stationed in Greek waters, flew over Greece in support of the rightist Greek government. Thereafter, American officials announced that the American fleet would remain in the Eastern Mediterranean within range of the Soviet Union and the Middle Eastern oil concessions of American companies. In a major policy speech on September 12, Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace asked Americans to look at world affairs through traditional American attitudes rather than with the imperialist outlook of Britain reflected in the pro-British, anti-Russian press in America. Wallace called for Soviet-American cooperation rather than American support of British imperialism in Greece and the Middle East.[18]

And I believe we can get cooperation once Russia understands that our primary objective is neither saving the British empire nor purchasing oil in the Near East with the lives of American soldiers. We must not allow national oil rivalries to force us into war.[19]

Wallace pointed out that Eastern Europe was not of special interest to America although it was to Russia. But this fact was attacked on the ground that America’s special interest in Eastern Europe was founded on England’s pledge to support Poland in 1939; thus, Wallace was accused of speaking the same language that the isolationist Senators had been speaking before World War II. Truman thereupon forced Wallace’s resignation from the Cabinet.[20]

By late 1946 America was providing Greece with surplus military supplies and was preparing to extend foreign aid through the dispatch of a high-level economic mission to Greece. At this time, Russian concessions permitted completion of the peace treaties with the German allies, and Russia hoped that the United States would reciprocate at the forthcoming German peace conference in Moscow in March-April, 1947. However, the preparatory conference on the German peace treaty in January-February, 1947 was undercut when the State Department adviser, John Foster Dulles, urged the construction of an anti-Soviet bloc in Western Europe based on the revival of German power in The Ruhr (January 17, 1947). Less than a month later, Dulles again called for a policy of excluding statesmanlike diplomacy and replacing it by negotiations based only on positions-of-strength. American editorials noted that any application of Dulles’ German policies would prevent the conclusion of a German peace treaty. Dulles’ long association with German industrial interests did not present a completely disinterested picture of any Dulles policy on Germany, and this critical fact was not overlooked in Europe or in Russia.

Echoing Winston Churchill, Dulles was trying to frighten the rest of the world with “the ghost of non-existent Soviet expansion”. Later in the month Drew Middleton reported from Moscow that perhaps nothing had so established the difference of approach to the German problem as the announcement of Secretary of State Marshall that Dulles would accompany him to the approaching Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers, as an adviser on German affairs.[21]

When, during the preparations for the German peace conference, Britain told the United States at the end of February, 1947 that it would have to remove its army supporting the Greek royalists against the guerrillas and to end its subsidies to the Turkish army, the American government determined to assume Britain’s imperialist role in the Eastern Mediterranean. In a little more than two weeks, President Truman had delivered his momentous speech to Congress proclaiming the Truman Doctrine. Fleming emphasizes the snowstorm that disrupted the British economy in late January, 1947 as the cause of this crisis, although the English notification of withdrawal from Greece was preceded by weeks of frantic cables from the various high-level American groups operating in Greece. The cables pleaded that heavy American military aid was imperative to preserve the collapsing rightist Greek government.[22] Fleming indicates that the immediate decision of the State, War and Navy Department officials to issue a public declaration of American policy to aid governments everywhere in the world against Communist-led opposition was the result of long-held official purpose. Truman had determined since the end of the war in 1945 to announce publicly his policy of opposition to the Soviet Union.[23]

To the fundamental question: why was the Truman Doctrine issued early in March, 1947, Fleming answers that Truman chose the opening of the Foreign Ministers’ Conference which was to conclude a peace treaty with Germany. The question of Germany has been the major source of Soviet-American conflict, and the major question at the conference was whether America had entered these negotiations with the same self-sacrificing spirit that Russia had shown in concluding the peace treaties with Germany’s allies a few months earlier. “Did the President mean to torpedo the conference?” Fleming asks, and he replies that the purpose of the Truman Doctrine was to create a position-of-strength atmosphere in which General George C. Marshall and John Foster Dulles could threaten the Russians with the alternative of accepting the harsh American conditions for a German peace treaty or forgoing the benefits of peace by facing continuing aggressive policies on the part of America. At the conference, Marshall emphasized not negotiations but the military power of the United States. Fleming quotes a contemporary account of the Truman Doctrine: “The place it was aimed at was the Moscow Conference.”[24] Fleming concludes that Truman’s declaration of the Cold War, represented by the American shift to positions-of-strength diplomacy that was completed at the Moscow Conference by Marshall and followed immediately by the Marshall Plan (June 5, 1947), caused the profound change to a hard-line in Soviet domestic life which characterized the final years of Stalin’s rule. The Soviet Union had to deprive itself of the benefits of peace and gain a position of military parity as a defense against the positions-of-strength policy of the United States; only thus could it enter genuine diplomatic negotiations with America rather than accept Gen. Marshall’s demand for American world hegemony.

The Russians had amply proved that they were tough, long, hard bargainers, but they had no thought of abandoning diplomacy and risking their remaining lives and resources on political war. It was the United States which did that.[25]

Walter Lippmann’s analysis of the Truman Doctrine, presented by Fleming, was an incisive criticism of the general premise of support for reactionary governments, whether in defense of Western oil monopolies or broadly throughout the world. Lippmann urged that the existing policy of no serious negotiations with the Russians be replaced by negotiations for a general settlement of issues with the Soviets. Fleming indicates the major errors in George Kennan’s justification of the Truman Doctrine of containment which was published in July, 1947. While Kennan’s first reaction to the Truman Doctrine was shock at the provocative language and at the proposal to send military aid to Greece and Turkey, his article was an attempt to rationalize, soften, and justify the Truman Doctrine. Kennan’s recognition of the importance of Marxist ideology led him to underestimate the essential national interests of Russia. Although he realized that the Marxist view of the inevitability of the disappearance of capitalism led the Soviet Union to refrain from military aggression, Kennan failed to point out Russia’s willingness to enter into negotiations to gain the immediate security of the Soviet Union. This failure led Kennan to accept Truman’s virtual abolition of diplomacy. There would be no negotiations with the Soviet Union because the latter was not a state with essential national interests but only an ideological movement which could not be reasoned with nor negotiated with, but only contained by military force.[26]

Considering Fleming’s masterful treatment of the development of the Truman Doctrine, it is difficult to understand his ultimate ambivalence on the question of whether the international political situation required such a doctrine. Fleming argues:

In Greece a political vacuum yawned ahead, and in Western Europe a much bigger one was already plainly discernible. Some action was essential if the danger that communism would fill these vacuums was to be averted. The obvious move was large scale economic aid. . . .

. . . .there was a good case for a ringing political pronouncement that would tell the European peoples that we were behind them, that we were coming to their aid.[27]

Fleming suggests that since the problem was the growth of domestic opposition within the European countries, and not Soviet aggression, it was unwise to declare the American objective to be anti-Soviet or a world-wide anti-Communism. Nevertheless, by endorsing American intervention to prevent the growth of domestic Communist parties in Europe, Fleming comes down on the side of the same anti-Communist myths which it is the objective of his work to dispel. It was only the world-wide application of the doctrine which Fleming feels was in error. “This was clearly a self-defeating policy, one fitted to squander our resources on the way to an immeasurable, unmanageable war.[28] Thus, Fleming ultimately rejects neither the doctrine of American intervention, nor the actual intervention in the Greek civil war, nor the use of the myth of a Communist danger to force a reluctant Congress to vote for foreign aid.

“...some action on our part in Greece was foreordained. Greece would not be allowed to fall into the Soviet orbit. Some anti-communist connotation was also advisable to secure quick congressional approval.”[29]

Professor Fleming indicates the important role of the election of the Republican Eightieth Congress in the Administration’s decision to issue the Truman Doctrine, and he concludes in answer to the question whether a domestic political purpose was involved that “the domestic political advantages were very obvious.”[30] Fleming’s acceptance of the use of the myth of Communist danger by the Democratic Administration in order to gain foreign aid from the Republican Congress appears based on his belief that nothing could be worse, even if including a touch of anti-Communist hysteria, than the American people and their Congressmen espousing a policy of non-intervention and isolationism and rejecting further foreign aid. Thus, the principle of the Cold War, if not its every application, becomes a positive good in overcoming the natural isolationism of the American people . The Republican Eightieth Congress, which took office in January, 1947, had been engaged for two months in fulfilling election promises to reduce economic spending heavily, especially on foreign aid and military projects. This cutback included allowing expiration of the draft. It was in frenzied response to these cutbacks that the White House and the State Department initiated the campaign to impress, frighten, and threaten the Congressmen with a Soviet threat of which the Congressmen had seen no evidence. Congress did not fear the events in Greece, nor did it demand action to support what it considered a corrupt and reactionary regime. Therefore, the Congress was thoroughly subjected by the State Department to the geopolitical myth of the yellow press. The theory presented was that the removal of the rightist Greek government would lead inexorably to Russian domination of three continents, extending Soviet military rule through the Near East and Africa across to South America and up Central America to the American-Mexican border. Fleming notes that the Congressmen were thus given their “first exposition of the ‘falling dominoes’ theory which was to determine our actions at other stages of the Cold War.’’[31] The State Department insisted that the Soviet threat to American dominance created the most irreconcilable world conflict since the Roman-Carthaginian struggles. The Congress received the Truman Doctrine grimly, resentfully and without applause. The Congress resented the whole crisis-approach which forced it to appropriate foreign aid for Greece and Turkey or else publicly repudiate the President’s negotiating position. The Congress’s opposition to being tricked into supporting America’s assumption of the role of the major imperialist power in the Mediterranean is noted by Fleming under “Retaliation in Congress.”

In the last stages of the bill’s legislative progress the House of Representatives took two steps which betrayed its resentment over the Greek crisis. On April 30, by a vote of 225 to 165, largely on party lines, it cut the European aid bill from $350,000,000 to $200,000,000, and a week later Secretary of State Marshall complained that the proposed $60,000,000 slash in the State Department’s outlay for the coming year was very embarrassing to the government’s drive for world peace. He hoped particularly that the “Voice of America” radio programs would not be silenced.[32]

In addition to the Truman Doctrine, the West by 1949 had undertaken two more steps which warmed the hearts of the growing legion of Americans demanding a preventive war against Soviet Russia. In June, 1948 the West made the decision to break the deadlock on Germany and set up a separate West German government. Fleming points out that it was this “decision which precipitated a Russian effort to drive the West out of Berlin.”[33] Moreover, Fleming admits that the Russians had a firm basis for this endeavor. The decision to set up a separate government in the West was an open violation of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. Why then should the Russians have continued to live up to the very agreements that the West had deliberately broken; why should they have allowed the West to continue its occupation of Berlin, deep in the heart of the Soviet zone? The West could not have it both ways; we could not split Germany in two in violation of our agreements, and then defend our continued control of West Berlin by alluding to the sanctity of these same agreements. This Western decision to split up Germany was preparatory to a drive to rearm her and press her into the anti-Soviet bloc. The nation which had almost destroyed Russia a few short years before was now to become a menace to her once again, this time with the full and continued backing of the West. Fleming indicates the crucial importance of American military officials in the development, independent of American civilian officials, of American policy on Germany.

Walter Lippmann deplored the extent to which our German policy was being fashioned by our officials in Germany. General Clay was the prime mover, seconded by his advisers in Berlin and his immediate superiors in the Pentagon...

After Clay had denied these allegations, Sumner Welles strongly supported the charges. He declared it was “notorious that General Clay has occasionally taken independent action which has shaped policy” and he was still permitted by Washington to retain the initiative in the formulation of policy. This meant control of German policy by army officers and investment bankers who had no real knowledge of European history or of the social and economic forces and national psychologies with which they were dealing...France especially was repeatedly brushed aside and the decisions made in Germany “provoked the present crisis with Moscow.”[34]

These decisions were followed in early 1949 by the formation of the NATO military alliance. In addition to our vast stock of atomic weapons which so many in the West urged should be dropped forthwith upon Russia, we were now to build Europe into an armed camp and forward base - one more step in our plan of global encirclement of the Soviets. In regard to this, Professor Fleming raises one very important question which we in the West would do well to ponder. How would we react if the Soviets were encircling the United States with a global ring of military bases?

By 1950, American foreign policy had subtly shifted from the Truman-Acheson containment policy towards a more militant, almost preventive war, policy. Fleming subjects the background and decision to intervene in Korea to the same searching criticism which he applied to the Truman Doctrine, and for this purpose examines two fundamental questions: who began the Korean war, and was American intervention justifiable? As to who began the Korean war, Fleming believes that “there is grave doubt about Rhee’s part in the origins of the Korean war,” and that “it is increasingly probable that the invasion may have been touched off by an attempt by Rhee’s forces to march to the North, or to provoke an invasion.”[35] Noting that at the time the war broke out the North Korean army had less than half its forces fit for combat, Fleming asks, “was it possible that the North Koreans were the ones who were surprised?”[36] The earliest reports of the outbreak of the war by UN observers and by the American head-quarters in Tokyo described the South Koreans as having attacked North Korea.[37]

It is a matter of record that Rhee and his Defence Minister had been threatening to invade North Korea for months. . . . It is further established, also, that Rhee had been decisively defeated in the election of May 30, 1950, an election which the American government forced upon him. His regime was “left tottering.” He . had no political future unless war broke out, and his will power was entirely sufficient to bring war about. His prewar threats to march north were discounted during the war, but after it began the report that Secretary of State Acheson “never was quite sure that Rhee did not provoke the Red attack of 1950” was amply justified.[38]

After discussing the development of the views of the American military commander and our allies in the Far East, Fleming treats the events immediately preceding the outbreak of the war (June 25, 1950).

In the Spring of 1950 the MacArthur-Chiang-Rhee trio received a powerful ally in the person of John Foster Dulles. . . . Mr. Dulles visited South Korea on June 19. . . . The next day Dulles visited the 38th Parallel frontier and was photographed in the midst of a group of South Korean military officers looking over a map, while our Ambassador to South Korea looked through glasses over into Red Korea. This photograph, printed in the Herald Tribune, on June 26, 1950, carried the unfortunate suggestion that a military campaign into North Korea was being planned. It enabled Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Gromyko to hint strongly that the signal for the alleged attack by South Korea on North Korea had been given by Dulles.

From Korea Dulles went to Tokyo for conferences with General MacArthur. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and General Omar Bradley, head of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, has just been conferring with MacArthur. . . .

Why was Dulles so sure that “positive action” was impending, after his visit to the 38th Parallel, Seoul and MacArthur?. . . . This spate of top level activity by Dulles in Korea and Japan, and by MacArthur, Johnson and Bradley in Tokyo during the last half of June, with its accompanying publicity, suggested a change of American policy in the Far East.[39]

It is particularly unfortunate that the American decision to intervene in Korea is not discussed in detail by Fleming for despite his doubts and the background facts he concludes that the decision was justified. Truman’s intervention, which would “further our main aim of stopping communism was an objective worth some risk,” although Fleming emphasizes that

There was no careful study of the many factors and consequences involved. On the contrary, the decision reversed the carefully considered verdict of the Defense Department that Korea was not essential to our strategic security and that it was about the last place where we should fight a war.[40]

It is difficult to understand Fleming’s justification for American intervention into the Korean conflict, especially when he condemns the continuation of the struggle into North Korea when American policy flatly denied the existence of the North Korean government. The US and the UN were now trapped in their earlier Cold War maneuvers which had denied the existence of North Korea. At that time the United States had ousted the moderate and leftist Korean government below the 38th Parallel and induced the UN to declare Rhee’s rightist regime the only lawful government in Korea.[41]

Fleming’s attempt to draw distinctions for justifying Truman’s intervention in Korea is negated by the American and UN policies against the North Koreans. UN Secretary General Trygve Lie thundered that North Korean withdrawal beyond the 38th Parallel was insufficient, and that American and South Korean troops must establish a united Korean government involving the elimination of the North Korean regime. Supported by British Foreign Minister Bevin and Canadian Foreign Minister Pearson, the UN General Assembly directed MacArthur to secure stability through all of Korea and to establish a unified government. The commitment to this unification policy was so deep that MacArthur was instructed to use only South Korean troops to spearhead the advance through northern Korea, and he agreed to use as many South Korean troops as possible up to the Yalu River itself. But when the American-South Korean forces continued to approach the Yalu in the face of repeated Chinese warnings not to attempt to destroy the North Korean government or to unify Korea by force, the Chinese troops delivered a strong rebuff to the UN forces. Under the pressure of this response, the UN determined to offer the Chinese the occupation of a buffer area in Korea during negotiations for a peace settlement, and Chinese Communist representatives came to New York to meet UN officials. However, MacArthur frustrated this meeting by launching two large armies toward the Chinese frontier, and he received President Truman’s complete support including Truman’s threatening to use atomic bombs against the Chinese and “calling for world-wide mobilization against communism,”[42] as the Chinese hurled the American offensive back to the 38th Parallel. Among the critics of America’s irrational aggressive attempts to gain victory in an already lost war by escalating it towards the borders of China, Fleming notes “A responsible American writer, McGeorge Bundy, went further and plainly labelled MacArthur as a provocator.”[43] To prove its “resolve” the Truman Admininstration declared a national emergency and appropriated huge military expenditures. It forced the UN to brand the Chinese government as an aggressor despite the warnings of America’s Western European allies that they would not support Truman’s position. They blamed China’s actions on the American government’s refusal to seat the Chinese government in the UN, the establishment of American military control of Formosa, and the placing of a counter-revolutionary force supported by American troops at China’s Manchurian border.[44]

Among American critics of the continuation of Truman’s war in Korea, Herbert Hoover sought American recognition of the fact that the Communist powers would never invade America and that America’s “land war against this Communist land mass would be a war without victory.”[45] At the same time, Walter Lippmann, while disclaiming advocacy of traditional isolationism, indicated that the interventionist foreign policy pursued by Truman would logically lead the American people to accept a world war or a preventive war. Lippmann also advised liquidating the American intervention on the frontiers of China.

Discussing “The Crisis of Confidence,” Lippmann asked again whether a succession of resounding global declarations and snap decisions to fight wars constituted statesmanship. In the place of a reasoned doctrine of national security we had the Truman Doctrine, in the application of which, and contrary to the considered judgment of every competent soldier, the American army and all its reserves had been sucked into a peninsula of Asia “in defiance of overwhelmingly superior forces.” Great doctrines must not be improvised merely to get some appropriations for Greece and Turkey and great military commitments must not be made “in a few excited days, reversing the whole strategical judgment of the past.”[46]

By the Spring of 1951, the UN desired to modify its American-sponsored policy of a unified Korea and to gain peace at the 38th Parallel through comprehensive peace negotiations, including such questions as China’s UN membership and America’s control of Formosa. But the Truman Administration insisted that it would negotiate over Korea only, and thus committed itself to the terrible destruction of American lives which was to continue along the 38th Parallel for two more years until its defeat in the 1952 presidential election.

The Truman Administration was trapped by the premisses upon which its original intervention into Korea had been based. Even when its military failures became evident, it excluded the basis for a meaningful diplomacy - comprehensive negotiations with China on all outstanding problems. This left only two alternatives: a drawn-out military conflict involving horribly large American losses, or an escalation toward the bombing of Manchuria or the landing of Chiang’s discredited forces on the mainland to relieve Americans of the heavy losses suffered in Korea. Given the Truman Administration’s premisses, the large-scale controversy and popular discredit of Truman when he fired MacArthur was the logical result of Truman’s original error of intervening in Korea and his subsequent refusal to enter comprehensive peace negotiations with China. MacArthur’s policy was the logical culmination of Truman’s refusal to accept the reality of American failure, and the error of MacArthur’s policy merely reflected and compounded the original errors of Truman’s intervention into a civil war on the continent of Asia.[47]

From 1953-59, American foreign policy was largely directed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. It was under Dulles’ direction that the policy of encirclement of the Communist bloc was put aside in favor of the more activist policy of “rollback” and liberation. One need only reflect for a monent on Dulles’ pride in the fact that he had taken us to the “brink of war” three times, to realize how close we came to World War III in those seven years. To those elements, who, as long ago as 1946, had advocated an atomic attack on Russia; to those who, like MacArthur, had wanted to extend the Korean War into a massive assault on China, the coming of Dulles to power was a unique opportunity to see their views put into practice. Professor Fleming points to two major reasons why Dulles was not able to push us over the “brink.” First, there was the restraining hand of President Eisenhower, whom Fleming credits with an earnest devotion to the cause of peace. President Eisenhower did not formulate foreign policy; this he left to his Secretary of State. He did, however, have to approve the policies that Dulles proposed. In most instances, Dulles had no trouble at all in winning the President’s support. Yet, fortunately, Eisenhower summoned the will to resist when Dulles threatened to lead us into a Third World War. Secondly, there was the refusal of our allies to follow our lead into what seemed to them certain destruction in a nuclear war. Once the Russians possessed nuclear weapons, ii became apparent that the great nations of Europe would be obliterated in the event of war. This agonizing fact turned even so resolute a proponent of the Cold War as Winston Churchill toward the cause of peace.

1954 and 1955 were crucial years in the development of the Cold War. At that point the Russians were about to catch up to the West in nuclear weaponry, and to achieve a “nuclear stalemate.” Hitherto the West could have attacked the Soviets without the prospect of incurring nuclear retaliation; after the point of “nuclear stalemate.” however, a war would incur mutual destruction. The preventive war advocates in the West had strived mightily to bring about a World War before this point would be reached. Fortunately, more sober minds prevailed, but now the “war party” was determined to make one more try. Once the nuclear stalemate was reached, a trend towards peace would doubtless set in. If the West were to achieve the destruction of the Soviets, it would have to strike right then, while our casualties might still be numbered “only” in the millions.

Secretary of State Dulles made two attempts in this short space of time to lead the West into War. The first occasion was the imminent defeat of France in the eight-year-old Indochinese war. Dulles was prepared to jump into the breach and save the day for the West. All-out intervention, including a nuclear attack oh China if she extended aid to the Vietminh, alone would save Southeast Asia from Communism. That such an endeavor would, at the very least, involve another long-drawn-out, Korean-type war did not bother Mr. Dulles in the least. Moreover, it is inconceivable that the Chinese would not have taken action in an area so vital to their security. Yet in this event, Dulles would calmly have ordered the nuclear bombardment of the Chinese mainland, an event which undoubtedly would have brought Russia into the war. In this calm manner, the Secretary of State was ready to put into motion the chain of events that would, in all probability, have started World War III. Professor Fleming points out that Dulles was frustrated in this endeavor largely by the unwillingness of Britain and France to risk a world war over Indochina. With the refusal of our allies to follow our lead, the United States was isolated and alone; Dulles was forced to halt at the “brink”.

A year later the “war party” succeeded in convincing the President that forceful measures were necessary if the Red Chinese were to be kept from sweeping the corrupt Chiang government off Formosa. Eisenhower went before Congress to secure a “blank check” which would enable him to take whatever measures he deemed necessary for the defense of Formosa.

In this charged situation, the desired authority was readily granted. It was to be but a short time before Secretary of State Dulles determined to cash this “check”. A massive campaign was launched to convince both the people and the President that the defense of Formosa must begin on the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, literally within the harbors of mainland China. That these tiny and totally indefensible offshore islands should be in and of themselves the cause of war seems strange indeed. Moreover, could we really expect the Chinese Communists to acquiesce in Western control of territory that was in every respect Chinese? Obviously not. The islands meant nothing to Dulles; the opportunity to obliterate China if she attempted to occupy them, however, was too precious to pass up. Once again we advanced to the “brink of war” in another Dulles-created crisis. The planes, with their deadly cargo of nuclear bombs, were all in readiness and the long-awaited reckoning with China seemed at last to be imminent. Yet calmer heads prevailed; virtually at the eleventh hour the tide was turned. Both the President and the overwhelming majority of the American people suddenly woke to the realization that we were perilously close to war; a war to be fought over two small island groups to which we had, by no stretch of the imagination, any claim at all. Professor Fleming states that the Formosa crisis at last ended the dominance of the “war party” over American foreign policy. Ever since the Korean War, the preventive war elements had been a powerful factor in determining our policies; now at last their hold on us was broken.

1955, the beginning of the great “thaw” in the Cold War, saw both East and West armed with nuclear weapons; it was increasingly apparent that some way would have to be found by which they could live together in peace - the alternative of nuclear war was unthinkable. For a number of years now the British government had been in the forefront of a movement for a conference at which the outstanding differences between East and West might be settled. The year 1955 was propitious for such a conference. There were, according to Professor Fleming, four major reasons which together produced this long awaited first summit conference. Firstly, “the need to get away from the balancing on the brink of atomic war in the Formosa Strait was urgent and immediate.”[48]Secondly, the need to win the upcoming British elections; “The only thing which could easily defeat Eden was popular frustration over the long delay in meeting the Russians at the summit.”[49] These two, though, were only the short-range reasons which led to the conference; long-range facts were involved as well. The United States wished to end the growing fear around the world that she might initiate a nuclear war. Finally, there was the above-mentioned stalemate in the atomic arms race. “This was the final compulsion which made it imperative for the President to meet Bulganin at Geneva.”[50] Fleming holds that President Eisenhower, in a few short days, did more to end the Cold War than had been done in the previous ten years. Eisenhower earnestly desired to end the Cold War, we are told, and to that end he made every effort. “All during the conference he had private talks with the Russians, convincing them firmly that he was a man to be trusted and that there would be no war while he was President.”[51] Nonetheless, the conference dealt only in vague generalities. The heads of state produced the proper atmosphere for a settlement of the Cold War, but it would take hard work at the lower levels to reverse the trend towards war, and to take advantage of the “thaw” that the summit conference had made possible. The lower levels of the United States government, including the powerful position of Secretary of State, however, remained in the hands of the “Cold Warriors”. Could we expect the sabre-rattling John Foster Dulles to work seriously for a lasting peace between East and West?

The year 1956 saw a continued thaw in the Cold War. In the Soviet Union there was the dramatic denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev, and strides toward a top to bottom liberalization of the regime. The Soviets undertook to reduce their armed forces unilaterally, while in the Eastern European satellites a trend developed towards moderation and reform, replacing the rigors of the Stalin era. Yet in the United States no real effort was made to carry the spirit of Geneva over to day-to-day policy decisions. Dulles still talked of “liberating” Eastern Europe, with the threat of war and the increased tensions that such talk entailed. American policy remained rigid, in striking contrast to the flexibility of Soviet foreign policy. Nevertheless, whether it wanted or not the United States was being dragged by events and the universal desire for peace towards an end of the Cold War,

Then, in October, a momentous event occurred which first halted and then reversed the trend toward peace. In Hungary, the new freedom of the post-Stalin days led to demands for the withdrawal of Russian troops, the release of political prisoners, and the assumption of the post of prime minister by the liberal Imre Nagy. Vast crowds of people jammed Parliament Square to press these demands upon the government. Soon, clashes broke out between the demonstrators and the secret police. In this emergency, the government called upon Russian troops to intervene and restore order. Instead, the enraged Hungarian people turned upon the Russian troops, and bitter fighting broke out. Five days later, the Soviet forces agreed to withdraw from Budapest. The Hungarian people had won acceptance for their demands. Moreover, the “liberals” in the Kremlin led by Khrushchev had won out over the Stalinists and were determined to accept a large degree of liberalization in the satellite countries. Fleming feels, and he cites impressive evidence to support this view, that the Kremlin was, up to this point, genuinely prepared to accept the results of the Hungarian revolution.

Moving with the tide of change, however, Nagy uncritically widened his government and announced that on this basis elections would soon be held. The Russians understandably found these decisions threatening. In the first election held after World War II, victory had gone to a coalition in which the Smallholders Party held the majority, but which included the Social Democratic, Communist, and Peasant parties. The democratic nature of the new Hungarian government was vitiated, however, by the entrance into the Smallholders’ Party of all the elements who yearned for the old regime, e.g. landlords, military officers, clerical nationalists, and fascists, all of whom had supported and benefited from the Horthy dictatorship. In spite of their defeat alongside their Nazi allies in the invasion of Russia, such elements had retained their influence. After a similar setback in 1919 under a short-lived Hungarian revolutionary republic, these same reactionary forces had regained control through their dominance of the military establishment. Thus, there bloomed the hope of re-creating a counter-revolutionary coup whenever Russian forces should be withdrawn from Hungary. A coup prepared by the rightist elements in the Smallholders’ Party was discovered in 1947 by the Soviet occupation authorities, who were faced with the threat of a return to power by the very elements that had led large armies in the devastating invasion of the Soviet Union. The Russian authorities in Hungary therefore demanded that these reactionary elements be expelled by the Smallholders’ Party, and this demand was fully supported by the other coalition parties, who well remembered what had befallen their predecessors upon the overthrow of the republic in 1919. The expelled elements continued to be represented in Parliament while the Smallholders’ Party continued to lead the coalition. The Soviet authorities and the coalition parties drew from their experience with the forestalled coup the lesson that upon the withdrawal of Soviet forces, moderate parties might again become the vehicle for the reactionaries to return to power.[52]

The Russians therefore realized that Nagy’s proclamation of elections, to be held precipitously following clashes with Soviet troops, would permit once more the return to political significance of the reactionary elements. These very elements had returned to the Hungarian political scene during the October, 1956 revolutionary distractions, and were forming about themselves support, not only from the military, but also among those unable to remember the realities of the Horthy regime. Cardinal Mindszenty, newly released from detention, was being seriously proposed as regent of the Hungarian State, thus sharply threatening the republican institutions. To prevent such an occurrence and to assure their security, the Russians felt compelled to resume their treaty responsibilities and once again prevent reactionary elements from entering the Hungarian government. Had the Hungarians been reasonable in their actions, as were the Poles and the Polish Cardinal Wyszynsky, they would have been left free to enjoy the success of their revolution. Instead, the revolution became anti-Russian and thus brought about the intervention of Soviet forces.[53]

Fleming, in his discussion of the reasons for the revolution’s becoming more and more extreme, points out that the United States-controlled Radio Free Europe played at least some part in producing this effect. Radio Free Europe incited the Hungarian people to take ever more unreasonable measures and to turn the revolution into an anti-Russian uprising, all the time holding out the promise of American aid and support. However, Professor Fleming feels that the role of the United States propaganda media was decidedly secondary. Here serious exception may be taken to Professor Fleming’s interpretation of events. The United States propaganda media played a real role in inciting the people to an anti-Russian frenzy; United States promises of support undoubtedly emboldened the Hungarians to take drastic steps which they never would have taken without confidence of United States aid.[54]

After these events in Hungary, the trend toward peace had been reversed and the Cold War was going full force once again. But, with Dulles’ death in 1959, the advocates of conflict between West and East lost their most effective spokesman. To this must be added the increasing desire among the peoples of the world to begin where they had left off at the Geneva summit conference, and this time to end the Cold War once and for all. Unfortunately, however, the Cold War is far from being concluded. In 1959, President Eisenhower, on his grand world tour, once again stirred the hopes of the world for peace. With the Khrushchev visit to the United States, the world at last seemed to be moving in the right direction once more. All was in waiting for the summit conference that met in Paris in May of 1960. Yet in the aftermath of the crisis caused by the American U-2 flight, the move toward peace had failed. Once again, those responsible for the making of day-to-day decisions had pushed the American people closer to increased tensions and hostility with the Soviet Union.

In the years since the publication of Fleming’s contribution to a thorough understanding of the Cold War, the crisis caused by American policies has increased rather than lessened. Even as this is written, explosives, napalm and poison gas are raining upon the innocent people of Vietnam, North and South. Professor Fleming’s impressive examinations of American policy in the Cold War have been continuing, and he has applied his searching analysis to this most recent area of world crisis, American policy in south-east Asia (Western Political Quarterly, March, 1965). Humanity now stands at the crossroads. The logic of the Cold War impels America onto one of two paths: either escalation upward to nuclear annihilation or repudiation of the Vietnam war and of United States imperialism. To that repudiation, the American people must now make their contribution.

1.D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1961) 2 vols., p. 18.

2.Ibid., p. 20.

3.Ibid., p. 48.

4.Ibid., pp. 196, 258.

5.Ibid., pp. 25, 94, 492.

6.Ibid., pp. 87-88, 94.

7.Ibid., p. 88.

8.Ibid., pp. 84-85.

9.Ibid., pp. 111-14.

10.Ibid., pp. 94-95.

11.Ibid., p. 102.

12.Ibid., p. 249.

13.Ibid., p. 252.

14.Ibid., p. 282.

15.Ibid., p. 281.

16.Ibid., p. 446.

17.Ibid., pp. 174-87.

18.Ibid., p. 419.

19.Ibid., pp. 419-20.

20.Ibid., pp. 420, 424.

21.Ibid., pp. 434-35.

22.Ibid., pp. 438-39.

23.Ibid., pp. 440-42.

24.Ibid., pp. 465-66, 444, 470.

25.Ibid., pp. 470, 474-76.

26.Ibid., pp. 443, 450-51, 462-65.

27.Ibid., p. 469.

28.Ibid., p. 474.

29.Ibid., p. 474.

30.Ibid., p. 469.

31.Ibid., pp. 444, 430, 442-45, 456.

32.Ibid., pp. 460-61.

33.Ibid., p. 506.

34.Ibid., p. 506, note 4.

35.Ibid., p. 656.

36. Ibid., p. 599.

37. Ibid., pp. 598-60.

38. Ibid., p. 654.

39.Ibid., pp. 595-96.

40.Ibid., p. 655.

41.Ibid., pp. 589-92.

42.Ibid., pp. 623, 614-21.

43.Ibid., pp. 622, 629-39.

44.Ibid., pp. 630-32.

45.Ibid., p. 626.

46.Ibid., pp. 626, 629.

47.Ibid., pp. 625, 627.

48.Ibid., p. 737.

49.Ibid., p. 738.

50.Ibid., p. 740.

51.Ibid., p. 751.

52.Ibid., pp. 257-60, 461-62.

53.Ibid., pp. 795-805.

54.Ibid., pp. 806-14.

LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal Of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

Autumn 1965

Vol. I No. 2

EDITORIALS

Fortune and American “Idealism”

Discovering the Ninth Amendment

CONRAD J. LYNN,

The Case of David Mitchell Versus The United States

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD,

Liberty and the New Left

REPRINT:

DANIEL WEBSTER,

On Conscription

Left and Right is published three times yearly by Left and Right, Inc., Box 395, Cathedral Station, New York, N.Y. 10025. Subscription price: $2.50. Single issues: 85c

EDITORIAL

Fortune and

American “Idealism”

Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, American foreign policy has been conducted with a smug and self-righteous hypocrisy perhaps unmatched by any nation in the history of mankind. But recently there have been signs that this may be changing, and that, at least in some areas, a brutal candour may increasingly come to reveal the naked reality beneath the glossy surface. While this will serve the cause of truth, the new frankness is not an unmixed blessing; for it may well mean that our rulers consider us so softened and deadened by decades of propaganda that we will accept any of the naked truth, however harsh, without a murmur of protest or indignation. And the rulers appear to be right.

The first step in the New Frankness was a striking innovation in the theory and practice of war propaganda. Until now, atrocity stories, whether true or manufactured, were always directed against the designated Enemy. But now the United States has pushed atrocities to a more advanced stage; it now publicizes and matter-of-factly releases to the world the news of atrocities for which it is responsible! These are, for example, the numerous pictures, spread around the world, of systematic torture of prisoners by our puppet troops in South Vietnam. As these edifying documents are released and published, no one in America seems to be interested, let alone protest. The acts of torture are accepted as facts of nature, or acts of God, like tornadoes or earthquakes. It was Graham Greene who first pointed out what this flood of pictures implies about the present moral insensitivity of the American people, or of the estimate of that insensitivity by the American rulers.

The latest step in the truth treatment has been the beginning of the acknowledgment, by the American Establishment, that the United States is now indeed an imperial nation. A country steeped in anti-colonial traditions, indeed born in a revolution that was the first successful war of national liberation in the history of the world, America has always denied that it could ever become an imperialist power. That could not happen here. But now the Establishment apparently believes that the American people are ready to face the harsh reality that the United States has become the imperial power in the world today.

First it was Henry Fairlie, an astute British observer coming from a country long experienced in Empire, who, in the great organ of the Establishment, the New York Times, gently chided the American people for not waking up to the fact of American imperialism. The Americans, he said in effect, should recognize the reality of imperialism, plan it systematically and openly, and. . . enjoy it. And now Fortune magazine in its August, 1965 issue, endorses the Fairlie article and carries the analysis even further.

The great fuel that powered the United States into its present world Empire, notes the Fortune editorial, was not so much profit or self-interest as “idealism.” It was “idealism” that led the United States to enter World War II against Germany and Japan; and it was “idealism” that changed the American course from support of national liberation movements against imperialism to their suppression. Belying its tradition and history of support of national revolutions, the United States, in Fortune’s quaint language, “fell heir to the onerous task of policing these shattered colonies.” In short, the United States fell heir to West European imperialism.

Yes, writes Fortune in its wisdom, this assumption of world Empire may be at bottom irrational, but Woodrow Wilson and then every president from FDR to LBJ has been propelled by this same “idealism” to assert America’s hegemony over the rest of the world. Or, as Fortune revealingly puts it, “the U. S. is the engine of mankind and the rest of the world is the train”--or, rather, the engine of the “free world”, since the Communist world has been so ungrateful as to resist the blandishments of American “hauling power.” Here it is instructive to note that Harry Truman, in his day thoroughly hated by the American Right, is lauded by this organ of the Right-wing of the Establishment for his crucial role in generating American imperialism in the early post-war years. Truman’s “place in history grows larger as our perspective lengthens.”

Surveying America’s world empire from its lofty perch, Fortune considers each world area in turn, looking forward with enthusiasm to many decades of America’s “deep involvement in the fate of many nations.” In Asia, America must gird its loins for “some fantastic ordeal”; America is “again at war” there, and Fortune makes crystal-clear that it regards our real opponent as China, and believes that a full-scale war with China might happily be in the offing. Vietnam and perhaps China are the “testing ground” of American will and American “idealism”. In Europe, notes Fortune, we face an equally prolonged test, one that is “more subtle and sophisticated.” Here the “test” is that after America idealistically rebuilt Western Europe, the Europeans have been ungrateful enough to use their new prosperity to repel American business. This is especially true of Gaullist France. But we note with relief that the United States will not have to go to war with France; here U. S. businessmen should stop offending French sensibilities and “adjust their tactics” to mollify these petulant people.

Turning its buzzing searchlight to the south, Fortune reaches the height of its exercise in unconscious buffoonery. Here, the desideratum is how to prevent all further Cubas, but the wise strategists of the American Empire have apparently not yet come up with the requisite wholly-rounded strategy. We “are still groping for a strategy and a style.” The rushing of the Marines to Santo Domingo was useful, of course, but America needs moral force in Latin America to offset Communist propaganda. And the Marines in Santo Domingo, “however useful in the urgent circumstances”, somehow do not provide the sufficient moral force needed “in building the kind of just and humane order to the south that our idealism conceives.” For that kind of just, humane, and idealistic order, the Marines must be supplemented by. . . for example, the Peace Corps, which provides the necessary veneer of altruism to American actions. No better confirmation could be found for the Communist charge that the Peace Corps and similar institutions are the sugar-coating for the bitter reality of American world rule.

Fortune concludes its revealing editorial by reminding the naive that all this mess of ideals and justice and humanity can only be imposed by force, and that the American people must pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, forever and ever to this task: and thus meet the “unending test of American idealism.”

In a sense, Fortune is right about the role of “idealism”. For the State and its rulers could never get away with their depredations were it not for “idealistic” apologia spun by their favored intellectuals. The rhetoric of idealism provides the sophisticated cover for the plunder underneath; and it also spurs the intellectuals themselves to greater heights of despotism. In recent years, an increasing number of writers have begun to dissect the mischievous role played by what Harry Elmer Barnes has aptly termed the “totalitarian liberals” in the promotion of American expansionism and imperialism. These acute analysts include the historian William Appleman Williams and such of his students as James Weinstein, Ronald Radosh and Martin Sklar, and, on the Vietnam war by John McDermott, editor of Viet-Report. Totalitarian liberals have a great urge to “do good to” other people, preferably all over the globe, to plan their lives for them, and, therefore inevitably, to tell them sternly what they must do and force them to do it. All this may be summed up in Isabel Paterson’s pungent phrase, “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine.” As Mrs. Paterson puts it:

The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.

But he is confronted by two awkward facts; first, that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people, if unperverted, positively do not want to be ‘done good’ by the humanitarian. . . Of course, what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.[1]

The innocent people of Vietnam are, day after day, feeling the effects of the deadly “guillotine” blessed by the serried ranks of American “idealism.”

1.Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943), p. 241.

EDITORIAL

Discovering the

Ninth Amendment

Every clause and article of the United States Constitution has been studied, pored over, and interpreted countless times--every one, that is, but the Ninth Amendment, which until very recently, has stood in lonely splendor, unacknowledged, uninterpreted, ignored. And yet, since it is part of the Bill of Rights, one would think it deserving of some attention. The Ninth Amendment states:

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This crucial yet neglected clause says, then, that beyond the specific rights guaranteed in the other clauses and amendments (freedom of speech, press, due process, etc.) there are other rights retained by the people, which the federal government--and state governments--may not infringe.

At the very least, the Ninth Amendment provides explicitly a wide-open door for judicial “activists” to affirm individual rights that government may not violate. Those literalist jurists, who believe that judges must be mere file clerks applying the letter of the law or the Constitution and not straying beyond that letter, are here hoist upon their own petard. For the letter of the Ninth Amendment is an open invitation, indeed a command, to affirm numerous individual rights which the government may not violate: and these are affirmations which only the judges can make.

Instead of exploring and developing the rights guaranteed in the Ninth Amendment, the courts have, until this year, buried it thoroughly as simply a pale shadow of the more familiar Tenth Amendment, which states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” And since the Tenth Amendment had been reduced to a meaningless truism by construing it as saying merely that all powers not granted to the Federal or State governments are reserved to the states or the people, the Ninth Amendment had been implicitly eliminated as well. But the Ninth Amendment does not say that all powers not granted are reserved to the people; it says positively that there are rights which the people do retain beyond the Bill of Rights and which cannot be infringed by anyone, in short by either federal or state governments. What, then, are those rights?

To anyone who understands the terminology of the eighteenth century, it is clear in general what those rights are and what they must be: the natural rights of each individual. And these natural rights in essence mean that every individual has the inherent right to dispose of his person and his property as he sees fit, with no infringement on that right by government. Thus, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he sneered at the activist judges of his own day for allegedly enshrining the social philosophy of Spencer’s Social Statics in the Constitution, did not realize that the last laugh may well be on him: for that is just about what the Ninth Amendment does imply.

But the task of unfolding and applying the unenumerated and inherent natural rights of the individual belongs to the courts; and until this year the courts, having conveniently reduced the Ninth Amendment to a mere repetition of the Tenth, had never bothered to decide a single case on the basis of this Amendment. Here was truly a gross dereliction of judicial duty.

Then, this year, in the important case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the United States Supreme Court confronted the infamous Connecticut law prohibiting the dissemination and use of birth control devices. Here was evidently a monstrous law, a clear-cut invasion of the most intimate and personal area of liberty and action of the individual, an invasion of the most deep-seated right of privacy. But under what clause, specifically, could the law be declared unconstitutional? Not under the Fourteenth Amendment, which has done such heavy duty as applying the first eight amendments to state action, for the anti-birth control law does not violate any of those enumerated areas of freedom. In response to this problem, Mr. Justice Douglas and Mr. Justice Goldberg, in one of the monumental advances of constitutional law, discovered the totally forgotten Ninth Amendment, and realized that that Amendment provides for an inherent, and therefore constitutional, right of marital privacy which cannot be invaded by any arm of government.

Bennett B. Patterson, in the only treatise ever written on the Ninth Amendment, eloquently rediscovered and emphasized its meaning as a general declaration of inherent individual rights, and predicted that someday the right of privacy would be acknowledged as such an inherent right.[1] Now the Supreme Court was suddenly ready to make just such an advance.

Mr. Justice Douglas, in his majority opinion, laid down on June 7, 1965, affirmed the existence of an inviolable “zone of privacy” around the individual, a zone that existed as a right of man before the Constitution:

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights--older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.

More explicit in resting his decision on the Ninth Amendment was the concurring opinion of Mr. Justice Goldberg, agreed to by Mr. Justice Brennan and Chief Justice Warren. Goldberg affirmed his decision that the Connecticut law “unconstitutionally intrudes upon the right of marital privacy”. Resting his decision largely on the Ninth Amendment, Goldberg continued:

The concept of liberty protects those personal rights that are fundamental, and is not confined to the specific terms of the Bill of Rights. My conclusion that the concept of liberty is not so restricted and that it embraces the right of marital-privacy though that right is not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution is supported both by numerous decisions of the Court. . . and by the language and history of the Ninth Amendment. In reaching the conclusion that the right of marital privacy is protected. . . the Court refers to the Ninth Amendment. . . I add these words to emphasize the relevance of that amendment to the Court’s holding. . .

The Ninth Amendment to the Constitution may be regarded by some as a recent discovery, but since 1791 it has been a basic part of the constitution which we are sworn to uphold. To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment and to give it no effect whatsoever. Moreover, a judicial construction that this fundamental right is not protected by the Constitution because it is not mentioned in explicit terms by one of the first eight amendments or elsewhere in the Constitution would violate the Ninth Amendment. . .

Rather, as the Ninth Amendment expressly recognizes, there are fundamental personal rights such as this one, which are protected from abridgement by the Government though not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. . .

In sum, I believe that the right of privacy in the marital relation is fundamental and basic--a personal right “retained by the people” within the meaning of the Ninth Amendment. Connecticut cannot constitutionally abridge this fundamental right. . .

In dissent, Mr. Justice Black declared the rediscovery of the Ninth Amendment “shocking doctrine”, and Mr. Justice Stewart repeated the old canard that the Ninth Amendment simply repeated the meaning of the Tenth. “Until today,” wrote the bewildered Stewart, “no member of this court has ever suggested that the Ninth Amendment meant anything else.” Correct, but conservatives will simply have to get used to the discovery, at long last, of a highly radical and potentially explosive clause which happens to be part of their cherished original Constitution.

What, then, are the standards that the judges must use in discovering and setting forth the fundamental rights protected by the Ninth Amendment? Mr. Justice Goldberg, in his opinion, finds them in the “traditions and collective conscience of our people” which can determine whether a principle is “so rooted. . . as to be ranked as fundamental.” But if these rights are, as the framers intended, natural rights, they are of much broader scope. Indeed, they may be so construed as to restrict government to Mr. Spencer’s prescriptions and thus virtually to eliminate governmental power altogether. Thus, Lysander Spooner, the only constitutional lawyer in history who was also an individualist anarchist, wrote as follows of the Ninth Amendment:

What then, were these “other rights”, that had not been “enumerated”; but which were nevertheless “retained by the people”?

Plainly they were men’s natural “rights”; for these are the only “rights” that “the people” ever had, or, consequently, that they could “retain.”

And as no attempt is made to enumerate all these “other rights”. . . and as no exceptions are made of any of them, the necessary, the legal, the inevitable inference is, that they were all “retained”: and that Congress should have no power to violate any of them.

Now, if Congress and the courts had attempted to obey this amendment, as they were constitutionally bound to do, they would soon have found that they had really no lawmaking power whatever left to them; because they would have found that they could make no law at all, of their own invention, that would not violate merits natural rights.[2]

1.Bennett B. Patterson, The Forgotten Ninth Amendment (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955). For an appreciation of the importance of the Griswold decision in discovering the Ninth Amendment, see James D. Carroll, “The Forgotten Amendment”, The Nation (September 6, 1965), pp. 121-122.

2.Lysander Spooner, A Letter to Grover Cleveland (Boston: B. R. Tucker, 1880), p. 97.

The Case of David Mitchell Versus The United States

by CONRAD J. LYNN

David H. Mitchell is a young man charged, and now convicted, in Federal Court with failing to report for induction into the armed forces. Refusing to cooperate with the system by becoming an officially recognized conscientious objector, Mitchell decided to turn the court proceedings into an indictment of his accusers, the United States government. Hence, in a profound sense, this was a case of Mitchell versus the United States rather than vice versa. In his brief on behalf of Mitchell, the noted civil libertarian lawyer Conrad Lynn presented an indictment of the United States government on moral, political, legal, and constitutional grounds in the course of defending Mitchell’s refusal to make himself part of a war and a foreign policy which he abhors.

David Mitchell was convicted and sentenced to a prison term of eighteen months to five years plus a $5,000 fine; the case is up for appeal, although for various reasons it appears that the appeal will rest on narrower grounds than does the brief.

The essence of Conrad Lynn’s brief for Mitchell, omitting some technical legal points, follows below.

In 1961, shortly after his eighteenth birthday, David H. Mitchell 3rd, the defendant, then a student at Brown University and a resident of New Canaan, Connecticut, registered under the Universal Military Training and Service Act. However, the defendant’s subsequent developing consciousness of world events resulted in his active protest against the military posture of the United States government. In August 1961, his local board, number 17 in Connecticut, sent him a Classification Questionnaire. Because the defendant was involved in an act of civil disobedience in protest against the construction and deployment of nuclear-armed Polaris submarines, he did not know of this Questionnaire until his release from jail. After considerable reflection, he decided that, for political and moral reasons, he must disaffiliate himself from the conscription system and, as reply to the Questionnaire, so notified local board 17 by letter of October 8, 1961.

The local board responded by sending: 1) a Delinquency Notice (dated October 10, 1961) for failure to return the Questionnaire; 2) a Notice of Classification; 3) a letter (dated October 17, 1961) advising that a “registrant’s classification depends upon information supplied by the registrant.” Reiterating his disaffiliation, defendant sent a Statement of Selective Service Disaffiliation together with a three-page letter elaborating his reasons, both dated December 3, 1961. There was no response to the defendant from any part of the Selective Service System subsequently. More than two years were to elapse before the Selective Service System was again to contact the defendant.

During that time, the defendant actively maintained his opposition to the draft by helping to initiate and by participating in the End The Draft committee. In its initiating statement, of which the defendant is a signatory, End The Draft states, in part:

“In the tradition of Thoreau and the principles of Individual Guilt and Individual Responsibility established in the Nuremberg trials and in the first session of the United Nations, we assert the right and obligation of the individual to protest and dissociate himself from these criminal preparations.”

The Delinquency Notice for failure to return the Classification Questionnaire was not rescinded nor acted upon nor again referred to by the Selective Service System.

The next correspondence from local board 17, a Current Information Questionnaire, was dated January 31, 1964. Use of the questionnaire apparently meant that the defendant’s classification was being considered anew although such was not stated. An accompanying notice listed verifying certificates required in areas in which deferment rights are granted. The defendant replied in letter of February 10, 1964 that his position was unchanged. He stated, in part:

“I realize that I could employ means to gain exemption from induction, but this does not interest me. My purpose is not to be classified quietly within the draft system, but rather to oppose the draft. While classification might suit some sort of individual ‘convenience,’ my acceptance of classification would be a negation of my social responsibility.

“I oppose the draft, not as something wrong for just me or wrong for only certain people, but as something wrong for the peace and survival of the world. Selective Service is the criminal in this case as can be judged by American militarism throughout the world--from Cuba to Panama to South Vietnam and by our basing of policies on nuclear war. I refuse to cooperate in any way which would support the continuance of such activities. I certainly wouldn’t have worked in a Nazi concentration camp just because I would not have to tend the ovens or the gas but could be a guard or a clerk. Rather, as I am doing with the draft and the militarism it contributes to, I would have dissociated from such wrong and worked against it.”

In addition, he enclosed the Statement of End The Draft for the Senate Armed Services Committee, dated March 12, 1963, in which they “urge(d) this committee to recommend that the draft extension bill be defeated and, thereby, to accept its responsibility in approaching world peace and the survival of the human race.” The defendant received no reply.

Almost two months later, however, he received Order (dated April 2, 1964) to Report for Armed Forces Physical Examination (scheduled for April 28, 1964). True to his position, he did not report. Then, by Delinquency Notice of May 4, 1964, he was declared delinquent for failure to report. As with the previous Delinquency Notice, the Selective Service System did not pursue a resolution of the matter in the courts. However, unlike the prior situation, the local board now persisted. By induction order of May 18, 1964, the defendant was ordered to report for induction on June 10, 1964.

The defendant responded by writing an article entitled “Challenge The Draft” and sending a copy of same, as it appeared in downdraft, Vol. I, No. 3, May 1964, to local board 17. His lawyer notified the local board of his retention as counsel for defendant by End The Draft. On June 10, 1964, the defendant did not report for induction.

However, the government did not prosecute. By letter of August 18, 1964, local board 17 notified defendant that his May 4th, 1964 “delinquency status was removed,” his “classification reopened and considered anew,” and, hence, prepared for a third cycle of attempts to have the defendant acquiesce to selective service procedures.

Bypassing the use of questionnaires, local board 17 sent another Order (dated September 25, 1964) to Report for Armed Forces Physical Examination (scheduled for October 21, 1964). Refusal of defendant to report resulted in a Notice of Delinquency, dated November 10, 1964, which cites November 10, 1964 as the date the defendant became delinquent. There followed an exchange of correspondence between the defendant and local board 17 in which the defendant sought to clarify the sequence of events and in which he bade the local board attend to his counsel’s request for copies of all material sent defendant. The local board referred defendant’s correspondence to State Headquarters of the Selective Service System in Connecticut. The content of the exchange escalated also as the defendant learned of discrepancies of which he had not otherwise been notified; the defendant challenged the Selective Service System for infringements on his right of defense.

In the midst of this exchange, the local board again sent defendant an Order (dated December 14, 1964) to Report for Induction (scheduled for January 11, 1965). Defendant’s firm position of individual responsibility against his government’s crimes against peace, its crimes against humanity, and its war crimes, again prevented him from obeying this order. His refusal to obey this order is the basis of this indictment. Pursuant to Rule 12 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the defendant moves to dismiss.

POINT I

The draft call is constitutionally invalid.

Justification for the draft call cannot simply be found in the text of the Universal Military Training and Service Act. Unless that act conforms to the supreme law of the land it is of no force and effect. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U. S. 137.

While the defendant consistently maintains that it is macabre understatement to characterize murders and atrocities as unconstitutional-he submits that the draft call is in violation of treaties by which the United States is bound. It is also in violation of the peaceful intent of the Constitution:

“. . . the genius and character of our institutions are peaceful and the power to declare war was not conferred upon Congress for the purpose of aggression or aggrandizement, but to enable the general government to vindicate by arms, if it should become necessary, its own rights and the rights of its citizens.” Fleming et al. v. Page, 9 How. 603.

This conscription act has been upheld as within the power of Congress in Gara v. United States, 340 U. S. 857 (1950), by an equally divided court. It must not be overlooked that this decision was made at the beginning of the Korean War. The decision was rendered October 23, 1950. The Korean War began June 25, 1950. It is inconceivable that the court would have divided evenly unless it was troubled by the fact that Congress had not exercised its responsibility to declare war. U. S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 11. The justification for bypassing the cited provision was the contention that the security of the United States was placed in desperate peril by the alleged aggression of a Communist power, North Korea, against South Korea. However, the United States had occupied South Korea on September 8, 1945 with an army under the command of General John R. Hodges. Prior thereto and after the Japanese surrender in August, 1945, the Korean people by democratic methods set up a provisional government for the whole of Korea. The United States military government proceeded to break up this government and ordered that it be disbanded in South Korea. It was unable to enforce its will in the northern part of Korea in 1945 because troops of the Soviet Union supported the government of Northern Korea.

“The United States Military Government seized all the former Japanese state and privately owned properties and enterprises constituting the bulk of the wealth of that area. . . This seizure and retention of the bulk of the wealth of the country prevented the rehabilitation of the Korean economy. “The acts of the United States in regard to Korea were in violation of the assurances contained in the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations. They were also in violation of the third Clause of the Atlantic Charter by which the United States assured the people of the world, including the people of Korea, that after the war it would respect the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they would live.” Answer, U. S. v Farmer, U. S. District Court, Middle Dist. of Tenn. Civil Action No. 2203 (1956).”

The 1950 Korean action was a direct outgrowth of the announced decision of President Truman (The Truman Doctrine, March 12, 1947) to block by force any revolution anywhere in the world which the United States Government did not like. (See D. F. Fleming, “Cold War and Its Origins,” pp. 446-7.) This country was established by armed revolution. The government of France openly supported the American Revolution with its troops and navy. Historically peoples have won their independence throughout the world by armed revolt. The doctrine that the United States executive seeks now to impose upon the world would brand as enemies of civilization those British and other European intellectuals who came to the aid of the Greeks in their fight for independence against the Turks in the beginning of the 19th Century. It would condemn to moral obloquy the volunteers who came to the aid of the Spanish Republic when it was being crushed by the twin fascisms of Italy and Germany in the prelude of the Second World War.

The Cold War Doctrine of every President since Truman - the practice of armed unilateral intervention at the whim of the chief executive - has effectively nullified the constitutional provision reserving the power to declare war in the elected congressional representatives of the people. The barbarous war being waged now by the United States forces in Vietnam and the bloody intervention in Santo Domingo are only the latest examples of this legally and morally indefensible policy.

The Selective Service System has become the chief instrument for enabling the government to maintain huge armed forces in being for the implementation of its Cold War practices. It is true that a minority of the men in service are draftees. But the threat of conscription makes many men volunteer in order to complete a term of military service and thus no longer to be eligible for drafting.

“The blackmail aspects of the draft were bluntly admitted during the 1959 House Armed Services Committee hearings by Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles G. Finucane who stressed the value of the draft as a threat in encouraging enlistments. . .

“We are criminal when we dominate or threaten to dominate small nations, both in terms of the people’s right to self-determination (e.g. Cuba, South Vietnam) and in terms of the possibility of guerrilla aggression escalating into nuclear war. “The draft is a basic support for such criminality. It forces our country’s people to accept war as a sane, normal function of world relations by making national policy of the military subjugation of our young men and by conditioning them, in the services to the cold war. It allows government manipulation of world tensions by the arbitrary interruption of civilian lives and arbitrary increases in the size of the draft (e.g. President Kennedy’s sudden draft increase during the Berlin crisis). It is used to give our economy the easy war-preparations way out by turning unemployed youth into soldiers, selecting, equipping, feeding, training, housing them--treating youth as so much grist for the war preparations mill. . .” Statement of End The Draft Committee, “Extension of the Draft and Related Authorities,” H. R. 2438 (S. 846), March 12, 1963, pages 72, 73.

By refusing to obey the order for induction from his local draft board David Mitchell acts in the highest tradition of the responsible citizen of a democracy. He is prepared to risk his freedom and his future in an effort to halt the criminal course of the government. He summons all other citizens to join in this life-and-death struggle.

POINT II

The individual must dissociate himself from the war crimes of his government.

The defendant’s fundamental concern is with the nature of the summons to military service. The defendant holds that the draft board, as an agent of the United States government, has no right to order him to take up arms and fight in the unjust wars in which this country is now engaged. He realizes that there are a variety of “acceptable” methods for him to get out of serving. But he feels that, while these may serve his convenience, they would not serve his conscience. Instead of neglecting his individual responsibility, the defendant refuses to cooperate with his government’s militarism, and he raises a fundamental challenge to United States policies.

The defendant raises the parallel of Hitler’s Germany where the Germans submitted to the call for law and order and neglected to take a stand on the criminal content the laws protected. He insists that empty law is the arsenal of criminal rationalization-and that if anything makes law meaningful instead of empty, it is the subordination of law to truth. The defendant reminds the court of that great movie, “Judgment at Nuremberg,” in which the criminals on trial were judges who had administered laws devoid of all morality, laws which built a protecting shell of technicalities around Nazi crimes. The defendant wonders how convincing he would have been in Germany.

The defendant can cite a history of unjust American laws-from pre-revolutionary American laws through laws of slavery to today’s laws which perpetuate the brutalization and oppression of the Negro people and drive the American Indians from their culture and land in a continuing policy of genocide. He asserts that he will have no part in any of this.

While the defendant maintains a selective position toward legality, he maintains a moral position that is uncompromising. As he reminded his draft board by letter of December 3, 1961, he now reminds this court of the words of Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay taxes for the Mexican War: “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”

The defendant holds that the United States stands accused before the world on the very principles which it promulgated in the fight against and in the punishment of fascism. Unlike the non-conscience of the German people under Hitler, the defendant is remaining responsible to moral principles and the principle of individual guilt and responsibility. The defendant maintains that the government has no right to compel him to goose-step to U. S. crimes.

POINT III

The United States is committing crimes against peace.

The accused here is convinced that the United States government, its President, its military chiefs, its Secretary of Defense, its Secretary of State, its chief of the C. I. A. and its chief of the U. S. I. A., have been and are engaged in violations of international law and in war crimes deeply offensive to mankind generally and, in justice, should be brought to trial.

The conduct of the United States in Vietnam is a prime case in point. After the Japanese were expelled from the Indo-Chinese peninsula during the Second World War, the French were reinstated in their former colonies with the help of the United States. Ho Chi Minh, leader of the nationalist Vietnamese forces, began a struggle for independence. The French entered into an agreement with the nationalists recognizing their right to territorial integrity which they broke almost as soon as made. The nationalist forces immediately embarked on a long, bitter, bloody fight for independence. The United States government supported the French with billions of dollars in the form of material supplies, war equipment and money. Finally, at Dien Bien Phu, the French were disastrously defeated. Some of their American supporters had recommended the use of the atom bomb as a last desperate expedient, but some semblance of sanity prevailed and the world survived. The French signed a treaty with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on July 20, 1954. On July 21, 1954, this treaty was endorsed by a declaration of the Geneva Conference consisting of the representatives of Cambodia, the Republic of Vietnam, France, Laos, Communist China, the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States. At the last moment the United States representative refused to sign. However, he appended a statement for his government at the end of the Final Declaration of Geneva Conference which reads, in part, as follows:

“The Government of the United States being resolved to devote its efforts to the strengthening of peace in accordance with the principles and purposes of the United Nations takes note of the agreements concluded at Geneva on July 20 and 21, 1954. . . declares with regard to the aforesaid agreements and paragraphs that (i) it will refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb them, in accordance with Article 2 (4) of the Charter of the United Nations dealing with the obligations of members to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force; and (ii) it would view any renewal of the aggression in violation of the aforesaid agreements with grave concern and as seriously threatening international peace and security. . .

“In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure that they are conducted fairly.” From full text in “The Minority of One,” June 1965, Vol. VII, No. 6 (67), pages 21-25.

Article I of the Geneva Agreement fixed a “provisional military demarcation line” roughly at the 17th parallel, north of which the Peoples Army of Viet-Nam would withdraw and south of it the forces of the French Union. The major purpose was to allow for the orderly withdrawal of the French Army from the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Neither in the Agreement itself or in the Appended Statement of the United States was there any contemplation of a separate nation of South Vietnam. On the contrary, Article 14 of the Agreement states:

“(a) Pending the general elections which will bring about the unification of Viet-Nam, the conduct of civil administration in each regrouping zone shall be in the hands of the party whose forces are to be regrouped there in virtue of the present Agreement.”

In fact, the Geneva Conference explicitly programmed general elections for July 1956 to ensure peace and the free expression of national will.

“6. The Conference recognizes that the essential purpose of the agreement relating to Viet-Nam is to settle military questions with a view to ending hostilities and that the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary. The Conference expresses its conviction that the execution of the provisions set out in the present declaration and in the agreement on the cessation of hostilities creates the necessary basis for the achievement in the near future of a political settlement in Viet-Nam.

“7. The Conference declares that, so far as Viet-Nam is concerned, the settlement of political problems, effected on the basis of respect for the principles of independence, unity and territorial integrity, shall permit the Viet-Namese people to enjoy the fundamental freedoms, guaranteed by democratic institutions established as a result of free general elections by secret ballot. In order to ensure that sufficient progress in the restoration of peace has been made, and that all the necessary conditions obtain for free expression of the national will, general elections shall be held in July 1956, under the supervision of an international commission composed of representatives of the Member States of the International Supervisory Commission, referred to in the agreement on the cessation of hostilities. Consultations will be held on this subject between the competent representative authorities of the two zones from 20 July 1955 onwards.” Final Declaration with regard to Geneva Agreement, from full text in “The Minority of One,” supra.

The subsequent history of United States involvement in Viet-Nam has been one of continual and ever-broadening violation of the 1954 Geneva Agreement, as well as other commitments to international law (Kellogg-Briand Pact, Atlantic Charter, U. N. Charter). By attempting to impose upon the VietNamese a permanent division of their country, the U. S. embarked on a policy of contempt for the principles of independence, unity and territorial integrity. The United States set up SEATO and placed South Viet-Nam under its “protective cover,” although South Viet-Nam was not a separate state and was prohibited by the Geneva Agreement from such alliances. With the French we had attempted to bolster the exiled Emperor, Bao Dai, but failing there, the C. I. A. groomed Diem as the next puppet dictator. Diem was supplied with funds and aid from the U. S. as he assumed authoritarian control and refused consultations on elections to unify the whole of Viet-Nam. That the U. S. did not want general elections to ascertain the people’s will in Viet-Nam - for fear that “. . . possibly 80% of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh” - is admitted by the then President Eisenhower in his book “Mandate for Change.”

The determination of successive United States governments to frustrate the will of the Viet-Namese people lies at the heart of all the illegal actions of our governing authorities since that period. In Viet-Nam, the government is attempting to subjugate by force a people which has been fighting for independence for more than twenty years against Japan, France and now the United States. As with its previous interventions in China, Korea, the 1954 overthrow of the Guatemala government, etc., the U. S. is acting in the face of the same internal aspirations that it had to admit existed after its failure to dominate the Chinese people:

“The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces, which this country tried to influence but could not.” State Department White Paper on Relations With China, July 30, 1949, page 402.

After the blockage of 1956 elections to reunify Viet-Nam, the U. S. backed Ngo Dinh Diem in his repression of dissidents by what are commonly referred to as “manhunts” throughout South Viet-Nam. As resistance to Diem formed, the U. S. increased its intervention with what were first called “American advisers,” who aided in a program of “pacification” of South Viet-Nam by bombing and burning villages and crops, and placing the population in concentration camps. Diem was finally executed by his own followers, and since then South Viet-Nam has gone through no less than ten governments as the U. S. scurries to give some appearance of legality to its open aggression. Even in the face of student and Buddhist protests within the city of Saigon itself during the last two years the United States has increased its intervention by committing to open combat upwards of 150,000 U. S. troops and massive bombing of both the southern and northern parts of Viet-Nam and areas of Laos.

All of this is prohibited by Geneva Agreement prohibitions against the introduction of fresh troops, military personnel, arms and munitions and military bases, specifically emphasizing any “. . . military bases under the control of a foreign state. . .” As if the facts were not enough to show American policy as the reimplementation of Nazi Germany’s policies of world domination by force, the words of our ruler give emphasis. Johnson stated to American students in February 1965 that he “would like to see them develop as much fanaticism about the U. S. political system as young nazis did about their system during the war.” (N. Y. Times, February 6, 1965.) And the latest U. S. imposed rulers in South Viet-Nam give loud voice to such advice by act and word. The newest head of the government in Saigon, Ky, stated, when asked who his heroes were, “I have only one-Hitler.” (London Daily Mirror, July 4, 1965. Also see London Sunday Times, January 10, 1965.)

The United States stands nakedly revealed as an imperialist power determined to maintain, at whatever cost, a colonialist outpost on the mainland of Asia. It is clearly guilty, as defined by the Charter of the International Military Charter at Nuremberg, of crimes against peace for “. . . planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances. . .” The obviously immoral and illegal position of this government is emphasized by its refusal to submit the controversy to the United Nations.

Nor is the role of the U. S. in Viet-Nam an isolated example of government-ordered crimes against peace. The sudden dispatch of more than 20,000 marines to the tiny nation of the Dominican Republic this spring demonstrated again the utter contempt our present government has for international law and its own solemn word. This action is reminiscent of the U. S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Our gunboat diplomacy has long been a loathsome familiarity to Latin Americans.

In Santo Domingo, when the United States was not physically occupying it, a puppet dictator ruled at the behest of this government. After the overthrow of Trujillo a democratic regime was briefly installed by the people. A liberal constitution was adopted in 1963. But the elected President, Juan Bosch, was not pliable enough for powerful financial interests in this country, so a military coup was arranged and Bosch was sent to Puerto Rico in exile.

A popular uprising broke out this spring and Bosch was summoned home to resume his Presidency, but, just as the revolutionists were about to triumph, President Johnson intervened to “stop communism.” There is considerable evidence that the American Ambassador ordered the bombing of the capital city, resulting in the loss of thousands of lives, just before the United States soldiers landed.

American intervention and domination of foreign lands takes place around the world, from Viet-Nam and Santo Domingo to U. S. paid mercenaries in the form of Cuban exile pilots (see N. Y. Times, July 17, 1964, p. 1) and “rescue missions” in the Congo to U. S. sponsored juntas and dictators with their U. S. trained armies and U. S. military missions for counter insurgency. The Johnson Doctrine, which this accused has been ordered to take up arms to support, requires the United States be the final bulwark of reaction everywhere in the world. The defendant is performing a duty in refusing to become a robot in uniform to enforce this savage pax Americana.

POINT IV

United States authorities and their agents are committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Second World War was the second war of annihilation of this century. In extent and intention it dwarfed the First World War. Not only was a nearly successful experiment made in exterminating an entire race of people but the deliberate slaughter of noncombatants in cities was made a deliberate pattern of policy. The Germans began this latter practice at Guernica, Lidice and Coventry. But the United States perfected it in large-scale massacre at Dresden and ignored a proffered Japanese offer of peace to wreak the unprecedented havoc and horror of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (See, Gar Alperovitz, “Atomic Diplomacy,” 1965.)

Small wonder then that the veterans of this conflict do not hesitate to apply torture, terror and callous slaughter in order to extinguish the spirit of self-determination in the Viet-Namese people! Let us note a few examples!

Extensive raids on Viet-Nam peasant villages have been carried out in an effort to “pacify” the villagers by burning crops and homes and forcing the people into government concentration camps in scorched earth operations. Homer Bigart wrote in the March 29, 1962 New York Times concerning such an operation:

“The government was able to persuade only seventy families to volunteer resettlement. The 135 other families in the half dozen settlements were herded forcibly from their homes. . . Some families were able to carry away beds, tables and benches before their homes were burned. Others had almost nothing but the clothes on the backs. A young woman stood expressionless as she recounted how the troops burned the families’ two tons of rice.”

New York Herald Tribune Dispatch from Saigon stated on May 23, 1965 that “. . . The marines set crops on fire and burned or dynamited huts in a scorched earth operation.”

Jack Langguth writing for the June 6, 1965 edition of the New York Times reported on the results of a raid by United States planes, dropping napalm bombs on Viet-Namese villages: The air force reported that the raid killed 500 Viet Cong guerrillas. But Langguth said:

“The American contention is that they were Vietcong soldiers. But three out of four patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese Hospital afterward for burns from napalm, or jellied gasoline, were village women.”

Senator Wayne Morse speaking in the United States Senate on June 7, 1965 charged:

“One who listens to the President. . . would think we were killing no one in North Vietnam. . . If anyone says we can bomb munition centers, bridges, transportation centers, terminal centers and railroad yards and not kill human beings, he is misleading the American people. . . Of course we are killing North Vietnamese. We are killing thousands in South Vietnam. . . The Defense Department keeps and publishes all the figures of killings and casualties in the south committed by the Vietcong. But they tell nothing of the South Vietnamese civilians we are killing and maiming with our napalm and our strafing and our artillery. . . The period of this war will not be a proud chapter in their country’s history for future American boys and girls to read.”

And again speaking on the Senate floor on June 15, 1965, Morse charged:

“It is our power and our money that continue the war in Vietnam. It is our napalm that burns the people of Vietnam and that destroys their meager possessions. I do not know of any weapon, or terror of the Vietcong that has destroyed as much in South Vietnam as U. S. aircraft have destroyed, all in the name of benevolent persuasion.”

Even Senator Mansfield, the administration floor leader reports his revulsion at Republican support of the President that “can only amount to an indiscriminate slaughter of Vietnamese by air and naval bombardment-a slaughter of combatants and non-combatants alike, of friend and foe alike.” New York Times, July 2, 1965, page 2.

Besides the patterned genocide to carry out a “pacification” program against the Vietnamese, U. S. forces are aiding and abetting a general program of torture in Vietnam:

“According to the Japan Times (May 20) the ‘TV camera crew claims it had to work under serious restrictions’ as it followed a Saigon marine battalion on combat missions. The resulting footage was edited into three half-hour sections for TV showing on successive Sunday nights. The films documented such extreme barbarism by the Saigon marines that, according to the Japan Times, ‘the broadcast film was only a small portion of the entire footage and it was edited to mitigate the degree of brutality shown. One can well imagine what the deleted parts would be like.’” National Guardian, June 12, 1965.

“This conduct (torture) has been accepted as a matter of course in the United States. May I point out that it is in direct violation of provisions of the 1949 Geneva Prisoner-of-War Convention which has been ratified or adhered to by Vietnam (1953), the USSR (1954), the United States (1955), Communist China (1956), and the Viet Minh (1957), presumably the countries most directly concerned. (Actually by June 1964, 103 countries had agreed to be bound by the Convention.)

“While the 1949 Convention is directed primarily towards the regulation of international warfare and the conflict in Viet Nam is, at least theoretically, a civil war, there is one article of the Convention which relates exclusively to civil wars; and it specifically prohibits, with respect to prisoners of war, ‘violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture.’” Howard S. Levie, Colonel U. S. A. (Ret.) and Assoc. Prof of Law, St. Louis University Law School. Quoted in St. Louis Post Dispatch, April 9, 1965.

When Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State was asked by a reporter on television show why the United States forces did not respect the Geneva Convention on the treatment of war prisoners he blandly replied: “But we are not at war!” In other words, not only is the administration absolved from seeking democratic approval of its course by having Congress declare war as its constitutional prerogative, but the absence of a declaration of war enables authorities to resort to medieval tortures and genocide with a clear conscience. (See G. I. A. D. Draper “The Red Cross Conventions,” pp. 149-183).

As a result of the horrors of the new scientific savagery the United States is introducing in Vietnam, a new type of real hero is emerging among the Americans. On June 23, 1965, Lieutenant Richard R. Steinke was brought for trial before a Court Martial on Okinawa because he refused an assignment in a Vietnamese village of the type described. Lt. Steinke is an honor graduate of West Point. He had been accepted and trained in the elite Special Forces, an anti-guerrilla group established by President Kennedy. On January 31, 1965 in Saigon the Lieutenant declared his disapproval of United States policy and actions in Vietnam and expressed his conviction that the Vietnam war “isn’t worth a single American life.” He was convicted on June 25, 1965 of having disobeyed orders. To reduce publicity the Army dismissed him from the service. In Steinke’s home town of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, his wife, a young daughter and twenty persons staged a spontaneous demonstration on June 26, 1965 in his support at the main post office. (National Guardian, July 3, 1965.)

Germans were tried for crimes such as America commits by its genocide and torture in Vietnam. The U. S. is guilty under the provisions for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Charter on all counts (IMT Charter):

“b) War crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or person on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

c) Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.” R. K. Woetzel, “The Nuremberg Trials In International Laws,” pp. 274-275.

The defendant, by his challenge to his government, voices an indictment against its leaders for their national arrogance and racial chauvinism. Possibly it is difficult for them to accord to brown, black or yellow people the full status of humanity. They have difficulty identifying with them. Hence, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Indian and Negro genocide, and the atrocities in Vietnam.

The accused is asking us all to stop at the brink before it is too late. His moral stand of refusing complicity in his government’s atrocities ranks as the highest order of allegiance to humanity. Such an allegiance was plainly lacking in Germany as its population rallied to patriotism-that “last refuge of the scoundrel.”

POINT V

The United States violates treaties regarding war and self- determination.

In the section of the United States Constitution which makes it plain that treaties are a part of the supreme law of this land (Article VI, Section 2) the obligation on the part of all government officials to conform to treaties is manifest. A treaty is not in the same category as a mere act of Congress or the law of a state. After the carnage of World War I Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes foresaw the necessity of the national states foreswearing some of their sovereignty in order that the collective body of mankind might survive upon the earth. In writing the opinion of the court in Holland v. Missouri, 252 U. S. 416, he placed treaties on a par with the United States Constitution:

“Acts of Congress are the Supreme Law of the Land only when made in pursuance of the constitution while treaties are declared to be so when made under the authority of the United States. . .”

Besides being in violation of treaties and assurances concerning self-determination and the use or threat of force, the U. S. is in violation of numerous specific conventions on warfare which form background and amplification for Nuremberg International Law.

The use of poison gas bombs and other chemical substances among civilian populations is banned by the Hague Regulations of 1907, Article 23(A) and (E) and by the Geneva Protocol of 1925 ban of “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases. . .” By the murder en masse of civilians or of individuals without charge, without trial, and by the wrongful seizure and imprisonment, ill-treatment and tortures of the civilian inhabitants in the areas occupied, U. S. forces have broken express provisions of the Hague Regulations of 1907 (Article 46) imposing a duty on the Occupying Power to protect the lives of the inhabitants. The bombardment of undefended towns and villages far from the front and the indiscriminate destruction from the air of non-military objectives are in violation of the accepted Laws and Customs of War and, in particular, the Hague Regulations. Articles 46 and 52 of the Hague Regulations prohibit the deliberate destruction or the confiscation without requisitioning authority and without compensation or receipt of foodstuffs and the private property of civilians not necessary for the forces. The Conventions of 1929 and 1949 concerning the treatment of prisoners of war prohibits humiliating and degrading treatment, mutilation, torture and murder. By violating all of the above, the U. S. is guilty of war crimes as defined by Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg and the Genocide Convention of 1948.

POINT VI

The indictment should be dismissed

It is clear that David Mitchell is not a draft dodger. He does not evade his duty as a citizen. He presses upon the court and, therefore, upon the government, the criminality implicit in the present bloody course of this nation.

For years in correspondence with his local board, Mitchell presented the fundamental issues he has now raised in this challenge to the indictment. While the accused raises many points of constitutionality and legality which have important bearing in exposing the conduct of his government, they are subordinate to the essence of his challenge-the priority of morality over legality.

Even if the atrocities and fascistic domination around the world had been constitutionally authorized, the moral responsibility of the individual to dissociate and challenge would remain. On this point the accused asks the court to fulfill its responsibility to humanity, to refuse to permit the nazification of American courts into mere instruments of national policy, and, so, dismiss the indictment.

The order for induction is based upon a law which presumes a grave national emergency or actual war. The emergency is unmasked as callous, unprincipled power plays by the executive arm of the government. No declaration of war has been sought from Congress. The government breaks one solemn treaty after another in a determination to become the gendarme of the world. This policy seeks to kill the hopes of all people everywhere in their struggle to be free. It brands the United States as the chief enemy of liberty in the world. In no way can David Mitchell be accused of aiding and abetting the crimes under discussion. The accused has not been charged with a crime, but rather with obstructing crimes. The accuser stands accused!

Liberty and the New Left

by MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

Within the past year, all the news media--not only the little magazines and journals of opinion, but even the mass magazines and radio-and-television, have devoted a great deal of attention to the phenomenon of the New Left. And deservedly so, for here indeed is a truly new force in American life. Still basically a student movement, but now beginning to bring its new outlook to other groups in the community, the New Left may be said to have emerged with the formation of SNCC (the Student Non-Violent coordinating Committee) in 1960, grown to its present form with the creation of SDS (the Students for a Democratic Society) in 1962, and burst into national consciousness and to critical importance in American political life with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of late 1964 and the anti-Vietnam war March on Washington of April 17, 1965, led by SDS and aided by M-2-M (the May 2nd Movement). The New Left has accomplished far more, but these are the milestones of its growth. And even though the real upsurge of the New Left may be dated only from the summer and fall of 1964, it has already displaced the Old Left on the ideological spectrum; what is more, it has also clearly taken the place of the briefly-touted Conservative youth groups (YAF and ISI) as the Wave of the Future on campus.

As Harry Elmer Barnes has stressed, we all tend to suffer from a “cultural lag” in our assessment of social institutions; and so few people have grasped the vastness of the gulf between the Old Left and the New, a gulf not simply of esthetics or generational attitudes; and a gulf that has caused enormous bitterness and a hurling of maledictions from the ranks of the Old. The Left has changed greatly, and it is incumbent upon everyone interested in ideology to under- stand the change. The present article analyzes the numerous and significant ways in which the change marks a striking and splendid infusion of libertarianism into the ranks of the Left.

Old and New Left

A good way of gauging any change is to consider what had existed before. The Old Left, flourishing in the United States in the 1930’s and 40’s, may best be summed up as Social Democracy: a Social Democracy permeating all groups from the “liberals” and “official” Social Democrats on the right to the Browderites on the left. Essentially what this means is an accommodation to and admiration for the State, and a willingness to settle down in cozy alliance with Big Business and other power groups to parcel out perquisites and privileges in the mixed economy of welfare-warfare State Monopoly Capitalism. It is commonly asserted that Fabianism and Leninism differ only in method and pace: that the former believes in gradual change and the latter in revolution. But this-completely misses the real point: that Fabianism, which is basically Social Democracy, believes in blending into the State apparatus, whereas Leninism believes in its destruction.

As Fabians to the core, Social Democracy gave a pseudo-progressive and idealistic tone to the state monopoly capitalism of the New Deal, comfortably assumed a large portion of power, and eagerly came to give “liberal” and socialist coloration to the Cold War and the Permanent War Economy that prevails in the United States. Old Left historians, previously fond of such mass-supported and libertarian figures as Jefferson and Jackson, as well as such mass movements as the Populists, now found that in the seats of power any mass action whatever might rock the boat: and so they came to hail Hamilton, the Whigs, and indeed all previous American Establishments, as prototypes of the very system that they were now enjoying.

The New Left tends to think of the elder statesmen of the Old as having “sold out” to the Establishment (=the power structure= the ruling classes); but this “sellout”, while very real, is deeper and more profound than the New Left realizes. For the strident reactionaries and celebrants of the “American dream” of the 1950’s and 60’s are taking a position logically implied in their supposedly radical golden age of the 1930’s. The Old Left, by embracing the State, “sold out” decades ago, and what we are now witnessing is the logical conclusion and final degeneration of this process.

The Social Democratic justification and rationale for this surrender to the State may be summed up as: “representative democracy.” As long as everyone is allowed to vote, and the representatives of the majority do rule, the Social Democratic story runs, there is nothing for anyone to worry about: the State is transformed from the evil instrument of exploitation abhorred by classical Marxism and anarchism, into a friendly and beneficent institution responsive to the will of the majority. In their almost stupefying naiveté, the Social Democrats believe that the mere act of pulling down a lever in a ballot box and choosing between two machine candidates, insures the blessings of liberty and democracy to any decisions that the State rulers and the bureaucracy might then make. And this theory of political representative democracy was echoed in the very organizations of the Old Left: typified by a torpid and inactive mass run and manipulated by a handful of oligarchic officials--but officials who were duly elected every few years.

The people, then, were consigned by the Old Left to the passive and manipulated role of marking their ballots every once in a while: and within that framework, the State and the bureaucracy were to have carte blanche--especially The President, who in his majesty and his periodic victory at the ballot box was the beau ideal of Social Democracy. Hence, the political emphasis of the Old Left was on central planning of the economy at home, and of “collective security” intervention into everyone’s affairs and wars all over the world.

It is no wonder then that, confronted by the spectre of this Leviathan, many people devoted to the liberty of the individual turned to the Right-wing, which seemed to offer a groundwork for saving the individual from this burgeoning morass. But the Right-wing, by embracing American militarism and imperialism, as well as police brutality against the Negro people, faced the most vital issues of our time. . . and came out squarely on the side of the State and against the person. The torch of liberty against the Establishment passed therefore to the New Left.

The crucial contribution to both ends and means by the New Left as well as its most direct form of confrontation with the Old Left is the concept of “participatory democracy.” In the broadest sense, the idea of “participatory democracy” is profoundly individualist and libertarian: for it means that each individual, even the poorest and the most humble, should have the right to full control over the decisions that affect his own life. Participatory democracy is at the same time, (here again bringing a profoundly new dimension to social thought), a theory of politics and a theory of organization, an approach to political affairs and to the way New Left organizations (or any organizations, for that matter) should function.

In 1949, Sidney Lens, one of the few older leftists who are also active in the New, distinguished between “manipulative” and “participative” democracy; and in 1962, Tom Hayden incorporated the ideal of participatory democracy into the founding Port Huron statement of the Students for a Democratic Society. Lens, in a recent article, has explained some of the differences very well:

The United States is a democracy, all right, but a manipulative one in which we are excluded by and large from the major decisions in our lives. Participative democracy, on the other hand, means participation in the process of decision-making in all areas of life--economic and social, as well as political. Now if you judge the United States by its own standards of political democracy--that is, the right to put an “X” in a box every four years and to speak and write with a degree of tolerance--then the United States ranks very high in the firmament of democracies. But if you put it to the criteria of participative democracy, it ranks rather low. The area of decision-making is extremely narrow, and while we do have elections they are between two parties which stand for much the same thing.[1]

An excellent summary of the relation between the Right and the New Left was contained in a letter to Newsweek by a New Left student:

The movement (the New Left) has taken up a “right wing” cause which the avowed conservatives have dropped in favor of defending corporations and hunting Communists.

This is the cause of the individual against the world. Most obviously, the activists exhort the individual to fight the world’s blatant evils. More subtle, more difficult and in the long run more important, they urge him not to trade his individual freedom for the mass-produced comfort modern society offers so temptingly. Hence, their natural hostility toward the Establishment, middle-class prosperity and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and their ideal of decentralized “participatory democracy”--a sort of “states’ rights” minus racism. . . Until we’re sure just what we must renounce for the affluence of the liberal’s welfare state, we desperately need people who will bite the hand that feeds them.[2]

Organization and Tactics

As will be seen, it is impossible to isolate the organizational from the political aspects of the New Left’s theory of participatory democracy, because the New Left’s ends and means, its members’ personal lives and their abstract ideologies, blend and interpenetrate so closely. But let us attempt to turn first to the organizational aspects of participatory democracy, since these have been the most striking and the best developed. As an intra-organizational theory, participatory democracy decrees that there be absolutely no bureaucratic elite, no ruling oligarchy within the organization: that each member, however new or humble, have his full say and full control over his own actions. One happy indirect consequence of this set-up is that a New Left organization is almost impossible to red-bait. In the so-called “Communist-front” organizations of the 1930’s or 1940’s, the organization was typically run by a few top officers, with the rank-and-file passively accepting their lead; this, indeed, has always been true of all organizations. But the consequence was that these organizations could easily be red-baited, as it could be assumed that the secretary, the chairman, etc, played a role far beyond their number. But in a New Left organization nobody can maintain that a few men run the show.

But far more important is the creative innovation that all this implies for the theory and practice of organization per se. Here indeed is a breakthrough for organizational work in any sphere of life at any time in history: and it has been carried out in practice in SNCC and SDS (and also by an organization not usually considered New Left: the Women Strike for Peace). Now it is very easy to ridicule this theory of organization and to see its shortcomings; and anyone who has sat through an eight-hour session far into the night in which forty people try to decide what color to paint the walls will emerge calling for a little old-fashioned administrative dictatorship. But this is a wonderful and exhilirating experiment in ways of voluntary social cooperation, and it should not be lightly abandoned. Interestingly enough, explorations in such a truly individualist theory of organization have been carried on by such “right-wing” libertarians as Dr. F. A. Harper of the Institute for Humane Studies; and fascinating experiments in economic management in which workers are transformed into independent and equal entrepreneurs have been carried out by a few business firms over the country. Yet such is the isolation of social thinkers today that the New Left and the other groups are unaware of each other’s existence or of their fundamental similarity: a function of the increasing obsolescence of the categories of “right” and “left’ in today’s world.

The New Left organization, then, bends over backward not to manipulate the rank-and-file, to obtain ideas from the ranks, and to gain a genuine consensus and unanimity out of exhaustive (and often exhausting!) discussion. And then, at the polar opposite from any exaction of party discipline, each individual participates only in those projects which he personally finds important or worthwhile. Here is a monumental contribution to the age-old problem of reconciling organization with the maximum independence and fulfillment of the individual.

The tactics of a New Left organization, tactics from which emerges its characteristic life-style, again mesh with the theory of participatory democracy. A New Left organization spurns the typically Old Left tactic (or any tactic of old organization, for that matter) of quiet lobbying in the back halls of the Establishment’s sources of power. In the New Left, every member wants to participate fully in advancing his goals, participate personally and completely, thus integrating his way of life with his abstract goals. Hence the stress of the New Left on direct action by the membership, direct action in the streets.

Since the New Left is truly radical, totally opposed to the Establishment, its characteristic tactic of direct action has taken the form of mass civil disobedience. Here again is a relatively new tactic on the American scene, especially as a continuing organizational way of life. Beginning with the SNCC sit-ins in 1960, civil disobedience has, for the first time, brought mass non-violent resistance to the American scene. While its use as a mass tactic was fathered by Gandhi, the originator of the concept was the American Henry Thoreau, and hence Professor Staughton Lynd, the brilliant young historian who is probably the most prominent intellectual on the New Left, has called Thoreau the New Left’s single most important inspiration from the American past.

Now Thoreau was at least a quasi-anarchist, and mass civil disobedience is, purely and simply, an anarchist tactic. Hence, while the Old Left has grudgingly accepted the civil disobedience of the Martin Luther Kings, it basically looks with horror upon the entire concept, for at the root of it is the total breakdown of the mystique of The Law that permeates both the Right and Old Left alike. These apologists of the State say, time and time again, that if we don’t like a law, or consider it unjust, we must never, never (except perhaps in an outright dictatorship) break that law; we must only go through accepted (manipulatively) democratic (i.e. governmental) channels to get the law peacefully, quietly, and discreetly changed. Break this process, say they, and the majesty of the law is ruptured, and who knows what anarchy may follow. Never mind that laws are being broken all the time (some broken so habitually that even the Right and the Old Left don’t take them seriously even though officially on the books), and that the infamy of Prohibition was smashed precisely by people going about their daily lives thumbing their noses at the law--until it became crystal-clear that the law could not be enforced. The civil rights movement, after decades of going hat-in-hand to the law through the democratic process, had accomplished very little; and it was only when the civil rights movement went noisily into the streets to confront the State directly and to defy the vicious segregation laws that these laws finally collapsed. In short, it was only when the civil rights movement shifted from Old Left to New Left that it was able to break down the oppression of the white power structure.

The New Left learned many lessons from this experience. It learned that, morally, the “democratic” argument was a sham: that unjust laws deserve to be broken. And it learned that, strategically, the structure of unjust laws can only be smashed when determined men, even if they be a minority, take to the streets eager and willing to defy them. The New Left has learned the hard way the importance of the old revolutionary slogan: “fill the jails!” It learned that intensity of commitment and willingness to act on that commitment is far more important, morally and strategically, than the mere passive willingness to toddle down to the ballot box and mark an “X” every few years. To be blunt about it, the New Left is a movement of heroes.

If, then, the Old Left looked for its inspiration to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New looks to Thoreau; and this is particularly ironic when we consider that in the years after World War II the main advocate of Thoreau’s ideas in this country was the “right-wing” libertarian Frank Chodorov, in his sparkling little broadsheet analysis: an instructive example indeed of the way in which libertarian ideals have unconsciously passed from Old Right to New Left. (It need hardly be added that the present-day Right looks upon Thoreau with total abhorrence.)

If, then, the New Left is radical, individualistic, and militant, what is the content of its ideology, what policies does it advocate? Here it is true that the New Left has not worked out a systematic ideology, a coherent vision of the society it wishes to bring into being. And here it is the despair of the various youth groups whose tight-knit ideologies they would like to impose upon the New Left. But this lack of a totally developed ideology is perfectly understandable: this is a movement new, young, groping, learning; and, furthermore, this looseness is even an advantage, for the result has been a healthy refusal to worry about all the old squabbles, about who betrayed whom in 1938, etc. that have chronically plagued radical movements in this country. This looseness of ideology, combined with the individualistic ideals of the New Left, have led--to the despair of many of the old cliques--to its absolute refusal to bait: red-bait, brown-bait, or any other type of baiting. The New Left cheerfully accepts and works with anyone who shares its specific goals, and wishes to join in its activities, and so engages in no internal purges, witch-hunts, or loyalty testing. Hence the free and open atmosphere that tends to pervade the New Left.

But the New Left is not nearly as devoid of ideology as many observers believe. On the contrary, it knows precisely what it doesn’t like, what it totally opposes in our present society, even if its vision of the ultimate future is a bit cloudy. It can work devotedly for shorter or middle-run goals because its members are pervaded with a moral passion with which existing social and political institutions are gauged and found wanting. After generations of inculcation of the virus of positivism and utilitarianism, a virus that helped atrophy the moral fervor of each successive generation, it is magnificent to see morality once again used to pass swift and final judgment upon American institutions. This is a moral fervor that insists on “Freedom--Now”, sweeps aside the so-called “practical” objections of the tired, the resigned, and the comfortably adjusted, and dares boldly to bring its ideals into practice. The great Lord Acton saw unerringly that to take morality seriously is to be truly revolutionary, to install “a revolution in permanence.” And the “kids” of the New Left (for this is an overwhelmingly youthful movement) do take morality seriously.

The most important clue to New Left ideology is characteristically at the same time contentual and strategic (and also determined by the ideal of participatory democracy): the creation of “parallel institutions.” In short, while the typical Old Left goal is to move into the seats of State power, and maneuver the State into piecemeal “reforms” to be imposed upon the public from above, the New Left scorns statism and social reformism and aims to stimulate the people themselves to build “parallel institutions” outside of, and confronting, the State apparatus. Staughton Lynd, the leading theorist of the parallel-institution way, has pointed out that the American Revolution occurred precisely by the people spontaneously and voluntarily creating local and then regional committees and assemblies totally apart from the State apparatus, and progressively taking on more and more of the State’s functions. He might have pointed to Pennsylvania as a particularly good example of this process: for here the existing assembly was particularly reactionary and reluctant to declare independence of Great Britain, and so the radicals proceeded to create a network of committees and assemblies that simply ignored the old assembly, and the older legislature literally withered away from lack of popular support or even attention. Another outstanding example of parallel institutions and its corollary, “dual power”, emerged in the Russian Revolution of 1917, in the form of the workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ Soviets.

Let us now turn to specific areas in which the New Left has provided a highly libertarian thrust through the use of a pure and radical morality combined with a search for creating positive parallel institutions in society.

The Negro Question

Civil rights furnished the baptism of the New Left, and this has been a particularly fruitful area for demonstrating New Left ideology, tactics, and strategy.[3] The Old Left civil rights movement was typically discreet, reformist, statist, embodied in the NAACP. Racially, its goal was integration, economically it advocated typical statist reform measures: government intervention in housing, federal aid to education, federal anti-poverty programs. Its method was to lobby the federal government, and enter cases in the federal courts.

The New Left has been activist, militant, stressing mass civil disobedience by the membership. The focus of attention in civil rights has been those matters that can be treated by mass demonstrations: segregation laws, restrictions on the right of the Negro to vote, all-pervasive police brutality. The focus on police brutality, importantly enough, is precisely the major concern of all the poorer classes of Negroes, in the South and in the ghettoes of the North and West. Indeed, it should be evident that the Negro uprisings of 1964 and the Watts insurrection of 1965 were directed, not against the usual Old Left shibboleths of poor housing, lack of playgrounds, or discrimination at lunch-counters: they were directed, almost exclusively, at systematic police brutality against the Negro in this country. A newspaper reporter thus described the well-springs of the retaliatory violence by the Negro workers of Birmingham--in retaliation for white bombings--that led President Kennedy to rush Federal troops to that city in May, 1963:

They (the poorer Negroes) have known only two kinds of white men--the boss and the cop. The boss is none too good. . . But the cop is much worse. The cop accosts them at any hour and arrests them on any pretext.

In every town there’s gossip of what cops do in the back room. There was no need for a backroom in Birmingham. The cops often beat Negroes senseless in full public view on the street. . .

They had always cowered before the cops and held back their hatred--to protect their skulls. But suddenly, without forewarning, for they had been in no church rallies and ridden in no freedom rides, they saw Negroes defying the hated cop.

So, the non-privileged decided to make it a fight of their own. . .[4]

Thus, by focussing on areas in which the white-run State oppresses the Negro people, the New Left has transformed the Negro movement from a basically statist into a basically libertarian movement--and by doing so, has come much more into alignment with the central aims and desires of the Negro masses themselves. The New Left can well understand the key role for the Negro people of the issue of police brutality; for, in its own confrontations with the State, it too has felt at least a taste of what the Negro masses have been experiencing all their lives.

Similarly in economics: for here too the New Left has broken through the old Liberal shibboleths. The New Left, for example, believes that urban renewal, far from being a progressive measure benefitting the people, is a program of forced Negro removal for the benefit of favored real estate and construction interests. It recognizes that the federal anti-poverty program is a sham and a fraud, and a bureaucratic top-down manipulation of the Negro masses by the politicians and government officialdom. In contrast, the New Left has acted with the highest constructive-ness on these issues, and has gone deep into the poorest Negro communities, has lived for many months as vital parts of these communities, and has stimulated these often disorganized and apathetic people into community organizations and “community unions” stressing self-help by the impoverished Negroes themselves. In the North, SDS has, in the past year and a half, gone deeply into the poorest of the Negro ghetto areas (e.g., Newark, Cleveland) and used the utmost humility and patience in participatory democracy to build self-help organizations and community unions. In the South, SNCC has done a phenomenal job in stimulating self-help and right-to-vote drives among the most depressed rural Negro communities, especially in Mississippi. A parallel institution in the political realm was launched by SNCC in the form of a Freedom Democratic Party of Mississippi, which may well serve as a model for Freedom Parties in other states and regions. The New Left established Freedom Schools in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, headed by Staughton Lynd, to provide, in a participatorily democratic way, education for impoverished Negroes which would not or could not be provided by the State apparatus. Here was another, and highly useful, form of parallel institution.

The New Left, furthermore, has cast off the uncritical adulation of the Old toward labor unionism. Instead of looking invariably to unions as the vanguard of progress, the New Left sees clearly that labor unions have constituted some of the most restrictive and monopolistic forces in American society. And toward Negroes, trade unions have been more restrictive and discriminatory than has any other segment of American life.[5] Hence the formation by SNCC in Mississippi of another important parallel institution: the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union for enrolling Negro workers.

Peace and United States Imperialism

A measure of the enormous impact of the New Left is the way that it has swiftly and radically transformed the American peace movement. Before 1964-65, the American peace movement was almost classically Old Left: torpid, superficial, manipulative, hat-in-hand. Typical was the leading American peace organization, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE). Trying desperately for respectability, SANE’s typical stance was to address letters or advertisements to the President, of the: “please Mr. President, follow your true instincts and be a little more peaceful” variety. Above all, the impetus of SANE was in no sense any moral revulsion at American war policies or against Americans pushing smaller nations around; it was solely a matter of protecting American citizens from potential nuclear holocaust. In short, peace was desired in the abstract while there was an absolute refusal to dig into the question of who the major enemies of peace are, or where the drive for war is coming from in the present world. Indeed, any attempt to pin responsibility upon American imperialism for the Cold War or for other American wars was immediately labelled “double standard”. And, as Sidney Lens has pointed out, since “third campism” inevitably becomes “one-and-a half campism”, SANE-type peace people inevitably wound up as only slightly reluctant supporters of basic American foreign policy, in short of United States global militarism and imperialism.

The same indeed is true of the small, old-line pacifist organizations (e.g. Committee for Non-Violent Action, War Resisters League, Fellowship of Reconciliation); while willing to bear personal witness for peace (peace walks, strapping themselves to Polaris submarines, etc.) these pacifists, by being aggressively “third-camp“, failed to engage in any sort of realistic or knowledgeable analyses of the cause of international crises. Hence, these pacifists remained almost completely irrelevant to the American ideological scene. This total irrelevance was multiplied by the refusal of the old-line pacifists to make any moral distinctions between the use of defensive and of offensive violence. Even the old-line pacifists’ long-standing opposition to conscription was at bottom weak: for they object not so much to conscription per se as slavery, nor to the imperialist wars in which the conscripts must serve, but only to conscription’s personal coercion to kill. As a result, the old-line pacifists tend to be satisfied with the present conscription system which exempts them as conscientious objectors from having to kill anyone. As Robert J. Smith has pointed out, in conscription these pacifists object only to killing; they do not really object to their own enslavement (e.g. CO camps).

The accelerating slide of SANE and other Old Left peace groups into superficiality led them by 1963 to exclusive concentration upon the need for a test-ban treaty to keep Strontium-90 out of children’s milk. It was this kind of lowest-level issue that mobilized the suburban mothers and on which the peace movement became fixated; and hence the test-ban treaty of 1963, as the Chinese Communists gloomily and accurately predicted, pulverized and liquidated the peace movement in the United States. The suburban mothers happily returned to their PTA meetings, convinced that the millenium had arrived, and the peace movement came de facto to an end. But not only the mothers: at a Scientists for Survival conference in New York in the summer of 1964, the prevailing opinion of the assembled scholars and professors was that the hoped for detente with the Soviets had arrived, that the Cold War was really at an end, and that therefore there was really nothing further to worry about. This monumental and widespread inanity stemmed, again, from a general scholarly refusal to probe into the causes of war in the present-day world, and specifically to investigate the nature of United States imperialism.

From this total bankruptcy of the American peace movement, there began to emerge a truly radical, New Left-type of movement, devoted characteristically to opposition to war and conscription through resistance to American imperialism. Characteristically again, this new movement was a youth, a student movement, as have been virtually all activities of the New Left. In the spring of 1964, the May 2nd Movement was formed, dedicated specifically to opposition to the American war in Vietnam, and more generally to the etiology of that war in American imperialism; here, in short, was a radical anti-imperialist student movement that did not consider its function that of advising the State Department how best to preserve the American presence in Vietnam. It considered its function that of taking a moral stand in opposition to the whole American involvement, past, present, and future. In early 1965, when the U. S. began its systematic, brutal and totally indefensible bombing of North Vietnam, the far larger SDS perceived the moral issue and was at last galvanized into action against American imperialist foreign policy. Taking its cue from the 1963 March on Washington for civil rights, SDS held a highly successful anti-Vietnam War March on Washington in April, 1965, despite massive Old Left hostility, and based on the New Left principle of “non-exclusion”, of welcoming all those opposed to the war. And then, miracle of miracles, the shining example of this eager mass of students activated even the comfortably torpid American professoriat, and there swept the country in the late spring that remarkable new phenomenon--the teach-in. Inspired by the militant direct-action “ins” of the New Left, the teach-in created, if only for a single night at each locale a much-needed parallel institution in academe, a true community of scholars in which faculty and students alike could educate each other meaningfully and in depth on a truly vital issue of the day.

Of course, the teach-in had its weaknesses, stemming from its failure to be New Left enough, i.e., to be fully moral. Faculty experts could not resist the temptation to play State Department adviser, to indulge in realpolitik. And yet, as so often happens, the moral position turned out to be far more practical and “realistic” than the supposed practicality of those whom C. Wright Mills brilliantly called “the crackpot realists.” For the New Left student position was and is simply: immediate U. S. withdrawal from Vietnam. This position is moral, simple, and irrefutable by expertise or by Administration razzle-dazzle. But the supposedly “practical” position dominant at the teach-ins: “negotiation to end the war”, immediately and inevitably became entangled in superior Administration expertise. For, after all, President Johnson only needed to assure everyone that he was negotiating and was willing to negotiate, and then how could anyone say him nay? The only practical position for the peace movement is to forget about procedural matters (e.g. negotiations) and simply demand of the Administration concrete results, i. e. immediate withdrawal. Given this demand, the detailed procedure may be left to the President.

The measure of the gulf between Old and New Left is their vividly contrasting responses to the war in Vietnam and to America’s previous imperialist war, in Korea. Korea effectively liquidated the Old Left as a force for peace; for almost to a man, and awestruck by the imprimatur of the absurdly venerated United Nations, the Old Left rushed to endorse America’s intervention in Korea.[6] In contrast, the New Left was galvanized by America’s escalation of the conflict into far more vigorous anti-war activity, an activity particularly remarkable because it is courageously taking place during a war, not merely before or after.[7] Indeed, opposition to the Vietnam War has now become the central focus of New Left concerns. It was largely in connection with the Vietnam war that Staughton Lynd, in a brilliant article, advanced the idea of parallel institutions to oppose the war, as against the Old Left strategy of reformist coalition within established channels of the Democratic Party, a coalition that Lynd trenchantly referred to as “coalition with the marines.”[8] Specifically, Lynd called for a new Continental Congress of the people, to set against an American Congress that fails to represent the opposition to the war, as well as for professorial foreign policy committees to hold hearings on the war; furthermore, “men of spiritual authority from all the world might be convened as a parallel Supreme Court, to assess guilt and responsibility for the horror of Vietnam.” The Assembly of Unrepresented People that met around the Washington Monument this August was a response to that call; certainly too quixotic and premature to be a genuine Continental Congress, it did at least result in an SDS-oriented National Coordinating Committee of grass-roots groups that oppose the Vietnam war.

At a conference of radical scholars in September, 1965, Staughton Lynd advanced the view that the revolutionary crisis situation in the United States would come, not as in classical Marxism from economic depression, but from being increasingly bogged down in imperialist wars. It was indeed defeat or stalemate in imperialist war that led directly to the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and to the Chinese Revolution of the 1940’s.

Education

Since the bulk of the New Left are students, perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of New Left activity has been the campus revolution, notably the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the fall and winter of 1964-65, and the numerous student protests throughout the country that resulted from Berkeley. While free speech was the immediate issue, an issue that mobilized student support throughout the whole ideological spectrum from Maoists on the Left to Goldwaterites on the Right, the young militants at Berkeley realized from the beginning that far more was at stake: that what was needed was a revolution in the entire educational system in this country.

For what the youth at Berkeley were rebelling against was precisely the system of mass education in the United States, a system that herds increasing masses of young men and women into college to train them in uniformity and conformity, and to take their due and uncomplaining places in the gigantic military-industrial complex. It was this massive impersonal bureaucracy, this grinding “machine”, that the Berkeley students realized was the pernicious microcosm of American society as a whole. The Berkeley students concluded that only by direct confrontation, only by radical civil disobedience against the machine, could any autonomy be won in their personal lives or any area be carved out for a truly educational process.

It is ironically appropriate that the Berkeley uprising came at a university whose mammoth bureaucracy reflected the apogee of the educational theories of its President, Clark Kerr; and that President Kerr is the very model of a modern Liberal, an economist whose experience has been in labor arbitration and whose view of education is precisely as avast factory to process the students to fit into the military-industrial complex. Kerr’s viewpoint is that of the Liberal who frankly accepts statism and giant bureaucracy as the literal “Wave of the Future”; the task of the university, or “multiversity”, is to service State capitalism by supplying it with its experts and technicians; and all of this is to be accomplished largely by the university administrators, Kerr’s enthusiastically embraced “Captains of the Bureaucracy.” In what might only be called the apotheosis of social fascism, Clark Kerr calls on everyone to welcome what he himself terms the “new slavery”, headed by the bureaucrats and the managers: “Turning Marx on his head (as James Burnham had done a generation earlier in The Managerial Revolution), they are the ‘vanguard of the future”. All of this Kerr held forth consciously as “the socialist view, for service to society which the administration and the trustees represent.” This in noble contrast to “nonconformists” who wish to criticize or attack society, and to the parochial “guild view” of those faculty members who seek “self-determination.” As a self-styled Captain of Bureaucracy himself, of course, it was easy for Kerr to adapt to this kind of “socialist” role.

For the university, Kerr wrote that:

The campus and society are undergoing a somewhat reluctant and cautious merger, already well advanced. MIT is at least as much related to industry and government as Iowa State ever was to agriculture. . .

The university is being called upon. . . to respond to the expanding claims of national service.

The university is to function as a knowledge factory processing the students who are its “raw material” into fit products to serve the various organs of state capitalism.

Particularly relevant to the student revolt was Clark Kerr’s expressed attitude toward intellectuals, especially students. For above all, they are dangerous, precisely because they have no vested interests or life commitments and are therefore fully free to think:

The intellectuals (including the university students) are a particularly volatile element. . . capable of extreme reactions to objective situations--more extreme than any group in society. They are by nature irresponsible, in the sense that they have no continuing commitment to any single institution or philosophical outlook and they are not fully answerable for consequences. They are, as a result, never fully trusted by anybody. . .

Hal Draper (another rare Old Leftist who has made the transition to the New), in his brilliant dissection of The Mind of Clark Kerr, at this point properly exploded in indignation:

In all likelihood, dear reader, you did not read this carefully enough. Did you notice that the entire tradition of humanistic and democratic educational philosophy has been contemptuously tossed into the famous garbage can of history? It teaches ‘irresponsibility’; you cannot trust people brought up that way . . .[9]

But, adds Kerr in the best Liberal fashion, intellectuals can also be a “tool” (revealing term) as well as a “danger”; after all, intellectuals are needed to service the State, to furnish technicians and strategic thinkers for the military, and to supply ideological weapons for fighting the Cold War. “Consequently,” writes Kerr, “it is important who best attracts or captures the intellectuals and who uses them most effectively, for they may be a tool as well as a source of danger.” And Draper aptly comments: “There are the alternative roles of the intellectual in the Kerrian world: tool or danger. It is a notorious dichotomy, celebrated in the literature of totalitarianism.”

It was in this kind of a university and this kind of an ideological climate that the Berkeley rebellion took place, and the militant students were quite conscious of the nature of this confrontation. Thus, the following item appeared in No. 5 of the FSM (Free Speech Movement) Newsletter, for December 10, 1964;

At the beginning, we did not realize the strength of the forces we were up against. We have learned that we must fight. . . the Board of Regents with their billions of dollars and Governor Brown with his army of cops.

But neither did they realize the forces they were up against. At the beginning, they thought they had only to fight a hundred or so ‘beatniks’, ‘Maoists’, and ‘Fidelistas’. But they put eight hundred of the ‘hard core’ in jail and found they still had to face thousands of other students and faculty members.

The source of their power is clear enough: the guns and clubs of the Highway Patrol, the banks and corporations of the Regents. But what is the source of our power?

It is something we see everywhere on campus but find hard to define. Perhaps it was best expressed by the sign one boy pinned to his chest: ‘I am a UC student. Please don’t bend, fold, spindle or mutilate me.’ The source of our strength is, very simply, the fact that we are human beings and so cannot forever be treated as raw materials--to be processed. Clark Kerr has declared, in his writings and by his conduct, that a university must be like any other factory--a place where workers who handle raw material are themselves handled like raw material by the administrators above them. Kerr is confident that in his utopia ‘there will not be any revolt, anyway, except little bureaucratic revolts that can be handled piecemeal.’

As President of one of the greatest universities in the world, one which is considered to lie on the ‘cutting edge of progress,’ Kerr hopes to make UC a model to be proudly presented for the consideration of even higher authorities.

By our action, we have proved Kerr wrong in his claim that human beings can be handled like raw material without provoking revolt. We have smashed to bits his pretty little doll house. The next task will be to build a real house for real people.[10]

Or, as Mario Savio, the young student of philosophy who led the Berkeley revolt, has declared:

He (Clark Kerr) looks at a university this way. . . these are his metaphors, not mine. It’s a factory and it has a manager. . . that’s Kerr. . .and a Board of Directors. . . that’s the Board of Regents. . .and employees, the faculty and teaching assistants, and raw materials. . .that’s us. We’ve proven ourselves rather intractable raw material. . .

His view. . . is that we serve the national purpose by being ‘a component part of the military-industrial complex’. Well, I haven’t felt much of a component part and I think that has been part of the problem. There is an incredible alienation on the campus, especially among the undergraduates. . . I think it is a scandal that such a person should be president of a university. . . any university. But, maybe the thing worst about the university is not that Kerr is president of it but that it’s the kind of university that needs Kerr to run it. Because it is a factory to a large extent. . .

That is the issue. Arbitrary power, alienation, the managers and the managed. . . after a while the people get tired of being treated, you know, by managers, as managed. They want to be treated as human beings should be treated. . . Human beings are not things to be used.[11]

Savio has also written:

the schools have become training camps--and proving grounds--rather than places where people acquire education. They become factories to produce technicians rather than places to live student lives. And this perversion develops great resentment on the part of the students. Resentment against being subjected to standard production techniques of speedup and regimentation; against a tendency to quantify education--virtually a contradiction in terms. Education is measured in units, in numbers of lectures attended, in numbers of pages devoted to papers, number of pages read. . .

Those disciplines with a ready market in industry and government are favored and fostered: the natural sciences, engineering, mathematics, and the social sciences when these serve the braintrusting propaganda purposes of ‘liberal’ government. The humanities naturally suffer, so that what should be the substance of undergraduate education suffers. . .the undergraduate has become the new dispossessed: the heart has been taken from his education--no less so for science students--for the humanities are no longer accorded the central role they deserve in the university. . .

In a healthy university an undergraduate would have time to do ‘nothing’. To read what he wants to read, maybe to sit on a hill behind the campus all alone or with a friend, to ‘waste time’ alone, dreaming in the Eucalyptus Grove. But the university, after the manner of a pesky social director, sees to it the student’s time is kept filled with anti-intellectual harassment: those three credits in each three unit course, those meaningless units themselves. . .

There are little attractions in various places, philosophy in one corner, physics in another, maybe a bit of mathematics every now and again, some political science--nothing bearing any relationship to anything else. Everything requires too many papers, too much attendance at lectures, two-thirds of which should never have been given.[12]

If any intellectual may be considered the “father” of the New Left, particularly in its educational philosophy, it is Paul Goodman, the self-professed anarchist whose brilliant essays have spoken directly to youth and to the necessity of drastic change in the educational system. Goodman’s Community of Scholars was a fundamental attack on our deadening system of mass bureaucratic education and a call for a return to an informal, flexible, and genuine “community of scholars” between teachers and students; his Compulsory Mis-Education was a powerful plea for the elimination of compulsory attendance laws that act as a prison for uninterested youth yearning to be free and thus as a breeding-ground for juvenile delinquency; instead, young people should be allowed to “dropout” and work at jobs that truly interest them.

Goodman has written perceptively that the major exploited class in the United States is not the industrial workers but middle-class students, a class that is rapidly becoming the bulk of the youth. “The labor of intelligent youth is needed and they are accordingly subjected to tight scheduling, speed-up and other factory exploitative methods. Then it is not surprising if they organize their CIO.”

Quoting this very passage from Goodman, the Steering Committee of FSM, in a pamphlet entitled “We Want a University”, went on to point out:

Current federal and private support programs for the university have been compared to classic examples of imperialism and neocolonialism. The government has invested in underdeveloped, capital-starved institutions, and imposed a pattern of growth and development upon them which, if disrupted, would lead to economic breakdown and political chaos.

Research and training replace scholarship and learning. In this system. . .the student is pressured to specialize or endure huge, impersonal lecture courses. He loses contact with his professors as they turn more to research and publishing, and away from teaching. His professors lose contact with one another as they serve a discipline and turn away from dialogue. Forms and structures stifle humane learning. . .

We get a four-year-long series of sharp staccatos: eight semesters, forty courses, one hundred twenty or more ‘units’, ten to fifteen impersonal lectures per week, one to three oversized discussion meetings per week led by poorly paid graduate student ‘teachers’. Over a period of four years, the student-cog receives close to forty bibliographies; evaluation amounts to little more than pushing the test button, which results in over one hundred regurgitations in four years; and the writing of twenty to thirty-five ‘papers’ in four years in this context means that they are of necessity technically and substantially poor due to a lack of time for thought. The course-grade-unit structure, resting on the foundation of departmentalization, produces knowledge for the student-cog which has been exploded into thousands of bits and is force-fed, by the coercion of grades. We all know what happens when we really get ‘turned on’ by a great idea, a great man, or a great book: we pursue that interest at the risk of flunking out. The pursuit of thought, a painful but highly exhilirating process, requires, above all, the element of time.

. . .It is as though we have become raw material in the strictly inorganic sense. But the Free Speech Movement has given us an extraordinary taste of what it means to be part of something organic. Jumping off the conveyors, we have become a community of furiously talking, feeling, and thinking human beings.[13]

And a very strong Paul Goodman influence may be seen in an editorial of the first issue of the Free Student, the organ of M-2-M. Calling for a community of scholars of “free teachers and free students”, the journal adds:

At a certain point it was considered a convenience to this community (of scholars) to employ janitors to look after such worldly but irrelevant problems as carting off the garbage. That historic decision heralds the birth of the University Administration. By the second half of the 20th Century the janitors, the expeditors, have set themselves up as high priests of wisdom. . .As for the students. . .we are numbers on an IBM card, enrollment statistics in the President’s annual speech, grist, elements in a production line, ‘privileged’ to listen in on a dialogue in which ‘our’ teachers justify their wages to their immediate employers--the janitors of administration.

The community of scholars transmitting cultural heritage and intellectual development disappears before the demands of other ‘communities’--‘communities’ with power, with money, groupings of men and institutions who control and direct America’s vast Military and Corporate Complex and guide this country’s fortunes into the cold and not-so-cold wars that justify the Complex. It is to this force that the janitors of administration owe their loyalty, and in the person of Berkeley’s Clark Kerr, proclaim it proudly.

The University, then, is an ‘institution’ in the service of the Military-Corporate Complex. It recruits and trains scientists and technicians in the use of ‘priority’ technology--i.e. missile systems, nuclear fission and bacteriological warfare.

And it is an institution of repression. Faculty members who pursue knowledge inconsistent with the care and training of the desired cold war mentality are driven from the campus. The student is subject to thousands of petty rules and regulations about where he should live, and with whom, what he should wear, what he should drink and where he should eat. Co-eds are usually introduced into a women’s detention home with a system of penalties and penances. . .And all of this is done in the name of “in loco parentis” . . . The assumption is naked; if the administration can act like parents, then we must act like children. And if we are dealt a ‘conformity’, without question, in dress, speech, in somebody else’s official morals, the hope is that we will conform on a total level. For the ultimate effect of this total imposition, intuited by the Military-Corporate Complex that owns the University, is to emasculate the student body as an independent ‘non-conformist’ social and political factor in this country. For if we are not serious, not mature enough to be a personal force in our own lives, how can we be so ‘presumptuous’ as to dare put to use our accumulated knowledge, as students, to meaningfully change the international and domestic injustice of American life.[14]

The ideological ancestor to Paul Goodman and these individualistic students trenchantly and passionately rebelling against mass bureaucratic education was undoubtedly Albert Jay Nock--ironically enough a leading intellectual of the Old Right of over twenty years ago. The deep-seated fraud of the present-day Conservative Movement’s still clinging to the term “libertarian” may be seen in a comment on Berkeley by the prominent conservative writer, Henry J. Taylor. Where does Taylor stand on individual freedom?:

Delinquents? Why, certainly they’re delinquents. Education is impossible without authority and the recognition of authority. Management has to manage. That this affects one’s place in life--and throughout life--is elementary. If a university can’t teach that to its students, it’ll never be able to teach them anything.

Every institution--families, schools, enterprises, government, our armed forces, everything--falls apart on any other basis. And the future of American youth falls apart with it. . .

‘I am youth. I am joy. I am freedom,’ said Peter Pan. But a great storm cloud mounts and darkens throughout the world and its crimson rim reaches out to suck down the United States. We’d better produce something better than millions and millions of Peter Pans or impudent delinquents who succumb to the unlovely habit of telling, not asking.[15]

Ultimately, education in America is faced with the clear choice for virtual fascism (nakedly with the Taylors, more subtly with the Kerrs) or toward freedom and genuine learning, sought in their different ways in the past by Nock and Robert M, Hutchins and in the present-day by Paul Goodman and the student rebels.

The taunt “If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?” has about the same moral and intellectual stature as the old “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go to Russia?” But it is true that the more radical of the New Left have begun to despair of any reform of the swollen universities of the present-day, and have begun to opt out of the system to create parallel institutions, “Free Universities” of genuine communities of scholars. The teach-ins were such “universities”, though of course very short-lived. At Berkeley, during the strike, students and faculty, especially graduate teaching assistants, came together in a “Free University” of teaching and learning. But this too was temporary. This summer, a group of young scholars established The Free University of New York to teach and discuss vital subjects that cannot be found in the established universities, and the group insists on making all decisions on the basis of democratic participation by the community of staff, students, and faculty. And in several cities, “Free Universities” are in the process of being established--indeed, parallel institutions confronting the Establishment.

What Vision of the Future?

In every field it has entered, then, the New Left has tried to combine construction (of parallel institutions) with its root-and-branch opposition to the Establishment; indeed, it has understood that genuine opposition requires such parallel construction. Thus, Staughton Lynd writes of a projected future strategy for the participatory democracy of the New Left:

What is most clear at the moment is the call reminiscent of the Radical Reformation to ‘come out of Babylo’. Let the teacher leave the university and teach in Freedom Schools; let the reporter quit his job on a metropolitan daily and start a community newspaper; generally, let the intellectual make insurgency a full-time rather than a part-time occupation. As the Russian radical movement grew from Tolstoy ism and the Narodnik’s concern to dress simply, speak truth, and ‘go to the people’, so participatory democracy at this point speaks most clearly to the middle-class man, daring him to forsake powerlessness and act.[16]

But Lynd stops short at the nature of the final vision of the ultimate society; for he falls prey, on the other side of the coin, to the illusion of Clark Kerr and others that participatory democracy cannot really run an economic system, that a modern industrial economy must be centralized, and therefore that decentralization and participatory democracy must be drastically limited by a centralized socialist planned economy. Here, the young philosopher John McDermott confronts his confreres of the New Left with a stark dilemma; for he points out that it is precisely Liberals and socialists that have played crucial roles in bringing our society to the parlous state against which the New Left is now in revolt. Sympathizing even with the Goldwaterite attack on our present trends toward centralization and the corporate state, McDermott points out:

The fact is that liberal and socialist writers have taken ambiguous positions with respect to these trends. Centralization has been seen as reinforcing the rationality of planning against the blindness of the market; efficiency, progress, and science against waste, stagnation, and superstition. In particular, the growth of the Executive Department of the Federal government--in many ways the crown of the whole process--has been presented as the triumph of popular will over private industrial caprice. Such notions can be maintained, however, only by ignoring the evidence of Engler, Kolko, Nossiter and others that to the degree the Federal government assumes authority in economic matters, it becomes the willing partner of the economic interest involved. . . Nor does centralization create economic and social efficiency. . .

Among the chief supports of these trends and their social consequences is the continuing acceptance on the part of social critics that they are in some sense inevitable. But if these trends no longer represent progress, if they daily grow more dangerous to the democratic fabric, and if they present lively possibilities of social chaos, then the way is cleared to examine seriously--and to reject--the claim that they are inevitable. Is the task of the progressive intellectual to extract democratic values out of increasingly hostile technological and social directions? Or should he instead work to devise political and economic institutions which will enhance freely chosen sets of values?[17]

If, then, we are to take the path of McDermott and reject centralized planning of the economy, how can participatory democracy be extended to run efficiently a modern industrial system? With his overriding commitment to decentralization and his keen grasp of history, Paul Goodman in his latest book has almost found the answer: the free market. For Goodman hails the quasi-anarchistic development of the free market during the Enlightenment and under the Articles of Confederation, and, in a passage reminiscent of F. A. Hayek, hails the free market as the epitome of decentralized decision-making:

Decentralization is not lack of order or planning, but a kind of coordination that relies on different motives from top-down direction, standard rules, and extrinsic rewards like salary and status, to provide integration and cohesiveness. . .

As an example of decentralist coordination, the anarchist Prince Kropotkin, who was a geographer, used to point spectacularly to the history of Western science from the heroic age of Vesalius, Copernicus and Galilee to his own time of Pasteur, Kelvin, and J. J. Thomson. The progress of science in all fields was exquisitely coordinated. There were voluntary associations, publications, regional and international conferences. . . There was continual private correspondence, even across warring boundaries. Yet in vast common enterprise, so amazingly productive, there was no central direction whatever. . .

Over the centuries, not only scientific truth but most other objective values, like beauty or compassion, have thrived by voluntary association and independent solitude. . . Almost by definition, the progress of social justice has been by voluntary association, since the central authority is what is rebelled against. . .

But we must also remember that in its heyday. . . the free-enterprise system of partnerships and vigilant joint stockholders was in theory a model of decentralist coordination, as opposed to the centralized system of mercantilism, royal patents and monopolies that it replaced. It reposed an absolute reliance on self-interest, voluntary association, and the cohesive influence of natural forces: Economic Man and the Laws of the Market. Pretty soon, however, the stockholders stopped attending to business. . . And almost from the beginning in this country, notably in the bank and the tariff, there was a revival of state monopolies. . .

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the development of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution was a swing to decentralization. This time, the voluntary associations were friend-groups, partnerships, and companies of individuals rather than corporate bodies. They banded together to enterprise in their own way, free of royal monopolies, mercantilist regulations, and the ossified relics of guilds, universities, and feudalism. Scientists and scholars tended to go it alone, by correspondence, and in independent academies. Stockholders in joint-stock companies were vigilant of management. And these groups federated across national boundaries for trade, science, technical innovation, and political action. Out of it came political economy and modern social theory, the first colonial revolutions, the Bill of Rights, the limitation of absolute power, the critical philosophy, the theory of perpetual peace--in brief, everything that we now think of as our best.[18]

Finally, few more trenchant appreciations of the free market or criticisms of state socialism have been made than by the Italian Marxist-humanist Bruno Rizzi. Of state socialism, Rizzi writes:

Statification of the great agricultural, industrial, commercial and service enterprises has created a State monopoly of the means of production, of transport, of “public” services, of distribution and of foreign trade which has eliminated the market. . .

But monopoly is the opposite of the market, and if oligopolitical monopoly is detestable, that of the State is unique in that it eliminates the market, the free interplay between supply and demand, and free competition among commodities. Competition is found only on the collective market, or on the black market which is the true market that hides since it is illegal.

If it is established that there is a State monopoly. . . then it is clear consequently that labor is also monopolized for the workers are dependent upon only one employer--the State. In fact, it is the State which establishes norms and payment for labor according to its own decision. . . In capitalist society he (the worker) could choose between one entrepreneur and another; he has lost the right to choose, his labor is channelized by the only entrepreneur--the State.

. . . In effect. . . the State does not buy labor power; by means of its authority, all of labor is seized, its purchase is abolished. It can therefore no longer permit a strike. The strike of serfs is rebellion.

If the workers cannot enter into contracts for their labor with the social directors, they lose the right to cross their arms even if their directors are self-styled “Marxist-Leninists.” . . . Thus, the principal social consequences of this economy is that the bond between the worker and the entrepreneur is no longer juridical, as in capitalist society, but a question of political power as in all feudal societies.[19]

In their concrete struggles against centralized oppression, the young militants of the New Left are moving, largely unwittingly but more consciously in the work of some of its advanced thinkers, toward a vision of the future that is the fullest possible extension of the ideals of freedom, independence, and participatory democracy: a free market in a free society.

1.Sidney Lens, “The New Left and the Establishment,” Liberation (September, 1965), p. 9.

2.Letter by Kenneth Winter, Newsweek (June 14, 1965), pp.8-9.

3.For a history of the Negro movement in the South, see Anne Braden, “The Southern Freedom Movement in Perspective,” Monthly Review (July-August, 1965).

4.The New York Post, May 13, 1963.

5.For an important example of New Left scholarship in revealing the racist history of American trade unionism, see Herbert Hill, “Racial Practices of Organized Labor,” New Politics (Spring, 1965), pp.26-46.

6.For a chronicle of the rush to support the Korean War by such leaders of the Progressive Party as Henry A. Wallace, Thomas I. Emerson, and Corliss Lamont, see Karl M. Schmidt, Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1960), pp. 303-309. On the attitude of the Nation and New Republic on the Korean conflict, see Leonard P. Liggio, “Why the Futile Crusade?” LEFT AND RIGHT (Spring, 1965), pp.53-58.

7.The Old Right could be capitulationist too; thus, after Pearl Harbor, and over the objection of the great majority of its militants, the America First Committee hastened to dissolve and rush ingloriously to proclaim its super-patriotism. The national committee majority of America First trumpeted before dissolving:

“Our principles were right. Had they been followed, war could have been avoided. No good purpose can now be served by considering what might have been. . . We are at war. Today. . .the primary objective is. . .victory.

The period of democratic debate on the issue of entering the war is over; the time for military action is here. Therefore, the America First Committee has determined immediately to cease all functions and to dissolve. . .And finally, it urges all those who have followed its lead to give their full support to the war effort of the nation. . .” In Wayne S. Cole, America First (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953), p. 195.

8.Staughton Lynd, “Coalition Politics or Nonviolent Revolution?” Liberation (June-July, 1965), pp. 18-21.

9.Hal Draper, “The Mind of Clark Kerr”, in Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 211.

10.In Draper, op. cit. pp. 224-225.

11.Mario Savio, “Berkeley Fall: The Berkeley Student Rebellion of 1964,” in The Free Speech Movement and the Negro Revolution (Detroit: News and Letters, July, 1965), p. 19.

12.Savio, loc. cit., pp. 17-18.

13.Draper, op. cit., pp. 191-194.

14.“Ideologue: Who Owns the University?”, Free Student, Number 1, p. 3.

15.Henry J. Taylor, “Peter Pans in Our Universities,” New York World-Telegram and Sun, May 7, 1965.

16.Staughton Lynd, “The New Radicals and ‘Participatory Democracy,” Dissent (Summer, 1965), pp. 328-329.

17.John McDermott, “Does the Goldwater Movement Have a Future?” Dissent (Spring, 1965), p. 159.

18.Paul Goodman, People Or Personnel (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 6-9, 152.

19.Bruno Rizzi, in News & Letters (April, 1965), p. 7.

REPRINT

On Conscription

by DANIEL WEBSTER

During America’s first great war, waged against Great Britain, the Madison Administration tried to introduce a conscription bill into Congress. This bill called forth one of Daniel Webster’s most eloquent efforts, in a powerful opposition to conscription. The speech was delivered in the House of Representatives on December 9, 1814; the following is a condensation.

This bill indeed is less undisguised in its object, and less direct in its means, than some of the measures proposed. It is an attempt to exercise the power of forcing the free men of this country into the ranks of an army, for the general purposes of war, under color of a military service. It is a distinct system, introduced for new purposes, and not connected with any power, which the Constitution has conferred on Congress.

But, Sir, there is another consideration. The services of the men to be raised under this act are not limited to those cases in which alone this Government is entitled to the aid of the militia of the States. These cases are particularly stated in the Constitution-- “to repel invasion, suppress insurrection, or execute the laws.”

The question is nothing less, than whether the most essential rights of personal liberty shall be surrendered, and despotism embraced in its worst form. When the present generation of men shall be swept away, and that this Government ever existed shall be a matter of history only, I desire that it may then be known, that you have not proceeded in your course unadmonished and unforewarned. Let it then be known, that there were those, who would have stopped you, in the career of your measures, and held you back, as by the skirts of your garments, from the precipice, over which you are plunging, and drawing after you the Government of your Country.

Conscription is chosen as the most promising instrument, both of overcoming reluctance to the Service, and of subduing the difficulties which arise from the deficiencies of the Exchequer. The administration asserts the right to fill the ranks of the regular army by compulsion. It contends that it may now take one out of every twenty-five men, and any part or the whole of the rest, whenever its occasions require. Persons thus taken by force, and put into an army, may be compelled to serve there, during the war, or for life. They may be put on any service, at home or abroad, for defence or for invasion, according to the will and pleasure of Government. This power does not grow out of any invasion of the country, or even out of a state of war. It belongs to Government at all times, in peace as well as in war, and is to be exercised under all circumstances, according to its mere discretion. This, Sir, is the amount of the principle contended for by the Secretary of War (James Monroe.)

Is this, Sir, consistent with the character of a free Government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No, Sir, indeed it is not. The Constitution is libelled, foully libelled. The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of despotism. They have not purchased at a vast expense of their own treasure and their own blood a Magna Carta to be slaves. Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war, in which the folly or the wickedness of Government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty? Sir, I almost disdain to go to quotations and references to prove that such an abominable doctrine has no foundation in the Constitution of the country. It is enough to know that that instrument was intended as the basis of a free Government, and that the power contended for is incompatible with any notion of personal liberty. An attempt to maintain this doctrine upon the provisions of the Constitution is an exercise of perverse ingenuity to extract slavery from the substance of a free Government. It is an attempt to show, by proof and argument, that we ourselves are subjects of despotism, and that we have a right to chains and bondage, firmly secured to us and our children, by the provisions of our Government.

The supporters of the measures before us act on the principle that it is their task to raise arbitrary powers, by construction, out of a plain written charter of National Liberty. It is their pleasing duty to free us of the delusion, which we have fondly cherished, that we are the subjects of a mild, free and limited Government, and to demonstrate by a regular chain of premises and conclusions, that Government possesses over us a power more tyrannical, more arbitrary, more dangerous, more allied to blood and murder, more full of every form of mischief, more productive of every sort and degree of misery, than has been exercised by any civilized Government in modern times.

But it is said, that it might happen mat any army would not be raised by voluntary enlistment, in which case the power to raise armies would be granted in vain, unless they might be raised by compulsion. If this reasoning could prove any thing, it would equally show, that whenever the legitimate powers of the Constitution should be so badly administered as to cease to answer the great ends intended by them, such new powers may be assumed or usurped, as any existing administration may deem expedient. This is a result of his own reasoning, to which the Secretary does not profess to go. But it is a true result. For if it is to be assumed, that all powers were granted, which might by possibility become necessary, and that Government itself is the judge of this possible necessity, then the powers of Government are precisely what it chooses they should be.

The tyranny of Arbitrary Government consists as much in its means as in its end; and it would be a ridiculous and absurd constitution which should be less cautious to guard against abuses in the one case than in the other. All the means and instruments which a free Government exercises, as well as the ends and objects which it pursues, are to partake of its own essential character, and to be conformed to its genuine spirit. A free Government with arbitrary means to administer it is a contradiction; a free Government without adequate provision for personal security is an absurdity; a free Government, with an uncontrolled power of military conscription, is a solecism, at once the most ridiculous and abominable that ever entered into the head of man.

Into the paradise of domestic life you enter, not indeed by temptations and sorceries, but by open force and violence.

Nor is it, Sir, for the defense of his own house and home, that he who is the subject of military draft is to perform the task allotted to him. You will put him upon a service equally foreign to his interests and abhorrent to his feelings. With his aid you are to push your purposes of conquest. The battles which he is to fight are the battles of invasion; battles which he detests perhaps and abhors, less from the danger and the death that gather over them, and the blood with which they drench the plain, than from the principles in which they have their origin. If, Sir, in this strife he fall--if, while ready to obey every rightful command of Government, he is forced from home against right, not to contend for the defense of his country, but to prosecute a miserable and detestable project of invasion, and in that strife he fall, ‘tis murder. It may stalk above the cognizance of human law, but in the sight of Heaven it is murder; and though millions of years may roll away, while his ashes and yours lie mingled together in the earth, the day will yet come, when his spirit and the spirits of his children must be met at the bar of ominipotent justice. May God, in his compassion, shield me from any participation in the enormity of this guilt.

A military force cannot be raised, in this manner, but by the means of a military force. If administration has found that it can not form an army without conscription, it will find, if it venture on these experiments, that it can not enforce conscription without an army. The Government was not constituted for such purposes. Framed in the spirit of liberty, and in the love of peace, it has no powers which render it able to enforce such laws. The attempt, if we rashly make it, will fail; and having already thrown away our peace, we may thereby throw away our Government.

I express these sentiments here, Sir, because I shall express them to my constituents. Both they and myself live under a Constitution which teaches us, that “the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” With the same earnestness with which I now exhort you to forbear from these measures, I shall exhort them to exercise their unquestionable right of providing for the security of their own liberties.

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LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal Of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

Winter 1966

Vo. II No. 1

EDITORIALS

Old Right/New Left

New Right: National Review’s Anniversary

New Right: Future?

From Georgia With Love: The Case of Julian Bond

The Mitchell Case

LEONARD P. LIGGIO,

Isolationism, Old and New, Part I

REPRINT:

GARET GARRETT,

The American Empire

Left and Right is published three times yearly (Winter, Spring, Autumn) by Left and Right, Inc., Box 395, Cathedral Station, New York, New York 10025. Subscription price: $2.50. Single issues: 85c.

EDITORIAL:

Old Right/New Left

Mr. Murray Kempton, one of America’s most perceptive journalists, attended the annual December, 1965 convention of the National Association of Manufacturers at the Waldorf, and found himself unexpectedly wistful about the good old days when the NAM spent a good portion of its energies attacking governmental interference with the individual. Instead, he found the NAM praising Administration officials, and found himself disgruntled at the change, in short at the passing of the libertarian “Old Right” spirit that used to pervade that favorite whipping boy of the Old Left. Indeed, Kempton saw the NAM fitting smoothly into the current military-industrial complex:

Ever since the ‘thirties, power in the NAM used to center in the middle-sized companies. . .Most of them (their presidents) are gone now; they have been replaced by representatives of the major corporations whose biggest customer is government, which, as the biggest customer, has a claim to be if not always, at least often enough, right. . .

NAM’s new permanent president came there from the General Dynamics Corporation, a company which was organized on the basis of confidence in the favor of government. The new NAM is also described in Thomas Mechling, its recently-appointed director of information and a discovery of Thomas B. Watson, Junior. Mechling is best remembered for his lonely struggle as a liberal Democrat against the late Senator Pat McCarran in Nevada.[1]

Kempton keenly noted the irony of the fact that the only criticism of NAM’s new orientation to be heard all week came from a New Left student at Yale Law School, who came to interpret the student rebellion to the leaders of industry. And the burden of the criticism was that NAM was no longer living up to its Old Right ideals, which, the student implied, were now being carried forward by the student rebels of the New Left:

“If you were listening,” he said, “you might find that the Students for a Democratic Society and the NAM were in part saying the same thing. . . I had thought that this organization spent much of its time warning of the consequences of a too-powerful central authority for a system in which the individual is the supreme concern.

Perhaps many of you have changed your mind, under the guiding hand of Consensus and Cost plus Six percent; perhaps the GNP has erased your concern for what might happen to people when they are no longer responsible for themselves. The student rebel, however, believes in democracy, not just in free speech, but in bringing into the political process all those left out by poverty, bigotry and technology. . . Call that radical if you will. I prefer to regard this as a belief in the dignity of man; a belief I hope many of you still may share.”

The delegates warmly applauded this expression of the pieties they had abandoned.[2]

Another perception of the linkup of Old Right-and-New Left came recently from one of the major theoreticians of the New Left, historian William Appleman Williams, of the University of Wisconsin. On November 5, Professor Williams delivered an address before a predominantly Old Left audience at an anniversary dinner of the National Guardian. Though an avowed socialist, Williams displayed a keen understanding of the cul-de-sac the American Left had reached by identifying itself with the movement for centralized bureaucracy and the Leviathan State. First, Williams implied that the Left must abandon its Marxist mystique of the working-class, and include the great middle-class in its ambit:

Community is an inclusive conception, and an inclusive practice. In the true and deep sense, a community includes my father-in-law who wrote in the name of Johnny Birch on his last presidential ballot, as well as my 83-year-old neighbor who did the same for Eugene Debs. . . If Martin Luther King can include white segregationists in his vision of an American community, then American radicals ought somehow to be able to include the middle class in their vision.[3]

Williams then went on to analyze the cul-de-sac that radicals had gotten themselves into by pushing American society into a “centralized and consolidated” corporate state, a state and society structured and governed by a cozy coalition of conservatives and liberals. Instead, Williams emphasized, radicals must break completely with the conservative-and-liberal program of centralized corporate welfare capitalism, and plump whole-heartedly for decentralization:

The core radical ideals and values of community, equality, democracy, and humaneness simply cannot in the future be realized and sustained—nor should they be sought—through more centralization and consolidation.

These radical values can most nearly be realized through decentralization and through the creation of many truly human communities. If one feels the need to go ancestor-diving in the American past and spear a tradition that is relevant to our contemporary predicament, then the prize trophy is the Articles of Confederation. . .

Such decentralization is technologically and economically possible. Such decentralization is essential if democracy is to be maintained and extended. And such decentralization is psychologically and morally mandatory. Our humanity is being pounded and squeezed out of us by the consolidated power of a nationalist corporate welfare capitalism.[4]

Williams then went on to define specifically the relationship between his proposed recasting of the American Left and the libertarian Old Right credo which he saw (probably over-optimistically) in the Goldwater Movement:

Such decentralization also provides American radicalism with the most exciting and creative vista upon a different and a better America. The validity of this is ironically attested to by the handful of tough and shrewd old 19th century conservatives who have already beaten the radicals to this perception, and have in less than five years evoked from Americans of all generations a response that frightens and concerns the majority.

It is probably a harmless convention to talk at cocktail parties about the Goldwaterites in terms of their status problems, but it is a highly dangerous habit to think seriously about them in that fashion. They want participatory democracy pointed toward the very concrete restoration of 19th Century laissez faire. Or so they think, because that is what their reactionary leaders want. But in truth most of them want the welfare state cut down to human size, and structured in terms of community. And that is precisely what relevant radicalism would offer as its bedrock appeal for a constituency.

Professor Williams’ thoughtful striking out in new directions has met the fate of all intellectual pioneers. On the one hand, the Right-wing, which treats the New Left only in terms of sinister conspiracy or petty and irrelevant aesthetics (the charge of “beatniks”, etc.), has ignored the speech completely. On the other, Williams has aroused the conditioned hysterical responses of all the hidebound guardians of the Old Left, who could only see in Williams a Bircher, a Goldwaterite, even—ultimate curse of curses—a Nazi! Thus, one Norval Welch of New York City:

It is no coincidence that, in Williams’s opinion, the ‘most exciting and creative vista’ he longs for has been offered by whom? — the Goldwaterites!. . .

Are our memories so short that we have forgotten where romantic socialism leads? Did not the unemployed and demoralized Germans, 19291931, also long for a “new order” along “socialist” lines?[5]

Henry F. Mins also saw something sinister in Williams’ insistence on forming a community with his Birchite father-in-law, and concluded that Williams was only advocating a “corn-fed variety of ethical culture”; and Sophia Kutey of the Bronx could only throw up her hands at the whole thing and urge Professor Williams to go and study Lenin’s “Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder,” a response typical of Marxists who are unable to grasp a new idea.[6]

The ideological walls in America are crumbling fast, and regrouping and reforming almost as rapidly. The keepers of the flame of the Old Left are as much doomed to obsolescence as are the swaggering fire-eaters of the New American Right.

________

1.Murray Kempton, “Laughter at the Waldorf,” The New Republic (December 18, 1965), p. 20.

2.Ibid.

3.“Williams on policy for U, S. radicals,” National Guardian (November 27, 1965), p. 6.

4.Ibid., p. 7.

5.In National Guardian (December 11, 1965), p. 8.

6.Ibid.(January 22, 1966), p. 2.

EDITORIAL:

New Right:

National Review’s Anniversary

In the fall of 1965, National Review celebrated its 10th anniversary, and part of the record of its orgy of self-congratulation may be found in its November 30 issue. The magazine has, during its decade, even achieved the ultimate: for the issue contains the major part of a book in the process of publication, the bulk of which is solemnly devoted to the petty internal theoretical squabbles among the National Review editors and assorted contributors. To have a young professor of English—author of this tome—really think it important whether a true Conservative should worship Burke or Madison, the Crown of St. Stephen or the Crown of St. Wenceslas (for of such stuff are its intra-journal discussions made), demonstrates that National Review has arrived as a serious force in American life.

But National Review has accomplished far more than this, far more perhaps than even it realizes; in much less than a decade it has managed virtually single-handed, to effect a massive transformation in the nature of the Right-wing in America. This is a transformation that has gone virtually unrecognized by the Right-wing itself, never the most reflective of groupings, as well as by most observers of the American ideological scene.[1]

The outer trappings of National Review’s “takeover” are clear enough: the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) at Bill Buckley’s estate at Sharon, Connecticut, and the subsequent emergence of YAF as the political-action youth arm of the Conservative Movement, especially on campus; the major role of National Review publisher Bill Rusher in the newly-won conservatism of the Young Republican movement; the prominent role of National Review-types in the Draft Goldwater campaign as well as that of Brent Bozell (Buckley’s brother-in-law and then an NR editor) in helping to ghost Goldwater’s best-selling Conscience of a Conservative; the founding by NR-oriented people of the Conservative Party of New York; Bill Buckley’s emergence as the Number One TV “personality” of the Right-wing, and the general admiration expressed for him as such a personality by the New York press during Buckley’s 1965 campaign for Mayor. Neither are the reasons for the ease of NR’s takeover of the Right-wing difficult to find. The Right-wing in America has never been distinguished for the intensity of its intellectual life; and those scattered intellectuals that did exist on the right generally confined themselves to the brief exposition of general principles. Such exposition is all very well, but hardly suffices to generate a sturdy ideological, let alone a political, movement. Into this vacuum at the top, then, stepped National Review: witty, polished, glib, erudite, and ready to do battle, week in and week out, with at least the Liberal wing of the Establishment. It is then not surprising that NR quickly leaped to the leadership of the Right-wing, that it inspired a youth and an intellectual movement, nor that the mass of rightists were unreflectively eager to accept that lead.

So much for the trappings and the reasons; more important is the content of the radical transformation from Old Right to New. Without detailing the views and principles of the Old Right here (since recalling and examining them is one of the major purposes of this magazine), we may cite a few examples as a guide to the enormous distance that the New Right has travelled under the aegis of National Review:

(1) At the end of 1955, FOR AMERICA, a leading right-wing political action group of the day, published its platform; two of its major foreign policy planks were: “ABOLISH CONSCRIPTION”, and “Enter NO FOREIGN WARS unless the safety of the United States is directly threatened”. It was not exactly an advanced peace platform, but it was squarely anti-militarist and anti-foreign intervention, and there was not a line in the document about stopping Communism all over the world, liberating Communist countries, etc.

(2) In 1954, the novelist Louis Bromfield published a political work that praised individualism and denounced statism, war, conscription, and imperialism. Bromfield wrote:

One of the great failures of our foreign policy throughout the world arises from the fact that we have permitted ourselves to be identified everywhere with the old, doomed, and rotting colonial-imperialist small European nations which once imposed upon so much of the world the pattern of exploitation and economic and political domination. . . None of these rebellious, awakening peoples will. . .trust us or cooperate in any way so long as we remain identified with the economic colonial system of Europe, which represents, even in its capitalistic pattern, the last remnants of feudalism. . . We leave these awakening peoples with no choice but to turn to Russian and communist comfort and promise of Utopia. . .

The growing “neutralism” of the European nations is merely a reasonable, sensible, and civilized reaction, legitimate in every respect when all the factors from Russia’s inherent weaknesses to our own meddling and aggressiveness are taken into consideration. . . The Korean situation . . .will not be settled until we withdraw entirely from an area in which we have no right to be and leave the peoples of that area to work out their own problems. . .[2]

(3) In the spring of 1953, George Morgenstern, historian and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune, published an article in the right-wing weekly Human Events (now tragically become a hack organ for the “Conservative Movement”). The article was a trenchant attack on U. S. imperialism since the days of McKinley:

At the end of the 19th Century the United States began to stir with those promptings of imperialism and altruism which have worked to the mischief of so many puissant states. The sinister Spaniard provided a suitable punching bag. Two days before McKinley went to Congress with a highly misleading message which was an open invitation to war, the Spanish government had agreed to the demands for an armistice in Cuba and American mediation. There was no good reason, but there was war anyway. We wound up the war with a couple of costly dependencies, but this was enough to intoxicate the precursors of those who now swoon on very sight of the phrase “world leadership”.

McKinley testified that in lonely sessions on his knees at night he had been guided to the realization that we must “uplift and civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos. He asserted that the war had brought new duties and responsibilities ‘which we must meet and discharge as becomes a great nation on whose growth and career from the beginning the Ruler of Nations has plainly written the high command and pledge of civilization.” This sort of exalted nonsense is familiar to anyone who later attended the evangelical rationalizations of Wilson for intervening in the European war, of Roosevelt promising the millenium. . . of Eisenhower treasuring the “crusade in Europe” that somehow went sour, or of Truman, Stevenson, Paul Douglas, or the New York Times preaching the holy war in Korea. . .

An all-pervasive propaganda has established a myth of inevitability in American action: all wars were necessary, all wars were good. The burden of proof rests with those who contend that America is better off, that American security has been enhanced, and that prospects of world peace have been improved by American intervention in four wars in half a century. Intervention began with deceit by McKinley; it ends with deceit by Roosevelt and Truman. Perhaps we would have a rational foreign policy . . .if Americans could be brought to realize that the first necessity is the renunciation of the lie as an instrument of foreign policy.[3]

That these views are diametrically opposed to the current New Right and its intellectual organ, National Review, need hardly be documented; we need only add that NR’s—and its favorite candidate, Barry Goldwater’ s—most cherished President is undoubtedly Theodore Roosevelt, the embodiment of the very imperialist vices that Mr. Morgenstern so vigorously denounced. And can we for example, imagine Senator Taft, the political leader of the Old Right, rushing to the defense of the fascist regime of South Africa? Neither is the transformation from Old to New Right confined to foreign affairs, although there it is the most glaring. For a Right-wing that used to be at least partially devoted to the civil liberty of the individual now puts up as candidate for Mayor of New York City William F. Buckley, whose major political position was to denounce all libertarian restraints upon the police power and call, in essence, for all power to the police.

In the last few years, as it has sniffed the heady wine of imminent political power, National Review has become increasingly Establishment-y and increasingly concerned to oust from Right-wing ranks all groups that might prove a political embarrassment. For example, Mr. Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, who embarrass the Conservative Movement by accepting its own major premises (such as the bogey of the all-pervasive “international Communist conspiracy”) and deduce from it, with far better logic than wielded by the sophisticates of National Review, absurd but consistent conclusions (e.g. Welch on Eisenhower as a dedicated Communist.) National Review’s increasingly savage attacks on the Birch Society are attacks on its own Logical Conscience. The attacks escalated in late 1965 when Mr. Welch came out in favor of U. S. withdrawal from Vietnam. By thus directly opposing NR’s cherished policy of global war, the Birch Society finally put itself beyond the pale—totally outside that magazine’s cherished Conservative “community.”

National Review has reason to look back upon its ten years and be proud. It has accomplished most of what it set out to do: it has managed to transform the American Right from essentially old-fashioned liberalism to old-fashioned Conservatism, with all the devotion to war, theocracy, the State police, and racism that the change implies. It managed to nominate one of the New Right’s very own as a major party presidential candidate. If the Great Consensus of the Center should falter in its slow but sure course of extirpating American freedom, NR and the New Right stand ready to present us with an alternative: finishing the task quickly and dramatically. To some of us, this kind of “choice” is all too magnified an “echo”. But there are strong signs that the Conservative Movement peaked in 1964 and has been declining rapidly ever since, and perhaps we can look forward to a rather less exuberant and gala celebration on National Review’s fifteenth anniversary.

________

1.There are only two analyses of this phenomenon: Ronald Hamowy, “National Review: Criticism” and “Rejoinder”, in New Individualist Review (November, 1961), pp. 3-7, 10-11; and Murray N. Rothbard, “The Transformation of the American Right,” Continuum (Summer, 1964), pp. 220231.

2.Louis Bromfield, A New Pattern for A Tired World (New York: Harper and Bros., 1954), pp. 49-50, 73-74.

3.George Morgenstern, “The Past Marches On”, Human Events (April 22, 1953).

EDITORIAL:

New Right:

Future?

A prospectus is going the rounds heralding a new, slick fortnightly magazine, oddly entitled Future-the Future referring not, as might be thought, to science-fiction Utopias, but to the Second Coming of Jesus. Judging by its editors and associates, Future will be National Review with the gloves off, stripped of all pretenses to old-fashioned libertarian rhetoric, stripped of glib Madison Avenue concessions to traditional American persuasions. The spiritual symbol of Future will not so much be the Cross and the Sword, as proclaimed by its editors, but rather the auto-da-fé: for here we will find a blend of 20th Century Catholic fascism with the religio-political stance of the Holy Inquisition. The essence of its program will be to extirpate, at any and all costs, all atheists and infidels, at home and abroad. Featured in the magazine will be such past and present National Review luminaries and lay theologians as L. Brent Bozell, Thomas Molnar, Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk, and Sir Arnold Lunn (doyen of British clerical-fascism); it is a measure of the Weltanschauung of this illustrious collection that the sturdy monarchists Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Otto von Hapsburg form what might ironically be called the “left-wing” of the founding group. Only one non-Catholic appears among the founders: Prof. Gerhart Niemeyer, and he, one presumes, squeezes in under the wire because, though a Protestant, he has the grace to teach at Notre Dame University.

We welcome the impending arrival of Future on the American journalistic and ideological scene. It is always more exhilirating—and more educational—to confront the naked and unadorned face of evil than to joust with it hidden behind the camouflage of concession and demagogy. We cannot believe, however, that there really will be a Future in our future; we cannot believe that the ranks of American businessmen, upon whose advertising and contributions Future will presumably depend for its survival, are so besotted that they will support a magazine that will lay its monstrous program so clearly on the line. Surely, there is enough devotion to freedom remaining in American business so that this, at least, shall not pass.

SELF-SEEKING?

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Revolution in Enterprise EL RAY

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Depression Coming? HOWARD KATZ

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EDITORIAL:

From Georgia With Love:

The Case Of Julian Bond

Julian Bond, a brilliant young leader of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), having been duly elected to the Georgia state legislature from Atlanta, dared to endorse SNCC’s statement attacking conscription and the American war in Vietnam. In so doing, Mr. Bond indelibly stamped himself as a “bad” Negro in the eyes of his legislative colleagues, and was thus barred from his seat in the Georgia House by a vote of 184 to 12.

In the widespread comment on the Bond case, there has not been sufficient emphasis placed on its vital importance, for Mr. Bond’s treatment raises the crucial question whether or not America is truly a “free country”. In particular, classically there are only two basic routes to fundamental change in a nation’s policy: through free elections or through revolution. Indeed, the whole point of free elections is to make peaceful change possible. But elections are most emphatically not free if the legislature can bar or expel a member with whose views it does not agree.

The case of Julian Bond cuts to the heart of the very nature of American democracy. It must not be decided on the basis of the old legal myth that a legislature is essentially a private club, which may legitimately and arbitrarily decide who sits in its chambers. The case recalls the shameful expulsions of Representative Victor Berger from the U. S. House of Representatives in 1919, and of five members of the New York State legislature the following year, for the high crime of having been members of the Socialist Party and thus having opposed U. S. entry into World War I. All of these men, indeed, like Bond, ran again for their seats, were re-elected, and were again barred by their respective legislatures. But in the case of the Socialists, a stubborn addiction to the alleged right of a legislature to decide on its own membership prevented the victims from testing the whole problem in the courts. Julian Bond fortunately suffers from no such qualms, and will pursue the matter in the Federal courts. They will decide whether or not elections in America are only a mockery.

EDITORIAL:

The Mitchell Case

The case of David H. Mitchell, the young man who is challenging the very basis of the conscription law, was treated in our previous issue (Conrad J. Lynn, “The Case of David Mitchell versus the United States, LEFT AND RIGHT (Autumn, 1965)). On January 13, 1966, the United States Court of Appeals unanimously reversed David Mitchell’s conviction in the lower courts, and ordered a new trial on grounds of Mitchell’s having been deprived of enough time to obtain legal counsel. The case will now be retried in the lower courts. We are happy to report that, under the direction of the eminent civil libertarian lawyer Fyke Farmer, Mitchell’s case will be made, among other possible points, on the constitutional lines indicated in our previous issue.

With the draft reaching out to threaten more and more American families as the war in Vietnam escalates in destruction, the case of David Mitchell becomes ever more important as a defense of liberty in the United States. But Mr. Mitchell greatly needs funds to pursue this vitally important case and to stay out of prison while the case is being conducted. Anyone who wishes to support his endeavor should send funds to:

END THE DRAFT

c/o Mitchell

150 Crown Street

Brooklyn, N. Y. 11225

Isolationism,

Old and New

By LEONARD P. LIGGIO

PART l

The Old Isolationism

During the 1964 Democratic National Convention, the American people waited while Lyndon Johnson met with the two senators, Thomas Dodd and Hubert Humphrey, between whom he would choose his vice-president. For those who were not confused by the superficial differences between them, the meeting of the three symbolized one of the major traditions in American politics. Johnson, Dodd, and Humphrey had one major common denominator: their consistent and unswerving support of American imperialism. Johnson was a member of the Southern congressional bloc that was a major force for American intervention in World War II; he supported the Truman Administration’s launching of the Cold War and maintained it during the succeeding years; and he was a major proponent of the heavy defense budgets for both strategic missiles and the smaller armaments for conventional limited wars whereby US imperialism is maintained around the globe. Senator Dodd’s career as a government bureaucrat and a congressional advocate of the Cold War was interrupted by service as the chief trial prosecutor against German political officials at the Nuremberg trials. Senator Humphrey had risen to mayor of Minneapolis from the havoc wreaked on Minnesota liberalism by advocacy of intervention in World War II. The defectors from Norman Thomas’ isolationist socialism had formed the Union for Democratic Action, which had become the pre-Cold War ADA with Humphrey firmly in the leadership; the Minneapolis Trotskyist teamster leaders were tried for sedition for their anti-imperialism, and the Farmer-Labor party ultimately collapsed from the loss of its isolationist base. Johnson, Dodd, and Humphrey were strong supporters of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam interventions, as well as the imperialist policies which formed and surrounded them.

The tradition of American imperialism is a long one as its proponents keenly emphasize, and this is indicative of the kind of system that has successfully maintained itself in this country, despite occasional major threats, until this very moment. The major threats have been occasional because, unlike the system evidenced by American imperialism, there has not been the organization, continuity and understanding by those whom the system exploits comparable to that displayed by the beneficiaries from the exploitation. The opposition to the tradition of American imperialism has been characterized as the tradition of “isolationism”. The statesmen of the American Revolution were the founders of the American isolationist tradition, which combines cosmopolitanism and citizenship of the world with rejection of international political alliances. The concept of cosmopolitan neutrality and non-intervention, established in Washington’s Farewell Address, was firmly rooted in American ideals by Thomas Jefferson, who in his First Inaugural Address announced the principle: “Honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”[1] The isolationist creed was maintained by the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians in their opposition to international status quo exploitation.

Significantly, it was also John Quincy Adams who first rebuffed a European suggestion that the United States assume a share of responsibility for world order. . . Ultimately, John Quincy Adams’ precepts were incorporated into isolationist creed: the United States would lend only moral support to the worthy cause of universal freedom, and would not deviate from non-entanglement even for the purpose of preserving world peace.[2]

During the period of American imperialism against Mexico, the aggressive expansionists labelled their opponents as “isolationists”.[3] The American South has always been the major center of American overseas expansion and foreign intervention. The South desired to use federal troops to gain additional territory just as it had used them to maintain slavery and then serfdom among the Negroes. Spearheaded by the Texans, the South took the lead in the Mexican aggression, and then pushed for the conquest of Cuba and control of Central America, especially the Isthmus. The Civil War crisis developed through the South’s loss of control of the federal troops to a party which preferred continental expansion within the national boundaries to either the conquest of Cuba or the extension of slavery across the continent. The centers of opposition to expansionism and American imperialism during the Mexican and Civil Wars were the Middle West and areas in the East, which were centers of anti-war activities, including non-payment of taxes and draft-riots.

The origins of modern twentieth century isolationism are related to the development of the New Imperialism from the 1880’s on, and in which the United States was a major participant. The seizure by the US of the Spanish colonial empire at the turn of the century was a major cause in the development of isolationism. The Anti-Imperialist League under the - leadership of the Liberal Republicans (Mugwumps) established the basic traditions of American isolationism, with which the populism of Bryan and the socialism of Debs were associated. The Mugwumps were paralyzed by their upper social position from bringing forward and educating those who sympathized with their views; Bryan compromised the Populist commitment which itself was lacking in clarity. It was the incipient Socialist movement in America which, as heir to classical liberalism, possessed in this period the ability to bring together and educate those opposed to American imperialism. The strongest early twentieth century isolationists in America were those most influenced by socialism, whether directly like Debs or indirectly like LaFollette; similarly, in Europe, isolationism was led by Socialists like Jaures and Lenin. Thus, in America as in Europe, it was the Socialists who led the struggle against US Imperialism’s intervention in World War I and bore the brunt of the resulting persecutions.

The liberals whose courage had failed with US intervention in World War I rejoined LaFollette, Debs et al. in the two-fronted battle for isolationism and for civil liberties against the Wilson Administration. The government’s campaign for the League of Nations coincided with its persecution of progressives in the Red Scare of 1919-20. The League of Nations was recognized as the imperialist instrument of the exploiters that would lead to war by maintaining the status quo imposed by them at Versailles. Oswald Garrison Villard, Walter Lippmann, Albert Jay Nock and Scott Nearing provided the intellectual and polemical ammunition for the anti-League senators of the Battalion of Death led by Robert LaFollette, Hiram Johnson and William Borah. The campaign for isolationism and civil liberties continued during the 1920’s as US imperialism continued its course in the Caribbean and in the Far East. But it was the depression of the 1930’s which eventually led to a strong popular isolationist movement. Rooted in the close financial collaboration with Britain in the 1920’s, the depression forced the “have not” nations into desperate measures against the system of Western imperialism which exploited them, and these desperate measures in turn provided the excuse for the rearmament by which the US government finally was able to end the depression.[5]

The development of opposition to American intervention in World War II was crucial for the succeeding quarter century of American history. It was the US intervention into World War II that disrupted the isolationist factor in American politics and led to confusion of its basic principles.

During the course of the protracted twentieth-century debate over foreign policy, the word “isolationist” became a cliche. Through reckless use it acquired, like “appeaser” or even “liberal”, a somewhat sinister meaning. . . It was a handy designation for our twin policies of neutrality and non-intervention. . . We can begin by saying that American isolationism has never meant total social, cultural, and economic self-sufficiency . .Ardent isolationists have frequently advocated American leadership in the promotion of peace, provided always that we limit our efforts to moral suasion and scrupulously avoid commitments for coercive action to allay or punish aggression.[6]

The death in January, 1940 of Senator William Borah was a significant blow to American isolationism. Borah had a complete grasp of world problems and understood the nature of imperialism, and especially of American Imperialism. He recognized that it was Asia and not Europe that formed the crisis center of the world because it was there that nations suffered from imperialism and would struggle mightily to free themselves. Furthermore, Asia was the area of the greatest US financial and strategic involvement and expectation. Borah died as the earliest US measures leading to war against Japan were initiated, and no one remained with the preception to center the attention of American isolationism on the crisis in Asia.

It was the threat of American intervention in the European war that led to the formation of the America First Committee and it was the European situation on which the America First Committee concentrated during the near year-and-a-half of its existence. Founded by R. Douglas Stuart, Jr., Kingman Brewster, Jr., and other Yale students under the influence of the eminent international lawyer, Professor Edwin Borchard, the organization came to include many of the traditional isolationists, like John T. Flynn, Norman Thomas and Harry Elmer Barnes, but was dominated by businessmen with short-run viewpoints. Many of these businessmen were former generals who not only completely lacked understanding of the basic isolationist opposition to militarism and conscription, but even proposed a wide program of militarization for America. Thus, the failure of America First to put itself in complete opposition to the draft permitted the extension of conscription in September, 1941 by but a single vote. Without the extension of conscription the administration would never have pursued the aggressive policy against Japan which led to war in December, 1941. Thus, the insistence upon compromise, moderation and non-principled stands by the businessmen-generals who assumed the leadership of the isolationist movement undercut and ultimately defeated the traditional isolationism of the membership and the intellectuals in America First, as well as of the other isolationist groups. It was the compromises and failures of that very leadership that provided the opportunity for successful US involvement in World War II.

The noninterventionist strength, which the Committee and other groups represented, definitely affected the strategy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. More than that, persons close to Roosevelt felt that the noninterventionists had fought the president very nearly to a standstill near the end of 1941. . .[7]

With their decision in favor of compromise, moderation, and manipulation, the leadership of America First attempted to play a game that was lost from the beginning. The “instrumentalists” of the pro-war New Republic recognized that their only effective opposition came from the principled and absolutist isolationists, men who had emerged from the original main center of American isolationism, the American Left.[8] In its editorial “Hutchins and the Absolute”, the New Republic (February 3, 1941) declared;

It is worth noting that, whatever their other differences, it is the absolutist philosophies of our time that are united for isolation and appeasement. The Communists and the dogmatic socialists of the Norman Thomas stripe; the pacifists; the Nazis; the liberal absolutists of the Flynn type; and now the Hutchins brand of neo-Thomas (sic) absolutism that speaks and thinks in terms of frozen moral categories.[9]

The “instrumentalist” approach is essentially a conservative one, dedicated as it is to the substantial maintenance of the status quo. Walter Lippmann, who was developing a conservative philosophy, and Herbert Agar, a leader of southern conservative thought, became interventionists, as did conservative critics of the revolutionary aspects of National Socialism, such as Peter Viereck (Metapolitics: From Wagner to Hitler) and William M. McGovern (From Luther to Hitler). American nationalists like Joseph Alsop and William Kintner (American White Paper) were joined by European-born nationalists like Robert Strausz-Hupe (Axis America: Hitler Plans our Future) and Stefan T. Possony.[10]

Stefan T. Possony is an interesting example of the role of nationalist influences - the antithesis of American cosmopolitan isolationism. Until 1939 Possony had lived in Vienna where he published a work on economic controls during wartime (English translation, Tomorrow’s War. London, 1938). Based on the German experience during and since the First World War, Possony emphasized the development of capital accumulation by the State during wartime in case the European conflict should be resumed. Possony soon fled to France where he became an adviser to the French government, 193940, and came to the US after the defeat of France. When it was proposed in the Nation. “Shall we feed Hitler’s Victims” as suggested by the work of the Quakers, the Red Cross and Herbert Hoover, Possony effectively answered, no, in “Relief, Limited” (Nation. December 14, 1940). Possony contributed to the hysteria engendered by Hearst’s geopolitical theories, under which the US would be invaded by Germany by way of Africa, South and Central America. When John T. Flynn rationally disposed of these ravings, Possony rushed into print in the New Republic (May 12, 1941) making fantastic military predictions, but also significantly appealing to the all-too-real fears that American business in South America could not bear German economic competition.[11]

By early 1941, however, the Nation and New Republic had fallen behind in the intensity of advocacy of belligerency as compared to the Hearst newspapers and the Luce publications, Time and Life. Tex McCrary, Hearst editorialist, declared: “When we have won the war I will become a rampant imperialist - in that I would want to see America enforce the peace. . . It would be a “Roman peace”, and we would be the Romans. . .”[12] Clare Boothe Luce’s campaign for war won her a nomination in Common Sense (January, 1941) as the American woman who when war came could claim “sole responsibility for the event”. Asia, and especially, China, was central to the American dreamers of empire, as William L. Neumann has noted:

Financial aid to Chiang Kai-shek, another writer promised, would be the “first step toward the practical realization of the long-awaited El Dorado of the Chinese market”. Henry Luce, perhaps the most influential disseminator of the conventional image of China, warned that failure to assume the responsibilities of the “American Century” would mean a dissolution of the Asian dream, whereas a positive program would mean that Asia “will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year.”[13]

Henry Luce’s “American Century” would establish the US as the dominant world power in alliance with England. Max Lerner (New Republic. April 7, 1941) criticized liberal lack of enthusiasm for Luce’s program, and approved of much of the program, especially in contrast to the position of the isolationist liberals like Senator Wheeler and John T. Flynn, Luce represented for Lerner “a new capitalist-conscious group, most of them younger men, who do not fear the war but regard it as an opportunity”. Lerner noted that Luce’s views were preceded by a New Republic editorial (December 23, 1940) on the necessity of an American-led Anglo-American hegemony. America in cooperation with England should “establish its hegemony in the world, control the world sea lanes and world trade, send out technicians to develop the world and education to teach it and food cargoes to feed it and ideals to inspire it”.[14]

The role of American financial and business leaders and their major press organs, such as the Luce publications, was clear to the leading isolationists. They realized, too late, where the real source of American imperialism was seated. Senator Robert Taft’s rebuttal (Nation. December 13, 1941) to an article by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (Nation. December 6, 1941) summed up the major forces supporting American intervention in World War II:

Nor is Mr. Schlesinger correct in attributing the position of the majority of Republicans to their conservatism. The most conservative members of the party - the Wall Street bankers, the society group, nine-tenths of the plutocratic newspapers, and most of the party’s financial contributors - are the ones who favor intervention in Europe. . . The war party is made up of the business community of the cities, the newspaper and magazine writers, the radio and movie commentators, the Communists, and the university intelligentsia.[15]

In the period preceding American entrance into World War II there had been a number of persons who sought direct US support for the Chiang Kai-shek regime, among them such individuals as Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, Walter Judd, Alfred Kohl-berg, and Joseph Alsop who worked through a number of established groups and specially-formed committees. As part of the limited opposition permitted by themselves during the war, Republicans agreed to limit their attacks to the waste and methods of conduct of the war effort. One of the gravest examples of graft and corruption was the use of American money by the Chiang regime. The exposure of this waste in 1943 caused a split between the businessmen and journalists who continued to support Chiang, and the East Asian scholars who denounced this injury to the war effort; indeed, it has been said that Chiang stopped active fighting when the US came into the war. Alfred Kohl-berg then leaped to the charge that anti-Chiang and “therefore” pro-Communist influence had caused these scholars to criticize Chiang Kai-shek. The basis for this wild accusation was the charge that the scholarly journals Pacific Affairs and Far Eastern Survey had contained in the preceding seven years no criticism of Japanese policies except for its feudal land system, no major criticism of the Soviet Union, and mixed criticism and praise of Chiang.

Despite the veteran opposition to Chiang by American isolationists, the burgeoning China Lobby in the U. S. was able to execute a cunning maneuver to curry the temporary favor of the isolationists. During the Congressional Pearl Harbor inquiry in 1945, it was revealed that a crucial American proposal for a Japanese modus vivendi in November 1941 had been scuttled by a negative cable from Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang had demanded that the US cancel its proposal, which would have forced him to enter into a coalition with Chiang’s former prime minister who now headed a pro-Japanese government in northern China. Whereas Chiang was clearly the person responsible for the note and hence the collapse of the last hope for peace in the Pacific, both the isolationists and the China Lobby, for entirely different reasons, agreed to center their retrospective fire upon Owen Lattimore, who had been sent out by the US some months before as special adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. As a result of this maneuver, the isolationists were effectively disarmed from combatting the China Lobby’s smear campaign against the formerly pro-Chiang interventionist Lattimore, a campaign launched by Kohlberg in the pro-Chiang American organ, China Monthly, in October, 1945.

The China Lobby’s concentration upon Alger Hiss also served to neutralize any isolationist opposition, for Hiss, as a pro-Chiang and pro-interventionist assistant to Stanley K. Hornbeck at the Far Eastern desk of the State Department, had earned the hatred of the isolationist forces. Thus, despite the fact that the purpose of the China Lobby’s campaign was stepped-up US intervention on Chiang’s behalf, its early concentration on such formerly pro-war US advisers as Hiss and Lattimore served to stifle any developing bisolationist opposition to this early—and crucial—emergence of the Cold War in Asia.

The China Lobby, early in its Cold War campaign, established the American China Policy Association, with Clare Boothe Luce as president and Alfred Kohlberg as vice-president. In preparation for the 1948 elections, Richard Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee began, in the summer of 1948, its parade of ex-Communist witnesses—the Bentleys, the Budenzes, the Chamberses—all distinguished for their often failing memories and their bitterness toward their former comrades. The China Monthly soon claimed (in its September, 1948 issue) the honor of being “the first to distinguish between a loyal and disloyal citizen.” It is also perhaps not too far-fetched to collate the pro-Chiang enthusiasm of Senators Knowland and Nixon with the fact that the Bank of America, California’s immensely powerful bank, has been the major depository for Chiang’s enormous American cash holdings.

The total defeat of Chiang and the establishment of his government on Formosa led to an all-out effort by the China Lobby to preserve that island as the center for future US domination of China. In January, 1950, the Truman Administration indicated its willingness to allow Peking to gain possession of Formosa during the summer of that year. Senator Knowland, with the cooperation of General Mac-Arthur’s staff in Tokyo, immediately leaked this information to the public and attacked the idea. Early in February of 1950, Senator McCarthy began his famous attacks on the State Department, concentrating his smear charges especially on Philip Jessup, who had prepared the State Department book demonstrating that the Chiang regime had fallen from its own failings. Jessup was, characteristically, accused of being a Communist. The charge against Jessup revealed that the China Lobby now felt itself strong enough (and the isolationists weak enough) to break with the isolationists in the course of drumming up its multi-sided propaganda for a new American war. For Philip Jessup had been a distinguished leader of American isolationism (after as well as before June 22, 1941). Jessup had been chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations before the War, and editor of the Far Eastern Survey. However, he had been forced out of his posts by the Luce-Kohlberg-China Lobbyists because of his isolationism. He had been a key adviser to the America First Committee and had sponsored its local chapters in Norfolk, Conn. and New York City. Philip C. Jessup was as isolationist in 1950 as he had been in 1940 and suffered for this equally; he had opposed US imperialism against Japan just as much as he now opposed it against the New China.[16]

For Philip Jessup to be accused of Communism by the agents of the China Lobby was not a special case. Most isolationists have been so accused for so many years that the charges have lost all meaning. Senator Taft, within a matter of weeks of the Jessup slur, was himself subjected to the same charges by another influential member of the China Lobby, Joseph Alsop. Taft and all other isolationists were characterized as tools of Communism because isolationism basically denies the aggressiveness of any major power other than the US government, the only government that Americans can do anything about.

But it was not only the burgeoning China Lobby wing of the American Right that heartily smeared isolationists as tools of Communism. The charges were enthusiastically joined by the nation’s liberals—the Nation, the New Republic, Americans for Democratic Action—who still fixed upon the dwindling ranks of American isolationism as the major enemy. And in a profound sense they were right; for these battered isolationists were the last carriers of a great American tradition, and constituted the last centers of total opposition to expanding and swelling American global imperialism. It was precisely these liberals, moreover, whom the historian William Appleman Williams has brilliantly termed “the corporate liberals”, who have provided the major ideological and demagogic rationale for World War II and post-war American imperialism. And so these liberals recognized their main enemy, and were not above the very tactics of “McCarthyism” from which they were later to recoil when McCarthy himself humorlessly began to employ them against the Establishment itself!

As for the Communists themselves, they were not about to favor any kind of political alliance with the isolationists. For one thing, the Communists still suffered from the cultural lag of the World War II thesis that smeared the isolationists as “parroters of the Goebbels line”; for another, the Communist policy was to seek passive adaptation and coalition on virtually any terms with reformist liberals—indeed the very liberals who were cementing the new American imperialism upon the American public. In short, whereas the liberals were astute in recognizing their main enemy, the Communists never succeeded in identifying theirs.

The Geography of Isolationism

The isolationist tradition in the United States is often associated with geographical regions. Of course, geographical regions are short-hand methods for describing cultural areas, so that a geographical description summarizes a complex of ideological, economic, and ethnic bases of cultural units. Briefly, the region best known in America for isolationism is that embracing the Old and New Northwest, from the Ohio River westward. This region, as the frontier that was settled last, has had the least influence in the decision-making of the federal government, a situation aggravated by the limited economic and intellectual influences of the region. The settlement of this region occurred primarily in the nineteenth century, and its viewpoint reflected the people who migrated there from Europe or the East. The economic reasons for their migration were based on their desire for independent economic development, free from the feudal systems of Europe and even in the American East. Similarly, the European migration from northern Europe and from the American East hoped to avoid the caste and class domination of politics that characterized the established political regimes. The leading migration to this area was German: whether as descendants of the German pacifist sects that had settled at first in Pennsylvania, or as refugees from the militarism and authoritarianism of anti-democratic German governments in the nineteenth century, there was a common cultural viewpoint shared by the Scandinavians as well as by the migrants from the East and the British Isles.

Samuel Lubell has emphasized the importance of the generally neglected German element in American politics.[17] As the second major ethnic group in the US it could not help but have a strong influence. Yet Lubell limits his analysis to the purely ethnic aspects without fully recognizing their far more significant cultural dimensions. Particularly significant were the democratic and anti-militarist traditions of the German immigrants and their descendants. These groups would not have favored the US entering a war on the side of Germany any more than they favored a war opposed to Germany. Their profound anti-militarism was the significant factor during both of the wars which Lubell perceptively feels could well be described as the first and second German wars. What Lubell fails to notice is that the accusations of pro-Germanism levelled against all opponents of US war were particularly directed against Americans of German descent, since their way of life emphasized their Germanic heritage for religious and cultural reasons. Their use of the German language made them especially suspect, for during the wars all things German were proscribed. The severe persecutions induced in German-Americans an identification with the government of Germany from which they had previously been free. At the same time, the pressures of mass culture have homogenized German-American and other ethnic groups, and have thus helped to undermine the specifically anti-militarist traditions of German America.

Pro-British, pro-League sentiment was always strongest in the Eastern and Southern areas. The Germanic elements were joined in opposition by other western European groups such as the Irish and Italians. While for special reasons Slavic groups led by the Poles supported the League, Southern sentiment for the League was aroused by the reminder that the anti-English Irish and Germans had provided the margin of victory for the North in the Civil War. The Ku Klux Klan, it must be remembered, was solidly based in the old Anglo-American groupings. Along with the racist Southern groups, the American Legion’s Anglophile outlook was in reaction against the revisionism that had exposed the unheroic nature of the war and of deaths in which the Legion gloried.[18]

Internal migrations in the US have altered the sectional divisions based on cultural diversities. The heaviest migrations in the last quarter-century have been out of the South. It has been noted by sociologists that the less progressive attitudes on political, economic, social and especially civil libertarian questions exhibited by blue-collar workers reflects not only their educational level and the effects of mass media but the fact of accelerated Southern origins of America’s industrial working class. Not only has there been a vast increase in industrialization in the South but Southerners in huge numbers have migrated to the cities of the Middle West and to southern California. The situation in California is especially instructive. Before World War II, California was a major center for progressivism in America, in liberal and socialist aspects of which were reflected in attitudes toward foreign policy. California’s powerful Hiram Johnson was one of the leading opponents of American entrance into World War I, the League of Nations, and World War II, and was a center of isolationism in the Senate until his death in 1945. The Second World War greatly changed the political demography of California, southern California and Los Angeles in particular. For a quarter-century a massive government defense industry has developed there, fed by the labor of largely Southern migrants. The post-war emergence of William F. Knowland and Richard M. Nixon as California’s Senators and major centers of Republican power, contrasts strikingly to such pre- World War II Republican leaders as Hiram Johnson and Earl Warren. All this is reflective of the changes in California brought about by the heavy World War II migrations. The migration from the South, however, has also been double-edged, involving as it has large numbers of Southern Negroes seeking the constitutional rights and civil liberties denied them in the South. Their anti-militarist religious traditions and their continued deprivation of civil liberties in the cities of the East, Middle West and southern California, combine with their recent admission to voting in the South to make the Negroes a potentially important anti-imperialist force in both electoral and direct action.

In the meanwhile, the older center of isolationism—the Old and New Northwest—was reduced as such by the swelling of Southern migration to the cities north of the Ohio River. The remaining strongholds of isolationism are the states of the Northwest from Lake Michigan to the Pacific. Surely it is no accident that states like Wisconsin which produced the two Bob LaFollettes are now represented by Senators with strong doubts about America’s aggression in Vietnam; or that Montana, which used to be represented by Burton K. Wheeler is now represented by Mike Mansfield; or that Idaho which sent William Borah and Glen Taylor to the Senate now sends Frank Church, or that Oregon’s Charles McNary has been succeeded by Wayne Morse.

________

1.See Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth-Century Reaction (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1957), pp. 10-11.

2.Ibid., p. 14.

3.Ibid., pp. 14, 27.

5.Cf. Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1963), and William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (N.Y.: Dell Pub. Co., 1962.)

6.Adler, op, cit., pp. 26-29.

7.Wayne S. Cole, America First, the battle against intervention. 1940-1941 (Madison, Wise; University of Wisconsin Press, 1953), pp. viii, 199.

8.“America First and the Left,” New Republic, June 2, 1941.

9.See James J. Martin, American Liberalism and World Politics. 1931-1941 (New York: Devin-Adair, 1964), II, 1272.

10.Ibid., pp. 1167-68, 1180, 1265, 1274.

11.Ibid., p. 1258.

12.Ibid,, p. 1174.

13.William L. Neumann, “Determinism, Destiny and Myth in the American Image of China,” in George L. Anderson, Issues and Conflicts, (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1959), p. 13.

14.See Martin, op. cit., pp. 1171-72.

15.Ibid., pp. 1277-78. The Communists’ role had of course changed drastically with Germany’s invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941. For the Communists though not for the Trotskyists the new turn of events had so changed the nature of the war to justify advocacy of American intervention.

16.Cole, op. cit., pp. 76, 161, 188. On Jessup, see also McGeorge Bundy, The Pattern of Responsibility (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1952), p. 218; and Congressional Record. Vol. 87, Pt. 8 (October, 1941), p. 8321.

17.Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Poltics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), and Lubell, Revolt of the Moderates (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956).

18.Adler, op. cit., pp. 75-92.

REPRINT:

The American Empire

By GARET GARRETT

One of the most perceptive and felicitous writers of the Old Right was the doughty and fiercely independent Garet Garrett, who, during his long career in journalism, was an editor of the Saturday Evening Post and of the quarterly American Affairs. Unlike so many of his colleagues on the Old Right, Mr. Garrett did not succumb to the lure of American imperialism after World War II; on the contrary, he levelled against it some of his most effective onslaughts. The following is a condensation of Garrett’s pamphlet The Rise of Empire, published in 1952, and included in his collection The People’s Pottage (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953). We are indebted to Caxton Printers for permission to print the article below.

We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night; the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: “You now are entering Imperium.” Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: “Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.”

That a republic may vanish is an elementary school book fact.

The Roman Republic passed into the Roman Empire, and yet never could a Roman citizen have said, “That was yesterday.” Nor is the historian, with all the advantages of perspective, able to place that momentous event at an exact point on the dial of time. The Republic had a long, unhappy twilight. It is agreed that the Empire began with Augustus Caesar. What Augustus Caesar did was to demonstrate a proposition found in Aristotle’s Politics, one that he must have known by heart, namely this: “People do not easily change, but love their own ancient customs; and it is by small degrees only that one thing takes the place of another; so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about a revolution in the state.”

Revolution within the form.

There is no comfort in history for those who put their faith in forms; who think there is safeguard in words inscribed in parchment, preserved in a glass case, reproduced in facsimile and hauled to and fro on a Freedom Train.

Let it be current history. How much does the younger half of this generation reflect upon the fact that in its own time a complete revolution has taken place in the relations between government and people?

The extent to which the original precepts and intentions of Constitutional, representative, limited government, in the republican form, have been eroded away by argument and dialectic is a separate subject, long and ominous, and belongs to a treatise on political science. The one fact now to be emphasized is that when the process of erosion has gone on until there is no saying what the supreme law of the land is at a given time, then the Constitution begins to be flouted by executive will, with something like impunity. The instances may not be crucial at first and all the more dangerous for that reason. As one is condoned another follows and they become progressive.

To outsmart the Constitution and circumvent its restraints became a popular exercise of the art of government in the Roosevelt regime. In defense of his attempt to pack the Supreme Court with social-minded judges after several of his New Deal laws had been declared unconstitutional, President Roosevelt wrote: “The reactionary members of the Court had apparently determined to remain on the bench for as long as life continued—for the sole purpose of blocking any program of reform. “

Among the millions who at the time applauded that statement of contempt there were very few, if there was indeed one, who would not have been frightened by a revelation of the logical sequel. They believed, as everyone else did, that there was one thing a President could never do. There was one sentence of the Constitution that could not fall, so long as the Republic lived.

The Constitution says: “The Congress shall have power to declare war.”

That, therefore, was the one thing no President could do. By his own will he could not declare war. Only Congress could declare war, and Congress could be trusted never to do it but by will of the people. And that was the innermost safeguard of the republic. The decision whether or not to go to war was in the hands of the people—or so they believed. No man could make it for them.

It is true that President Roosevelt got the country into World War II. That is not the same thing. For a declaration of war he went to Congress—after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. He wanted it, and yet the Constitution forbade him to declare war and he durst not do it.

Nine years later a much weaker President did.

After President Truman, alone and without either the consent or knowledge of Congress, had declared war on the Korean aggressor, 7000 miles away, Congress condoned his usurpation of its exclusive Constitutional power. More than that, his political supporters in Congress argued that in the modern case that sentence in the Constitution conferring upon Congress the sole power to declare war was obsolete.

Mark you, the words had not been erased; they still existed in form. Only, they had become obsolete. And why obsolete? Because war may now begin suddenly, with bombs falling out of the sky, and we might perish while waiting for Congress to declare war.

The reasoning is puerile. The Korean war, which made the precedent, did not begin that way; secondly, Congress was in session at the time, so that the delay could not have been more than a few hours, provided Congress had been willing to declare war; and, thirdly, the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the republic may in a legal manner act defensively before a declaration of war has been made. It is bound to be made if the nation has been attacked.

Mr. Truman’s supporters argued that in the Korean instance his act was defensive and therefore within his powers as Commander-in-Chief. In that case, to make it Constitutional, he was legally obliged to ask Congress for a declaration of war afterward. This he never did. For a week Congress relied upon the papers for news of the country’s entry into war; then the President called a few of its leaders to the White House and told them what he had done. A year later Congress was still debating whether or not the country was at war, in a legal, Constitutional sense.

A few months later Mr. Truman sent American troops to Europe to join an international army, and did it not only without a law, without even consulting Congress, but challenged the power of Congress to stop him. Congress made all of the necessary sounds of anger and then poulticed its dignity with a resolution saying it was all right for that one time, since anyhow it had been done, but that hereafter it would expect to be consulted.

At that time the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate asked the State Department to set forth in writing what might be called the position of Executive Government. The State Department obligingly responded with a document entitled, “Powers of the President to Send Troops Outside of the United States, February 28, 1951.” For the information of the United States Senate it said:

As this discussion of the respective powers of the President and Congress has made clear, constitutional doctrine has been largely moulded by practical necessities. Use of the congressional power to declare war, for example, has fallen into abeyance because wars are no longer declared in advance.

Caesar might have said it to the Roman Senate. If constitutional doctrine is moulded by necessity, what is a written Constitution for?

Thus an argument that seemed at first to rest upon puerile reasoning turned out to be deep and cunning. The immediate use of it was to defend the unconstitutional Korean precedent, namely, the declaration of war as an act of the President’s own will. Yet it was not invented for that purpose alone. It stands as a forecast of executive intentions, a manifestation of the executive mind, a mortal challenge to the parliamentary principle.

The question is: “Whose hand shall control the instrument of war?”

It is late to ask. It may be too late, for when the hand of the Republic begins to relax another hand is already putting itself forth.

If you may have Empire with or without a constitution, even within the form of a republican constitution, and if also you may have Empire with or without an emperor, then how may the true marks of Empire be distinguished with certainty? What are they?

The first requisite of Empire is:

The executive power of government shall be dominant.

It may be dominant originally, as in the days of hereditary kingship, or it may come to be dominant by change, as when the Roman republic passed under the rule of Caesars.

What Empire needs above all in government is an executive power that can make immediate decisions, such as a decision in the middle of the night by the President to declare war on the aggressor in Korea, or, on the opposite side, a decision in the Politburo in the Kremlin, perhaps also in the middle of the night, to move a piece on the chessboard of cold war.

The Federal income-tax law of 1914 gave the government unlimited access to wealth and, moreover, power for the first time to levy taxes not for revenue only but for social purposes, in case there should arise a popular demand for redistribution of the national wealth. World War I immediately followed. Looking backward we can see that these two events marked the beginning of a great rise in the executive power of government. Then came in rapid succession (1) the Great Depression (2) the revolutionary Roosevelt regime, and (3) World War II, all within an arc of twenty years.

In those twenty years the sphere of Executive Government increased with a kind of explosive force. Congress received from the White House laws that were marked “must”. Its principal function was to enact and engross them. The part of the Supreme Court was to make everything square with the Constitution by a liberal reinterpretation of its language. The word executive came to have its new connotation. For all the years before when you spoke of the executive power of government you meant only the power to execute and administer the laws. Henceforth it would mean the power to govern.

A further very subtle change was taking place. Only a few years ago if you had asked such a question as, “Who speaks for the people?” or “What organ of government utters their sovereign will?” the answer would have been “The Congress of the United States”. Certainly. That was what Congress was for.

Now it is the President, standing at the head of the Executive Government, who says: “I speak for the people,” or “I have a mandate from the people.” Thus the man who happens to be the embodiment of the executive principle stands between the Congress and the people and assumes the right to express their will.

There is more to this. How much more than Congress the President acts directly upon the emotions and passions of the people to influence their thinking. As he controls Executive Government, so he controls the largest propaganda machine in the world, unless it be the Russian machine; and this machine is the exclusive possession of Executive Government. The Congress has no propaganda apparatus at all and continually finds itself under pressure from the people who have been moved for or against something by the ideas and thought material broadcast in the land by the administrative bureaus in Washington.

The result is Bureau Government, administered by bureaucrats who are not elected by the people.

In The Grandeur that was Rome, Stobart says that for a long time after the Republic had become an Empire a stout republican could still believe that he was governed by the Senate; yet little by little as a complete imperial bureaucracy was evolved the Senate sank into insignificance. It was really the bureaucracy of the imperial palace that governed the Roman world and strangled it with good intentions. The growth of the bureaucracy was both symptom and cause of the increasing power of the executive principle.

Aggrandizement of the executive principle of government takes place in several ways, mainly these:

(1) By delegation. That is when the Congress delegates one or more of its Constitutional powers to the President and authorizes him to exercise them. That procedure touched a very high point during the long Roosevelt regime, when an obliging Congress delegated to the President, among other powers, the crucial one of all, namely, power over the public purse, which until then had belonged exclusively to the House of Representatives, where the Constitution put it.

(2) By reinterpretation of the language of the Constitution. That is done by a sympathetic Supreme Court.

(3) By innovation. That is when, in this changing world, the President does things that are not specifically forbidden by the Constitution because the founders never thought of them.

(4) By the appearance in the sphere of Executive Government of what are called administrative agencies, with power to issue rules and regulations that have the force of law. These agencies have built up a large body of administrative law which people are obliged to obey. And not only do they make their own laws; they enforce their own laws, acting as prosecutor, jury and judge; and appeal from their decisions to the regular courts is difficult because the regular courts are obliged to take their findings of fact as final. Thus the Constitutional separation of the three governmental powers, namely, the legislative, the executive and the judicial, is entirely lost.

(5) By usurpation. That is when the President wilfully confronts Congress with what in statescraft is called the fait accompli—a thing already done—which Congress cannot repudiate without exposing the American government to the ridicule of nations. It might be, for example, an executive agreement with foreign countries creating an international body to govern trade, in place of the International Trade Organization Treaty which the Senate would probably not have approved. The point is that the Constitution does not specifically forbid the President to enter into executive agreements with foreign nations; it provides only for treaties. In any case, when an executive agreement has been signed the Congress is very loath to humiliate the President before the world by repudiating his signature. Or again, it may be such a thing as going to war in Korea by agreement with the United Nations, without the consent of Congress, or sending troops to join an international army in Europe, by agreement with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

(6) Lastly, the powers of Executive Government are bound to increase as the country becomes more and more involved in foreign affairs. This is true because, both traditionally and by the terms of the Constitution, the province of foreign affairs is one that belongs in a very special sense to the President.

So much for the rise in the executive power of government to a colossal dimension, all in our own time. It is no longer a coequal power; it is the dominant power in the land, as Empire requires.

A second mark by which you may unmistakably distinguish Empire is: “Domestic policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.”

That happened to Rome. It has happened to every Empire. The consequences of its having happened to the British Empire are tragically appearing. The fact now to be faced is that it has happened also to us.

It needs hardly to be argued that as we convert the nation into a garrison state to build the most terrible war machine that has ever been imagined on earth, every domestic policy is bound to be conditioned by our foreign policy.

The voice of government is saying that if our foreign policy fails we are ruined. It is all or nothing. Our survival as a free nation is at hazard.

That makes it simple, for in that case there is no domestic policy that may not have to be sacrificed to the necessities of foreign policy—even freedom. It is no longer a question of what we can afford to do; it is what we must do to survive.

We are no longer able to choose between peace and war. We have embraced perpetual war. We are so committed by the Truman Doctrine, by examples of our intention, and by such formal engagements as the North Atlantic Treaty and the Pacific Pact.

Let it be a question of survival, and how relatively unimportant are domestic policies—touching, for example, the rights of private property, when, if necessary, all private property may be confiscated; or touching individual freedom, when, if necessary, all labor may be conscripted; or touching welfare and social security, when in a garrison state the hungry may have to be fed not by checks from the Treasury but in soup kitchens!

The American mind is already conditioned. For proof of that you may take the dumb resignation with which such forebodings as the following, from the lead editorial of The New York Times, October 31, 1951, are received by the people:

. . .the Korean war has brought a great and probably long-lasting change in our history and our way of life. . .forcing us to adopt measures which are changing the whole American scene and our relations with the rest of the world. . . We have embarked on a partial mobilization for which about a hundred billion dollars have already been made available. . .Finally, we have been forced not only to retain but to expand the draft and to press for a system of universal military training which will affect the lives of a whole generation. The productive effort and the tax burden resulting from these measures are changing the economic pattern of the land.

What is not so clearly understood, here or abroad, is that these are no temporary measures for a temporary emergency but rather the beginning of a wholly new military status for the United States, which seems certain to be with us for a long time to come.

What a loss it would be to the Bible if the prophets had been editorial writers on The New York Times. Never before in our history, probably never before in any history, could so dire a forecast have been made in these level tones. But what they are saying is true. And certainly never before could people have felt so helpless about it, as if this were not the harvest of our foreign policy but Jehovah acting through the Russians to afflict us—and nobody else responsible.

Another brand mark of Empire is: “Ascendancy of the military mind, to such a point at last that the civilian mind is intimidated.”

The great symbol of the American military mind is the Pentagon in Washington with its seventeen and one half miles of corridor, in which admirals and generals sometimes get lost; its twenty-eight thousand people at desks, eight thousand automobiles parked outside—the largest indoor city in the world. It was built at a cost of seventy million dollars during World War II, not as temporary housing such as was built during World War I, but as a dwelling for Mars. What it represents is a forethought of perpetual war.

There global strategy is conceived; there, nobody knows how, the estimates of what it will cost are arrived at; and surrounding it is our own iron curtain. The information that comes from the inner side is only such as the military authorities are willing to divulge, or have a reason for imparting to the people. All the rest is stamped “classified” or “restricted,” in the name of national security, and Congress itself cannot get it. That is as it must be of course; the most important secrets of Empire are military secrets. Even information that is without any intrinsic military value may be classified, on the ground that if it got out it might give rise to popular criticism of the military establishment and cause bad public relations.

It was General Mac Arthur himself who uttered these devastating words: “Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. . . Indeed, it is a part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusory foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.”

The bald interpretation of General Mac Arthur’s words is this. War becomes an instrument of domestic policy. Among the control mechanism on the government’s panel board now is a dial marked War. It may be set to increase or decrease the tempo of military expenditures, as the planners decide that what the economy needs is a little more inflation or a little less—but of course never any deflation. And whereas it was foreseen that when Executive Government is resolved to control the economy it will come to have a vested interest in the power of inflation, so now we perceive that it will come also to have a kind of proprietary interest in the institution of perpetual war.

Yet in the very nature of Empire, the military mind must keep its secrets. A Republic may put its armor on and off. War is an interlude. When war comes it is a civilian business, conducted under the advice of military experts. Both in peace and war military experts are excluded from civilian decisions. But with Empire it is different; Empire must wear its armor. Its life is in the hands of the General Staff and war is supremely a military business, requiring of the civilian only acquiescence, exertion and loyalty.

Another historic feature of Empire, and this is a structural feature, is:

A system of satellite nations.

We use that word only for nations that have been captured in the Russian orbit, with some inflection of contempt. We speak of our own satellites as allies and friends or as freedom loving nations. Nevertheless, satellite is the right word. The meaning of it is the hired guard. When people say we have lost China or that if we lose Europe it will be a disaster, what do they mean? How could we lose China or Europe, since they never belonged to us? What they mean is that we have lost or may lose a following of dependent people who act as an outer guard.

It is a long list, and satellite traffic in the American orbit is already pretty dense without taking into account client nations, suppliant nations and waif satellites, all looking to the American government for arms and economic aid. These are scattered all over the body of the sick world like festers. For any one of them to involve us in war it is necessary only for the Executive Power at Washington to decide that its defense is somehow essential to the security of the United States. That is how the Korean War started. Korea was a waif satellite.

Empire must put its faith in arms.

Fear at last assumes the phase of a patriotic obsession. It is stronger than any political party. Any candidate for office who trifles with its basic conviction will be scourged. The basic conviction is simple. We cannot stand alone. A capitalistic economy, though it possesses half the industrial power of the whole world, cannot defend its own hemisphere. It may be able to save the world; alone it cannot save itself. It must have allies. Fortunately, it is able to buy them, bribe them, arm them, feed and clothe them; it may cost us more than we can afford, yet we must have them or perish. This voice of fear is the voice of government.

Fear may be understood. But a curious and characteristic emotional weakness of Empire is:

A complex of vaunting and fear.

The vaunting is from what may be called that Titanic feeling. Many passengers on the doomed Titanic would not believe that a ship so big and grand could sink. So long as it was above water her listing deck seemed safer than a life boat on the open sea. So with the people of Empire. They are mighty. They have performed prodigious works, even many that seemed beyond their powers. Reverses they have known but never defeat.

So those must have felt who lived out the grandeur that was Rome. So the British felt while they ruled the world. So now Americans feel.

As we assume unlimited political liabilities all over the world, as billions in multiples of ten are voted for the ever expanding global intention, there is only scorn for the one who says: “We are not infinite. Let us calculate our utmost power of performance, weigh it against what we are proposing to do, and see if the scales will balance.” The answer is: “We do not know what our utmost is. What we will to do, that we can do. Let us resolve to do what is necessary. Necessity will create the means.”

Conversely, the fear. Fear of the barbarian. Fear of standing alone. A time comes when the guard itself, that is, your system of satellites, is a source of fear. Satellites are often willful and the more you rely upon them the more willful and demanding they are.

And then at last the secret, irreducible fear of allies—not this one or that one invidiously, but foreign allies in human principle, each with a life of its own to save. How will they behave when the test comes?—when they face, in this case, the terrible reality of becoming the European battlefield whereon the security of the United States shall be defended? If they falter or fail, what will become of the weapons with which we have supplied them? What if they were surrendered or captured and turned against us?

The possibility of having to face its own weapons on a foreign field is one of the nightmares of Empire.

As we have set them down so far, the things that signify Empire are these, namely:

(1) Rise of the executive principle of government to a position of dominant power,

(2) Accommodation of domestic policy to foreign policy,

(3) Ascendancy of the military mind,

(4) A system of satellite nations for a purpose called collective security, and,

(5) An emotional complex of vaunting and fear.

There is yet another sign that defines itself gradually. When it is clearly defined it may be already too late to do anything about it. That is to say, a time comes when Empire finds itself—

A prisoner of history.

The history of a Republic is its own history. Its past does not contain its future, like a seed. A Republic may change its course, or reverse it, and that will be its own business. But the history of Empire is world history and belongs to many people.

A republic is not obliged to act upon the world, either to change or instruct it. Empire, on the other hand, must put forth its power.

What is it that now obliges the American people to act upon the world?

As you ask that question the fear theme plays itself down and the one that takes its place is magnifical. It is not only our security we are thinking of—our security in a frame of collective security. Beyond that lies a greater thought.

It is our turn.

Our turn to do what?

Our turn to assume the responsibilities or moral leadership in the world.

Our turn to maintain a balance of power against the forces of evil everywhere—in Europe and Asia and Africa, in the Atlantic and in the Pacific, by air and by sea—evil in this case being the Russian barbarian.

Our turn to keep the peace of the world.

Our turn to save civilization.

Our turn to serve mankind.

But this is the language of Empire. The Roman Empire never doubted that it was the defender of civilization. Its good intentions were peace, law and order. The Spanish Empire added salvation. The British Empire added the noble myth of the white man’s burden. We have added freedom and democracy. Yet the more that may be added to it the more it is the same language still. A language of power.

Always the banners of Empire proclaim that the ends in view sanctify the means. The ironies, sublime and pathetic, are two. The first one is that Empire believes what it says on its banner; the second is that the word for the ultimate end is invariably Peace. Peace by grace of force.

One must see that on the road to Empire there is soon a point from which there is no turning back.

The argument for going on is well known. As Woodrow Wilson once asked, “Shall we break the heart of the world?” So now many are saying, “We cannot let the free world down.”

What does going on mean? You never know.

On June 24, 1941, as he extended Lend-Lease to Russia in World War II, President Roosevelt said:

“We will accept only a world consecrated to freedom of speech and expression—freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—freedom from want and freedom from terrorism.”

Senator Taft was one of the very few at that time who could imagine what going on from there might mean. He asked: “Will that part of the world which Stalin conquers with our airplanes and our tanks be consecrated to freedom of speech and expression? Will it be consecrated to freedom from want and freedom from terrorism? Or, after a Russian victory with our aid, must we step in with our armies to impose the four freedoms on two hundred million people, ten thousand miles away, who have never known freedom from want or freedom from terrorism?”

In October, 1951, only ten years later, Collier’s magazine devoted one entire issue to a preview of World War III, with twenty articles written by professors, military people, publicists and others who might call themselves makers of public opinion—and the sequel of it was the liberation of the Russian people. The answer to Mr. Taft’s question.

Between government in the republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people.

The country has been committed to the course of Empire by Executive Government, one step at a time, with slogans, concealments, equivocations, a propaganda of fear, and in every crisis an appeal for unity, lest we present to the world the aspect of a divided nation, until at last it may be proclaimed that events have made the decision and it is irrevocable. Thus, now to alter the course is impossible.

Who says it is impossible? The President says it; the State Department says it; all globalists and one-worlders are saying it.

Do not ask whether or not it is possible. Ask yourself this: If it were possible, what would it take? How could the people restore the Republic if they would? or, before that, how could they recover their Constitutional sovereign right to choose for themselves.

When you have put it that way you are bound to turn and look at the lost terrain. What are the positions, forgotten or surrendered, that would have to be recaptured?

The height in the foreground is a state of mind. To recover the habit of decision the people must learn again to think for themselves; and this would require a kind of self-awakening, as from a wee small alarm in the depths.

The second height to be regained is that where of old foreign policy was submitted to public debate. How long ago that seems! And how was that height lost? There was no battle for it. The government seized it without a struggle; and now the President may say the people ought to accept the government’s foreign policy without debate.

In a speech to the National Women’s Democratic Club on November 20, 1951, President Truman said: “You remember what happened in 1920. When the people voted for Harding, that meant a tremendous change in the course the United States was following. It meant that we turned our backs on the new-born League of Nations. . . I think most people now recognize that the country chose the wrong course in 1920. . . .Since I have been President I have sought to steer a straight course of handling foreign policy matters on the sole basis of the national interest. The people I have chosen to fill the major positions concerned with foreign policy have been picked solely on merit, without regard to party labels. I want to keep it that way. I want to keep our foreign policy out of domestic politics.”

So far had the American mind been conditioned by the infatuate phrase, bi-partisan foreign policy, that extraordinary statement was vacantly received. What was the President saying? He was saying that because, in his opinion, the people once voted wrong on foreign policy, they ought not to vote on it at all any more. Let them leave it to the President. It follows logically that the people have no longer anything to say about war and peace.

On this height, where foreign policy once more shall be debated by the people who may have to die for it, let the wind be cold and merciless. Let those be nakedly exposed to it who have brought the country to this impasse.

On the next height lies control of the public purse. Until the people have recovered that they cannot tame Executive Government. Passing laws to control or restrain it is of no avail whatever. The only way to reason with it is to cut it off at the pockets. The people have not always managed the purse well. They have sometimes stuffed it with bad money; they have sometimes flung its contents around in a reckless manner. But there is this difference, that no matter how badly the people may manage the public purse it cannot control them, whereas in the hands of the government control of the purse becomes the single most powerful instrument of executive policy touching the lives of the people.

The positions in the lost terrain that have been named are vital. To serve the Republic they must all be stormed and captured. But there is still one more, the last and highest of all. The slopes are steep and barren. No enemy is visible. The enemy is in yourself. For this may be named the Peak of Fortitude.

What you have to face is that the cost of saving the Republic may be extremely high. It could be relatively as high as the cost of setting it up in the first place, one hundred and seventy-five years ago, when love of political liberty was a mighty passion, and people were willing to die for it.

When the economy has for a long time been moving by jet propulsion, the higher the faster, on the fuel of perpetual war and planned inflation, time comes when you have to choose whether to go on and on and dissolve in the stratosphere, or decelerate. But deceleration will cause a terrific shock. Who will say, “Now!” Who is willing to face the grim and dangerous realities of deflation and depression?

When Moses had brought his people near to the Promised Land he sent out scouts to explore it. They returned with rapturous words for its beauties and its fruits, whereupon the people were shrill with joy, until the scouts said: “The only thing is, this land is inhabited by very fierce men.”

Moses said: “Come. Let us fall upon them and take the land. It is ours from the Lord.”

At that the people turned bitterly on Moses, and said: “What a prophet you have turned out to be! So the land is ours if we can take it? We needed no prophet to tell us that.”

No doubt the people know they can have their Republic back if they want it enough to fight for it and to pay the price. The only point is that no leader has yet appeared with the courage to make them choose.

LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal Of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

Spring 1966

Vol. II, No. 2

EDITORIALS

The Irish Revolution

The Power of the President

Labor Unionism, Two Views

Cold War Revisionism, The Major Historical Task

Our First Anniversary

WILLIAM L. NEUMANN,

Hiroshima Reconsidered

LEONARD P. LIGGIO,

Early Anti-Imperialism

RUSSELL D. STETLER, JR.,

The Freedom to Travel

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HERBERT SPENCER,

On Moral Education

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EDITORIAL

The Irish Revolution

Fifty years ago, on Easter Monday, April 25, 1916, began the glorious Irish Revolution, a revolution that was to end by sweeping away a monstrous record of brutality and oppression that had been foisted for centuries upon the long-suffering Irish people. In defeating the mighty armies of the greatest and most ruthless empire on the face of the earth, the Irish were the first people to have the courage and the stamina to follow through on the promise of the American Revolution against the same imperial oppressors: a Revolution that had been the first successful war of national liberation in modern history. The Irish Revolution was the second such successful war. For other wars of national liberation prompted by the American Revolution (e. g. Belgium, the Netherlands, Geneva, and later the revolutions of 1848) had been beaten back by the forces of armed international counter-revolution.

The Irish Revolution was fought and won in the only way such wars can be won: in relentless guerrilla fashion, by an armed people. Characteristically, it was begun heedlessly, recklessly by a relatively small band of idealistic young people, young people who did not sit around waiting for the ripening of “objective conditions” before launching their rebellion. The Easter Rising was hopeless, bungled, quixotic, doomed—and yet was eventually to succeed, thus confirming the unquenchable convictions of the rebel leaders. As the historian of the Irish Revolution writes:

The leaders realized with complete clarity that the majority of the Irish people were almost lost to all sense of the rights of Ireland as a nation, had learned to rely on the vague optimism of the Parliamentarians and were ready to give thanks for a petty instalment of Home Rule. The Independence movement was the movement of a minority still, and those who were ready to give and take life in armed insurrection were a minority in that movement. They believed, however, that the inherent native passion for freedom was dormant, not extinguished, and that only bold action was needed to arouse the people to a sense of their rights, their needs, and the strength that still lay within them unused.[1]

While their actions were quixotic in the short-run, the rebel leaders were astute enough to realize that England’s troubles were Ireland’s opportunity, and that therefore England’s embroilment in World War I furnished an indispensable opportunity for launching the revolution. This illustrates the general historical rule that imperialist wars form the seedbed of revolution.

The linkage between America and the Irish cause has not been confined to the influence of the American Revolution. The Irish cause has long been sustained and nurtured, materially and morally, by Irish-Americans, in such influential organizations as the Clan-na-Gael. Irish-and-Ameriean linkage has also run the other way: for the methods and procedures used by the English to suppress the Irish then served as models for English imperial rule over the American colonies. Not only that; for the genocidal racism directed against the Irish also served as model for the English-American treatment of the American Indian. The pattern of dehumanization was for the English to steal Irish land, murder and drive out the inhabitants, and then to sneer at the unfortunate Irish as inhuman because they somehow chose to live in squalor and misery. Thus, the English historian William Thomas wrote in 1552:

. . .the wild Irish, as unreasonable beasts, lived without any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of their goods, cattle, women, children, and every other thing. . .And hereof it followed that because their savage and idle life could not be satisfied with the only fruit of the natural unlaboured earth, therefore continually they invaded the fertile possessions of their Irish neighbours that inhabited the. . .English Pale.[2]

During its relatively brief career, the government of the United States of America has come down unerringly on the wrong side of virtually every issue in foreign affairs. Its record during the Irish rebellion was all too consistent with this bleak record. Rather than being favorable, or even neutral, toward the Irish struggle for freedom, that great Anglophiliac fighter for national self-determination and the rights of small nations, Woodrow Wilson, did his best to rivet the chains of oppression upon Ireland. Despite our supposed neutrality in the World War, agents of the U. S. Secret Service illegally raided the offices of the German Consul in New York on April 18, 1916, and there broke into and confiscated the files of correspondence. On finding news of the imminent Easter rising, the U. S. government lost no time in transmitting the information to the British Embassy, and this act of invasion and belligerence played an important part in crushing the initial stage of the rebellion. The resulting summary execution of the rebel leaders by the British may thus be partly laid to the door of the Wilson Administration.

America’s entry into World War I provided the Wilson Administration with the opportunity to harass and persecute American friends of Irish liberation. Confiscated German documents were leaked to the press smearing Irish-American leaders. Particularly severe was the persecution of Jeremiah A. O’Leary. O’Leary was indicted by the Administration for conspiring to obstruct recruiting in the armed forces and to commit treason, and documents were released to the press charging him with being ready to commit sabotage on behalf of Germany. So ill that his trial had to be postponed, systematic brutalities were inflicted upon O’Leary in the Tombs prison. Finally acquitted in January, 1919, O’Leary was given a hero’s welcome by thousands of Irish-Americans in New York City.

In the summer of 1917, the Friends of Irish Freedom circulated a petition in the United States for Irish independence. Woodrow Wilson’s response was characteristic: ordering Secret Service agents to engage in rigorous examination of the finances of the Friends. Was their campaign financed by “German gold?”[3] Neither were local governments hesitant about getting into the patriotic act. Peaceful meetings of the Friends in New York City were broken up by the police and by federal soldiers, who had been creative enough to include the “preaching of sedition” in their definitions of “disorderly conduct” and “obstructing traffic.” The Espionage Act was also invoked to break up pro-Irish meetings. The good, grey Anglophiliac New York Times hailed this “forward step” in preventing expressions of sedition; but, it sententiously hastened to add, “free speech, in a reasonable sense, will not be interfered with.”[4]

But the implacable ruthlessness of the British Empire, assisted by its mighty U. S. ally, could not suffice to keep Ireland in thrall forever. The Irish Republic proclaimed by seven gallant and seemingly quixotic rebel leaders on Easter Monday, 1916, was destined to prevail, despite their execution by the vengeful British. Perhaps the best epitaph to these men was the deeply moving revolutionary speech delivered the previous August by the young lawyer and poet, Padraic Pearse, who was to read this proclamation of the Irish Republic and be named its President. Pearse’s great speech was a eulogy at the funeral of the grand old Fenian rebel, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, and the enthusiasm lit by Pearse at that eulogy may be considered the spark for the Easter Rising eight months later. Pearse had stirringly proclaimed:

. . .if there is anything that makes it fitting that I rather. . .than one of the grey-haired men who were young with him and shared in his labour and in his suffering, should speak here, it is perhaps that I may be taken as speaking on behalf of a new generation that has been rebaptised in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian program. I propose to you then that, here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows; that, here by the grave of this unconquered and unconquerable man, we ask of God, each one for himself, such unshakable purpose, such high and gallant courage, such unbreakable strength of soul as belonged to O’Donovan Rossa. . .

We stand at Rossa’s grave not in sadness but rather in exaltation of spirit that it has been given to us to come into so close a communion with that brave and splendid Gael . . .

In a closer spiritual communion with him now than ever before or perhaps ever again, in spiritual communion with those of his day, living and dead, who suffered with him in English prisons, in communion of spirit too with our own dear comrades who suffer in English prisons today, and speaking on their behalf as well as our own, we pledge to Ireland our love, and we pledge to English rule in Ireland our hate. This is a place of peace sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and all restraint; but I hold it a Christian thing, as O’Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression, and hating them, to strive to overthrow them. Our foes are strong and wise and wary; but, strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seeds sown by the young men of ‘65 and ‘67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today. Rulers and Defenders of Realms had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.[5]

1.Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965), pp. 145-46.

2.In Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), p. 169.

3.See Charles C. Tansill, America and the Fight for Irish Freedom (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), pp. 233ff.

4.H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917-1918 (Madison, Wise: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 74.

5.Macardle, op. cit., pp. 136-37.

EDITORIAL

The Power of The President

The Liberals are, at last, beginning to wake up. For decades the Liberals and the Old Left have been regaling us with exaltation of the power, the glory, the grandeur of the President, especially in foreign and military affairs. The President was, uniquely and miraculously, the living embodiment of the Will of the People. Once every four years the individual American is allowed, nay exhorted, to troop to the polls, where he may pull down a lever beside the name of one out of two indistinguishable Personalities. After the winner is duly chosen by about one-fourth of the eligible electorate, the mantle of the Popular Mandate settles about his regal shoulders, and he is then to do as he pleases with us all until the hour of the next quadrennial extravaganza. The Liberals have been in the forefront of the advancement and glorification of this despotic process: anyone who dared to question or grumble at the burgeoning of unchecked power in the President was damned as an obstructionist, reactionary, and Neanderthal, heartlessly and wilfully attempting to block America’s divinely-appointed path to her future destiny. And within the Pantheon of Presidents, the deified ones were the “strong” (i. e. war-making) Presidents—the Lincolns, the Wilsons, the Roosevelts, while the pacific and “do-nothing” Presidents were denigrated and scorned.

Too often it all depends on whose ox is being gored. World War II and the Korean “police action” were preeminently Liberal wars, and so the Liberals of course saw nothing wrong in them or in the Presidential powers that brought the wars about or were greatly intensified by the conflict. But the Vietnam War is a war of a different color, and many Liberals find that their chickens have truly come home to roost. Here and there Liberal voices are being raised, suddenly alarmed that something has gone wrong in the Paradise of presidential power.

The latest recruit to the growing body of the alarmed is the eminent Professor Hans J. Morgenthau of the University of Chicago, quondam adviser to Presidents and diplomats, apostle of the Cold War and of hard-nosed realpolitik. More than most of his fellow Liberals, Morgenthau realizes not only that the Liberal-propelled process has gone too far, but even more that something is fundamentally wrong in the political system itself. Thus, Morgenthau laments that: “What the Founding Fathers feared has indeed come to pass: The President of the United States has become an uncrowned king. Lyndon B. Johnson has become the Julius Caesar of the American Republic.”[1] Furthermore, Morgenthau recognizes that it is precisely the U. S. Constitution that has furnished the necessary framework for this appalling development. Morgenthau writes:

The objective conditions for the ascendancy of presidential powers have been long in the making; they only awaited a President willing and able to make full use of them. . .

Thus the stage was set for a new Caesar to bestride it. Only Caesar was missing. Presidents Truman and Kennedy could not fill the role because they were unable to manipulate Congress, and President Eisenhower, even though he created the administrative machinery of the contemporary presidency, was not interested in using it for the actual enlargement of the President’s powers. It is the signal contribution Lyndon Johnson has made to American political life that he has taken advantage of the objective conditions of American politics with extraordinary skill and with an extraordinary taste for power. He has well-nigh exhausted the possibilities of power of the modern presidency, dwarfing the other branches of the government and reducing the people at large to helplessly approving bystanders.[2]

We welcome Professor Morgenthau to the anti-presidential ranks; but, as is generally the case with Liberals, his analysis is not thoroughgoing enough, and his positive proposals are far less penetrating than his analysis. All he can offer is to call briefly for more exertions by Congress and for a return to the “checks and balances” supposedly envisioned by the Founding Fathers. For far more light as well as heat on the American Constitution we must turn to the great and eloquent Patrick Henry, a radical not a liberal, and a man whose root-and-branch opposition to the Constitution envisioned what sort of political system that document would promote. In the course of his fiery and determined opposition to the Constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention, Patrick Henry thundered:

This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting. It squints toward monarchy; and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American? Your President may easily become King. . . Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that our American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world. . . blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad? Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty!. . .

If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him. . . I would rather infinitely. . . have a King, Lords and Commons, than a government so replete with such insupportable evils. If we make a King, we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them; but the President, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke. . . But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not, at the head of his army, beat down every opposition? Away with your President! we shall have a King! The army will salute him monarch: your militia will leave you, and assist in making him King, and fight against you: and what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?[3]

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1.Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Colossus of Johnson City”, The New York Review of Books (March 31, 1966), p. 11.

2.Ibid., p. 12.

3.Available in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 330-31.

EDITORIAL

Labor Unionism, Two Views

If there was anything that characterized the Old Left it was adulation of labor unions and of the process by which the government has created, maintained, cabined, and confined these unions to its will. Government control inevitably follows government privilege, and, as in the Fascist or Communist countries, privileged unionism has become in effect a powerful arm of the State apparatus for controlling the labor force and the economic system as a whole. Rather than representing their members, union leaders have been coopted into the power elite, there to serve as transmission belts for keeping the workers under the control of the various governmental “guidelines” (an apt term.)

While the Old Left has shown few qualms about this sorry condition of labor unionism, those on the Left who are not bemused by statism—notably on the New Left-have begun to see clearly the despotic role that trade unionism plays in present-day society. They are beginning to see also that the supposedly glorious acceleration of unionism attendant on the New Deal privileges of the 1930’s was only glorious if one’s ultimate goal is totalitarian dictation over the labor force. One of the most perceptive analyses of this development has just come to light: in a widely distributed reprint of an analysis of modern unionism by the left-wing anarchist Sam Weiner.[1]

Weiner begins by noting that the Great Depression of the 1930’s saw the final liquidation of the private enterprise system and its replacement by the present system of “state capitalist ‘welfarism’”. The CIO was the essential instrument, created by the government, in effecting this transformation, and in “overcom(ing) the resistance of old-line capitalism” and the old-line craft unions. Finally, the “conservative unionists (of the AFL) had adjusted themselves to the fact that ‘welfarism’ was here to stay” and the AFL and CIO were ready to unite in harmony for “maximum centralization of control over the working class.” Weiner then sums up the essential nature of American trade unionism and the American economy, of the present-day:

The character and function of the North American unions have changed greatly. A State-regulated economy needs a State-regulated labor movement. The government will help the unions so long as the leaders can assure the smooth cooperation of a docile labor force. The “Welfare State” has come to assume ever greater social functions and has intervened on an ever-greater scale in the control of economic and social life. It regulates, and shows an increasing tendency to dominate the whole field of social security, business, labor, crop and price supports, public power, housing, etc.

This process was expanded and accelerated by World War II, the Korean war, “defense” spending, foreign aid programs, and the prosecution of the “cold war.” The bureaucratic administrative apparatus kept pace with the expansion of governmental power. Individual liberty and local initiative have diminished as the State domination of society has increased. The individual has had less and less to say about his own life and interests as the Government prescribes, to an ever greater degree, the conditions under which he must live. This process continues inexorably, regardless of the political party in power.[2]

Weiner then goes on to point out that the increasing usurpation of governmental power over the individual in society, has been matched by a corresponding usurpation of power by the union bureaucracy over the individual worker, aided and abetted by control of welfare funds, “the vicious practice of industrywide “collective bargaining’ on a national scale, long-term contracts and the power to discipline dissidents among the members.” Weiner concludes on this incisively penetrating note:

The State drives toward complete control of society. This is inherent in its nature. . .State capitalist “welfarism” is exploitation streamlined. AFL-CIO unionism is business unionism streamlined. The groundwork is being prepared for a future totalitarian society in the United States and the AFL-CIO already plays the role of “labor front” in the embryonic set-up. When the process is completed, as it will be if not stopped by working class resistance on a massive scale, the unions will end up by being as impotent as are the unions in Russia. During the whole period of the struggle against Fascism and “Communism”, the basic features common to both of them have been or are being adapted for our own country.[3]

Now if there was anything that characterized the Old Right, it was its thoroughgoing hostility to any unionism privileged by the State apparatus: e.g. growing out of the NIRA or the Wagner Act. And yet it is instructive to contrast the foregoing brilliant denunciation of modern statist unionism by the pro-union Mr. Weiner with the recent lauding of modern unionism by the conservative editor, Dr. Howard Kershner, a long-time friend and aide of Herbert Clark Hoover. Dr. Kershner edits the fortnightly Christian Economics, a periodical supposedly devoted to championing the cause of a free-market economy. And yet we find in a recent issue Kershner worshipfully celebrating “The Statesmanship of George Meany!”[4]

What, we may ask, is the “high order of statesmanship,” the “wisdom,” the “great statesmanship,” yea, even the “sound economics,” that Dr. Kershner repeatedly and fawningly finds in George Meany? It boils down quite simply to this: that Mr. Meany has ever been willing and eager to place stringent maxima upon wage increases. In October, 1946, for example, Mr. Meany, along with William Green and the rest of the Executive Council of the AFL issued a report attacking any request for wage increases that would “break” price ceilings. Certain wicked unions outside the AFL (such as the steel union) persisted in ignoring the “wise” guidelines of that day and thus, according to Kershner, “started the wage-price spiral that has dogged the country ever since, resulting in the loss of 61 percent of the value of the consumer’s dollar since 1946.” Kershner then quotes from a statement by Meany that the AFL has always been opposed to basing wages on the “cost of living or on price inflation. The established wage policy of this country has been based on raising wages as increases in productivity made this possible. This is the only possible basis for an expanding economy with rising living standards.” In short, as in President Johnson’s “guidelines” today, wage increases are to be kept in line to correspond with the small general overall productivity increase, and never with larger price rises, Kershner exults over this Meany viewpoint:

This is sound economics. Mr. Meany is right. He occupies a strategic position in our country. . .Mr. Meany, you are the key to the situation. You have shown the statesmanship and the knowledge. We hope you will step into the breech and bring about a great reconciliation between workers and owners so that our beloved country may give the world a new and more impressive example of the great benefits to be derived from free market capitalism.[5]

Now, there is something very curious afoot here; as a devotee of free-market economics, Dr. Kershner should certainly be familiar with the fact that one of the great truths of that economics, taught in all the schools ranging from Ludwig von Mises to the Chicago School, holds that price inflation is always caused by an increase in the money supply. In particular, it is caused by bank credit expansion propelled by the central government. Price rises are not caused by particularly wicked groups in the market: by unions, businessmen, Jews, speculators, foreigners, or whatever, as governments have throughout history charged in order to take the blame and attention off governmental shoulders. Of all people, Dr. Kershner should be familiar with the statist trick of the guilty party (the government) demagogically leading the pack to pin the blame on some group within the society. Above all, he should not be playing this game himself. It should be clear to him that the wage-price spiral is caused by monetary inflation; yet monetary expansion is not so much as mentioned in the course of his paean to George Meany.

In fact, Kershner also displays ignorance of the important finding of such Chicago School economists as H. Gregg Lewis and Albert Rees: that the major effect of unionism and collective bargaining is to introduce rigidity into the wage-setting process. While it is true that during a depression this rigidity works to keep union wage rates higher than non-union rates, during a boom the process works the other way. In short, during an inflation, the rigidity of union contracts and collective bargaining causes union wage rates to lag behind the rise in non-union rates.[6] Hence, far from unionism being culpable for price inflation, the truth is precisely the reverse: union-set wage rates lag behind the free-market rates during an inflation. Hence the sober lack of hysteria on the part of the Chicago economists about the impact of unions in causing allocation problems during a boom.

If, then, union wage rates lag behind non-union during a boom, this reveals in all its starkness the reason for the perpetual if moderate inflationism of the present state-capitalist system. The reason is precisely that frankly advocated by Lord Keynes, the economist-saint of modern state capitalism, and, it should be noted, of all the Old Left: to lower real wage rates by fooling the workers into thinking that their wages are rising when, in terms of real purchasing power, they are being lowered. Hence we see the acumen of Mr. Weiner’s analysis of the current system of “state capitalist ‘welfarism’”: that the function of labor unionism in the system is to serve as the “labor front” for “maximum centralization of control over the working class.” And, further, we see that the Keynesian-New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great Society program of perpetual inflation is an integral part of this control and exploitation of the mass of workers. It begins to look as if Dr. Kershner’s odd concept of the “free market” is yet another “front” for such control; this is the clear meaning of the paeans to the “labor statesmanship” of George Meany, a statesmanship that boils down to obeying the dictates of the State and herding the labor force into following the controls of “guidelines” dreamed up by our conservative-liberal collectivist rulers. The real free market is very different from all this; one of the main attributes of a truly free-market society would be the liberation of the unions, the workers, and all Americans from the despotism of federal guidelines, suggestions, or controls—their liberation, therefore, from all varieties of “labor statesmanship.” And we might be permitted to hope for another if less important form of liberation: the liberation of free-market teachings from such alleged champions as Howard E. Kershner. Once again, Kershner’s writings prompt us to ask: in what sense do present-day conservatives really favor the free-market?

1.Sam Weiner, Ethics and American Unionism (New York: The Libertarian League, 1958), passages reprinted in Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry, eds., Patterns of Anarchy (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 286-288.

2.Ibid., p. 287.

3.Ibid., p. 288.

4.Howard E. Kershner, “The Statesmanship of George Meany,” Christian Economics (April 19,1966), pp. 1-3.

5.Ibid., p. 3.

6.Thus, see H. Gregg Lewis, Unionism and Relative Wages in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).

EDITORIAL

Cold War Revisionism: The Major Historical Task

One of the most vital struggles in the writing and publishing of history is the conflict between the government’s propaganda myths, enshrined in “official history”, and historical reality brought forward by ‘revisionism”. In a time of foreign policy crisis the publishing of revisionist material is especially welcome; hence the importance of the recent all-revisionist issue of the quarterly Rampart Journal, as well as the publication of David Horowitz’s study, The Free World Colossus.[1]

Robert LeFevre’s commentary in the revisionist issue of Rampart Journal is an estimable summary of the profound changes in ideological attitudes being forced upon thinking people by the demands of developments in world affairs. On modern conservatism, LeFevre notes:

Traditionally, the world was divided by a series of vertical barriers erected around nations and called “national boundaries”. Karl Marx sought to bring a revision in thinking by drawing a horizontal line and insisting that the world was actually divided between its classes. . .

The reaction against this attempt at revision, especially among conservatives, has been to reemphasize the national boundaries and to wage wars across them for economic reasons benignly cloaked in humanitarian terms calculated to elevate human sacrifice to the status of ultimate nobility. The military configurations and the geographic revisions emerging from this effort have done more to advance Marxist economics than the First, Second, and Third Internationals combined.[2]

Few people have analyzed the major contribution of the conservatives to the current catastrophic situation of the world. The conservative impulse toward aggressive violence, the waging of wars “for economic reasons benignly cloaked in humanitarian terms”, has been the major international fact of the twentieth century. Revisionism’s task is the destruction of the myths by which conservatives—i. e. governments and their supporters—obtain the people’s acquiescence in aggressive violence. Revisionism substitutes for the conservative’s vertical or State analysis a realistic horizontal or social analysis: “The world is not divided between those nations which are free and those which are not. The world is divided between those persons who seek to mind their own business and those who intend to mind the business of others by forceful interventions of every kind and description.”[3]

LeFevre suggests that a “conservative movement” in the United States was formed by the crisis of Depression and New Deal. The possessors of power—the conservatives—were able to appropriate new labels by co-opting and rewarding the former liberal critics of that power. This process forced upon the opponents of New Deal imperialism, who had been called liberals and radicals when opposing the imperialism of Wilson and Hoover, the new label of “conservatives”.

Thus, by the beginning of the 1940’s the lines were drawn. The conservative view was in favor of peace, individualism, lower taxes, smaller government, independence, and self-reliance. . . The liberals, who rallied to Mr. Roosevelt’s banner, proclaimed a new “deal” in which. . . America would intervene in all international affairs and assume a position of “world leadership”.[4]

But this situation was soon altered by the development of anti-Communism, through which many conservatives completely abandoned their principles.

And with this shift came a strange metamorphosis to the conservative objective. For where it had served originally as the champion of peace, it now began to urge the line of “stand fast”, “no compromise”, “war if necessary”. And where it had originally championed the idea of smaller government, it began to clamor for larger bureaus to hunt down Communists. It called for expansion of the police powers, sought laws to arrest persons of non-conservative persuasion on the grounds that they were “traitors”, and clamored for costly “investigations”. . . All at once the government became the most important thing in the mind of the conservative. The government must be made strong. It must spend billions in missile and weapon research. It must develop “strong men”.

Gradually, the theory arose that the way to prevent a war with Russia was to start one. . .

Where conservatives had joined ranks in opposing the military draft of Roosevelt and in criticizing the draft of President Woodrow Wilson, they now joined hands in branding anyone who refused to be drafted as a “dupe” or an outright “red”. Those who had opposed Roosevelt’s brand of intervention now began to favor outright assistance to foreign countries which would oppose Russia. . .

What we now see within the framework of conservatism is a new alliance between former liberals and latter-day conservatives. The liberal of the 30’s wanted larger government, principally in the area of social legislation, welfare, and human experiment. The latter-day conservatives also want larger government, but they now want it in the police area of armies, navies, air forces, and rocketry. They also want more trials, more rigid domestic policing. . . . The latter-day conservative, while still critical of the “welfare state” of the former liberal, lends his support to the formation of a military or a “police state” where things will be controlled at the top by a “strong man”.

Meanwhile, another strange shift is occurring. For while some of the former liberals are intrigued by this turn of events and are now jumping on the bandwagon of “anti-communism”, other liberals, in the nineteenth century tradition of liberalism, are beginning to wonder about human liberty in the great sense, and are shifting over to oppose war-making, the draft, foreign intervention, and even high taxes. Thus, it appears that the liberal camp, as well as the conservative camp, is splitting.[5]

Cold War revisionism reveals how the New Deal liberals—i. e., the sophisticated conservatives, as C.Wright Mills called them—were able to keep possession of power from World War II to the present day by enmeshing the “conservatives” in the new crusade of anti-communism. As LeFevre has indicated, it has taken a generation for “conservatives” to wake up to their betrayal by anti-communist liberal-conservatism, and to begin the necessary work of aligning with those liberals and radicals who have remained faithful to American liberalism’s traditional opposition to the national power-structure.

The radical tradition, betrayed by the liberals’ adherence to New Deal-Fair Deal imperialism, was exemplified by Eugene Debs. As Harry Elmer Barnes states in his magisterial exposition of revisionism, “Eugene Debs was imprisoned by Wilson. . . Debs’ crime was a statement that the war had a primarily economic basis, precisely what Wilson himself declared in a speech on September 5, 1919.”[6] During the 1920’s and 1930’s, the truth about the precipitation of World War I by the US government and its allies was able to dispel the myths still propounded by the “patriots” of the American Legion and the Ku Klux Klan. But the situation after World War II has been vastly different. First, the US government learned from its post-World War I experience with revisionism, and took the necessary steps to thwart the development of revisionism in the future. Propaganda was carried out “not only with the connivance but with the active assistance of prominent officials such as J. Edgar Hoover and Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan, the heads respectively of the FBI and the OSS (predecessor of the CIA),”[7] The government made sure that its myths would be propagated by official history, and there has arisen hardly any group with the courage to mount an opposition to this historical blackout. Barnes points out:

The anti-interventionist groups of 1937 and thereafter, like America First, were primarily conservative and for the most part welcomed the early revisionist publications. But they soon fell in line with the Cold War because of the business advantages in industry, trade and finance which an extravagant armament program and foreign aid provided. Thereafter, they feared or refused to give any open support, financial or otherwise, to a scholarly movement which undermined the cold-war assumptions as thoroughly as it did the interventionist mythology of 1939-41. Hence, revisionism since 1947 has not only been unpopular or ignored but also poverty-stricken.[8]

Until reality replaces the myths of official history, Barnes notes, the process of deeper and continuing American involvement in foreign interventions, like US aggression in Vietnam, will be found to intensify. However, Barnes does hope that some of the current younger generation will have the courage to smash through the official history, confront the system that perpetuates the Cold War, and hopefully dismantle it. But that generation will have to stand together and steel itself against the smears of the system’s apologists and the betrayals of the unprincipled, smears and betrayals such as Harry Barnes has long experienced. As Barnes writes:

In this era of Nineteen Eighty-Four, “The Organization Man”, . . . even the average American college graduate became little more inclined to independent thinking than was a Catholic peasant during the papacy of Innocent III. As Irving Howell pointed out in the Atlantic of November, 1965, American higher education conformed to the Orwellian cold-war system about as conveniently as the Pentagon or American business. When, in the mid-1960’s, a small minority of students began to show signs of restlessness, this caused widespread surprise and alarm, and public leaders like Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut suggested procedures which would have won them kudos from Hitler.[9]

Thus the New Left has become the contemporary repository and heir of the revisionism of the ‘Original Left” in America represented by Beard, Barnes, and Albert Jay Nock. For there exists what Barnes calls a ‘Lost Generation” in historical writing—the period when revisionism was in the hands of people who considered themselves “conservatives” and thus were not really committed to opposing the system threatened by revisionism. Hence, they did not truly support the efforts of those who did pursue revisionist study. But, as Barnes indicates, the Old Left failed even more starkly, for this was a Left that supported New Deal imperialism.

Also important was the failure of European historians to fulfill the role that they had admirably played after World War I. American scholars often tend to be conservative and timid; such attitudes make them natural allies of the Establishment in the furthering of official history. The attention of American scholars after World War I was directed to historical realities by the documentary and analytic work of European scholars whose work could not be ignored. The situation after World War II was totally different. The official Axis documents fell into the hands of the United States and Britain, which controlled their publication. The German, Italian and Japanese governments as the new allies of US imperialism have treated the publication of such documents as a crime and have discouraged revisionist scholarship.

Ultimately, the contradictions of the Cold War have begun to force a revisionist breakthrough in Europe, and have thus opened discussion of it in America. This breakthrough was accomplished by the English historian, A. J. P. Taylor, who had written imperialist propaganda in World War II. Taylor began his revisionism as an opponent of the Cold War. Thus, he shared the platform with Bertrand Russell at the February, 1958 meeting from which emerged the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Indeed, Taylor called on all opponents of imperialist aggression to confront Western political leaders with the cry of “Murderers!” Taylor, as in the case of so many advocates of disarming imperialism, had often been confronted with the canard that “Western democracy” must destroy communists just as it had destroyed fascists in World War II. By a healthy reexamination of The Origins of the Second World War (1961) (a book termed by Barnes “a new epoch in revisionist historiography”), Taylor undercut the charge of German aggression as being responsible for World War II. Having cleared the air of such myths about the Second World War, revisionism is now in a position to undertake the main task of the present period, Cold War revisionism. As Barnes concludes, there is a direct link between the beginnings of the Cold War and the brutal act that ended World War II. As Barnes declares:

All other indefensible breaches of a humane code by either Hitler or the Allies were outdistanced by the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . The documents now available prove that the bombings were ordered and were approved by Stimson as technological exhibitionism and were carried out primarily to impress and intimidate the Russians.[10]

James J. Martin’s article in the Rampart Journal forms an important bridge to the new task of revisionist history. Martin directs attention to the imperialist basis of US aggression by taking as his theme a quote from a 1938 report by the Office of Naval Intelligence:

Realistically, all wars have been for economic reasons. To make them politically and socially palatable, ideological issues have always been invoked. Any possible future war will, undoubtedly, conform to historical precedent.[11]

Martin notes that the Cold War did not begin as commonly dated with Churchill’s repetition of Goebbels’ “Iron Curtain” attack on the Soviets in March, 1946. Rather, the imperialists launched the Cold War before the completion of their war against Germany and Japan, even before the first meeting of the UN in San Francisco in April, 1945; it was launched by Winston Churchill against the popular forces resisting the Allied re-establishment of Greek reaction in November, 1944. The Cold War became what Charles A. Beard had described in his famous phrase as “perpetual war for perpetual peace”. Martin’s summary of the way that the Cold War was fastened upon the American people in the late 1940’s is worth quoting at length;

Reluctance to enlist (in the Cold War) was seen from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other, from Senator Robert A. Taft and former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy to William Z. Foster, but, as in the case of the Second World War, emotions and sentiments favorable to belligerence did not respect political lines either, and were seen to crop up in all camps. A “left”-“right” coalition favorable to a “halt the spread of communism” policy was only a few months in the making, after a shaky start. Conservative politicians, members of the business world, and prominent church dignitaries soon found themselves cheek-by-jowl with ex-Communists, Trotskyites, Menshevik Social Democrats, Socialists, and contingents of the well-left-of-center totalitarian liberals, who had devised and produced most of the rationale behind American participation in the global bloodbath of 1941-1945. . .

A ponderous volume can be prepared on the early pro-Cold War literary propaganda alone. Some of the most widely read were ghost-written works by recent defectees to the “West” from the Soviet Union, mainly former military and political functionaries. But there were two particularly significant works which contributed to thinking of the showdown with the Communists on the level of global strategy, William C. Bullitt’s The Great Globe Itself (New York: Scribner, 1946), and James Burnham’s The Struggle for the World (New York: Day, 1947). These might have supplied most of the propaganda fuel for the Cold War by themselves, had no other works along such lines ever appeared.

. . . Bullitt, a prestigious diplomat during the Roosevelt era, had a well-known pedigree as an anti-Soviet strategist; his book contained the first dress rehearsal of the rationale of “containment”. It was eclipsed by that of Burnham, whose background as a Marxist scholar and Trotskyite proponent disclosed no notable previous anti-Soviet works. Burnham’s Struggle was published and reviewed the same month President Harry S. Truman announced his government’s decision to take up the British “burden” of supporting the Greek and Turkish governments (March, 1947).

Despite owing a very heavy intellectual debt to Arnold J. Toynbee and his “challenge and response” theory, Burnham’s book gained wide readership and was one of the first bridges thrown across to the American left and liberal-left to aid in mobilizing them in substantial numbers in behalf of the latest political offensive. It also had an important part to play in the sharp division of left-liberal politics, since many of the latter were most remiss about abandoning their decades of championing the post-1917 dispensation in Russia.

An example may be seen in the whooping enthusiasm for the Burnham thesis of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in. his review for The Nation (April 5, 1947, pp. 385, 398-99), though Schlesinger shuddered a bit at the thought of Burnham as secretary of state.[12]

Martin contrasts the Cold War propaganda of anti-Soviet Marxists, ex-Communists and socialists with the non-communist opposition to the Cold War represented by Walter Lippmann and former Congressman Hamilton Fish. Fish, a consistent isolationist, knew exactly what Truman, Marshall, Acheson, William Bundy, etc. were up to in the interventionist Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan: “Fish, one of the half-dozen best known opponents of American involvement in World War Two, though a fierce anti-Communist, attacked Truman’s aid to Greece and Turkey ‘containment’ program as ‘dollar imperialism’.”[13] The core of Cold War propaganda for interventionist “containment” and “dollar imperialism” was “the assemblage of ex-Reds, former Soviet well-wishers, and dis-affected Mensheviks who were published in the American Mercury during the editorship of Eugene Lyons, or in the Social Democrat weekly New Leader.”[14]

Martin agrees that a striking failure of the political opposition to US imperialism and aggression has been its Europe-centeredness. US exploitation and hope of exploitation in Asia, especially in China, has been noted as the main basis for the Anglo-American alliance by which the US entered World War I. The proponents and opponents of US involvement in World War II debated the European war exclusively, while New Deal imperialism in the Administration and the China Lobby took the main chance in Asia. While Berlin and the German problem engaged public attention in the late 1940’s and again in the 1960’s, the Truman and Johnson Administrations and the China-Vietnam Lobby acted to unleash US aggression in Korea and Vietnam, the two classic invasion routes into China.

Martin concludes that since the Cold War is the principal continuing obstacle to revisionism, a concentration on the Cold War is the principal duty of revisionist scholarship:

The Cold War has done more to hobble revisionism than all other influences and forces combined. It is for this reason that revisionism, if it is to have any significance henceforth, must not only become involved more deeply in investigations of how the world went to war again in 1939-41 and what really went on during that war, but also devote increasing attention to the Cold War and illuminate its spurious and artificial origins and dimensions.[15]

The beginnings of Cold War revisionism in the last works of Charles Beard were smothered in the avalanche of abuse poured upon all who questioned the myths of official history. It took a dozen years after Beard’s works before important criticisms of US imperialism could make an appearance. The scars of the attacks on Beard by the official historians (about whom A.J.P. Taylor has said: “they are as much ‘engaged’ as though they wore the handsome uniforms designed for German professors by Dr. Goebbels”) were not overcome until the courageous revisionism of William Appleman Williams’ Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959). Into the fresh area of Cold War revisionism Williams has been followed by the works of D. F. Fleming, John Lukacs, Herbert Aptheker, etc.

Even so, the unnecessary divisions caused by the mass desertion to support New Deal imperialism remain unhealed wounds, and the errors committed in the New Deal-Fair Deal decades have been institutionalized into dogmas. Thus, in his review of Williams’ The Contours of American History, Dr. Aptheker (in Studies on the Left. Vol. III, No. 1, 1962) attacks Williams’ refusal to view fascist countries as aggressive or expansionist when contrasted to the aggressive and expansionist aims and actions of New Deal imperialism. Aptheker says: “I would suggest that this is a reason why one has Mr. Williams expressing very warm feelings toward the isolationism of Charles A. Beard, in his last years, and towards Herbert Hoover.” An irrational commitment to one or another aspect of US imperialism makes it difficult for many scholars to undertake the real task of Cold War revisionism, a task that requires the total rejection of US imperialism as exemplified in the works of Beard, Barnes and Williams.

Blindness to certain aspects of US imperialism was recently evidenced by a review in The Nation (Feb. 21, 1966), of David Horowitz’s Free World Colossus by Arnold Kaufman of the philosophy department of the University of Michigan. Horowitz begins his work with a quote from William Appleman Williams: “Perhaps the major American casualty of the cold war has been the idea of history. This wound in the American intellect has, for the most part, gone unnoticed.” It is doubtful, however, that Horowitz foresaw that this quote would be applicable to the “liberals” who have reviewed his own book (e.g. in the Nation, the New Republic.)

After criticizing Horowitz’s rather lacklustre book for being too “exciting”, Kaufman goes on to charge that it contains “three pervasive theoretical distortions.” First, there is Horowitz’s revisionist view that the use of US industrial capacity for the Cold War has been responsible for the current nationalization of the US economy. To Kaufman, that nationalization has been brought about simply by the “national response to the plight of the world’s needy;” the Cold War thus being the conscious spearhead for US social welfare on a worldwide scale. It is unfortunate to find this point of view in the Nation; for it represents a reversion to the liberal, quasi-imperialist Nation of post-World War II. This was a myth taken up two decades ago by the ADA and adopted, in reverse, by the mindless right, which considers the collectivization of the economy since World War II as due solely to the growth of a welfare state. But, on the contrary, as pointed out years ago by Beard and Williams, the role of foreign aid and other aspects of the warfare-welfare tax-burden upon the American people has been the enrichment of the state monopoly system in the United States.

Secondly, Kaufman insists that the adoption of the Cold War by America was a response to “the nature of Stalinism, and to the experiences many good people had with domestic communism during the Thirties.” As though the domestic policies of forced industrialization in the Soviet Union or of support for the New Deal in America can plausibly be offered as an excuse for US aggression in the Cold War! Thirdly, Kaufman attacks Horowitz’s—and the New Left’s—failure to “play the (liberal) U. S. political game,” e.g. for his obvious preference for Eisenhower over the more war-mongering Harry Truman.

The Nation had promised to print in a subsequent issue the response of David Horowitz to this unfortunate review, as well as a reply by Kaufman. But nothing of the sort has appeared, and it is clear that The Nation has decided not to allow Horowitz to answer the Kaufman attack. This is a disquieting setback for the cause of Cold War revisionism, for the Nation in the past several years had begun to return to the high standards of revisionism achieved by its pre-1930’s editor Oswald Garrison Villard, who was later barred from the magazine for opposing the forward rush of US aggression in World War II. Furthermore, the review itself is an apt commentary on the weaknesses of the potentially dynamic teach-in movement, of which Professor Kaufman was one of the founding fathers.

In March, 1966, the libertarian-pacifist magazine Liberation celebrated its tenth anniversary, an anniversary which should not go unnoticed, considering the importance of the journal for Cold War revisionism. Edited by Dave Dellinger, Paul Goodman, Sidney Lens, and A. J. Muste, Liberation has among its permanent contributors Kenneth Boulding, Erich Fromm, Staughton Lynd, Lewis Mum-ford, William L. Neumann, Linus Pauling, and Kenneth Rexroth. For this anniversary, Liberation reprinted its “Tract for the Times” from its first issue. Liberation’s viewpoint, that editorial made clear, would be based upon the Judaeo-Christian tradition, pacifist and non-violence philosophies, libertarian movements, and the American tradition of “Jefferson, Paine, Thoreau, Emerson, Debs, Randolph Bourne.” Thus, Liberation declared: “The national, sovereign, militarized and bureaucratic State and a bureaucratic collectivist economy are themselves evils to be avoided or abolished. . . Our emphasis is rather on possibilities for decentralization, on direct participation of all workers or citizens in determining the conditions of life and work. . .”

The original Liberation world-view, influenced by Gandhi and Indian “neutralism”, was marred by an unthinking Third Camp position that weakened its struggle against US imperialism. But Liberation has since evolved out of a negative Third Camp approach. Staughton Lynd’s articles, for example, have been invaluable in clearing the air. Thus, in the anniversary issue he effectively answers the critics of his statements made in Hanoi last January:

When I said in Hanoi that American policy in Vietnam was “illegal, immoral and antidemocratic”, I said something which to the best of my knowledge as a scholar and historian was true. I believe I can document each contention. . .But when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. recently said that he, when in government during the Bay of Pigs crisis, had deliberately lied, but that he hoped he would be forgiven for acting in the public interest, I noticed no statement from the President of Harvard condemning Mr. Schlesinger for violating the most elementary precept of intellectual integrity. It would seem then, that for one historian to lie in Washington is almost patriotism, while for another to try and tell the truth in Hanoi, is almost treason.

It is upon such a spirit of scholarship and devotion to the truth that historical revisionism is built.

One of Liberation’s major contributions to revisionism was made by its publication of two significant articles by Harry Elmer Barnes: “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace” (Summer, 1958), the subsequent Symposium on Revisionism in its October and November, 1958 issues, and Barnes’ “Revisionism Revisited” (Summer, 1959). Barnes’ first article was reprinted by Peace News in England, and translated on the Continent, but Dr. Luigi Villari failed in his attempts to have it reprinted in Italy. Professor D. F. Fleming, the Dean of Cold War Revisionism and a major foundation for the Horowitz book, commented thus on Barnes’ article: “The case of the Revisionists deserves to be heard. They may help us avoid the “one more war’ after which there would be nothing left worth arguing about.” Harry Paxton Howard’s contribution to the Symposium was particularly prophetic in his recognition that the wars of Roosevelt and Truman provided the basis for such later wars as Lyndon Johnson’s: “Every effect of the Roosevelt War contained the seeds of further war. We have already had one in Korea—and President Truman did not even bother to ask Congress for a declaration. We can have another one any time the warlords in Washington so decide.”

It is not surprising that Barnes found the comments of Professor William L„ Neumann among the most significant, especially the “vigor with which Professor Neumann exposes the lack of logic, consistency, realism, and good sense on the part of those who were ardent Revisionists with respect to the first and second World Wars but are now in the vanguard of those who are whooping it up for planetary destruction in a third World War.” Barnes pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the old leaders of the America First movement were now far more interested in America’s “Third Crusade” than in any revisionist revelations on the second World War. He noted a few honorable exceptions such as Bruce Barton and Hamilton Fish, “who spoke out boldly against Mr. Dulles’ apparent willingness to launch the final war of nuclear extermination to enable Chiang Kai-shek to linger on gracefully and comfortably at the American ‘farm club’ in Formosa.”

Harry Barnes, in his Rampart Journal essay, ends on a bleakly pessimistic estimate of the chances for the future acceptance of revisionism. But his own and the Martin articles in this issue, as well as the recent emergence of Rampart Journal itself, is just one of the important straws in the wind for a far more optimistic prognosis. And a particularly important development has been the emergence of revisionist ideas and scholarship on the New Left, and in major works of recent years by such historians as Gar Alperovitz, David Horowitz, James J. Martin, William L. Neumann, and William Appleman Williams. And recently, a brilliant young New Left historian was heard to praise the Union Party of 1936 as isolationists and radicals who refused to be co-opted into the New Deal system of imperialism and state monopoly. For the success of revisionism, it may well be later than we think.

Readers might be interested in a new

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1.Particularly notable articles in the Rampart Journal are: Harry Elmer Barnes, “Revisionism: A Key to Peace”, Rampart Journal (Spring, 1966), pp. 874; James J. Martin, “Revisionism and the Cold War, 1946-1966: Some Comments on its Origins and Consequences”, Ibid., pp. 91-112; and Robert LeFevre, “On the Other Hand,” ibid.. pp. 114-20. Also available from the journal is Barnes’ important Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books, which can e obtained for 500 from Pine Tree Press, Box 158, Larkspur, Colorado 80118.

David Horowitz, The Free World Colossus (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965).

2.LeFevre, op. cit., pp. 115-16.

3.Ibid., p. 116.

4.Ibid., p. 118.

5.Ibid.. pp. 118-20.

6.Barnes, “Revisionism; A Key to Peace,” op. cit., p. 12.

7.Ibid., p. 20.

8.Ibid., pp. 38-39.

9.Ibid., p. 37.

10.Ibid., p. 72.

11.Ibid., p. 91.

12.Ibid., pp. 99-101.

13.Ibid., p. 102n.

14.Ibid., p. 102.

15.Ibid., p. 112.

EDITORIAL

Our First Anniversary

This issue marks the beginning of the second year of the publishing of LEFT AND RIGHT. If the Nation can celebrate its centennial and National Review its tenth year of existence, we may be permitted a modest celebration of our own first anniversary. In a sense, our own longevity is already more remarkable than theirs. We began as an act of faith, a leap in the dark, unblessed then or now by the largesse of Boston Brahmins, oil millionaires, advertising by the military-industrial complex, or indeed by any donations whatever. So far we have been able to bear this condition without complaint, and without sending periodic pleas and exhortations for funds to our subscribers. But not only have we always existed on a shoestring; we did not begin, as did the other publications, as full-blown representatives of a flourishing popular and intellectual movement. We began with no eager army of laissez-faire liberal readers, as did the Nation, or of embattled Conservatives, as did National Review. In fact the main reason for our birth was a conviction by our editors and a tiny handful of colleagues that it was not possible that we could be the only people in the country with our particular political and ideological position. Hence our launching as a leap in the dark, as an almost desperate search for people who agree or might come to agree, in whole or in significant part, with our ideological outlook. LEFT AND RIGHT began, not in answer to the clamor of an eagerly receptive market of readers, but in a fervent search for a market that should be there, but which seemed to be non-existent. In particular, we hoped to be able to detach individualist libertarians from their thralldom to a Conservative Movement that had become the major enemy of their own ideals and principles; and, furthermore, to try to infuse into the often instinctively libertarian New Left an increased knowledge of economics and an appreciation of a truly free-market economy.

We must say that while we hoped for a modicum of success, we expected none at all; and that, in our short span, we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The response from all sides to our fitful efforts, efforts without benefit of advertising budget, has been truly remarkable. We have had enthusiastic expressions of approval and support from people of all manner of occupations and ideological positions: from economists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, journalists, and editors; from unemployed scholars, trade union officials, and foundation and trade association executives; from engineers, accountants, businessmen, and school teachers; from libertarians, left and right, from pacifists, isolationists, anarchists (left, right, and center), voluntary communalists, ex-Wobblies, Egoists, autarchists, creative Marxists, neo-Maoists, Irish nationalists, Birchers, classical liberals, and thinking Conservatives; from atheists, agnostics, Protestants, Jews, Catholics, and Jesuits. Most important of all is the enthusiasm we appear to have sparked in groups of college students across the country: in colleges and universities in New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Illinois, Kansas, and California, eager groups of students have coalesced around an emphatic and determined Left/Right orientation. In quite a few cases, these are former leaders of YAF or ISI who have now joined SDS or local Free Universities.

Evidence of an extensive impact for our fledgling journal has already found its way into print. A conservative newsletter that likes to think of itself as libertarian has grumpily complained that we have “monopolized” the libertarian name. In the Daily Tar Heel, student newspaper at the University of North Carolina, Wilson Clark, Jr. has developed an explicitly Left/Right position. And our magazine and its position were hailed in the New Republic by Professor Ronald Hamowy of the history department of Stanford University, in commenting on a series of articles by young radicals of the present-day.[1]

Throughout the land, heartening evidence continues to mount that a market does exist for our efforts, that enough individualists have become uneasy with the New Conservatism and enough leftists critical of the centralized State to provide the basis for a genuine ideological realignment in this country.

1.Ronald Hamowy, “Left and Right Meet,” The New Republic (March 12, 1966), pp. 14-16, and Wilson Clark Jr., “Common Ground for Right and Left,” The Daily Tar Heel (April 13, 1966), p. 2.

Hiroshima Reconsidered

By WILLIAM L. NEUMANN*

The generation born since World War II and now surging through college classrooms views with less awe than its elders that event which Harry Truman proclaimed on August 6, 1945, as “the greatest thing in history”. Students glimpse the possibility that nuclear weapons may determine their own life span, but the bombs tend to be accepted, like television and transistor radios, as normal facts of life, a part of the environment of modern society.

Acceptance of the threat of nuclear warfare has not stilled this generation’s curiosity about the decision to try to end the Pacific war with a mass cremation of Japanese. Many students, after reviewing the available facts, are unable to comprehend or accept the official justifications for the American decision. This skepticism will now be intensified by two recent volumes which reexamine the thinking that surrounded the first use of atomic weapons.[1]

Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam is the work of Gar Alperovitz, who took an undergraduate degree in history at the university of Wisconsin, a master’s degree in economics at Berkeley and a doctorate in political economy at Cambridge. Writing with a very strong thesis which at times is stretched too far, Alperovitz has produced a scholarly work from the great mass of printed materials as well as using the few manuscript collections now available. Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed are television writers, drawn into producing The Decision to Drop the Bomb as a result of their research on two N.B.C. documentaries. Their bibliography lists most of the standard secondary works along with over fifty interviews of American and Japanese individuals who had some role in the bomb decision or the surrender. Although their volume is in great part made up of quotes, their sources are not clearly identified either by footnotes or in the text. Many of those interviewed had already written books or articles on the subject and the interviewing technique seems to have been too conventional, failing to raise the kind of searching questions that might have elicited new information or fresh interpretations. Within these limitations, however, The Decision to Drop the Bomb is a good introduction to the current state of knowledge on this subject. While Alperovitz’s volume attempts to revise the conventional view, Giovannitti and Freed in the end accept the prevailing interpretation but their book provides materials for a revision.

The official view of the purpose of the elimination of two Japanese cities is that upheld by Harry Truman in his memoirs: that the bomb was dropped to save the lives of American boys who were expected to die in an invasion. As the years have passed and Japanese have acquired status as a “friendly people”, the intention has been broadened to include the saving of Japanese lives as well. Truman emphasized this point a few years ago when he was visited by a Japanese delegation of survivors. Winston Churchill in his Triumph and Tragedy volume stated the official intention far more eloquently, “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions.” Some of the scientists involved in producing the bomb have affirmed the same viewpoint, notably Karl Compton and James B. Conant, both members of the Interim Committee that weighed the bomb’s use. Robert Oppenheimer also seems to fall in this group with his statement to Giovannitti and Freed that

“the decision was implicit in the project”, claiming that the makers of the bomb always assumed that it would be used.

Estimates as to the number of lives expected to be lost in the Japanese invasion vary. Churchill claimed that the conquest of Nippon “might well require” the loss of a million Americans and half that number of British. Truman in his memoirs reported that General Marshall had told him that it might cost a half a million lives to force Japan’s surrender on its own soil. If estimates were made of expected Japanese deaths they have not as yet been published. American military plans contemplated the invasion of the most southern of the major islands, Kyushu, in November of 1945, with a possible American casualty list of thirty to forty thousand. The central plain of Tokyo was to be invaded in 1946 and mopping up operations in Japan completed in 1947.

Among supporters of the decision to drop the bomb there is also a secondary argument for the necessity of this action. In view of the investment of two billion dollars of the taxpayers’ money in the atomic project, it is claimed that the Roosevelt and Truman administration had to act to prove the value of this expenditure. If the bombs were not used and their existence concealed, Congress would have eventually uncovered the decision and the critics of the administration - presumably the Republicans - would have had a powerful weapon with which to berate their opponents. In an age when many more billions are gambled on a very questionable race to the moon and when each misfire costs the taxpayer millions such sensitivity to wartime waste on the part of the voter seems less credible, but both James Byrnes and General Leslie Groves clearly had this consideration in mind.

The case of the doubters and critics rests heavily on the information available to Washington that Japan was close to surrender before Hiroshima. Despite the valiant fighting on Okinawa the will to continue the war was reported to be fading rapidly by a number of intelligence sources. The Japanese Navy had ceased operations and the Air Force was severely decimated, with oil shortages grounding most of the surviving planes. Peace feelers had been made to Moscow in the spring of 1945 and their existence communicated to Washington. As the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded after their postwar study of Japanese morale: “From the standpoint of the politics of surrender - and by August 1945 politics was the key - the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not essential.” Air Force General Curtis LeMay, whose bombers had killed more Japanese in their fire raid on Tokyo than did the first atomic bomb, was certain that he would run out of targets and out of a war by September of 1945.

There can be little doubt that there was some realization of Japan’s imminent collapse on the highest levels of government by the summer of 1945. “Japan is doomed and the Japanese know it,” Harry Hopkins informed the White House from Moscow in late May. Even General Eisenhower, busy with occupation problems in Europe, claims that he knew that Japan was defeated and that dropping the bomb was unnecessary. In Mandate for Change he reports the visit of Secretary of War Stimson to Europe, informing the General of the plan for bombing Japan. Stimson is remembered as being “deeply perturbed” and “almost angrily refuting” the reasons Eisenhower offered for his belief that the bomb was not needed to save American lives and would only shock world opinion. Admiral William Leahy, Chief of Staff to the President, and one who doubted that the bomb would even explode, also claimed that Japan was already defeated because of the effective sea blockade and conventional bombing.

This evidence is basic to the belief that there was another reason, or at least an additional reason, for using the bomb on Japan. One of the earliest to set forth another thesis - if not the first to do so - was P.M.S. Blackett, the British physicist and Nobel prize winner. Writing in 1948, Blackett claimed that the nuclear bombing was not so much the last act of the Second World War as it was the first major operation of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. This view, strongly upheld by Alperovitz, has two phases: one, that the use of the bomb was intended to end the Pacific War before the Russians moved into China and by a declaration of war acquired a claim to sharing the occupation of Japan. The second phase of the argument is that the bomb was also intended as a demonstration of American power that would make the Russians more amenable to accepting American policies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Keeping the Russians from implementing their Yalta pledge to enter the war against Japan was no doubt a consideration that weighed heavily in Washington. Churchill also took note of it, and in discussing the bomb decision in Triumph and Tragedy he says: “Moreover, we should not need the Russians. . . We had no need to ask favours of them.” Alperovitz offers a great deal of evidence of the growth of influence of the “hardline” proponents, both political and military men, who found in President Truman a receptive mind. Each difficulty with Russia encountered by American policy in Europe convinced these men of the importance of keeping Stalin from playing any role in Asia and particularly in the occupation of Japan.

There is more difficulty in assessing the importance of the bomb’s use as a modern version of the old sword-rattling technique in an effort to scare the Kremlin. Jonathan Daniels, son of Josephus, Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and a White House aide, has recorded what is the most unambiguous record of Truman’s thinking. According to Daniels, when Truman discussed the bomb he said: “If it explodes, as I think it will, I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys.” Leo Szilard, the physicist, reports a similar expression of hope on the part of Byrnes, who said that the major purpose of the bomb was to “make Russia more manageable in Europe.”

The initiative in launching the Cold War consequently seems no longer so one-sidedly attributable to the Kremlin. Already, on April 20, 1945, Averill Harriman told Truman that the United States was faced with a “barbarian invasion of Europe”. The historian might wonder what the indictment of the Russians would have been if they had stopped their warfare against the Germans on the 1939 Polish-German frontiers and left the bloody task of taking Berlin to the British and Americans. Harriman and other hard-line advisers of Truman seem to ground the greatest source of their hostility in the Russian insistence upon installing their own hand-picked government in Poland. The White House seems to have had no important adviser whose historical knowledge recalled the attempt of the victors in 1919 to install a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe. A little history and a little insight might have suggested that the Russians would view any British and American interference in Eastern Europe as a new effort to rebuild the structure that had collapsed at least by 1938. A little understanding of the behavior of great powers would also have suggested that the Russians, having bled to the extent of over seven million combat dead, would be determined to install their own cordon sanitaire in those countries that had fallen so quickly to Nazi Germany.

Reading Alperovitz raises an even more basic question about the nature of changes in American policy. For some important members of the Truman administration in 1945 Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe were significant enough areas for American national interests to risk launching a third world war and disrupting the United Nations at its very inception. As Truman said, if the Russians did not play ball and did not wish to join us in the United Nations - on American terms, of course - “they could go to hell”. Yet, only a few years before, in 1938 and 1939, when there had been some opportunity to fight to maintain a skeleton of the 1919 settlement, none of these voices were raised to propose American intervention. Truman had been typical of a kind of unintellectual middlewestern isolationist who, as late as June of 1941, had greeted with glee a Russo-German conflict as weakening both of these powers.

What radical change in the role of Poland or in the American mind made a war over Poland unthinkable for American leaders in 1939 but easily contemplated in 1945? Was it the vaguely forming concept of a Pax Americana that made all areas of the world open to the influence of the rival great power of almost equal vital importance to American eyes? John Lukacs, in his brief study of the origins of the Cold War, makes a good case for the view that postwar Soviet Russian national interests have greater congruity with those of Tsarist Russia than have the 1945 and post-1945 assessments of American national interests with those of 1935. The great revolution in world affairs might well be considered the new role chosen by the United States. In this change, the creation and use of the atomic bomb, as these two recent volumes suggest, was a central factor. An important area of revisionism is being opened up by this new thesis or set of theses. Like most revisionism in international affairs, the new thesis must fight the “good nation vs. bad nation” oversimplifications which nationalism tries to impose upon scholarship and which often makes unpopular the struggle for truth and objectivity.

* William L. Neumann is professor of history at Goucher College, Maryland, and author of America Encounters Japan.

1.Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision to Drop the Bomb (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965). 348 pp. $6.00.

Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965). 317 pp. $7.50.

Early Anti-Imperialism

By LEONARD P. LIGGIO

The anti-imperialist American youth of today are, without realizing it, following in a great tradition of modern anti-imperialism inaugurated during the burgeoning of US imperialism at the time of the Spanish-American War. This applies not only to the opposition as a whole, but even to such tactics as agitating among US troops against the war effort. This heritage applies also to what the statist ideologues of National Review have perceptively called the “anarchist impulse”, which they discern at the root of American youth’s support of Negroes or Vietnamese oppressed or assaulted by the US State-apparatus. For Conservatives, out of their irreconcilable conflict with libertarians, recognize that isolationism and anti-imperialism in foreign policy is but the other side of the coin of “anarchism” in domestic affairs.

The United States initiated its aggression against Spain on April 20, 1898. The immediate object: to restore stability in Cuba for the benefit of US owners of plantations, mines and other vestiges of feudalism, and to prevent the success of the Cuban revolutionary movement. But the major focus of US aggression had already become the Far East, where the U. S. Asian Squadron, conveniently located at Hong Kong to dominate the South China Sea, made haste to occupy Manila Bay on May 2—considerably before the annexation of Hawaii (July 7) or the occupation of Santiago, Cuba (July 17). In the Far East, the US quickly replaced Spain as the imperialist oppressor of the Philippines national liberation movement. American libertarians had no hesitation then in giving every aid and support to those fighting against the US aggressors, and in urging Americans to disassociate themselves actively from the criminality of the US government. In the absolute forefront of the anti-imperialist confrontation with the US State-apparatus was the dean of American laissez-faire liberals, the businessman-advocate of free trade and hard money, Edward Atkinson, who founded the American anti-imperialist movement.

The Philippine situation led to the most sensational episode in the history of the movement, the seizure of the Atkinson pamphlets. . .

Long the ardent champion of a score of reforms, Atkinson began writing, publishing, and distributing violent anti-imperialist pamphlets in the fall of 1898. This, of course, was no more than was being done by a dozen other enthusiasts in the movement. In the spring of 1899, however, he wrote to the secretary of war, enclosing his three principal pamphlets, and declaring his intention of sending them to American soldiers in the Philippines. . .

The government acted at once. On May 2, 1899, Postmaster-General Charles Emory Smith ordered the San Francisco postmaster to remove all Atkinson pamphlets from the Manila mails. A number of the offending documents were intercepted the following day. This action aroused great interest throughout the United States. The anti-imperialists rushed to Atkinson’s defense, the Springfield Republican finding in the seizure “the mailed hand of the rule of blood and iron being gradually disclosed. . . which,” it added, “will next fall heavily upon freedom of speech within the old borders of the United States”. The postmaster general defended his order in sharp words, and was supported by most of the imperialist press.[1]

Edward Atkinson, along with William Graham Sumner, was the most widely known American exponent of pure liberalism. Atkinson (1827-1905) came to maturity in the most significant period of American intellectual history, the pre-Civil War Jacksonian era. Carl Schurz, radical German refugee from the 1848 Revolution, declared of America in the 1850s:

Every glance into the political life of America strengthens my convictions that the aim of a revolution can be nothing less than to make room for the will of the people - in other words, to break every authority which has its organization in the life of the state, and, as far as is possible, to overturn the barriers to individual liberty. . . Here in America you can see every day how slightly a people needs to be governed. In fact, the thing that is not named in Europe without a shudder, anarchy, exists here in full bloom.[2]

An abundance of authors, of whom Thoreau, Emerson, and Parker were foremost, provided the intellectual analysis for the instinctive and popular no-government philosophy of the Jacksonian era. Opposing all work within State-oriented institutions, they stood outside of them, and called for their total abolition on the basis of absolute moral principles. They not only called for it, they actively worked at it by giving support to the internal revolutionary activists of whom John Brown is justly the most famous. Thoreau, Emerson, and Parker became fully radical when they collected funds to purchase arms, “Beecher’s bibles”, to overthrow the slave system maintained by the US government.

The grounds for this new resistance to society as order and discipline might be narrower than Emerson would have liked, but rebellion against a pro-slavery government could be a first step in making radical individualism something more than just a literary fancy or a prerogative of isolated genius. Perhaps the time was approaching when every individual would realize that he had no further need of laws and governments. Following the lead of Thoreau, who had first made transcendentalism the basis for defying law in his doctrine of civil disobedience, Emerson passed from a theoretical anti-institutionalism to something approaching straight-out anarchism.[3]

Unfortunately, slave insurrectionism was side-tracked by the US power structure into governmental aggression and aggrandizement in the Civil War, which ended with the Negroes still defrauded of their rights and the property which they had created during generations of enslaved labor. However, the tradition of this radicalism remained a strong undercurrent in nineteenth century America.

Edward Atkinson gained his theoretical self-education during this period. He was strongly and totally influenced by the writings of Frederic Bastiat, whose economic writings correcting the errors of Ricardo and Malthus had become important from 1850 on. Atkinson was an Abolitionist in the Garrison tradition, placing moral and political principles above traditional forms and mechanisms. His attitude toward the continued growth of government support of slavery was indicated in February, 1850: “I say damn compromise, if compromise -damn union.”[4] However, he did not limit himself to declamations. Atkinson immediately joined Theodore Parker’s Boston Vigilance Committee, which liberated Negroes from federal authorities seeking to restore them to slavery. And, as befitted the most successful New England textile manufacturer, Atkinson was the treasurer of the committee that equipped John Brown’s guerrillas in Kansas with weapons and ammunition. During the Civil War Atkinson was the secretary of the Educational Commission, which sought to bridge the failure of the government to leave to the Negroes the confiscated plantations by raising voluntary contributions to gain the properties for the Negroes. Throughout the post-Civil War period Atkinson was convinced that there was an intimate relation between the betrayal of Negro civil and property rights under Reconstruction, and the system of pillage of the general public by government privileges, subsidies, tariffs, and inflation. He fought to end the privileges of tariffs, government-protected banking, and currency. In 1867 he stated: “Capitalists, speculators, and middlemen are stealing the share of annual product which under natural law belongs to labor, by the use of false money (greenbacks)”; while in 1891 he noted: “For the purpose of passing a Force Bill the Republicans have admitted into the Senate the Senators from the so-called ‘rotten borough states’ (western states);. . . They have sold out the Republicans on the Force Bill for the purpose of gaining a benefit to the silver mines.”[5] However, when the exploitation of the general public by speculators and contractors through inflation, privileges and subsidies, and of the Negroes by denial of civil and property rights, was escalated to a higher stage of imperialism, Edward Atkinson was prepared to escalate his opposition to government, despite his advanced age of seventy years and his social position as the leader of industrial fire insurance.

Senator William Borah, perhaps the premier American anti-imperialist, well summarized the contradictions between imperialism and liberty during his own crusade against the imperialist Versailles Treaty and League of Nations:

You can not yoke a government whose fundamental maxim is that of liberty to a government whose first law is that of force and hope to preserve the former. These things are in eternal war, and one must ultimately destroy the other. You may still keep for a time the outward form, you may still delude yourself, as others have done in the past, with appearances and symbols, but when you shall have committed this Republic to a scheme of world control based upon force. . . you will have soon destroyed the atmosphere of freedom, of confidence in the self-governing capacity of the masses, in which alone a democracy may thrive. . . And what shall it profit us as a Nation if we shall go forth to the dominion of the earth and share with others the glory of world control and lose that fine sense of confidence in the people, the soul of democracy?[6]

In that same speech Borah singled out the US government’s protection of the feudal concessions controlled by US interests in Venezuela in 1895, as the origin of the Imperialism that has dominated American foreign policy ever since. The revival of the Monroe Doctrine in 1895 after decades of disuse signalled the beginning of the aggressions that US imperialism would undertake.[7] Atkinson was galvanized into action by the monstrosity of reviving the Monroe Doctrine; for the implicit militarism, especially naval construction, would introduce through the backdoor the subsidies, privileges, government contracts to business and the currency inflation which libertarians had been combatting for years. Charles Eliot Norton, the Harvard professor, said of our policy in Venezuela: “I fear that America is beginning a long course of error and wrong and is likely to become more and more a power for disturbance and barbarism”, while to E. L. Godkin he wrote of the rise of “a barbaric spirit of arrogance and unreasonable self-assertion.”[8] Godkin, editor of The Nation and the New York Evening Post, was an intransigent defender of laissez-faire liberalism, sound money, Negro rights, and anti-militarism, as were such of his associates as Carl Schurz, Oswald Garrison Villard and Edward Atkinson. It was to Godkin’s Post that Atkinson wrote his first anti-imperialist blast (January 8, 1896), in which he offered the best practical means of distinguishing between true supporters of peace and proponents of war:

A question has arisen as to whether Jingoism is a chronic disease affecting any great number of persons or only a superficial eruption or eczema developed by the itching for notoriety of a few persons who occupy but do not fill high positions, irritating but not dangerous. A conclusion could be easily reached upon these two phases of the question by drawing up a petition to the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States somewhat in the following form:

“It is requested that an act may be passed to the effect that any citizen of the United States who proposes to force this country into a war with Great Britain or with any other country on a dispute about boundaries or any other similar issue, shall be immediately conscripted or entered upon the army roll for service from the beginning to the end of any such war when it shall occur. It is suggested that Senators of the United States shall be assigned to the position of general officers in this addition to the army upon the ground that their military capacity must certainly be equal to their political intelligence. . . It is next suggested that Representatives in Congress shall be assigned to the command of brigades upon the ground that their capacity to lead military bodies had been proved by their capacity to mislead civil organizations. It is suggested that all other persons such as the heads of police departments and the like shall be ranked in the subordinate offices or as privates according to the relative energy which they may have exhibited in the development of the Jingo policy.”

Of course, men who in high public position have held that patriotism should not be made subordinate to dollars and cents, and who have expressed such an earnest desire to assert and defend the honor of the country at any cost, would most enthusiastically vote for this enactment and would immediately enroll themselves for active service in the field.

If the Jingo spirit is deeply seated, the army thus recruited would be ample for the defense of the country; while on the other hand, if it is a merely superficial or skin disease of a slightly contagious kind, that fact would be proved by the lack of enrollment of gentlemen in the higher positions which would leave the Jingo army short of officers even if the number of privates should be sufficient to make two or three regiments out of our seventy million people. . . The place for the most effective service would be upon the disputed territory in South America lying between Guiana and Venezuela. A (Henry Cabot) Lodge might be found in some vast wilderness of the Orinoco, from which source the center of direction could be given to the Jingo army. Effective work would be found for young men of previous experience in the police departments of northern cities (Theodore Roosevelt) in the Provost Marshal department of the Jingo army. A place could also be found in the Courts Martial of the Jingo army for the Judges who fear that without an occasional war the young men of the North will be enervated and will become too much imbued with that Christian spirit which we have become so accustomed to consider as one making for peace, order and human welfare. . . This proposal for the immediate enrollment of the Jingo army will at once develop the sincerity of purpose of the advocates of aggression and violence by their enlistment. An indirect but great benefit would then ensue by the removal of these persons from the high positions in which they have proved their incapacity to deal with questions of peace, order and industry and to give them the opportunity to exert and prove their military prowess.[9]

Note has been taken of the swiftness with which US imperialism switched from the point of origin of the Spanish-American war in the Caribbean to the area of its real interest, the Far East. The presidential message calling for the war stated:

In the name of humanity, in the name of civilization, in behalf of endangered American interests which give us the right and duty to speak and to act, the war in Cuba must stop,

and maintained the theme that US interest was limited to preserving peace and ending the mutual slaughter between the government and the rebels through the salutary intervention of US troops. An indication of the direction of US intent was the recognition of Cuban independence and the repudiation of the republican government in whose name and under whose social program the Cuban guerrillas had been fighting.[10] Although Cubans struggled and rebelled to regain a true independence without the humiliation of US interventions and US naval bases, it was only in 1959 that a beginning was made - and more than a beginning - to repay US imperialism for its crimes; but one portion of Cuban territory, Cuban independence, and Cuban honor remains unredeemed—at Guantanamo Bay.

The establishment of US imperialism in the strategically crucial and raw materials-rich region of Southeast Asia surrounding the South China Sea reflected the increasing role of US imperialism in the exploitation of China. While the US supported Japan against Russia in the exploitation of north China, the US desired to act directly in competition with France and Britain in south China. From Hong Kong Britain dominated much of south China through privileges and concessions. Similarly, France’s domination of Vietnam derived originally from the desire to have an area from which to threaten and exploit China, as in Britain’s position at Hong Kong. When south Vietnam proved unsatisfactory for such a role against China, France asserted a “protectorate” over the Vietnamese government in the north. It then defeated a Chinese army which came to the aid of the Vietnamese, and from Vietnam the French extended their imperialism into south China bordering Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin. By conquering Manila the US hoped to use it to the same advantage as a base for exploitation of Southeast Asia and south China. (It has been suggested that the development of Philippine nationalism seeking the end of the US “protectorate”, and the establishment of real Philippine independence, threatens the use of US strategic bases aimed at China located near Manila at Clark Field and Subic Bay. The result is the large-scale US troop and construction commitment at the strategic bases aimed at China on the coast of south Vietnam.)

The US domination of Manila, culminating in the surrender of the major forts at Corregidor and Cavite (May 2, 1898) “marks a turning point in the history of American territorial expansion. It marks as well the beginning of a protest movement of proportions, a movement led by a strangely assorted group of citizens who fought expansion tooth and nail, and, in the face of overwhelming odds, urged renunciation of the spoils of war”.[11] The real meaning of the event was foreseen by such outstanding liberals as the President of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, who told a San Francisco rally that same day that for the US to embark upon a policy of imperialism “our democracy must necessarily depart from its best principles and traditions. . . The basal principles of the Republic, a cooperative association in which ‘all just government is derived from the consent of the governed.’”

The US seizure of Manila short-circuited the social revolution which had been developing in the Philippines. After years of executing rebelling intellectuals and priests, Spanish rule was challenged by a popular national liberation movement led by Emilio Aguinaldo. Upon US seizure of Manila Bay, the rebels proclaimed, on June 12, 1898, the independence of the Philippines under a provisional government with Aguinaldo as president, a proclamation later ratified by a constituent assembly. Three days after the declaration of Philippine independence a meeting to protest US imperialism and US aggression was held at Faneuil Hall in Boston. A Saratoga Conference on foreign policy in August, 1898, however, became an instrument of the government when the anti-imperialists yielded on principles to gain a broad coalition.

In America the outbreak of a war to be carried to the enemy and posing no danger to the homeland, did not silence but galvanized the war’s opponents. Suddenly they became an entity with a name; the Anti-Imperialists. Professor Norton, now over 70, brought upon himself torrents of abuse and threats of violence to his house and person by urging his students not to enlist in a war in which “we jettison all that was most precious of our national cargo.” Although an Irish politician of Boston proposed to send a lynching party for him and the press called him a “traitor”. . . (a)t a meeting of the Congregational Church in Cambridge he spoke of how bitter it was that now, at the end of a century which had seen the greatest advance in knowledge and the hope of peace, America should be turning against her ideals and “plunging into an unrighteous war”.[12]

The Bostonians, Gamaliel Bradford and Moorfield Storey, past president of the American Bar Association, founded the Committee of Correspondence to pursue the revolutionary purposes of thwarting US imperialism. Finally, to harness the leadership and popular support of the anti-imperialists, a large membership organization was formed. The Anti-Imperialist League was founded in the office of Edward Atkinson, and important league branches were founded in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

The quest for power, money and glory abroad, the League maintained, would distract from reform at home and bring in its train a strong central government destructive of traditional states’ rights and local liberties. Americans had enough to do to solve the problems of municipal corruption, war between capital and labor, disordered currency, unjust taxation, the use of public office for spoils, the rights of the colored people in the South and of the Indians in the West, before taking alien peoples under their rule. . . The Anti-Imperialists did not sweep up with them the Populists and followers of William Jennings Bryan and those soon to be known as Progressives. While these groups opposed standing armies, big navies and foreign entanglements and were in theory anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-European, they were simultaneously imbued with a fever to fight Spain as a cruel European tyrant stamping out liberty at America’s doorstep.[13]

The core of the Anti-Imperialist League was the Liberal Republicans or Mugwumps who supported sound money and free trade against the conservative Republicans’ policies of inflation and protection of business. Carl Schurz, Charles Francis Adams, Edward Atkinson, Gamaliel Bradford, Moorfield Storey, E. L. Godkin, and Oswald Garrison Villard stood for the gold standard and free trade, peace and laissez-faire, good, but very little, government if at all. Their pre-Civil War no-government traditions were indicated by the inclusion of the “remnant of the old abolition groups, represented by the son of Garrison, the son of Emerson, the son of James Birney”. Also identified with them were reformers and pacifists such as Jane Addams, George C. Mercer, who defended Indian rights, and Ernest Crosby, Charles B. Spahr and Edward Osgood Brown, all supporters of the single tax. The few businessmen, headed by Andrew Carnegie and Atkinson, provided the financing, while even fewer labor leaders were involved. But, intellectuals played a crucial role, whether as popular writers of fiction like Mark Twain or of social thought like Atkinson or college presidents and professors like David Starr Jordan of Stanford, William Graham Sumner of Yale, or Charles Eliot Norton and William James of Harvard.[14]

Richard Clark Sterne, “The Nation and its Century”, in The Nation’s 100th Anniversary Issue, notes how the crisis of US imperialism imposed a unity upon what had up to then appeared to be competing political philosophies, such as laissez-faire and Henry George’s single tax concept.

But in The Nation of January 2, 1896, George is highly praised for organizing an anti-war demonstration at Cooper Union. The New York Tribune. The Nation angrily remarked, had given “mendacious reports” of the meeting magnifying the number of hecklers, but the occasion had been a success. George had made a “powerful and effective speech in the interest of peace and common sense.”[15]

The paradox of the economically laissez-faire Nation joining hands with economic “radicals”, because both the magazine and the radicals were opposed to colonialism, was illustrated on other occasions around the turn of the century. For example, in 1896 The Nation noted that the Socialists in Germany had been directing their attacks more and more upon militarism, “which they characterize as the systematic fleecing of the workingman in the interest of a soldier class”. The magazine observed:

They are about right. . . it is hardly too much to say that international socialism is at present about the most promising influence that is making for the disarmament of Europe.

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the journal which thus praises “international socialism” was anti-Marxist and laissez-faire. During the muck-racking years at the beginning of the twentieth century, the journal was to remain a most cautious critic, and always from a nineteenth century Liberal standpoint, of the “trusts”. But. . . The Nation of that era was a friend of the anti-militaristic Socialists.[16]

The Spanish-American war ended effectively within six months of its beginning and was concluded within the year by the Treaty of Paris (December, 1898). Andrew Carnegie assumed the leadership of the lobby of the Anti-Imperialist League to defeat the treaty in the Senate. William Jennings Bryan, who had supported the imperialist war as did so many so-called progressives, lobbied for the passage of treaty ratification so that “peace” could be made, the imperialist issues easily disposed of, and the political situation cleared for another presidential campaign centering on domestic issues. Despite Bryan, the anti-imperialists almost defeated the treaty. But, it was ratified in early February, 1899 by a single vote, with several Democratic and Populist senators voting for it on Bryan’s recommendation. A resolution for Philippine independence was missed only by the tie-breaking vote of the Vice-President at the very moment that the Philippine national government of President Aguinaldo, realizing the totality of the American betrayal, attempted to resist the US occupation.

If The Nation was deeply depressed by our Cuban adventure, it was profoundly ashamed - along with Mark Twain and William James - of our treatment of the Filipinos. . . The United States cooperated with the Filipino patriot leader, Aguinaldo, in taking the islands from the Spaniards, and then American forces took the Philippines from the Filipinos. The official argument used to defend this procedure that the mass of the natives desired American rule - was refuted by The Nation:

Whenever a small force of Americans undertakes an expedition, the woods and hills become alive with enemies.

Not bands of Filipino “robbers”, The Nation continued, were using terrorist tactics; rather,

The American troops have done the terrorizing. Their conduct in some actions has been so ferocious, and their revenge in so many cases so terrible, as to make them dreaded and hated. The natives submit to the Americans because they are afraid of them. . .

30,000 Filipinos, the magazine estimated, had been killed by our forces.[17]

The Philippine resistance to the US aggression led to a complete identification with the cause of national liberation and opposition to the US government and its army by the anti-imperialists. The guerilla war against US imperialism led to a rapid growth of the anti-imperialist movement. By May, 1899 the original organization had thirty thousand members.

With the outbreak of the Philippine insurrection, in February, 1899, events in the islands came to play a much greater part in the productions of the anti-imperialists. . . Particularly useful to the anti-imperialists were the reports of outrage committed by American troops during the insurrection - instances of the burning of crops and villages, disregard of the rules of civilized warfare, of the “water cure”, and orders to “take no prisoners”. Ironically enough, these were the sort of stories that had aroused the American nation against the Spaniards in Cuba. The anti-imperialists were quick to note this, and claim that it furnished a concrete example of the inevitable consequences of denying a people the fundamental right of self-government.[18]

Edward Atkinson assumed the forefront of the anti-imperialist publicity campaign.

In addition to being a vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League, and contributing material for use by that organization, Mr. Atkinson printed and distributed his own series of pamphlets. . . By some he was branded a traitor to his country, others praised his efforts as being highly patriotic and made substantial monetary contributions for the continuation of his work. Some of his former associates in the tariff and silver fights turned against him, while on the other hand, some of his strongest opponents found Common ground with him on this issue.

In April, 1899, Mr. Atkinson conceived the idea of sending some of his pamphlets to some of the officers and soldiers stationed in the Philippines. He outlined his purpose (to the Secretary of the Treasury) on April 22. “In this morning’s paper a correspondent of the Boston Herald states that the Departments are going to “expose” the Anti-Imperialist League and others who have as alleged stirred up discontent among the troops in Manila. I do not think the Executive Committee of the Anti-Imperialist League has yet taken any active measures to inform the troops of the facts and conditions there. The suggestion is, however, a valuable one and I have sent to Washington today to get specific addresses of officers and soldiers to the number of five or six hundred so that I may send them my pamphlets, giving them assurance of sympathy. I shall place the same lists in charge of the Executive Committee of the League to keep up the supply”. Naturally, no such list of names was forthcoming.

Washington, May 2 (news dispatch). The Postmaster-General has directed the postmaster at San Francisco to take out of the mails for Manila three pamphlets issued by Edward Atkinson, of Boston, vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League. This order does not apply to circulation of the pamphlets by mail in this country, but bars their dispatch from this country to the Philippines, discontent, and even mutiny, among the soldiers being stated by the department to be the design of these publications. The three pamphlets are specifically described, and in no circumstances are they to be forwarded by mail to the Philippines.[19]

The New England Anti-Imperialist League became skittish over Atkinson’s exercise of freedom of speech between American citizens in disregard of the slavery of the US uniform. As a result he turned from the East Coast to the Mid-West as the focus of his pamphlet work and the Chicago Anti-Imperialist League became the major distributor of Atkinson’s assaults upon the US government. Of the May 2 seizure and denial of free speech by the government post office, Atkinson drew on his forty years of acquaintance with Cabinet members and other high government officials in declaring:

I think the members of the Cabinet have graduated from an asylum for the imbecile and feeble-minded. They have evidently found out their blunder because the Administration papers suddenly ceased their attacks on me all on the same day, and I miss the free advertisement. I am now trying to stir them up again to provoke another attack.[20]

On June 3, 1899, Atkinson began the publication of The Anti-Imperialist (of which six numbers were issued through October 1, 1900) and by September he was declaring his latest pamphlet “my strongest bid yet for a limited residence in Fort Warren”. The distribution of about 135,000 copies of Atkinson’s anti-imperialism pamphlets did not in the end result in Atkinson’s imprisonment. But the fact that he and others had absolutely no respect for the processes of a government which had embarked upon an imperialist course created the conditions for a strong anti-imperialist and isolationist attitude among the American people, an attitude sufficient to blossom forth in crises two-thirds of a century later.

The American Anti-Imperialist League was founded as a protest against militarism and heavy taxes at home and aggression abroad; it held imperialism to be evil because of its denial of liberty and self-determination equally at home and abroad. The American Anti-Imperialist League held that if there was such a thing as treason, then it consisted of the support of imperialist actions of the US government and not opposition to them; it held that it was the US government that had introduced a civil war in American life, not those who opposed the betrayal of the fundamental ideals of the American people.

We earnestly condemn the policy of the present National Administration in the Philippines. It seeks to extinguish the spirit of 1776 in those islands. We deplore the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, whose bravery deserves admiration even in an unjust war. We denounce the slaughter of the Filipinos as a needless horror. . .

Imperialists assume that with the destruction of self-government in the Philippines by American hands, all opposition here will cease. This is a grievous error. Much as we abhor the war of “criminal aggression” in the Philippines, greatly as we regret that the blood of the Filipinos is on American hands, we more deeply resent the betrayal of American institutions at home. The real firing line is not in the suburbs of Manila. The foe is of our own household. . . Whether the ruthless slaughter of the Filipinos shall end next month or next year is but an incident in a contest that must go on until the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are rescued from the hands of their betrayers. Those who dispute about standards of value while the Republic is undermined will be listened to as little as those who would wrangle about the small economies of the household while the household is on fire. The training of a great people for a century, the aspiration for liberty of a vast immigration are forces that will hurl aside those who in the delirium of conquest seek to destroy the character of our institutions. . .

We cordially invite the cooperation of all men and women who remain loyal to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.[21]

Louis Hartz has noted that an imperialist war, since it lacks any military danger to the imperialist country, permits freedom from hysteria and oppression that accompany a general war. An imperialist war may thus contain the conditions out of which a disinterested, uncompromising opposition can rally popular support. Imperialist wars, in contrast to general wars, are not fought against nations who share descendants with America, and therefore there is no clear-cut “fifth column” of Filipinos, Malays, Thais or Vietnamese, or Dominicans or Congolese for that matter, against whom a popularly supported witch-hunt can be directed. Thus, lacking the strong but compromised base of an ethno-centered and political opposition, anti-imperialist opposition can be generally American and moral. The shift in world politics changing US conflicts from inter-European to non-European creates totally new problems for the US government and important new opportunities for American anti-imperialists. Notwithstanding the imperialist messianism of racism, state-interest and chauvanism, imperialist wars fail to permit the ideological progaganda amidst the fears manufactured in a general war. Imperialist wars eliminate ideological debate between conflicting states, and open the most basic internal ideological debate, as Hans Morgenthau has perceptively noted.[22] As Hartz describes it:

McKinley was involved in no ideological war unless it was a war within the United States. The Filipinos posed no threat to the American way of life, Aguinaldo had no agents in Washington or San Francisco, and the current of moral passion, such as it was, came entirely from the American side. . . The Anti-Imperialist League, far from going underground, had branches openly in all parts of the country, enlisting the allegiance of many of the most prominent men in the country. . . And when the Secretary of War tried to stop Edward Atkinson from sending anti-imperialist propaganda to the soldiers who were actually fighting in the Philippines, a howl of protest went up which forced a withdrawal of the action and discredited the McKinley Administration. Atkinson, an outraged editorial writer said, was being victimized by a “rule of blood and iron”.[23]

Thus, as the case of Atkinson and the Anti-Imperialist League demonstrates, imperialist war provides a particularly fertile ground for a radical and widespread movement of opposition at home. A prolonged imperialist war, especially one leading to a defeat or stalemate for the imperialist power, is the most dangerous threat to its stability and its very continued existence.

A significant discussion of the role of the early Anti-Imperialists was held at the annual meeting April, 1962, of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, and published in Studies on the Left (Vol. III, No. 1, 1962). Under the title “The Anti-Imperialists and Twentieth Century American Foreign Policy,” the major paper was presented by John W. Rollins, and comments made by Harold Baron and Thomas J. McCormick.

Rollins properly noted that “the Great Debate over American imperialism that began in the 1890’s has never ended.” His major thesis holds that American liberal corporatists have attempted to reconcile the imperialism of US foreign policy—the negation of true liberalism—with the claims and rhetoric of liberalism. Hence, they have sought to portray imperialism not as the basic element of US history in the twentieth century but as a mere passing interlude. Thus, while they were dismissed as futile and irrelevant, the Anti-Imperialists emerged, in a sense, as the ideological victors. For imperialist liberal corporatism has been forced to speak as though anti-imperialist principles have formed the basis for American policies. Rollins, however, unfortunately leaps from the use of the Anti-Imperialist viewpoint as a mask for imperialism, to the conclusion that twentieth century imperialism really is the Anti-Imperialism of 1898-1900.

Baron perceptively pointed out that Rollins’ error was caused by a confusion between the expansion of international trade without any support from government, with an expansion of territory or trade resting on government aid. As Baron declares: “all definitions of imperialism include as a central point the use of the power of the state. . . To him (Hobson) imperialism was the antihesis of free trade because it brought forth a neomercantilist policy on the part of the state in order to gain preferred positions in world markets. . . the doctrine of comparative advantage in international trade theory can hardly be classed as expansionism. The free trade concept of developing international trade had nothing in common with the neo-mercantilist governmental policy that prevailed in the United States.”[24] Baron also recalled Lenin’s comment in his Imperialism that the Anti-Imperialists in America were the “last of the Mohicans of bourgeois democracy,” the last to resist the process by which monopoly and imperialism replaced the system of capitalist free competition.

McCormick also stressed the great differences between the current coercive system and the views of the laissez-faire Anti-Imperialists: “it would be fruitless to analyze the domestic scene in the twentieth century by equating ‘corporatism’ with laissez-faire. . . The primary role played by the State in contemporary expansionism, plus the accepted use of force—moral, economic, and military—–to promote that expansion, make twentieth century American diplomacy a far different animal than the ‘dead horse’ of laissez-faire anti-imperialism.”[25]

1.Fred Harvey Harrington, “The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States”, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXII (1935), in Frank Freidel and Norman Pollack, eds. Builders of American Institutions, (Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1963), p. 365.

2.George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 8.

3.Ibid., p. 39.

4.Harold Francis Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography of an American Liberal. 1827-1905 (Boston: Old Corner Book Store, Inc., 1934), p. 4.

5.Ibid., pp. 83, 157.

6.Freidel and Pollack, op. cit., p. 423.

7.It has often been suggested that the outward thrust of US imperialism coincided with the closing of the internal American frontier. Few have noted, what nineteenth century anti-imperialists well knew, that there was not any noteworthy rise in US blood-thirstiness; for the blood-thirst formerly expended in the slaughter of the native Indian tribes now found insufficient release in the growing lynching of Negroes, and was turned toward the black and brown peoples of the Caribbean and the Far East. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that racism stands at the root of US imperialism, militarism, and the conscription system.

8.Barbara W. Tuchman, “The First Anti-Imperialists,” The Nation, 100th Anniversary Issue, p. 79.

9.Williamson, op. cit., pp. 215-16.

10.Julius W. Pratt, A History of United States Foreign Policy (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1955), pp. 374-81.

11.Freidel & Pollack, op. cit., p. 359.

12.Tuchman, op. cit., p. 80.

13.Ibid., pp. 80-81.

14.The similarity between the present criminal aggression of the US government in Vietnam and that in the Philippines has led to the republication of the statements of leading opponents of the US government, such as Mark Twain’s “To the person sitting in darkness”, Viet-Report (January, 1966), pp. 25-29, and William James’ support of the Philippine guerrilas against the US marines, The Progressive (January, 1966), p. 9.

15.The Nation, op. cit., p. 252.

16.Ibid., p. 260. However, the founders of the Nation considered, and used radical terms to describe, their laissez-faire principles as radical. “Olmsted tagged himself a “socialist democrat” and Godkin called himself a “radical”, and they believed any government beyond the intimacy of the town meeting to be a tyranny.” Robert Fridlington, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Launching The Nation”, Nation (January 3, 1966), p. 12. A founder of the Nation, William Lloyd Garrison, his son, Wendell Phillips Garrison, and his grandson, Oswald Garrison Villard, both editors, were often considered anarchists. Villard sought confrontations with state power as much as Garrison did. “I suspect that one of his greatest disappointments was his discovery that the suspension of The Nation in September, 1918, was not in response to his article blasting the Justice Department for its violation of civil liberties, but for Albert Jay Nock’s article characterizing Samuel Gompers as the administration’s lackey, traveling in an “atmosphere of sheer bagmanism”.” Michael Wreszin, “Oswald Garrison Villard, The Pacifist Rough Rider”. Nation (June 21, 1965), p. 671.

17.The Nation, op. cit., p. 256.

18.Harrington, in Freidel and Pollack, op. cit., pp. 364-65.

19.Williamson, op. cit., pp. 227-29. Atkinson’s pamphlets included: “The Cost of a National Crime” (1898), 34 pp.; “The Hell of War and its Penalties” (1898), 23 pp.; and “Criminal Aggression; by Whom Committed?” (1899), 13 pp.

20.Ibid., pp. 229, 293-95. The New England Anti-Imperialist League again became the center of Atkinson’s publication in 1902, especially his pamphlets on the cost of warfare of which five were issued until his death in 1905 soon after his participation in the 1905 International Peace Congress in Boston. Ibid., p. 236.

21.Louis L. Snyder, ed., The Imperialism Reader (Princeton, N. J.: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1962), pp. 391-93.

22.Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955), p. 288. Hans J. Morgenthau, “Where Consensus Breaks Down”, New Republic (January 22, 1966), pp. 16-18.

23.Hartz, op. cit., pp. 288, 292.

24.Hans Baron, in Studies on the Left (Vol. III. No. 1, 1962), pp. 25-26.

25.Thomas J. McCormick, in ibid., p. 33.

Freedom To Travel

By RUSSELL D. STETLER, JR.*

The recent activities of the Passport Office of the State Department have recently made headlines in the press. Official maneuvers to restrict the passport of Professor Staughton Lynd have been matched by FBI demands that Professor H. Stuart Hughes be officially observed on his visits abroad. No friend of liberty can fail to abhor any interference with the freedom to travel, a freedom that has been one of the most basic liberties in American constitutional development. Long before the recognition of freedom of speech or assembly, the Magna Carta established the freedom to travel. Moreover, any attempt by the US government to interfere with free expression by Americans anywhere in the world by restricting their travel is a violation of the First Amendment by the Constitution. Senator George Malone (Rep., Nev.) expressed the libertarian view when, in 1957, he broke the State Department’s travel ban by visiting a country on the Department’s proscribed list: “It has always been my view that an American citizen could travel anywhere he liked.” Or, as the Wall Street Journal declared editorially (June 18, 1958): “As for us, we don’t like government by bureaucratic whim. We prefer government by law. . . We think American citizens who have broken no laws are as entitled to travel outside the 48 states as they are entitled to travel within them.”

The freedom to travel no longer exists absolutely for citizens of the United States. The recent ruling of the Supreme Court in the Zemel case has reaffirmed very serious limitations on the freedom of Americans to travel when and where they please. The high court has upheld the power of the State Department to invalidate passports for travel to certain nations at a time when we are legally at war with none of them and when de facto war exists between the United States and only one of these nations. It has not yet been decided by the Court whether it is constitutional to impose criminal sanctions on those who violate the travel ban. The long-delayed decision in United States v. Laub, Martinot, etc. will settle that question.

It would be misleading for us to suppose at the outset that the question we are considering ever receives the attention of anyone who has no prejudgments about the various extra-constitutional factors that impinge on the final decision. We are all well aware of the political and historical context in which these decisions have been and will be rendered. That the justices of the High Court are confessedly relying in their decisions on a number of dubious prejudgments about the internal nature and foreign policies of the various countries which Americans are not permitted to see with their own eyes, was brought home in the remarks of the Chief Justice in the Zemel case. According to the report of the New York Times of May 4, 1965:

“In the case of Cuba, Justice Warren said, the restrictions are justified because the Communist Government there seeks to export revolution through travelers.”

I admit frankly that my own prejudices differ sharply from those of the court as expressed by the Chief Justice. I believe, for example, that “revolution” cannot be exported; instead, revolutions grow out of particular sets of conditions that make large numbers of people discontented with existing regimes and encourage them to develop and follow that ideology which will alter the conditions that breed dissatisfaction.

A more important point, however, is to show that the Court does not function outside the influence of certain hypotheses, and that these hypotheses and judgments outweigh other determinants in recent decisions limiting freedom to travel. I myself start with the assumption that holds quite simply that the freedom to travel ought not to be limited.

The Passport: Political or Functional

The basic restriction on travel from and returning to the United States involves the passport. It is important to note at the outset that the passport need not be per se a limitation on the freedom to travel. In fact, the original purpose of passports in the United States was merely to facilitate travel abroad. There was no prior assumption that the Government had to grant permission for travel. From the beginning, there were no official obstacles to travel. Only convicts and accused persons awaiting trial or on appeal were restricted.

Passports were issued not to authorize a right already enjoyed by most Americans but to certify that these individuals were citizens of the United States. Passports were to serve as a mere convenience to identify Americans to foreign principals. At first they were issued simultaneously by a variety of agencies, including the Secretary of State, other federal officials, state and local officials, and notaries public. In Urtetiqui v. D’Arcy. 34 U. S. (9 Pet.) 692 (1835), the Court noted that,

“. . . there is no law of the United States in any manner regulating the issuing of passports, or directing upon what evidence it may be done, or declaring their legal effect.”

The fact that several different agencies employing diverse criteria had taken on the task of issuing passports created a number of obvious problems, not the least of which was that of forgery. It was thought to be in the general interest, then, to provide legislation to rectify these difficulties. In a circular of July 1845 the State Department declared:

“For the information of citizens of the United States about to visit foreign countries, where they may be subjected to inconvenience for the want of sufficient evidence of their national character, it is stated that passports will be granted gratis, by the Secretary of State, to such citizens, on his being satisfied that they are entitled to receive them.”[1]

The precedent for this action had been established in wartime, particularly in the last days of the War of 1812. But in 1850 Congress first established its concern with the passport question by ratifying a treaty with Switzerland providing that the two nations would furnish passports to their nationals for travel to the other nation.

In 1856 Congress enacted a full-fledged passport statute, which stands today as our basic law on this subject. The Act of August 18, 1856 provided:

“That the Secretary of State shall be authorized to grant and issue passports, and cause passports to be granted, issued, and verified in foreign countries by such diplomatic or consular officers of United States, and under such rules as the President shall designate and prescribe for and on behalf of the United States, and no other person shall grant, issue, or verify any such passport; nor shall any passport be granted or issued to, or verified for, any other persons than citizens of the United States. . .”[2]

The Government has since argued that this statute is permissive, rather than mandatory. While conceding that the statute does not stipulate that a passport is required for egress or entry, many assert that the Secretary of State is not constrained by the Act to issue passports to any citizen. But this position seems to be opposed by the majority of earlier practitioners of the statute, such as Secretary of State Hamilton Fish (who spoke of the “right to be furnished with. . . evidence of citizenship”), Attorney-General Alphonso Taft, and the authors of the 1905 Rules Concerning the Granting and Issuing of Passports in the United States (who spoke of persons being “entitled to receive a passport”).[3] Thus, the historical development of the passport in the United States indicates that there was wide acceptance of the notion that all citizens had the right to be granted passports on request—even though the passport was not at the time necessary to foreign travel.

Much of the controversy turns on the question of whether the passport is to be regarded as a political document or a functional instrument. In other words, we must examine the nature of the passport to determine whether it should be subject to the kinds of restrictions that have been imposed. The earliest legal statement on this question is to be found in a case cited above, Urtetiqui v, D’Arcy.[4] Here the Court holds:

“It (the passport) is a document, which from its nature and object, is addressed to foreign powers; purporting only to be a request, that the bearer of it may pass safely and freely; and is to be considered rather in the character of a political document, by which the bearer is recognized, in foreign countries, as an American citizen; and which, by usage and the law of nations, is received as evidence of the fact.” (My emphasis.)

Whether this case remains good law would seem to depend on the context in which this decision was written and whether the context has been substantially altered since then.

The Government holds that a passport is still a political document. It is partly on this basis that the Government argued in the Robeson, Nathan, Clark, and Kamen cases, holding that passports came within the foreign affairs function of the State Department. Ultimately, the decisions in these cases (including only the second of the two Robeson cases) failed to uphold the position of the Government.[5]

The difference in the positions of the courts in these cases and the earlier determination in Urtetiqui, is, as we have suggested above, due to a difference in context. The most important aspect of context is the change in the meaning and function of the passport over the years. In 1835, the passport was official identification, political in nature because it was a Government-issued certificate to foreign powers. The passport was not a necessary condition of travel at that time. Later, the passport became such a necessary condition. As a functional instrument to travel—and thus a possible restriction on the freedom to travel—it is hardly to be thought of as a “political” document. From the context of “convenience” to the context of “necessity” the passport moves to the status of an indispensable document which cannot any longer be termed merely “political”.

Without a passport it becomes impossible to travel from the United States (and indeed for some time it was also regarded as impossible to enter the country without a passport); this encroachment on the freedom to travel should never be further aggravated by political conditions, particularly when the term “political” is endowed with an unconstitutional vagueness.

Restrictions on Passports

Restrictions on freedom to travel were originally introduced as temporary war measures whenever the United States embarked on an interventionist or warlike foreign policy. During the War of 1812, travel was restricted in areas controlled by the enemy. Restrictions were again imposed during the Civil War. In 1918, during World War I, citizens of the United States were required to have a passport to enter or leave the country. This statute was terminated by an act of March 3, 1921; but, on June 21, 1941 the law was re-enacted, giving the Executive the power to require passports whenever the President should declare a “national emergency”. When the Japanese persisted in not accepting US dominance in Asia, President Roosevelt proclaimed a national emergency on November 14, 1941—three weeks before war was officially declared. After the war the restrictions were not strictly enforced. In 1952, however, they were replaced by the Walter-McCarran Act, which extended the 1918 and 1941 statutes into peacetime. Actually, the Walter-McCarran Act was passed and proclaimed (January 17, 1953) during the Korean “police action”. And President Truman’s declaration of national emergency during the Korean “police action” (December 16, 1950) has not yet been rescinded, even though over fifteen years have since elapsed. On top of the restrictions on Americans’ freedom to travel to China, Korea, Vietnam, and Albania, President Kennedy added prohibition of travel to Cuba (January 19, 1961). Thus, the attacks on civil liberties that began during war emergencies have now become part of the permanent powers of government.

Once it was decided that the passport is a requirement for travel abroad, the State Department attempted to restrict freedom to travel according to its “discretion”. Broadly speaking, there are two major categories of restriction on the freedom to travel imposed by the State Department. The first is an attempt to deny passports to particular individuals on the basis of a political test. The second is an attempt to deny all Americans access to particular foreign nations by refusing them valid passports for travel to these areas.

The State Department’s initial attempt to deny passports on the basis of a political test occurred at the height of the McCarthy period. At that time, anyone who wished to travel abroad was required to sign an affidavit, swearing that he was not presently, nor had he ever been, a member of the Communist party or connected with a “Communist front” organization. Clearly the imposition of such a political test seriously threatens the liberties of all Americans; when the espousal of particular political beliefs and the active exercise of basic rights may be construed as a basis for confining an individual to this country, there is an important question of the vitality of the Constitution.

Moreover, the non-communist affidavit itself—objectionable and vague as it was—was but a necessary and not a sufficient condition for obtaining a passport. In other words, even if an individual signed the affidavit, he was not guaranteed to receive the passport since the State Department reserved the right to deny passports on accusations from certain undisclosed sources. Thus, Leonard Boudin, Clark Foreman, Corliss Lamont, Otto Nathan, Paul Robeson, and Max Schachtman sued the State Department during the nineteen fifties on the ground that “undisclosed” accusations constituted a denial of certain Fifth Amendment rights. The courts sided with the plaintiffs and demanded that hearings be held in accord with due process before the State Department could deny passports.

The constitutionality of the affidavit itself was later called into question by Dr. Walter Briehl and the artist Rockwell Kent. In Kent v. Dulles, 357 U. S. 116 (1958), the Supreme Court held that the Secretary of State had not been authorized to exercise such broad “discretionary” powers as he had exercised in requiring the non-communist affidavit. In addition to this narrowly legalistic decision, the court added that even if he had been properly authorized by an act of Congress it “would be faced with important constitutional questions”.

In the second category of encroachments on the freedom to travel is the so-called “travel ban”. In addition to the passport’s being generally necessary for travel abroad, it must also be “valid” for travel to those countries that one may wish to visit. Thus, Dr. Waldo Frank, in possession of a “valid passport” (i.e., a passport that had not expired), was unable to accept an invitation to lecture on Walt Whitman at the University of Peking because his passport was not specially “validated” for travel in China. This dual validity—general and special—seems in itself to be a problem meriting judicial attention. But the Supreme Court refused to review the Frank case.[6]

The already ambiguous concept of validity becomes incomprehensible in any further consideration of the travel ban. Whenever particular individuals have violated the travel ban, their penalty has been confiscation of passport. Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, for example, traveled to China in 1956. When he returned to the United States, his passport was removed. Furthermore, when he promised not to violate the travel ban in the future, his passport was returned. Scrutinizing the various changes that occur in this process, we find that Dr. DuBois left the United States with the necessary condition (a valid passport). However, his passport was not sufficiently valid to cover his eventual trip to China. Moreover, he returned to the United States with the necessary condition (a valid passport). His passport was then rendered absolutely invalid; then, on his promise not to visit any proscribed country in the future, his passport was restored to him. It is extremely difficult to find any consistency or logic in the actions of the Government in this entire matter.

The case of William Worthy is slightly more consistent. Mr. Worthy, a well-known Negro journalist of the Baltimore Afro-American, traveled to China and lost his passport as a result. His was never returned, and subsequent excursions by Worthy resulted in his ultimately being indicted for entering the country without a valid passport. Worthy’s conviction was reversed by the Fifth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals (which also stated explicitly that it would have upheld a conviction for leaving the country without a valid passport, had that been the issue). Once again, it is difficult to discern the logic of the courts.

Most recently, the Court has denied Louis Zemel’s petition to obtain a passport that would be valid for travel to Cuba. The explanation given by the Court on this matter merits some consideration; the New York Times of 4 May 1965 reports:

In affirming that decision today, by a vote of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court distinguished the situation from earlier cases in which it had invalidated efforts of the Secretary of State to deny passports on the ground of political belief or association.

. . .

In the Court’s ruling today, Chief Justice Earl Warren said that the area restriction is different from those (Kent, etc.) cases because it was based on “foreign policy considerations affecting all citizens,” and was not used to penalize individuals for their beliefs.

He said that the fact that a liberty cannot be inhibited without due process of law does not mean that it can under no circumstances be inhibited.

It would seem to be unnecessary to mention that the Constitution does not speak explicitly of passports and the freedom to travel. But the confusion on this matter constrains us to state the obvious: the State Department’s authority on the passport question does not stem from the Constitution itself. Phrases like “foreign policy considerations affecting all citizens” must not be used to cloud this issue; the simple fact is that whatever powers the State Department has in this regard are bestowed on it by Congress.

The Act of August 18, 1856, which made the issuance of passports the unique prerogative of the State Department, was modified by the Act of July 3, 1926, which states:

“The Secretary of State may grant and issue passports. . . under such rules as the President shall designate and prescribe for and on behalf of the United States, and no other person shall grant, issue, or verify such passports.”[7]

There is one important alteration in the wording of the statute. The earlier version contained the phrase ‘shall be authorized to’ rather than the word ‘may’. This construction does not, of course, alter the fact that this law of Congress is authorizing the Secretary of State to perform the particular tasks designated. It has been used, however, to suggest that the Secretary of State is not obligated to issue passports. We need only note that at the time this statute was passed Congress did not contemplate making the passport a necessary condition for travel.

It is quite clear that whatever “discretionary” powers may be said to derive from this statute are procedural, and not substantive. This contention is in fact supported by the Executive Order that provides the firmest basis for the Government’s contention that discretionary powers exist. Executive Order No. 7856, March 31, 1938, states:

The Secretary of State is authorized in his discretion to refuse to issue a passport, to restrict the passport for use only in certain countries, to withdraw or cancel a passport already issued, and to withdraw a passport for the purpose of restricting its validity or use in certain countries.[8]

The Secretary of State is authorized to make regulations on the subject of issuing, renewing, extending, amending, restricting, or withdrawing passports additional to the rules in this part and not inconsistent therewith.[9]

Once again, it is to be noted that this proclamation is made in reference to the 1926 statute which did not contemplate making passports a condition for travel.

In any case, the Executive Order stipulates that whatever rules the Secretary of State shall make must not be inconsistent with already existing provisions. Additionally, it in no way suggests that the “discretion” of the Secretary of State could be used to deny someone the right to travel—except to certain proscribed regions. Moreover, the only basis for denial of passport must conform substantively to previous directions; namely, that citizenship and absence of criminal indictments be the sole criteria for granting passports.

The passport did not become a necessary condition for entry and exit until 1952, with certain wartime exceptions. The Act of June 27, 1952 states that, after a prescribed proclamation by the President, it is “unlawful for any citizen of the United States to depart from or enter, or attempt to depart from or enter, the United States, unless he bears a valid passport.”[10] A similar provision had existed for wartime and had been extended in 1941 to include states of emergency.

In 1947 the Passport Division initiated the procedure of employing political tests as criteria for issuance of passports. This new procedure came at a time of so-called emergency in which the passport was already necessary for travel abroad. Leonard Boudin sums up the event thus:

“Suffice it to say that without statutory support, an executive order, or even its own formal regulations, the Passport Division (now called the Passport Office) added its own political criteria to the list of qualifications requisite for passport issuance. Individuals of widely contrasting views were told, without benefit of charges, hearing, or evidence, that their travel would not be ‘in the best interests of the United States.’”[11]

Two cases tested the State Department’s unprecedented action. The first was brought by Paul Robeson to return his passport, which had been invalidated by the State Department. His case presented broad issues, and the courts dodged them. It was dismissed on various technicalities, such as jurisdiction and the contention that the passage of time would have caused the passport to expire anyway, thus mooting the matter at hand after that amount of time. A more limited attack came in Bauer v. Acheson, in which the appellant conceded that the Secretary of State had certain discretionary powers but contended that these powers had been abused by an arbitrary exercise of them. A three-judge statutory court decided in favor of that contention.

Relying on the court’s recognition of its nebulous discretionary powers—provided they not be used arbitrarily—the State Department soon formalized its regulations. On August 28, 1952 regulations were instituted which deny passports to persons associated in one way or another with “the Communist movement”. Membership in the Communist party is only one type of damning connection; persons otherwise under the “control” of the Communist movement are prevented from obtaining passports.

The reaction of the courts to these attempts by the State Department to limit the freedom to travel of political dissidents has been described earlier. At this point, we have only to add the comments of the court in regard to discretionary power in the Kent case:

“Since we start with an exercise by an American citizen of an activity included in constitutional protection, we will not readily infer that Congress gave the Secretary of State unbridled discretion to grant or withhold it. If we were dealing with political questions entrusted to the Chief Executive by the Constitution we would have a different case. But there is more involved here. In part, of course, the issuance of the passport carries some implication of intention to extend the bearer diplomatic protection, though it does not more than ‘request all whom it may concern to permit safely and freely to pass, and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection’ to this citizen of the United States. But that function of the passport is subordinate. Its critical function today is control over exit. And, as we have seen, the right of exit is a personal right included within the word ‘liberty’ as used in the Fifth Amendment. If that ‘liberty’ is to be regulated, it must be pursuant to the lawmaking functions of the Congress. . . And if that power is delegated, the standards must be adequate to pass scrutiny by the accepted tests. . . Where activities or enjoyment, natural and often necessary to the well-being of an American citizen, such as travel, are involved, we will construe narrowly all delegated powers that curtail or dilute them. . . We hesitate to find in this broad generalized power an authority to trench so heavily on the rights of the citizen.”[12]

Thus, Mr. Kent has scored a Pyrrhic victory. He has won his case, but much has been lost to the State Department. The abuses of Mrs. Ruth Shipley (head of the Passport Office during the height of the McCarthy period) are terminated, without abolishing or even challenging the original basis of that power which she so clearly abused.

Conclusions

“The right to travel is a part of the ‘liberty’ of which the citizen cannot be deprived without the due process of law of the Fifth Amendment. So much is conceded by the Solicitor General. In Anglo-Saxon law that right was emerging at least as early as the Magna Carta. Chafee, Three Human Rights in the Constitution (1956), 171-181, 187 et. seq., shows how deeply engrained in our history this freedom of movement is. Freedom of movement across frontiers in either direction, and inside frontiers as well, was part of our heritage. Travel abroad, like travel within the country, may be necessary for a livelihood. It may be as close to the heart of the individual as the choice of what he eats, wears, or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values. . . ‘Our nation,’ wrote Chafee, ‘has thrived on the principle that, outside areas of plainly harmful conduct, every American is left to shape his own life as he thinks best, do what he pleases, go where he pleases.’ Id., at 197.

“Freedom of movement also has large social values. As Chafee put it,

Foreign correspondents and lecturers on public affairs need first-hand information. Scientists and scholars gain greatly from consultations with colleagues in other countries. Students equip themselves for more fruitful careers in the United States by instruction in foreign universities. Then there are reasons close to the core of personal life—marriage, reuniting families, spending hours with old friends. Finally, travel abroad enables American citizens to understand that people like themselves live in Europe and helps them to be well-informed on public issues. . .[13]

The Supreme Court has spoken eloquently and clearly on the value of freedom to travel. It has regarded it as a precious liberty, already enshrined in the glorious tradition dating from the Magna Carta. The right to travel has been viewed as basic to the preservation of democracy. But the courts have also shown their willingness to set aside such statements in order to preserve a less glorious tradition, that of Cold War American diplomacy.

It appears that the Supreme Court is unwilling to assert libertarian doctrine in an anti-libertarian climate. The courts explicitly (Zemel) or implicitly (Worthy) accept the hypothesis that there is an imminent danger to our liberties from an international communist movement aiming to conquer the world. The alleged external danger is introduced as a balancing factor against our basic liberties. Even when this balancing test is not explicitly acknowledged, its presence may be discerned in the attitude of the court. For example, the New York Times of May 4, 1965 reported Earl Warren’s off-the-record remarks thus:

In delivering his opinion from the bench he ad libbed that such restrictions were needed “in these turbulent times when explosion after explosion occur in the world”.

The unacknowledged balancing test is also to be read, between the lines in the Worthy opinion. The Appeals Court found banishment to be unconstitutional (in effect voiding one half of the provision of the Walter-McCarran Act of 1952, which requires passports for entry to and exit from the United States in time of war or national emergency). But it balanced this libertarian contention by offering an obiter dictum that upheld the provision for prosecution for leaving the country without a valid passport. The Court’s argument in this latter case is an interesting example of its ability to disregard its own professions about “freedom” and “basic values”. After quoting from the Kent decision in regard to the necessity of freedom to travel, the Court states:

A citizen (intending to leave the United States) at an airport or pier without a passport, can refrain from a violation of the statute (1185) by remaining in the country. So doing, he can continue to exercise all the rights and privileges of a citizen.[14]

What the court seems to be averring is that (1) all Americans have the right to travel, (2) traveling without a passport is a crime, (3) a failure to exercise the right to travel is a means of avoiding criminal prosecution for exercising the right to travel, (4) a failure to exercise the right to travel allows the possibility of exercising “all the rights and privileges of a citizen”. This last proposition seems to be inherently contradictory. It seems to embody the position that the freedom to travel means the “freedom to travel with a passport” or the “freedom not to travel without a passport”.

Such specious arguing hardly results from a logical attempt to examine statutes and regulations abstractly. The confusion derives from an attempt to balance reason and unreason, liberty and alleged dangers, constitutional principles and Cold War hysteria.

The same attempts at balance are to be found in Zemel. This time the court has supported the Government’s position; but it leaves open the possibility that in the future it will once again respect certain basic liberties by refusing at this time to make advisory statements on the application of criminal sanctions for violation of the travel ban.

The question of punishment for traveling to Cuba may be settled in the case of Helen Travis, whose conviction by the Federal District Court of California has been upheld on appeal. Miss Travis traveled to Cuba without a “valid” passport; the prosecution is based on the Immigration Act of 1952. The whole matter will be settled finally in the cases involving the students who organized and led student trips to Cuba in the summers of 1963 and 1964. The representatives of the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba who are under indictment are charged with entering and leaving the country without valid passports (a violation of the Walter-McCarran Immigration Act of 1952) and with “conspiring” to commit a crime (i.e., to travel to Cuba).

These cases provide a supreme test of the Court’s position: does its acceptance of a “Red menace” overbalance its belief that criminal sanctions ought not to be imposed on those who exercise what have been considered to be basic and elementary rights?

The Supreme Court’s role at this time is cautious. It advocates liberties on rare occasions, while opting for procedural due process with good consistency. But nearly always there is evidence for believing that the Court is fearful of opposing not the “paramount interest” of the nation, but the orthodox madness of Cold War policy. The nation fears, and the Court will not show courage. Our liberties are in our own hands.

* Russell D. Stetler, Jr. is co-author with Bertrand Russell of War and Atrocity in Vietnam.

1.U. S. Department of State, The American Passport, by Gaillard Hunt (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1898), p. 46.

2.11 Stat. 60 (1856).

3.Quoted in Leonard B, Boudin, “The Constitutional Right to Travel,” Columbia Law Review. Vol. 56 (January 1956), p. 53, especially footnote 53.

4.Urtetiqui v. D’Arcy. 34 U. S. (9 Pet.) 692 (1835).

5.See Boudin, op. cit., p. 51.

6.See Philip Abbott Luce, “The Freedom to Travel: A Study”, Rights (November-December 1963), p. 16.

7.Title 22, United States Code, Section 211 (a).

8.Title 22, Code of Federal Regulations, Section 51.75.

9.Title 22, Code of Federal Regulations, Section 51.77.

10.Title 8, United States Code, Section 1185.

11.Boudin, op. cit., p. 60.

12.Kent v. Dulles, 357 U. S. 116 (1958).

13.Kent v. Dulles, 357 U. S. 116 (1958).

14.Quoted in Levi Lee Laub, “Recent Decisions on Travel,” Rights (April-May-June 1964), p. 18.

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On Moral Education

By HERBERT SPENCER

Education is a perennially important and controversial subject, especially in a country as child-centered as the United States. Within libertarian ranks, an unlimited diversity of viewpoint prevails, ranging from rigorous traditionalists to ultra-progressives. Among the numerous libertarians in the Los Angeles area, a controversy is now raging between the Cardin and Montessori methods of education. We believe that the views of Herbert Spencer, the great 19th century English social philosopher, can provide a much-needed but totally neglected contribution toward a rational solution to many of these disputes, a solution grounded on education in cause-and-effect. The following article is condensed from the chapter on “Moral Education” in Herbert Spencer’s Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical (A. L. Burt Company, n.d.).

While it is seen that for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, an elaborate preparation is needed, it appears to be thought that for the bringing up of children, no preparation whatever is needed. In the absence of this preparation, the management of children, and more especially the moral management, is lamentably bad. Parents either never think about the matter at all, or else their conclusions are crude, and inconsistent. In most cases, and especially on the part of mothers, the treatment adopted on every occasion is that which the impulse of the moment prompts: it springs not from any reasoned-out conviction as to what will most conduce to the child’s welfare, but merely expresses the passing parental feelings, whether good or ill; and varies from hour to hour as these feelings vary. Or if these blind dictates of passion are supplemented by any definite doctrines and methods, they are those that have been handed down from the past, or those suggested by the remembrances of childhood, or those adopted from nurses and servants—methods devised not by the enlightenment, but by the ignorance of the time.

Let us go on to consider the true aims and methods of moral education. When a child falls or runs its head against the table, it suffers a pain, the remembrance of which tends to make it more careful for the future; and by an occasional repetition of like experiences, it is eventually disciplined into a proper guidance of its movements. If it lays hold of the fire-bars, thrusts its finger into the candle-flame, or spills boiling water on any part of its skin, the resulting burn or scald is a lesson not easily forgotten.

Now in these and like cases, Nature illustrates to us in the simplest way, the true theory and practice of moral discipline. Observe, in the first place, that in bodily injuries and their penalties we have misconduct and its consequences reduced to their simplest forms. Though according to their popular acceptations, right and wrong are words scarcely applicable to actions that have none but direct bodily effects; yet whoever considers the matter will see that such actions must be as much classifiable under these heads as any other actions. Note, in the second place, the character of the punishments by which these physical transgressions are prevented. Punishments, we call them, in the absence of a better word; for they are not punishments in the literal sense. They are not artificial and unnecessary inflictions of pain; but are simply the beneficent checks to actions that are essentially at variance with bodily welfare—checks in the absence of which life would quickly be destroyed by bodily injuries. It is the peculiarity of these penalties, if we must so call them, that they are nothing more than the unavoidable consequences of the deeds which they follow; they are nothing more than the inevitable reactions entailed by the child’s actions.

Let it be further borne in mind that these painful reactions are proportionate to the degree in which the organic laws have been transgressed. A slight accident brings a slight pain, a more serious one, a greater pain. When a child tumbles over the doorstep, it is not ordained that it shall suffer in excess of the amount necessary, with the view of making it still more cautious than the necessary suffering will make it. But from its daily experience it is left to learn the greater or less penalties of greater or less errors, and to behave accordingly. And then mark, lastly, that these natural reactions which follow the child’s wrong actions, are constant, direct, unhesitating, and not to be escaped. No threats: but a silent, rigorous performance.

Still more significant will these general truths appear, when we remember that they hold throughout adult life as well as throughout infantine life. It is by an experimentally-gained knowledge of the natural consequences, that men and women are checked when they go wrong. After home education has ceased, and when there are no longer parents and teachers to forbid this or that kind of conduct, there comes into play a discipline like that by which the young child is taught its first lessons in self-guidance. If the youth entering upon the business of life idles away his time and fulfills slowly or unskillfully the duties entrusted to him, there by and by follows the natural penalty: he is discharged, and left to suffer for awhile the evils of relative poverty. On the unpunctual man, failing alike his appointments of business and pleasure, there continually fall the consequent inconveniences, losses, and deprivations. The avaricious tradesman who charges too high a rate of profit, loses his customers, and so is checked in his greediness. And so throughout the life of every citizen. In the quotation so often made a propos of these cases—“The burnt child dreads the fire”—we see not only that the analogy between this social discipline and Nature’s early discipline of infants is universally recognized; but we also see an implied conviction that this discipline is of the most efficient kind.

Have we not here, then, the guiding principle of moral education? Must we not infer that the system so beneficent in its effects, alike during infancy and maturity, will be equally beneficent throughout youth? Is it not manifest that as “ministers and interpreters of Nature” it is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct—the natural reactions: neither warding them off, nor intensifying them, nor putting artificial consequences in place of them?

Probably, however, not a few will contend that already most parents do this—that the punishments they inflict are, in the majority of cases, the true consequences of ill-conduct—that parental anger, venting itself in harsh words and deeds, is the result of a child’s transgression. But observe that the discipline on which we are insisting is not so much the experience of parental approbation, or disapprobation, which, in most cases, is only a secondary consequence of a child’s conduct; but it is the experience of those results which would naturally flow from the conduct in the absence of parental opinion or interference. The truly instructive and salutary consequences are not those inflicted by parents when they take upon themselves to be Nature’s proxies; but they are those inflicted by Nature herself. We will endeavor to make this distinction clear by a few illustrations, which, while they show what we mean by natural reactions as contrasted with artificial ones, will afford some directly practical suggestions.

In every family where there are young children there almost daily occur cases of what mothers and servants call “making a litter”. A child has had out its box of toys, and leaves them scattered about the floor. In most cases the trouble of rectifying this disorder falls anywhere but in the right place: if in the nursery, the nurse herself, with many grumblings undertakes the task; if below stairs, the task usually devolves either on one of the elder children or on the house-maid; the transgressor being visited with nothing more than a scolding. In this very simple case, however, there are many parents wise enough to follow out, more or less consistently, the normal course—that of making the child itself collect the toys or shreds. The labor of putting things in order is the true consequence of having put them in disorder. Every trader in his office, every wife in her household, has daily experience of this fact. And if education be a preparation for the business of life, then every child should also, from the beginning, have daily experience of this fact. If the natural penalty be met by any refractory behavior, then the proper course is to let the child feel the ulterior reaction consequent on its disobedience. Having refused or neglected to pick up and put away the things it has scattered about, and having thereby entailed the trouble of doing this on someone else, the child should, on subsequent occasions, be denied the means of giving this trouble. When next it petitions for its toy-box, the reply of its mamma should be—“The last time you had your toys you left them lying on the floor, and Jane had to pick them up. So that, as you will not put away your toys when you have done with them, I cannot let you have them.” This is obviously a natural consequence, neither increased nor lessened; and must be so recognized by a child. The penalty comes, too, at the moment when it is most keenly felt. A new-born desire is balked at the moment of anticipated gratification; and the strong impression so produced can scarcely fail to have an effect on the future conduct. Add to which, that, by this method, a child is early taught the lesson which cannot be learned too soon, that in this world of ours pleasures are rightly to be obtained only by labor.

Take another case. Not long since we had frequently to listen to the reprimands visited on a little girl who was scarcely ever ready in time for the daily walk. Of eager disposition, and apt to become thoroughly absorbed in the occupation of the moment, Constance never thought of putting on her things until the rest were ready. The governess and the other children had almost invariably to wait; and from the mamma there almost invariably came the same scolding. Utterly as this system failed it never occurred to the mamma to let Constance experience the natural penalty. Nor, indeed, would she try it when it was suggested to her. In the world the penalty of being behind time is the loss of some advantage that would else have been gained: the train is gone; or the steamboat is just leaving its moorings. And every one, in cases perpetually occurring, may see that it is the prospective deprivations entailed by being too late which prevent people from being too late. Is not the inference obvious? Should not these prospective deprivations control the child’s conduct also? If Constance is not ready at the appointed time, the natural result is that of being left behind, and losing her walk. And no one can doubt that after having once or twice remained at home while the rest were enjoying themselves in the fields, and after having felt that this loss of a much-prized gratification was solely due to want of promptitude, some amendment would take place. At any rate, the measure would be more effective than that perpetual scolding which ends only in producing callousness.

Again, when children, with more than usual carelessness, break or lose the things given to them, the natural penalty—the penalty which makes grown-up persons more careful—is the consequent inconvenience. The want of the lost or damaged article, and the cost of supplying its place, are the experiences by which men and women are disciplined in these matters; and the experience of children should be as much as possible assimilated to theirs. We do not refer to that early period at which toys are pulled to pieces in the process of learning their physical properties, and at which the results of carelessness cannot be understood; but to a later period, when the meaning and advantages of property are perceived. When a boy, old enough to possess a penknife, uses it so roughly as to snap the blade, a thoughtless parent, or some indulgent relative, will commonly forthwith buy him another; not seeing that, by doing this, a valuable lesson is lost. In such a case, a father may properly explain that penknives cost money, and that to get money requires labor; that he cannot afford to purchase new penknives for one who loses or breaks them; and that until he sees evidence of greater carefulness he must decline to make good the loss. A parallel discipline may be used as a means of checking extravagance.

These few familiar instances, here chosen because of the simplicity with which they illustrate our point, will make clear to everyone the distinction between those natural penalties which we contend are the truly efficient ones, and those artificial penalties which parents commonly substitute for them. Let us note the many and great superiorities of this principle over the principle, or rather the empirical practice, which prevails in most families.

In the first place, right conceptions of cause and effect are early formed; and by frequent and consistent experience are eventually rendered definite and complete. Proper conduct in life is much better guaranteed when the good and evil consequences of actions are rationally understood, than when they are merely believed on authority. A child who finds that disorder lines s entails the subsequent trouble of putting things in order, or who misses a gratification from dilatoriness, or whose want of care is followed by the loss or breakage of some much-prized possession, not only experiences a keenly-felt consequence, but gains a knowledge of causation: both the one and the other being just like those which adult life will bring. Whereas a child who in such cases receives some reprimand or some factitious penalty, not only experiences a consequence for which it often cares very little, but lacks that instruction respecting the essential natures of good and evil conduct, which it would else have gathered. It is a vice of the common system of artificial rewards and punishments, that by substituting for the natural results of misbehavior certain threatened tasks or castigations, it produces a radically wrong standard of moral guidance. Having throughout infancy and boyhood always regarded parental or tutorial displeasure as the result of a forbidden action, the youth has gained an established association of ideas between such action and such displeasure, as cause and effect; and consequently when parents and tutors have abdicated, and their displeasure is not to be feared, the restraint on a forbidden action is in great measure removed; the true restraints, the natural reactions, having yet to be learned by sad experience. As writes one who has had personal knowledge of this short-sighted system: “Young men let loose from school plunge into every description of extravagance; they know no rule of action—they are ignorant of the reasons for moral conduct—they have no foundation to rest upon.”

Another great advantage of this natural system of discipline is, that it is a system of pure justice; and will be recognized by every child as such. Whoso suffers nothing more than the evil which obviously follows naturally from his own misbehavior, is much less likely to think himself wrongly treated than if he suffers an evil artificially inflicted on him; and this will be true of children as of men. Take the case of a boy who is habitually reckless of his clothes, scrambles through hedges without caution, or is utterly regardless of mud. If he is beaten, or sent to bed, he is apt to regard himself as ill-used; and his mind is more likely to be occupied by thinking over his injuries than repenting of his transgressions. But suppose he is required to rectify as far as he can the harm he has done—to clean off the mud with which he has covered himself, or to mend the tear as well as he can. Will he not feel that the evil is one of his own producing? Will he not while paying this penalty be continuously conscious of the connection between it and its cause? And will he not, spite his irritation, recognize more or less clearly the justice of the arrangement?

Again, the tempers both of parents and children are much less liable to be ruffled under this system than under the ordinary system. Instead of letting children experience the painful results which naturally follow from wrong conduct, the usual course pursued by parents is to inflict themselves certain other painful results. A double mischief arises from this. Making, as they do, multiplied family laws; and identifying their own supremacy and dignity with the maintenance of these laws; it happens that every transgression comes to be regarded as an offense against themselves, and a cause of anger on their part. Add to which the further irritations which result from taking upon themselves, in the shape of extra labor or cost, those evil consequences which should have been allowed to fall on wrong-doers. Similarly with the children. Penalties which the necessary reaction of things brings round upon them—penalties which are inflicted by an impersonal agency, produce an irritation that is comparatively slight and transient; whereas, penalties which are voluntarily inflicted by a parent, and are afterward remembered as caused by him or her, produce an irritation both greater and more continued.

Just consider how disastrous would be the result if this empirical method were pursued from the beginning. Suppose it were possible for parents to take upon themselves the physical sufferings entailed on their children by ignorance and awkwardness; and that while bearing these evil consequences they visited on their children certain other evil consequences, with the view of teaching them the impropriety of their conduct. Suppose that when a child, who had been forbidden to meddle with the kettle, spilt some boiling water on its foot, the mother vicariously assumed the scald and gave a blow in place of it; and similarly in all other cases. Would not the daily mishaps be sources of far more anger than now? Would not there be chronic ill-temper on both sides? Yet an exactly parallel policy is pursued in after years. A father who punishes his boy for carelessly or wilfully breaking a sister’s toy,-and then himself pays for a new toy, does substantially this same thing—inflicts an artificial penalty on the transgressor, and takes the natural penalty on himself: his own feelings and those of the transgressor being alike needlessly irritated. If he simply required restitution to be made, he would produce far less heartburning. If he told the boy that a new toy must be bought at his, the boy’s cost, and that his supply of pocket-money must be withheld to the needful extent, there would be much less cause for ebullition of temper on either side; while in the deprivation afterward felt, the boy would experience the equitable and salutary consequence. In brief, the system of discipline by natural reactions is less injurious to temper, alike because it is perceived on both sides to be nothing more than pure justice, and because it more or less substitutes the impersonal agency of nature for the personal agency of parents.

At present, mothers and fathers are mostly considered by their offspring as friend-enemies. Determined as their impressions inevitably are by the treatment they receive; and oscillating as that treatment does between bribery and thwarting, between petting and scolding, between gentleness and castigation; children necessarily acquire conflicting beliefs respecting the parental character. A mother commonly thinks it quite sufficient to tell her little boy that she is his best friend; and assuming that he is in duty bound to believe her, concludes that he will forthwith do so. “It is all for your good”; “I know what is proper for you better than you do yourself”; “You are not old enough to understand it now, but when you grow up you will thank me for doing what I do”;—these and like assertions, are daily reiterated. Meanwhile the boy is daily suffering positive penalties; and is hourly forbidden to do this, that, and the other, which he was anxious to do. By words he hears that his happiness is the end in view; but from the accompanying deeds he habitually receives more or less pain. Utterly incompetent as he is to understand that future which his mother has in view, or how this treatment conduces to the happiness of that future, he judges by such results as he feels; and finding these results anything but pleasurable, he becomes skeptical respecting these professions of friendship. And is it not folly to expect any other issue? Must not the child judge by such evidence as he has got? And does not this evidence seem to warrant his conclusion? The mother would reason in just the same way if similarly placed. If, in the circle of her acquaintances, she found someone who was constantly thwarting her wishes, uttering sharp reprimands, and occasionally inflicting actual penalties on her, she would pay but little attention to any professions of anxiety for her welfare which accompanied these acts. Why, then, does she suppose that her boy will conclude otherwise?

But now observe how different will be the results if the system we contend for be consistently pursued—if the mother not only avoids becoming the instrument of punishment, but plays the part of a friend, by warning her boy of the punishments which Nature will inflict. Take a case; and that it may illustrate the mode in which this policy is to be early initiated, let it be one of the simplest cases. Suppose that, prompted by the experimental spirit so conspicuous in children, whose proceedings instinctively conform to the inductive method of inquiry—suppose that so prompted the child is amusing himself by lighting pieces of paper in the candle and watching them burn. If his mother is of the ordinary unreflective stamp, she will either, on the plea of keeping the child “out of mischief”, or from fear that he will burn himself, command him to desist; and in case of non-compliance will snatch the paper from him. On the other hand, should he be so fortunate as to have a mother of sufficient rationality, who knows that this interest with which the child is watching the paper burn results from a healthy inquisitiveness, without which he would never have emerged out of infantine stupidity, and who is also wise enough to consider the moral results of interference, she will reason thus: “If I put a stop to this I shall prevent the acquirement of a certain amount of knowledge. It is true that I may save the child from a burn; but what then? He is sure to burn himself sometime; and it is quite essential to his safety in life that he should learn by experience the properties of flame. Moreover, if I forbid him from running this present risk, he is sure hereafter to run the same or a greater risk when no one is present to prevent him; whereas, if he should have any accident now that I am by, I can save him from any great injury; add to which the advantage that he will have in future some dread of fire, and will be less likely to burn himself to death, or set the house in a flame when others are absent. Furthermore, were I to make him desist, I should thwart him in the pursuit of what is in itself a purely harmless, and indeed, instructive gratification; and he would be sure to regard me with more or less ill-feeling. Ignorant as he is of the pain from which I would save him, and feeling only the pain of a balked desire, he could not fail to look upon me as the cause of that pain. To save him from a hurt which he cannot conceive, and which has therefore no existence for him, I inflict upon him a hurt which he feels keenly enough; and so become, from his point of view, a minister of evil. My best course then, is simply to warn him of the danger, and to be ready to prevent any serious damage.” And following out this conclusion, she says to the child—“I fear you will hurt yourself if you do that.” Suppose, now, that the child perseveres, as he will very probably do; and suppose that he ends by burning himself. What are the results? In the first place he has gained an experience which he must gain eventually, and which, for his own safety he cannot gain too soon. And in the second place, he has found that his mother’s disapproval or warning was meant for his welfare: he has a further positive experience of her benevolence—a further reason for placing confidence in her judgment and her kindness—a further reason for loving her.

Of course, in those occasional hazards where there is a risk of broken limbs or other serious bodily injury, forcible prevention is called for. But leaving out these extreme cases, the system pursued should be not that of guarding a child against the small dangers into which it daily runs, but that of advising and warning it against them. And by consistently pursuing this course, a much stronger filial affection will be generated than commonly exists. If here, as elsewhere, the discipline of the natural reactions is allowed to come into play—if in all those out-of-door scramblings and in-door experiments, by which children are liable to hurt themselves, they are allowed to persevere, subject only to discussion more or less earnest according to the risk, there cannot fail to arise an ever-increasing faith in the parental friendship and guidance. Not only, as before shown, does the adoption of this principle enable fathers and mothers to avoid the chief part of that odium which attaches to the infliction of positive punishment; but, as we here see, it enables them further to avoid the odium that attaches to constant thwartings; and even to turn each of those incidents which commonly cause squabbles, into a means of strengthening the mutual good feeling. Instead of being told in words, which deeds seem to contradict, that their parents are their best friends, children will learn this truth by a consistent daily experience; and so learning it, will acquire a degree of trust and attachment which nothing else can give.

Bear constantly in mind the truth that the aim of your discipline should be to produce a self-governing being; not to produce a being to be governed by others. Were your children fated to pass their lives as slaves, you could not too much accustom them to slavery during their childhood; but as they are by and by to be free men, with no one to control their daily conduct, you cannot too much accustom them to self-control while they are still under your eye. Aim, therefore, to diminish the amount of parental government as fast as you can substitute for it in your child’s mind that self-government arising from a foresight of results. In infancy a considerable amount of absolutism is necessary. A three-year-old urchin playing with an open razor, cannot be allowed to learn by this discipline of consequences; for the consequences may, in such case, be too serious. But as intelligence increases, the number of instances calling for peremptory interference may be, and should be diminished; with the view of gradually ending them as maturity is approached. All periods of transition are dangerous; and the most dangerous is the transition from the restraint of the family circle to the non-restraint of the world. Hence the importance of pursuing the policy we advocate; which, alike by cultivating a child’s faculty of self-restraint, by continually increasing the degree in which it is left to its self-constraint, and by so bringing it, step by step, to a state of unaided self-constraint, obliterates the ordinary sudden and hazardous change from externally-governed youth to internally-governed maturity.

Lastly, always remember that to educate rightly is not a simple and easy thing, but a complex and extremely difficult thing: the hardest task which devolves upon adult life. If you would carry out with success a rational and civilized system, you must be prepared for considerable mental exertion—for some study, some ingenuity, some patience, some self-control. You will have habitually to trace the consequences of conduct—to consider what are the results which in adult life follow certain kind of acts; and then you will have to devise methods by which parallel results shall be entailed on the parallel acts of your children.

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LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal Of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

Autumn 1966

Vol. II, No. 3

EDITORIALS

Why Be Libertarian?

The Cry for Power: Black, White, and “Polish”

The Martyrdom of Earl Francis

Pearl Harbor: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

YALE BROZEN,

Automation: The Retreating Catastrophe

ERIC DAL TON,

Private Property and Collective Ownership

LEONARD P. LIGGIO,

Palefaces or Redskins: A Profile of Americans

Left and Right is published three times yearly (Winter, Spring, Autumn) by Left and Right, Inc., Box 395, Cathedral Station, New York, New York 10025. Subscription price: $2.50. Single issues: 85c.

EDITORIAL

Why Be

Libertarian?

Why be libertarian, anyway? By this we mean: what’s the point of the whole thing? Why engage in a deep and lifelong commitment to the principle and the goal of individual liberty? For such a commitment, in our largely unfree world, means inevitably a radical disagreement with, and alienation from, the status quo, an alienation which equally inevitably imposes many sacrifices in money and prestige. When life is short and the moment of victory far in the future, why go through all this?

Incredibly, we have found among the increasing number of libertarians in this country many people who come to a libertarian commitment from one or another extremely narrow and personal point of view. Many are irresistibly attracted to liberty as an intellectual system or as an aesthetic goal, but liberty remains for them a purely intellectual and parlor game, totally divorced from what they consider the “real” activities of their daily lives. Others are motivated to remain libertarians solely from their anticipation of their own personal financial profit. Realizing that a free market would provide far greater opportunities for able, independent men to reap entrepreneurial profits, they become and remain libertarians solely to find larger opportunities for business profit. While it is true that opportunities for profit will be far greater and more widespread in a free market and a free society, placing one’s primary emphasis on this motivation for being a libertarian can only be considered grotesque. For in the often tortuous, difficult and gruelling path that must be trod before liberty can be achieved, the libertarian’s opportunities for personal profit will far more often be negative than abundant.

The consequence of the narrow and myopic vision of both the gamester and the would-be profitmaker is that neither group has the slightest interest in the work of building a libertarian movement. And yet it is only through building such a movement that liberty may ultimately be achieved. Ideas, and especially radical ideas, do not advance in the world in and by themselves, as it were in a vacuum; they can only be advanced by people, and therefore the development and advancement of such people—and therefore of a “movement”—becomes a prime task for the libertarian who is really serious about advancing his goals.

Turning from these men of narrow vision, we must also see that utilitarianism—the common ground of free-market economists—is unsatisfactory for developing a flourishing libertarian movement. While it is true and valuable to know that a free market would bring far greater abundance and a healthier economy to everyone, rich and poor alike, a critical problem is whether this knowledge is enough to bring many people to a lifelong dedication to liberty. In short, how many people will man the barricades and endure the many sacrifices that a consistent devotion to liberty entails, merely so that umpteen percent more people will have better bathtubs? Will they not rather settle for an easy life and forget the umpteen percent bathtubs? Ultimately, then, utilitarian economics, while indispensable in the developed structure of libertarian thought and action, is almost as unsatisfactory a basic groundwork for the Movement as those opportunists who simply seek a short-range profit.

It is our view that a flourishing libertarian movement, a lifelong dedication to liberty, can only be grounded on a passion for justice. Here must be the mainspring of our drive, the armor that will sustain us in all the storms ahead: not the search for a quick buck, the playing of intellectual games, or the cool calculation of general economic gains. And to have a passion for justice one must have a theory of what justice and injustice are—in short, a set of ethical principles of justice and injustice which cannot be provided by utilitarian economics. It is because we see the world reeking with injustices piled one on another to the very heavens that we are impelled to do all that we can to seek a world in which these and other injustices will be eradicated. Other traditional radical goals—such as the ‘abolition of poverty”—are, in contrast to this one, truly Utopian; for man, simply by exerting his will, cannot abolish poverty. Poverty can only be abolished through the operation of certain economic factors—notably the investment of savings in capital—which can only operate by transforming nature over a long period of time. In short, man’s will is here severely limited by the workings of—to use an old-fashioned but still valid term—natural law. But injustices are deeds that are inflicted by one set of men on another; they are precisely the actions of men, and hence they and their elimination are subject to man’s instantaneous will.

Let us take an example: England’s centuries-long occupation and brutal oppression of the Irish people. Now if, in 1900, we had looked at the state of Ireland, and we had considered the poverty of the Irish people, we would have had to say: that poverty could be improved by the English getting out and removing their land monopolies, but that the ultimate elimination of poverty in Ireland, under the best of conditions, would have to take time and be subject to the workings of economic law. But the goal of ending English oppression—that could have been done by the instantaneous action of men’s will: by the English simply deciding to pull out of the country. The fact that of course such decisions do not take place instantaneously is not the point; the point is that that very failure is an injustice that has been decided upon and imposed by the perpetrators of injustice: in this case the English government. In the field of justice, man’s will is all: men can move mountains, if only enough men so decide. A passion for instantaneous justice—in short, a radical passion—is therefore not Utopian, as would be a desire for the instant elimination of poverty or the instant transformation of everyone into a concert pianist. For instant justice could be achieved if enough people so willed.

A true passion for justice, then, must be radical—in short, it must at least wish to attain its goals radically and instantaneously. Leonard E. Read, President of the Foundation for Economic Education, expressed this radical spirit very aptly twenty years ago when he wrote a pamphlet, I’d Push the Button. The problem was what to do about the network of price and wage controls then being imposed on the economy by the Office of Price Administration. Most economic liberals were timidly or “realistically” advocating one or another form of gradual or staggered decontrols; at that point Mr. Read took an unequivocal and radical stand on principle; “If there were a button on this Nostrum”, he began his address, “the pressing of which would release all wage and price controls instantaneously, I would put my finger on it and push!”[1] The true test, then, of the radical spirit, is the button-pushing test: if we could push the button for instantaneous abolition of unjust invasions of liberty, would we do it? If we would not do it, we could scarcely call ourselves libertarians, and most of us would only do it if primarily guided by a passion for justice.

The genuine libertarian, then, is, in all senses of the word, an “abolitionist”; he would, if he could, abolish instantaneously all invasions of liberty: whether it be, in the original coining of the term, slavery, or it be the manifold other instances of State oppression. He would, in the words of another libertarian in a similar connection: “blister my thumb pushing that button!” The libertarian must perforce be a “button-pusher” and an “abolitionist”. Powered by justice, he cannot be moved by amoral utilitarian pleas that justice not come about until the criminals are “compensated”. Thus, when in the early nineteenth century, the great abolitionist movement arose, voices of moderation promptly appeared counselling that it would only be fair to abolish slavery if the slave-masters were financially compensated for their loss. In short, after centuries of oppression and exploitation, the slave-masters were supposed to be further rewarded by a handsome sum mulcted by force from the mass of innocent taxpayers! The most apt comment on this proposal was made by the English Philosophical Radical Benjamin Pearson, who remarked that “he had thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated”; clearly, such compensation could only justly have come from the slaveholders themselves.[2]

Anti-libertarians, and anti-radicals generally, characteristically make the point that such “abolitionism” is “unrealistic”; by making such a charge they are hopelessly confusing the desired goal with a strategic estimate of the probable outcome. In framing principle, it is of the utmost importance not to mix in strategic estimates with the forging of desired goals. First, one must formulate one’s goals, which in this case would be the instant abolition of slavery or whatever other statist oppression we are considering. And we must first frame these goals without considering the probability of attaining them. The libertarian goals are “realistic” in the sense that they could be achieved if enough people agreed on their desirability, and that if achieved they would bring about a far better world. The “realism” of the goal can only be challenged by a critique of the goal itself, not in the problem of how to attain it. Then, after we have decided on the goal, we face the entirely separate strategic question of how to attain that goal as rapidly as possible, how to build a movement to attain it, etc. Thus, William Lloyd Garrison was not being “unrealistic” when, in the 1830’s, he raised the glorious standard of immediate emancipation of the slaves. His goal was the proper one; and his strategic realism came in the fact that he did not expect his goal to be quickly reached. Or, as Garrison himself distinguished: “Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.”[3]

Actually, in the realm of the strategic, raising the banner of pure and radical principle is generally the fastest way of arriving at radical goals. For if the pure goal is never brought to the fore, there will never be any momentum developed for driving toward it. Slavery would never have been abolished at all if the abolitionists had not raised the hue and cry thirty years earlier; and, as things came to pass, the abolition was at virtually a single blow rather than gradual or compensated.[4] But above and beyond the requirements of strategy lie the commands of justice. In his famous editorial that launched The Liberator at the beginning of 1831, William Lloyd Garrison repented his previous adoption of the doctrine of gradual abolition: “I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice and absurdity.” Upon being reproached for the habitual severity and heat of his language, Garrison retorted: “I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.” It is this spirit that must mark the man truly dedicated to the cause of liberty.[5]

1.Leonard E. Read, I’d Push the Button (New York: Joseph D. McGuire, 1946) p. 3.

2.William D Grampp, The Manchester School of Economics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960), p. 59.

3.Quoted in William H. and Jane H. Pease, eds., The Antislavery Argument (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. xxxv.

4.At the conclusion of a brilliant philosophical critique of the charge of “unrealism” and its confusion of the good and the currently probable, Professor Philbrook declares: “Only one type of serious defense of a policy is open to an economist or anyone else: he must maintain that the policy is good. True ‘realism’ is the same thing men have always meant by wisdom: to decide the immediate in the light of the ultimate.” Clarence Philbrook, “‘Realism’ in Policy Espousal,” American Economic Review (December. 1953). P. 859.

5.For the quotes from Garrison, see Louis Ruchames, ed., The Abolitionists (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964), p. 31, and Fawn M. Brodie, “Who Defends the Abolitionist?”, in Martin Duberman, ed., The Antislavery Vanguard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 67. The Duberman work is a storehouse of valuable material, including refutations of the common effort by those committed to the status quo to engage in psychological smearing of radicals in general and abolitionists in particular. See especially Martin Duberman, “The Northern Response to Slavery,” in ibid., pp. 406-413.

EDITORIAL

The Cry For Power

Black, White,

And “Polish”

In recent months, the cry of “black power!” has been heard resounding in the land. As usual, both Conservatives and Liberals have reacted violently and on the wrong side, each for their different and characteristic reasons. The Conservatives, in their mindless racism, can only react in paranoid visions of nameless “Reds” and of black violence against person and property. The more sophisticated Liberals have reacted, again typically, no more nobly and with considerably more hypocrisy. For decades, white Liberals have preened themselves as the Lords and Ladies Bountiful of the civil rights movement, uplifting their fallen brethren, financing all their causes, gently but firmly governing the Negroes in the civil rights movement and humanely pushing them around, “for their own good” of course. Now, at last, Negroes are beginning to tell the white Liberals, firmly and more or less politely, that Negroes are now prepared to stand on their own feet: that they don’t need the gentle but steely bonds of dependence upon their white benefactors. Let the whites organize themselves, say the new advocates of black power; it is up to us to organize ourselves and to run our own lives.

White liberals are often thought of as well-meaning but misguided; but how well-meaning can we consider a group that reacts to this manly desire for independence with such undisguised fear and horror? The true humanitarian rejoices when the people he helps feel ready to assert their independence and to strike out on their own; for isn’t this independence essential to being truly human? But instead of such rejoicing, the white liberals have reacted, almost to a man, with snivelling (“How can they reject us now?”) and deep hostility (“How dare they be so ungrateful?”). Let us face it: the white liberals have been despotic rulers over their Negro allies. It is true that they have not ruled by coercion; but they have ruled through their financial power, and its consequent setting up of severe dependency on the part of the Negroes. In the familiar way of the worst of parents, the white liberals have ruled through dependence, money, and “love”. The spurning by Negroes of parasitic white liberals has come none too soon.

There is more of significance in the sharp turn by militant Negroes from the goal of integration to that of black power. Integration was, in essence, a statist and coercive movement, for it meant forcing Negroes into areas where they could only be met with increasing hostility. Black power asks: why should I force myself into a lunch counter peopled by characters who hate me? Are they worthy to sit with me at the same counter? Black power’s emphasis is not on compulsory integration but on getting the white oppressors off the backs of the Negro population. Not only is this a more profound and fundamental goal, it is also one which libertarians should be able to support wholeheartedly.

The black power concept perceives that the Negroes are, and always have been, a colonized people, in effect a colonized nation within American borders. Hence, the cry for black power is essentially a cry of black nationalism, an acknowledgment that what Negroes need most is to get the boot of the white majority off their necks. In concrete, it means a call for the end of rule over Negro areas by white police, over Negro children by white public school teachers and administrators, over the Negro poor by white welfare workers.

Many libertarians have tended to oppose any form of nationalism on the grounds that they cannot support any nation-State. But it is critically important to realize that “nationalism” cannot be lumped together in one mass. There are two contrasting types of nationalism: a desire to liberate an oppressed nation from the chains imposed by another nation (a movement for “national liberation”); as against a desire to aggress against other nations and impose one’s own national domination upon them (a movement for “imperialism”). Thus, in the centuries-long struggle of the Irish people against English rule, the Irish movement was a movement for national liberation, the English conquest an example of English imperialism. One is a libertarian form of nationalism, the other an invasive, profoundly anti-libertarian form. A Negro nationalist movement in present-day America is a movement for national liberation; any white insistence on thwarting such a movement is an example of white imperialism. Such are the qualitative differences within the concept of nationalism.

One prominent argument to deprecate black nationalism, which has been used by every white liberal up to and including President Johnson, is that the whole movement is pure folly, since Negroes only constitute 10% of the total U. S. population. How then could such a movement possibly succeed? But this argument overlooks the crucial fact that Negroes are concentrated heavily within certain territorial areas, and that within those areas they constitute a majority. Negroes constitute a majority in much of the Black Belt of the South, and in concentrated and growing areas of the major cities of the North and West. Black nationalism could therefore conceivably be achieved for those areas. Indeed, the development by SNCC of the increasingly successful “Freedom Organization” third party in the Black Belt of Alabama, and the growing demands by the Negroes of Harlem to control their own public schools, are both part of an increasing Negro awareness that black power is feasible, in black areas. It would be almost as ludicrous to argue that Welsh nationalism could never hope to succeed because the Welsh are outnumbered by the English over the entire United Kingdom; obviously the riposte is that the Welsh enjoy superior numbers in Wales itself.

If we are to agree to the concept of “black power”, then neither should we simply and brusquely dismiss as frenzied racist mobs those white rioters in the South Side of Chicago who have called desperately for “white power”. A New York Times reporter of these Chicago riots noted that, in one neighborhood, the people were shouting for “Polish power”, and the reporter lacked the imagination to go over and try to find out why, on the South Side of Chicago in the year 1966, there should suddenly arise the cry of “Polish power”. Obviously what all this means is that the white masses of this country are beginning to wake up to the fact that despite our vaunted democracy they have no power either, that they too do not have the power to run their own lives, whether it be the Polish ethnic groups on Chicago’s South Side or the white masses generally throughout the country. The black masses, realizing that they have no power, attribute that power to the “white power structure”; the white masses, resentfully realizing that they have no power, angrily attribute the trappings of rule to the Negroes or to the NAACP or to the Rev. Martin Luther King. But actually, both groups are right; neither has power over their lives; and that power belongs to a ruling oligarchy, an Establishment that is powerful, wealthy and also largely white (although a few Negroes have been co-opted into the ruling elite). Both the black and the white masses, increasingly aware of their own powerlessness, must eventually learn to identify their common oppressor and hence their common enemy: the ruling Establishment. When they learn to do so, then at last there will be a sound and sober groundwork for unity among black and white: not a misty groundwork in a mutual “love” that will not arrive short of a new Garden of Eden, but unity in a common pursuit of justice against the group that rules them both—and rules us all.

EDITORIAL

The Martyrdom Of Earl Francis

Above all else, Earl L. Francis cherished freedom; and to Earl Francis freedom meant working for himself, his own man on his own property. He found that freedom far from the madding crowd, high in the Catalina Mountains of Arizona; “A man can be free in the mountains,” Francis used to say, “He doesn’t have to punch a clock or take orders from a boss.” He staked and worked a scanty gold-mining claim in those mountains, but he was able to make enough money digging the gold to build a comfortable home on the claim, a home constructed out of the granite in the mine shaft, and to spend much of his time painting canvases of his beloved mountain sunsets.

Earl Francis staked his claim in 1964 at the age of 33; but no sooner had he completed his home than the government of the United States zeroed in. He had built his home on government land, and while gold miners are allowed to build homesteads on such land, they can only do so if the gold mine is adjudged to be profitable by the standards of the U. S. government. Francis protested that the mine was profitable enough for him: “There’s a few dollars’ worth I can scratch out. But I like it better that way than if there was enough to make me rich. At least I don’t owe nobody and nobody owes me.” But such argument made no imprint on the humanitarian bureaucracy of our all-loving Welfare State. After a year and a half of gruelling litigation, Earl Francis’ claim was declared null and void, and the government ordered him to leave the mine and to tear down his lovingly constructed home. Last August, Francis obeyed those orders; he blew up his home and his mine and his studio with a keg of dynamite—and he blew himself up along with them.

Technically, Earl Francis’ death must be marked as a suicide. But in actuality, he must be marked another lonely martyr of individualism at the hands of the burgeoning State. In effect, Earl Francis was murdered by the government of the United States of America, and it is at the very least incumbent upon every American who loves liberty to see to it that he does not go to his fiery grave unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

EDITORIAL

PEARL HARBOR:

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary

The cataclysm of Pearl Harbor occurred twenty-five years ago, and yet the average American, bemused by official propaganda, still thinks of Pearl as an unprovoked act of Japanese aggression that took the United States and the Roosevelt Administration unawares. Yet the “revisionist” insight: that the attack was sought and welcomed, and known of in advance, by the Roosevelt Administration in order to get the U. S. into World War II, has managed, despite overwhelming odds, to make a bit of headway. For a few years after the war, the courageous and perceptive revisionist works by such historians as Beard, Sanborn, Morgenstern, and Tansill were published and won a partial hearing against the massive attempts at Establishment blackout. But these books were largely published and financed by conservatives, who in those days were doughty champions of peace and “isolationism”. As the conservatives increasingly joined in and led the hoopla for a Third Great Global Crusade, however, they began to realize that a revisionist view of Pearl Harbor would prove highly embarrassing for U. S. imperialism’s latest exercise in global warfare. For if revisionism teaches us anything, it teaches us the duplicity and the needlessness of the foreign wars promoted by U. S. imperialism. A new look at the myth of Pearl Harbor could not help but inspire a new look at the myths of the Cold War.

Our forthcoming, Winter, issue is devoted to taking a comprehensive new look at the Pearl Harbor catastrophe and at the responsibility of the American leaders. We are proud to be presenting the definitive discussion of Pearl Harbor to date, based on all the most recent findings of revisionist scholarship. As yet, there has been no one book to present the definitive history of Pearl Harbor, and until such a book is written, we believe that the forthcoming Winter issue of LEFT AND RIGHT will be able to serve as the most up-to-date presentation of historical scholarship.

AUTOMATION:

THE RETREATING CATASTROPHE

By Yale Brozen*

Amateur social scientists such as Norbert Wiener (a professional mathematician) predicted, in 1949, that we faced “a decade or more of ruin and despair” from the wholesale unemployment which would occur in the 1950’s. Cybernation and automation were going to abolish jobs at an unprecedented rate. The prediction was reaffirmed by a parade of witnesses in the mid-1950’s before a Congressional committee investigating automation. Yet, the “decade or more of ruin and despair” from the unemployment that was going to be caused by automation appears to have been postponed by at least 17 years. Nevertheless, we still have doom criers who say that this consequence of automation will be appearing in the near future.

The Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution has issued a Manifesto (March 1964) which declares that the advent of complex computers and self-regulating machines introduces an historical break in the evolution of social processes. “A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural.” The new machines introduce an era of unlimited productive capacity. The new machines are displacing people in droves from manufacturing and agriculture and will soon displace them from the service industries. Men cannot compete with these machines. Poverty is expanding and it has become impossible to achieve full employment.

Judgement Day is coming. Despite the fact that the predictions of its coming have been constantly disappointed, it will be upon us soon, you sinners, so repent while there is still time.

These predictions of wholesale unemployment seem to be repeated at shorter intervals as more of such predictions fail to materialize. In the late 1700’s, machines such as the loom and the spinning jenny were about to bring the end of the world upon us. Edward Baines, the historian, writing in 1834, made the following comment about these predictions:

“At the accession of George III (1760), the manufacture of cotton supported hardly more than 40,000 persons; but since machines have been invented by means of which one worker can produce as much yarn as 200 or 300 persons could at that time, and one person can print as much material as could 100 persons at that time, 1,500,000 or 37 times as many as formerly can now earn their bread...

“Any yet there are still many, even scholars and members of Parliament, who are so ignorant or so blinded by prejudice as to raise a pathetic lament over the increase and spread of the manufacturing system... there are persons who regard it as a great disaster when they hear that 150,000 persons in our spinning works now produce as much yarn as could hardly be spun with the little handwheel by 40,000,000.”

In the 1870’s and 1880’s, the spread of mechanization showed that the end was in sight. David Ames Wells, writing on Recent Economic Changes in 1889, reported that:

“The power to excavate earth, or to excavate and blast rock, is from five to ten times as great as it was when operations for the construction of the Suez Canal were commenced, in 1859-’60. The machinery sent to the Isthmus of Panama, for the excavation of the canal at that point, was computed by engineers as capable of performing the labor of half a million of men.

“The displacement of muscular labor in some of the cotton mills of the United States, within the last ten fears, by improved machinery, has been from thirty-three to fifty percent, and the average work of one operative, working one year, in the best mills of the United States, will now, according to Mr. Atkinson, supply the annual wants of 1,600 fully clothed Chinese, or 3,000 partially clothed East Indians. In 1840 an operative in the cotton mills of Rhode Island, working thirteen to fourteen hours a day, turned off 9,600 yards of standard sheeting in a year; in 1886 the operative in the same mill made about 30,000 yards, working ten hours a day. In 1840 the wages were $176 a year; in 1886 the wages were $285 a year.

“The United States census returns for 1880 report a very large increase in the amount of coal and copper produced during the ten previous years in this country, with a very large comparative diminution in the number of hands employed in these two great mining industries; in anthracite coal the increase in the number of hands employed having been 33.2 percent, as compared with an increase of product of 82.7; while in the case of copper the ratios were 15.8 and 70.8, respectively. For such results, the use of cheaper and more powerful blasting agents (dynamite), and of the steam drill, furnish an explanation. And, in the way of further illustration, it may be stated that a carload of coal, in the principal mining districts of the United States, can now (1889) be mined, hoisted, screened, cleaned, and loaded in one half of the time that it required ten years previously.

“The report of the United States Commissioner of Labor for 1886 furnishes the following additional illutrations:

“In the manufacture of agricultural implements, six hundred men now do the work that, fifteen or twenty years ago, would have required 2,145 men-a displacement of 1,545.

“The manufacture of boots and shoes offers some very wonderful facts in this connection. In one large and long-established manufactory the proprietors testify that it would require five hundred persons, working by hand processes, to make as many womens’ boots and shoes as a hundred persons now make with the aid of machinery-a displacement of eighty per cent.

“Another firm, engaged in the manufacture of children’s shoes, states that the introduction of new machinery within the past thirty years has displaced about six times the amount of hand-labor required, and that the cost of the product has been reduced one half.

“On another grade of goods, the facts collected by the agents of the bureau show that one man can now do the work which twenty years ago required ten men.

“In the manufacture of flour there has been a displacement of nearly three fourths of the manual labor necessary to produce the same product. In the manufacture of furniture, from one half to three fourths only of the old number of persons is now required. In the manufacture of wallpaper, the best evidence puts the displacement in the proportion of one hundred to one. In the manufacture of metals and metallic goods, long-established firms testify that machinery has decreased manual labor 33 1/3 per cent.

“In 1845 the boot and shoe makers of Massachusetts made an average production, under the then existing conditions of manufacturing, of 1.52 pairs of boots for each working day. In 1885 each employee in the State made on an average 4.2 pairs daily, while at the present time in Lynn and Haverhill the daily average of each person is seven pairs per day, showing an increase in the power of production in forty years of four hundred per cent.”

In the early 1900’s electrification meant that the end was at hand. Then in the 1930’s, the heavens cracked and the deluge descended because, it was said, there was too little technological change, a reversal of the earlier stand. But we are now back at the old stand again. Technology is about to engulf us. Job opportunities are about to be swallowed up, once again, by technological change, which we now call automation and cybernation.

Frankly, I am puzzled by this increasingly repeated belief in a judgement day which is constantly postponed. I am especially puzzled in view of facts which demonstrate that, if ever a judgement day threatened, it is farther in the future than ever. More jobs exist today than ever existed at any time in our history. The number of jobs has grown, not declined or even remained static. More jobs are vacant and more employers are searching for additional help than at any time in our recent history. And this is not because there is a greater gap between the skills required to fill jobs and the skills possessed by those seeking jobs. There are more people at work today filling jobs than at any time in our history. Not only are more people at work than ever, but the proportion of those aged 18 to 64 who are at work has been growing. The population in the 18 to 64 age bracket has increased at a 0.9% per year rate since 1947. Total civilian employment has increased even faster, mounting at a 1.3% per year rate since 1947. The growth rate in number of civilians employed is 40% faster than the growth rate of population in the age brackets that furnishes most of the available tenants for jobs. Yet the Ad Hoc Committee blandly states that the labor force participation rate is declining because people are losing jobs. They tell us that the unemployment figures do not tell the actual unemployment because they do not include those who have withdrawn from the market because they have found the quest for jobs to be hopeless.

Where do we find this spectre of declining job opportunities with which the doom criers are constantly trying to haunt us? The major place where we find it is among Negro teen-agers. After the statutory minimum wage rate was increased to $1.00 an hour in 1956, the unemployment rate among this group leaped to 18% of those who would like to have jobs (from a range of 7 to 13% in the preceding decade). After the statutory minimum wage was raised to $1.15 in 1961, the unemployment rate among this group jumped to 21%. With the further increase in the statutory minimum wage rate to $1.25 in 1963, the unemployment rate in this group rose further to 24%.

Now a proposal is before Congress to increase again the statutory minimum to $1.40 next year and then to $1.60 and to extend further the number of jobs covered by this wage law. We seem to be intent on forcing more and more teenagers into unemployment. We seem to be eager to foreclose the opportunities to learn a skill and become productive enough to be worth employing at wage rates well in excess of the statutory minimum in the later years of life.

A major part of our education is obtained while at work. We are foreclosing educational opportunities by these successive increases in the statutory minimum wage rate. We pushed the statutory minimum wage up by 212% from 1949 to 1963 in a period when the average wage of all employees rose less than 80%. It is no wonder that unskilled, inexperienced workers are finding it difficult to land jobs.

The inability of a major number of teen-agers to find jobs is hardly attributable to automation. The arbitrary price set by law that employers must pay must take the major share of the blame for the lack of employment opportunities for this group.

Mass unemployment, or even a minor amount of unemployment, has not been caused by automation. We are closer to a mass shortage of employees in the 20 to 64 year age bracket than we are to a shortage of jobs.

Since 1949, when alarms were sounded about the expected effect of automation, the number of people at work has increased by 14 million and the number of jobs by 16 million. At the same time, the average hourly compensation of factory employees has increased from $1.90 (measured in 1965 dollars) to $2.90. This is a 55% increase in real terms (i.e., measured in dollars of constant purchasing power). If the demand for employees had been depressed by automation, we would have seen a drop in the real wage, not a 55% rise, particularly in view of the rising size of the labor force.

This is not a pronouncement that no person ever lost a job because of automation. I am saying that the number of unemployed persons has not increased because of automation. Automation has created more jobs than it has destroyed. Unemployment has dropped because of it, although there are some people among the unemployed who would not have been there if there had been no automation. But there are a great many more people among those employed because of automation than are among the unemployed because of automation. Although automation has displaced some employees, the total number unemployed is smaller today than it would have been without automation, given the present wage structure.

Most of the unemployment of those 20 years of age and over is the normal unemployment that we will always have with us because of the constant shifting among jobs. People voluntarily quit jobs in very large numbers in order to seek better jobs. Normally, six million or more persons a year do this. During the period in which they are choosing among the jobs available, they are classed as unemployed and seeking work. They are not unemployed because of economic disaster, however. They are unemployed because they are taking time to canvass the market and choose among alternative openings or because they are doing some work at home and are not counted among the employed even though they are employed. If they average two months between the time they quit one job and the time they start a new one chosen from among the many openings available, the average unemployment appearing in the statistics from this one source would be over one million.

Automation does result in a redeployment of the work force. This, however, is an old story in America. A hundred years ago, there was no automobile industry, no aircraft industry, no electric generating industry, no camera or film industry, no motor boat industry, no radio and television industry, no telephone industry, ect. Today, these are all very substantial industries employing large number of people. Without a redeployment of the work force, these industries would not be in existence. Automation-caused redeployment is simply another facet of the redeployment of labor which has been a constant fact in American life.

Why Is Automation Alarming?

In the face of this data, why do some cry that doomsday is coming? What is it about automation that causes alarm? Why is it that workers asked about their attitude toward mechanization feel no threat, yet appear frightened when asked about their feelings toward automation?

The hallmarks of automation, to distinguish it from simple mechanization or automatic methods, are its sensing, feed-back, and self-adjusting characteristics. Because it senses changing requirements and adjusts without human intervention, it presumably does away with the need for human attendants or human labor. This is very fearful indeed to those who depend upon jobs for their livelihood.

Fear of automation can be traced to four sources. One is based upon the assumption that there is a fixed amount of goods, which buyers want. Any new method which enables us to turn out more goods per man-hour will, it is believed, enable us to turn out the fixed amount of goods and services with fewer men. If a man helped by an automatic machine can produce twice as many widgets per hour as he formerly did, then, presumably, only half as many hours of work will be available for each man to do. If work weeks are not shortened, only half as many jobs could, it is asserted, be provided in these circumstances. The President of the United States used this sort of logic when he said “that approximately 1.8 million persons holding jobs are replaced every year by machines.”

The second source of fear springs from the idea that automation or cybernation is something more than the latest stage in the long evolution of technology. Automation is said to be so different in degree that it is profoundly different in its effect. Automated machines controlled by computers do not simply augment muscle power as previous machines did. They replace and outperform human intelligence. In the future, machines will not only run machines; they will repair machines, program production, run governments and even rule men. Union leaders will collect no dues and business will have no customers because, presumably, there will be no production workers required. Human beings will, it is believed, be made as obsolete by these machines as horses were by the tractor and the automobile.

The third source of fear lies in the fact that we are much more aware of the people displaced by automation and concerned about them than we are of the other unemployed. Among the three million unemployed are several thousand persons laid off because their skills are not usable by concerns installing automated processes to replace previously used technology. Presumably, possessing only obsolete skills there are no job opportunities open to them. Others who are laid off or who are among the unemployed because they have voluntarily quit their jobs are less worrisome because their skills are not obsolete and they will have new jobs in a few weeks.

A fourth source of fear is the high incidence of joblessness among the unskilled. It is felt that the unskilled are unemployed because automated production reduces the demand for unskilled workers. Any increases in the demand for labor occurring because of automation are believed to be concentrated on highly skilled workers.

Is The Alarm Justified?

Let us analyze these presumptions which make automation so fearful to some. First, is there a fixed amount of work to be done? Does an improvement in technology which enables us to do a fixed lump of work with fewer men mean there will be fewer jobs?

In terms of a very recent type of automation, the use of electronic data processing equipment, a United States Department of Labor study of large firms which introduced such equipment concluded that: despite the reduction in labor requirements for the tasks performed by the computers, total employment of the offices as a whole rose. Over the four years from December 1953 to December 1957, total office employment at 17 offices studied increased an average of 7 percent. The experience of these offices suggests the possibility of expanding employment in new areas of office activity to handle information which had previously been uneconomical to acquire.[1]

This experience of increasing office employment despite reduced labor requirements per unit of outputs is a specific instance of what has been going on generally in our economy. From 1919 to 1962, man-hours required per unit of output in the American economy dropped by 67 percent, yet total number of jobs rose from 42 million to 68 million. The tripling of output per man-hour did not reduce the number of jobs by two-thirds as those who believe in a fixed amount of work available would predict.

One group which subscribes to the fixed lump of work philosophy has pointed to the 1960-65 annual rise in output per man-hour of 3.6 percent with alarm. It has said that this exceeds the long term average annual rise of 2.4 percent from 1909 to 1963 and the average annual postwar rise of 3.0 percent. This, it has said, indicates that the pace of technological change is accelerating and will create a great unemployment problem.

The more rapid rise of output per man-hour from 1960 to 1965 was accompanied by an increase in the number of civilian jobs from 67 million to 72 million—an increase of 5 million. An even more rapid rate of increase in output per man-hour from 1949 to 1953, amounting to 4.0 percent per year, was accompanied by increase in civilian jobs from 59 million to 62 million. On the other hand, a slowed rate of increase in output per man-hour from 1953 to 1954, when output per man-hour rose by only 1.8 percent, well below the long run average rise of 2.4 percent, was accompanied by a drop in employment from 62 million to 61 million. “It is noteworthy that while many Americans worry about the loss of jobs due to technological change, the much more rapid increase in productivity abroad has been accompanied by a great reduction, not an increase, in unemployment.”[2] It would seem that a more rapid rise in output per man-hour should be welcomed as a means of creating jobs more rapidly than they can be destroyed by other factors at work in our economy.[3]

The primary effect of automation and increased output per man-hour is not a reduction in the number of jobs available. Rather, it makes it possible for us to do many things which otherwise could not and would not be done. Automation enables us to earn larger incomes and lead fuller lives. It will, in the future, literally make it possible to travel to the moon. It saves lives through the aid it gives doctors. By controlling traffic signals in response to traffic flows and reducing traffic congestion, it adds hours to the free time of commuters every week. It helps scientists, with the aid of high-speed data processing, to develop new knowledge that otherwise would not be available in our lifetimes. We are increasing the scale of educational activities because mechanization, automation, cybernation, or whatever we choose to call our new technology, makes it possible to do more than we could formerly. With the coming of automation, men are able to do more and have more. Both sublime and mundane activities are being enlarged and the number of jobs has grown as a consequence, not declined.

The second source of fear—the idea that automation is something more than the latest stage in the long evolution of technology—the idea that it is so different in degree that it is profoundly different in effect—is an equally specious hobgoblin. The first thing to be said is that automation is not a new phenomenon.

Although we may grant that automation differs from other kinds of technology, we should not blind ourselves to history to the point of saying it is completely new. Perhaps the earliest automated device was the pressure cooker invented by Denis Papin in 1680. He originated a pressure control which is still one of the most widely used regulators. Despite this automated device, and others such as thermostatic oven controls, cooks are still extensively employed and housewives still find it necessary to devote time to their kitchen work. Although home-makers may spend less time in the kitchen, this has simply freed them to do more of other kinds of work, such as better educating their children and decorating their homes.

During the eighteenth century, several types of automatic regulators were applied to windmills. An automatic, card-programmed loom was devised by Jacquard over 150 years ago. An automatic flour mill was built in 1741. Eighteenth century steam engines were controlled by governors which had sensing, feed-back, and resetting characteristics which are the hallmark of automation. Automation has been increasingly applied over the last two centuries, yet employment has risen continually.

If automation is so remarkably different in degree than previous technological change, it should show in the data on productivity. I have said above that output per man-hour has risen in the last five years at a 3.6% annual rate. If automation is doing such profoundly different things to us, that rate, then, should be a markedly higher rate of increase than ever before experienced. Yet, in contrast, output per man-hour in manufacturing in the post World War I decade rose at a 5.0% per year rate—a rate which has not been matched in any ten year period you want to pick since World War II. If automation is such a profound leap in technology, it has yet to manifest itself as such in economically significant terms.

As to the third source of fear—the fear that our skills will be made obsolete much more rapidly because of automation and we will lose our jobs for that reason and, with obsolete skills, be unable to find any other job—there is simply no evidence that workers are becoming unemployed in greater numbers for this reason and are unable to find other jobs because their skills are obsolete. The only group which has suffered a significant increase in the incidence of unemployment are teen-agers seeking their first job. I have already indicated that this is a consequence of man-made legislation—the stupendous increase in the minimum wage rates set by statutes passed by Congress and state legislatures.

When skill requirements on jobs change, most of the affected employees are retrained by their employers for new jobs. The average production worker in General Motors is retrained six times in ten years. The average airline spends $100,000 per pilot over a pilot’s career retraining him for flying new aircraft as old aircraft are phased out and replaced. Industry in general is spending well over $20 billion a year on employee training and retraining.

The U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics studied the experience of twenty major firms converting to electronic accounting and found that only one employee of the 2,800 employees involved was laid off. In seven companies installing automation equipment which were intensively studied by the Stanford Research Institute, not one employee was laid off. When the South Chicago Works of U. S. Steel was replaced by an automated mill, of the 1,346 employees involved, only one was laid off.

Automation has resulted in the re-deployment of the work force—not in discarding obsolete men for whom there is no further use. I said earlier that this is an old story. The extent of the redeployment which has occurred may startle many readers.

Only a century ago, fifty out of every one hundred workers toiled on farms producing the nation’s supply of food and fiber. Only two or three out of every one hundred workers were producing educational, medical, recreational, and other services which contribute to a richer, fuller, healthier life. Today, the number of workers in these life-enriching occupations is relatively five times as great. Those toiling on farms have been reduced to one-s e v e n t h their former number. They now direct machines instead of using animal power and their own muscles. The quality of life has been improved and brute toil has been reduced because technology has increased our incomes to the point where we can afford these services and these machines.

Most of this redeployment occurred before we ever heard of automation, much less had any effects produced by it.

The fourth source of fear of automation apparently springs from the high incidence of joblessness among the unskilled. Some of the doom criers tell us the unskilled are unemployed because automation has reduced the demand for unskilled workers even though it may, in some instances they grudgingly admit, increase the demand for skilled workers.

If the unskilled were the victims of automation, we should expect a steadily growing volume of unemployed among the unskilled as the economy becomes increasingly automated. Instead, we find, for example, that the age group 14 to 17 “had particularly severe declines (in employment) from 1950 to 1951, 1955 through 1957, and 1960 to 1961. These declines in employment for this group coincide with Federal increases in minimum wages and the extension of coverage.” After the surge in teen-age unemployment coinciding with the last increase in the minimum wage rate in 1963, the unemployment rate has started dropping. If we believe that automation causes unemployment among the unskilled, the unemployment rate in this group should have continued to rise.

There is abundant evidence that the increased unemployment among the unskilled is a result of the rise in the statutory minimum wage rate and extension of the number of jobs covered by the statutory minimum. There is now a large literature which displays the data establishing this fact.

The evidence available concerning the effects of automation leads to these conclusions:

1. If no technological change had occurred in the past decade, the number of civilian jobs available and occupied could have grown as it has from 63 million to 72 million only at the price of restricting increases in wage rates.

2. The technological change of the last decade has increased the average employee’s earnings by $400 per year compared to what they would be if there had been no automation.

3. Automation increased the number of jobs available at the 1955 wage level by 20 million. Since only 9 million additional people have joined the work force and become available to fill jobs, there would be a shortage of 11 million workers today if wage rates had not increased. The increase in wage rates has reduced the demand for labor to the point where there are few shortages of most types of labor.

4. The overly large increase in the wage rate for the unskilled as a result of minimum wage legislation, has destroyed so many jobs for these people that we have a surplus of unskilled teen-agers for filling unskilled jobs in some sections of the country. This surplus is not a result of automation but of over-pricing.

5. Automation and other forces such as the growth in the stock of capital are doing a major job in alleviating poverty. If we define poverty in terms of a $3000 per year family income measured in 1962 dollars, the incidence of poverty has fallen from 32% of all family units in 1947 to 18% in 1964 and to approximately 15% today. The declarations of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution that there is an increasingly large disadvantaged group in our society, that there is a growing permanently depressed class, and that poverty is worsening simply do not square with the facts.

6. Instead of being alarmed about growing automation, we ought to be cheering it on. The catastrophe that doom criers constantly threaten us with has retreated into such a dim future that we simply cannot take their pronouncements seriously.

Let us have more automation, more mechanical slaves to work for us, and stop wasting our time and dwelling on the threat of hobgoblins which exist only in the imaginations of those who refuse to look about them at what is going on in the economy.

[*]Yale Brozen, an expert on the economics of automation, is professor of economics at the Graduate School School of Business, University of Chicago.

1.U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, ADJUSTMENT TO THE INTRODUCTION OF OFFICE AUTOMATION, Bulletin NO. 1276 (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1960) p. 4.

2.R. N. Cooper, “International Aspects,” AUTOMATION AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE, edited by J. T. Dunlop (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 148.

3.A study by S. Fabricant for the pre-war period found that “trends in unit labor requirements have been negatively correlated with trends in man-hour employment in different industries” (that is, decreases in hours of labor per unit of product—increases in output per man-hour—have been correlated with increased employment while increases in hours of labor per unit of proudct have been correlated with a decline in employment). EMPLOYMENT IN MANUFACTURING, 1899-1939 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1942).

Private Property And

Collective Ownership

By Eric Dalton[*]

Philosophy has fathered a number of other sciences. It is, as we all know, the father of physics which used to be known as natural philosophy. And no one is ignorant of the fact that economics was launched by a moralist whose name was Adam Smith. Nor should this be really surprising when we reflect on the fact that the most general notions in all these sciences are basically philosophical and that the methods of unfolding their implications are basically philosophical. There is, of course, the problem of determining whether there is any thing in reality which corresponds to the notions whose depths we attempt to plumb. In general the answer to this problem is not given to us by philosophical methods; it is given to us by observation.

How then does philosophy differ from the other sciences? No hard and fast line can be drawn between them. Both the scientist and the philosopher analyze concepts. Both of them engage in observations. But the people called philosophers have usually begun the analysis of the concepts and have made the most general observations. Others continue where they leave off. These we may call the scientists. They prolong the work which was begun to the philosopher, leaving him to open up new areas which are in their turn to be handed over to future scientists for further refinement.

Consider the idea of free exchange. We can analyze this notion and work out all of its logical implications. We can also concern ourselves with finding out whether there is such a thing as free exchange in reality and to what extent. Now let us ask ourselves whether this notion is proper to philosophy or to economics. In vacuo there really is no way of answering the question. In the abstract it is no more the one than the other. We may note, however, that the full working out of the idea and its application has been achieved by a group of people known as economists. And we could therefore define an economist as one who has developed this and other more or less closely related ideas.

There is an enormous quantity of metaphysics in Newton’s Principia just as there is an enormous quantity of science in Aristotle’s Physics. It is, therefore, simplistic to speak of the one as being a philosopher and the other as being a scientist. It is rather a question of more or less. We can say that Newton belonged to the class of those who pushed a certain line of inquiry to an extraordinary degree and that there are enough of such people to enable us to speak of a class of physicists.

So, perhaps, we should not ask whether so and so is talking philosophy or economics. About all we can say is that he has gone further into a certain type of question than most people called philosophers care to go. If he does a bad job we tend to say he is out of his field; it would probably be better simply to say that he is out of his depth. But we should not say: “He is out of his depth. Therefore, he did a bad job.” Rather we should say: “He did a bad job; therefore, he is out of his depth.”

If all this begins to look like an apology for what I am going to discuss this will be because it is. Had I not written this preface the reader would be tempted to wonder whether I, a philosopher, was doing philosophy or economics. I trust that this question will now seem a less interesting one. I propose to attempt a justification of private ownership and then to analyze the term “collective ownership”. I hope to show that this latter term is without any meaning. Unfortunately, it is often assumed to have meaning and the existence of such a thing in reality is frequently taken for granted even by would-be defenders of individual ownership. I shall conclude by pointing up a number of cases where this occurs - to the great detriment of economic debate.

Self-Ownership And Property Right

We shall begin by stating our fundamental thesis concerning private property. Any man has the right to acquire previously unowned goods, keep or give them away at his pleasure, use or not use them at his pleasure. We shall now attempt to justify this proposition.

Lest there be any confusion, it would be well to define exactly the manner in which we are employing the term “right”. When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use. We do not deny, therefore, that one may in many instances have an obligation to share his property with various of his fellows. It does not follow that one may with propriety produce and sell addictive drugs to whomsoever desires them. What is wrong, however, is the use of physical force to stop these things from happening.

We mention this to point up the fact that we do not give automatic approval to whatever occurs on the free market. Not only this, but the market itself provides suitable punishments to what we may regard as undesirable forms of conduct. As an example, let us mention the “Legion of Decency”. In the early thirties there was widespread disapproval of many of the films being turned out in Hollywood. The Legion was extremely active in organizing a boycott of such films. Now whether we approve of the particular effort or not, we should note that it did not rely on physical force and that it was effective to a considerable degree. It relied on voluntary activity and relied entirely on the right of free speech. There is also the old remedy of the raised eyebrow. Most of us do not like to be known as skinflints; on the contrary, we like to be known as great benefactors of mankind and some of us even want to be that way. Doubtless factors such as these had considerable influence on much of the philanthropy during this and the last century. We may say that a man’s right to property tells us not so much what he may properly do but rather what others may not properly do to him. It is fundamentally a right not to be interfered with.

We may now ask ourselves on what this right rests. It derives, we would say, from the prior right of self-ownership. Each of us owns himself and his activities. This means that we may not initiate violence against others. We say “initiate” because we may certainly employ violence against those who have initiated it against us. In other words, we may repel violence. Now let us suppose that in various manners I deploy my activity upon material non-human goods that are previously unowned. By what right does anyone stop me? There are but two possible justifications: either he has the right to direct my activities by using violence (in other words he owns me) or else he owns the material goods in question. But this contradicts the assumptions we have already made: that each human being is self-owned and that the material goods in question are not previously owned. This man is claiming either to own me or the property I think I have acquired. The only factor open to question is whether the other man had peacefully acquired the land before me. But to raise this question is to concede the right of private property which is the thing we are trying to establish. Now, if no one man has the right to do this, it follows that no greater number may do so, for the same question that was asked of A may be asked concerning C, and so of all the others. Surely, if this is true of any of them taken singly, there is no reason to suppose that they could properly do this if they banded together.

There is, then, an unlimited right of acquisition. This applies, however only to what others have not already acquired. This sounds obvious, but apparently it is not for many. One frequently hears the claim that there should be a redistribution of property on the grounds that its present division does not enable everyone to be a landowner and each one has the right to be a property owner. The equivocation should be clear: each one has the right to appropriate what no one else has appropriated. The right to appropriate is without content unless he who does so may keep what he has taken. And if one may keep what has been taken, it follows that nobody has the authority to wrest it from him.

The right of self-ownership implies the right to give away property either gratis or in exchange for something else. By what right could one force an individual to retain ownership of his property? Likewise, if an individual may give away his property then by the same token a person may receive it. One is the corollary of the other. All the objection to inherited wealth is an attack on the right of a man to give away his property. Where do we derive the authority to force a man to give his property to the individuals whom we designate? Surely their income is just as much unearned as the one to whom the original owner desires to bequeath his goods.

There appears to be an extremely powerful prejudice against unearned wealth. But it is as selective as it is powerful. The “liberals” object to it when the recipients are wealthy and favor it when they are poor. Some “conservatives” select in the opposite direction. These latter will object to the guaranteed annual income on the grounds that it is unearned by the recipient and it removes from him the stimulus to produce. Neither of these reasons is valid. The mere fact that an income is unearned is totally irrelevant and although the fact that a person is not productive is bad for the rest of us, we do not have the authority to force him to be productive. The true answer to the advocates of such subsidies is that they involve stealing from legitimate owners. This has nothing to do with whether we favor the “Protestant Ethic”. By using this type of argument “conservatives” fall into the hands of their opponents, who have a field day in raising all manner of difficulties against that ethic. The unearned income of the rich is justified because it belongs to them; whereas that of the man on government relief is not because it is stolen from its rightful owner. It is certainly proper to point out to those who favor such measures that most of the people whom this kind of income would motivate not to produce would eventually become poorer than they already are - this because they are unaware of long-range economic efforts. But the primary issue still remains ethical. Suppose that even without welfare payments the leisure preferences of most people increased enormously. All of us would then be poorer because of their failure to produce. But this fact would not justify our forcing them to produce. The only legitimate alternative would be for us to move elsewhere.

Man also has the right to use or not to use his property as he sees fit. By use we mean any alteration in the physical constitution of the thing owned. Once the property has been appropriated the owner may either leave it alone or alter it in any manner whatsoever. Many object to the continued ownership of “unimproved” land on the grounds that the owner has done nothing to increase its value. Were he later to sell it he would be obtaining something without any effort on his part. Here again is implicit the fallacy that gain is justified only to the extent that it is the result of previous misery - a doctrine that Marx and others inherited from the Schoolmen. But more basically, it relies on a totally false supposition: that by transforming an object we can increase its value. There is no such thing as value in the object. Objects are valued by people: what is valued by people is the physical reality. People do not value values! The only way to increase another’s valuation of what I have is by hypnotism.

True, we may so change the physical constitution of objects that they correspond to the future values of people. But note that there is no absolute certainty as to what their values will be. It may very well be the case that what people will value will be the object in its original form. If this happens then all my efforts will have been in vain. I then would have benefitted him and myself far more by doing nothing. In other words, the owner of property performs an entrepreneurial function. He must predict the future valuations that he and others will make and act or not act accordingly. He is “rewarded” primarily, not for his work, but for his good judgment.

This is a simple lesson the learning of which would have spared the world a tremendous amount of misery. Unfortunately the world seems as far from accepting it as always. The view that one should be rewarded for one’s efforts is part of the Conventional Wisdom and one finds it on the tongue of both the liberal and the conservative. One of the reasons why Marxism always finds such a ready ear is the fact that before hearing about it people already hold its basic theory of value. And it is an easy matter for the Marxist to show such a person that the way in which wages are paid accords very poorly with commonly accepted ideas of justice. Far from retarding the acceptance of Socialistic ideas his religious convictions will tend to accelerate the process. Witness the numbers of clergymen who have been caught in this trap.

Justice And Property In Land

So much, then, for the basic principles connected with the notion of private property. The sad reality of England at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century was rather difficult from the ideal situation. Undoubtedly the extent of the misery that prevailed after the introduction of more or less free economies has been grossly exaggerated. Indeed there would have been even greater misery had this system not been introduced. This leads us to believe that there was something radically wrong before the change that has never been given the proper attention. While most of the frightful restrictions on economic action were removed, the enormous feudal land-holdings were left untouched in the name of respect for private property.

As we know these holdings were mostly the result either of conquest or state land-grants. It is highly dubious that these holdings could ever have attained their size on the free market. Justice would have dictated the division of these lands among the agricultural workers. Unfortunately this was not done. The result was that a few individuals had votes in the market far beyond their due and were thereby enabled to determine the course of events. These were responsible for the spectacular amount of investment and consequent economic growth of the area. There is no doubt that we have more goods at our disposal now because of what happened then.

Suppose the land had been divided up. Probably agriculture would have been a much more important industry in England. It is also likely that the rate of consumption would have been higher. This would have meant less investment, less “growth”. We would not be where we are today. Supposing all this to be true, what of it? The primary question is the one of justice. Where does a man get the authority to require that some one else use his property in the manner that the outsider judges to be the most economic? It is his property and he has the right to use it in the way which satisfies him. If he does not want to “grow” that is his business.

The fact that a future generation may be better off because of a forced rate of growth during the previous generations excuses nothing. This would be tantamount to allowing future generations to impose taxes on their ancestors. The forced abstinence from consumption is constantly being justified on the grounds that “we will be better off in a hundred years”. Just who is “we”? In a hundred years we will all be dead. Even if we were not, suppose we want to be better off now. Should not individuals be allowed to function in accordance with their own time-preferences?

The unwillingness of some to remedy an unjust distribution of holdings on the ground that to do so would be uneconomic is positively scandalous. After all, if not to remedy such an iniquitous distribution is justifiable in the name of economics, then would it not also be legitimate to create an unjust system for the same reason? Why not seize small holdings and give them to those men who would choose to save rather than to consume? But this would be unjust. True, but so it is if people are allowed to retain holdings that really do not belong to them.

We can go further, however, and challenge the thesis that the system of holdings that obtained at the time the free-market was instituted was the most economic one. How can anyone tell? On the supposition that a free market had obtained from the beginning we can say that the distribution of wealth is the most economic one. The size of anyone’s holdings will tend to reflect the extent to which he satisfied the desires of those with whom he engaged in business. Since, ex hypothesi, there never was coercion everybody benefitted by the exchanges. Certainly no such claims can be made in behalf of a system that preexisted the unhampered market. All we can say is that if the holdings are left untouched and if free exchange is introduced, then eventually a satisfactory system will develop. Here, however, the long run may be long indeed, and what about the rights of the people in the meanwhile? They will prefer to consume the smaller pie that is theirs by rights. That people who possess what is rightfully yours are busy making a larger pie which can be consumed only by your descendants is cold comfort indeed.

These considerations surely raise numerous questions about the situations in the undeveloped areas of the world. Obviously one of the big problems is what to do with the vast holdings of land. There is little doubt that these were not acquired by legitimate means. Because these exist large numbers of individuals are doomed to a life of misery even by their own standards. One can sympathize with the misguided concern of the Marxist reformer. On the other hand, we must deplore his forked-tongued approach to the propaganda problem. Interestingly he will appeal to the peasant by his proposals to divide the land—an effective appeal because by instinct the peasant firmly believes in private property and feels he has been defrauded of it. To the factory workers, however, he has an entirely different story to tell. He gives them to understand that the capitalistic mentality of the peasant is his real enemy and promises that the land will be taken over by the state, so that the kulaks will not be able to charge the workers in the city exorbitant prices.

Anybody who understands the workings of the free market can see that the policies advocated by collectivists are doomed to failure. For the most part, however, those who pay lip-service to the market show little desire to question the property arrangements in these areas. This is why they have little to say that would interest the poor and downtrodden in these countries. These people have therefore come to associate the free market system with approval of the status quo. They would not be greatly helped by the fact that from now on their oppressors would be able to exchange with each other on an unhampered basis. All this means is that for the foreseeable future a few more crumbs might fall from the tables of those who profit by facilitated exchange.

Here again the spirit of growthmanship is operative. “These countries will never become industrialized unless the vast holdings are allowed to continue and the land will not be well used if divided up.” Could a Marxist be more critical of the free market than these people? Is it not the right of the real owners to decide to what extent their area shall be industrialized?

Also operative are certain special interests who want justice here but not abroad. Some of them have bought land from people who had no right to it in the first place; others have been given land by governments who had previously expropriated it. This makes them a party to the injustice. Obviously much of the justifiable complaining in these areas is misdirected. Just as these foreign companies will object to any expropriation by appealing to the sanctity of property, so the natives will blame their troubles on the system of private property itself, or they will attack foreign investment as something which is evil in itself. As in so many instances people are unable to locate their real enemy. Surely if these people do blame their troubles on free enterprise, the defenders of this system are partly responsible for their error.

We have given a general analysis of what is involved in the notion of private, individual property. We have attempted to show that this system is justified by the more basic right of self-ownership. We then pointed out that the only ground on which others could prevent a person from acquiring ownership is an implicit claim to previous ownership by somebody else. But to concede that somebody else owned the property is to admit that there is such a thing as the right to property. Then we established that no one has the authority to interfere with the non-aggressive use of that property. It is finally important to realize that goods that have been illegitimately acquired do not become lawful property by virtue of the mere passing of time.

“Society” And Collective Ownership

We have put off until now reckoning with one final notion: that the goods of the earth belong to no individuals, but rather are vested in an entity called “society”. Somehow, this entity is a whole of which each one is a part. It is conceived as having rights and also duties. The actions of the parts may be permitted only to the extent to which they aid the whole. The organ through which society expresses itself can be either a king, a parliament, or simply the majority of its members. Supposedly, whatever these organs want “we” want. Pervasive as it is, this theory is quite difficult to formulate, and for good reason. It is often enough used as the ultimate justification of government.

The question we should ask is not so much whether society has the rights attributed to it as whether such an entity can be meaningfully said to exist at all. When, however, you ask what kind of entity this could possibly be you are referred to various analogies. Just as we are made up of cells so society is made up of individuals. “If you claim that the notion of ‘society’ is unintelligible, you must also claim that the notion of a whole is meaningless.” It is, indeed, difficult to admit that the one could exist and not the other. If, therefore, the notion of “society” derives its plausibility from these analogies it might pay us to inquire a bit into them. Are there really, anywhere, entities that are made up of entities, or are we the victims of a linguistic trick? If nowhere are such entities to be found, then automatically this notion of “society” will fall to the ground.

Perhaps the best approach to the matter would be through an examination of what is meant by a collective noun. As an example, let us take “baseball team”. We use this term to designate many things that are united in some particular respect. In the case at hand each man acts in conjunction with others in order to bring about a certain pattern of activities. Do we literally have a new being which did not exist before these people joined forces? Certainly not. We do as a matter of fact speak as if there were now a single entity, we use the word “team” as the subject of a sentence, we replace the word “team” by “it”. But we are conscious that in so doing we are simply using a convenient manner of speaking which is designed to save time. The proof of this is that we could simply eliminate the word “team” from our language and substitute a more prolix language that referred to “those men who are united for the purpose of playing baseball”. This is quite a complicated formula and it is well we have discovered more convenient fashions of expressing ourselves. Nor does this cause any problem as long as we realize exactly what we are doing.

Note that in the example given there is no “Ego” over and above that of the individuals who have pooled their activities. Nor, strictly speaking, is there a collective activity; there are only individual activities directed by individual persons towards a mutually agreed upon end. The “whole” is nothing but the individual players insofar as they cooperate. The only real entities are the individuals or the “parts”. This suggests that we could in principle eliminate “whole” sentences from our language and replace them by more complicated sentences whose subject is “parts” or “individuals”.

In what sense can we speak of these organizations or societies as owning property? These groups vary considerably from one another but there are a few general remarks that should apply to all. The first thing to realize is that no matter what else may be true of the arrangements, these groups own what they do because of the free choice of the individuals who have entered into this type of cooperation. Indeed, the very existence of the organization presupposes the willingness of individuals to join together and its continuance requires new decisions on the part of those willing to collaborate with the already existing members. It is certain that the organization cannot have preceded its first members. The financial arrangements will be those decided upon by the original members, for even if changes are later to be made, the procedure for introducing them will have been set up by the founders. So, from first to last the societal ownership is ultimately that of its individual members.

Let us now return to the contention that the original owner of the property is not the individual but “Society”. We have seen that the only real entities are individuals, so that nothing can be true of a society which is not true of the individuals that make it up. Consider first the ownership of the individuals. In so doing we shall suppose a society made up of two individuals A and B. There are but two possibilities: A owns A, B owns B; or A owns B or B owns A. There is no third entity that can own them both. But there must be a third if both of them are to be owned; that is, for them to belong in the literal sense to Society. If we suppose that A owns B or the opposite, we still do not have societal ownership but individual ownership. Now since the appropriation of non-human goods can only take place via the activities of people, it follows that what is appropriated by the individuals will belong to the owners of the individuals. Since it is impossible that Society own the individuals, it cannot own what they appropriate.

It is true that the two members of our little society can agree jointly to appropriate land of which they will be co-owners. But in this case the initial decision is entirely voluntary, and each one is an individual part-owner of that property and may abandon his share of ownership at his own pleasure.

Thus we see that the thesis that Society is the original owner of land cannot stand up under analysis. This is not simply a question of historical fact. In the very nature of the case, the individual precedes society and this includes the ownership of the individual. All the rest must be the result of contractual relationships, itself dependent on the free decisions of individuals.

Though the concept that there are goods that belong to Society is unacceptable, there are many occasions where it is taken for granted that Society is an entity in its own right and that it automatically does own things. This constitutes the unspoken major premise of many political proposals. We would like briefly to examine a number of cases where this assumption is made.

“It is necessary to conserve Society’s valuable resources.” This is the famous problem of waste. As we have already seen, these resources are either unowned or else their ownership is distributed among various individuals. There is no third possibility. The first alternative presents little difficulty. How come nobody owns these resources? Surely if it were in the interest to the economy various individuals would be appropriating such resources. Why do they fail to do so? Why is it not to their interest to acquire them? The fundamental reason appears to be the fact that such goods are not sufficiently scarce to justify the cost (and there is such) of appropriating them. In other words the very fact that there are goods which no one sees fit to acquire for his exclusive use is of itself a sign that no problem exists concerning their conservation. Surely, if there were, some entrepreneurs would notice the fact and do something about it. It is surely suspicious when the only one who can see that it is worthwhile to acquire resources is the government.

The other possibility is that the resources are already distributed among individual owners. In which case the only ones who have the right to speak about wasting “our” resources are the owners themselves. Each owner will make use of his resources in the way he sees fit. He can be said to have wasted his resources only when he makes mistaken predictions, and the more resources he has the ability to acquire the less likely he is to be the kind of person who makes the wrong predictions. The same may be said concerning those who make eccentric use of their resources, e.g., setting their oil fields afire in order to produce spectacles. Here we cannot say that the man is wasting something. He may be so constituted that he gets more satisfaction out of doing this than from other uses to which he might put his property. All we can say is that in a free society people of this type are unable to acquire any considerable amount of property unless someone makes a gift of it to them. In an unhampered market the entire tendency is that one may grow wealthy only by serving in large measure the interest of his fellows. If the wealth were given to someone of this nature, again, he would not be able for any length of time to preserve his position. So we can say that full freedom to perform non-aggressive actions tends to prevent any large scale use of resources that is not mutually beneficial. Not only is it meaningless to speak of Society’s resources; it is not even helpful.

“Our country is importing too much.” Here is another statement which, given a free society, is without content. Countries do not import. Only people do. How can an individual import too much except by failing properly to predict his future wants? If he is that poor a guesser he will not be around for long, and the less wealthy he is the more quickly he will cease importing. In any area some people will import a great deal, others much less, but no one can go on importing too much for his good for any length of time. But perhaps some people are importing too much for the good of others in the sense that they are failing to help the others. We must note, first of all, that a person’s importing is not the reason why those around him are not helped. Suppose he were to cease importing and not buy the goods from those near him. Are they any better off because he stopped importing? We may also add that to the extent that the importer has wide relationships with those near him, his imports from elsewhere will positively benefit them because these extensive relationships can continue only because what he imports is of greater benefit to them. Obviously, the fewer economic ties he has with his neighbors, the less they will be helped by his imports. But then to complain about this is to stake a claim to the effect that simply because X lives within a certain radius of Y, he should be forced to help Y.

One of the common complaints against an unmanaged currency is that the people are unable to control their money. The ambiguity lies in the expression “the peoples’ money”. Does it mean that there is collective ownership of the medium of exchange? If so, the phrase is unintelligible. Given the free economy each individual owns whatever money he is able to acquire. He values it as he sees fit, controls it as he sees fit, and manages it as he sees fit. The people control their money in the same way they control their television sets. Of course, the last thing that advocates of government planning want is for people to have control of their money. What they want is for the government to control it. What they mean by “uncontrolled” is precisely that it is controlled but not by those whom they would like to see control it. One of the great problems of the world is the fact that money is not controlled by its rightful owners.

Then there is the old chestnut that has it that our country is losing gold. Supposing that each individual owns whatever gold he has, it is obviously impossible for a country to lose gold. It doesn’t have it in the first place. Only the individuals who have the gold can lose it - not a very likely contingency. Normally people do not lose gold. They exchange it for things that they would rather have. We would be somewhat astonished to hear someone maintain in all seriousness that he “lost” two dollars because he went to the movies. The real truth behind such claims is that the government which has expropriated the peoples’ gold is being called upon by other governments to redeem its currency. But this would never have happened had not the government engaged in an inflationary policy.

I will end with a particularly weird example from Robert Heilbroner’s The Making of Economic Society, pp. 96-97:

“Yet England experienced difficulties enough in launching the Great Transformation. As we can now see, many of these difficulties were the direct consequences of the problems which our model highlighted for us. The industrialization process of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did, indeed, necessitate a great amount of saving - that is, of the releasing of consumption - and much of the social hardship of the time can be traced to this source.

For who did the saving? Who abstained from consumption? The manufacturers themselves (for all their ostentatious ways) were among those who plowed back a substantial portion of their profits into more investment. Yet the real savers were not the manufacturers so much as another class - the industrial workers. Here, in the low level of industrial wages, the great sacrifice was made - not voluntarily, by any matter of means, but made just the same. From the resources they could have consumed was built the industrial foundation for the future.”

.We have already referred to what we believe were the great injustices of the period of the “Great Transformation”. Had there been a more equal distribution of property individuals would have been consuming more of what they produced, simply because each of them would have been producing a smaller quantity and, therefore, a lesser tendency to save. Since Heilbroner’s reasoning does not depend on any prior unjust distribution of property, let us take for granted the justice of the arrangement and see if his analysis makes any sense.

It is true that non-consumption is a necessary condition for saving. But the non-consumption in question concerns one’s own resources, not those of other people. I can hardly be said to be saving for you when I fail to consume your resources. This is not the place to discuss the problem of wages. Suffice it to say that had less been produced real wages would not have been as high as they were at any given time. The increased production was mutually beneficial to the owners and the workers. The fact that the owners saved rather than consumed made the workers’ condition far better than otherwise. They were perhaps victimized by the fact that the producers had the money that rightly belonged to them. But not by the fact that the money was saved. It is absolutely ridiculous to assert that the workers actually did the saving for they did not have the resources to save. Even if someone takes my money away from me and saves it, it is hardly enlightening for me to claim that I am doing the saving. It is only because he indulges in this type of collective thinking that Heilbroner was able to write such nonsense. Its plausibility can only rest on the analogy of a family where some members, anxious to increase the total wealth, deliberately abstain from consuming their earnings in order to contribute them to the investments of the more productive individuals of the group.

In the next paragraph we are told that “England had to hold down the level of its working class consumption in order to free its productive effort for the accumulation of capital goods.” What on earth is the entity that ever made such a decision? Practically the only entities making decisions in nineteenth century England were those who owned resources. There were many decisions on the part of many people, but none by England. And I am quite sure that no one thought himself capable of “holding down the consumption of the working class” or desired to do so “in order to free its productive effort for the accumulation of capital goods”. Decisions of this kind are made today, however. But they are made, not by property owners, but by dictators.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this paper it is that the only enlightening way of analyzing economic and property problems is by always returning to the individual who, alone, is real. People are ill served by the manufacture of spurious entities.

[*]Eric Dalton is the nom de plume of a professor of philosophy at a major American university.

Palefaces Or Redskins:

A Profile Of Americans

By Leonard P. Liggio

On the same day that tropical Pearl Harbor stood in flames, in the other part of the world in a snowstorm Russian divisions were first driving back the Germans from their advanced outposts near Moscow. ....7 December 1941 was the turning point of the Second World War. From that day onward the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan was assured.[1]

John Lukacs indicates that the roots of the Cold War are to be found in the beginnings of World War II. Lukacs analyzes how Pearl Harbor resulted from the policy decisions of particular forces in the governments of Washington and Tokyo. Roosevelt’s demands on behalf of the US puppet Chiang prevented peaceful relations from prevailing between US imperialism and the Asian national bourgeoisie, for whom Japan had been the traditional spokesman. As a result of the United States’ provocative embargo on trade with Japan and its refusal to negotiate in good faith, the nationalist militarists in Japan became predominant over the peaceful traditional and business interests. Lukacs sketches the final efforts by the Japanese to gain US agreement to peace in the Far East, and indicates the central role of Chiang’s China Lobby in involving the American people in an Asian conflict which has lasted for the past twenty-five years.

There is no doubt that the Japanese Emperor and at least part of the Tokyo government really wished to avoid war with the United States in 1941. Even though Roosevelt refused to meet Prince Konoye in Honolulu earlier, around 20 November the situation was such that a possibility for a compromise was discernible from the text of a so-called Japanese “Proposal B” that was not too far apart from an American modus vivendi proposal already drafted. But between 22 and 25 November it was decided in Washington not to present the modus vivendi to the Japanese; and the American note handed to them on 26 November contained conditions that, though excellent in principle, the Japanese government could hardly accept. ...The motives behind this American diplomatic reversal are still somewhat obscure. We know that Chiang’s friends, allies, lobbyists, and agents played a very important role.[2]

American intervention in World War II on the side of Chiang had a profound effect on American foreign policy attitudes, particularly upon Isolationism, as noted in Lukacs’ analysis of the development of the Cold War. Lukacs says:

Obviously Isolationism ceased to be respectable after Pearl Harbor. ...Yet, again, we may ask whether this development has been profound rather than superficial and even whether it has been so clear a gain at all?[3]

Lukacs then quotes President De Gaulle’s views on the manner in which the undercutting of American isolationism contributed to the origins and maintenance of the Cold War. Lukacs suggests that of all who have written about American foreign policy from World War II “there is but one who saw through Roosevelt’s global plans with profound insight. It is General De Gaulle” in his War Memoirs.[4] De Gaulle declared:

a kind of messianic impulse now swelled the American spirit ...which concealed the instinct for domination.... It was true that the isolationism of the United States was, according to the President, a great error now ended. But passing from one extreme to the other, it was a permanent system of intervention that he intended to institute by international law. In his opinion, a four-power directorate - America, Soviet Russia, China and Great Britain - should settle the world’s problems. ...such an organization, according to him, would have to involve the installation of American forces on bases distributed throughout the world, some of which would be located in French territory. Roosevelt thus intended to lure the Soviets into a group that would contain their ambitions and in which America could unite its dependents. Among the ‘four,’ he knew, in fact, that Chiang Kai-shek’s China needed his cooperation and that the British, in danger of losing their dominions, would yield to his policy. ...the support offered by Washington and the existence of American bases would give rise to new sovereignties in Africa, Asia and Australasia, which would increase the number of states under an obligation to the United States.[5]

De Gaulle concluded by noting that given this limitless global domination by the United States, it was possible to satisfy the limited, defensive needs of the Soviet Union that there be no hostile regimes in Eastern Europe; in fact, as Churchill noted at the time, the recognition of Russia’s interest in that region was a perfect way to distract Russia from the areas of the world which were of greater importance to Western imperialism.

Yet the Truman Administration determined to impose Western imperialism’s aims upon Eastern Europe as well as on the rest of the world. As the author of The Great Powers and Eastern Europe, Lukacs is especially knowledgeable in Soviet-American relations in Eastern Europe. He concludes that the Soviet Union had made no attempt to interfere with America’s new domination of Western Europe.

Now Stalin did not particularly contest American power: he did not challenge America’s sphere; did it not seem to him, however, that the Americans were beginning to challenge his sphere?[6]

The Truman Administration had difficulty in rousing the American people to the Cold War crusade. The American people knew that more than six million Russians had been killed and the major industrial, agricultural and cultural regions destroyed by the war. Americans recognized that only “two of every thousand Americans” had had to die in the war because “fifty out of every thousand Russians” had died. It was remembered that “the massive bulk of this (American) aid did not reach Russia until after the Battles of Moscow and Stalingrad” when the tide of war had already been reversed, and that for every enemy division facing the Western allies there were three against the Russians. These facts were reinforced by distrust of Western imperialism “felt by Left-wing Democrats as well as by Right-wing Republicans.” Furthermore, Lukacs adds, “the inchoate but deep and widespread inclinations of American isolationism had not yet been spent.”[7] To overcome this opposition to the Cold War the Truman Administration called in the Old World to redress the balance of the New. From Winston Churchill to escapees from war crimes trials, the American people were deluged with propaganda totally lacking in the legitimacy of native birth.

The collapse of the Old Regime in Eastern Europe threw up on America’s shores an intellectual Iron Guard to reinforce the US’ administration’s position vis a vis the American people. Lukacs distinguishes in American politics two main traditions: The Redskins and the Palefaces. This concept is transposed to ideology from one long familiar in American literature. The political Redskins, the mass of the American people, came here to flee the feudal systems of the old world to seek freedom from taxes, inspection, control, ‘education,’ conscription and foreign wars. The Redskin culture is an accumulation of individual decisions, individual desires, individual purposes which conflict with any imposition of grandiose organized schemes. The Redskin, the American, does not wish to be ruled, ordered, taxed or conscripted, but his flight from feudalism has meant a failure to confront the issue of domination by the Palefaces. The Redskins have not yet purged themselves fully by revolutionary experiences of the mentality of the emancipated slave or serf. Thus, the Redskins suffer from disunity and their leadership tends to be prophetic, lacking in the organizational talents necessary to lead a sustained assault on the citadels of privilege and monopoly, the “bureaucratic Welfare State” which the Redskins’ weakness has allowed the Palefaces to construct.

The Palefaces represent those who seek to emulate the aristocratic society of Europe, that is, the ways of feudalism upon which the European ruling classes are based. Thus, the American Palefaces have viewed themselves as a divinely chosen elite who must paternalistically direct, educate and especially control the mass of the American people, the Redskins. To the Palefaces, the Redskins have no sense of the responsibilities and sacrifices outside their natural surroundings which the Palefaces’ nation-state’s call to greatness entails; thus, to Palefaces the Redskins appear ‘uncivilized,’ ‘uncultured,’ and ‘uneducated.’ For their role in the feudal system of being guides and guards, leaders and teachers, the Palefaces insist upon a sizable part of the productivity of the Redskins. The Redskins’ self-interest must be curbed, according to the Palefaces, by their own devotion to the ‘common good,’ the ‘general welfare,’ or the ‘national interest.’ With this rationale, the Palefaces’ ultimate role is the administrator-the inspector, the public school teacher, the welfare worker, the tax-collector, the policeman, the army officer. Lukacs asks

whether the very organization of our societies, too, is not unconsciously moving in a “rightist” direction, away from Capitalism toward older, medieval institutions. Consider only the movement away from money economy, the dependence of the citizen’s position not upon birth or wealth but upon his function: a status rather than a contract society, and so forth.[8]

Capitalism has been historically the polar opposite of the Right. Capitalism, freedom, the Left, have challenged feudalism, restriction and status, the right, with all other possible positions falling between these poles. Capitalism, the self-determination of people to decide their own priorities, is precluded by the Palefaces’ feudal commercial system of mercantilism or state ‘capitalism’. The “rightist” direction, away from Capitalism,” has subjected Americans, the Redskins, to the Palefaces’ monopoly ‘capitalism’ or to “government intervention and to the extension of socialist patterns of life and thought.”[9] The feudal nature of American statism is best seen in the major instrumentality of Paleface administration - the draft. Control of people’s labor is an important element of feudalism, and it is control of people’s labor that is the major goal of the Palefaces. Defense Secretary McNamara recently made the ‘enlightened’ proposal in the face of the popular, Redskin, opposition to conscription, that a system of two-year national service for all youth be instituted. That is, a confiscation of two years’ labor from most American citizens. Thus, in the tradition of feudalism, the rulers will have an expendable, cheap, and especially dependent (unprotected by the civil laws and subject to military and administrative slave codes) labor force. The term-of-years rather than permanent subjection is not alien to feudal institutions; indentured servitude and apprenticeship systems are refinements of the feudal system applied to advanced and complex economic relationships. The government, or to speak plainly, the Pentagon, is the largest consumer of capital and of labor in the country; compared to the Pentagon, all major industrial concerns fall to middle rank category where their profit margins are threatened by the rising firms associated with the Pentagon contract system. “United States industrialists in the name of Free Enterprise clamor for more and more government orders for their own enterprises.”[10]

Thus the United States, now the leader of the Free world, was ahead of the world in bureaucratization. This is an alarming development. ...Just as government, with its cancerously growing number of civil servants (and the less visible but more ominous growth of the number of people indirectly and partly employed by the government), suggests the transformation from the Legislative to the Administrative State, similar developments have taken place in every kind of enterprise and in wide areas of American life. The administrator rather than the producer has become the typical (and respected) American occupation.[11]

The Palefaces’ administrator-orientation has been expanded from domestic feudal-paternalism to foreign imperialist-paternalism “of the White Man’s Burden, of Liberation, of International Policemanship.”[12] With the dominance of the Right, the Palefaces, in the American government, twentieth century American foreign policy has been imperialistic, whether by T. or F. Roosevelt, Wilson or Truman, Eisenhower or Kennedy: “these Presidents were imperialists, imperialists of a new sort, covering up their concepts of national ambitions with high-flown moralistic oratory, eminently successful imperialists of a new kind.”[13] The state nationalism at the root of imperialism was the dominant ideology during the early modern period until challenged from the Left by the patriotism of the democratic revolutions, based upon Rousseau’s conception of human happiness lying in the natural institutions outside the state. To the revolutionary impulse of freedom, the statist or Rightist responded; “in the early nineteenth century, the state is put forward by certain German thinkers as a majestic end in itself.”[14]The Palefaces’ nationalism, or state consciousness, is loyalty to the state, disregarding and often conflicting with the natural institutions, the traditions, and the specific locality of the people. The Redskins, patriotism, nation (patrie)-consciousness, is loyalty to the natural institutions, the specific locality and the traditions of the people. Thus, imperialism especially conflicts with the traditions of the mass of the American people, the Redskins. Lukacs notes the effects of the development of “an imperial society” based upon the “American world empire:”

here I am concerned with the effects of this worldwide transformation on American society. For this involved—and it still involves—great radical departures from previous American traditions. Together with the development of a welfare state, the bureaucracy of the American government increased in tremendous proportions. The proportionate increase of the personnel and of the powers of federal investigative and intelligence agencies was even greater,[15]

As Lukacs indicates, the FBI and the CIA are the two Paleface instrumentalities furthest removed from the traditional freedom of the American, the Redskin; they are direct transplants from European state nationalism. As typified in Nazi Germany, state nationalism was anti-patriotic, anti-communist and anti-tradition. Thus, in twentieth century Europe, ‘National’, designating expansionist, anti-patriotic, anti-communist movements, “became a byword for anti-patriotic treachery during the Second World War. This tendency is faintly discernible even in the United States (cf. the McCarthyite, pro-German and sometimes mildly pro-Fascist National Review).”[16]

The anti-patriotism and anti-freedom traditions of the Palefaces have been infused with new reserves from European feudalism since World War II. Having failed in Europe with their anti-patriotic, anti-communist, and expansionist state nationalism, these strategic advisers have crossed over to America for one last gamble to prove their discredited theories.

It may be symbolic that among the myriad Experts of International Relations who have been berating and advising the American people ever since the beginning of the last World War, Americanized immigrant professors have played a large role: they have fashioned, defined, and proposed new kinds of American National interests, of an atomic Realpolitik tailored to what they state are America’s needs. Before me lies one of these incantations by a Director of a Foreign Policy Research Institute, consultant to the Government and Pentagon: “For the next fifty years or so, the future belongs to America. The American empire and mankind will not be opposites but merely two names for the universal order under peace and happiness. Novus orbis terrarum.” I regard this kind of thing not merely pompous but impertinent.[17]

These European emigre Foreign Policy advisors have become the intellectual vanguard in the State Department, Pentagon and universities for the Paleface Establishment. So far removed are these émigrés from the American, the Redskin, traditions that irony is too weak a word to describe the transferral, the betrayal, involved when these men are appointed the judges of “Un-American” activities. Lukacs notes that “Americanism” had originally meant the instruction of immigrants in traditional American thought; but the “Un-American” activities committees have immigrants teaching their defeated feudal concepts to native-born Americans!

These Paleface emigres have escaped the judgment of the tribunals of their Redskin compatriots; since their state nationalism was allied with the imperialism of the Western Palefaces, the patriotic and traditional Redskin movements in their countries adopted the methods of communism to achieve liberation from Paleface dominion. Lukacs describes the Bolshevik Revolution as essentially a patriotic or isolationist movement which Lenin led to success: “the great and dreadful disgust of the Russian people with the European war, with Russia’s Western allies, including her own cosmopolitan and Francophile aristocracy.”[18]Bolshevism was the modern Russian Redskin or isolationist (Slavophile or Eurasian) tradition against the aristocratic Palefaces or Westernizers allied with Western imperialism. Thus, the Bolsheviks moved the capital from western St. Petersburg to Moscow in the interior. The same Paleface accusation of ‘agent of a foreign power’ hurled against the isolationists, the Redskin patriots, Debs, Senator LaFollette, and Congressman Lindbergh, was used by the Russian Palefaces against Lenin. Although Marx himself neglected the importance of the nation as opposed to the state, Lukacs indicates that contemporary communism is a system of achieving patriotic revolutions rather than a philosophical or economic theory, as the careers of Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Castro well illustrate; Lukacs says; “A political Marxist, such as Castro, for example, declared himself to be pro-Communist because he was anti-American, and not the reverse.”[19]

Cuban resistance to American imperialism is a major subject added to this revised New History of the Cold War. The Cuban Revolution was already over a year old when the first edition of the book was written. As in the case of such few perceptive historians of American foreign relations as William Appleman Williams (Tragedy of American Diplomacy) and John Gerassi (Great Fear in Latin America), Lukacs notes that nationalist movements tend to take on the ideological structure of the major opponents of Western imperialism - fascism before 1945, communism since. Cuba’s communism is the consequence of Cuban nationalism’s opposition to American domination; Castro adopted Marxism-Leninism as the leading philosophy of irreconcilability with American imperialism and to force the Soviet Union to protect Cuba against American military interventions after 1960. Lukacs is unequivocal in placing the blame for the October 1962 Missile Crisis upon the United States:

It was this threat of an American invasion and not the so-called Rocket Confrontation which culminated in the fantastic American-Russian crisis over Cuba in October 1962: the former led to the latter and not, as it is commonly believed, the reverse.[20]

The Soviet installation of medium rockets in Cuba is explained as a cautious, defensive move to prevent a widely expected American invasion of Cuba and to stabilize American-Soviet relations. With the discovery of the missile sites, built “in an ostentatious manner, without any attempt to conceal or disguise them,” serious negotiations led to their dismantlement in exchange for the major American commitment not to invade Cuba, and the minor one of removing American missile bases against Russia in Turkey and Italy. As the Soviets had hoped, the concrete solution of the crisis led to a detente between Russia and America, exemplified by the nuclear test ban treaty and by the wheat agreement. On June 10, 1963 at American University, Kennedy made what Lukacs calls “the most significant speech of his career”; he spoke out against a military and foreign policy of a “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war.”[21] This was succeeded by initiatives in various areas of the world. A new policy reducing the American hostility toward China was about to be launched, along with the actual withdrawal of American troops in Vietnam preceding a negotiated settlement between the anti-Diem Junta and the National Liberation Front. Finally, restoration of amicable relations with Cuba was projected by Kennedy in a Miami speech of November 18, 1963, just four days before his assassination.[22]

A major new contribution by Lukacs is his treatment of the meaning of the 1964 elections. Johnson’s electoral mandate was based upon an essentially isolationist program. Johnson’s interests drew him toward domestic affairs away from international involvements. “True, this characteristic was inseparable from a certain parochialness of his views,” but it was suitable since America “would do well to embark on a policy of broad and cautious retrenchment.”[23]This American mood of isolationism was challenged by the Republican candidate who offered, as Lukacs notes, the first clear choice since the isolationist-interventionist contest of 1920; Johnson’s plurality was second only to that of 1920 when isolationism also triumphed. Of course, Johnson’s isolationism was a fraud and he adopted Goldwater’s expansionism soon after the election had repudiated it. Lukacs doubts that Goldwater’s nomination represented an increase in “American conservatism”:

It would be wrong to deduce therefrom (Goldwater’s nomination) that the appeal for “American conservatism”, that is, for an anti-Communist crusade, had grown during that decade; indeed, there is reason to believe that the social base of McCarthy’s following was more solid than was Goldwater’s.[24]

This anti-communist crusading signifies “the weakness of American ‘conservatism’ - which is, in reality, nothing more than radical nationalism of a shallow and second-rate nature,.. Adlai Stevenson may be the American Mendes-France; but, mon Dieu, what do Barry Gold-water and Charles de Gaulle have in common? Nothing.”[25] De Gaulle is peaceful, patriotic, traditional - isolationist; “American conservatives” are expansionist, anti-patriotic, anti-communist - “National”.

Involved in these matters is the civil rights revolution. Negroes in the Black Belt and Black Ghettos have shared with the mass of American people an adherence to patriotic nationalism against state nationalism as represented in their localities by the public welfare workers, school teachers, police forces, etc. In the Black Belt state nationalism has been supported by such community groups as the KKK. Lukacs notes that

in the South the demonstrations for the enforcement of the long overdue civil rights were resisted by brutal murders committed by members of the reborn Ku Klux Klan, a general sense of malaise appeared in many manifestations of American life, suggesting that the problems of this great people were deeper and more widespread than it has been generally believed; that perhaps it was not only the lack of world historical experience but also the superficiality of domestic cohesiveness which might eventually reduce that American role of world leadership...[26]

Yet, the weaknesses of the domestic foundations of American imperialism have been matched by increasingly wilder gambles on the international scene, especially in Asia. Lukacs indicates that “today that portion of the Russo-Chinese frontier is still along the Amur” where it was fixed by treaty in 1689: in contrast, while Boston and New York were experiencing the English Glorious Revolution, “in 1689 the American frontier was but a few dozen miles inland from the Atlantic coast; today the American flag flies in Okinawa, Japan, Korea, across the Pacific everywhere and even on the Asian mainland.”[27] On the Asian mainland, it was in relation to China that American expansion was most clearly evident after 1945, as it had been before; and Chiang’s interest remained paramount, dragging the American people into the Cold War just as his interest had led to Pearl Harbor.

American marines, and naval units helped to ferry advanced troops of the Nationalist government up North to establish their authority after the Japanese surrender... after all is said, the Russians did evacuate Manchuria by late 1946, turning its cities over not to Communist but to Chinese Nationalist garrisons. Russian support to the Chinese Communists cannot be denied; but, on the other hand, this support was far less than American supplies to the Nationalists during the same period... Stalin’s support of Mao was halfhearted. Remembering the occasional enthusiasm of certain American officials for Mao during the war, until mid-1947 the Russians feared that, the Chinese Communists would be unduly close to the United States. This was at least one of the principal reasons why Moscow refused to break relations with Chiang’s regime even as late as 1948.[28] I

Lukacs discussion of the American intervention in Korea seems relevant to today’s events; the inability of modern warfare to defeat popular Asian forces was evident despite the “undisputed superiority of American air power during the first phase of the war.”[29]

The relative victor of the Korean War was not Russia but China; but her victory was one of prestige rather than of power...[30]

Checked in its crusade against China from the northern gateway, Korea, which Japan had used to invade China, the Pentagon shifted to the alternative route which Japan had also adopted, Vietnam.

American military and political influence was already superseding the French in southern Indochina when the Dien Bien Phu crisis broke... and in view of the experience of the Korean war, it is strange how Dulles and Admiral Radford could believe that the intervention of American air power alone could turn the tide of this guerrilla war fought in millet fields and rice paddies.[31]

Lukacs sketches the American intervention in Vietnam from its encouragement of Diem to violate the Geneva Agreement’s election terms “since they feared that they would lose such an election to Ho Chi Minh”, to the United States’ escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965, which Lukacs notes

did not at all mean that the Americans could do what the French had been unable to do more than a decade earlier; to defeat the Vietcong in the field and to eliminate the guerrilla warfare altogether. Reasonable estimates suggested that no less than one million American soldiers were needed to do the trick - perhaps... the Indochinese situation was different from the Korean one. ...in Vietnam the North and the Vietcong proved to be a match for the Americans without having to depend on the Chinese for their survival... (In Korea) there is every reason to believe that the aerial bombing of Manchuria would have led nowhere. Unfortunately there was little to suggest that Dean Rusk in 1964-65 understood these historical distinctions better than had his predecessor, the other Dean (Ache-son), exactly fifteen years earlier; and it seems, too, that Johnson was not sufficiently aware of the singular inefficacy of strategic air power. ...like the strategic bombing of Germany during the last world war, or like the American air superiority during the first phase of the Korean War, this produced no worthwhile effects at all. ...the wooden diplomacy of Dean Rusk deserves most criticism: for, given the by now undoubtedly impressive endurance of the Vietcong and of the Ho Chi Minh regime in the North, it seems that even in the not too likely event of a decisive American victory in the South the Americans’ present adversaries may have earned their rights to become virtually the principal power in Indochina in the long run.[32]

Lukacs wonders how many Americans, Left or Right, will consider Vietnam worth the bones of a single US marine. One is reminded of Bismarck’s warning on December 5, 1876 during a major crisis between the Great Powers in the newly emerging countries of the Balkans« “They are not worth the healthy bones of a single Pommeranian grenadier.” Bismarck and Eisenhower had the sense to stay the hands of the military from engaging in the loss of their people’s lives. Bismarck’s successors, as well as Johnson, lacked that discretion and have been marked in the ledger of history as war-criminals, as much for what they did to their own people as for the suffering they inflicted upon others.

1.John Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 36-37

2.Ibid., pp. 84-85.

3.Ibid., p. 369; Cf. Liggio, “Isolationism, Old and New Part I,” LEFT AND RIGHT (Winter, 1966), pp. 19-35.

4.Lukacs, pp. 45, 369-370.

5.John Lukacs, Decline and Rise of Europe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1965), pp. 208-209.

6.Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War, p. 81.

7.Ibid., pp. 4, 38, 46, 62. Cf. Garet Garrett, “The American Empire,” LEFT AND RIGHT (Winter, 1966), pp. 36-53.

8.Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War, pp. 402-13.

9.Ibid., p. 296.

10.Ibid., p. 298.

11.Ibid., pp. 294-95.

12.Ibid., p. 339.

13.Ibid., p. 371.

14.Lukacs, Decline and Rise of Europe, p. 149.

15.Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War, pp. 161-63.

16.Lukacs, Decline and Rise of Europe, p. 159.

17.Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War, p. 380.

18.Lukacs, Decline and Rise of Europe, p. 193.

19.Ibid., p. 193.

20.Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War, p. 237.

21.Ibid., p. 259.

22.Ibid., pp. 246-47.

23.Ibid., pp. 261-62.

24.Ibid., pp. 262-63.

25.Lukacs, Decline and Rise of Europe, p. 262,

26.Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War, p. 263.

27.Ibid., p. 12.

28.Ibid., pp. 90-91.

29.Ibid., p. 96.

30.Ibid., p. 102.

31.Ibid., p. 118.

32.Ibid., pp. 267-71.

LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal Of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

Winter 1967

Vol. III, No. 1

EDITORIALS

Frank Chodorov, RIP

SDS: The New Turn

Ronald Reagan as Educator

Is There a Nazi Threat?

Liberalism and the CIA

JANET McCLOUD and ROBERT CASEY,

The Last Indian War

REPRINT:

LYSANDER SPOONER,

Natural Law, or the Science of Justice

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EDITORIAL

FRANK CHODOROV

R. I. P.

It was almost twenty years ago that I first met Frank Chodorov. It was at one of those luxurious but terribly dreary cocktail parties that have long served as rallying ground for the intelligentsia of the American right-wing. There the more articulate of the rightists are wont to gather to declaim at each other for the umpteenth time on the perils of inflation, the immorality of welfare recipients, and the clear and present menace of Walter Reuther to the vitals of the American Republic. These and similar cliches have long provided the feeble structure of application for the glittering but always vague generalities on “free enterprise”, “limited government” and the American Way. The men of the Right have long been content to set forth this windy rhetoric as a convenient and almost “non-controversial” substitute for hard-edged ideas, while on the back stairs they dicker with the brokers of Big Government for an increase in their subsidies and privileges and a cut in their fiscal burdens.

In that crowd of time-servers, Frank Chodorov stood out like a blaze of radiant light. He stood out at that cocktail party, too, the only person alive and ablaze amidst the whole gaggle of one-dimensional and identical men around him. There he stood, his tie askew, his balding head disheveled, the ashes from his beloved pipe flying all around, his intelligent and merry eyes twinkling as he scored some outrageous, logical, and beautifully penetrating point to some clod who couldn’t tell the difference between the host of cardboard “individualists” and this one genuine article. For Frank was sui generis, and the vast gulf in the quality of mind and the rigor of ideas between him and the other “rightist” intellectuals was, in a sense, embodied in that other gulf of spirit and outward form.

Unflinching honesty, courage, love of the intellect and the products of the mind, these are some of the things that distinguished Frank Chodorov to the very core of his being and set him many light years above his confreres. While the others prattled on about liberty and individualism, Frank Chodorov really meant it; he was an individualist, and when he died in late December, 1966 an entire era died with him. The outstanding disciple of his beloved mentor, the great libertarian Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, again unlike his “libertarian” colleagues, never forgot for an instant that the State is the great predatory enemy of the human race, that the State is, in its very being, the organization and regularization of predation, exploitation, and robbery. He did not, as do most classical liberals and alleged libertarians, merely regard the State as another instrument of social utility, which in proper measure might be useful and even praiseworthy. Scorning evasion and compromise, Frank Chodorov saw the State, from early days to last, as a profoundly anti-social institution, the canker in the heart of any attempt at peaceful cooperation by free individuals in society.

I shall never forget the profound thrill -- a thrill of intellectual liberation -- that ran through me when I first encountered the name of Frank Chodorov, months before we were to meet in person. As a young graduate student in economics, I had always believed in the free market, and had become increasingly libertarian over the years, but this sentiment was as nothing to the headline that burst forth in the title of a pamphlet that I chanced upon at the university bookstore: Taxation is Robbery, by Frank Chodorov. There it was; simple perhaps, but how many of us, let alone how many professors of the economics of taxation, have ever given utterance to this shattering and demolishing truth? Frank was always like that; while the pusillanimous rightists pleaded with our rulers to cut the income tax by a few percent, Frank had the perception and the profound honesty to “tell it like it is.” While the general run of rightists decorously deplored the increase in the public debt and urged the government to retrench a bit, Frank Chodorov boldly and logically exhorted his readers: “Don’t Buy Bonds!” Since he was a real individualist and not a would-be member of a team of White House advisors, Frank’s “alienation” from the government of the United States was total; hence, he was the only one of the host of ostensible believers in the free market economy in this country to call for the outright repudiation of the public debt, and to see that such repudiation is infinitely more libertarian and infinitely less criminal than looting taxpayers to redeem that debt.

Being a genuine individualist, Frank again pursued the logic of liberty without flinching to arrive at an even more dangerous position: “isolationism”, in short, absolute limitation upon government action in the foreign as well as the domestic sphere. This brand of “isolationism” meant, quite consistently, economic and cultural exchange to the uttermost (free trade, freedom of migration, friendship with all foreign peoples), coupled with the political isolating of the U.S. government from all forms of meddling with and pushing around of the people of other countries. He abominated militarism or conscription in any form. For his intransigent opposition to American imperialism’s entry into World War II Frank Chodorov was obliged to leave his post as director of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York, and to eke out a precarious living as the owner, publisher, editor, and distributor of analysis, one of the best, though undoubtedly the most neglected, of the “little magazines” that has ever been published in the United States. Over a decade later, and toward the end of his writing career in 1955, Frank, as editor of the revived Freeman, did his best to reaffirm the values of isolationism and to stem the headlong and tragic rush of the right-wing toward the even more disastrous imperial crusade of the Cold War. Also toward the end Frank tried his valiant best to stem the concomitant rush of the right-wing to adopt the label of “conservative.” Frank knew his intellectual history; he was and always would be an “individualist”, and he recognized “conservatism” to be the embodiment of the creed of the ancient Statist enemy. Writing to protest the designation of himself as a “conservative” in the pages of National Review, Frank retorted: “anyone who calls me a conservative gets a punch in the nose.” His cri de coeur, alas, went unheeded; and a lot of deserving folk remain unpunched to this day.

Analysis was the crown of Frank Chodorov’s achievement. The chief writer as well as editor and publisher of this four-page monthly broadsheet, Frank, sitting in a dingy loft in lower Manhattan, month after month, published his beautifully written, penetrating, and infinitely logical-and hence radical,-essays. As a stylist he was a distinguished craftsman, emulating Albert Jay Nock; his characteristic mode was the quietly penetrating parable. And so: the attacks on taxation, on public schooling, on government debt, on militarism; and the loving evocation of his heroes -- Nock, Thoreau, Spencer. Going through the back files of analysis will not take much time; but the reward in communicating with the mind of a keen and fearless and clear-headed individualist at work will make this an experience infinitely more educational than years of courses at the multiversity.

For Frank as a person one adjective, corny though it may seem, persists in crowding out all the others: “lovable”. All of us loved Frank, and loved him deeply; even those who were scarcely fit to be in the same room with him, even those who used him only to betray everything he stood for, even they realized that here, above all others, was a man. Wedded to that keen intelligence and merriment, to that fearlessness and candor, was an infinite gentleness of soul, an almost childlike simplicity and open-heartedness that poured forth his generosity and his spirit to the eager young. From that very first meeting at the cocktail party I was drawn irresistibly to Frank, and would sit at his feet imbibing his wisdom and his unvarnished insight. Always eager to give young libertarians their start, he was the first to publish my own fledgling work; I remember proudly my first article in print: a review of H. L. Mencken’s A Mencken Crestomathy in the August, 1949 issue of analysis.

One of Frank’s great attributes was his love of intellectual discourse, of the play of ideas and the life of the mind. A son of rough-and-ready days of Old New York, Frank cut his eyeteeth in intellectual discussion and debate when these flourished in the cafeterias of the Lower East Side in the early decades of the century. It was characteristic of Frank that he once lamented to me that there didn’t seem to be any Marxists around anymore. With Marxists one could argue and converse; one could slash away at the labor theory of value and make an impact. But what can you do, he went on, with pragmatists, with men whose statism or socialism is not grounded upon any logic or principle?

It was a sad, sad day for me and maybe for Frank as well when his wonderful one-man publication died; it was like the death of a dearly beloved member of the family. Officially, as with almost all publications these days, analysis did not die, but was merged with the Washington weekly Human Events. In those days Human Events was not the conservative puff sheet it was later to become, but a newsletter of some distinction; but still, the loss was irreparable, even though Frank continued to write frequently for Human Events as associate editor. I shall never forget the last time I saw Frank as he was packing to make the move to Washington, a move that was for him truly cataclysmic for he was going, he said a bit fearfully, into the heart of the State itself, into an environment of almost pure statism, and he hoped that he would be able to remain uncontaminated by the deadly atmosphere.

Frank, in those days, was far more unsentimental and radical about politics than I. I was an ardent “extreme right-wing Republican”, in the days of course when this term meant isolationist and at least partial devotion to the liberty of the individual, and not a racist or enthusiast for the obliteration of any peasant whose ideology might differ from ours. But Frank, even then, would look at me quizzically and want to know why I was concerned with political clap-trap; he personally had not voted for decades and had no intention of ever voting again, regardless of the degree of statism of the particular candidate. I replied that extreme right-wing Republicans, though of little hope in rolling back the statist tide, at least would keep things from getting worse. “What’s wrong,” Frank countered, “with things being allowed to get worse?”

Frank remained a few years an exile in Washington, and then returned to New York for an all-too-brief stint as editor of the Freeman during 1955. Our paths crossed when I had the honor of succeeding Frank as Washington columnist for the now totally forgotten “little” West Coast magazine, Faith and Freedom. After 1955, however, Frank’s great voice was stilled. Partly for lack of suitable outlet, then largely from the tragic illness that was to cut him down following the death of his beloved wife, shortly after their golden wedding anniversary. Frank’s final flowering was his last ideological testament, the brilliantly written The Rise and Fall of Society, published in 1959, at the age of 72. For the rest, we must hastily draw a veil over these years, not only because of his lengthy illness but because of the betrayal of his name and his ideas in the latter years by those whom Frank, in his nobility of heart and simplicity of soul, embraced and trusted implicitly. The mark of Frank’s life now transcends all of that, as a giant blots out the pygmies that might attempt to surround him. And yet it will be a long time before they can be forgiven. One of the last times that I saw Frank I recalled to him how much I had loved analysis, and how much it had meant to me, both intellectually and personally. A gleam, a strong hint of the old merry twinkle, came back into his tired eyes, and he said, wistfully: “Ah yes, analysis. That was the one time in my life I could write what I really believed.”

As we gathered a few weeks ago at Frank’s funeral, we old acquaintances, friends, and enemies, there was a very real sense that in paying last respects to Frank we had found a life with a very special meaning, a meaning that could transcend the very real grief at his loss. Surely one part of that meaning is that we must all pledge to fight to bring about a world where a Frank Chodorov will receive all the honors, all the acclaim and even all the simple honesty of treatment, that is his just due. And especially we must do what he wanted us to do above all: to hold high the torch of liberty, and to pass it on to succeeding generations. We mourn and grieve his loss; but we are proud that Frank has joined the Immortals. Above all, we are proud and privileged to have known him and loved him as a friend.

Murray N. Rothbard

EDITORIAL

SDS:

THE NEW TURN

Among the activist organizations of the New Left, two and only two have had a direct impact on American life: SNCC and SDS (the Berkeley phenomenon has been important, but has not been contained in anyone organization.) SNCC, founded in 1960, was the first, and its militance, direct action, and spirit of participatory democracy provided the inspiration for the now far larger Students for a Democratic Society founded two years later. In the years following 1960, the Negro struggle provided the sole focus for New Left activity, and hence, SNCC, albeit a cadre, rather than a mass-membership organization, was alone in the moral and political forefront. But then a great widening of the struggle took place in the winter of 1964-65, which thereby served as the first crucial turning-point for the New Left; for the Berkeley Free Speech eruption in December 1964 and the shocking Johnson escalation of the Vietnam war two months later ineluctably brought to the fore the issues of university education and the ever more repellent war in Vietnam.

Granting the basic importance of change in the university, it was quickly evident that the horror of the Vietnam War would have to be the main focus of any opposition movement to the current reigning corporate state in America. It was also clear to the New Left that the traditional forms of peace protest were totally inadequate to the building of a truly mass antiwar movement in the United States. For the traditional (i.e. pre-1965) forms were either: (a) personal pacifist witness, such as the strapping of one’s body to Polaris submarines, or (b) the puling ineffectualities of wishy-washy Liberalism, as typified by SANE, pleading: “Please Mr. President, please follow your peaceful instincts and negotiate.” SANE Liberalism was not only ineffectual, it would have been little improved had it been effective: for Johnson simply to “negotiate” is very easy and quite trivial; a call for “negotiations” glorifies a mere process rather than the content of American actions. As for personal witness, however heroic and however lovable, this too was necessarily scattered and ineffective; to most opponents of war, stopping the American war juggernaut is more important than bearing individual witness to the sins of the imperial state. The New Left, searching for a new antiwar strategy, escalated the traditional form of demonstration or peace march, and decided, under the inspiration of the “official” Trotskyist groups (Socialist Workers Party, Young Socialist Alliance), to erect a single-issue peace movement, focussed on the theme of unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam.

The shift from SANE and from pacifist protest to unilateral withdrawal was an enormous step forward in maturity for the anti-war movement, which now for the first time really constituted an opposition movement to the U. S. government’s war program. But the movement was still trapped by the Trotskyist insistence on cleaving only to the single issue of the war and on the deliberate omission of all other important social issues, even the ones (such as conscription) which were directly related to the war system. The reason for this uncharacteristic “conservatism” and moderation on the part of the “Trots” is quite clear: the Trots are still part of the “Old Left”, and as such believe that the war can actually be stopped simply by forming a traditional, genteel mass pressure upon the President. In short, the static Trotskyist emphasis on public opinion and genteel protest ironically brought the Trots very close to the old SANE strategy of “Please, Mr. President” ---even if the Trotskyist “please” is made of considerably sterner stuff. The single issue approach, moreover, was hopelessly static, and totally overlooked the dynamism inherent in the bringing together in a united front of all sorts of opposition forces to the American Leviathan, on issues foreign and domestic. The basis for unity between black power advocates and the antiwar movement, for example, has become increasingly evident, even when limited to such narrow points as the preponderance of Negroes among the troops that do the fighting and dying in the imperial war in Vietnam. A single-issue movement, precisely because it lacks any sort of overall outlook or program, must needs be trapped within the framework of traditional “please, Mr. President” - pressure- politics; a multi-issue united front, on the other hand, bears at least the potential for a truly radical and all-encompassing movement of opposition to the workings of the corporate state.

Suffice it to say that, by the end of 1965, responsibility for the anti-war movement had devolved again upon SNCC and SDS. And, just when responsibility was again being thrust upon them, both SNCC and SDS were finding themselves, during 1966, at a crossroads; both found that they must take a decisive stand on internal disagreements that were beginning to paralyze their respective organizations. Both organizations faced their internal problems candidly and courageously in 1966; and, almost miraculously, both took a decisive and historic turn away from powerful holdovers of Old Left statism that were crippling their development. Both took a turn toward radicalism and toward liberty.

The SNCC turn was decisively toward black power and away from compulsory integration, thus transforming the entire thrust of the civil rights movement as it had existed for decades and embodied in such conservative-and-Old Left groups as the NAACP. This shift to black power is quite well known and needs little elaboration here (our views on the cry for power were expressed in an editorial in the Autumn, 1966 issue.) What needs to be added, however, is that Stokely Carmichael, dynamic young leader of SNCC, is following in the footsteps of the martyred Malcolm X not only in the concept of black nationalism but also in beginning to take steps toward internationalizing the Negro struggle. We stated in the Autumn issue that Negro nationalism, despite the low ratio of blacks to whites in the United States as a whole, makes a great deal of sense when we consider it to be concentrated in specific areas where Negroes do constitute a majority. But there is another way in which Negro nationalism can make practical sense by overcoming black minority status within the U. S.: and that is by internationalizing the struggle, by somehow transforming the arena of the conflict to the world scene as a whole, where whites, of course, are in a minority and the colored races in the majority. Malcolm’s creative idea, in the last months of his life, was to internationalize by having the African nations bring U. S. segregation laws to the bar of world opinion in the United Nations; while UN resolutions would have been of minor importance, Malcolm’s strategy might well have succeeded in pushing the African nations out of their current category of more or less willing client states for U. S. imperialism. Malcolm, however, was struck down before he had a chance to try out this approach. Now Stokely Carmichael has begun to internationalize the struggle by forming an alliance with the Pro-Independence Movement of Puerto Rico: each group agreeing to oppose U. S. “colonialism” both at home--against Negroes and Puerto Ricans--and abroad, each agreeing to oppose the draft and the Vietnam War, as well as, restores independence to the island of Puerto Rico. SNCC has also moved toward wider international concerns by courageously agreeing to join in the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal, to bring American war crimes in Vietnam to the bar of world opinion, if not of world justice.

But if SNCC’s admirable turn has received the full light of publicity, few people realize that SDS, a far larger organization, has also experienced a decisive turn this past year. SDS has always been in inner tension between two broad forces; on the one hand, an Old Guard, which, despite a great advance over older organizations, remains still at the core statist and Social Democrat, and whose ultimate goal in life is to join in cozy if critical coalition with the left-wing Liberals of the Democratic Party, as well as to fulfill the dogmatic Marxist dream of coalition with the supposedly radical “working class.” In short, the goal of the Old Guard, after all the radicalism and participatory democracy and criticism of “corporate Liberalism” is said and done, is to reintegrate SDS into old-style coalition party and pressure-group politics, and hence to reintegrate the Movement back into the encompassing folds of the American System. The Old Guard has unfortunately had in its camp most of the articulate ideologists, and most of the scholars, in SDS. Hence the reason that SDS’s Radical Education Project, an embodiment of those within the organization that have wanted to develop a groundwork of scholarship and research, quickly fell into the hands of the Old Guard. In contrast to the Old Guard have been the ever increasing numbers of younger and radical activists, scornful of Marxist or Social Democrat ideology and comfortable coalitionism, who, though often inchoately, are anti-statist and instinctively libertarian to the core of their being. It was due to Old Guard obstructionism that SDS, which had decided in the fall of 1965 to concentrate on a radical anti-draft program, suddenly abandoned the program and essentially did nothing during the first half of 1966. Despite the brilliant and inspiring leadership of Carl Oglesby, who had been elected as president over the Old Guard at the 1965 SDS convention, the Old Guard leadership was quickly taken into camp by the U. S. government. These leaders were flown down to spend some time with a few of the august Liberals in Washington, after which they were happy to scuttle the most fundamental issue that any youth group must face in this country: the battle against the slavery of conscription. It was easy for these Old Guard leaders to become what the Establishment happily refers to as “responsible”; they had had the makings of “responsibility” (i.e. crooking the knee to Power) long before.

The ambiguities of the old SDS may be seen in its major theoretical document, the famous Port Huron Statement, adopted at SDS’s founding convention at Port Huron, Michigan in June 1962. While an enormous advance over ADA-type Liberalism, the Port Huron Statement still contained considerable admixtures of Old Left thought. For example, the Port Huron Statement did not fully assimilate the decisive New Left insight of William Appleman Williams and the Studies on the Left group that Big Government as developed down through the New Deal and New Frontier, has not been a “progressive” instrument by which “the people” curbed and regulated Big Business. On the contrary, it has been precisely the instrument by which Big Business has been able to win for itself subsidies, privileges, and monopolies at the expense of the rest of the populace. At Port Huron, there was still the mistaken notion that government is essentially a people’s instrument for checking big business, but that business has been able to keep that control weak--the nub of the Old Left position. And, in contrast to the recent insights of Gabriel Kolko, Big Business is deemed to be monopolistic largely out of market forces; it was little realized at Port Huron that business monopolies are created by government intervention in the economy. Thus, the Port Huron Statement talks of “the benign yet obscuring effects of the New Deal reforms”; it speaks of government regulation not as creating cartels but as “ratify (ing) industry policies or serv (ing) as pallatives at the margins of significant business activity”; it considers government fiscal and monetary policy not as inflationary exploitation of the mass of the people but as “minor” because “greatly limited by corporate veto”; it welcomes the federal highway program as “meeting the needs of people” rather than seeing it as a vast boondoggle and subsidy for the benefit of the automobile and oil interests; it fails completely to understand the essential imperialism and corporate statism involved in any foreign aid program; and it makes its obeisance to classical Marxism by avoiding the stark reality of our state-dominated world and affirming that: “the basic decision-making environment of society, the basic structure of distribution and allocation . . . is still determined by major corporations . . . in comparative insulation from the public and its political representatives.”[1] Sic! Imagine the current SDS speaking in Establishmenty solemnity about the public’s “representatives” in government!

Thus, despite its great achievements and even greater potential, SDS contained within itself ambiguities and contradictions which were bound to intensify and polarize as time went on. Fortunately, year after year the Old Guard got older and the new younger elements were far more radical and anti-statist than their predecessors. Finally, SDS came into crisis during 1966; for, masses of radical students had flocked in to SDS during 1965 in response to its taking the lead against the war in Vietnam, only to find the anti-war effort shrivelling. For now, in the first half of 1966, SDS had abandoned its own anti-draft program and was therefore effectively blocked from giving any leadership to the anti-war struggle.

A hopefully decisive moment for SDS came at its national convention at Clear Lake, Iowa in August, 1966. There, it was expected to elect an Old Guardsman as president. But the grass-roots members of SDS, many of them wearing “I Hate the State” buttons, decisively defeated the Old Guard and elected a slate of national officers sympathetic to their goals. It was the convention at Clear Lake that marked a signal repudiation of the Old Guard by SDS; in effect, it meant the sharp weakening of Social Democrat influence in the organization. The path was cleared for new directions, for new aims, for giving the radicals and libertarians their head.

This critical event went almost undetected at the time, partly because it all happened in such a diffuse and inchoate fashion that few people who were not close to the workings of SDS could decipher what was going on. Furthermore, SDS now had its new turn, but it was still only theoretical; the new stance had not yet been embodied in a concrete program. This concrete program came into being at the December 28 meeting of the National Council of SDS at Berkeley. There the promise of Clear Lake was fulfilled; and SDS decided, by an overwhelming vote of 53 to 10, to focus its activities on an all-out struggle against the draft. Introduced by vice-president Carl Davidson and ably backed by national secretary Greg Calvert and others, the anti-draft resolution, though slightly watered down from Davidson’s original proposal, is one of the most superb resolutions ever passed by an antiwar opposition in this country. Thus, SDS declared “its opposition to conscription in any form. We maintain that all conscription is coercive and anti-democratic, and that it is used by the United States Government to oppress people in the United States and around the world.” It also flatly opposed any Liberal attempts to “reform” this evil by such proposals as compulsory universal service or a draft lottery. SDS, moreover, in a true act of heroism, declared that it “encourages all young men to resist the draft.” To that end, it has decided to: “organize unions of draft resisters” who “under no circumstances will allow themselves to be drafted.” Soldiers already in the armed forces will be encouraged to oppose the war in Vietnam; as SDS puts it, “this is an effort to reach men who, within a system of involuntary servitude, are indoctrinated as well as isolated from open discussion.” Information will be provided to those young draft resisters who decide to emigrate to Canada, and these will be encouraged to build international support for the draft resistance and anti-war movement. And on Vietnam, SDS declared its “opposition to the United States Government’s immoral, illegal, and genocidal war against the Vietnamese people in their struggle for self-determination.”[2]

The new orientation of SDS is incisively explained in a moving report by the new national secretary, Greg Calvert. Calvert explains that the new program on the draft:

does not talk about politics or the taking of power . . . It talks about “resistance.” And finally, behind its rhetoric and its programmatic details, it talks about the only thing that has given life and creativity to “the movement.” It talks about the kind of struggle which has been most meaningful to the new left--the revolutionary struggle which engages and claims the lives of those involved despite the seeming impossibility of revolutionary social change . . . It is the struggle . . . which says that “this is what a human being must do, no matter what the consequences, because this is what it means to be a human being” -- “this is the struggle for freedom in our time” -- “this is the revolt of slaves against their masters” -- “this is what being a ‘crazy nigger’ meant in the South and what it now means in the North” -- “this is the first act of freedom.”

One might dispute the political wisdom of the program. One may descry the lack of analysis. One may be appalled by the lack of direction. But unless one does not understand what it meant to be a “crazy nigger”

in a world of “good niggers”, it is impossible to understand what has created and recreated the new radicalism . . . It is a subjective struggle for individual freedom and meaning thrust up against the “objective” world which denies freedom and self-realization. It offers no clear path to power, no magic formula for success, only struggle and a new life. No promise is made, only the hope that struggle and confrontation with the existing system of inhumanity will create freedom in the midst of a life-destroying society.

We can speculate endlessly about how draft resistance might end the war. However, only talking about how resisting the draft will change peoples’ lives can create a draft-resistance movement. Call that “anarchistic”, “personalistic”, “religious”, or “crazy” -- you will not have dealt with the reality which created the movement . . . SDS just simply was not interested in talking about organizational problems or about political analysis; it revealed its deepest concern in talking about what people can do with their lives . . . and with their bodies . . . What counts is that SDS be involved in the creation of a cutting-edge in the freedom struggle.

SDS, as a movement, is a wedge into American society. It is involved in the creation of what Carl Oglesby called “space” -- breathing space, living space, freedom space--in a society which increasingly stifles freedom. Those who opposed the draft resistance program because they considered it “adventuristic” failed to understand the dynamic of “movement sensitivity.” If the wedge is to continue to create more and more space in the society, then we cannot recoil from those areas of greatest tension where the risks are most dangerous. We were once desperate: “Trapped in a System.” The movement has begun to pry open the jaws of that trap. The necessity which we must deal with involves keeping up the pressure on that trap until it is finally sprung. In the process, new life, new hope, and new freedom are created, -- but, above all, it engages the lives of people in new ways and that’s how revolutionary cadres are built.

Two years ago, Lee Webb and Paul Booth urged SDS to move “From Protest to Politics.” Now SDS has moved from “Protest to Resistance.”[3]

We can only stand in awe and admiration at the clear-sightedness, the gallantry, and the astonishing courage of the kids of SDS. But where, for the sake of all that is holy, are the adults? Must we always endure an America where the adults abandon their youthful radical vision in exchange for a comfortable and even prestigious seat at the trough? Are there none to dare, and dare mightily? If we had adults with one-tenth of the courage of SDS, we would be well on the way to achieving that free society that America always boasts of being.

One basic flaw remains which might imperil the success of the new turn: the fact that the overwhelming majority of the scholars and ideologists of SDS are Old Guardsmen who will struggle to return to the old paths. The problem will be particularly acute should SDS, as seems likely, attempt another overall theoretical statement of its views. If the radical kids at the grassroots leave ideology in disgust to the Old Guard, they might well find SDS shifting state-ward without their realizing it. The hostility to ideology per se at the grassroots is easy to understand; but it is vital for the radical kids at SDS to realize that not all ideology, not all theory, is a call for centralized control over the individual. There is a theory of liberty, a theory at the very least as solid and well-grounded as the various ideologies of statism. The crucial problem of today is to discover that body of theory and to make it known.

1.The Port Huron Statement (New York: Students for a Democratic Society, 1964), pp. 14-17.

2.“Anti-Draft Resolution,” new left notes (January 13, 1967), p. 1.

3.Greg Calvert, “From Protest to Resistance”, ibid., p. 1.

EDITORIAL

Ronald Reagan As Educator

For two years we have been instructed by the radical opposition at Berkeley on the evils of the swollen and gigantic multiversity that constitutes the University of California: the vast bureaucracy, the impersonality, the emphasis on quantity, the use of the multiversity to process swelling numbers of students into the military-industrial complex. All these stem from two root causes: the burgeoning of mass, indeed almost universal, education, and the development of governmental colleges. If the government educates, it is bound to educate for its goals and indoctrinate in its values. Now, Governor Reagan, in his first acts in office in California, has taken two important steps toward the dismantling, or at least the whittling down, of this elephantine growth: the dramatic slashing of the University of California budget, and the firing of the theoretician of the multiversity himself, Clark Kerr. Also, Reagan has moved to require the university to charge some tuition; most people consider this a terribly “reactionary” step, but what is so terrible about moving some of the burden for paying for education from the backs of the California taxpayers and on to the students themselves? It is an odd construction of the terms “progressive” and “humanitarian” to load the expenses of education onto to those who are not getting its often dubious benefits, and to allow the university students to enjoy these benefits while loading the costs onto others. What is progressive about that? Furthermore, charging tuition will help to reduce that selfsame swollen educational Leviathan which we all have been attacking for the last several years.

This brings us to the proper reaction to Governor Reagan’s blitz attack against the University of California. For those who have really been opposed to the multiversity, to Clark Kerr and the proliferation of bureaucracy, there is only one answer: to hail the Reagan moves and to cheer the ouster of Kerr. The fact that Ronald Reagan is manifestly not an eminent educator, or the fact that his ouster of Kerr was prompted by Kerr’s being “too weak” on the Berkeley radicals, is beside the point. The point is that these particular actions are in themselves healthy and even liberating, and therefore should be supported.

The reaction of the Liberals is interesting if predictable. Liberals are nothing if not smugly content with the American System, but let their cozy privileges and perquisites be in the slightest bit threatened, and they begin to howl like banshees. Hence, the nationwide instant hysteria by the Liberals about the ouster of Kerr, and the mobilizing of Establishmenty students and faculty, who again find common ground in defending centrist privileges against the bogey of the Ultra-Right. The important thing is that the New Left not get suckered into defending the privileges of Liberals in the name of the old coalitionist mythology of combatting the menace from the Ultra-Right. There is danger in not remembering, over and over again, the great lesson that has been painfully won over the years: “all right we are two nations” (in the immortal words of the early Dos Passos), and the Liberals are on the other side. In fact, there is good ground for holding that the Liberals are the major Enemy. To allow ourselves to get drawn in to a pro-Kerr coalition would be to abandon all the insights of recent years and to surrender to all the ills of the multiversity.

There is one Liberal argument which needs to be speared here and now: that the Reagan move to oust Kerr means the introduction of that terrible thing, “politics”, into the university. The point is that as soon as one builds a government university, politics is already there and cannot be eliminated: for it is the government that collects taxes from the citizens to pay for its operations. To “eliminate politics” from governmental universities means to eliminate any influence by the politicians who are at least in some degree responsive to the views of the voters, and to turn their control over to a self-selected oligarchy of Liberal educationists who do not have to be in any sense responsive to the wishes of the people. Given the unfortunate existence of governmental universities, there is no ideal solution; the best or rather, the least bad, way to operate in that case is to allow control by those who are at least responsive to the desires of the taxpaying public.

One of the pro-Kerr Regents, emerging from the session that ousted Kerr, complained bitterly that this was a happy day for both the “extreme right” and the “extreme left”. In saying this, the Liberal Regent caught hold of a profound truth: that the realities of the present day more and more require a coalition, even a fusing, of these two “extremes”. For both of these extremes have caught hold of part of the total truth about our society, and both of them can blend, far more easily than is generally believed, into a common assault upon the Totalitarian Center, upon that “menace” that is not, like the bogeys of the Ultra-Left and Ultra-Right, a phantom potential of some far-off future, but the group that is oppressing all of us, right here and now.

EDITORIAL

IS THERE A NAZI THREAT?

World War II has been aptly termed the Liberals’ War. More than that, it was the Old Left’s War, in which the entire Liberal spectrum, from proto-ADA types grouped in the Union for Democratic Action on the Right to the Communist Party on the Left, happily banded together to take their fighting places in the serried ranks of U. S. imperialism. Present-day peaceniks were proud to serve as Majors in the Field Artillery, as heads of the U. S. Army Orientation program to indoctrinate new recruits on the glories of America’s world mission, and as high officials in the War Production Board. It was the glorious high point of the Old Left’s cherished policy of what Staughton Lynd has trenchantly called “coalition with the Marines.” Your typical Old Leftist was not only apt to be in coalition with the Marines; he was even likely to have enlisted in that notoriously freedom-spreading wing of America’s armed personnel. The Old Leftist is apt to look back on his World War II experience as the high point in his checkered career; for then, as in no other time before or since, he was in the broad mainstream, arm-in-arm with Rockefeller agents, J. P. Morgan partners, and A. F. of L. bosses, taking us all onward and upward toward the New Tomorrow and the Century of the Common Man.

Essential toward this kind of a really broad coalition is, of course, the existence of a Nazi Threat, the more threatening and glowering the better, and the Old Left has been wont to look back wistfully on the Good Old Days of the Nazi Menace and to yearn hopefully for its renaissance. And so the Old Left periodically pokes around in the embers of the Nazi past, trying desperately to discover a recrudescence of the Enemy long gone.

The current white hope for a Nazi threat is the latest political events in West Germany. Onstage: the new Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, an authentic former member of the National Socialist Party, who edifyingly informs us that, from the very beginning, he did, down deep in his heart, oppose the whole system. And then: off in the wings, like a cloud so far no bigger than a man’s hand, the new National Democratic Party, which scored some successes in the recent West German elections. This party, we are assured by everyone, is “neo-Nazi.” Here we have the basic ingredients for a new anti-German and anti-Nazi mixture with which the Old Left will try manfully to revive the heady anti-Nazi coalition of yore.

The big problem with this Old Left approach is similar to its grievous error on the home front, where the Old Left is always looking to revive a very broad domestic coalition against the menace of the Ultra-Right, which can often be tenuously linked together with the foreign, German foe. It is the same problem that the Ultra-Right suffers from in its perpetual worry about a Communist Menace lurking under the bed and around the corner. That problem is that while the eye is fixed on some far-off, tenuous, and insignificant Menace, the real Menace is right here, and running the whole show. In short, the real problem is not some far-off Threat, but the people who are ruling and oppressing us right here and now. Whether it is a Communist Menace or an Ultra-Right Menace or a Nazi Menace we are all supposed to band together to prevent, it is the very people we are asked to rally behind who arc our real enemies. Often, of course, our ruling classes are happy and eager to foster the myth of the far-off menace, precisely because our rallying behind them distracts us from the real Enemy and enormously cements their power. This is the true meaning of all Popular Fronts with existing governmental rulers, of all Coalitions with the Marines, whether against Right-Wing or Left-Wing Threats.

The brilliant libertarian journalist Garet Garrett put it all very well thirty years ago when he wrote: “There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them.”[1] By “revolution” Garrett meant the New Deal, or, more widely, the great shift in the locus of power in America from the people, i. e., from a largely free market and free society, to the apparatus of the Leviathan State. Our task is not to guard the pass against some form of threat coming up the road; our task is to organize and do something about a “threat” that long ago succeeded all too well, succeeded in foisting upon America a corporate-state. Our problem is to dismantle our own existing imperial Behemoth.

What, then, of West Germany? The problem there is not whether Chancellor Kiesinger is a very appetizing specimen; clearly he is not. The real problem is that West Germany, especially now that France has been displaying a keen and manly independence, is U. S„ imperialism’s most pliant and powerful tool in all of Europe. West Germany, our former enemy, is the linchpin of America’s structure in Europe; let West Germany go, and America’s imperial position there would become untenable. This is the really important question: not whether or not West Germany’s rulers were Nazi party enthusiasts thirty years ago, but whether or not they are willing tools of American imperialism here and now. Of course, the tool can become a dangerous and ultra-imperialist force on its own hook: a Syngman Rhee can drive North, a Marshall Ky can call for invading North Vietnam, a West German finger on the nuclear trigger could force us to support a war of revanche for lost German territories in East Europe. But the important point is that West Germany has been hand-in-glove with U. S. imperialism since the end of World War II; and the vital goal for anti-imperialists is to split West Germany off from the American grip and to have it seek accomodation with the East rather than reunion through a war of “liberation.”

The important reality about West Germany is that, in the last several years, a danger has arisen to its role as right bower of American imperialism and mainstay of the Cold War in Europe. For the vast, sprawling Christian Democratic Party had lost its absolute majority in the German parliament, and the balance of power in West Germany between the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats had been held for the past several years by the unsung but extremely significant Free Democratic Party. The Free Democrats have been a quasi-libertarian party in many ways corresponding to the Left-Right tendency in this country; for the Free Democrats, like the Taft Republicans of an olden day, have been in favor of free enterprise, low budgets, and a peaceful foreign policy. With the outlawing of all Left parties in that bastion of the “free world”, the Free Democrats have become the only hope that Germany might leave the path of war and U. S. imperialism and pursue a peaceful, independent role in Europe.

The ascendancy of the Free Democrats as the swing party precipitated the ouster of the fanatically war-mongering Konrad Adenauer, whom the Free Democrats steadfastly refused to support, and his replacement by the centrist moderate Ludwig Erhard. More importantly, this meant the rise to the Foreign Ministry of Gerhard Schroeder, the leader of the pro-peace wing of the Christian Democrats and a man well-liked by the Free Democracy. In 1966, Erhard drove the Free Democrats to break off their support by two anti-libertarian actions: the raising of taxes, and use of these taxes to pay for the occupation armies of imperialism. The Free Democrat breakaway and the consequent fall of Erhard presented West Germany with two choices: one, a Social Democrat-Free Democrat coalition based on a peaceful foreign policy and a shift away from American imperialism; or two, a sinister “Grand Coalition” between the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats behind the pro-war stance of the Adanauer-Strauss wing of the Christian Democrat party. The Christian Democrats, propelled by Adenauer and Strauss who had long yearned for the crushing of the Free Democrats, proffered the Grand Coalition; and the spineless Social Democrats, turning down the chance to head the German government for the first time since the war, accepted the proposition. Germany is now ruled jointly by its two major parties, which has the same implications for democracy as if the Democrats and Republicans were to join in a formal coalition to govern the country. It is true that we are not so very far from this right now; our much-vaunted two-party system is always close to an ideal fusion into a frank and open one-party dictatorship. But the point is that open one-party rule means the abandonment of even the formal trappings of democracy, and that this has been accomplished without a single iota of criticism from America’s vaunted free press. Not only criticism; there was hardly mention of the fact that all this was done in order to end the influence of the Free Democrats and to eliminate their powerful threat to American hegemony over West Germany.

The big “threat”, then, is not the phantasm of a West German conquest of the United States; the real problem is the continuing American rule over West Germany. It is within that context that we must see the recent beginnings of the National Democratic Party in Germany. The significance of this party is not so much its “neo-Nazi” trappings, as that it, like the Free Democrats, offers the Germans a foreign policy independent of American dictation. Neither the National Democrats nor even Kurt Kiesinger constitutes the real German problem; that problem is the smashing of the Grand Coalition that rules West Germany today.

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1.Garet Garrett, “The Revolution Was,” in The People’s Pottage (Caldwell, Id.,: The Caxton Printers, 1953), p. 15.

EDITORIAL

LIBERALISM

AND THE CIA

In the wake of the scandal of the NSA, several points need to be highlighted. In the first place, let all attacks cease forevermore on those of us who hold what has been universally smeared as the “conspiracy theory of history”: i. e., on those of us who believe in the laws of cause and effect, who believe that men do not act purposelessly and without motive, and who believe in using our intellects to trace connections and frame hypotheses in analyzing the world and not merely to record officially proclaimed events. Secondly, let all attacks cease upon the “paranoia” of radicals; who’s “paranoid” now?

Even more profoundly, the NSA scandal provides illuminating and unforgettable insights into the workings of Liberalism as well as the workings of contemporary American society. For example: the NSA leadership had decided two years ago to terminate the huge secret subsidies from the CIA because this was repugnant to “an open democratic society”; yet the subsidies were still being used when the scandal broke because, after all, “the CIA was financing a considerable portion of the association’s overseas activities and these could not be dropped suddenly.”[1] Certainly not! Despite the supposed yearnings for an “open democratic society”, the NSA leaders did not, of course, reveal the sordid story to the American public; instead, they were extremely anguished when the courageous and indefatigable Ramparts magazine decided to break the story. For: “our whole credibility has been based on the image that we are independent and left liberals. Now everything we do or have done will be tainted whether we’re guilty or not.” Yes, isn’t that a crying shame? And the topper: “they expressed fears that it (the Ramparts story) would harm the liberal enlightened wing of the CIA and destroy NSA.”

So here we have it! The “liberal enlightened wing of the CIA” indeed! Here is the mentality of coalitionist Old Left Liberalism stripped bare and blazing in all of its glory. This is the same mentality that would, if the Nazis were now in power, look to strengthen the “liberal” wing of Nazis under Goering so that bad old Goebbels or Streicher wouldn’t receive too much power. This is the same mentality that would immediately search for the “moderates” in Murder, Incorporated. The logic of Liberalism is pushed to its inexorable and shameless conclusion.

Such, then, is the face of Liberalism nakedly revealed for all to see. Here are men -- and youths -- willing, just as the Egg of Head was depicted in Barbara Garson’s brilliant MacBird, to accept any conditions in exchange for working within the corridors of Power. Here are men whining in terms of liberal rhetoric about the open society while they accept covert handouts and domination from America’s hired gang of patriotic thugs. And, when found out, worried about their “image” and “credibility” and about the poor “liberal” wing of the CIA! Sheldon Sachs, president of the student government at the City College of New York, expressed not only the Liberal creed but the larger American Credo as well; in commenting on the affair he called it “grossly exaggerated”: “The funds have to come from somewhere.” Yes, don’t they?

Also illuminating is the revelation of the role of supposedly private and independent and charitable tax-exempt foundations in serving as covert conduits for CIA money. This sort of thing needs extensive investigation; part of it was revealed a few years ago in the pioneering work The Invisible Government, by David Wise and Thomas Ross, but obviously this was only the beginning of study of the problem.

Above all, let us carry away from this affair the insight that, to put it baldly and bluntly, Liberalism is, in essence, a front for the CIA!

1.New York Times, February 15, 1967, p. 18.

The

Last Indian War

By Janet McCloud And Robert Casey*

The Indians of the Pacific Northwest are engaged in what may well be called the last Indian war. They are taking a stand against the never-ending encroachment and aggression of their white neighbors within the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The Indians’ fishing stations on the rivers of those three states are coveted by powerful politically-minded sportsmens’ groups, who are pushing the State officials to get the Indians off the rivers.

Along the banks of the Nisqually River the spotlight is focused upon a band of pathetically outnumbered Indians who are waging a series of bitter and bloody battles against the police power of the State of Washington. Equally small bands of Indians are springing up all over Washington State to fight for the last shred of the rights guaranteed to them through numerous treaties with the United States Government.

Governor Dan Evans, one of the nationally publicized new faces of the Republican Party, is brutally wielding the police power of this state in an effort to force the Indian people into submissive compliance with his demand that the Indians give up their fishing stations for the exclusive use of the sportsmen.

It all began in 1854, when the President of the United States sent his offical emissary--Isaac Stevens--to negotiate treaties with the Northwest Indians in behalf of the federal government. (Actually, his mission was to spread a thin layer of legality over the theft of Indian land, which was already occurring in the Oregon Territory as it had everywhere else in the country.) It was necessary to do this prior to the granting of statehood to Washington and Oregon, for no state constitution can be formed, or any legal foundation arrived at, until title to the land is securely vested in the hands of the federal government. Americans have always displayed a fine hand for legality--no matter how you steal a thing, in the end make it look legal.

These negotiations followed the usual pattern of making treaties with the unlettered Indians, a blanket take-it-or-leave-it choice. The whites drew up the so-called sacred documents and used interpreters to give the Indians an entirely different version of the treaties, which needed the Indians’ signatures to make them legal and binding.

In the Oregon Territory on December 26, 1954, the first treaty was negotiated on the banks of the Medicine Creek with the Nisqually, Squaxin, Puyallup and allied tribes. The Indians protestingly gave up their homelands--millions of acres, today worth billions of dollars. They were allowed to reserve a small reservation to live upon, more for the purpose of isolating the Indians than as a concession. When the Indians learned that they were going to be confined they became very worried, for these were fisher-people and nomadic in their fishing habits. Stevens assured them over and over that he wanted only the land; he further stated that all the fish and game belonged to the Indians, and would belong to them forever. The right to fish was more important to these northeast Indians than the land. The Indians reserved their fishing rights unrestricted.

The current assault on the Indians who are living a way of life that is natural to them was legally triggered by an injunction prohibiting Indians from fishing in their ancestral fishing stations. Judge John Cochran, Pierce County Superior Court, Tacoma, set aside the hundred-year-old treaty commitment of the federal government and forbade Indians to fish on the Nisqually River in Washington State. This was done at the behest of the state’s Game and Fisheries Departments, which in turn are carrying out Governor Evans’ program.

It is extremely questionable whether any state judge has the legal power to set aside or nullify a treaty drawn up between the federal government and the “Indian Nations” (so designated in the language of the treaty itself, which was written solely by the whites and upon which the very foundation of Washington statehood is based). Legally only an act of Congress can revoke treaty obligations and commitments, but the letter of the law never seems to apply to Indian land and rights as it does to others. (To illustrate: just imagine the furor that Governor Evans would create if he took the same attitude to the treaty commitments the federal government has made to various Saigon regimes, as they applied to the State of Washington.)

Following this injunction a series of clashes occurred between the protesting Indians and the state wardens. To cite a few of the most notable ones: On October 7, 1965, two Indian fishermen, Billy Frank and Alvin Bridges, were tending their nets when state wardens came up the Nisqually River in a big power boat and rammed their frail canoe without any warning. It was a dark, rainy night. One of the fishermen was spilled into the ice-cold, dangerous river. Fortunately, despite being dressed in heavy winter gear he made it safely to shore -- right into the arms of wardens waiting there.

The next clash was more serious. On October 9, 1965, also late at night, wardens cornered two teenage boys on a log jam in the middle of the Nisqually River. Word flew out somehow, and the Nisquallies came flying from every direction. The wardens were now the cornered ones, and the enraged Indians would not let them go. Fights erupted everywhere. Indian warcries cut through the still night air, causing the wardens to suffer paroxysms of fear. They sent out a frightened call for reinforcements. Before the night was over every available unit of the Thurston County Sheriff’s office, the Pierce County Sheriff’s office, the Fort Lewis Military Police and Governor Evans’ newly formed and specially trained State Troopers was at the scene. Some cars were busted up as well as some people. Finally Thurston County Sheriff Clarence Van Allen, long a friend to the Indians, talked them into calling it a stalemate. The police withdrew, and no Indians were arrested. However, the wardens did get away with an Indian’s canoe, allegedly to use as court evidence. Though no one was arrested and no court case came of the incident, the canoe still has not been returned.

Then on October 13, 1965, the Survival of American Indians Association held a protest fish-in on the Nisqually River. It was highly publicized and was intended as a protest to the continued night raids of the state wardens against the Nisqually Indians. Fish-ins had been used in the past by Indians as their way of protesting the State’s encroachment on their treaty fishing rights. It has been a peaceful way to vent the Indian’s growing bitterness and hostility at the whites’ never-ending invasion of their land and rights. That ended on October 13! Those who volunteer to go fishing in violation of the court injunction usually end up sitting in jail. Their purpose is to try to obtain a writ of habeas corpus from a higher court, as this is the cheapest, tho the hardest, way to overturn a lower-court ruling. It is the only way that these poverty-stricken Indians can go. To this date the higher courts of Washington have flatly refused even to hear these writs--another violation of their court rules.

The October 13th fish-in turned into the bloodiest conflict of all, due to the sadistic actions of the wardens and their very evident hatred of the Indians. This battle took place at Frank’s Landing, which is Federal trust land, posted with NO TRESPASSING signs as required by the Federal Trespass Law. Local news media sent their photographers and reporters to cover the story. Interested organizations sent their qualified representatives to observe the fish-in demonstration. The cameramen set up their equipment long before the fish-in was scheduled to begin. State wardens watched impassively from behind bushes on the other side of the river, the exact number of their forces well hidden from the Indians and non-Indian observers. There were about twenty-seven Indians, eight of them men and the rest women and children; there were more reporters than Indians. Later it was learned that the State’s forces consisted of about 100 strong; game and fisheries wardens had been called in from all over the state, and Governor Evans’ special unit of the State Patrol was waiting about a half mile from the scene, with all the weapons of war to use against the unsuspecting Indians.

The Indians’ boat contained eight occupants: two Indian fishermen, Donald McCloud and Alvin Bridges; one teenage boy, Dorien Sanchez; two boys under ten years of age, Don McCloud, Jr. and Jeffrey McCloud; the family dog, Tex; and three newspapermen. At the preannounced time the boat proceded out on the Nisqually River, and the Indian fishermen set their net. From the other side of the river shouts were heard: “Get em!” “Get the dirty S. O. B.’s!” In the twinkling of an eye, three big powerboats emerged from the underbrush, were quickly launched and used to ram the Indians’ boat. No attempt was made to secure peaceful arrests, and at no time during the entire riot, which lasted only twenty minutes, were the Indians told that they were under arrest.

The Indians on the beach, now thoroughly incensed at the actions of the State wardens who had turned their intended peaceful demonstration into an excuse to beat up and terrorize the Indians, began pelting the State’s forces with anything they could lay their hands on. A large force of wardens, who had been hiding on the Indians’ side of the river, then closed in on the Indians, and the fighting became general. The Indians, tho badly outnumbered, gave a good accounting of themselves -- even the children.

After the dust cleared, six Indians found themselves under arrest, charged with resisting arrest. (Alvin Bridges, 41, and his wife Maiselle, 41; Don McCloud, 39, and his wife Janet, 31; Susan Satiacum, 23; and Don George, Jr.) In the squad cars the fighting continued, but here the newsmen were kept away and could verify nothing. When one of the women was questioned after her release she said, “The way they were acting, we were afraid they were going to take us somewhere and kill us. They can do anything they want to, because they wear a badge.”

Later that evening there was another clash on the Nisqually River banks. Two more Indians were arrested, Joe Kautz and Harold Gleason. Small boys were hauled in, but Sheriff Van Allen refused to book them, and they were released and sent home. Indian mothers and fathers looked far into the night for their young boys, who were hiding in the woods from the now drunken wardens (they had been celebrating their victory) who were chasing Indian boys with pistols and clubs. One of the guns was knocked out of a warden’s hand by a young Indian. A search was conducted until it was found; according to Washington state law, wardens are not allowed to carry firearms.

The State’s actions were directed by Walter Neubrich, game director, and Robert Josephson, fisheries director. Later Mr. Neubrich proudly told the reporters, “Our men are not trained in riot control, but I was sure proud of the way they handled this.”

Thor Tollefson, State Fisheries Director, had told newsmen before the fish-in that “no unusual law-enforcement measures were to be used against the Indians.” Therefore everyone assumed that the wardens would take down the Indians’ names and ask the local judge to issue warrants, with the actual arrests to be made by the sheriff’s department; this was the way it had been done in the past.

The next day, fully aware of the improper procedure of his departments, Governor Evans told the worried public that the entire blame was due “to the irresponsible elements of the Indian population”; he further stated, “The Indian treaty is nothing but a worthless piece of hundred-year old paper and it isn’t even worth the paper it’s written on.”

Fortunately for the Indians, the battle was well watched and photographed by a small army of competent observers. They told of the arrival of a large force of wardens, carrying nightsticks, long seven-inch flashlights (totally unnecessary in the bright sunlight, but a formidable weapon well known to them) and at least one blackjack, which the Indians got away from them.

State Representative Hal Wolfe of Yelm, a Republican, arrived on the scene after the Indians had been taken to jail. After he had talked to the crying and bruised children, he immediately went to the jail to find out what had happened. He told the press, “Governor Evans assured me that no on-the-spot arrests were going to take place. Frank’s Landing has been used as a fishing site by the local Indians for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure, but in my mind Gestapo methods were used against the Indians today.”

Parris Emery, a 69-year-old television cameraman, was one of the few to be in a good position to take pictures of the riot. He obtained good shots of two young Indian boys being systematically worked over by wardens; when the wardens spotted Emery photographing them, they turned on him, knocking him around, twisting his arms, and trying to break his camera. They did succeed in dumping him into the river, but he saved his film. It was Emery’s unedited film that was seen nationwide.

Another newsman, Darrel Houston of KIXI Radio, was threatened with arrest by Ed Sarardov, fisheries warden, when Houston attempted to get the name of an officer who was seen striking an Indian boy with a steel pipe. This warden officer refused to remove his hand from his jacket pocket, when surrounded by newsmen and witnesses demanding to see what he had concealed. One witness, however, did get movie film of this incident, and another got pictures of the same warden hitting an Indian girl in the mouth and pulling her long hair. The girl was Valerie Bridges, who was trying to help her mother Maiselle. Other children displayed marks that were obviously made by something harder than a man’s fist. While an arrested Indian was being held by two wardens, another officer was seen striking him in the small of the back with his nightstick, but when a photographer tried to get a picture of this the wardens forcefully stopped his efforts.

One bystander, after watching the brutal manhandling of women and children, told a reporter, “I think I’ll go home and throw up.”

Two men from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which is universally hated -- despised -- by the Indians) were seen sitting in their car, a safe distance from the scene. When questioned by reporters, they refused to give their names, stating, “We’ve been instructed not to get involved.” They were identified by the Indians and by one reporter as A. G. Risswick and Charles B. Allen. They had talked to Janet McCloud before the fish-in began, and had asked her to take pictures of everything for them. They said that they had been sent by their superiors to observe. Later they tried to get statements from the Indians, but the Indians refused to give them any because they were furious at the cowardly actions of these federal officers. An Indian told them, “You were sent here to watch and you were too scared to get out of your car; why should we do your job that you’re getting paid to do?”

Even the later encounter that evening was witnessed by a capable observer. Dr. Evan Roberts, Jr., of the American Friends Service Committee came to try to learn more of the day’s events. He went with some of the Indian parents who were worriedly looking for their young boys. When he arrived at the scene where the night battle was taking place, he was hit in the stomach with a nightstick and told by state officials that he had no right to be present. The Quaker doctor stuck to his position that he had every right to be present. After he had taken in the scene, which was lit up by the wardens’ flashlights, he told of wardens flashing pistols around and of smelling alcohol on some of the wardens’ breath. He accused them outright of being intoxicated; he told them he was a doctor and therefore an expert on the subject. Later he made a statement to the press and a report to Governor Evans.

In another sworn statement, a qualified observer said, “They were like animals that smell blood. Their whole treatment of the Indians was cold, premeditated and cruel, whereas the Indians’ reaction was normal, in the face of a situation where their legal test was being used as an excuse to terrorize them.”

This statement pinpoints the basic difference between the current Negro revolt and the ever-continuing Indian struggle.

The Negro faces discrimination which sometimes turns into race hatred as he struggles for assimilation. The Indian on the other hand has alway faced unreasoning race hatred from the very first. Indians fight desperately to retain an Indian way of life in the face of all the forced assimilation policies of the United States government. In fact, they despise much of the white culture and the values of an avaricious and aggressive white society.

While the fishing war simmered on the banks of the Washington rivers, the legal machinery in the courts continued to grind. In Tacoma five Indians were convicted for illegal fishing and were sentenced to sixty days, suspended on condition they abide by the court injunction. In Olympia the same afternoon six Indians pleaded not guilty to a charge of interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty.

On October 26, 1965, in Seattle, the embattled western Washington Indians staged a protest march in front of the Federal Court House. Only about fifty people turned out for the march, which had been widely publicized. The Stillaguamish tribe sent a banner, and a few eastern Washington Indians were present. (Once more the total absence of liberal, progressive, or left-wing whites underlined the basic difference between an Indian demonstration and a Negro demonstration -- whites simply do not support the Indians’ struggle; they all, whether left or right, reside upon Indian land, and they don’t intend to return any part of that land or to make restitution.) The marchers passed out pamphlets explaining their just cause, to all who would accept them. Their flyer contended that the Washington officials, in their persecution of the Indians, were violating the United States Constitution, existing federal laws, and also the Washington State Constitution and existing state laws. It went on to accuse the state’s game and fisheries departments of deliberately enacting fish-conservation laws which are at variance with existing federal treaties and therefore unconstitutional.

Reuben Wright, a dedicated tribal council leader of the Puyallup tribe, was doing a sixty-day jail sentence for contempt of court in violating the fishing injunction. In the same jail on the same charge was the controversial self-styled chief, Bob Satiacum. Both of these Indians had been volunteers at an earlier fish-in demonstration on the Puyallup River, which had been led by the wellknown movie star Marlon Brando, who had come to the state with the National Indian Youth Council. Brando was not arrested for his fishing activities, but later many Indians were. Mrs. Reuben (Elaine) Wright and her six children and Mrs. Bob (Susan) Satiacum and her children led the marching demonstration at the Federal Court House in Seattle.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs then announced that only the federal government had legal power to regulate the Indians’ treaty fishing rights, although all three major parties involved in the dispute (the Indians, the states, and the federal government) now said that they would welcome an early ruling by the US Supreme Court. That is what the Indians have wanted all along.

The Indian people have always known that it is not their fishing activities that cause the dwindling of the salmon supply. They have stated over and over that the cause is the evils attendant on white society. The Indian people account for less than 1% of the total salmon catch. To understand the causes of depletion, it is necessary to take into account the entire life cycle, from the time the spawned salmon eggs hatch and the fish leave for their long journey to the arctic icecap, til they finally come back to their native riverbeds to spawn. The salmon fingerlings that start down the rivers face many dangers, both civilized and natural. Industrial water pollution, hydroelectric dam turbines, irrigation silts, trout season, and natural predators are just a few of the causes of salmon fingerling depletion. There is an immediate need to eliminate or to control more effectively the civilized causes of salmon depletion instead of pointing an accusing finger at foreign fishing nations and American Indians.

When and if the salmon reach their destination and maturity, they start their long, perilous journey home. As the salmon leave their comparatively safe refuge under the arctic icecap, the first danger they encounter is the never-ending maze of international fishing nets. The big commercial fishing nations are the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada, Japan, and Norway. What salmon survive to reach Puget Sound waters are followed by the Americans who take another large number of them. The salmon, tired and hungry, are unfair prey for the baited hooks of sportsmen, whose boats literally blot out the waters of Puget Sound.

Finally, the survivors reach the mouth of their native river, where they become rejuvenated by the fresh water. (Indians say that they become like intoxicated people, full of fight and power.) The salmon’s instincts and perceptions are sharpened -- an Indian fishnet does not last for long, for in the salmon’s fight fur survival they can easily break the strongest net, and those that follow go thru the holes.

The salmon travel a roadway in the rivers, which of course cannot be seen; yet if the Indians cannot find this roadway they cannot catch even one fish. It is a hard struggle for the majority of Indian fishermen to earn a decent living at their much-loved occupation. The few fish that survive to reach the Indians’ fishing stations are either too strong to be caught, or too puny (colloquially, the condition of salmon weakened, battered and emaciated from their journey, as they near the spawning grounds where their lives will end -- editor’s note) to sell for food fish. It is indeed a struggle for survival for both the salmon and the American Indians.

Nevertheless, it is a fact that the Indian people have never been despoilers of nature; they are the first and original conservationists. They have never contended that there is no need for stringent conservation laws, for they realize that non-Indians do not seem to understand the need to obey Nature’s conservation laws. As the Washington Fisheries Department is under the control of the large fishing industries and the Washington Game Department is under the control of the large, politically-minded sportsmen’s clubs, the Indians have a just fear of being placed under their control. For it would in no way assure the survival of the salmon -- all it would accomplish is the destruction of the Indian fishing industry, which has been in active existence for 800 known years.

On November 4th, a jury deadlocked over Chester Satiacum’s trial in Tacoma for illegal fishing. The foreman told reporters that after three hours of deliberation there were still some “who said they would be willing to hold out for a week if necessary”. The Puyallup Indian was freed.

On November 9th Mrs. Chester Satiacum was given a thirty-day suspended sentence for illegal fishing. She did not have funds for an attorney and had to speak for herself. Attorneys are hard to find who will take the Indians’ fishing battle, because too much pressure is brought on them by the State.

In November the Survival of American Indians Association staged another fish-in on the Nisqually River. While some fifty Indians cheered them from the beach, Don Matheson, Survival Association president, Janet McCloud, woman warrior, and Alvin Bridges entered a boat and went fishing. Again State wardens were on the other side of the river, but this time they did not interfere. As before, the event had been well publicized. When Governor Evans was questioned by reporters on what action he intended to take, he stated, “There aren’t any fish in the river this time of the year anyway”. So the Indians took particular delight in displaying their net full of fish. (At the October 13th fish-in, the net that the Indians tried to set was not capable of catching fish, as it had no leadline.) Among the observers this time were two Episcopalian clergymen, a college professor, and for the first time some Negro sympathizers -- who didn’t permit anyone to doubt whose side they were on.

On December 7th the Survival of American Indians Association secured the services of Mr. Jack Tanner to represent them in court. Sisters-in-law Clara and Susan Satiacum (wives of Chester and Bob Satiacum) were found guilty of a series of charges stemming from a wild boat ride on the Puyallup River on September 21st. The two young Indian women had led eighteen Tacoma police a frenzied race, for an hour and a half, up and down the river before they were finally cornered and arrested -- and roughed up by the police. Susan wore the marks from the handcuffs for a long time. The judge sentenced them to sixty days and thirty days respectively. Mr. Tanner immediately gave notice of appeal and they were released on bond.

On January 29th the angry and embittered Indians held a night rally at Frank’s Landing. It was really more of a war party. This time over two hundred Indians attended, and about fifty non-Indians, though the weather was rainy and cold. Indian leaders from all over the state spoke over a loudspeaker and protested the Gestapo actions of Governor Dan Evans’ departments. This all took place around a huge bonfire -- the light from the fire could be seen for miles. A large party of Indian war dancers came from the Yakima tribe, led by Alex Wesley. Don Matheson introduced the speakers, who included Bob Satiacum of the Puyallup tribe, Janet McCloud, of the Tulalip, Frank Allen of the Stillaguamish, and many more. Satiacum likened Evans to Hitler and his methods used against the Jewish people. Mrs. McCloud told the crowd that they intended to burn Governor Evans in effigy because of the way “he unleashed the police power of this state to come down on us like a bunch of mad dogs”. The climax of the demonstration came when the Yakima did an authentic war dance around the fire and two young Indian girls threw a lifesize effigy of Governor Evans into the flames, while the Indians cheered and emitted war whoops. Reporters and cameramen had turned out in large numbers to cover the event. An Indian leader told a reporter that “this state is the Mississippi of the West” for the Indian people. State men were observed walking around with walkie-talkies and a large force was seen across the river. The Indian leaders did not want to be accused of another massacre, so they ignored their presence.

February 6, 1966, Negro comedian Dick Gregory joined the Indian fight and offered his services to the Indians. The Indians invited him to fish-in with them on the Nisqually River, and he accepted the invitation. Two Nisqually Indians, Leonard and Louis Squally, went in the boat with Gregory, who caught two steelhead. State wardens watched, but as in the case of Marlon Brando, did not arrest him. After the fish-in Gregory told in a news conference that the Indians’ treaty fight was one of the most important civil-rights fights going on in the nation at this time. He went on to define the civil rights movement as a campaign for human dignity for all men, not just for Negroes.

The next day Governor Evans branded Dick Gregory’s participation as “just another publicity stunt”.

Meanwhile Gregory sent for his wife Lillian, who came west to join her husband. Soon they were both in jail. Although they could have bailed out after entering their plea of not guilty to the charge of illegal net fishing, they both remained in jail to publicize the case.

On February 17th Dick Gregory bailed out of jail in order to join Janet McCloud, Bob Satiacum, Frank Wright, Puyallup tribal chairman, and the state’s man Robert Lasseter, fisheries warden, at a nearby Catholic college in a discussion about the fishing controversy. Gregory stated that he intended to sue the state for false arrest. Mrs. McCloud denounced Evans’ charge that Gregory was seeking publicity: “All Dick Gregory is doing is casting a spotlight upon a problem that’s been here for over a hundred years, and it’s well known that people who do dark deeds don’t like light cast upon them”. Bob Satiacum bitterly denounced the whole history of Indian and white relations and concluded by stating that “almost every word that the state puts out is a lie”. Some students boo’ed this, but it’s a historical fact nevertheless. While all the Nisquallies were at the campus, the state made a raid and took the fishing nets from the river.

March 1, 1966, four Indians refused to show up in Tacoma Superior Court to show cause why they should not be held in contempt of court for violating the fishing injunction. In these rigged show-cause cases the Indians are not allowed a jury trial. Judge John Cochran issued arrest warrants for Alvin Bridges, Herman Johns, Jr., and Louis and Leonard Squally.

It reminded one local writer of Irish rebel days, when someone on the run was described as “a man on his own keep” --meaning that the English were hunting him. A strong strain of Irish and Scotch blood is present in the Washington Indians, the legacy of early fur traders, so the allusion to the moors and bogs of Eire is not so farfetched. Only now their descendants are in hiding along the thickly forested streams and hills of the Nisqually reservation. However, both areas are extremely wet and cold.

While Mrs. Gregory was sitting it out in jail the Indians held a protest march which started in front of the Justice Building at the capitol grounds and proceeded to the jail, where they took up flowers and candy to Mrs. Gregory in appreciation of her efforts. From there the marchers went to Governor Evans’ mansion to protest his persecution of them. The governor didn’t show his face, but he had a large force of his special unit there and they were very nervous. Again only a small group showed up to participate in the protest march.

Now the Muckleshoot tribe said that they intended to have a fish-in on the Green River. They also have a fishing injunction against them; in fact, they were the first tribe to be hit. They asked Dick Gregory to join them, and he accepted. It was decided by both the Muckleshoots and the Nisqually Indians that they would have two fish-ins on the same day, the first to be held on the Nisqually at nine in the morning and the second on the Green at one in the afternoon. The press was not informed until an hour before the first fish-in, so at the Nisqually only ten people and two newsmen showed up. Dick Gregory had decided to fish in both of the demonstrations. When the wardens saw how small the Nisqually force was, they moved in on the Indians in large numbers. Edith and Janet McCloud, sisters-in-law, tried to order the wardens off the federal land, when the wardens came in to arrest Gregory. A pushing match started and the two women were arrested and again charged with interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duties. They entered a plea of not guilty, and their case was set over for a jury trial. Gregory was charged with illegal net fishing, and all three stayed in jail on a hunger strike.

Meanwhile, on the Green, the Muckleshoot had a large turnout of Indians and non-Indian spectators, about three hundred people in all. When the large force of game wardens descended on the Green River fish-in and started to rough up a young Indian girl, the assembled Indians promptly turned on them and stoned them--men, cars, and everything in sight. The wardens left the scene and made no on-the-spot arrests. Later four Indians who had gone fishing were arrested and their bail was set at $1,000 each. Their attorney refused to have anything to do with them; the Survival of American Indians Association went good for their bail bonds. And the American Civil Liberties Union finally took a stand for the Indians and provided an attorney to represent the four Muckleshoots. Mr. Bill Hansen, attorney, promptly filed a writ of prejudice against the judge who issued the arrest warrants, and it was granted. The Indians have been victims of political-minded judges since this state was formed; it’s about time attorneys took a direct stand against this discrimination with a legal cloak.

II

In January of 1964 the Nisqually, Puyallup and allied tribes formed the Survival of American Indians Association for the purpose of channeling their energies into a united fight. It is this group of Indians that has been the leaders of resistance. Other efforts of the Association have been to raise much-needed funds for legal assistance when requested by an Indian or Indian tribe, to provide bail bonds, food and moral support to battle-weary Indians.

The Indians have relied largely upon their fish-in demonstrations as their direct action program, as the few marches they have staged have been unsuccessful for lack of support by the public or by the Indians themselves. The main reason for the Indians’ reluctance to march is that many people tend to lump the Negro problem and the Indian problem into one barrel when both use the same tactics. Indians want the distinction understood: the Indians are dead set against assimilation into the white society, contrary to the Negroes who appear to welcome assimilation. It must also be remembered that the Indian people are large property owners, and most of their problems come from the illegal attempts of the whites to take the Indian’s property--against his will.

The State’s confiscation of thousands of dollars worth of fishing gear (allegedly for future court evidence) was done as an economic blow to the Indians because of their resistance to the State’s injunctions. It is hard for these people to replace the hand-dug-out canoes, boats, outboard motors, and fishing nets, which have either been handed down from their fathers or bought with their life’s earnings. In fact, the dugout canoes are irreplaceable. These confiscations are just a way to beat the Indians down, identical to the policy of shooting the buffalo in an earlier time.

The hostile attitude against the Indian people by a large percentage of the general public is reflected by statements made to the Indians by judges of Washington courts.

Judge Jacques, Pierce County Superior Court, who over two years ago issued an injunction against the Nisquallies, told the Indians, “They never meant for you people to be free like everyone else.”

Pierce County Assistant Prosecutor Harmon in Justice Court said, “We had the power and force to exterminate these people from the face of the earth, instead of making treaties with them. Perhaps we should have. We certainly wouldn’t be having all this trouble with them today.”

Federal District Judge Boldt told one Indian tribe’s attorney, who was seeking a writ of prohibition against the State, “I don’t want to hear any more about these damn’ Indian fishing cases”.

While Governor Evans tries to deny that any racial undertones are present in his actions against the Indians, the fact remains that within the past two years about one hundred Indians have been arrested and many of them have been denied jury trials. On the Nisqually River where the greatest resistance has been put up, all the arrested Indians’ fishing gear has been confiscated. There have been no court hearings on the taken gear as required by law. The few attorneys who are brave enough to take the Indians’ cases have been harassed and intimidated by state officials and sportsmen’s groups. Moving pictures of a few Indians net fishing are shown to clubs across the state to stir up the public against the Indians. For example, in Concrete, Washington, where the Skagit Indians fish, the State used these tactics so well that the mayor of the town led a mob to the river, saying, “Let’s get those god-damned Indian nets out of the river”. And in a small town near the Makah Indian reservation, after the State showed its “hate-the Indians” pictures another mob gathered to demand that all the Indians be run off the rivers.

Of course, not all the Indians are agreed on the methods being used to fight the State of Washington. A few of the tribal council leaders, who are strongly influenced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, criticize all the demonstrations held by their brothers. These Indian tribal councils generally occupy the same role that the paramount Chiefs and their councils did in colonial Africa, that of stooging for the whites against their own people. The fighting Indians call them “Uncle Tomahawks” (the Indian equivalent of “Uncle Tom”).

The Yakima Indians, like the Nisquallies, are also divided over the issue of treaty fishing rights. The controversy within the tribe is simple enough--those who are ready to fight, and the Uncle Tomahawks who would rather switch. The group spearheading the fight formed the “Five Man Fish Commission of the Yakima Nation”. (Fourteen tribes, the Yakima among them, compose the Yakima Nation.) The Nation is actually the superior power, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs, having found it not willing to sign away its people’s rights, managed through illegal chicanery to set up the Yakima tribe as the superior power. This has caused much suffering for the Indian people, who are unable to stop the sale of their land to whites or to prevent the corrupt Uncle Tomahawks from wasting the tribal funds. The tribe picks and chooses whom it will protect in legal fights, including actions to defend the tribal fishing right. Since its formation the Five Man Fish Commission has actively campaigned for honest Indians on the Tribal Council and backed them up when they get into office. Last year the Commission managed to get three Indians elected to the fourteen-man council. Needless to say, the Bureau of Indian Affairs uses every method to hinder its activity.

The Yakima fight for their fishing rights on the banks of the Columbia River, boundary between the states of Washington and Oregon. This river is fished commercially by whites at the river mouth, using drift nets. The Indians fish with set nets in their old waters. Where ancient sites have been terminated by dam construction, new fishing stations have been designated for them by the Federal government. One such site is Cooks, above Bonneville Dam. Here, at about four o’clock in the morning of April 21, 1966, three Indian fishermen were tending their net in a howling wind. The water was rough, and the Indians fought desperately to get their net into the boat before it was dashed against the sharp rocks. One was running the outboard motor and attempting to control the boat, while the other two managed the net; all three were too busy to be aware of anything but their battle with the river. Without warning, a big power speedboat filled with plain-clothed wardens rammed their boat. The wardens were armed--one jumped into the Indians’ boat and ordered the fishermen to shore, threatening to blast them out of the water if they disobeyed.

At the camp site, other Indians were awakened by the sounds of running feet and barking dogs, and ran to the beach to see what was happening. What they saw churned their fighting Indian blood -- game and fisheries wardens armed with high-powered semi-automatic rifles, shotguns, and seven-celled flashlights had invaded their fishing site. The Indians asked to see the wardens’ required federal permission permit -- none was produced. They asked to see the wardens’ credentials, as many of them were in plain clothes -- again, none was shown.

By this time the boats had reached shore. The Indian boat was owned by Madeline Alexander Weeks, who testified later that she had loaned it to her brother. When it touched the dock, she waded out to secure it, wrapped its towline around her waist and was pulling it to shore when she was jumped by a game warden, Gene Whittem. A diminutive woman, she fought a gallant fight to protect her property--but Whitten had a knife; he slashed the rope around her waist, cutting her and her coat. Other Indians were to testify to equally harrowing experiences in this terroristic pre-dawn raid.

Brought into Skamania County Court on illegal fishing charges, the Indians faced the usual prejudiced judge and jury, and were found guilty in a few short minutes.

The trials that Indians are subjected to in the name of “Equal justice before the law” are the hardest pills to swallow. The judge in Stevenson, where these fishermen were tried, is not even a lawyer. The Indians are not allowed to enter the treaties as evidence--nor to enter any evidence at all, for that matter. In the Nisqually cases, state attorneys found it hard to secure convictions when the treaty was introduced, so now jurors must leave the jury room whenever treaty rights are mentioned. The state attorneys also found that juries would not swallow their conservation pleas, so now they use an old type of plea to get the juries to decide against the Indians: PREJUDICE! And it works! The fact is that few of the white invaders have forgiven the Indians for their original crime of being here first. The television westerns, the movies, and the school history books all teach that “the only good Injun is a dead one” --still today. The only thing that these stories apologize for is that the whites couldn’t wipe all the Indians out and so had to make treaties with them. So it is a relatively easy thing to play on an all-white jury’s anti-Indian feelings. If this sounds like hogwash--sit down tonight and watch the children’s programs.

Yakima Indians took up firearms to protect themselves and their gear against the combined forces of the states of Washington and Oregon. In the early morning hours of July 27, armed Yakimas arrested five game wardens at Cooks Landing and held them at gunpoint until they could be turned over to the State Patrol, which assured the Indians that the wardens would be available for trespass charges to be filed in Federal Court. Delno Hoptowit, 22, a Yakima, explained to the press: “They claim they are trying to stop us to save the salmon. The commercial white fishermen below the dam take more fish in one night than all the Indians can take all year. We have to fish now, before the white commercial season starts, or starve. Once they start, their 1500-foot nets literally block the whole channel of the river. In a couple of days they will clean out all the fish.”

Before the Yakima took up arms, over 32 Indians had been arrested in night raids. After the Indians retaliated, Robert Robinson, chief administrative officer for Washington’s Fisheries Department, told the press that his department “will enforce the law where able to, but will not risk the lives of its enforcement agents. There is no use running full force into these people. We are not going to risk our lives for a few fish.” The night arrests ceased. After that, Indians were arrested when they went to the store, one by one.

The hostility of the public is shown in an Oregon newspaper editorial: “It has been many generations since the last armed conflict between white men and red men... But bullets could fly and blood flow, if rifle-toting Yakima Indians are so brash as to use their weapons to back up their claim to the treaty rights to string nets across the river . . . American Indians learned to their sorrow the folly of trying to defeat the whites by force of arms.”

Last year Malcolm S. McLeod, attorney for the twenty Indian tribes in western Washington, had told the public in a television interview: “There is likely to be bloodshed. You can’t deprive a people of their livelihood and expect them to take it lying down.” His prophecy would seem to be bearing fruit.

Another way the State of Washington whips the Indians economically is to deprive them of markets for their fresh salmon, by harassing and intimidating the fish buyers. Last year the Survival of American Indians Association did a hit-and-miss survey of markets where the Indians usually sell their salmon. When asked why they had refused to buy from Indians, buyers stated that every week the fisheries and game wardens come in and check their receipt books. Although it is not against any state law to buy from Indians, the state wardens intimated to the buyers that they could make things “hot” for them. As one buyer stated: “You guys are right. Those game wardens act like Gestapo agents. They came in here and demanded to see my books. I ain’t buying any fish from the Indians, but those guys made me mad, the way they acted.” When he was asked if he would buy fish from the Indians, he said, “I know you guys are right but I’ve got a business to run and I need fifteen state licenses to keep it open. They said they’d suspend one of my licenses and close me down. I can’t afford to buck the State.” Others were told that if they bought any Indian fish they would be jailed and fined one thousand dollars; even if the State couldn’t make charges stick, the buyers would be saddled with expensive attorney fees and court costs.

Halvorson’s fish market in Tacoma could not be intimidated by the state wardens. So wardens came to the market every day, checking fish receipts and trying to scare away business. He continued to buy fish from the Indians.

Danny Newton and his wife Alice, both Indians, armed with a federal trade license and $7,000 in cash from a timber sale on their allotted land, decided to buck the state of Washington and buy fish from the Puyallup Indians. In July of 1964 they setup a fish-buying camp in the seven-acre plot of land owned by the Puyallup tribe within the metropolitan area of Tacoma. The state immediately put their camp under 24-hour surveillance. Newton’s trucks were followed everywhere by both city and state police. He got thirty traffic tickets in one week alone, for everything from driving an inch over the dividing line to driving too fast or too slow. The Newtons were investigated by both the Health and the Welfare departments, constantly persecuted by Washington state officials.

Newton bought the Indians’ fish for cash, and sold them to bigger markets on a consignment basis. He bought fish from his Indian brothers for over three months, until his ready cash gave out. One market which owed him about $7,000 (an amount approximately equal to his original capitalization) refused to pay him. He obtained a lawyer who did get back a small amount of the money, but Newton took a big loss. Without resources to investigate, the Indians can never be sure, but they feel that the state was involved in this swindle.

Newton and his wife were arrested five times for illegal fish buying, but as he had a federal trade license, they never lost their case. Yet they never won: after all attorney fees, traffic tickets, and all the other forms of harassment, the Newtons lost all their money and suffered severe mental anguish. Today the Indians list them among the casualties of the war between the Indians and the State.

Another fish buyer who is on the state’s blacklist is Roy Stritmater. Roy owns a fish market in the town of Hoquiam, Washington. He bought fish from the Washington Indians for at least forty years. This is only a sideline, as most of his fish come from non-Indian commercial fishermen. Roy’s brother Lester Stritmater is an attorney and justice of the peace. Roy not only buys salmon from the Indians, but the controversial salmon-like steelhead trout, which the state of Washington has declared a game fish.

Roy had been branded a renegade by the state officials, even though he is officially licensed to do business. He has been arrested numerous times and has had to pay large bail bonds. He has had hundreds of tons of fish confiscated. He has been chased on wild rides by wardens threatening bodily harm. Yet he refuses to bow down to the state. He fights inside and outside the courts. Of course, there is a world of difference between Stritmater, a non-Indian with an already thriving business, and Newton, an. Indian just starting his business, and with no attorney brother to defend him. The state is hurting Roy’s business by using propaganda; they tell the white commercial fisherman that Roy is an Indian-lover and a renegade. He has lost a lot of his fishermen.

The Sko-bobch (literally “Green River”) tribe was concentrated on the Muckleshoot Reservation after the signing of the Port Elliot Treaty in 1855. The Sko-bobch have never lost their ethnic identity, but are more commonly known today as Muckleshoot Indians. Formerly the Green River ran through reservation land, but it has been diverted by dams and waterways; the State now has a fish hatchery on the river, and claims ownership by squatters’ rights. The Muckleshoot Reservation lies somewhat east of a line drawn about midway between Tacoma and Seattle, in what has become the most densely populated region of the state. The Indians arrested after the big fish-in on the Green, in which Dick Gregory participated, were descendants of the Sko-bobch tribe. Their trial was scheduled to take place at a local justice court.

The American Civil Liberties Union, entering the case on the Indians’ behalf, delegated Mr. Bill Hansen to represent the arrested fishermen. He filed a writ of prejudice against the local judge, and the case was removed to Federal Way Justice Court. The Muckleshoots announced their now historic treaty trek. Old and young Indians along with non-Indian sympathizers trekked for fifteen miles from the reservation to Federal Way, to present the judge with a copy of the Port Elliot Treaty, as a protest of the state’s encroachment of the treaty rights. The judge hurriedly had the case removed from his court before the Indians finished their trek. When the judges finished their game of passing the buck around, the Indians ended up in Seattle District Court, before Judge James J. Dore.

At the trial it was apparent that the State had prerehearsed its witnesses. Almost all of them used exactly the same words on the stand, and were cool, calm, and deliberate in their testimony. The Indians were unrehearsed and emotional in their defense. In their attempt to show the jury that the Indians are savages and incapable of understanding the need for conservation laws, state attorneys stressed over and over how the Indians catch and kill the fish, as though the Indians were being tried for murder of the fish rather than violation of state game laws. “After they caught the fish”, the deputy prosecutor said, “they used big rocks and clubs on the poor fish and their eyes flew out and the blood flew in the air”. (Unlike whites who let the fish suffer a long and agonizing death, Indians are taught early to hit the fish on a certain spot to kill it instantly.)

The U. S. Attorney’s office sent an attorney to represent the Federal Government’s defense of its treaty commitments with the Sko-bobch Indians. Bill Hansen, of the ACLU, represented the Indians, Cecil Moses, Robert Moses, Sherman Dominick and Larry Maurice. Their defense was that since their ancestors were signatories to the Port Elliot Treaty, which Chief Seattle signed in their behalf, that state had no jurisdiction over their common and accustomed fishing stations on the Green River. The state was not in existence at the time of the treaty agreements, and is therefore an interloper trying to establish ownership of the Indian fishing stations. It is true that the Indians ceded the land, but they specifically retained ownership of all the Washington waters--legally speaking, they are the riparian owners. Tribal elders took the stand to defend the young fishermen and to identify them as tribal members.

Mike Johnson, assistant to the State Attorney General, and Donald Skinner, King County Deputy Prosecutor, represented the State of Washington. They sought to block the entering of the treaty as evidence in the Indian defense, but were overruled. Nevertheless, they were able to convince the jury that there were no such Indians as the Sko-bobch.

The Indians, of course, lost. Their attorney gave notice of appeal.

The Muckleshoots have been a source of inspiration to Indians all over the United States (and outside it) because of their unity and their fight. No other tribe in this state (there are 37 in existence today) has staged such a fight outside of the courts as this tribe. They have literally no money, and are few in number--yet this summer they had a treaty trek, a canoe trek, and another march in Seattle. Old and young alike, fisher people and non-fisher people, Indian and non-Indian. Only those who have an accurate knowledge of the Indians’ history understand or realize the importance of this feat. It marks a new page in the Indians’ future history.

The Survival of American Indians Association, mostly composed of Nisqually fishermen, has been busy this summer with its Operation Re-education Program--especially in the Nisqually area, where the children who have been victims of state raids are most ready to learn. This program is to teach Indian children their almost lost culture, history, and language. The sad fact is that Indians in this state don’t know as much about their culture as the Boy Scouts do. In the early days of white settlement, this western part of the state was Catholic territory; the state was divided in half, the eastern part being Protestant. The division was necessary as the churches were paid so much a head to deIndianize the Indians, and religious wars were erupting in their fight to get more heads. The first thing the churches did was to burn all the Indians’ clothing and dress them in white clothing, then they forbade all Indian dancing, singing, teaching of moral customs to the young, etc. After suffering the worst indignities that one (so-called) human being can inflict on another, the, Indians in eastern Washington killed the missionary Marcus Whitman in 1847. The vast majority of Washington Indians today suffer from mass social disorientation as a result of the government’s policy of cultural genocide. Unable to accept the avaricious whites’ materialistic culture in place of their own, Indians have resorted to the bottle in an attempt to forget. The AA, which helps alcoholics by seeking individual causes of a person’s alcoholism, has been unable to help the Indians, for the causes of an Indian’s alcoholism are social, the result first of being addicted by corrupt whites to get Indian land and later of the brainwashing being used to deIndianize the Indians. Operation Re-ed seeks to teach the young these lost treasures, knowing that it is a fact that “the truth shall set you free.”

The Lummi tribe near Bellingham ran into difficulty with the state over the demand that the Indians give up their best waterfront land for a new scenic freeway that the state wants to build. The Indians refused to sell their land, but the state will not take no for an answer. Every method is being used to pressure the Indians into selling. The method the state has found most effective is an attack on the young children: the state has discontinued school buses on the reservation. Until the Indians give in, they must get their children to school themselves. Lack of transportation is not accepted as an excuse for absence. If the children are not in school, parents are taken into court as unfit to retain their custody. The Lummis also have problems over their fishing rights, and many have been jailed. The Lummis are one of the most peaceful tribes in the state, but their patience is bound to run out.

The Skokomish tribe, like the Muckleshoots, allowed the state to build a fish hatchery on its river above the fishing sites. Now the state claims it owns the whole river, because the Indians gave permission to build a hatchery. The Skokomish is a fighting tribe. If the State keeps up its demand that they move off their river--watch for fireworks! The Skokomish tribe has another fight with the state, over the sale of real fireworks on the reservation, contending that the state has no jurisdiction on reservation land, and that its ban on fireworks sales is therefore void. This case has not yet been brought to trial.

Every tribe in the United States is involved in a legal battle of one sort or another--illegal taking of Indian land, hunting rights, human rights, oil leases, uranium, gold, timber and fishing rights. Every government official states that these matters must, and can only, be settled in the courts. Court battles have been going on since Andrew Jackson was President and the Cherokees fought his Indian Removal Act. The United States Supreme Court ruled for the Indians, but the Cherokees were removed anyway. The fisher Indians have been in court fighting since 1905, and the federal courts have ruled for us, yet what good are these federal court rulings? The courts cannot enforce their decisions and never will be able to. The American Indians who are under the guardianship of the U.S. are the richest people in the world--and stil the poorest. When the Indian people finally come of age and can manage their own estates, will there be anything left to manage? --the Great Spirit and everyone else knows that America’s once poverty-stricken immigrants (who flocked over here from Europe with literally nothing) are now the richest people in the world. No wonder--they are the executors of our estates.

As it was in the past with the Cherokees, so it is today with the Negroes in their battle for civil rights. MISSISSIPPI! Cherokee country. The rich red American blood of the Cherokees flowed freely over the country and fertilized it. Today, the Negroes trying to make this nation’s people live up to its courts’ decisions, and to the laws of Congress, and to the claims it makes to the world about “Life, Liberty, and Justice for all”, are fertilizing the soil with their blood. No: the quest for justice will never find fulfillment in American courts.

The only solution to the American Indians’ problem lies with the United Nations, for the following reason: treaties! No matter what tribe is fighting, the fight is over treaty rights. The fact is evident that the Indians are getting nowhere--merely being drained of their funds for legal expenses. If the Indians must be under a guardianship, they should be placed under a United Nations trusteeship, which would not be in a position to make a profit from Indian resources as do our trusts today. The first thing the U.N. would have to do is review all the treaties between the new United States and the American natives. What every Indian tribe is fighting for is only what was stipulated in those treaties. All the land that was reserved should and must be re-established under tribal ownership, for the majority of Indians are wandering homeless on this land. The whites who live illegally on reservation land today (for treaties stipulated that no whites would be allowed to reside upon Indian land) should be amply paid for their removal. Those Indians who prefer to follow the road of the whites should be free to do so, but those who are sickened of the whites’ way of non-life, as many are, would reside within the safety of the reservations. All this would be watched over by a United Nations trusteeship, which would also help the Indians with their economic, health, education and welfare problems until the Indians are capable of doing these things themselves--which, would happen much faster than under the present system.[1]

* Robert Casey is a journalist; Janet McCloud is editor of the newspaper of the Survival of American Indians Association.

1.This essay originally appeared as mimeographed Bulletins No. 29 and 30 issued by the Seattle Group.

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Naturai Law, Or Science Of Justice

By Lysander Spooner

Lysander Spooner has many great distinctions in the history of political thought. For one thing, he was undoubtedly the only constitutional lawyer in history to evolve into an individualist anarchist; for another, he became steadily and inexorably more radical as he grew older. From the time that Benjamin R. Tucker founded the scintillating periodical, Liberty, in 1881, Spooner and Tucker were the two great theoreticians of the flourishing individualist anarchist movement, and this continued until Spooner’s death in 1887, at the age of 79.

Spooner and the younger Tucker differed on one crucial point, though on that point alone: Tucker was strictly and defiantly a utilitarian, whereas Spooner grounded his belief in liberty on a philosophy of natural rights and natural law. Unfortunately, Spooner’s death left Tucker as the major influence on the movement, which quickly adopted the utilitarian creed while Spooner’s natural rights-anarchism faded into the background. The present-day followers of Spooner and Tucker, in the United States and England, have also forgotten the fundamental natural-rights grounding in Spooner and have rested on the far more shaky and tenuous Tuckerian base of egoistic utilitarianism.

Lysander Spooner published Natural Law, or the Science of Justice as a pamphlet in 1882; the publisher was A. Williams & Co. of Boston. The pamphlet had considerable influence among American and European anarchists of the day, and was reprinted in three editions in the three years following publication. Spooner meant the pamphlet to be the introduction to a comprehensive masterwork on the natural law of liberty, and it is a great tragedy of the history of political thought that Spooner never lived to complete the projected treatise. But what we have retains enduring value from the fact that, of all the host of Lockean natural rights theorists, Lysander Spooner was the only one to push the theory to its logical--and infinitely radical--conclusion: individualist anarchism.

Those who are interest in delving further into Spooner’s exhilirating writings will be greatly rewarded by reading his No Treason and his Letter to Thomas F. Bayard, published together under the title No Treason by the Pine Tree Press, Box 158, Larkspur, Colorado, and available for $1.50.

The following is the complete and unabridged pamphlet by Spooner; his characteristic subtitle to the pamphlet was: A Treatise on Natural Law, Natural Justice, Natural Rights, Natural Liberty, and Natural Society; Showing That All Legislation Whatsoever is, an Absurdity, a Usurpation, and a Crime. Spooner also appended another characteristic note that: “The Author reserves his copyright in this pamphlet, believing that, on principles of natural law, authors and inventors have a right of perpetual property in their ideas.”

THE SCIENCE OF JUSTICE

I.

The science of mine and thine-the science of justice-is the science of all human rights; of all a man’s rights of person and property; of all his rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is the science which alone can tell any man what he can, and cannot, do; what he can, and cannot have; what he can, and cannot, say, without infringing the rights of any other person.

It is the science of peace; and the only science of peace; since it is the science which alone can tell us on what conditions mankind can live in peace, or ought to live in peace, with each other.

These conditions are simply these: viz., first, that each man shall do, towards every other, all that justice requires him to do; as, for example, that he shall pay his debts, that he shall return borrowed or stolen property to its owner, and that he shall make reparation for any injury he may have done to the person or property of another.

The second condition is, that each man shall abstain from doing to another, anything which justice forbids him to do; as, for example, that he shall abstain from committing theft, robbery, arson, murder, or any other crime against the person or property of another.

So long as these conditions are fulfilled, men are at peace, and ought to remain at peace, with each other. But when either of these conditions is violated, men are at war. And they must necessarily remain at war until justice is re-established.

Through all time, so far as history informs us, wherever mankind have attempted to live in peace with each other, both the natural instincts, and the collective wisdom of the human race, have acknowledged and prescribed, as an indispensable condition, obedience to this one only universal obligation: viz., that each should live honestly towards every other.

The ancient maxim makes the sum of a man’s legal duty to his fellow men to be simply this: “To live honestly, to hurt no one, to give to every one his due.”

This entire maxim is really expressed in the single words, to live honestly; since to live honestly is to hurt no one, and give to every one his due.

II.

Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenseless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will, perform them. But of his legal duty-that is, of his duty to live honestly towards his fellow men-his fellow men not only may judge, but, for their own protection, must judge. And, if need be, they may rightfully compel him to perform it. They may do this, acting singly, or in concert. They may do it on the instant, as the necessity arises, or deliberately and systematically, if they prefer to do so, and the exigency will admit of it.

III.

Although it is the right of anybody and everybody-of any one man, or set of men, no less than another-to repel injustice, and compel justice, for themselves, and for all who may be wronged, yet to avoid the errors that are liable to result from haste and passion, and that everybody, who desires it, may rest secure in the assurance of protection, without a resort to force, it is evidently desirable that men should associate, so far as they freely and voluntarily can do so, for the maintenance of justice among themselves, and for mutual protection against other wrongdoers. It is also in the highest degree desirable that they should agree upon some plan or system of judicial proceedings, which, in the trial of causes, should secure caution, deliberation, thorough investigation, and, as far as possible, freedom from every influence but the simple desire to do justice.

Yet such associations can be rightful and desirable only in so far as they are purely voluntary. No man can rightfully be coerced into joining one, or supporting one, against his will. His own interest, his own judgement, and his own conscience alone must determine whether he will join this association, or that; or whether he will join any. If he chooses to depend, for the protection of his own rights, solely upon himself, and upon such voluntary assistance as other persons may freely offer to him when the necessity for it arises, he has a perfect right to do so. And this course would be a reasonably safe one for him to follow, so long as he himself should mainfest the ordinary readiness of mankind, in like cases, to go to the assistance and defense of injured persons; and should also himself “live honestly, hurt no one, and give to every one his due.” For such a man is reasonably sure of always having friends and defenders enough in case of need, whether he shall have joined any association, or not.

Certainly no man can rightfully be required to join, or support, an association whose protection he does not desire. Nor can any man be reasonably or rightfully expected to join, or support, any association whose plans, or method of proceeding, he does not approve, as likely to accomplish its professed purpose of maintaining justice, and at the same time itself avoid doing injustice. To join, or support, one that would, in his opinion, be inefficient, would be absurd. To join or support one that, in his opinion, would itself do injustice, would be criminal. He must, therefore, be left at the same liberty to join, or not to join, an association for this purpose, as for any other, according as his own interest, discretion, or conscience shall dictate.

An association for mutual protection against injustice is like an association for mutual protection against fire or shipwreck. And there is no more right or reason in compelling any man to join or support one of these associations, against his will, his judgment, or his conscience, than there is in compelling him to join or support any other, whose benefits (if it offer any) he does not want, or whose purposes or methods he does not approve.

IV.

No objection can be made to these voluntary associations upon the ground that they would lack that knowledge of justice, as a science, which would be necessary to enable them to maintain justice, and themselves avoid doing injustice. Honesty, justice, natural law, is usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common minds. Those who desire to know what it is, in any particular case, seldom have to go far to find it. It is true, it must be learned, like any other science. But it is also true that it is very easily learned. Although as illimitable in its applications as the infinite relations and dealings of men with each other, it is, nevertheless, made up of a few simple elementary principles, of the truth and justice of which every ordinary mind has an almost intuitive perception. And almost all men have the same perceptions of what constitutes justice, or of what justice requires, when they understand alike the facts from which their inferences are to be drawn.

Men living in contact with each other, and having intercourse together, cannot avoid learning natural law, to a very great extent, even if they would. The dealing of men with men, their separate possessions and their individual wants, and the disposition of every man to demand, and insist upon, whatever he believes to be his due, and to resent and resist all invasions of what he believes to be his rights, are continually forcing upon their minds the questions, Is this act just? or is it unjust? Is this thing mine? or is it his? And these are questions of natural law; questions which, in regard to the great mass of cases, are answered alike by the human mind everywhere.*

Children learn the fundamental principles of natural law at a very early age. Thus they very early understand that one child must not, without just cause, strike, or otherwise hurt, another; that one child must not assume any arbitrary control or domination over another; that one child must not, either by force, deceit, or stealth, obtain possession of anything that belongs to another; that if one child commits any of these wrongs against another, it is not only the right of the injured child to resist, and, if need be, punish the wrongdoer, and compel him to make reparation, but that it is also the right, and the moral duty, of all other children, and all other persons, to assist the injured party in defending his rights, and redressing his wrongs. These are fundamental principles of natural law, which govern the most important transactions of man with man. Yet children learn them earlier than they learn that three and three are six, or five and five ten. Their childish plays, even, could not be carried on without a constant regard to them; and it is equally impossible for persons of any age to live together in peace on any other conditions.

It would be no extravagance to say that, in most cases, if not in all, mankind at large, young and old, learn this natural law long before they have learned the meanings of the words by which we describe it. In truth, it would be impossible to make them understand the real meanings of the words, if they did not first understand the nature of the thing itself. To make them understand the meanings of the words justice and injustice, before knowing the nature of the things themselves, would be to make them understand the meanings of the words heat and cold, wet and dry, light and darkness, white and black, one and two, before knowing the nature of the things themselves. Men necessarily must know sentiments and ideas, no less than material things, before they can know the meanings of the words by which we describe them.

V.

If justice be not a natural principle, it is no principle at all. If it be not a natural principle, there is no such thing as justice. If it be not a natural principle, all that men have ever said or written about it, from time immemorial, has been said and written about that which had no existence. If it be not a natural principle, all the appeals for justice that have ever been heard, and all the struggles for justice that have ever been witnessed, have been appeals and struggles for a mere fantasy, a vagary of the imagination, and not for a reality.

If justice be not a natural principle, then there is no such thing as injustice; and all the crimes of which the world has been the scene, have been no crimes at all; but only simple events, like the falling of the rain, or the setting of the sun; events of which the victims had no more reason to complain than they had to complain of the running of the streams, or the growth of vegetation.

If justice be not a natural principle, governments (so-called) have no more right or reason to take cognizance of it, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance of it, than they have to take cognizance, or to pretend or profess to take cognizance, of any other nonentity; and all their professions of establishing justice, or of maintaining justice, or of regarding justice, are simply the mere gibberish of fools, or the frauds of imposters.

But if justice be a natural principle, then it is necessarily an immutable one; and can no more be changed-by any power inferior to that which established it-than can the law of gravitation, the laws of light, the principles of mathematics, or any other natural law or principle whatever; and all attempts or assumptions, on the part of any man or body of men-whether calling themselves governments, or by any other name-to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion, in the place of justice, as a rule of conduct for any human being, are as much an absurdity, an usurpation, and a tyranny, as would be their attempts to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion in the place of any and all the physical, mental, and moral laws of the universe.

VI.

If there be any such principle as justice, it is, of necessity, a natural principle; and, as such, it is a matter of science, to be learned and applied like any other science. And to talk of either adding to, or taking from, it, by legislation, is just as false, absurd, and ridiculous as it would be to talk of adding to, or taking from, mathematics, chemistry, or any other science, by legislation.

VII.

If there be in nature such a principle as justice, nothing can be added to, or taken from, its supreme authority by all the legislation of which the entire human race united are capable. And all the attempts of the human race, or of any portion of it, to add to, or take from, the supreme authority of justice, in any case whatever, is of no more obligation upon any single human being than is the idle wind.

VIII.

If there be such a principle as justice, or natural law, it is the principle, or law, that tells us what rights were given to every human being at his birth; what rights are, therefore, inherent in him as a human being, necessarily remain with him during life; and, however capable of being trampled upon, are incapable of being blotted out, extinguished, annihilated, or separated or eliminated from his nature as a human being, or deprived of their inherent authority or obligation.

On the other hand, if there be no such principle as justice, or natural law, then every human being came into the world utterly destitute of rights; and coming into the world destitute of rights, he must necessarily forever remain so. For if no one brings any rights with him into the world, clearly no one can ever have any rights of his own, or give any to another. And the consequence would be that mankind could never have any rights; and for them to talk of any such things as their rights, would be to talk of things that never had, never will have, and never can have existence.

IX.

If there be such a natural principle as justice, it is necessarily the highest, and consequently the only and universal, law for all those matters to which it is naturally applicable. And, of consequently, all human legislation is simply and always an assumption of authority and dominion, where no right of authority or dominion exists. It is, therefore, simply and always an intrusion, an absurdity, an usurpation, and a crime.

On the other hand, if there be no such natural principle as justice, there can be no such thing as injustice. If there be no such natural principle as honesty, there can be no such thing as dishonesty; and no possible act of either force or fraud, committed by one man against the person or property of another, can be said to be unjust or dishonest; or be complained of, or prohibited, or punished as such. In short, if there be no such principle as justice, there can be no such acts as crimes; and all the professions of governments, so called, that they exist, either in whole or in part, for the punishment or prevention of crimes, are professions that they exist for the punishment

or prevention of what never existed, nor ever can exist. Such professions are therefore confessions that, so far as crimes are concerned, governments have no occasion to exist; that there is nothing for them to do, and that there is nothing that they can do. They are confessions that the governments exist for the punishment and prevention of acts that are, in their nature, simple impossibilities.

X.

If there be in nature such a principle as justice, such a principle as honesty, such principles as we describe by the words mine and thine, such principles as men’s natural rights of person and property, then we have an immutable and universal law; a law that we can learn, as we learn any other science; a law that is paramount to, and excludes, every thing that conflicts with it; a law that tells us what is just and what is unjust, what is honest and what is dishonest, what things are mine and what things are thine, what are my rights of person and property and what are your rights of person and property, and where is the boundary between each and all of my rights of person and property. And this law is the paramount law, and the same law, over all the world, at all times, and for all peoples: and will be the same paramount and only law, at all times, and for all peoples, so long as man shall live upon the earth.

But if, on the other hand, there be in nature no such principle as justice, no such principle as honesty, no such principle as men’s natural rights of person and property, then all such words as justice and injustice, honesty and dishonesty, all such words as mine and thine, all words that signify that one thing is one man’s property and that another thing is another man’s property, all words that are used to describe men’s natural rights of person or property, all such words as are used to describe injuries and crimes, should be struck out of all human languages as having no meanings; and it should be declared, at once and forever, that the greatest force and the greatest frauds, for the time being, are the supreme and only laws for governing the relations of men with each other; and that, from henceforth, all persons and combinations of persons - those that call themselves governments, as well as all others - are to be left free to practice upon each other all the force, and all the fraud, of which they are capable.

XI.

If there be no such science as justice, there can be no science of government; and all the rapacity and violence, by which, in all ages and nations, a few confederated villains have obtained the mastery over the rest of mankind, reduced them to poverty and slavery, and established what they called governments to keep them in subjection, have been as legitimate examples of government as any that the world is ever to see.

XII.

If there be in nature such a principle as justice, it is necessarily the only political principle there ever was, or ever will be. All the other so-called political principles, which men are in the habit of inventing, are not principles at all. They are either the mere conceits of simpletons, who imagine they have discovered something better than truth, and justice, and universal law; or they are mere devices and pretenses, to which selfish and knavish men resort as means to get fame, and power, and money.

XIII.

If there be, in nature, no such principle as justice, there is no moral standard, and never can be any moral standard, by which any controversy whatever, between two or more human beings, can be settled in a manner to be obligatory upon either; and the inevitable doom of the human race must consequently be to be forever at war; forever striving to plunder, enslave, and murder each other; with no instrumentalities but fraud and force to end the conflict.

XIV.

If there be no such obligation as justice, there can certainly be no other moral obligation- truth, mercy, nor any other-resting upon mankind. To deny the obligation of justice is, therefore, to deny the existence of any moral obligation whatever among men, in their relations to each other.

XV.

If there be no such principle as justice, the world is a mere abyss of moral darkness; with no sun, no light, no rule of duty, to guide men in their conduct towards each other. In short, if there be, in nature, no such principle as justice, man has no moral nature; and, consequently, can have no moral duty whatever.

NATURAL LAW CONTRASTED WITH LEGISLATION

I.

Natural law, natural justice, being a principle that is naturally applicable and adequate to the rightful settlement of every possible controversy that can arise among men; being, too, the only standard by which any controversy whatever, between man and man, can be rightfully settled; being a principle whose protection every man demands for himself, whether he is willing to accord it to others, or not; being also an immutable principle, one that is always and everywhere the same, in all ages and nations; being self-evidently necessary in all times and places; being so entirely impartial and equitable towards all; so indispensable to the peace of mankind everywhere; so vital to the safety and welfare of every human being; being, too, so easily learned, so generally known, and so easily maintained by such voluntary associations as all honest men can readily and rightfully form for that purpose-being such a principle as this, these questions arise, viz.: Why is it that it does not universally, or well nigh universally, prevail? Why is it that it has not, ages ago, been established throughout the world as the one only law that any man, or all men, could rightfully be compelled to obey? Why is it that any human being ever conceived that anything so self-evidently superfluous, false, absurd, and atrocious as all legislation necessarily must be, could be of any use to mankind, or have any place in human affairs?

II.

The answer is, that through all historic times, wherever any people have advanced beyond the savage state, and have learned to increase their means of subsistence by the cultivation of the soil, a greater or less number of them have associated and organized themselves as robbers, to plunder and enslave all others, who had either accumulated any property that could be seized, or had shown, by their labor, that they could be made to contribute to the support or pleasure of those who should enslave them.

These bands of robbers, small in number at first, have increased their power by uniting with each other, inventing warlike weapons, disciplining themselves, and perfecting their organizations as military forces, and dividing their plunder (including their captives) among themselves, either in such proportions as have been previously agreed on, or in such as their leaders (always desirous to increase the number of their followers) should prescribe.

The success of these bands of robbers was an easy thing, for the reason that those whom they plundered and enslaved were comparatively defenseless; being scattered thinly over the country; engaged wholly in trying, by rude implements and heavy labor, to extort a subsistence from the soil; having no weapons of war, other than sticks and stones; having no military discipline or organization, and no means of concentrating their forces, or acting in concert, when suddenly attacked. Under these circumstances, the only alternative left them for saving even their lives, or the lives of their families, was to yield up not only the crops they had gathered, and the lands they had cultivated, but themselves and their families also as slaves.

Thenceforth their fate was, as slaves, to cultivate for others the lands they had before cultivated for themselves. Being driven constantly to their labor, wealth slowly increased; but all went into the hands of their tyrants.

These tyrants, living solely on plunder, and on the labor of their slaves, and applying all their energies to the seizure of still more plunder, and the enslavement of still other defenseless persons; increasing, too, their numbers, perfecting their organizations, and multiplying their weapons of war, they extend their conquests until, in order to hold what they have already got, it becomes necessary for them to act systematically, and co-operate with each other in holding their slaves in subjection.

But all this they can do only by establishing what they call a government, and making what they call laws.

All the great governments of the world-those now existing, as well as those that have passed away- have been of this character. They have been mere bands of robbers, who have associated for purposes of plunder, conquest, and the enslavement of their fellow men. And their laws, as they have called them, have been only such agreements as they have found it necessary to enter into, in order to maintain their organizations, and act together in plundering and enslaving others, and in securing to each his agreed share of the spoils.

All these laws have had no more real obligation than have the agreements which brigands, bandits, and pirates find it necessary to enter into with each other, for the more successful accomplishment of their crimes, and the more peaceable division of their spoils.

Thus substantially all the legislation of the world has had its origin in the desires of one class of persons to plunder and enslave others, and hold them as property.

III.

In process of time, the robber, or slave-holding, class-who had seized all the lands, and held all the means of creating wealth-began to discover that the easiest mode of managing their slaves, and making them profitable, was not for each slaveholder to hold his specified number of slaves, as he had done before, and as he would hold so many cattle, but to give them so much liberty as would throw upon themselves (the slaves) the responsibility of their own subsistence, and yet compel them to sell their labor to the land-holding class-their former owners-for just what the latter might choose to give them.

Of course, these liberated slaves, as some have erroneously called them, having no lands, or other property, and no means of obtaining an independent subsistence, had no alternative - to save themselves from starvation-but to sell their labor to the landholders, in exchange only for the coarsest necessaries of life; not always for so much even as that.

These liberated slaves, as they were called, were now scarcely less slaves than they were before. Their means of subsistence were perhaps even more precarious than when each had his own owner, who had an interest to preserve his life. They were liable, at the caprice or interest of the land-holders, to be thrown out of home, employment, and the opportunity of even earning a subsistence by their labor. They were, therefore, in large numbers, driven to the necessity of begging, stealing, or starving; and became, of course, dangerous to the property and quiet of their late masters.

The consequence was, that these late owners found it necessary, for their own safety and the safety of their property, to organize themselves more perfectly as a government, and make laws for keeping these dangerous people in subjection: that is, laws fixing the prices at which they should be compelled to labor, and also prescribing fearful punishments, even death itself, for such thefts and trespasses as they were driven to commit, as their only means of saving themselves from starvation.

These laws have continued in force for hundreds, and, in some countries, for thousands of years; and are in force today, in greater or less severity, in nearly all the countries on the globe.

The purpose and effect of these laws have been to maintain, in the hands of the robber, or slave-holding class, a monopoly of all lands, and, as far as possible, of all other means of creating wealth; and thus to keep the great body of laborers in such a state of poverty and dependence, as would compel them to sell their labor to their tyrants for the lowest prices at which life could be sustained.

The result of all this is, that the little wealth there is in the world is all in the hands of a few-that is, in the hands of the law-making, slave-holding class; who are now as much slave-holders in spirit as they ever were, but who accomplish their purposes by means of the laws they make for keeping the laborers in subjection and dependence, instead of each one’s owning his individual slaves as so many chattels.

Thus the whole business of legislation, which has now grown to such gigantic proportions, had its origin in the conspiracies, which have always existed among the few, for the purpose of holding the many in subjection, and extorting from them their labor, and all the profits of their labor.

And the real motives and spirit which lie at the foundation of all legislation-notwithstanding all the pretenses and disguises by which they attempt to hide themselves - are the same today as they always have been. The whole purpose of this legislation is simply to keep one class of men in subordination and servitude to another.

IV.

What, then, is legislation? It is an assumption by one man, or body of men, of absolute, irresponsible dominion over all other men whom they can subject to their power. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to subject all other men to their will and their service. It is the assumption by one man, or body of men, of a right to abolish outright all the natural rights, all the natural liberty of all other men; to make all other men their slaves; to arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may, and may not, do; what they may, and may not, have; what they may, and may not, be. It is, in short, the assumption of a right to banish the principle of human rights, the principle of justice itself, from off the earth, and set up their own personal will, pleasure, and interest in its place. All this, and nothing less, is involved in the very idea that there can be any such thing as human legislation that is obligatory upon those upon whom it is imposed.

* Sir William Jones, an English judge in India, and one of the most learned judges that ever lived, learned in Asiatic as well as European law, says: “It is pleasing to remark the similarity, or rather, the identity, of those conclusions which pure, unbiassed reason, in all ages and nations, seldom fails to draw, in such juridical inquiries as are not fettered and imanacled by positive institutions.” -Jones on Bailments, 133

He means here to say that, when no law has been made in violation of justice, judicial tribunals, “in all ages and nations,” have “seldom” failed to agree as to what justice is.

LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal Of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

Spring - Summer 1967

Vol. III, No. 2

GORDON TULLOCK

The Political Economy of Slavery:

Genovese and Davis

FREDERICK C. FREILING

Tullock on Science and Society

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

Frank Meyer on the Communist Bogey-Man

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

Vietnam: Teach-Ins, and the Republican White Paper

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

Jonas on Isolationism in America

LETTERS . . . Kerry Thornley

Left and Right is published three times yearly (Winter, Spring, Autumn) by Left and Right, Inc., Box 395, Cathedral Station, New York, New York 10025. Subscription price: $2.50. Single issues: 85c.

The Economics Of SLAVERY

The Political Economy of Slavery by Eugene D. Genovese. Pantheon Books, New York (1965) 304 pp. $6.95.

The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis. Cornell University Press (1966) 505 pp. $10.00.

By Gordon Tullock[*]

The editor, when he asked me to review these books, said I could write as much as I wished. This was probably unwise of him since I have been working intermittently on the economics of slavery for some time, and have never before had an opportunity to put my conclusions in writing.[1] Nevertheless, I intend to take advantage of his generosity and discuss the economic theory of slavery as a necessary background to any understanding of these books. I should like to begin, however, by restricting my discussion to those examples of slavery in which the slaves formed a sizeable part of the labor force. Serfdom and slavery in situations where slaves are uncommon, will be omitted, not because they are uninteresting, but simply to avoid putting too much strain on the generosity of the editor.

With these limitations, confining our attention to large scale slavery, we find that it is historically quite a rare phenomenon. There seem to be only two significant examples: the Greek-Roman classical world and the system which grew up on the East Coast of the Americas from Brazil to Virginia.[2] This is in spite of the fact that slavery has been a minor feature in very many places and times. The legal and social institutions for slavery have been quite common historically, but only twice have they been utilized on a major scale for a significant period of time.[3] This sharp limitation on large scale slavery would seem to indicate that there are natural economic forces tending to prevent or eliminate it, and that the two major examples are cases where some special circumstance permitted the development of an institution which under normal conditions would be non-viable. It will be one of the objects of this essay to indicate that this is in fact the case.

First, however, let us examine the functioning of a large scale system of slavery. The first special characteristic of such a system is that labor may be obtained either by hiring it in the usual way, or by purchasing it. The man setting up some sort of enterprise may decide to staff it with slaves instead of employees. If he decides on slaves, then he will make an initial capital investment when he purchases them, which must be amortized over the life of the investment.[4] Thus the slave owner will spend a certain amount on the sustenance of his slaves, and he can only make a profit on his investment if this amount is enough less than the wages he would have to pay free labor to do the same work so that he can cover the costs of his original capital investment. Since slave labor is notoriously inefficient, this means that the difference between the sustenance given a slave and the current wage rate must be substantial.

Expectations of this differential, together with expected mortality and the prevailing interest rate will determine the prices paid for slaves. There has been much ink spilled on the question of whether southern slavery was profitable. Most of the contributors to this controversy take the price of slaves as fixed and try to work out the return. In the actual historic situation, the prices were not fixed, being dependent upon estimates of the profitability of one investment (slaves) as against another (say, improved machinery). Presumably investments in slaves were as profitable or unprofitable as investments in other types of capital. Some people no doubt made their fortunes, others lost their shirt, and the majority did reasonably well, just as in any other kind of investment. The entrepreneurs, moving their personal abilities and the capital they controlled from activities in which slaves were used to those in which they were not, or vice versa, in continual search for profit, kept the returns on all resources reasonably similar.

The system, then, brought in no great profit for anyone. The slave owner, the slave producer, and the owners of other resources all simply got the normal returns. The slave, on the other hand, suffered a very great loss. Thus we see a system which inflicted terrible penalties on one part of the population without any compensating gains to others. The institution clearly imposes a large net cost on society as a whole. Its total cost, however, is not measured only by the injury inflicted on the slave. A slave would have the strongest possible motive to revolt, kill his master, or run away. This meant that the continuance of the slave system required a very sizeable expenditure on ‘‘security” against the slaves. These costs were largely born by the non-slaveholding free population. If the costs of the Roman slave wars or the “county patrollers” who kept the slaves in order in the old South, had fallen exclusively on the slave holders, it is dubious that the system could have survived. Instead, these costs were largely put upon the free population by some form of conscription, like the legal requirement of serving in the legions or the county patrol. As George Fitzhugh said, “The poor . . . constitute our militia and our police. They protect men in possession of property, as in other countries; and do much more, they secure men in possession of a kind of property which they could not hold a day but for the supervision and protection of the poor.”[5]

The whole society might be warped by the necessity of providing security against the slaves. Again, this cost was not borne exclusively by the slave-holders. Further, in the American south the slaves were all negroes and all whites were free men. Under these circumstances the color of a man’s skin, not an easily hidden characteristic, was fairly good evidence of whether he was or was not a runaway slave. The development of concentrations of negroes who were free would have provided shelter for runaways. Hence the continual (albeit, ineffectual) efforts of southern legislators to prevent development of a significant free population of negroes. If the free negroes in an area were so numerous that the police officers would not know all of them by sight, then the detection of runaways would have been much more difficult. Similarly, concentrations of negroes in cities raised a very real danger of slave revolts. Hence southern cities were not as interested in growth as were their northern counterparts.

But to return to the theory of slavery, we have so far said nothing about the origin of the slaves. They can, logically be obtained in two ways, by raising them or by capture. Raising a slave is an expensive process and will be undertaken only if the price at which slaves are selling will repay the investment of capital over a period of 15 or so years for each slave “produced.” If the slaves are captured, on the other hand, they may be relatively cheap. In the Greek and Roman world a large part of the slave population were obtained as a sort of by-product of the wars which were a continual preoccupation of that society. The slaves exported from Africa, to the United States only before 1806, but to Brazil as late as 1870, were similarly the result of capture or were “taxed” by the African kings. In either case the cost of “raising” the slave was not born by the enterprise which first put him on the market, and the slave could be profitably sold at much less than if he had been raised by his first owner.

The low price of slaves who had been captured rather than raised meant that they could be treated quite differently from the more expensive slaves who were raised. They could be given standards of sustenance which were not likely to keep them alive very long, be over-worked, and be subject to disciplinary measures which might lead to death.[6] It would appear that the slaves imported from Africa to the Caribbean sugar plantations or to Brazil had a life expectancy of about 5 years. As far as we can tell, during the parts of Roman history in which frequent wars led to frequent captures of slaves, the treatment and life expectancy were rather similar. When the supply of captured slaves was cut off, by periods of peace in Rome or by legal bans on importation to the Caribbean and the United States, drastic changes in the treatment of the slaves occurred. The slaves were now much more valuable and had to be treated in a way which took that into account. Standards of sustenance were raised and less barbaric methods were used in discipline. The fact that the only two major cases of significant economic utilization of slaves began during the period of the worst Roman wars, and when slaves could be freely captured in Africa, is at least some evidence that the system is only viable when captured slaves are available.

The African kings who provided most of the slaves for the two Americas operated under essentially competitive conditions. Each one would, as long as his power lasted, have control of his operating area and a strip of coast, but the slave ships could easily go somewhere else if he put his prices above those of his royal competitors. Thus there is no reason to believe that the prices at which slaves were sold on the African Coast produced much pure profit for the “producers.” Shipping the slaves to their destination in the Americas was also a competitive enterprise, and there is no reason to believe that the ship owners of Boston, Bristol, or Lisbon got any greater return on these runs than on their ships carrying ordinary cargo across the North Atlantic. It is a sobering thought that this trade which inflicted such extraordinary suffering on the blacks who were seized by force and shipped across the Atlantic under appalling conditions, produced no more than ordinary profits for the enterprises involved. Once again we have an example where the institution of slavery inflicted great harm without providing any compensating great gains.

One topic remains in our hasty survey of the economics of slavery, manumission. Freeing a slave is normally treated as an act of grace on the part of the master, and deemed a morally meritorious act. Although I would not like to deny the existence of such acts of manumission, the fact remains that historically manumission has more often taken the form of a mutally profitable arrangement between the slave and his master. As has been noted, slaves are not normally very efficient workers. The reasons for this have to do with the lack of incentives for good work when their master will get most of the benefit of their labor. The empirical evidence seems clear that it is frequently possible to get as much, perhaps more, labor from a slave as from a free man if the slave is given the reward of eventual freedom for his extra work. The institutional arrangements for permitting the slave to “purchase” himself from his master are extremely various,[7] but there is one simple and straightforward method which can do as an example. Suppose that the return that a slave owner may expect from a slave after having paid for his sustenance (but not capital costs) is $.50. The slave “rents” himself from his master for $.55 and seeks employment from someone else. In this other employment he will work as hard or harder than a free man and can make $.90 per day over his sustenance. He saves the $.45 and eventually purchases himself from his master. Both master and slave have benefited from the bargain, and the shortage of major slave systems in history comes simply from the fact that slaves and masters normally, perhaps only after a generation or two, see this opportunity.

The basic reason for the failure of this type of “sale” of the slave to himself in the guise of manumission to develop in the ante-bellum South would appear to be the stringent and steadily growing legal restrictions on manumission. There was also considerable social pressure against manumission, and in the last years before the Civil War a reaction to abolitionist propaganda developed into strong arguments that slavery was somehow a superior form of civilization. The explanation for these developments is fairly simple. The individual slaveholder would have been better off if he could have made a deal with his slaves to sell them their freedom. Large numbers of free negroes, however, would have endangered the “property rights” of the slaveholders in those that were still fully or partially owned. Thus the slaveholders had a motive collectively to favor laws against manumission in spite of the fact that each one would have benefited from permission to manumit his own slave if he were the only one given such permission. The long run outcome of this tension between the individual and collective interests of the slave owners cannot now be known. From 1806 when importation of slaves was forbidden to 1860 was only 54 years, or considerably less than the threescore years and ten which the Bible gives as a normal life span. In economic terms this was not long enough to bring the system even near to full equilibrium. If we add on the numerous sociological factors, adjustment would have been even more delayed. Thus the possibility that slavery would have eliminated itself remains an open one.

Having completed my desperately brief survey of the economic problems of slavery, I can now turn to the books which I am to review. Putting my opinion briefly, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture is an excellent discussion of a relatively unimportant subject, and The Political Economy of Slavery is a poor book on a subject of considerable significance. From the title of Davis’s book, it might seem that he is dealing with an even broader subject than Genovese, but his real field is intellectual history, and the subtitle of his book indicates that it is almost entirely concerned with developments before 1770. Thus it is a review of the literature in western languages on slavery. Greek and Roman experience is largely ruled out of consideration as too early to be part of western culture, and the account begins with medieval efforts to apply the Roman law of slavery to quite different institutions. Although the Latin and early French sources are explored for late medieval work on the subject, and the Spanish and Portuguese experience in the New World is touched on, the main interests of Dr. Davis are obviously concentrated on literature in English and the institutions of the English speaking world. Some important French writers of the Enlightenment are discussed, but they probably had as much effect on English thought as on French. Granted this rather narrow subject, Dr. Davis’s scholarship is impeccable.

The limitation on The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, put in its simplest possible form, is that there wasn’t much literature on the problem of slavery in English before 1770. Granted Dr. Davis’s obvious talents, I was led to wonder at his devoting so much energy and skill to the cultivation of such barren ground. The obvious conclusion is that he is in process of writing a multi-volume history of thought on the problem of American slavery, and that this is a sort of introductory volume giving the historical background. If my hypothesis is correct, then the later volumes should be very good. Dr. Davis is an excellent intellectual historian, and given a broader scope, he should produce highly important work. I should not, however, like to leave my discussion of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture on an entirely negative note. It is very well written, and I enjoyed reading it. It cannot be listed as “indispensable” but it surely is interesting.

Dr. Davis seems to know little about economics, and the writers he is studying, naturally, knew nothing which we would now recognize by that name. Nevertheless, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture is economically a better book than The Political Economy of Slavery. The ignorance of Dr. Davis and the sources upon which he draws is considerably better than the systematic error of Dr. Genovese. A good many of the people quoted by Dr. Davis were practical men with a great deal of experience with the “peculiar institution.” Dr. Davis, who has no particular ax to grind, merely reports their opinions, and they are frequently of considerable economic interest. Dr. Genovese, on the other hand, is unfortunately a religious man. The “truth” was revealed to him before he began his research, and he tortures his material until it fits the Gospel According to St. Marx. Unfortunately, too, Dr. Genovese does not show much evidence of even having studied Marx very carefully. Marxism today appears to be in dissolution.[8] Dr. Genovese’s presentation is most accurately described as symptomatic of that dissolution rather than as representing the thought of Karl Marx. In its orthodox version Marxism had a certain degree of logical cohesion which is lacking in The Political Economy of Slavery. Dr. Genovese has a sort of emotional attitude which resembles that of Marx and knows a few Marxist slogans and tags, but he shows no sign of having studied the higher reaches of Marxist thought.

The the great defect of Genovese’s book is not its ideological outlook but its technical inadequacy. In the introduction he says that “the book falls within Gonzalez Prada’s definition of Sociology—the art of saying old things in new ways and the science of affirming contradictions.” The contradictions affirmed are not few, and neither are other types of errors as well. I cannot list all of the errors in The Political Economy of Slavery in the space of even a review article. But one example, Genovese’s discussion of the diet of the slaves, illustrates a clear-cut contradiction as well as the author’s unfortunate methods of interpreting data.

Theoretically, one would expect that the slave owners would approach the diet of their slaves in much the same way that the owners of draft horses decided what and how much to feed their animals. The objective is to keep the “stock” healthy enough to do heavy labor at a minimum cost.[9] This, we would expect, would lead to a diet much like that of the’ present-day Chinese peasant: coarse grains and potatoes supplemented by a fair amount of leafy vegetables and members of the bean family. We would expect very little meat in the diet because it is expensive.

But, in fact, the slave diet went in heavily for meat, primarily pork or pork products with very little in the way of vegetables.(45) Dr. Genovese gives a figure of 3 1/2 pounds of bacon per head per week. This clearly is not a minimum cost diet. The simplest explanation would appear to be ignorance of dietetic principles on the part of the slave owners. Modern research has taught us a great deal since 1860. Looked at from the perspective of our present day knowledge, everyone, free and slave, ate too little in the way of vegetables, salads and fruits in the 19th century. Dr. Genovese, however, doesn’t mention this possible explanation, and explains the phenomenon on the grounds that the planters were trying to keep down their expenses. Surely less pork and more vegetables would have produced better nutrition at a lower cost.

Dr. Genovese also appears to think that the slave owners actually did not feed their slaves enough to keep them in good health. I say “appears” because his discussion on the point is hard to follow. Thus: “There is nothing surprising in the slave’s appearance of good health: his diet was well suited to guarantee the appearance of good health and to provide the fuel to keep him going in the fields, but it was not sufficient to ensure either sound bodies or the stamina necessary for sustained labor.” (45) In the first place, this implies that the work of the field hand on a cotton plantation was fairly easy—surely the reverse of the truth. And secondly, if he does affirm that the slaves were underfed, the motives that would lead the slave owners to keep their “stock” in less than optimum working condition would seem to bear investigation. The only light I was able to obtain on the question was a vague feeling that Dr. Genovese thought this condition was the result of the economic system. But no detailed mechanism connecting the economics of slavery with the purported underfeeding of the slaves is presented. Dr. Genovese doesn’t even seem to realize that this is a problem.

As another example of Dr. Genovese’s peculiar standards of logical coherence: “The term ‘slavery’ applied to West African societies could easily mislead us, for the slaves held therein functioned in the economy without special disadvantage. Apart from the gloomy possiblity of ritual execution, the worst a slave suffered was to have to endure as a pariah ... ” Or: “an acceptable general theory of the social effects of soil exhaustion must be sufficiently flexible to account for the requirements of different historical epochs. The rise of capitalism requires a theory that includes the inability of the soil to recover sufficient productivity to maintain a competitive petition.” (88) This would appear to make any theory of the rise of capitalism in England, Japan, or many other countries impossible. And, finally, Genovese says: “The ideological barriers to substantial planter investments (in industry) remained formidable, for investments in land and slaves brought high status, whereas investments in industry did not, and those requiring the sale of surplus slaves might even bring social dis -approval.” (189) This statement is “supported” by a footnote in which Jefferson Davis is reported to have “complained bitterly that many millions of dollars in private capital had been invested in blockade running, but very little money had been devoted to manufacturing.” (213-214)[10]

As my final example of Genovese’s errors, I turn to a major misunderstanding of general economic principles. The ante-bellum South was, of course, a specialized producer of cotton for export and the deep involvement in foreign trade that this brought with it seems to disturb Dr. Genovese. Again and again he reports that something was imported (or exported) and treats this as evidence of southern economic weakness. It is hard to see exactly what he thinks is wrong with foreign trade, but clearly something is. “The South’s dependence on the export trade, in contradiction to the North’s primary reliance on its home market, indicates not merely a social division of labor, but the economic exploitation of the exporting South.” (160) His treatment of other economic issues is equally obtuse.

But these are only a few examples of Dr. Genovese’s methods, drawn more or less at random from the book. He is careless with facts, crabbed in his interpretations, and totally ignorant of economic theory.

In the first footnote to the introduction of his book Genovese says: “The generalizations presented in this first study require considerable elaboration and defense, which the following studies only begin to offer.” (10) This is one sentence from the book with which I wholeheartedly agree. Surely the present state of his work is more apt to lead to skepticism than to conviction. Whether he will, in future works, successfully defend his “generalizations” is more doubtful. I would suggest that instead of “elaborating”, he reconsider them.

______

[*] Gordon Tullock is associate professor of economics at the Thomas Jefferson Center for Political Economy at the University of Virginia, author of The Politics of Bureaucracy and The Organization of Inquiry, and co-author of The Calculus of Consent.

1.My interest and knowledge were both greatly expanded by conversations with Dr. John Moes. Since Dr. Moes is currently on a UN mission in Africa, he cannot be blamed for anything in this article, but many of its insights are due to him. He has published three excellent discussions of the subject: “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South. Another Comment”, Journal of Political Economy, April 1960, 183; “Comment”, Aspects of Labor Economics, National Bureau for Economic Research—Princeton University Press (1962), 247; and “The Absorption of Capital in Slave Labor in in the Ante Bellum South and Economic Growth”, American Journal of Economics and Sociology (October 1961), 535.

2.Stalin’s slave labor camps might be considered a third, and it was, in fact, an interest in whether they were economically profitable to the Soviet State which first turned my attention to the problem of slavery. On careful examination, however, it appears that there are clear distinctions between the Stalin labor camp system (and Hitler’s smaller scale experiment with the same system) and private slavery. As a single example, the death rate in the camps was much higher than any private master who had to pay for the purchase of replacements would permit.

3.“Major” and “significant” are somewhat hard to define, and it is obvious that I am using essentially arbitrary criteria. There is, however, a clear distinction between the situation where slavery is confined to a few servants in wealthy households and where slaves do much of the hard work in the society. Most cases fall in one or the other classifications quite readily, but there are marginal cases. Developments in Italy toward the end of the Middle Ages would be an example.

4.If the slave-master takes good care of his slaves, then they may reproduce themselves or even grow in number. In this case he must get only the interest on the investment, not replacement costs.

5.Quoted in Genovese, p. 230. Although his book is entitled The Political Economy of Slavery, this is almost the only place where the vital problem of the security of a slave system is mentioned by Genovese. Davis’ book, in contrast, is an intellectual history, but it discusses the problem frequently. This is only one of the many cases where Davis shows greater penetration than Genovese.

6.In the days before the discovery of germs, gangrene was an omnipresent danger whenever the skin was broken.

7.John Moes points out that the slave will normally be willing to pay more for his freedom than his market value to another slave owner. As he, rather grimly put it, the slave will pay a higher price because he has a sentimental attachment to his own body.

8.It may be that the dissolution is not the first step toward the total elimination of this powerful religion, but merely a breaking away of the talmudic encrustation of the true scribes and pharisees of the Second and Third Internationals. Such a development is not uncommon in the history of other religions. My personal opinion is that the disintegration which we now see is more fundamental, however, and I doubt that Marxism will survive the century as a living faith.

9.This is a slight over-simplification. Strictly, the owner would attempt to maximize the present discounted value of the stream of labor services expected to be received from the slave and his progeny minus the present discounted value of the food to be provided.

10.Genovese’s sloppy standards of documentation are illustrated also by his stating in the preface that six of the studies comprising the book appeared previously in journals, “as noted in the acknowledgments”, whereas in the acknowledgments we find only four articles listed. Such errors are minor, but they are scattered thickly throughout the book. Traditionally, economic historians have been particularly careful in their use of statistical data. Recently, the younger scholars have been introducing advanced statistical techniques into the field. Dr, Genovese lacks both the scientific tools of the younger generation and the scrupulous care of the older.

Science And Society

The Organization of Inquiry by Gordon Tullock, Duke University Press, 1966.

By Frederick C. Kreiling[*]

Do we now have the Third Culture that C. P. Snow saw coming to life? It would appear so. A good deal of work is currently being produced by a mixed group of scholars and intellectuals who are concerned with the problems of science and civilization and anxious to remedy the isolation and intellectual fragmentation that have arisen from intense specialization. Professor Tullock’s absorbing book falls into this general category. More specifically, he is concerned with science as a social system, with the socioeconomic implications of science and with the behavior of the scientific community.

Why do men inquire, he asks, and comes to the hardly surprising conclusion that some men inquire because they are genuinely curious, others because they are induced to do so by the gains that will accrue to them. Fair enough, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The really crucial discoveries, from which science takes its inner life, seem to require such talent and depth of motivation that no general theory can really account for them. What was it that impelled Newton? Hope for fame? Neurosis? Fortunate historical circumstance? It is very hard to say. All three, and much more besides. Indeed, scholars have only within the last decade begun to describe his achievement with the degree of precision it deserves and there are probably not more than a dozen men in the whole world who really understand the Principia in its innermost depths. Before we can have a good theory of scientific creativity we must know more about particular scientists and the conditions under which they lived and worked.

The vision of the unity of the sciences goes back to Aristotle. It was discussed at length during the seventeenth century especially by Leibniz. It is a beautiful and reassuring vision, but it is not quite, as Mr. Tullock believes, an accepted fact on which we can rely. Each science deals with separate categories of facts that are treated experimentally or observationally by persons who know the accepted theories and whose special skills have been sharpened by constant practice. The combined set of theories, applications, instruments and practices, that Thomas S. Kuhn has aptly called the paradigm of a science, is shared by a group of adherents. Under normal conditions they proceed to work on more detailed and refined questions which all refer to the general paradigm as given. At no point in history, least of all today, have the set of paradigms in existence taken together been entirely consistent. Before we can talk meaningfully of science as a unity, we should have to develope a language of the utmost precision that would, as Leibniz hoped, enable us, for example, to speak of both physics and psychology in consistent terms. We should, in brief, require a science of science.

To his credit, the author is keenly aware of the pitfalls in writing about science. He knows very well that there is more myth than truth in what is commonly held to be the theory of induction. Yet he cannot resist, albeit apologetically, spending a chapter on it. He correctly points out that human beings habitually make patterns out of bits of available information, and that this process, extended and refined, is probably the means by which theories are related to sets of facts. But he tends to neglect the historical dimension, in particular the fact that the researcher’s attention is conditioned by the sheer existence of certain fields of inquiry and of preferred modes of investigation at any given time. Suppose, let us say, that during the seventeenth century a great epidemic attacked Western Europe, a disease that had the effect of altering the perception of Europeans so that they focused on one set of phenomena to the exclusion of others and that they proceeded to examine the preferred set. Later researchers would certainly be disposed to continue in the chosen areas, but at the price of neglecting equally or even more important ones. Scientists generally investigate classes of facts that have previously been established as significant. There is nothing, in principle, that cannot be examined scientifically, but the existence of particular scientific fields has been determined in large part by historical situations.

Does the law of diminishing returns apply to science? A good number of writers, including the author of this work, think that it does. They share among other things the view that the degree of specialization may well be higher than optimal at least in traditional fields, and there is a good deal of evidence to support their contention. Indeed, it is even possible, as Stephen Toulmin has suggested, that the rate of increase in science as a whole is declining. No growth curve in nature ever continues at a constant rate.

As science claims an increasing share of the Federal budget its costs become a matter of concern, although they are minute in comparison with those of the war. More serious are the effects of support on science itself. The more the scientist depends on Federal grants, the more he is obliged to “justify” his work to government agencies that tend to measure “success” by results that can be put into immediate use. The administrator inevitably begins to think of the planning of research. Mr. Tullock is, (rightly, I think) against excessive planning in the sciences, for the historical record clearly shows that individual creativity has been by far the most significant source of innovation, whether in pure or applied fields. However, when one contemplates the effects of the untrammed expansion of certain kinds of technology, one is not inclined to trust Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ as the best means of control.

We cannot forget, as Mr. Tullock tends to, that business as usual for the automobile industry will not help the traffic problems of the cities, which could be ameliorated at least by the use of much smaller vehicles, nor that costly moon shots may not be as important in the long run as efforts to resolve the present ecologie crisis.

Sir Karl R. Popper, whose thought provided the philosophical inspiration for this work, is justly celebrated as one of the greatest living philosophers of science. He has stressed, among many other things, that freedom of inquiry is imperative for the growth of science; that many of the standard modes of explaining science mislead by giving the impression that scientific truth is absolute; and that one of the most important features of scientific procedure is that it requires hypotheses to be cast into a form in which they not only can be verified, but more significantly, proved wrong.

I share with Popper and Tullock the liberal view that science has been a potent force for individual freedom in the past. But doubts arise for the present and future at the realization that so much scientific activity in recent years has been shrouded in secrecy or held as the special province of experts who brook no disagreement except from their colleagues. One wonders what John Stuart Mill would have thought of the words of one astute and humane observer of both science and the establishment who writes that: “unfortunately, the constraints of secrecy, although they disturb the comparative judgment, do not disturb the scientific process. In more liberal days, in the days of Rutherford’s Cambridge, Bohr’s Copenhagen, Franck’s Gottingen, scientists tended to assume, as an optimistic act of faith, as something which ought to be true because it made life sweeter, that science could only flourish in the free air. I wish it were so. I think that everyone who has ever witnessed secret science and secret choices wishes it were so. But nearly all the evidence is dead against it. Science needs discussion, yes; it needs the criticism of other scientists; but that can be made to exist, and of course has been made to exist, in the most secret projects. Scientists have worked, apparently happily, and certainly effectively, in conditions which would have been thought the negation of science by the great free minded practitioners. But the secret, the closed, the climate which to earlier scientists would have been morally intolerable, soon becomes easy to tolerate. I even doubt whether, if one could compare the rate of advance in one of the secret sciences with one of those which is still open to the world, there would be any significant difference. It is a pity.” (C. P. Snow, Science and Government, New York 1962, p. 68) We must at least not overestimate the liberating effects of science in the contemporary world. There can be no modern industrial nation without it and its potentialities for improving the lot of all mankind are immense, but the possibility of secret science as a medium of political control calls up the nightmare of the super-state armed with electronic listening devices and computerized dossiers on every citizen.

Mr. Tullock believes that the social sciences are decidedly “backward” because they are incapable of exact prediction. Worse, he thinks practitioners in those fields are mainly of the “induced” variety, rather than persons with a sustaining natural curiosity, and, as an economist, he is unhappy to be classed among them. The belief in the alleged inferiority of the social sciences, which he also shares with Popper, arises, I believe, from the unfortunate practice of comparing them with physics. It is extremely unlikely, perhaps even undesirable, that anything as precise as physics will ever be derived from social science, and in my view, it is a tactical error for social scientists to worry so intensely about exact measurement to the exclusion of more profitable concerns. This is especially true at a time when previous physical models of the universe have undergone such profound transformations. Biology, particularly evolutionary studies, and above all ecology are probably more useful models. In these sciences, to which neither Popper nor Tullock have devoted much attention, the age-old quest for an irreducible essence has been accompanied by great interest in interactive processes, and it is precisely this type of study which is more useful in understanding social or political issues. Furthermore, the motivation of the best social scientists has been in no way inferior to that of the best natural scientists. (Every field has its modest contributors, perennial journeymen and so on; they help provide the social niche in which the best minds can function.) The issues social scientists confront are really much more difficult. Even Max Planck confessed himself terrified at the perplexities of economics and turned back with relief to the relative simplicity of physics.

On the whole Professor Tullock has written a provocative and interesting work which should prove very useful as an introduction to the problems of science in the matrix of modern culture.

________

[*] Frederick C. Kreiling is professor of history at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, and a specialist in the history of science.

The Communist As

Bogey-Man

The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre by Frank S. Meyer. Harcourt, Thrace, and World, New York, 1967. Paper. Originally published in hard cover in 1961.

By Murray N. Rothbard

Frank S. Meyer is by far the most intelligent, as well as the most libertarian-inclined, of the National Review stable of editors and staff. Of all the National Review editors and contributors, for example, Meyer is the only one to lend his name to the recently organized Council for a Volunteer Military, which calls for abolition of the draft (and even though Meyer is not unequivocally against the draft for all times and places.) But, tragically, Meyer is also, of the war-mongering crew of intellectuals on the Right, perhaps the most frankly and apocalyptically warmongering of them all (with the possible exception of L. Brent Bozell.) Meyer’s libertarian inclinations are fatally warped by his all-consuming desire to incarcerate and incinerate all Communists, wherever they may be. Meyer is, therefore, an interesting example in microcosm of the swamping of any libertarian instincts on the current Right-wing by an all-pervading passion for the Great Crusade to exterminate Communists everywhere.

Meyer is also a microcosm of the Right in that he is a former leading member of the Communist Party of the United States—a fact clearly related to his passion for destroying his former comrades. In fact, Meyer was one of the highest ranking members of the C. P., having been a party member for over a decade, a member of the national committee of the CPUSA, and head of the Workers’ School, the Communist training school in Chicago second in rank only to the famous Jefferson School in New York. While not as publicly well known as such defectors from the Communist Party as Louis Budenz, Meyer apparently outranked them all in the Communist cadre. During the Smith Act and other similar trials, Meyer appeared as expert witness for the prosecution on Communist theory; and this book was the fruit of his experience as organizer and a leading member of the “Communist cadre.” When the book appeared, in 1961, it was uniformly lauded in the scholarly journals, where the reviewers buried their hostility to conservatism in the interests of the common anti-Communist cause, while the left-wing journals ignored the book altogether. It is very possible, therefore, that this is the first unfavorable review of the Meyer book—now reissued unaltered in paper-back—to see publication.

Americans were bombarded, throughout the nineteenth century, by “confessional” literature—by tracts and volumes by defectors and renegades from various groups and causes—purporting to expose and decry the all-pervading sins and horrors of their former colleagues. The land abounded with tracts carrying such titles as: “I Fled From a Nunnery”; “The International Catholic Conspiracy Exposed!” “The Horrible Secrets of Freemasonry”, etc. Americans, one would suppose, had learned to take this literature with a liberal dose of salt, and had learned not to take these fulminations very seriously. The problem with this literature is not simply the outright lies and fabrications; the problem is the deeper one of a total loss of perspective that leads the defector, in guilt at his former actions as well as resentment against his former colleagues for not seeing the light, to blow up unpleasant incidents into a uniquely diabolic movement that needs to be exposed, reviled, and universally condemned.

Let us take, for example, the hypothetical case of a man who spends a decade or two of his life as an active and leading battler for some cause—say, vegetarianism. Then, after this length of time, he becomes converted to an opposite position: say, to be extreme, that vegetables are a positive evil and that one should eat virtually nothing but meat. Think of the enormous weight of guilt that this man now feels; a decade or more of the best years of his life, he now believes, had been spent in promoting what he now believes to be a great and monstrous evil, and in undermining what he now believes to be a positive good. Is it any wonder that he tends to go off half-cocked on the problem, denouncing both his former beliefs and the purveyors of them as the ultimate evil, attacking the “international vegetarian conspiracy” which must either be destroyed or it will conquer the innocent meat-eating and meat-needing world? It would take much greater fortitude, of course, for our ex-vegetarian to say: “well, vegetarianism is relatively unimportant, and those decades were really a big waste of time” and then to forget about the whole affair. It is, instead, the easier course to do the opposite and thus to justify still, if not the goals of one’s lost decades, then at least the overriding importance of those years.

Generations of experience, then, with this kind of confessional literature had supposedly toughened Americans against taking it too seriously; but all this experience went by the board with the advent of the Cold War. Every lurid “I Was A Communist” horror tale was rushed into print to a national acclaim that would have done credit to the reception of a book “exposing” the “international” Jesuit order in the Georgia backcountry of forty years ago. Being an intellectual, Meyer did not publish the usual ex-Communist flim-flam of personal memoirs and denunciations; instead, he was the only ex-Communist to build out of his experience a general theory of the Communist training of their hard-core members: of the forging of “Bolshevik man.” But while very different in content from the usual ex-Communist confessional, critical analysis reveals the Meyer work to be suffering from the same basic stigmata: the blowing up of events and actions common to many groups into a monstrous and diabolic pattern of actions unique to the group from which the author had traveled. Specifically, Meyer points with horror to a pattern of action of the Communist cadre which is, in actuality, common to almost all modern organizations. His uniquely diabolic and re-moulded Bolshevik Men turn out to be, on further inspection, simply Organization Men, with the sins of all Organization Men everywhere.

The central thesis of the Meyer book, then, is the unique diabolism of the Communist movement and of the Communist cadre as persons. We read time and again of the “profoundly different character of Communist consciousness—different from anything with which we are acquainted” (4); “for the Communist is different. He thinks differently. Reality looks different to him.” (4) The personality of the Communist, says Meyer, is totally transformed, transformed by the “training process that moulds the Communist cadre.” He becomes a new man—a “Bolshevik”—and this new type is the same throughout the world Communist movement, regardless of the country involved. (This transcendence of any national or cultural boundaries is important for Meyer to establish, else he would have to admit that not all Communists are uniquely diabolic “Bolshevik” types.) As a result of this training, he declares, “they acquire a strength and confidence which, like the fearful evil they bring into being, can only be described as Luciferian.” (71) “Luciferian” is indeed the operative word, for the thesis of Meyer’s book is the radical difference between Communists and all other men, a difference that makes them non-human, that makes them in effect agents of the Devil—all-cunning, almost always successful in the pursuit of their evil ends—and against whom force and violence are called upon by Meyer to extirpate root and branch: “Against this vision of . . . Communist man, there is no recourse in compromise, reasonableness, peaceful coexistence . . . Communist man poses two stark alternatives for us: victory or defeat” (171)—kill or be killed, except, of course that modern weapons are such that both are likely to occur together—a highly important fact that Meyer somehow neglects to mention.

What, then, of Meyer’s central contention of a uniquely Satanic Communist organization and training? The big problem is that all of the characteristics he mentions can be found in almost any organization of dedicated men, regardless of what that dedication happens to be. Thus, the major feature of the “Bolshevik” is his absolute dedication and loyalty to the decisions of the Communist Party, a Party which takes on the right to run the lives of its members for its own benefit. And yet, this phenomenon unfortunately exists in all sorts of organizations. Much of this process occurs, for example, in the typical corporate Organization Man of our time. Take, for example, the rising young junior or middle-rank executive at GM or IBM. He begins as an ordinary quasi-independent human being, an individual. Then, as he works and rises up the ranks of the IBM “cadre”, his values and therefore his personality begin to be moulded, to be transformed into the typical Organization Man. He begins to believe that his own personal tastes and values and pursuits must be subordinated to an over-arching “loyalty to the company.” An eccentric hobby is given up as too outre for the company “image”; any tendency to obesity is reprimanded and stamped out by his friendly company bosses; even the choice of a wife is thoroughly checked and corrected by the criterion of whether or not she fits into the company executive mould. Yet Mr. Meyer seems to believe that only the Communist Party has presumed to dictate the private lives of its members!

This phenomenon of re-moulding and the reducing of the member of an organization to a “loyal” cipher is particularly marked in organizations that Meyer undoubtedly admires: the CIA, Army Intelligence, or the FBI. Meyer expresses shock that the Communist, through processes of training, holds the good of the Party above the good of his family, his friends, his private life, or even himself. But what of the “good CIA man”? Is he not taught the same thing and moulded in the same way? Is he not taught to lie, to cheat, even to kill, if the “interests of his country”—as interpreted of course by his government bosses—so demand? Isn’t he taught to disregard the interests of himself or his family, if they conflict with these “larger” interests? Is he not taught to keep secrets from his own family, to lie to them for his “country’s sake?” How does all this differ from Meyer’s picture of the cadre Communist? At one or two points, Meyer comes close to this truth by describing the Communist as a kind of soldier in the ranks; granted, but what then of all the other soldiers of this world? What of the American soldier? If Meyer should reply that the ends of the two are different, then this would concede the destruction of the central thesis of his book, for it is not his end (socialism) but his means and his personality and his type of organization that make him, for Frank Meyer, “Luciferian.” It is the latter—the Communist’s means and organization—that is supposed to make peaceful coexistence with him impossible. For if socialist goals were the distinctively Luciferian feature, then whole hordes of people—including Norman Thomas and Sidney Hook and perhaps even Walter Reuther and the ADA would, according to Meyer, have to be exterminated.

If, then, the Communist is taught that his end—the good of the Party as a whole—justifies any means to attain it, and this is his Luciferian quality—then so is taught the American or British or German soldier, so is the intelligence officer—and so, after all, is every politician. For are we not told, again and again, that the State and its politicians (regardless of what State or what party they belong to) cannot be bound by the ordinary rules of individual and social morality? Are we not told, again and again, that overriding “reasons of State” compel them to lie, cheat, kill, for the sake of the “national interest”? Every State, every government, every politician, follows such a path; how then does this differ from the Communist?

The objection might be raised: If we say that Communists are not uniquely monsters, how can they bring themselves to justify such brutalities as Soviet slave labor camps, as the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, etc? Don’t such justifications make the Communists diabolic and especially inhuman—as Meyer claims, and as he bolsters his claim with his and Whittaker Chambers’ depictions of the “crises” faced by Communists as they wrestle with the problem of the “screams in the night”—of those butchered by the Soviet and other Communist governments.

Well, let us investigate this “screams in the night” problem. Here again, it will become clear that such justification by Communists is not only not unique, but is unfortunately almost universal, and is engaged in by the supporters of all States, everywhere and at all times. For example, Harry S. Truman and his cohorts deliberately and wantonly annihilated hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians, including women and children, in A-bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How many Americans have listened to their screams in the night? Have Meyer or Chambers? How many Americans have failed to “justify”—in the name of the “national interest” or whatever—this monstrous act? How many “cadre Americans”—either in the government or out—jumped off the American-State bandwagon, because of this act? How many have even expressed remorse or indignation? And the same can be said of countless American actions, including the bombing of hundreds of thousands of German refugees at Dresden, the sending of hundreds of thousands of refugees back to the Soviet zone of Germany, etc. and down to the current genocidal napalming of the innocent peasantry of South and North Vietnam. Justifications, rationalizations, for butchery and mass murder have been served up by every State and cheerfully adopted by the overwhelming majority of their citizens. One amusingly ironic example from U. S. annals: the U. S. went to war against Spain in 1898 ostensibly to free the Cuban people from the activities of such as “Butcher Weyler”, the Spanish general who inaugurated the “modern” policy of concentration camps for the native civilian population. Yet, a short time later, and in direct consequence of our conquest of the Phillipines in the self-same war, the American Army used the exact same tactics—to which were added the burning of native villages, along with all of their inhabitants—against the Filipinos who were fighting for their independence against our occupying forces. Who in America remonstrated? Who jumped off the cadre-American bandwagon?

Apart from its concerte problems, the Russian suppression of the Hungarian Revolution needed no special justification by Communists; for every State in history, with no exception, has ruthlessly fought to suppress every revolution against its rule. The U. S. Army ruthlessly suppressed rioters and rebels a few years ago in the U. S. colony of Okinawa. On a larger scale, the British, in their ruthless war of suppression against Malayan revolutionaries fighting for their independence, razed and burned whole villages to the ground, using the very principle of “collective guilt” for which Americans and British had self-righteously denounced the Nazis at Lidice. Who protested in the West? Did Frank Meyer? On the contrary: for Meyer himself has an enormous number of anti-Communist-created “screams in the night” to account for and justify before the bar of morality. Meyer, for example, along with his fellow editors of National Review, supported the French war to suppress the Algerian national revolution, a war in which the French used every barbarism of which the Soviet government can be accused: collective guilt, mass slaughter, torture of prisoners, etc. And yet, Meyer, and his fellow “anti-Bolshevik men”, in the name of “anti-Communism” and “Western civilization”, whole-heartedly supported these and numerous similar actions-capped by the monstrous war in Vietnam. Do not Meyer and his fellow anti-Bolsheviks have at least as many screams in the night to justify and alibi for, as have the Bolshevik men? In fact, they may end with infinitely more: for Meyer and his confreres look forward almost with enthusiam to a nuclear holocaust against the Communist nations that would annihilate tens, if not hundreds, of millions of human beings. The devastation and suffering caused by nuclear war would bring about so many more “screams in the night” than Communism has ever done as to defy comparison. So are Communists then, unique monsters, unique justifiers of criminality?

If, then, Communist cadres are dehumanized, or brutalized, by their fealty to their organization, or by their justifications of its actions, the same is true—even more so—for other groups and especially other States: for the soldier who is deliberately brutalized by his training to kill unquestioningly at the command of his officers; for the especially brutalized paratroopers; for CIA men and espionage agents, etc. “The “anti-Bolshevik” man and his organizations can be—and are—just as brutal, just as inhuman, as the Communist, if not more so. Indeed, if we compare the enormous number of defections from the Communist party with the negligible number of defections from the CIA or from the American State, then we can conclude that the training and transformation of the Communist is much less effective than the training and moulding of the anti-Communist patriot. And this is especially true if we consider something which Meyer, in his portrayal of the monolithic world Bolshevik, does not even hint at: the astonishingly rapid breaking up, since the death of Stalin, of the International Communist “monolith”, both within and between countries. Where has been the equivalent disintegration and “polycentrism” of the anti-Bolshevik or the American-State cadre?

Apart from political and governmental organizations, other examples of dedication, of absolute organizational loyalty, abound in our society. Innumerable ideological movements, and religious movements, dictate to the lives of their members. The monk or nun must subordinate himself completely to ecclesiastical discipline—which is interpreted as defining the will of God. The Jesuit pledges willingness to obey the Pope in all things whatsoever, to submerge his individuality completely in the Jesuit Order as commanded by the Pope. The priest was obedience. The lives of the Buchmanites—the Moral Rearmament movement—are run totally by the movement itself, to which absolute fealty is pledged. The attitude of the Buchmanite is just as “totalitarian” over its members, just as “moulding” of the new man, as the Communist. An acquaintance of mine, who had been born into the ‘cadre’ of the Buchmanite Movement, was ordered by her superiors not to go to college, because they decided that she wasn’t fit for the move.

Some of the allegedly unique characteristics of the Communist and his “moulding” are not only reflected in numerous large and small organizations, and in all governments, but also in almost any profession. Thus, Meyer describes how the beginning Communist, first revolted at certain aspects of his work, gradually becomes “steel-hardened” to his work and gives up his former scruples. This is supposed to show the unique diabolism of Communist training. But isn’t this true of many quite ordinary and undiabolic professions? Doesn’t the surgeon, the nurse, first squeamish about the grisly details of their professions, eventually become a “Bolshevik man of steel” about them? Doesn’t the worker in a slaughterhouse follow the same “path of training”?

Throughout the book, Meyer describes in awed, portentous, almost breathless fashion situations which are ordinary, even commonplace, rather than diabolically unique to the Communist movement. One particularly absurd—almost unconsciously humorous—passage deals with Communists finding that they don’t make close friendships outside the Party, “Communists ... seem to find their really enjoyable recreation in informal, relaxed Party talk: talking shop, post-mortem, anecdotes, reminiscenses, semi-theoretical argument, Party gossip. The drying up of personal connections of depth with the outside world is compensated to a considerable degree by the comradeship that undoubtedly exists in the Party, born of common association . . .” (129). Now Good Heavens! Has Meyer never heard of friendships being formed on the basis of deeply-shared interests? Has he never heard, for example, that musicians, dedicated to music, tend to associate largely with other musicians? Writers with other writers? And don’t libertarians tend to form their deepest friendships with other libertarians (if they can be found?) Doesn’t Meyer himself largely associate with anti-Communists of the National Review variety? This is all very natural and very common, and there is nothing sinister about it. And yet, as in so many cases throughout the book, Meyer once more treats a common event as the uniquely sinister product or aspect of the “Communist conspiracy”.

Another typical piece of diabolism is Meyer’s discussion of how the C. P. recruits new members. Each man is carefully screened, his strengths and weaknesses assessed, his susceptibilities played on, etc. His personal friend will be the one to ask him to join, and after he joins he will be greeted in comradery fashion by other Party members. Again, Good Heavens! Consider any group in our society, whether it be a corporation consering hiring an executive, the President selecting someone for a White House appointment, or your local lodge or Kiwanis inviting a member to join. Will he not be screened and considered? Won’t his friend be the one to invite him? Won’t he then be greeted cordially by his fellow-members? In short, the supposedly sinister tactics of the C. P. are tactics used by almost any group, from government down to the local sewing circle, in treating potential or actual new members or “recruits”. What’s sinister about that?

Then again, we find that the C. P. particularly hates “renegades”, those who have defected from the Party, and whom it suspects will be uniquely anti-Party. But here again, this phenomenon is true of any. creed, any organization. Suppose again that a man is a vegetarian, part of a weak or a strong vegetarian movement. He does not hate a man who has never become interested in the vegetarian movement: that man is, to the vegetarian, simply ignorant, not yet apprised of the vegetarian truth, not yet raised to “vegetarian consciousness”. But let a man join the vegetarian movement, rise high in it, and then desert its ranks and become, anti-vegetarian, and hatred for this renegade—the man who has seen the truth and then spurned it—will almost inevitably well up in the ranks of the faithful. This again—while perhaps deplorable—is one of the most natural phenomena in the world. It is present in the Catholic Church, which has hope for the pagan but scorn for the apostate, it is present in every ideological or any other type of movement, it is present in the minds of General Motors men when one of their rank moves to Ford, it is present, even (as the work of Caplow and McGee, The Academic Marketplace. attests) in faculty members of “Siwash College” when one of their colleagues leaves for a job at any other college. His former colleagues somehow feel that he has betrayed them, has betrayed Siwash, and usually have little further to do with him. Again, Communists are simply acting like any other Organization Men or any other ideologists.

Meyer also considers unique and somehow sinister that the Communist, while fighting hard for his point of view within the Party, will stick with the Party and fight for its decision, even when it has decided contrary to his own views. But, once again, this attitude is true of all Organization Men, regardless of the organization. The loyal Democratic Party man remains with his party if his candidate or point of view loses in the primary or in party councils; he works hard for the winning candidate, and then, as cadre Communists are supposed to do, “bides his time” to see if he can make his views prevail later. The government bureaucrat does the same thing in inter-bureaucratic struggles; the general when he argues for his point of view in the General Staff; the corporation executive who wishes to pursue a new policy, etc. This attitude might not always be commendable, but it is hardly sinister or unique to Communists—again, it is almost universal.

We Have seen that time and again, imputes sinister attributes unique to Communism, to aspects that are common to many, or even all, organizations, ideologies, or dedicated people. But his error goes deeper than this, for in some cases, he attributes the sinister to qualities that we should consider virtuous or even admirable. For example, Meyer describes with some horror that the Communist tries to control his subconscious mind by his conscious, tries to mold his emotions to serve his reason. What in the world is wrong with that? On the contrary, such control, such rationalism, is admirable. That men should be more rational, and have complete mastery over themselves, is an ideal to be sought, and not something to be regarded as a sinister device of “Bolshevik Man”.

Similarly, Meyer makes a big to-do of the Communist principle of the “unity of theory and practice”, which he claims to be mystical, unique, etc Yet, on his own evidence, what is this mysterious ‘unity of theory and practice’? It is simply the desire to avoid two polar errors: the fashioning of theory which will be arid, sterile, and unrelated to human life; and the acting in day-to-day practice without having that practice guided and moulded by theoretical principles. Again, far from being something sinister, this is a highly admirable doctrine. And it can be applied to any theory which one wants to advance, whether Communist, libertarian, or vegetarian. Thus, again, the cause of vegetarianism is being hampered if vegetarians only study and develop vegetarian theory, with no attempt to agitate for vegetarianism in practice, to recruit new vegetarians, etc. Conversely, the cause of vegetarianism will suffer if vegetarians only act and never study, refine, or advance their theoretical principles—they will inevitably end by betraying or abandoning their own goals. Communists try to avoid this, as any sensible movement should; the difference only is that Communists have thought longer and harder about such problems than most other groups.

In trying to attach a unique, and sinister, quality to the Communists’ “unity of theory and practice”, Meyer reaches the heights of absurdity by pointing out that Lenin, Stalin, etc. wrote no systematic work, but that their main theoretical writings (Marx even included—except for Das Kapital) were not systematic theory, but intertwined in daily polemical struggles. Meyer says that “Marxism-Leninism has no Summa, no Institutes, etc.” Once again, Good Heavens! Doesn’t Meyer know that the same was true of the Christian Fathers? St. Augustine, the greatest of the Fathers, wrote no Summa, no theoretical work either; all of his theoretical doctrines were intertwined in polemical and daily struggles (in his organizational work as Bishop of Hippo, in his polemics against heretics, etc.) The same was true of the other Church fathers. It took a thousand years of developing Christian speculation and theology before St. Thomas and others began to write their Summas. The Communists have not had a thousand years.

Another admirable virtue which Communists apparently possess and which Frank attacks them for, is that they are taught to have an attitude, a position, on all political events, regardless of where they take place on the globe. They are, in short, taught to think responsibly in politics. What, again, is wrong with that? This is the highest form of political thought: to concern oneself, and to formulate a position, on all important and relevant political events of one’s time, and even on events in past ages.

This error of Meyer’s is bound up in his deprecation of Communists for trying to integrate all their thought, all their views on the humane and even natural sciences, into one great philosophic system. This aim, far from being sinister or diabolic, can only be considered wholly admirable, and in the best tradition of reason and science. To carve out an architectonic, a system which enables one to hold a consistent and integrated view of all the disciplines of man is a great and noble aim, and a rationalist individualist philosophy can also accomplish this goal. Clearly, it is the goal of science to be able to explain more and more phenomena. What’s wrong about the Marxists, contrary to Meyer, is not their aim of an integrated systematic approach to philosophy and its allied subjects, but the fact that this particular system is almost totally wrong. Yet, instead of rejecting the Marxian system only, Meyer attacks system per se. One instance Meyer gives of this is that the Marxist-Leninist considers himself able to instruct the physicist, for example, in the basic philosophic errors of the Principle of Indeterminacy or Uncertainty. Meyer treats this aim as ludicrous, but, on the contrary, the Marxist-Leninist would be right. The principle of indeterminacy is philosophically incorrect (though not necessarily for Marxist-Leninist reasons), and general philosophers are entitled to criticize it. Similarly, aesthetic philosophers are entitled to criticize modern art even though they are not at all artists. This aim of Marxism is simply the old Greek rationalist aim to make philosophy once more the queen of the sciences and of the intellectual disciplines.

Similarly, Meyer considers it sinister that the Communists want to purge their judgments of all “subjectivity” and to render them “objective”. What in the world is wrong with that? This has been the aim of every rationalist in the history of the world; the rationalist tries to be scientific and objective about arriving at truth, to rise above his own emotions and blasses. This has been generally considered a noble aim, yet Meyer implies it to be vicious and Bolshevik. Objectivity in searching for truth is indeed to be sought, and “subjectivity” spurned; where the Communists go wrong is to identify truth and objectivity not with their own careful judgment of the matter, but in other persons: in the Party. This—the identifying of reason and reality with a specific group of people—is their cardinal error, and not their attempts to be objective and rational.

The injunction of objectivity is also used, in the Communist movement, to assure that one’s views on events are guided by rational rather than emotive considerations—a highly commendable position surely. Thus, a man whom I have known for many years, and who professes to be an ardent libertarian, expressed a few years ago his hope that the Freedom Riders be jailed; here is an example, for a libertarian, of non-objective thinking—of allowing his emotional dislike for left-wing Freedom Riders to swamp his libertarian principles. This problem is therefore hardly uniquely Communist, nor is the Communist striving for keeping objective principles in mind anything but commendable (though the content of those principles, of course, is a different matter.)

Again, Meyer considers it rather sinister that Communists are highly concerned with “correct formulation” of position, and are concerned to oppose any “deviations” from this formulation. As he points out, the Communists do this because they realize that “ideas are weapons”, and that a slight deviation from fundamental premisses can mean large divergence from final conclusions. But this realization is not sinister, but simply an indication that Communists are serious about ideas, and realize the critical role that ideas play in public affairs—materialists though they may be. Of course, Communists may tend humorlessly to push this concern with correct formulaton to extremes—but probably less than did the innumerable Christian arguments about shadings of meanings of a Greek word, etc. that led to countless heresies, schisms, and even religious wars. Once again, the Communists are neither unique nor necessarily to be condemned for being precise and serious about their ideas.

Another presumably sinister attribute of the Communist is quoted by Meyer: “The basic principle of modern Soviet didactics is the principle of conscious understanding ... The Bolshevik insists on man’s responsibility for his behavior and on his ability to make his own destiny”. (189), Again, what could be more admirable than a striving for consciousness, for rationalism, and for self-responsibility? What could be more individualist, in fact? Of course, the Communist errs when “He follows the Party line because the Party is right’ and because he presumably understands why it is right’”, but at least we can commend the Communist for trying to understand rationally why the Party is “right” rather than merely accept orders for the sake of accepting. This puts the Communist far ahead, say, of the soldier—in the American or any other army—who is told to obey orders unquestioningly. Surely, that is a far more brutalizing and dehumanizing way of conducting an organization than is the Communist.

Meyer plunges once more into unconscious humor when, again with portentousness and awe, he describes the Communist as not being emotionally indignant against his enemies but being cool and sober. (73 f.) Meyer admits that, in public agitational speaking, the Communist will work himself into emotional indignation, but that “in private conversation”, his attitude, the attitude of the “developed Communist”, is “highly sober”. Now, again, really! Surely what Meyer is describing is not sinister Machiavellianism but simple maturity! The libertarian, for example, hates the State, particularly the Leviathan State of today. But he does not, if he is mature and sensible, go around frothing at the mouth; his attitude of indignation at the State is so deep-seated that he can afford to be, and will be, sober, cool, even humorous at times, about the whole problem. Again, this is simple maturity, not Communist machination, and does not connote a “new type of man” or “psychosurgery” or anything of the sort.

To turn now from instances where Meyer is attacking Communists for their virtues (responsibility, sobriety, rationalism, etc.) to other instances where he is attacking them for supposedly unique faults which are actually widespread: Meyer speaks, again portentously, of the prevalence of the “our” “they” dichotomy in Communist thinking and conversation. This is supposed to symbolize the depth of Communist alienation from all other people. But again, Good Heavens! This, again, is true of any ideological movement, regardless of what it is. The followers constitute “us” or “our side”; the antagonists “them” and the “other side”. How often do libertarians or conservatives, for example, ask: “Which side is he on?” “Has he come over to our side?”, etc. I am sure that the vegetarian, or the anti-flouridationist, or whatever, holds the same attitudes.

Again, Meyer thinks it strange and somehow diabolic that the Communist divides himself into the cadre and the rank-and-file, who serve as transmission belts for the cadre. Much is made, throughout the book, of this cadre vs. rank-and-file distinction as one of the essential facts of the “moulded” Communist man. But, once again, the distinction between cadre and rank-and-file is true of any organization, ideological or non-ideological. The local Kiwanis club will have inactive, passive rank-and-file members; and it will have a “hard core”—a cadre—of active leaders, who will be a minority in relation to the rank-and-file, but who will effectively “run” the rank and file and take the leadership in the organization. This is almost a sociological law of all organization, and not unique with Communists. Whatever the organization or profession, whether it be lodge meeting, Democratic Party, or General Motors, there will be a minority of the more interested and/or more able who will be the cadre leaders to a majority of passive, less able and/or less interested rank-and-file. Again, there is nothing particularly sinister here.

Another instance of absurdity in the book is Meyer’s statement that in Marxist party-training schools, economics is called “political economy” (167). Now, put baldly like this, the reader once more sees another sinister aspect of Communism: for here Communists twist economics and make it political: “political economy”. Another weight in the scales of supposed evidence of Communist diabolism has been made. But Meyer does not inform the reader that the explanation for this is very simple, and non-sinister. The reason is that the Communists follow the economics of Karl Marx, and Marx wrote at a time when all economics was called “political economy.” Hence, the Communists still cleave to the name—just as do the clearly non-sinister Henry Georgists, and for similar reasons. The term “economics” only came in toward the end of the 19th century.

Another favorite indictment of the Communists, and one used by Frank Meyer throughout this book, to demonstrate their unique diabolism, is that Communism is a “conspiracy.” How often have we read of the “international Communist conspiracy”! Other socialists are not bad, the cry runs, because they are not “conspirators”, whereas Communists are. Communists, say Meyer and others, are trained to deceive, they cooperate in secret, etc.

Let us, in the first place, analyze this much-used term “conspiracy”, What does it mean? It was introduced into the common law by panicky kings who wanted to stamp out all dissidence and opposition and who called their opposition “conspirators”. The law of conspiracy is, as a result, in very bad shape, for it outlaws A and B agreeing to do things together which are perfectly legal for them to do separately. In actuality, “conspiring” is just a “smear” term for doing something in secret and in private. If A and B agree to push C for nomination in the local lodge meeting, and you and I are against C, we can denounce A and B as engaging in “conspiracy”. In other words, if you and I agree to do something, it is simple and justifiable private agreement; if other people, whom we dislike, agree to do something, this becomes ipso facto “conspiracy”. Let us abandon this loaded term, “conspiracy”, and refer to agreements made in private or in secret.

What, then, is wrong with private or secret agreements or actions? (The ends might be bad—such as agreeing to rob a bank—but this is not the fault of the secrecy, but of the end involved. An open, public agreement to rob a bank would be morally just as bad. But we have agreed to prescind from the ends in view—in the case of the Communists it is socialism—and simply consider the means, the form employed by them: in this case, “conspiracy”.) There is surely nothing wrong with them; one of the most precious rights of an individual in a free society is privacy, and this includes the right to make private agreements with others, to form secret societies, etc. Attack on privacy and secrecy is an expression of massification and collectivist spirit at its worst and most meddlesome. Yet this spirit has always seen something sinister and diabolic in the secrecy of others: one of the most important political parties in American history was the “Anti-Masonic Party”, dedicated to the coercive extermination by the State of the “international Masonic conspiracy”; the Catholic Church and its rites have been denounced as secret and conspiratorial; so have the Knights of Columbus, etc.

Furthermore, what about those “dedicated anti-Communists”, the FBI, the CIA, the Army Intelligence, etc.? Are they not trained exclusively in secrecy, and in deception? Do not our espionage agents live by secrecy and double-dealing? What of their humanity, and their moral principles?

Furthermore, the Communist Party, believe it or not, is far less secretive than, not only the CIA, but also such approved groups as the Masons or the Knights of Columbus. For the Communists openly publish their views, proclaim their ends,etc. If they are secretive, they are far less so than innumerable secret societies which are considered perfectly appropriate to American life and whom Frank Meyer would not think of denouncing—but which, on his own terms, he should.

Finally, there is good reason for secretiveness in the Communist movement. That is, that a good portion of the time, Communists are either outlawed or in a state of semi-outlawry, harassed by government officials and espionage agents. Certainly, with the Smith and McCarran Acts, etc. this has been true in the United States. Much of the need for secrecy is imposed upon it from outside.

Moreover, all organizations are secretive to some extent: (in the jargon of “hard anti-Communism”, they are all partly “open” and partly “underground”). The Americans for Democratic Action issue open resolutions, but they do not bare all their inner deliberations and arguments to public view. And why should they? Neither do Democratic Party leaders bare their deliberations, nor do union leaders, nor do corporation executives. So are they all “conspirators”.

Basic to Meyer’s analysis of the Communist movement is his view of world Communism as a monolith, with the Politburo of the Soviet Union at its head. Now to the extent that this was true, this was only true during the Stalinist Period of the movement (approximately 1929 to 1948—the date of the defection of Marshal Tito.) Before and after, the Communist movement was never a monolith; disagreements, schisms, etc. were substantive, grave, and open. As early as the 1920’s, Mao-tse-tung disobeyed Stalin’s advice to coalesce with Chiang-kai-Shek, and took to the hills to form a guerilla army. And since 1948, and especially since 1956, the world Communist movement has clearly been far from a monolith; it is perhaps not coincidental that Meyer’s own personal experience in the Party was only in the Stalinist period; but there is still no excuse for him to ignore the last 19 years of extremely important Party history. Tito’s split opened up another fissure in the world Communist movement; and, in 1956, Khruschev changed the face of the world Communist movement for all time—how? by castigating the errors and and even crimes of Stalin. This attack on Stalin cannot be interpreted as simply another change in “line”. For what this meant was that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was openly repudiating its formerly revered leader—in fact, repudiating its own past actions. This means the open rejection of what Frank Meyer claims is the central tenet of every Communist: that the Party is always right. Now that the Party has acknowledged that it, even its central core, can make grievous mistakes, it is impossible for the CP ever to become a monolith again, for every Communist now knows that the Party can be proved wrong, even in its central leadership.

Meyer maintains that the world Communist movement is a monolith run by the Soviet Politburo, yet we have seen strikingly and increasingly in recent years that this is certainly not the case. That Meyer’s statements are pure assertion unbacked by convincing evidence is shown, further, by his failure to cite any sources dealing with the Russian or Asian or other non-European Communist parties. And there is another important point vis a vis “Communist man” that Meyer fails to consider. In countries where the Communist movement is out of power, we can be sure that its members are eager, dedicated ideologues. But in countries where Communism is in power, the situation inevitably changes. For this means that the only way to rise in society, to rise above the level of ditch-digger, is to join the Communist party. It is then inevitable that Communist parties in Communist regimes will become heavily infected with the virus of “careerism”, “opportunism,”, etc., men who will of course spout the slogans, but do so only ritualistically, and who will act increasingly as Russian—or Yugoslavian—or whatnot bureaucrats rather than ideologues. And as time goes on, this process is bound to accelerate. Yet, by omitting this element, Meyer’s policy conclusions in relation to Communist countries and their leaders become totally misleading.

We must conclude that Frank Meyer has not in the least established his thesis: that his discussion distorts the picture, and that one cannot concur in the special diabolism of the Communist organization. But if that is true, then the only thing really wrong about the Communists is their end: socialism, and this is an end pursued by a great many other people, people who are far more influential in the direction of socialism or statism than is the negligible CPUS A.

If the Communist is not uniquely disbolic, then what is, he? I think we can pretty well summarize the Communist by saying that he is, in form, structure, and means: an Intellectual Organization Man, and his end is socialism, of the proletarian-Marxian variety. Like all other Organization Men, he is devotedly loyal to his organization, in this case his Party. In the ranking of organizations and their men, it is fair to say that he is more subservient and dehumanized than a General Motors executive, but far less subservient and brutalized than a soldier, a paratrooper, or an agent of the CIA. If he rationalizes and justifies brutality, then so do the members and defenders of every State. He is far more independent than the soldier, paratrooper, or CIA man, as witness the numerous schisms, defections, etc. that have taken place in Communist ranks, as compared to the scarcity of mutinies in the ranks of the armed forces. The Communist has many admirable qualities which other people might well emulate: the striving to be rational and objective, the striving to integrate all of man’s knowledge and social philosophy into one great philosophic system, the wish to be serious and responsible, the striving for an ideal which (he believes) will bring about a Paradise on earth for the human race. He has two major errors: one is that the philosophical system that he has adopted, Marxism, is incorrect; and, as a consequence, that his goal of socialism is a grave error. But we have seen that the goal (socialism) must be ruled out of this discussion, because there are a great many socialists, and Communists then become no worse than any of the others. His second error is that he is an Organization Man: that he tends to place the locus of science, or reason, or reality, in other persons: i.e., in the ones who constitute the leadership of his organization. But while this is unfortunate, we have seen that this is a trait which the Communist shares with all too many millions of others today, in innumerable organizations of all types throughout the world. What we see here is not the compulsory bondage of an individual to the State, but the voluntary bondage of an individual to some external Orgnization. It is, indeed, incumbent on individualists and libertarians to give profound attention to this entire problem; for while we have thought and written a great deal about the State, we have done little to consider the problem of the individual vis a vis organizations.

Since there are Organization Men everywhere, and since the Communists are far better individualists than Army officers, etc., we must conclude that Communists are not uniquely diabolic, that the main thing wrong with them is their end goal; but that this is a goal which they share with much more respectable groups, groups whom few would attack as diabolic.

Finally, it is important to note a disquieting passage or two which indicates that one reason that Meyer is so fiercely opposed to Communism may be that it, in turn, is opposed to the State (or, at least, to the non-Communist State.) Thus, Meyer, in the course of his anti-Communist phillipic, says:

Previously, the policeman on the corner has been for him, as for most Americans or Englishmen, a neutral symbol at the worst, at the best a source of information and ultimate protection against robbers and other malefactors. Now he is transformed into an immediate symbol of danger, an agent of the enemy, the bourgeois state, with whom one’s only potential relations are those of warfare. An alienation from the mores of the society is being artificially created. . .

Through theory, through atmosphere, through interpreted experience in demonstration or picket line, the sense of community with the nation is shattered. Very concretely, the idea of a commonwealth within the established commonwealth, and in bitter battle with it, is instilled. (127-128)

Let us note this passage very carefully. For what Meyer is doing is to identify “the society”, “the nation”, and “the commonwealth” with the State—with the “cop on the corner.” Now this is the grievous error that has been made by every writer who has opposed liberty: this identification of the public, of the citizenry, with the State apparatus. It does not salvage Meyer’s position to add his wish that the State be “the limited government of a constitutional republic”; the damage is done. (Also, see page 68, where Meyer is opposing the Communist view of the State as pure force—which, of course, is precisely what the State is.) It is unfortunate, but perhaps not astonishing, that Frank Meyer should reveal a deep-rooted and fundamental statism in his political philosophy; for it is almost impossible to agitate for the State to kill Communists throughout the world without adopting statism at the root of one’s social philosophy.

VIETNAM:

Teach-Ins

Louis Menashe and Ronald Radosh, eds., Teach-ins: U.S.A., Reports. Opinions. Documents. New York, Frederick Praeger, 1967, 349 pp., $1.95.

By Leonard P. Liggio

The first teach-in developed at the University of Michigan. It was held on March 24, 1965 in response to the sustained bombing of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam by the US government. This teach-in was organized by the students and faculty at the University of Michigan and Professor Anatol Rapoport, one of the organizers, has presented this description of it:

The first teach-in was a demonstration, not a debate. To be sure, the meeting had the format of academic discourse, and, needless to say, the whole gamut of opinon found expression in the night-long discussions. But there was no question about the basis of discussion. The point of departure was our conviction that the present U. S. policy in Southeast Asia was dangerous, ineffective, illegal, and immoral. No Government spokesman and no apologist for the Administration’s policy appeared on the “faculty” of the “Free University of Michigan.” Whatever opposition was voiced was directed at us from the floor, not from among us. To the critics of this procedure we replied that the Administration had its own channels of communication and its own apparatus of influence. Our task was to establish a counterforce to the engineering of consent.

The “Free University of Michigan’s” “faculty” ranged from such long standing critics of US foreign policy as Professor Kenneth Boulding, to such then unrecognized commentators as Carl Oglesby. Kenneth Boulding has summarized the motivation of the teach-in as follows:

It began as a movement of pure protest and outrage. The motivations which inspired it were no doubt various. They included a genuine fear of escalation into nuclear warfare; they included also a sense of moral outrage at the use of such things as napalm and the “lazy dog,” and the appalling sufferings which we are imposing on the Vietnamese in the supposed name of freedom and democracy.

Professor Boulding has suggested the illusions that were revealed in the teach-ins. Often there were pleas for the US to resume a peaceful role in the world, as though the US government has not been an aggressor throughout its history. This meant that the teach-in needed to instruct the students, i. e., faculty and students, in the reality of American history and in the reality of aggression, neither of which is taught in American universities. As Professor Boulding said: “We are not, and never have been, a peace-loving nation; we are not only ruthless and bloody but we feel no shame about it.” Similarly, Professor Christopher Lasch’s commentary on the teach-ins indicates the potential role of education which has been rejected by the universities and its professors:

The real subject that needs to be “taught” is the history of the Cold War and of the relation of the American Left to Communism. The Left needs to reconsider its own history, as a patient therapeutically reconstructs his past . . . These are subjects—as distinguished from “alternatives” in Vietnam-worth teaching. Until the teach-ins begin to teach, they will be politically useless and intellectually boring. It will be interesting to see whether the failures of higher education-the confusion of education with expertise, the idea that students are a needless obstacle to “research” - will now repeat themselves in the political agitation to which teachers find themselves so unexpectedly committed.

The relationship of the origins of the Cold War and the failure of the American Left are really the same subject in that the ability of Liberal Corporatism, centered in the New Deal-Fair Deal, to co-opt the American Left and make it the spokesman of US imperialism against domestic and foreign anti-imperialists insured the existence of the Cold War-the modern expression of US imperialism. Lasch notes:

Things would be different if the American Left had not long ago committed itself to outdo the Right in its anti-Communist zeal; but, once the Left itself accepted anti-Communism as the sine qua non of political respectability, it became the prisoner of its own immediate success, surviving the postwar hysteria only to find that hysteria had become a permanent feature of the political scene.

The postwar hysteria resulted from the prewar hysteria which the Left engendered to aid US imperialism’s intervention in World War II. The teach-ins provided a beginning for exposing the limited range of difference that has passed for a left or a right in America - that both have alternatively merely been instruments for co-option by Liberal Corporatism. Such a role is revealed, for example, in a comment on the teach-ins by the new-rightist, Russell Kirk: “Fancy Dr. Staughton Lynd, or a professor of the Birchite persuasion, as Secretary of State.” What Kirk indicates is not merely the similarity of the anti-Establishmentism of the New Left and the Birchites, but also the frequent identity of their criticisms and conclusions, especially their neo-isolationist analysis of US imperialism.

Echoes of the earlier domestic anti-imperialist critiques were to be found from the beginning of the teach-ins at Michigan, and increased with the constant assertion by supporters of US imperialism in Vietnam that the domestic opposition was a resurgence of the American isolationism which opposed US aggression in 1898, 1917, 1941 and 1950. At the Michigan teach-in, Arthur Waskow, of the Institute for Policy Studies, appears to have initiated the insight when he raised the cry: “stop neo-isolationism.” Perhaps as a historian he recognized the essentially Left and revolutionary potentialities of isolationism - the domestic opposition to US imperialism. Liberal Corporatism requires a range of imperialist instruments to achieve its goals, but the most important over the long-run has been the foreign aid program. The conservatives in the Liberal Corporatist Establishment - Ful-bright, Kennedy, Morse, etc.-wish to rely on the tried and proven mechanism of imperialism, foreign aid (military and economic), rather than on the aggressive forward strategies of Johnson, Rusk, McNamara, Bundy, Rostow, etc., which raises threats to the existing exploitative system. Arthur Schlesigner, Jr., in his speech to the National Teach-in, quoted Senator Robert Kennedy to emphasize the crucial role of increased foreign aid to achieve the desired objectives of US imperialism, especially in Vietnam. Similarly, Arthur Waskow, to emphasize his opposition to the American neo-isolationism of the New Left, proposes increased expenditure for the major instrument of US imperialism, foreign aid. Waskow’s Michigan teach-in attack on neo-isolationism summarized that opposition to US imperialism as follows:

There are some Americans who have responded to their own horror over the means we are using in Vietnam by denouncing the use of any means at all, who have responded to the difficulties we have discovered in the way of accomplishing our official noble ends in the underdeveloped world by condemning those ends as irrelevant to, or undesirable for, the underdeveloped world. They have responded to the new American arrogance with what, at first glance, looks like a new American humility: the humility that says we have nothing useful to offer the world.

From the University of Michigan the teach-ins spread to many campuses and some had important repercussions by raising a number of fundamental issues which had remained unresolved beneath the surface of the previously unexamined American society . For example, the teach-in organized on April 23, 1965 by the Rutgers University SDS chapter played the role of raising such issues for the university as well as for the state’s electorate. At the teach-in history professor Eugene Genovese declared: “I do not fear or regret the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.” This statement as well as its repetition by political science professor James Mellen of Drew University, at a Rutgers teach-in in September, became the major issue in the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign; Gov. Hughes was re-elected on his support for academic freedom while Professors Genovese and Mellen were ultimately removed from their academic posts by the subtle means used by university administrators.

The National Teach-in held in Washington, May 15, 1965 departed from the basic nature of the teach-ins, for it was developed and operated in cooperation with the Administration in order to give respectability and distribution to the Administration’s postion among the uncommitted. Professor William Appleman Williams, who addressed the National Teach-in, noted the ability of the Administration to manipulate it so that “Deutscher’s assault on the assumptions of American policy, and Morgenthau’s laying bare the dangerous unreality of officialdom’s so-called realism” were blunted. (It is unfortunate that Isaac Deutscher’s address was not able to be included in Teach-ins: U. S. A.) Williams indicates that the failure of the National Teach-in compared to the teach-in movement lay in the absence of students in determining its activities. Williams says:

The first and crucial thing to understand is that the students largely supplied the initiative and power behind the entire movement . . .

They are young men and women who are intelligent and perceptive enough to learn from their elders without making all the same mistakes. They have had enough of hipsterism as well as of the jet-set, and of the Old Left as well as of the Establishment. And they are aware that emancipation involves men as well as women, and that it concerns something beyond changing patterns of sexual behavior and beyond the freedom and the opportunity to hustle their wares in the marketplace.

They are morally committed to the proposition that the American system must treat people as people, and that the system must be changed if that is necessary to achieve that objective. They are deeply angry about the double standard of morality they constantly experience.

In contrast to the students, the faculty who were the organizers of the National Teach-in were, according to Joan Scott’s perceptive observation, “confused about whether they loved the existing system or the enduring principle of American democracy.”

The most productive teach-in was the Berkeley Teach-in (May 21-22) which led to major political activities in succeeding months. It was addressed by the most significant American critics of US aggression in Vietnam as well as by international figures such as Isaac Deutscher and Bertrand Russell (by tape). Professor Staughton Lynd’s speech contained the important contribution to radical politics in America that coalition politics “means coalition with the Marines.” Lynd concluded his speech with a call for a revolutionary analysis of the meaning of imperialist war for American society. He said to the government of the United States:

And if you are worried that the natives all over the world are restless, we want you to know that the natives here at home are restless too, and maybe there should be a contingency plan to keep some of the Marines here to deal with us.

From this there developed the International Days of Protest which were the response to the activity and leadership for the Berkeley teach-in group. Focusing on the support of American opposition to US imperialism, international teach-ins were organized in major world capitals. A teach-in against US aggression in Vietnam was held at the University of Puerto Rico in which the independence movement of Puerto Rico drew the parallel between “Puerto Rico’s sturggle for liberation and that of the Vietnamese people.” From London to Tokyo (where recently-elected SDS president Carl Oglesby spoke) the response to the Berkeley group’s call for international solidarity with the American anti-imperialist movement contributed to the education of the radical movements in many countries. In the Paris teach-in an orthodox Marxist speaker was “reminded that the French working class, largely led by the Communist Party, had never struck for peace in Algeria; he may have begun to understand what a real teach-in might be: the examination of assumptions - even one’s own.”

VIETNAM

And The Republicans

The War In Vietnam. The Text of the Controversial Republican White Paper Prepared by the Staff of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, Washington, D. C., Public Affairs Press, 1967, 62 pp., $1.00.

By Leonard P. Liggio

Early in this staff study it is stated: America, no matter how pure its motives, cannot overcome the weight of history insofar as the Vietnamese look at it. In short, their memory of history is what we must learn to deal with, not our concept of it.

And in its conclusions, it declares:

In short, we Americans cannot simply go to Asia, wipe the slate clean, and say to them, “This is how it shall be.” The Vietnamese have their own view of nationalism, quite different from ours, the Vietnamese Communists identify with it, and it renders our involvement immeasurably difficult.

The advantage of the Republicans’ study is that it seeks to understand the realities both of the recent history of the Vietnamese people and of the present political situation. Against these facts the Republicans re-examine the U. S. intervention in Vietnam.

The background indicates to the Republicans that the “most crucial moments” came at the end of the Second World War. Ho Chi Minh’s leadership brought independence to Vietnam on September 2, 1945, but, based on the decision of the Anglo-Soviet-American Potsdam conference, allied forces under a British general restored the colonial rule of the De Gaulle government in southern Vietnam. “The consequences of this decision are with us today.”

While completely condemning the U. S. - supported French aggression, the Republican study merely touches on the original U, S. official involvement in Vietnam - its recognition of the puppet Saigon government in February 1950. It refuses to face the fact that this recognition was intimately involved in U. S. hostility to the newly established Peoples’s Republic of China. Throughout the study the relationship of Vietnam to overall U. S. policy, especially to China policy, is neglected as though the Vietnam involvement were an isolated mistake rather than the most obvious aspect of a single foreign policy. Thus, when in mid-January 1950, the Soviet Union objected to the presence of the Chiang delegate in the Security Council, the U.S., supported by France, vetoed the seating of the delegation of the People’s Republic of China; China recognized Ho Chi Minh’s government, the U. S., to compensate France, recognized the Saigon regime, and the Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council unitl after the beginning of the Korean war six months later. Again, regarding Truman’s intervention in Korea, the Republicans fail to indicate an overall policy in the simultaneous introduction of American forces at the three traditional invasion routes against China: Korea, the Seventh Fleet in the Strait of Taiwan, and the dispatch of American ‘advisers’ to Vietnam. Nor do they recall the strong Republican opposition to this policy led by Senator Robert Taft. Taft declared:

I have never felt that we should send American soldiers to the Continent of Asia, which, of course, included China proper and Indo-China, simply because we are so outnumbered in fighting a land war on the Continent of Asia that it would bring about complete exhaustion even if we were able to win.

If the President can intervene in Korea without congressional approval, we can go to war in Malaya or Indonesia or Iran or South America.

Understandably, the Republicans are proud of the Eisenhower administration’s responsible reaction to the Vietnam crisis of 1954.

President Eisenhower was willing to cash in his chips in 1954, ho matter how humiliating it might be to admit we had backed a loser, rather than throw good blood after bad money. In other words, he realized the application of military power could not resolve a hopeless political situation in Vietnam.

Eisenhower’s American-centered decision for non-intervention in Vietnam contributed to the famous accusation from careless observers that he was a “conscious agent of communism.”

The White Paper’s analysis of the Geneva conference of 1954 suggests that US imperialism’s defining of all opposition to it as Communist may rest less in ignorance than in conscious policy. By narrowing the alternatives for national liberation struggles in this way, US imperialism insures receiving the benefit of the accomodating influence of the major Communist powers in gaining a negotiated approach to end the struggle and in regaining at the conference table what imperialism lost on the battlefield.

The Soviet Union . . . pressured Ho Chi Minh to make concessions to France which Ho did not feel were justified. Since the Vietminh controlled three-quarters of all Vietnam, Ho was confident he could quickly capture the rest. . . Communist China, at the time, was trying to present a more moderate image to the world and was willing to cooperate with the Soviet Union in forcing Ho Chi Minh to ease his demands. . . . France emerged from the Conference having salvaged at the negotiating table much of which she had lost on the battlefield. Ho Chi Minh agreed to pull Vietminh forces out of South Vietnam, which they largely controlled, back above the 17th parallel.

This policy of US imperialism further limits the effectiveness of successful liberation movements by narrowing the alternatives for development in the future as well as by reducing the meaningful responses to US imperialism’s policies.

The Republican study emphasizes that the Geneva Agreement did not make the 17th parallel a permanent boundary and that elections were required in two years. However, the Republicans attempt to limit the responsibility of the Dulles policy for undermining the Geneva Agreement by placing the blame on Diem. Diem’s actions in Vietnam were a phase of U. S. policy in Asia set by Dulles by creating SEATO in September 1954, less than two months after the Geneva conference, and by the U. S. letter to Diem of October 23, 1954 which had been dictated by a Thai represenative. By concentrating upon Diem’s actions, however, the Republicans come to present an accurate description of the development of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. The study notes that the guerrilla activity began in 1957 as a result of Diem’s refusal to hold the 1956 elections provided for at Geneva. This opposition was intensified when Diem replaced the local village chiefs with Saigon appointees who naturally became the objects of local “terrorism,” i.e., popular justice.

The Republican statement, in its attempts to shift blame from bi-partisan US imperialism to the Democratic administration elected in November, 1960, fails to note the importance of that election for the Vietnamese. Diem was so closely identified with the Republican administration that its defeat by the Democrats led the anti-Diem opposition to revolt against Diem, on November 11, 1960. The Kennedy administration, however, was to support Diem as strongly as the Eisenhower administration. Meanwhile, as a result of the unsuccessful revolt of the Saigon military and political leaders supported by the paratroop forces, the only effective opposition to the US-puppet regime was now the guerrilla forces, and “in December 1960, the National Front for Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) was formed by militant South Vietnamese insurgents.”

Challenging the State Department assumptions that the NLF is controlled by the Hanoi government, the Republicans raise a controversial issue for future events in Vietnam. Either there will be a complete national liberation struggle without compromises with American imperialism or, due to pressures within the socialist camp, there will be an opportunity for new manipulations by American imperialism. The Republicans say:

It should be noted that the NLF has been southern oriented. Forty of their senior leaders were native South Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese Communists have, in the past, found Hanoi quite willing to enter into agreements at the expense of the South Vietnamese whether Communist or not. Examples: . . . Three, the Geneva Agreements of July 1954, left the south under control of the Diem government for at least 2 more years-this when most of the south was already under Communist control. Four, thereafter, neither Hanoi nor Peking, nor Moscow made strong representations against dropping elections in 1956, in effect confirming Diem’s control and leaving the South Vietnamese Communists out in the cold. All of which is a reminder to the South Vietnamese Communists that North Vietnam has separate interests, and has not in the past been the most reliable of allies.

Besides this must be placed the Four Points of the North Vietnam government of April 13, 1965, quoted by the Republicans, including point three: “The internal affairs of South Vietnam must be settled by the South Vietnamese people themselves, in accordance with the program of the South Vietnam Front for Liberation, without any foreign interference”

To emphasize the qualitative change of the U. S. intervention under Kennedy the study notes that Kennedy announced a crisis in Southeast Asia in May 1961. “President Kennedy reverted to old fashioned gunboat diplomacy and sent an aircraft carrier to demonstrate off Haiphong.” American troops were landed in Thailand, special forces units were sent to South Vietnam, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson went to Saigon to affirm the U. S. Vietnam policy. Beginning with China’s request of February 24, 1962 and General De Gaulle’s of August, 1963, both rejected by the Kennedy administration, and the initiatives of U Thant to the Johnson administration in 1963 and 1964, the Republicans detail the consistent refusal to seek peace by the U. S. government, and conclude that by December 1963 Johnson had made his choice: “The President now set the goal as military victory.” Following the assumption of their posts in Saigon in July 1964 by Generals Westmoreland and Taylor, the President received full powers in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, sponsored by Senator William Fulbright. The study states: “The series of events leading to the resolution began with a July 30th naval raid on North Vietnamese island radar and naval installations.” By early August, the U. S. escalated the war by air attacks on North Vietnam. Ten thousand dead, fifty thousand wounded and several thousand lost aircraft later the Republicans noted: “Yet at the beginning of April 1967, the United States and South Vietnamese were able to claim control over fewer villages and hamlets than in 1962.”

The single substantive proposal in the Republican study is that the United States should not be engaged in a land war on the Asian continent. While, if rigorously applied, the proposal would be a positive contribution, it does not deal with the most important, the most basic issue which underlies the Vietnam war: will the United States accept without any kind of intervention the revolutions which will be undertaken against foreign and domestic exploitation by the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America? A political party which dodges that fundamental question lacks a future.

ISOLATIONISM

RECONSIDERED

Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America. 1935-1941. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1966.

By Leonard P. Liggio

It must be stated at the outset that Jonas’ work is a disappointment. Like so much recently published scholarship it is superficial. For the sake of general reader interest the material has not been treated with the exhaustive consideration that the topic deserves. There is a great deal of important material that is absent. Nevertheless, Jonas’ book is clearly a major break-through. He has moved the consideration of the topic to the level of realism and responsibility from the general immaturity and prejudice which heretofore characterized the discussion of Isolationism. Despite his failure to understand or analyze his topic, Jonas’ methodology has accepted Isolationism as a serious approach to world affairs. This will make it possible for scholars to fulfill what Jonas has neglected: an understanding and relevant analysis of the domestic phase of the opposition to twentieth century American imperialism, the reasons for its development and the causes of its ultimate failures.

Jonas indicates how Isolationism is rooted in the events of the American past. Specifically, the past was the First World War - its origins, the American intervention, and its consequences in the post-war political and economic systems. Historical Revisionism, Jonas emphasizes, undermined the official myths of the causation of the war and by a realistic analysis of the data explained the origins of the war and the American intervention, as well as the political and economic crisis of the post-war world. The first general critique was made by Albert Jay Nock in the Freeman. During the war Nock’s editorial in the Nation (September, 1918) was singled out for seizure by the government for his analysis of the trade union movement as an instrument of American imperialism. The outstanding social scientist, Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, by his emphasis upon the economic causation for the American intervention in the First World War, opened a new field of research into the role of American banking and corporate interests in foreign policy: for example, C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought; George Seldes, Iron. Blood and Profits; and Frank C. Hanighen and H. C. Engelbrecht, Merchants of Death. Harry Elmer Barnes noted in his introduction to Merchants of Death that “through their pressure to put the United States into the War these bankers brought about the results which have well nigh wrecked the contemporary world.”

Jonas devotes a chapter to the Isolationist concentration upon the economic causes of international crisis. “The isolationist argument was coherent, logical, and self-contained: nations go to war for territorial gain or economic advantage. ’ The contribution of Historical Revisionism, according to Jonas, was to give Isolationism a general doctrine of economic causation for political events. The works of Scott Nearing, Harry Elmer Barnes and Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler were particularly important. This general doctrine was applied to the analysis of twentieth century American political policy, foreign and domestic. There was the clear recognition that American imperialism was totally enmeshed in the overall world economic system. Charles Beard concluded that “powerful economic and political personalities seeking to avoid one domestic crisis after another by extending credits to the Allies, finally induced President Wilson to avoid an immediate economic collapse by leading this country into war.” From this, isolationists understood that the major banks and corporations, according to Jonas, “Were among the leading supporters of a foreign policy designed to safeguard America’s overseas economic interests. The line of action they favored risked more general entanglement in European and Asian affairs . . . meddling in world affairs merely insured profits for bankers and businessmen who were the chief beneficiaries, and therefore its chief advocates.”

However, the nature of imperialism was clearly seen by only a few isolationists, even as events moved toward the Second Imperialist War. Quincy Howe in England Expects Every American To Do His Duty said that the greatest Empire on earth and the world’s strongest nation will be putting their combined support behind the status quo everywhere.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler wrote to Oswald Garrison Villard: “All of this talk about lining up with England and France to stop Fascism, by some radicals as well as conservatives . . . might possibly indicate that we were fighting over the colonies in Africa.” But, the very terms “by some radicals as well as conservatives” indicates the incomplete nature of the analysis which was made of the system. Jonas, not unlike most other commentators on American foreign policy, fails to begin with the dominant feature of the twentieth century-imperialism. It is imperialism that must define all political forces in each country in the twentieth century; this is how left/right categories should be divided since that is how they divide objectively. Domestic policy is at best secondary compared to foreign policy - imperialism and anti-imperialism. The fact that in the United States almost all the political figures described their own political positions in the superficial terms of domestic rather than foreign policy encouraged the confusions in actual politics as well as in historical analysis. There is a single policy of American imperialism which has to do with the organization of the single domestic-international economy. There have been a number of works which clarify this issue: primarily the overall analysis of William Appleman Williams, and more recently the analysis of the pre-First World War period by Gabriel Kolko, the post-First World War era by Murray N. Rothbard, and the pre-Second World War period by Lloyd Gardner. These authorities indicate that the main thrust for government economic intervention domestically and internationally were and are the banking and related corporate interests, supported by intellectuals and journalists; these have been the conservatives. Those Americans opposed to imperialism were united on the view that interventions were for the benefit of the special interests, and differed only over whether the existing political institutions were sufficient to prevent or overthrow these interventions. The events of a quarter century have demonstrated the weakness of the analysis of those who considered the American Constitution and the party system as a bulwark against special interest. That this should have been believed at all is surprising considering the contributions destroying those myths by the New Historians, Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, etc. “By rejecting the traditional view of America’s uniqueness,” Jonas says of Beard, “and emphasizing the principle of economic causation, he was, at least by implication, pointing to the universality of the American experience and to its close relationship to Eruopean ideas and events.”

As Jonas indicates, the major isolationist intellectuals were Charles Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, Albert J. Nock, Oswald Garrison Villard, Robert M. Hutchins and Norman Thomas. To name them, is to indicate that, except perhaps for Hutchins, Isolationism was a radical or left ideology. Isolationist politicians were also classified on the left, stemming as they did from the Populist Progressivism of the Midwest Republicans. Jonas notes that “the affinity between the tenets of Isolationism and the presuppositions underlying various forms of agrarian radicalism colored the Midwestern response to the wars in Europe and Asia.” Gerald Nye fought against the Republican administrations of the 1920s, especially as an investigator of special interest relationships to the government. In 1934 the Nye committee launched investigations of the role of pro-war banking and business interests in determining foreign policy. Nye characterized the major New Deal legislation, NIRA, “as a bird of prey on the masses” which “encouraged monopoly.” Borah opposed corporate influences in government as well as most Republican presidents and presidential candidates and opposed major New Deal measures as favorable to the corporatist interests. As chairman of the foreign relations committee (1925-33) he was the major advocate of recognition of the Soviet Union. Borah criticized the Central American interventions by the US as well as the interventions in China, especially the Hoover-Stimson policies.

In a very important analysis, “The Left and the Right,” Jonas presents the seemingly conflicting viewpoints which unified in Isolationism. As traditional Isolationism is radical, the major question is how Isolationism has come to be considered a conservative position. Due to the cooption of most radicals by New Deal corporatism, the radicals who refused to betray the cause were then castigated as “reactionary”, which label became a self-fulfilling prophecy when these radicals, barred from their former publishing outlets, found that only the publications with a conservative background would publish their radical writings on foreign policy. The New Deal corporatist system had been declared to be “radical” and the radical opponents of that system and its imperialist foreign policy were then declared to be “reactionary.” It was in the wake of this development that the America First Committee was organized; that it was conservative was understandable once the radicals had been betrayed and abandoned. Many radicals, such as Villard, Beard and Barnes, cooperated with America First but never fully integrated with it; radical isolatisinism was missing from the American political scene and these people therefore remained isolated: welcomed by the conservatives but hardly similar to them. In general, they found the conservatives lacking not merely on domestic issues, but on the basic issues of foreign policy and the tactics to be used.

The conservatives tended to take essentially moderate positions and to pursue very weak, “respectable,” tactics. America First limited itself to influencing public opinion by publications, advertisements and rallies, but eschewed marches on Washington as being too extreme (!) and an embarassment to the political opposition for which they operated as an auxiliary. Ultimately, America First considered entering politics directly as a new political force for peace, but this suggestion led to quick resignations by those traditionally connected to the major parties, not an unhealthy, though a too-long delayed, development. This weakness in tactics was partly caused by the moderation of the positions taken. Lacking any radical isolationist movement to spur them, they developed a defensive foreign policy stance. There was no attack on militarism, but rather an emphasis upon rearmament and preparedness. There was no clear critique of American imperialism due to the leadership role of people with imperialist interests, especially in Latin America. There was no clear repudiation of conscription, but a neutrality on this question which permitted the selective service renewal to pass by a single vote in the House in September, 1941. Had there been a truly radical isolationist movement in the United States, America First would have taken a much stronger stand on some of these issues. The Washington and New York chapters of America First had the advantage of traditional, i. e. radical, Isolationism in their leadership. In New York, the chapter was headed by John T.Flynn, premier radical journalist and investigator of the banking and munitions interests. Flynn made the New York chapter a strong voice of radical anti-imperialism.

A major aspect of Jonas’ analysis of Isolationism is to emphasize the importance of the international law strain in that position. He identifies such legislators as Senators Borah and Johnson and Representative Fish as well as the international lawyers, John Bassett Moore and Edwin M. Borchard. They had doubts about the successive neutrality bills. Borah strongly opposed the concept of embargoes which would fulfill the League of Nations’ system of economic sanctions against those seeking to change the imperialist status quo. Borah, Johnson, Fish, Moore and Borchard refused to support discretionary powers for the president as that would permit the president to provoke war. As embargoes would support the League and aid one of the belligerents, Borah and others preferred to relie on “international law to keep American commerce within the accepted standards of neutral behavior.” The Roosevelt administration placed an embargo on arms shipments to Spain during the Civil War although the act applied only to wars between states. In similar situations, the US had maintained normal relations with the government while not trading with the rebel forces; any placing of the government and the rebels on the same par was a form of recognition. The rebels in Spain were supplied by Germany and Italy, while England and France embargoed trade with both rivals, effectively depriving the Spanish government of trade while not disturbing the army rebels. Nye suggested that the New Deal had consistently applied the neutrality legislation to the benefit of the fascists. Hamilton Fish agreed with this view. Nye took the lead in the Senate in an attempt to prevent the administration’s discriminatory measures against the Spanish Republic. Nye especially objected to the proposal to prohibit the export of medical supplies.

The summer of 1940 was a crucial point for American Isolationism. In May, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies was organized. By July, the major periodicals supporting Isolationism had changed sides; Common Sense, the New Republic which dropped John T. Flynn, and the Nation which dropped Oswald Garrison Villard. Soon after, the America First Committee was founded. While the radical intellectuals continued to write about the meaning of the war, the America First Committee tended to pursue different lines of analysis. Yet, a radical position continued to be articulated. Hugh Johnson said that the sole aim of the war was the British government’s desire to “maintain her dominant Empire position with her own kinsmen and also over black, brown and yellow conquered and subject peoples in three continents.” Senator Nye reminded Americans of the “other Britain” which was the “very acme of reaction, imperialism and exploitation.” The Socialist party’s national convention in New York in April 1940 reaffirmed its commitment to Isolationism and its foreign policy resolution, read into the Congressional Record by Hamilton Fish, declared that the Allies had “no purpose of overthrowing fascism except to replace it by a more desperate and brutal government, if need be, that would crush the economic demands of the German workers, and leave England and France free to pursue their star of profit.”

The treatment of the isolationist analysis of US Far Eastern policy is limited in Jonas’ work. But the US intervention in the war was the result of events centering in the Far East, and it was that intervention that Jonas feels ended the isolationist position. Yet,” the suggested failure of isolationists to be concerned with the Far East is not explained or analyzed. Actually, there was a strong isolationist analysis of the Far East. Ralph Townsend, editor of Scribner’s Commentator, centered his critiques on the New Deal’s attempts “to make Americanism mean support for Chiang Kai-shek.” Similarly, Norman Thomas was critical of “the Chinese dictator Chiang.” Senator Borah was a close observer of Asian affairs and frequently criticized the Chiang regime as a front for Chinese and Anglo-American corporate interests. In essence, opposition to the Chiang regime represents a distinguishing mark of Isolationism.

Thus, Jonas’s book joins the recent works of Wayne Cole and James J. Martin in providing, for the first time, scholarly insight into the much-neglected phenomenon of Isolationism before World War II. But much more needs to be done in exploring the pathways blazoned by these men.

LETTERS . . .

ALMS FOR THE AGED!

Opponents of Social Security and Medicare are often unthinkingly accused of cruelty to old people. A good answer to any such charge may be given in the form of a proposal for legislation—namely, that when an individual reaches the “age of 65 the government refund to him, in lump sum and with interest, every cent it has taken from him through taxation during his lifetime. In addition to correctly fixing the blame for the poverty which many old people suffer in this society, this program has the advantage of exposing the welfare statists for the pikers they really are.

Once this legislation is passed, backers of the program can begin pushing to extend the coverage to include younger people—also demanding that the amount be increased to compensate for losses in purchasing power due to inflation. Eventually the law can be expanded to include everyone and its execution can be simplified by doing away with taxation altogether.

Then, if the government will just stop printing and minting worthless money and thus causing inflation, alms for the aged will nevermore be needed.

Kerry Thornley[*]

________

[*] Kerry Thornley is a Contributing Editor of the Innovator, the author of Oswald and a contributor to Fact and Cavalier magazines.

LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal Of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

Autumn 1967

Vol. III, No. 3

EDITORIALS

Ernesto Che Guevara, RIP

The Black Revolution

On Desecrating the Flag

War Guilt in the Middle East

RONALD RADOSH,

America’s Entry into World War II

LAURENCE S. MOSS,

The Power Elite Revisited

MARVIN E. GETTLEMAN,

A Vietnam Bibliography

A BERNARD FALL RETROSPECTIVE

LEONARD P. LIGGIO, On Fall’s Viet-Nam Witness

MARVIN E. GETTLEMAN, On Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place

Left and Right is published three times yearly (Winter, Spring, Autumn) by Left and Right, Inc., Box 395, Cathedral Station, New York, New York 10025. Subscription price: $2.50. Single issues: 85c.

NEW

INDIVIDUALIST

REVIEW

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IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in the ideas and evidence supporting a voluntary society; if you have discovered the intellectual bankruptcy of the authoritarian, statist position (Leftist and Rightist) then you should subscribe to NEW INDIVIDUALIST REVIEW, a journal of Classical Liberal thought, published quarterly. Subscription rates are $3.00 per year; students, $1.50.

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EDITORIAL

ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA,

R.I.P.

Che is dead, and we all mourn him. Why? How is it that so many libertarians mourn this man; how is it that we just received a letter from a brilliant young libertarian, a former objectivist and Birchite, which said, in part: “if they did finally get Che ... I am sure that his memory will live to haunt both Latin America and the U. S. for decades to come. Long live Che!” How come? Surely not because Che was a Communist. Precious few people in this country or anywhere else will mourn the passing, for example, of Brezhnev, Kosygin, or Ulbricht, Communist leaders all. No, it is certainly not Che’s Communist goals which made his name a byword and a legend throughout the world, and throughout the New Left in this country.

What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution. More than any man since the lovable but entirely ineffectual nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, Che earned the title of “professional revolutionary.” And furthermore, to paraphrase Christopher Jencks in a recent perceptive, if wrongheaded, article in the New Republic, we all knew that his enemy was our enemy—that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U. S. imperialism.

Trained as a physician in Argentina, witnessing CIA-fomented counter-revolution by the thug Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Guevara dedicated the rest of his life to the Revolution. He found a promising field first in Cuba, where, as everyone knows, Che was second only to Fidel Castro in waging and then winning the revolution there.

Che was a notable revolutionary, but not a distinguished administrator, and even poorer as an economist. It was Che who led the policy of coercively shifting Cuba from specialization in sugar toward a greater self-sufficiency—an arbitrary and uneconomic gesture that almost wrecked the Cuban economy until Fidel, spurred by the economic realists in Russia, called a halt and reversed the trend. Frustrated as an administrator, realizing that such work was not his forte, Che left Cuba to follow his chosen career of revolutionary, to ignite and spur revolutionary combat throughout Latin America. But before he did so, Che distilled his own experiences to become a distinguished theorist of revolutionary warfare, his book of Guerrilla Warfare coming to rank with the writings of Mao and General Giap in this new and burgeoning discipline.

Che’s disappearance for years ignited and accelerated the living legend that grew about him. It was a great and romantic legend, but it would all too quickly grow to destroy him. For as the cause of the Revolution began to become increasingly wrapped around the person of Che, Guevara began to forget his own vital principle that the revolution must grow out of the indigenous consciousness and struggles of the local peasantry. In his head Che knew full well that he and a handful of Cubans, no matter how carefully trained, could never export revolution, could never impose revolution upon a Bolivian or a Venezuelan peasantry who were not ready for the struggle. But in his mighty heart Che could not refrain from leaping a whole raft of stages, from plunging romantically but recklessly into the premature adventure of armed struggle in Latin America. And so, with tragic irony, Che Guevara, in his daring and courage, was betrayed by the very Bolivian peasantry whom he was trying to liberate, and who barely understood the meaning of the conflict. Che died from violating his own principles of revolutionary war.

There are other ironies in the death of Che Guevara. It was reported that as Che’s martyred body was brought in triumph to Vallegrande, Bolivia, a Cuban emigre and CIA-agent rushed over, and, on the public streets, began to embalm the body. The ubiquituous CIA was there to claim its own.

The CIA might claim Che’s body, but it will never be able to shackle his spirit. The most fitting memorial to Che was the intensely moving speech about his death delivered by his old comrade-in-arms, Fidel Castro. In that speech, Fidel declared:

No matter how difficult it may be to imagine that a man of his stature, of his prestige, of his personality, could have died in a clash between a guerrilla patrol and an army force, no matter how illogical it may seem, we who know him well realize, however, that it is not at all strange. Because he was always, during the whole time that we knew him, characterized by an extraordinary daring, by an absolute scorn of death, by his way, in every difficult and dangerous moment, of doing the most difficult and dangerous things. He did this many times during our struggle....

We were always worried lest his temperament, his habit of always being present during the moments of danger, should lead him to his death in combat.

No one could ever be sure that he would take even the slightest precautions. Many times he went forward with the advance patrols....

Above all else we would have liked to have seen him as the builder of the great victories of the people rather than as the precursor of those victories. But the fact is that a man of that temperament, of that personality, of that character, of that way of reacting before certain circumstances, is unfortunately usually destined to be the precursor rather than the one who realizes the victories. And the precursors are also, of course, the builders of victory, the greatest builders of victory....

It should not surprise anyone that he was among the first to fall in a guerrilla combat, since it would have been almost a miracle, almost impossible for it to have been otherwise....

The imperialists’ cries of victory in which they say that this will discourage revolutionary struggle will be shortly disproven by actual events. The imperialists also know the power, the impact of an example, and they also know that even though a man can be physically eliminated, an example like that can never be eliminated by anything or anyone....

Newspapers of all tendencies have universally recognized Che’s virtues.... He is an almost unique example of how a man could win the recognition and respect of his enemies, of the very enemies he faced with his arms in his hands, of those who have been ideological enemies and have nevertheless expressed feelings of admiration and of respect toward Che. . . .

Has the history of revolutions or of revolutionary peoples been characterized perhaps by the absence of hard blows? Aren’t true revolutionaries the ones who rise above those blows, those setbacks, and are not discouraged? Aren’t we revolutionaries precisely the ones who proclaim the value of moral principles, the value of example? Aren’t we revolutionaries the ones who believe in the durability of man’s works, of man’s principles? Aren’t we revolutionaries the first to recognize how ephemeral the physical life of man is and how durable and lasting man’s ideas, conduct and example are, when it has been man’s example that has guided the people throughout history?1

“Fidel Confirms Death of Che”, National Guardian October 21, 1967), p. 5.

EDITORIAL

The

BLACK

Revolution

Bewildered white Liberals are wont to ask: “What do you people want?” Some newsmen recently asked virtually this same question of H. Rap Brown, fiery young leader of SNCC and the Black Power movement. Rap replied: “I want Lyndon Johnson to resign and go to Vietnam and fight—he and his family.” Particularly interesting were the varied reactions to this statement; the reporter adds that: “Negro onlookers cheered as he brushed aside newsmen’s requests that he be ‘more specific.’” Indeed: how specific can one get? Why didn’t “Whitey” get the message?

The message, then, the great new fact about the Negro movement in America is that, in the last two years, it has changed drastically its methods and its goals. Until recently, it was a “civil rights movement”, led by Liberals and Social Democrats of the NAACP, dedicated to coercing whites into “integrating” all manner of private and public facilities. In short, its goal and its means were statist and Liberal to the core.

Now that this integration has been “achieved”, what do they want? But, in the first place, integration has not been achieved at all. In the most blatantly segregated areas, a pathetic “tokenism” has replaced segregation, but in the crucial areas of jobs, housing, power, the country remains the same as it ever was. It is becoming increasingly clear that, as the Conservatives said all along, integration cannot be achieved by law and by coercion; it must first come willingly into the hearts of men. All right, so then what? Negroes began to see that, not only was integration impossible of achievement, but that the very goal itself is flawed at its root. For what joy, what dignity, what satisfaction is there in forcing someone to eat or work or live with you if he despises you? Who, then, wants to integrate with him?

The Negroes then, began to turn, and turn swiftly, from the old Liberal ideal of compulsory integration to another tradition that had previously lingered, underground and un-respectable, at the core of the Negro community. This was the idea of black nationalism, an idea that had always appealed, not to the educated and articulate Negroes, but to the poorest inhabitants of the ghetto. The black nationalist idea came to the fore in the 1920’s with the phenomenally popular Marcus Garvey, who preached a return to Africa. With the death of Garvey, the idea dropped underground again, to re-emerge in the 1950’s with the phenomenon of the Black Muslims and its great charismatic leader, Malcolm X.

For a time many conservatives were enthusiastic about black nationalism; forgetting about the ultimate goal of either return to Africa or several Negro states in the U. S., the conservatives were overjoyed with the nationalist and Muslim emphasis on Negro self-help, thrift, dignity, and pride, in contrast to the old ideals of coerced integration from above. But there is one thing that the conservative proponents of black nationalism overlooked: self-help, pride, thrift, Negro businesses, etc. are all well and fine. But they cannot hope to flourish within the context of the black reality in America: permanent oppression by the white “power structure.” None of these good and libertarian things can be achieved without, first and foremost, getting the white-run U. S. and local and state governments off the backs of the Negro people.

Thus, the libertarian-conservatives made the same fatal mistake here as in their broader viewpoint on the free market and the free society. Libertarian-conservatives preach the virtues of the free market and individual liberty—without for a moment acknowledging that these great and good things can only be achieved by liquidating the tyranny of the government of the United States, and all other governments throughout the world. In short, these libertarian-conservatives have totally forgotten what the quasi-libertarians of the early nineteenth century: the James Mills, the Benthams, the Cobdens and Brights, to say nothing of the William Lloyd Garrisons and John Browns, full knew: that liberty is a profoundly revolutionary concept, and that it can only be achieved through the liquidation of the oppressor State.

Similarly, the black nationalists came to realize what the libertarian-conservatives forgot: that to achieve Negro freedom and autonomy white rule over Negroes must be brought to an end. Hence, the radicalizing and revolutionizing of Malcolm X, and then, after his martyrdom, of SNCC and CORE. Hence the shift of concepts in the Negro movement from “civil rights” to “black liberation.” Hence, also the focussing of black rebellion against the living embodiments of white rule in the black “ghettoes”: specifically, and first and foremost, the police. It is the overwhelmingly white police who are the enforcers of racial law and who express the basic racism of their own community by systematic brutalizing of the subject population. It is true, of course, that police are systematically brutal anyway: for the police (a) have a legal monopoly of the guns, and he who is entrusted with such great power will be the one who enjoys using that power to the hilt; and (b) the police are the enforcement arm for all the despotic legislation and ordinances on the government books. The police are the hired thugs who do the dirty work for the bosses of the State apparatus. In confronting poor people, the police are far rougher than with the upper or middle class, because of the lack of social or political power among the poor. But in confronting Negroes, the racist attitude of the polizei reinforces and redoubles their usual brutal role.

It is no accident that virtually every single case of black rebellion in the cities in the summer of ’67 was precipitated by police brutality: by beating up a Negro cab driver in Newark, by raiding and beating up an after-hours drinking club in Detroit. It is also no accident that, despite all the press hysteria about sniping and looting, the greatest bulk of the crime committed during the riots was by the enforcement-thugs of the State: the police, the National Guard, the federal troops. Almost all the killings were of Negroes by the police and troops; in fact, the behaviour of these enforcers was clearly reminiscent of the behaviour of U. S. imperial troops in Vietnam, or, in fact, of military occupiers anywhere in their continuing, permanent war against the native colored population. Thus, if a sniper fired from a building, the characteristic response of our police-Guard-army “protectors” was to spray fire into the entire building, heedless of the destruction and the casualties that would have to follow. One of the great lessons of the summer rebellions which we all should absorb is that the black population of the United States is a colonized and subject people.

Thus, newsmen reported that, on the staff of New Jersey Governor Hughes during the Newark and Plainfield rebellions, there were the “hawks” and the “doves” Terms like “hold and clear”, “search and destroy”, began to be applicable. Also revealing was the famous interview (New York Times, July 29) with Maj. Gen. Almerin C. O’Hara, commander of the New York State Army National Guard. General O’Hara called for “greater commitment of force” to bring the riots under control, and added the amazing statement that he would “not rule out the use of any weapon.” Escalation once again raises its ugly head; will someone soon suggest the use of Tactical Nuclear Weapons on American cities—“clean” ones, of course, so that the fallout does not filter down to white areas? The general, however, assures us that while he contemplates the use of hand grenades, bazookas, and recoilless rifles, the chances of using heavy artillery are “very remote”. Well, let us be grateful for small blessings.

General O’Hara insisted that National Guard actions must be under the authority and decisions of the military, including the choice of tactics and weapons, since “civilians are not cognizant” of the delicate fine points. “There are military decisions which should be left to military men.” O’Hara also stressed that the National Guard must not be “unduly restrained by civilian authority”, because “if the military is brought in and they lose control, then what do you have left?” The answer, it seems, is no control at all, in short, freedom, which is, of course, unthinkable in our “freedom-loving” country.

General O’Hara conceded that the standard riot control techniques—stressing closed formations with bayonets at the ready—are “not really adequate for the kind of guerrilla warfare (this is American cities he’s talking about, not Vietnam!!) and snipers we face these days.” Instead, he said, “military methods used in flushing guerrillas out of a village in Vietnam could be adapted to guerrilla warfare in the ghettoes.” “Of course,” the general added wistfully, “we can’t do just what we would do in Vietnam. Out there if you had a sniper in a room you’d just crank up a tank and fire a shell through the window, destroying the whole room, and much of the building. I don’t think public opinion would accept the use of that kind of force here.”

Let us also ponder this: if a white neighborhood were rioting and looting, would buildings be pulverized en masse? Would curfews be imposed, and streets blockaded? Would apartment-to-apartment searches be made, as at Plain-field, New Jersey, breaking down doors and destroying furniture without bothering about search warrants? Of the thousands wounded during the virtual civil war of July, 1967, almost all were Negro, and the vast majority were shot by trigger-happy white troops and police, concerned only to “shoot everything that is black and that moves”, in the perceptive words of one officer.

Was there need to stop looting? Looting is certainly unjustifiable, but by what right does the State move in and shoot looters? Shooting amounts to capital punishment, and by any moral standards, death as a punishment for looting is so excessive and barbaric a punishment that it amounts to criminal murder of the looter-victim. A criminal only forfeits the rights which he takes away from another person; and therefore capital punishment for any crime less than murder is itself a criminal murder.

The grisly masterpiece of unconscious humor during the July Days was emitted by President Johnson, who had the unmitigated gall to proclaim, on July 24: “We will not endure violence. It matters not by whom it is done, or under what slogan or banner. It will not be tolerated.” Surely this statement is a classic of its kind. It comes from a man in charge of the greatest violence-wielding machine, the mightiest collection of destructive power, in the history of the world. It comes from a man who is ordering, every day, the use of that power to bomb, burn, and napalm thousands of innocent women and children and old people in Vietnam. Yet so “brainwashed” is the American people, so used are they to the irrationalities of our society, that the statement was taken with a straight face by the public, none of whom seemed to include, under “what slogan or banner”, the “saving” of the crushed and bleeding people of Vietnam, North and South, from the clutches of “international Communism.”

And so while LBJ denounces violence no matter the slogan or banner, H. Rap Brown declares his goal to be the resigning of Johnson and going with his family to fight personally in Vietnam. Which statement was the more rational: the blatant self-contradiction of Johnson’s or the perceptive, libertarian revolutionary statement of the supposedly “irrational” H. Rap Brown? And there is another set of statements that the two made that could also be set side by side to compare the devotion to truth, reason, and justice of the two men. Johnson, in his statement, proclaimed: “From its earliest day, our nation has been dedicated to justice, to equality—and to order.” About justice and equality there is grave room for doubt; but not about our government’s continuing devotion to “order”. But what order? And whose order? The order of the exploiter, of the monopolist, of the imperialist, of the controller and ruler of the State apparatus. Let Rap Brown tell it: “The white man makes all the laws, he drags us before his courts, he accuses us, and he sits in judgment over us.”

While the polizei are the most blatant and evident example of race rule and hence the greatest focus of black resentment, there are other crucial groups in the ghetto who also serve as despotic “colonial administrators” over the Negro people. One group is the urban renewal planners. All good Liberals, not so long ago, used to admire urban renewal as a means of helping the poor and bringing esthetics to the city. Now, radicals and some conservatives are beginning to agree (in another burgeoning form of “Left-Right” coalition) that urban renewal is really a vast subsidy to the real estate interests at the expense, not only of the taxpayer which was always evident, but also of the poor themselves, who are summarily kicked out of their homes by the urban renewal bulldozer, and forced elsewhere, redoubling the slums there. If they try to move into the new urban renewal housing, they find that there is far less space available, and at much higher rents than they were paying before. And so, more and more people are coming to recognize, “urban renewal” is really “Negro removal”—for urban renewal has been concentrated in the Negro ghetto areas. It is surely significant that one of the great Negro grievances underlying this summer’s riot was the plan of the Newark government to liquidate many thousands of Negro homes in the center of the Negro district of the city in order to make way for another campus of the New Jersey State’s College of Medicine and Dentistry.

In addition to urban renewal, another large group of colonial administrators dictating to and oppressing the Negro are the administrators and teachers of the nation’s urban public schools. The public-school system, again so beloved by middle-class Liberals and again overwhelmingly staffed by whites, is a vast prison-house and chain-gang for the nation’s youth. The compulsory attendance laws force all of the youth of the country, regardless of their talents or inclinations, into this vast prison-system, and the teachers and administrators are their guards and wardens. The oppression lies much the heaviest in the urban Negro areas, where so many children are not inclined toward schooling and where racism as well as hatred for working-class mores are given full rein by the school staff, armed with the power of compulsory education to force their charges to stay in school. No wonder that Negro youth are embittered by their enforced stay in the system! Jonathan Kozol has just written a book about his harrowing experiences in the Boston school system, where Negro youth were systematically beaten physically and degraded and humiliated psychologically by their white guardians. On a more philosophical level, Paul Goodman and Edgar Z, Friedenberg have, in recent years, focussed more of our attention on the evils of compulsory mass public schooling and the consequences for the children that have flowed from it.

Police, troops—and of course, white judges in the courts—and teachers and school administrators; these are some of the colonial administrators over the Negro population. Another large and important group are the welfare workers, again mostly white, who administer the welfare programs in the ghetto. Not only are these workers engaged in setting up unmanly dependence among the Negro “clients” and are resented therefore, they also organize Gestapo-type raids on their clients in the middle of the night—without a search warrant, by the way—to make sure that there are no men in or under the female client’s bed, who could serve her as a private means of support.

And so the Negro ghettoes are enmeshed in a network of white-run and white-operated despotic colonial agencies. Hence the black revolution. Hence the cry for black power. It is a call for black power in black areas, it is a call for allowing the Negro people at last to run their own lives as they see fit. It is a call for an end to white race rule over the Negro.

A common Liberal objection is that the black revolution cannot hope to win as such because the Negroes are in a minority in the U. S. They are, however, a very large and therefore potentially powerful minority. But more than that, the Negro aim is not to overthrow the U. S. or local governments totally; if that were the aim, then of course the black liberation movement in the U. S. would be hopelessly quixotic. No, the aim is to overthrow white U. S. and local government rule in black areas—in those areas where blacks are a majority; roughly, the Black Belt of the South, and the ghetto areas of the North and West. This would be, in effect, a disintegration of white U. S. rule over these territories. And this is a perfectly feasible objective.

There is another consideration that gives weight to the realistic potential of the black power movement. That is, if the Negroes consider themselves the American cutting edge of the international struggle against the imperialism of the U. S. government. For just as the Negroes within the U. S. are battling white colonialism at home; so is the great majority of the world’s population—largely colored peoples in the underdeveloped world—battling U. S. imperialism abroad. Considering the world as a whole, the colored anti-imperialists are a great majority while U. S. whites are quite clearly a minority. Hence the great achievement of SNCC and CORE in recent years; from being ordinary American patriots unconcerned with foreign affairs, they have become anti-imperialists consciously linking themselves with their colored anti-imperialist brethren abroad. This notable advance is symbolized by Stokely Carmichael’s extended stay in the anti-imperialist world. And here once again, the martyred Malcolm X was the pioneer; it was when he had begun to internationalize the Negro struggle that he was cut down by assassins.

Finally, the seemingly far-fetched solution of black nationalism in black areas bids fair to be the only solution to the Negro question that will work. The two alternative solutions: the Liberal and the Conservative—are conspicuously failing to work and will continue to fail. The Conservative therapy for riots is, of course, simply the application of ever-greater force, just as this is the Conservative remedy for practically everything, from pornography to Vietnam. Send more troops, send more tanks, bomb ’em, defoliate ’em!! Etc. But in the Negro rebellions, it was demonstrated that more National Guards, more counter-revolutionary force applied by the State, simply provoked more rebel force, more sniping, etc. It was only, in many cases, when the Guardsmen and the troops were pulled out of the ghetto that calm was restored. Besides, when is the escalation of force demanded by the Conservatives going to stop? With the clean H-bomb? It very much appears that U. S. force will not be able to “win” until the entire Negro population is wiped out, just as U. S. force won’t be able to win in Vietnam without the genocidal destruction of the entire Vietnamese population. Is that what the Conservatives want, and is that what they call “victory”?

The Liberal solution has been shown to be little better. The Liberal solution, both at home and abroad, is of course always the same: more Federal money. If it’s “the American ghettoes then more Federal funds, more Federal subsidies, loans, playgrounds, etc., etc. And if it’s Vietnam, then more foreign aid, more “welfare planning”, etc. Again, both solutions have failed dismally. Detroit, everyone agrees, was supposed to be the great model home of Liberal Race Relations, with plenty of playgrounds, Human Relations Committees and all the rest. And Detroit suffered a week-long civil war with property damage of $1 billion. As the always scintillating reporter Andrew Kopkind wrote in the New York Review of Books about the rebellion, Detroit murdered Liberalism. And good riddance. It is no wonder that Liberal solutions cannot succeed; for the Federal funds tactic simply increases the governmental bureaucracy, aggravates the Negro dependence and resentment which inspired the rebellions in the first place. But Liberals, whose entire philosophy is steeped in the coercive creation of dependence, could never understand this truth; if they did, their whole credo would fall to the ground. Only the “extreme Left” and the “extreme Right” can understand.

Increasingly, there are two kinds of “Left-Right” coalitions emerging on the American scene and in American social philosophy. There is the ugly and despotic coalitionism of the “Left Center” and “Right Center”, of both the Liberal and Conservative wings of the Establishment. This is the kind of coalitionism that occurs when the current Right lauds the 100% ADA-Liberal Senator Thomas Dodd or when the ADA-Liberal Daniel Moynihan calls for an explicit coalition with National Review-type Conservatism over the two great issues of our day: Vietnam, and the black revolution. There is indeed full scope for coalition here. For, in the final analysis, the social philosophies of Liberalism and Conservatism are as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Their emphasis and their rhetoric is different; their substance is much the same, and grows closer day by day. For on what can Federal force rest but Federal funds? And how can Federal funds be collected and dispensed without the use of Federal force? In short, money and coercion, emphasized by Liberals and Conservatives respectively, in reality go hand in hand. And that is why the carrot-and-stick approach toward the Negro ghettoes, toward Vietnam, and, in truth, toward virtually everything else, can be supported enthusiastically by Liberals and Conservatives alike.

The other coalition looming is the coalition of opposition, the opposition of all those who, whatever their differences of rhetoric, emphasis, or even substance, join in their implacable hostility to the force-and-funds, the coercion wrapped in Liberal rhetoric, the “humanitarian-with-the-guillotine” in the memorable phrase of the libertarian Isabel Paterson, of the U. S. Liberal-Conservative Establishment. The most important call for such a coalition has come in the recent work of the thoughtful and eloquent Carl Oglesby, last year’s president of the Students for a Democratic Society:

“The right wing in America is presently in a state of almost eerie spiritual disarray. . . .the conservative right wing of imperialist, authoritarian, and even monarchist disposition enjoys the fraternity of the libertarian right wing of laissez faire, free market individualism. These two groupings could not possibly have less in common. Why have the libertarians conceded leadership to the conservatives? Why have the traditional opponents of big, militarized, central authoritarian government now joined forces with such a government’s boldest advocates?

They have done so because they have been persuaded that there is a clear and present danger that necessitates a temporary excursion from final values. They should know better. They should know that for the totalitarian imperialists there is always a clear and present danger, that it is pre-eminently through the ideology of the Foreign Threat, the myth of the tiger at the gates, that frontier and global imperialism have always rationalized themselves. . . .

It would be a piece of great good fortune for America and the world if the libertarian right could be reminded that besides the debased Republicanism of the Knowlands and the Judds there is another tradition available to them—their own: the tradition of Congressman Howard Buffett, Senator Taft’s midwestern campaign manager in 1952. . . .of Frank Chodorov...of Dean Russell. . . .of the tough-minded Garet Garrett. . . .

This style of political thought, rootedly American, is carried forward today by the Negro freedom movement and the student movement against Great Society-Free World Imperialism. That these movements are called leftist means nothing. They are of the grain of American humanist individualism and voluntaristic associational action; and it is only through them that the libertarian tradition is activated and kept alive. In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate.”[1]

Professor Staughton Lynd, among other Left critics of Oglesby’s call for a libertarian Left-Right coalition, protests in Liberation that the positive economic programs of the two wings are completely different, despite their common opposition to racism and war, and their common stand for decentralization and grass-roots decision making. The one believes in communal decisions, the other in individualism and private property. True enough; but even if we should ever get to the post-victory stage when this potential divergence should become imminent, Lynd does not realize that there is nothing in the individualist libertarian philosophy that would deny to Lynd or anyone else the option of forming their own voluntary communalist societies. That freedom of action is precisely one of the doctrines championed by the individualist believers in the free market and the free society.

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1.Carl Oglesby, “Vietnamese Crucible”, in Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull, Containment and Change (New York; Macmillan, 1967), pp. 165-167.

EDITORIAL

ON

DESECRATING

THE FLAG

The Congress of the United States, in its wisdom, has now moved to make a federal offense out of “desecrating the flag”. No doubt the great bulk of those who fought for, and voted for, this law, believe themselves to be devoted Christians and champions of the rights of private property. We shall prove that they are nothing of the kind.

The first thing that should be clear about the flag is that it is simply a piece of cloth with parallel stripes of certain colors. So the first thing that we should ask ourselves is: what is there about a piece of cloth that suddenly renders it sacred, holy, and above defilement when red and white stripes are woven into it? Contrary to many of our hysterical politicians, the flag is not our country; still less is the flag the freedom of the individual. The flag is simply a piece of cloth. Period. Therefore he who tampers with or “desecrates” that piece of cloth is not posing any kind of a threat to our freedoms or our way of life.

Consider the implications of taking the contrary position: if the flag is not just a piece of cloth, then this means that some form of mystical transsubstantiation must take place, and therefore that weaving a piece of cloth in a certain manner suddenly invests it with great and awesome sanctity. Indeed Webster’s defines “desecrate”: as “to divest of a sacred character or office”. Most people who revere and worship the flag in this way are religious; but to apply to a secular object this kind of adoration is nothing more nor less than idolatry. Religious people should be always on their guard against the worship of graven images; but their worship of State flags is nothing less than that kind of idolatry.

If, indeed, the flag is a symbol of anything throughout history, it has been the battle standard of the thugs of the State apparatus, the banner that the State raises when it goes into battle to kill, burn, and maim innocent people of some other land. All flags are soaked in innocent blood, and to revere these particular kinds of cloth, then, becomes not only idolatry but grotesque idolatry at that, for it is the worship of crime and murder on a massive scale.

There is another critical point in this whole controversy that nobody, least of all the defenders of anti-desecration laws, seems to have mentioned. When someone buys flag cloth, this cloth is his private property, to do with as he sees fit: to revere, to place in the closet... or to desecrate. How can anyone deny this who believes in the rights of private property? Anti-desecration laws and ordinances are clear-cut and outrageous invasions of the rights of private property, and on this ground alone they should be repealed forthwith.

Freedom must mean, among other things, the freedom to desecrate.

EDITORIAL

WAR GUILT

IN THE

MIDDLE EAST

The trouble with sectarians, whether they be libertarians, Marxists, or world-governmentalists, is that they tend to rest content with the root cause of any problem, and never bother themselves with the more detailed or proximate causes. The best, and almost ludicrous, example of blind, unintelligent sectarianism is the Socialist Labor Party, a venerable party with no impact whatsoever on American life. To any problem that the state of the world might pose: unemployment, automation, Vietnam, nuclear testing, or whatever, the SLP simply repeats, parrotlike: “Adopt socialism.” Since capitalism is allegedly the root cause of all these and other problems, only socialism will whisk them away, Period. In this way the sectarian, even if his spotting of the ultimate root cause should be correct, isolates himself from all problems of the real world, and, in further irony, keeps himself from having any impact toward the ultimate goal he cherishes.

On the question of war guilt, whatever the war, sectarianism raises its ugly, uninformed head far beyond the stagnant reaches of the Socialist Labor Party. Libertarians, Marxists, world-governmentalists, each from their different perspective, have a built-in tendency to avoid bothering about the detailed pros and cons of any given conflict. Each of them knows that the root cause of war is the nation-State system; given the existence of this system, wars will always occur, and all States will share in that guilt. The libertarian, in particular, knows that all States, without exception, aggress against their citizens, and knows also that in all wars each State aggresses against innocent civilians “belonging” to the other State.

Now this kind of insight into the root cause of war and aggression, and into the nature of the State itself, is all well and good, and vitally necessary for insight into the world condition. But the trouble is that the libertarian tends to stop there, and evading the responsibility of knowing what is going on in any specific war or international conflict, he tends to leap unjustifiably to the conclusion that, in any war, all States are equally guilty, and then to go about his business without giving the matter a second thought. In short, the libertarian (and the Marxist, and the world-government partisan) tends to dig himself into a comfortable “Third Camp” position, putting equal blame on all sides to any conflict, and letting it go at that. This is a comfortable position to take because it doesn’t really alienate the partisans of either side. Both sides in any war will write this man off as a hopelessly “idealistic” and out-of-it sectarian, a man who is even rather lovable because he simply parrots his “pure” position without informing himself or taking sides on whatever war is raging in the world. In short, both sides will tolerate the sectarian precisely because he is irrelevant, and because his irrelevancy guarantees that he makes no impact on the course of events or on public opinion about these events.

No: Libertarians must come to realize that parroting ultimate principles is not enough for coping with the real world. Just because all sides share in the ultimate State-guilt, does not mean that all sides are equally guilty. On the contrary, in virtually every war, one side is far more guilty than the other, and on one side must be pinned the basic responsibility for aggression, for a drive for conquest, etc. But in order to find out which side to any war is the more guilty, we have to inform ourselves in depth about the history of that conflict, and that takes time and thought—and it also takes the ultimate willingness to become relevant by taking sides through pinning a greater degree of guilt on one side or the other.

So—let us become relevant; and, with that in mind, let us examine the root historical causes of the chronic as well as the current acute crisis in the Middle East; and let us do this with a view to discovering and assessing the Guilty.

The chronic Middle East crisis goes back—as do many crises—to World War I. The British, in return for mobilizing the Arab peoples against their oppressors of imperial Turkey, promised the Arabs their independence when the war was over. But, at the same time, the British government, with characteristic double-dealing, was promising Arab Palestine as a “National Home” for organized Zionism. These promises were not on the same moral plane: for in the former case, the Arabs were being promised their own land freed from Turkish domination; and in the latter, world Zionism was being promised a land most emphatically not its own. When World War I was over, the British unhesitatingly chose to keep the wrong promise, the one to world Zionism. Its choice was not difficult; if it had kept its promise to the Arabs, Great Britain would have had to pull gracefully out of the Middle East and turn that land over to its inhabitants; but, to fulfill its promise to Zionism, Britain had to remain as a conquering, imperial power ruling over Arab Palestine. That it chose the imperial course is hardly surprising.

We must, then, go back still further in history: for what was world Zionism? Before the French Revolution, the Jews of Europe had been largely encased in ghettoes, and there emerged from ghetto life a distinct Jewish cultural and ethnic (as well as religious) identity, with Yiddish as the common language (Hebrew being only the ancient language of religious ritual.) After the French Revolution, the Jews of Western Europe were emancipated from ghetto life, and they then faced a choice of where to go from there. One group, the heirs of the Enlightenment, chose and advocated the choice of casting off narrow, parochial ghetto culture on behalf of assimilation into the culture and the environment of the Western world. While assimilationism was clearly the rational course in America and Western Europe, this route could not easily be followed in Eastern Europe, where the ghetto walls still held. In Eastern Europe, therefore, the Jews turned toward various movements for preservation of the Jewish ethnic and cultural identity. Most prevalent was Bundism, the viewpoint of the Jewish Bund, which advocated Jewish national self-determination, up to and including a Jewish State in the predominantly Jewish areas of Eastern Europe. (Thus, according to Bundism, the city of Vilna, in Eastern Europe, with a majority population of Jews, would be part of a newly-formed Jewish State.) Another, less powerful, group of Jews, the Territorialist Movement, despairing of the future of Jews in Eastern Europe, advocated preserving the Yiddishist Jewish identity by forming Jewish colonies and communities (not States) in various unpopulated, virgin areas of the world.

Given the conditions of European Jewry in the late 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, all of these movements had a rational groundwork. The one Jewish movement that made no sense was Zionism, a movement which began blended with Jewish Territorialism. But while the Territorialists simply wanted to preserve Jewish-Yiddishist identity in a newly-developed land of their own, Zionism began to insist on a Jewish land in Palestine alone. The fact that Palestine was not a virgin land, but already occupied by an Arab peasantry, meant nothing to the ideologues of Zionism. Furthermore, the Zionists, far from hoping to preserve ghetto Yiddish culture, wished to bury it and to substitute a new culture and a new language based on an artificial secular expansion of ancient religious Hebrew.

In 1903, the British offered territory in Uganda for Jewish colonization, and the rejection of this offer by the Zionists polarized the Zionist and Territorialist movements which previously had been fused together. From then on, the Zionists would be committed to the blood-and-soil mystique of Palestine, and Palestine alone, while the Territorialists would seek virgin land elsewhere in the world.

Because of the Arabs resident in Palestine, Zionism had to become in practice an ideology of conquest. After World War I, Great Britain seized control of Palestine and used its sovereign power to promote, encourage, and abet the expropriation of Arab lands for Zionist use and for Zionist immigration. Often old Turkish land titles would be dredged up and purchased cheaply, thus expropriating the Arab peasantry on behalf of European Zionist immigration. Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there thus came as colonists, and on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.

While Zionism was now committed to Palestine as a Jewish National Home, it was not yet committed to the aggrandizement of an independent Jewish State in Palestine. Indeed, only a minority of Zionists favored a Jewish State, and many of these had broken off from official Zionism, under the influence of Vladimir Jabotinsky, to form the Zionist-Revisionist movement to agitate for a Jewish State to rule historic ancient Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River. It is not surprising that Jabotinsky expressed great admiration for the militarism and the social philosophy of Mussolini’s fascism.

At the other wing of Zionism were the cultural Zionists, who opposed the idea of a political Jewish State. In particular, the Ihud (Unity) movement, centered around Martin Buber and a group of distinguished Jewish intellectuals from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, advocated, when the British should leave, a bi-national Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, with neither religious group to dominate the other, but both to work in peace and harmony to build the land of Palestine.

But the inner logic of Zionism was not to be brooked. In the tumultuous World Zionist convention at New York’s Hotel Biltmore in 1942, Zionism, for the first time, adopted the goal of a Jewish State in Palestine, and nothing less. The extremists had won out. From then on, there was to be permanent crisis in the Middle East.

Pressured from opposite sides by Zionists anxious for a Jewish state and by Arabs seeking an independent Palestine, the British finally decided to pull out after World War II, and to turn the problem over to the United Nations. As the drive for a Jewish State intensified, the revered Dr. Judah Magnes, President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and head of the Ihud movement, bitterly denounced “Zionist Totalitarianism”, which, he charged, is trying to bring “the entire Jewish people under its influence by force and violence. I have not yet seen the Zionist terrorists called by their rightful names: Killers—brutalized men and women . . . All Jews in America share in the guilt, even those not in accord with the activities of this new pagan leadership, but who sit at ease with folded hands . . .” Shortly afterward, Dr. Magnes felt it necessary to exile himself from Palestine and emigrate to the United States.

Under unbelievably intense pressure from the United States, the UN—including an enthusiastic US and USSR—reluctantly approved a Palestine partition plan in November 1947, a plan that formed the basis of the British pull-out and the Israel declaration of existence on May 15 of the following year. The partition plan granted the Jews, who had a negligible fraction of Palestine land, almost half the land area of the country. Zionism had succeeded in carving out a European Jewish State, over Arab territory in the Middle East. But this is by no means all. The UN agreement had provided (a) that Jerusalem be internationalized under UN rule, and (b) that there be an economic union between the new Jewish and Arab Palestine states. These were the basic conditions under which the UN approved partition. Both were promptly and brusquely disregarded by Israel—thus launching an escalating series of aggressions against the Arabs of the Middle East.

While the British were still in Palestine, the Zionist paramilitary forces began to crush the Palestinian Arab armed forces in a series of civil war clashes. But, more fatefully, on April 9, 1948, the fanatical Zionist-Revisionist terrorists grouped in the organization Irgun Zvai Leumi massacred a hundred women and children in the Arab village of Dein Yassin. By the advent of Israel’s independence on May 15, the Palestinian Arabs, demoralized, were fleeing in panic from their homes and from the threat of massacre. The neighboring Arab states then sent in their troops. Historians are wont to describe the ensuing war as an invasion of Israel by the Arab states, heroically rebuffed by Israel, but since all of the fighting took place on Arab territory, this interpretation is clearly incorrect. What happened, in fact, is that Israel managed to seize large chunks of territory assigned to the Palestinian Arabs by the partition agreement: including the Arab areas of Western Galilee, Arab west-central Palestine as “corridor” to Jerusalem, and the Arab cities of Jaffa and Beersheba. The bulk of Jerusalem—the New City—was also seized by Israel and the UN internationalization plan discarded. The Arab armies were hampered by their own inefficiency and disunity and by a series of UN-imposed truces broken only long enough for Israel to occupy more Arab territory.

By the time of the permanent armistice agreement of February 24, 1949, then, 600,000 Jews had created a State which had originally housed 850,000 Arabs (out of a total Palestinian Arab population of 1.2 million). Of these Arabs, three-quarters of a million had been driven out from their lands and homes, and the remaining remnant was subject to a harsh military rule which, two decades later, is still in force. The homes, lands, and bank accounts of the fleeing Arab refugees were promptly confiscated by Israel and handed over to Jewish immigrants. Israel has long claimed that the three-quarters of a million Arabs were not driven out by force but rather by their own unjustified panic induced by Arab leaders—but the key point is that everyone recognizes Israel’s adamant refusal to let these refugees return and reclaim the property taken from them. From that day to this, for two decades, these hapless Arab refugees, their ranks now swollen by natural increase to 1.3 million, have continued to live in utter destitution in refugee camps around the Israeli borders, barely kept alive by meagre UN funds and CARE packages, living only for the day when they will return to their rightful homes.

In the areas of Palestine originally assigned to the Arabs, no Palestinian Arab government remained. The acknowledged leader of the Palestinian Arabs, their Grand Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, was summarily deposed by the long-time British tool, King Abdullah of Trans-jordan, who simply confiscated the Arab regions of east-central Palestine, as well as the Old City of Jerusalem. (King Abdullah’s Arab Legion had been built, armed, staffed, and even headed by such colonialist British officers as Glubb Pasha.)

On the Arab refugees, Israel takes the attitude that the taxpayers of the world (i.e., largely the taxpayers of the United States) should kick in to finance a vast scheme to re-settle the Palestinian refugees somewhere in the Middle East—i.e., somewhere far from Israel. The refugees, however, understandably have no interest in being re-settled; they want their own homes and properties back, period.

The armistice agreement of 1949 was supposed to be policed by a series of Mixed Armistice Commissions, composed of Israel and her Arab neighbors. Very soon, however, Israel dissolved the Mixed Armistice Commissions and began to encroach upon more and more Arab territory. Thus, the officially demilitarized zone of El Auja was summarily seized by Israel.

Since the Middle East was still technically in a state of war (there was an armistice but no treaty of peace), Egypt, from 1949 on, continued to block the Strait of Tiran—the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba—to all Israeli shipping and to all trade with Israel. In view of the importance of the blocking of the Gulf of Aqaba in the 1967 war, it is important to remember that nobody griped at this Egyptian action: nobody said that Egypt was violating international law by closing this “peaceful international waterway.” (Making any waterway open to all nations, according to international law, requires two conditions: (a) consent by all the powers abutting on the waterway, and (b) no state of war existing between any powers on the waterway. Neither of these conditions obtained for the Gulf of Aqaba: Egypt has never consented to such an agreement, and Israel has been in a state of war with Egypt since 1949, so that Egypt blocked the Gulf to Israeli shipping unchallenged from 1949 on.)

Israel’s history of continuing aggression had only begun. Seven years later, in 1956, Israel, conjoined to British and French imperialist armies, jointly invaded Egypt. And oh how proudly Israel consciously imitated Nazi blitzkrieg and sneak-attack tactics! And oh how ironic that the very same American Establishment that had for years denounced Nazi blitzkriegs and sneak-attacks, was suddenly lost in admiration for the very same tactics employed by Israel! But in this case, the United States, momentarily abandoning its intense and continued devotion to the Israeli cause, joined with Russia in forcing the combined aggressors back from Egyptian soil. But Israel did not agree to pull its forces out of the Sinai peninsula until Egypt agreed to allow a special UN Emergency Force to administer the Sharm-el Sheikh fortress commanding the Strait of Tiran. Characteristically, Israel scornfully refused the UNEF permission to patrol its side of the border. Only Egypt agreed to allow access to the UN forces, and it was because of this that the Gulf of Aqaba was opened to Israeli shipping from 1956 on.

The 1967 crisis emerged from the fact that, over the last few years, the Palestinian Arab refugees have begun to shift from their previous bleak and passive despair, and begun to form guerrilla movements which have infiltrated the Israeli borders to carry their fight into the region of their lost homes. Since last year, Syria has been under the control of the most militantly anti-imperialist government that the Middle East has seen in years. Syria’s encouragement to the Palestinian guerrilla forces led Israel’s frenetic leaders to threaten war upon Syria and the conquest of Damascus—threats punctuated by severe reprisal raids against Syrian and Jordanian villages. At this point, Egypt’s premier, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had been an anti-Israel blowhard for years, but had concentrated instead on demagogic statist measures that wrecked Egypt’s domestic economy, was challenged by the Syrians to do something concrete to help: in particular, to end UNEF control—and hence continuing Israeli shipping—in the Gulf of Aqaba. Hence, Nasser’s request for the UNEF to leave. Pro-Israeli griping at U Thant’s swift compliance is grotesque, when we consider that the UN forces were there only at Egyptian request, and that Israel has always adamantly refused to have the UN forces on its side of the border. It was at that point, with the closing of the Strait of Tiran, that Israel evidently began to set the stage for its next blitzkrieg war.

While giving lip-service to peaceful negotiation, the Israeli government finally knuckled under to “hawk” pressure within the country; and the appointment of the notoriously warmongering General Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense was obviously the signal for the Israeli blitz attack that came a few days later. The incredibly swift Israeli victories; the press glorification of Israeli tactics and strategy; the patent unreadiness of the Arab forces despite the hoopla; all this indicates to all but the most naive the fact that Israel launched the war of 1967—a fact that Israel scarcely bothers to deny.

One of the most repellent aspects of the 1967 slaughter is the outspoken admiration for the Israeli conquest by almost all Americans, Jew and non-Jew alike. There seems to be a sickness deep in the American soul that causes it to identify with aggression and mass murder—the swifter and more brutal the better. In all the spate of admiration for the Israeli march, how many people were there to mourn the thousands of innocent Arab civilians murdered by the Israeli use of napalm? As for Jewish chauvinism among so-called “anti-war” people on the Left, there is no more sickening demonstration of a total lack of humanity than that displayed by Margot Hentoff in the left-liberal Village Voice:

Is there any war you DO like? If so, are you Jewish? Lucky. What a time to be Jewish! Have you ever known any Jewish pacificists? Did you know any last week? . . . Besides, this was a different war—an old kind of war, a kind of war in which death was life-giving and Arab deaths didn’t count. What a pleasure to be, once again, in favor of a war. What a good clean wholesome feeling to cheer those jeeps careening across the television screen filled with tough, lean, hard-faced, gun-bearing, JEWISH soldiers.

“Look at them go! WOW! ZAP! Nothing’s gonna stop them now!” said an old time radical pacifist, “This is an army of Jews!”

Another (whose major contribution to Judaism until now has been to write articles disowning Israel and announcing that Judaism is dead and deserves to be) spent the week confusing his nationality. “How are we doing?” he kept asking. “How far have we gotten now?”[1]

What a “clean wholesome feeling” indeed when “Arab deaths don’t count!” Is there any difference at all between this kind of attitude and that of the Nazi persecutors of the Jews whom our press has been attacking, day in and day out, for well over twenty years?

When this war began, the Israeli leaders proclaimed that they were not interested in “one inch” of territory; their fighting was purely defensive. But now that Israel sits upon its conquests, after repeated violations of UN cease-fires, it sings a very different tune. Its forces still occupy all of the Sinai peninsula; all of Palestinian Jordan has been seized, sending another nearly 200,000 hapless Arab refugees to join their hundreds of thousands of forlorn comrades; it has seized a goodly chunk of Syria; and Israel arrogantly proclaims that it will never, never return the Old City of Jerusalem or internationalize it; Israeli seizure of all of Jerusalem is simply “not negotiable.”

If Israel has been the aggressor in the Middle East, the role of the United States in all this has been even more unlovely. The hypocrisy of the U. S. position is almost unbelievable—or would be if we were not familiar with U. S. foreign policy over the decades. When the war first began, and it looked for a moment as if Israel were in danger, the U. S. rushed in to avow its dedication to the “territorial integrity of the Middle East”—as if the borders of 1949-67 were somehow embalmed in Holy Writ and had to be preserved at all costs. But—as soon as it was clear that Israel had won and conquered once again, America swiftly shed its supposed cherished “principles.” Now there is no more talk of the “territorial integrity of the Middle East”; now it is all “realism” and the absurdity of going back to obsolete status quo borders and the necessity for the Arabs to accept a general settlement in the Middle East, etc. How much more evidence do we need that an approving United States has always stayed in the wings, ready to come to the aid of Israel if necessary? How much more evidence do we need that Israel is now the ally and satellite of the U. S., which in the Middle East as in so many other areas of the world has assumed the mantle once worn by British imperialism?

The one thing that Americans must not be lured into believing is that Israel is a “little” “underdog” against its mighty Arab neighbors. Israel is a European nation with a European technological standard battling a primitive and undeveloped foe; furthermore, Israel has behind it, feeding it, and financing it, the massed might of countless Americans and West Europeans, as well as the Leviathan governments of the United States and its numerous allies and client states. Israel is no more a “gallant underdog” because of numerical inferiority than British Imperialism was a “gallant underdog” when it conquered far more populous lands in India, Africa, and Asia.

And so, Israel now sits, occupying its swollen territory, pulverizing houses and villages containing snipers, outlawing strikes of Arabs, killing Arab youths in the name of checking terrorism. But this very occupation, this very elephantiasis of Israel, provides the Arabs with a powerful long-range opportunity. In the first place, as the militant anti-imperialist regimes of Syria and Algeria now see, the Arabs can shift their strategic emphasis from hopeless conventional war with a far better armed foe to a protracted mass people’s guerrilla war. Armed with light weapons, the Arab people could carry out another “Vietnam”, another “Algeria”—another people’s guerrilla war against a heavily armed occupying army. Of course, this is a long-run threat only, because to carry it out the Arabs would have to overthrow all of their stagnant reactionary monarchies and form a united pan-Arab nation—for the splits into nation-States in the Arab world are the consequence of the artificial machinations and depredations of British and French imperialism. But for the long-run, the threat is very real.

Israel, therefore, faces a long-run dilemma which she must someday meet. Either to continue on her present course, and, after years of mutual hostility and conflict be overthrown by Arab people’s guerrilla war. Or—to change direction drastically, to cut herself loose completely from Western imperial ties, and become simply Jewish citizens of the Middle East. If she did that, then peace and harmony and justice would at last reign in that tortured region. There is ample precedent for this peaceful coexistence. For in the centuries before 19th and 20th century Western imperialism, Jew and Arab had always lived well and peacefully together in the Middle East. There is no inherent enmity or conflict between Arab and Jew. In the great centuries of Arab civilization in North Africa and Spain, Jews took a happy and prominent part—in contrast to their ongoing persecution by the fanatics of the Christian West. Shorn of Western influence and Western imperialism, that harmony can reign once more.

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1.Margot Hentoff, “Tomorrow, the World”, The Village Voice (June 15, 1967), p. 9.

Democracy And The

Formation Of Foreign Policy:

The Case Of F.D.R. And America’s Entrance Into World War II

By Ronald Radosh*

F. D. R.’s Undeclared War. 1939 to 1941, by T. R. Fehrenbach. David McKay Company, Inc., New York, 1967, $6.50

Discussion about the methods used by Franklin D. Roosevelt to bring the United States into World War II is not new. The dominant group of American historians have defended Roosevelt’s actions as those forced upon the President by the course of Axis aggression. A smaller group of revisionist historians have argued that American policy makers follwed a path that pushed the United States towards active involvement in what might have remained a purely European war.

The concentration on the revisionist charge that American policy contributed as much or even more than the Axis policy towards causing a new world war obscured a more fundamental charge levied by the revisionists—that while President Roosevelt publicly pledged to avoid involvement in the war, he deceptively took steps that made overt belligerency a matter of time. In the words of then Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, Roosevelt was “lying the country into war.” If the President had felt that his public antiwar commitments of 1940 had been rendered obsolete by events in 1941, as Charles A. Beard so ably expressed it, he had “constitutional and moral obligations to explain to the country the grounds and nature of a reversal in policy.” Such an explanation was never presented. What Beard had raised was the question of the character of a national leadership which showed so little confidence in its citizens that it preferred to lie about the issue of war and peace. Such realization of the dishonesty of Executive rhetoric meant the need to question the substance of a democracy whose leaders left no choice for the public but acquiescence in the prior decisions of the Executive branch.

T. R. Fehrenbach is the most recent to re-evaluate F. D. R.’s method of taking the nation into war. Fehrenbach’s book is not distinguished by the relating of any new or original material. Much of the work, indeed, is condensation and popular presentation of the writings of Charles A. Beard, William Henry Chamberlin, Harry Elmer Barnes, William Neumann, as well as the recent scholarly account of the same period provided by Robert A. Divine. One of the inexcusable omissions is any form of bibliography or footnotes. The result is that the uninitiated reader remains unaware of Fehrenbach’s sources and the books of previous authors whose work Fehrenbach has obviously studied closely and drawn from freely.

Nevertheless, Fehrenbach deserves comment because of the unusual twist he brings to the material. Fehrenbach concentrates on the effect that F. D. R.’s policy had on the democratic ethos. Previously the majority of Roosevelt’s defenders have argued that while the President may have actually deceived the people, he was acting, as Thomas A. Bailey once wrote, like “the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good.” Certainly this meant that the President had not entrusted the people with the truth. But as Bailey argued, the masses are “notoriously shortsighted” and must be deceived into awareness of their own long term interests. Or, as F. D. R.’s key aide Harry Hopkins had put it, “the people are too goddam dumb to understand.” Put simply, this is the old thesis that the truth must be kept from the people approach permits enactment of a foreign policy otherwise opposed (and possibly prevented from enactment) by the populace, it also assures a permanent damage to the moral fibre of a democratic nation.

Among the group of Roosevelt’s supporters, Fehrenbach distinguishes himself by acceptance of the validity of the major charges levied by the revisionists. He concisely, cogently, and persuasively reveals that the Roosevelt Administration took a series of major steps consciously intended to lead the country into a posture of belligerency against the Axis powers. Publicly, such steps were masqueraded as policies that would keep the peace and maintain American neutrality.

One example cited is the exchange of American destroyers for British bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland in September 1940. Fehrenbach does not mask the fact that this act violated neutrality statutes, was not covered by “cash and carry” legislation, and would not have been approved by the electorate. But Roosevelt avoided Congress in order to secure quick action, “avoid damaging debate, which might further divide the nation,” and thereby assure that the deal went through. Fehrenbach also understands the implication of the move for democracy. “If the President acted,” he writes, “the Congress and the public, presented with an accomplished fact, had no means of counteracting him. They could approve or disapprove -but they could not set the act aside.” The problem is that in a democracy, substantive public debate must take place before acts are committed if it is to have genuine meaning as well as the chance of affecting policy.

Of all the secret measures taken by the Roosevelt Administration in 1941, none was more significant than the conferences with the British staff held between January and March. These led to agreement that the U. S. Navy would convoy all transatlantic shipping, a step that violated the Neutrality Act. What made this agreement particularly reprehensible was that if the populace had known, it would undoubtedly have repudiated the President. Rather than announce and publicly state why he felt such acts were necessary, F. D. R. “publicly took the position that he was against convoys because they meant shooting.” These commitments could only have the final result of leading the United States into war. When Roosevelt ordered naval forces into the declared Nazi war zone beyond Greenland, it was inevitable that a clash would occur.

In his discussion of Japanese - American relations prior to Pearl Harbor, Fehrenbach makes it clear that resistance to Japanese aggression was not what motivated American leadership. Rather, it was the confrontation of the growing Japanese commercial empire in Asia with the West. Japan was seeking commercial expansion and prestige just as the Western powers, and in the process they had developed a “dynamic militarism’’ that worried the West.

Those Americans who were not willing to fight in defense of the West’s empire (or desired empire) in Asia are derided. Herbert Hoover is accurately discussed as one who took the position “that the United States could not, and had no business in trying, to act as a policeman halfway across the world.” Yet the intimation is that those in agreement were somehow wrong, although Fehrenbach himself admits that the war’s conclusion saw Japan granted exactly what she desired before Pearl Harbor; namely the “opening up of the European colonial preserves in Asia, and also the American market to Japanese manufactures.” A major reason for American opposition to Japan, he suggests, was the stake in Vietnam, then French Indo-China. Noting that American officials had become aware of its strategic importance, Fehrenbach writes that its possession by Japan was viewed as posing a “genuine threat to the Western position in Malay and the Indies.” For what was at stake was the need to keep Japan out of the rich and productive areas in the Dutch East Indies. When the Japanese finally decided to stage their infamous attack at Pearl Harbor, its purpose “was defensive.” The attack was not meant to lead Japan into war with the United States. It was designed only to prevent feared American interference in a declared or undeclared war against Japanese activity in the Indies.

Fehrenbach has only disrespect for those Americans who exercised their right of dissent and opposed the direction of American policy. Isolationists are ridiculed for their ignorance of the threat posed by the Nazis, and for endorsing Charles Lindbergh’s belief that “if we enter fighting for democracy abroad we may end by losing it at home.” While by 1941 it was possibly too late to avoid war, Fehrenbach’s excellent discussion of American-Soviet diplomacy suggests that had the constant Soviet proposals for a common front against the Nazis before 1939 been accepted, it “might have completely stopped German aggression before it scored its early, vital successes.”

But if the Western leaders had been blinded by their anti-Communism into failing to forge such a common front, hoping instead that Hitler and Stalin would fight each other alone; then the isolationist argument that war did not have to occur, and that its consequences might be negative within the United States, makes more sense than if opposition to “Atlantic escalation” is taken out of context. When he discusses Lindbergh, Fehrenbach makes the attack on “isolationism” meaningful to contemporary readers by the explanation that Lindbergh was “no more responsible for his actions” than are Bettina Aptheker and Staughton Lynd, who Fehrenbach argues have “inherited a mental outlook as well as genes.”

The last comment presents the reader with an insight into Fehrenbach’s real thesis. His argument essentially is that the secret measures taken by F. D. R. and the increased power in the hands of the Executive were necessary to assure American security; that in fact the American defense perimeter lies anywhere on the globe where the President sees American power and interests being challenged. What upsets Fehrenbach is not the decay of the democratic process begun by the Roosevelt Administration, but that F. D. R.’s tactics made it appear that his “serious war moves” seemed casually taken, though in reality they were carefully planned.

Fehrenbach believes that rather than withdraw to defend only U. S. national territory, or even extend defense to the Western hemisphere, defense of United States interests (which remain undefined by Fehrenbach) had to be wrapped in a “world view,” to the “earliest point of engagement -even if this were ten thousand miles away.” Fehrenbach’s criticism of Roosevelt is that he was not a Winston Church-hill—that he tried to develop a consensus behind a firm defense policy before openly taking necessary measures. He should have acted as a leader who brought the country to understand the need for increase of the security perimeter.

The result of F. D. R.’s actions was that the United States had actually entered a limited war against the Axis, solely through Executive action. By December 7, 1941 the United States already had a developed arms program, and had planned and coordinated future war strategy. By 1940, in fact, it had violated neutrality statutes by giving official Government aid to Great Britain, a belligerent power. These were, Fehrenbach notes, “enormous precedents.” But Fehrenbach has merely shown what they were, and has avoided asking the hard but necessary questions. He sees that the role of the Presidency was expanded, “without sharply defined limits to the powers of this office.” This meant that the President could use his powers “to commit American power abroad,” and that Congress would be unable to halt a strong President who used Executive authority for such a commitment.

But all of this is offered as proof that Congress cannot “be effective in the fields of foreign policy,” and Fehrenbach suggests that international power politics requires changes in the government structure which F. D. R. freely inaugurated. Whether they were constitutional or not. or resulted in war, is beside the point, because to Fehrenbach war itself is “neither moral nor immoral.” One of th problems facing any President is that in a democracy “the idea of foreign war still was met with prejudice.” The public did not hold to a concept of “advanced defense” and clung to “territoriality, rejecting ‘foreign’ war.” Hence many who supported F. D. R.’s undeclared war did so for the wrong reasons. They supported Roosevelt because they hated Hitler, rather than because they accepted “the concept of world power” and new strategic relationships. The result is what Fehrenbach terms a “new, liberal isolationism,” since liberals acted as “long-term isolationists” who, once Hitler was buried, sought again to retreat.

Fehrenbach’s message, it seems, is that those who really understood the need to fight in Europe and Asia in the 1940’s should be consistent and support the present effort in Vietnam. Roosevelt in the ’40’s wanted to avoid at all costs a President’s war, and to gain national unity for belligerency. Hence he saw a need to prepare for war while pretending to be for peace. Fehrenbach is critical because Roosevelt allowed a peace bloc to form around some Senators, which created an atmosphere in favor of neutrality. Fehrenbach feels that F. D. R. was hesitant in taking a belligerent stance because he paid too much attention to his “isolationist” critics. Instead, he should have squarely faced the fact that opposition “could in no way have halted or prevented any Presidential act-if the act were strongly pushed.” Unlike other F. D. R. supporters, Fehrenbach sees no need for Roosevelt having acted secretly when public approval did not exist for implementation of a new policy. Here he departs from the apologetics of historians like Bailey. But his criticism is a tactical one. Roosevelt should have performed like Churchill and forged a new public opinion that was more sound. He ends by suggesting that “a truly great President and American would have no concern for what might happen to ‘him personally once he had committed the nation to an irrevocable course, anymore than a soldier charging up a hill,” perhaps the most novel compliment to and rationale ever presented for Lyndon Johnson’s policies in Vietnam.

In one sense, Fehrenbach is correct. The precedents established by F. D, R. before World War II have borne fruit in Johnson’s policy in Vietnam, particularly in regard to the method of escalation, Fehrenbach’s problem, however, is that his material does not lead to endorsement of his thesis. Rather, the material suggests that opponents of our contemporary arrogance of power must pause and reevaluate their analysis of Roosevelt’s method of confrontation with the Axis powers. No better way to start exists than to re-read and learn from the monumental and misunderstood work by the late Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War. 1941.

Beard succeeded in confronting the real issues; an area in which Fehrenbach most notably fails. He understood that one major difference between democracy and totalitarian government is that the Constitution unequivocally does not “vest in the Congress or the President illimitable power secretly to determine the ends of the government in foreign or domestic affairs and secretly to choose and employ any means deemed desirable by either branch of the government to achieve those ends.”

If the precedents established by Roosevelt were allowed to stand, Beard had prophesied, it would mean that a future President might during an election campaign “publicly promise the people to keep the country out of war and, after victory at the polls, may set out secretly on a course designed or practically certain to bring war upon the country.” Finally, Beard warned, the President might, as a “crowning act in the arrogation of authority to himself, without the consent of the Senate, make a commitment to the head of a foreign government which binds the United States to ‘police the world’, ... to dominate the world, and the American people are thereby in honor bound to provide the military, naval and economic forces necessary to pursue, with no assurance of success, this exacting business.”

Beard’s darkest fears have, unfortunately, already occurred. Just as in 1941 the passage of Lend-Lease was used by interventionists to argue that the Act authorized the President to do anything he deemed necessary to militarily defeat Germany, even launching overt war, (an assumption totally unwarranted from the terms, conditions and arguments used for passage of Lend-Lease aid); so today the Gulf of Tonkin resolution is interpreted by the President and contemporary interventionists as a blank check for the conduct of large scale warfare in Asia, in which American troops were to conduct the bulk of the fighting.

Ironically, reexamination of the old revisionist writings on World War II leads to important new insights. In past years the revisionist thesis, most often equated with conservative thought and politics, was rejected by liberals and “radicals” who glorified and vaunted the powers of the President, especially in foreign affairs, and who sneered at the obstructionism of Congress. Now, when the nation faces a President whom the liberals almost uniformly revile, they yearn for a Congress that would be more responsive to their wishes in blocking his adventurist foreign policy. Yet the powers enjoyed by Lyndon B. Johnson, who fights an undeclared war without Congressional consent, and who escalates constantly while proclaiming a policy of peace, is a continuation of the policy and powers initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. For these reasons, many liberals today see that the old “conservative” critics were not so wide of the mark; that the much vaunted liberal ideal of “collective security” implied the increasingly naked reality of an informal Empire over the rest of the world; and that the praises sung to “internationalism” acutally meant espousal of interventionism, and that the denigration of “isolationism” meant concerted attack upon the few principled opponents of American expansion. By implication, these points may be discovered by a reading of Fehrenbach’s book. Perhaps, despite its author’s intentions, it will help a new generation come closer to the attainment of peace.

_________

* Ronald Radosh is Assistant Professor of History at Queensborough Communisty College of the City University of New York. He is the co-editor (with Louis Menashe) of Teach-Ins U. S. A., Reports. Opinions. Documents (Praeger, 1967)

The Power Elite Revisited

By Laurence S. Moss*

The revolutionary spirit of C. Wright Mills remains to be recaptured. From his major living disciple, Irving Horowitz,[1] we have received a prolific collection of articles and papers that attempt to clarify the ideas and sources upon which Mills’ analysis of American society was based. But nowhere in the academic tones of Horowitz, or in the countless array of Millsian-inspired articles, do we encounter that same unique power to “set things straight”, that rare ability to expose and educate, that characterize Mills’ work. The starting point for the libertarian thinker must be the Power Elite.[2] This study, which commands the attention all scholarly research deserves, overcomes the contemporary preoccupation with trivia by tackling a subject that transcends the locale of a Middletown, or the inconsequential machinations of some street-gang in Chicago—the maintenance and practice of “power” in American society. For it was self-evident to Mills, as it is obvious to us, that the perpetuation of the American monolith with its de facto ability to declare war, to bomb cities, and to interfere with the struggles of other peoples, stands as the foremost threat to the whole of American civilization—perhaps, human civilization.

The course of history over the past twelve years (since the first edition of the Power Elite appeared) has served to corroborate Mills’ diagnosis. The fears and concerns that Mills expressed in the ‘fifties are the fears and concerns that we have inherited in the ‘sixties. With increasing alarm we find that the political decisions affecting our destinies have been snatched out of the hands of the mass of American citizens and into the tailored pockets of a small group of “policy makers”. No matter what the imprecision Mills faced when defining the “power elite” and delimiting it from the rest of the populace, one fact remains clear; the common man is “represented” by a small group of policy makers, while the same common man, stilled by his impotence and beguiled by public school myths, is made to bear responsibility for decisions that he has not made (and probably would never have made, if given the choice). The “power elite” is real precisely because the country is divided up into the privileged who make the major decisions and the pillaged who work all of their lives to butter the others’ bread.

Thus, the purpose of the Power Elite was to answer the important questions, “who in American politics are making the crucial decisions?” and “what types of human beings are these decision-makers?” Mills’ classified his work as “sociology”, though his analysis of the problem served to throw light on another question asked by political scientists; “What types of decisions are being made?” The implications of the Power Elite are indeed profound.

Mills found that the members of the “power elite” are recruited from three primary sources of power—the military establishment, the modern corporation, and the state itself. This existing elite is characterized by the fact that those Americans seeking to gain access to the upper circles of the power pyramid must be privileged. They must possess wealth, ivy-league educations, proper social affiliations and above all a certain kind of saleable personality. These requirements can be fulfilled by only a few; and it is only a few who ever become the kings in the American game of political chess. Mills found no Horatio Algers in modern American politics because the “power elite” has ascended to a position where it can regenerate itself! Not through purity of the blood, as it was for the Pharaoh; not through noble patronage, as it was in pre-revolutionary France; but by patronizing institutions that are geared to mold a certain type of human being who they themselves deem fit to rule. Attendance at select schools, membership in the “correct” social clubs, belief in the Protestant ethos, all act to create the type of specimens the elite will sort out from the rest of the populace to inherit their reign. Whether it be the President of the United States, or the selection of a military advisor, the individuals are recruited from only one pot—a pot that contains only one blend of soup.

Whatever the differences between the policy makers’ personalities, habits, and interests; Mills argued that they cease to matter when it comes to the exercise of political power. The implication of his analysis is as subtle as it is poignant; if the decision-makers are all of one type then the decisions that they reach will also be of one kind. Clearly not the kind that the ordinary man is likely to make. It is extremely doubtful that the bombing of Hiroshima or the war in Viet Nam would have succeeded if put to a general referendum. Where is the representative democracy we learned about in high school? No where else but in the books!

A more important observation (one that Mills neglected to make) is that if the taxpayer were free to refuse his taxes, if the soldier were free to decide what to do with his life, where would the vital resources for these monstrous efforts come? How long could the elite survive with stale bread? - Or, even more likely, no bread at all?

As an analysis of the distribution of power in American society, the Power Elite made no attempt to suggest a viable alternative to the corporate-state capitalism we experience today. Mills’ work was dedicated to an analysis of the problem of power, rather than to a plan for political reconstruction. We might conjecture as to what type of social arrangement Mills preferred. There is some evidence to suggest that Mills favored a competitive market economy coupled with a limited and decentralized Federal government.[3] But Mills did not advocate this program because he believed that such an arrangement of affairs was no longer “technologically” possible.[4] Such an ideal belonged to an earlier age.

His study of American history convinced him that the passing of the laissez-faire economy dated from the mid-nineteenth century when technological development of large-scale production necessitated the break-up of the small competitive entrepreneurship and christened the evolution of the modern corporation.[5] It was the economic power of the corporation that, according to Mills, added the third source of power to that of the military and the state. This coalition between the “corporate chieftains”, the “warlords” and the “political directorate” marked the transition of a once basically individualistic economy to one ruled by the “power elite”.

We might only add that Mills’ pessimism might have been unwarranted. Mills’ despair was based upon a popular but erroneous interpretation of American history.[6] In the first place, Mills errs in assuming that there was once a time in history when “representative democracy” actually operated and the individual directed national policy. The inception of the American Constitution and the formation of the Federal government were the offspring of individuals hardly representative of the rest of the nation.[7] At no time did “We the people ...” describe the sentiments of the people living in 1786.[8] Furthermore, the history of the Federal government is a history not of balancing one pressure group against another, but a history of creating the very pressure groups that served to augment the state’s mighty power. Thus a correct study of American history must assign the state a causative role in creating the other sources of power from which it nourishes.

A study of business legislation in the United States leads one to wonder how quickly laissez-faire would have died, in the absence of the spider web of tariff protection and subsidy privilege granted to business by the ever-expanding state. One modern historian[9] has made such a study and holds the belief that most of the so-called “anti-trust” regulation did more to perpetuate the growth of the powerful corporation than to “reestablish” competition. Thus it was not so much the necessitites of large-scale production that created the features of “corporate-capitalism” and made the corporation chieftains immune to ordinary market pressures, but the active support of the state itself. The marriage Mills describes between the state and the economy is real, but the evidence seems to indicate that the state has wedded its own son.

Furthermore, Mills has failed to prove that the market economy is impractical in our modern age. The Power Elite does not expalin why economic power must necessarily become political power. In fact, Mills equates the two as synonymous while we must distinguish between these two types of power so that their differences remain. It is true that corporations can certainly grow large in size in the absence of state assistance. But economic power in a market economy is acquired and maintained in ways alien to that of state and military power. The power to sell is only as strong as another’s willingness to buy; and when the consumers stop buying, the life of the mightiest corporation is dated by the time it takes for its assets to be liquidated. On the other hand, when the consumer stops “buying” the “services” of the state, he is jailed, humiliated, and ultimately murdered. The maintenance of political power involves the language of taxation, the language of conscription—the language of violence. Tongues all foreign to the market economy.

There is still another reason to relinquish the Millsian pessimism of the ‘fifties—something that Mills did not live long enough to see. While today there still remains that awesome cleavage between the rulers and the ruled; the ruled are not as unaware of it as they were when the Power Elite was written. On college campuses and within certain minority movements, one individual after another is beginning to see through the opaque curtain of American politics. In the eyes of the New Left (a student movement influenced by Mills’ work) and in some of the rhetoric of the “Negro revolution”, the “power elite” is being exposed and held up to its proper ridicule.[10] Whether these voices crying in the wilderness will be able to challenge effectively the American monolith remains to be seen. “Times are changing. . .” but not fast enough. The Johnsons will be reelected for many years to come as the Republican and Democratic parties monopolize the presidential privilege. For the present, the libertarian must become better equipped for the future, for if he some day succeeds in winning back the individual’s freedom, it will be because part of his armour was fashioned by Mills’ powerful Power Elite.

_________

* Laurence S. Moss is a graduate student in the department of economics, Columbia University. He holds the M. A. in economics from Queens College of the City University of New York, and is the author of “Adam Smith—Social Scientist,” Social Science Review (April, 1966).

1.Irving Louis Horowitz’s contributions have appeared in the form of introductions to books by Mills and about Mills. See The New Sociology. Horowitz ed. (Oxford University Press, 1964), and Power Politics and People. (Ballantine, 1962). Horowitz has written several books all of which display the great influence of Mills; witness the title of his 1963 work, The War Game: Studies of the New Civilian Militarists. Of especial interest is Horowitz’s “Commentary” on The Power Elite entitled C, Wright Mills’ The Power Elite published by Study Master (New York, 1966).

2.C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, (Oxford University Press, 1959).

3.See The Power Elite, p. 260, and Robert B. Notestein, “The Moral Commitment of C. Wright Mills” in The New Sociology, pp. 49-53.

4.The Power Elite, pp. 259-60.

5.Ibid.

6.One source of this “popular” history of American society is E. H. Carr, The New Society, (Beacon Press, 1951).

7.A complete documentation of this position remains to be published. I have consulted the finished manuscript of Murray N. Rothbard on the period of colonial America where the author attempts to analyze the famous Constitutional Convention in terms of what actually happened rather than in terms of what many historians wanted to have happened. The manuscript is to be the first volume of a complete history of the United States. The still curious reader may consult with profit a small pamphlet by the libertarian - lawyer, Lysander Spooner, in which he argues that the American Constitution is “illegal”. The argument is based on the idea that unlike ordinary contracts between living individuals, the Constitution was signed by some individuals and meant to be binding on all future generations of individuals—thus, in what sense is the Constitution a “contract”? This is, of course, the immediate objection to Hobbes’ “contract theory” of the state. It is necessary to mention that Spooner constructs several other objections to the legitimacy of the Constitution. See his No Treason No II The Constitution, 1867 (Boston).

8.No Treason, p. 5 and see also Beard’s analysis of the backgrounds of the constitutional delegates, Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, (Macmillan, 1962).

9.See Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism, (Free Press, 1963).

10.See Left and Right, Vol. III, No. 1., Winter 1967, editorial entitled, “SDS: The New Turn” and also, Rothbard’s “The Negro Revolution” in New Individualist Review, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Summer 1963) published at the University of Chicago.

A

VIETNAM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

By .Marvin E. Gettleman, With The Assistance Of Sonford L. Silverman*

1. AGGRESSION from the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam. (U. S. Department of State Publication 7839: Far Eastern Series 130.) (Washington, D. C., Februrary, 1965). The “White Paper” of 1965, presenting the case for “escalation.” (Reprinted in no. 32 below).

2. AMERICAN FRIENDS of Vietnam. A Symposium on America’s Stake in Vietnam. (New York, September, 1956). Contains, among other things, Hans Mergenthau’s useful assessment of the Geneva conference (pp. 64-70) and Senator John F. Kennedy on “America’s Stake in Vietnam” (pp. 8-14). (See the discussion of the American Friends of Vietnam in no. 85 below).

3. AMERICAN FRIENDS Service Committee. Peace in Vietnam: A New Approach in Southeast Asia. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965). A Quaker-sponsored inquiry, prepared by a group that included several Asia specialists. Carefully presented alternative policies are discussed.

4. APTHEKER, Herbert. Mission to Hanoi. (New York: International Publishers, 1966). Record of a trip taken by a Moscow-oriented U. S. communist theoretician. Compare no. 61 below.

5. BACKGROUND Information Relating to South-east Asia and Vietnam. (Revised, June 16, 1965, Report of the U. S. Senate Committe on Foreign Relations, 89th Congress: 1st Session) (Washington, D. C., 1965). This collection documents the American government’s position.

6. BATOR, Victor. Vietnam: A Diplomatic Tragedy. (Dobbs Ferry, N. Y.: Oceana Publications, 1965). Study of international diplomacy in Southeast Asia.

7. BINH Thanh (see Hai Thu, jt. auth., no. 40 below).

8. BOUSCAREN, Anthony Trawick. The Last of the Mandarins: Diem of Vietnam. (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1965). An adulatory biography of Ngo Dinh Diem. A serious charge of plagiarism was laid against this book in The American Political Science Review. LIX (December, 1964), pp. 1013-4.

9. BROMLEY, Dorothy Dunbar. Washington and Vietnam: An examination of the Moral and Politcal Issues. (Dobbs Ferry, N. Y.: Oceana Publications, 1966). A study, written primarily for clergymen, stressing ethical considerations in government policy.

10. BROWNE, Robert S. “The Freedom Movement and the War in Vietnam”, Freedomways, V (Fall, 1965), pp. 467-480. Suggestive parallels between liberation movements in the black communities of America, and the liberation struggle in Vietnam.

11. BURCHETT, Wilfred. North of the Seventeenth Parallel. (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1956); Mekong Upstream. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959); The Furtive War: The United States in Vietnam and Laos. (New York: International Publishers, 1963); Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War. (New York: International Publishers, 1965); Vietnam North. (New York: International Publishers, 1966). Rich record of the observations of an able Australian journalist sympathetic to the Communist cause in Indochina.

12. BURLING, Robbins. Hill Farms and Padi Fields: Life in Mainland Southeast Asia. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965). An anthropological study, dealing with the ethnology and political geography of the region.

13. BUTTINGER, Joseph. The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1958). Takes the story to 1900, and offers a bibliography and a chronology to 1956. The author tends to be discursive, and his interpretation is characterized by an adulation of Ngo Dinh Diem. Buttinger, his views modified, has taken the history of Vietnam through 1963 in Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, 2 vols. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967).

14. CADY, John F. Southeast Asia: Its Historical Development. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Broadly conceived study by the author of the prize-winning Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1954).

15. CAMERON, James. Here is Your Enemy. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966). An English newspaperman’s eyewitness account of the North Vietnamese response to the U. S. escalations in 1965.

16. CARVER, George A. Jr. “The Real Revolution in South Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs, XLIII (April, 1965), pp. 387-408. A skillful, but debatable thesis that there is a genuinely revolutionary force in South Vietnam outside of the National Liberation Front. By the time Carver’s sequel appeared, (“The Faceless Viet Cong,” Foreign Affairs, XLIV, April, 1966, pp. 347-372), stating the U. S. government’s position on the NLF, it became known that the author had been a CIA agent.

17. CHINH, Truong. Primer for Revolt (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963). Facsimile reproduction of English translations of two important works (The August Revolution and The Resistance Will Win) by a leading North Vietnamese theorist.

18. CHOMSKY, Noam. “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” The New York Review of Books. VIII (February 23, 1967). A brilliant and powerful critique of the attempt by administration intellectuals to defend U. S. Vietnam policy. Chomsky believes “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”

19. CLUBB, Oliver Edmund Jr. The United States and the Sino-Soviet Bloc in Southeast Asia. (Washington, D. C: The Brookings Institution, 1962). Critical analysis of international relations from a liberal perspective.

20. COEDES, G. The Making of South East Asia. tr., by H. M. Wright (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). An anthropological study of the people of Indochina.

21. COLE, Allan B., et al. (eds.). Conflict in Indochina and International Repercussions: A Documentary History 1945-1955. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, for the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, 1956). A documentary approach to the Indochinese conflict which is a model of scholarship.

22. COLLINS, J. and others. Medical Problems of South Vietnam, 1966. (Boston, Mass., Physicians for Social Responsibility, 1966). A detailed overview of all aspects of illness, civilian casualties and health facilities in South Vietnam through the end of 1966.

23. DEVILLERS, Philippe. Histoire du Vietnam de 1940 a 1952. 3d ed. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952). The basic book on the genesis of the first Indochinese war. The author’s “Struggle for Unification of Vietnam” (China Quarterly, no. 9, January - March, 1962, pp. 2-23) is the best account of the origin of the guerrilla war in South Vietnam (reprinted no. 32 below).

24. DODD, Senator Thomas J. (ed). The Anti-Vietnam Agitation and the Te ach-In Movement, Staff Report of the U. S. Senate, Judiciary Committee. (89th Congress: 1st session) (Washington, D. C.; U. S. Government Printing Office, October, 1965). The aim is to demonstrate that the teach-in movement is communist-controlled. (Compare no. 66 below).

25. DRAPER, Theodore. Abuse of Power (New York: Viking, 1967). A well argued, tactical indictment of U. S. foreign policy in Vietnam and elsewhere. Draper’s “How Not to Negotiate”, The New York Review of Books. VIII (May 4, 1967), presents the thesis that the U. S. government has, in fact, avoided negotiations in Vietnam.

26. DuBERRIER, Hilaire. Background to Betrayal: the Tragedy of Vietnam. (Boston: Western Islands, 1965). Analysis by the Indochina correspondent of American Opinion of Vietnamese developments from the Geneva conference until the American escalation in 1965. Useful for information on the rise and maintenance of power of Diem, and the role of the CIA and the State Department. Important contribution on the persecution of the religious sects and their role in forming the National Liberation Front.

27. DuBOFF, Richard B. (see Herman, Edward S., jt. auth. no. 45 below).

28. DUNCAN, Donald. The New Legions (New York: Random House, 1967). An inside story of the Green Berets in Vietnam. See no. 70 below.

29. FALL, Bernard B. Late author of a huge corpus of uneven writings on Vietnam and Indochina. Of most value are The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis (Revised ed., New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1964). Vietnam Witness. 1953-1966 (New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1966) is a collection of Fall’s essays and articles. Hell In a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (New York, Lippincott, 1967) is a detailed account of the events of the spring of 1954, less readable than selection no. 80 below.

30. FIFIELD, Russell H. The Diplomacy of Southeast Asia. 1945-1958. (New York: Harper, 1958), Chapter 8 deals with the international diplomacy surrounding Vietnam.

31. FULBRIGHT, Senator William J, (ed). The Vietnam Hearings. (New York, Vintage Books, 1966). A condensation of Supplemental Foreign Assistance/ Fiscal Year, 1966—Vietnam, Hearings, before the U. S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, January-February 1966 (89th Congress; 2d session). (Washington, D. C., U. S. Government Printing Office, 1966). Fulbright’s Arrogance of Power (New York, Vintage Books, 1967) is an eloquent critique of U. S. Foreign Policy.

32. GETTLEMAN, Marvin E. Vietnam: History, Documents and Opinions. (New York, Fawcett World Library, 1965; 2d ed., Harmondsworth, England, Penguin books, 1966). A basic selection of readings drawn from many of the books and articles listed in this bibliography, as well as such key documents as the Geneva Agreements of 1954, The Reports of the International Control Commission, official government statements, National Liberation Front statements, teach-in texts, etc.

33. GETTLEMAN, Marvin E. and MERMELSTEIN, David. The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism. (New York: Vintage Books, 1967). A comprehensive survey of American society and politics, based upon the conviction of the unity between foreign and domestic policy.

34. GIAP, Vo Nguyen. People’s War, People’s Army (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965). Facsimile publication of English translations of the political and military papers of the great North Vietnamese general, and strategist of the victory at Dienbienphu.

35. GIGON, Fernand. Les Americains face au Vietcong (Paris: Flammarion, 1965). Well-informed account of this fateful confrontation by an able Swiss journalist.

36. GOODWIN, Richard. Triumph or Tragedy: Reflections on Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). An exercise in political Weltschmerz, with the barely disguised aim of providing the Kennedy government-in-exile with a foreign policy image different from the tarnished one of LB J. (See no. 88 below).

37. GREENE, Felix. Vietnam! Vietnam! (Palo Alto, Calif.: Fulton Publishing Co., 1966). A brief, accurate text, with extensive quotations; its strongest point is its powerful and moving photographs.

38. GURTOV, Melvin. The First Vietnam Crisis: Chinese Communist Strategy and United States Involvement, 1953-1954 (Studies in the East Asian Institute, Columbia University) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967). A run-of-the-mill piece of RAND Corporation geo-political mysticism. See the review by Marvin E. Gettleman in The Progressive (Madison, Wise.) XXXI: 8 (August, 1967), pp. 39-41.

39. HAHN, Thich Nhat. Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967). Eloquent statement of a Buddhist position of neutralism in the Vietnamese conflict.

40. HAI Thu and BINH Thanh. Coup After Coup in Saigon. (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1964). A North Vietnamese view of the sometimes amusing, sometimes brutal, political instability in the South.

41. HALBERSTAM, David. The Making of a Quagmire. (New York: Random House, 1964). An exciting and revealing account from the perspective of a young American journalist, whose reporting from Vietnam won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964.

42. HALL, D. G. E. A History of South-East Asia. 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1964). From prehistory to today’s independent states, this work presents a synthesis of the area’s complex history.

43. HAMMER, Ellen J. The Struggle for Indochina. (Institute of Pacific Relations). (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1954). A superb study of the French effort to hold on to Indochina.

44. HAYDEN, Thomas (see LYND, Staughton, jt. auth., no. 61 below).

45. HERMAN, Edward S. and DuBOFF, Richard B. America’s Vietnam Policy: The Strategy of Deception. (Washington, D. C.: Public Affairs Press, 1966). A powerful indictment. An early, abbreviated version of this study was entitled: “How to Coo Like a Dove While Fighting to Win.”

46. HICKEY, Gerald Cannon. Village in Vietnam. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964). Anthropological study of a South Vietnam village, innocent of any political understanding.

47. HIGGINS, Marguerite. Our Vietnam Nightmare. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965). The late newspaper woman argues that Diem was the kind of man we should support “out there.” His assassination, which she blames on the U. S., was in her eyes a great abiding blunder.

48. HO Chi Minh (Pseud.). Selected Works. 4 vols. (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960-1962). A collection drawn from Nguyen Tat Thanh’s (or Nguyen Ai Quoc’s) long lifetime of revolutionary activity. Bernard Fall’s collection, On, Revolution: Selected Writings of Ho, 1920-1966, (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), although it contains recent material, is no substitute for the Hanoi collection. Against U. S. Aggression: For National Salvation (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1967) is an official collection of Ho’s recent speeches and pronouncements.

49. INTERNATIONAL Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, Reports (London: Great Britain Parliamentary Sessional Papers, 1954-1967). Essential documents from the body set up to police the Geneva Agreements. (Brief excerpts appear in no. 32, above).

50. KAHIN, George McT., (ed). Government and Politics of Southeast Asia. (Cornell Southeast Asia Program). 2d ed. (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964). A magnificent reference work, the first book to consult on Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, the Phillipines, and even Vietnam. Good bibliographies.

51. KAHIN, George McTurnan and LEWIS, John W. The United States in Vietnam (New York: Delta Books, 1967). The fullest and best informed liberal critique of the U. S. position. Good maps, useful documentary appendices and bibliographies.

52. LACOUTURE, Jean. Vietnam Between Two Truces. (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). Well informed, historically grounded (if over-optimistic) analysis by an experienced French journalist.

53. LANCASTER. Donald. The Emancipation of French Indo-China. (Royal Institute of International Affairs). (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). The best single book on the history of all Indochina to about 1955. (Selection printed in no. 32 above).

54. LANDSBERG, Brian K. “The United States in Vietnam: A case Study in the Law of Intervention.” California Law Review. (August, 1962) pp. 515-531. A sophisticated defense of U. S. policy, based upon the assumption of South Vietnamese sovereignty,

55. LAWYERS Committee on American Policy Towards Vietnam. Vietnam and International Law: An Analysis of the Legality of the U. S. Military Involvement (Flanders, N. J.: O’Hare Books, 1967). A comprehensive examination by a distinguished group of international lawyers. Also an “answer” to the official U. S. position, as expressed in Leonard C. Meeker, “The Legality of United States Participation in the Defense of Vietnam,” U. S. Department of State Bulletin (March 28, 1966).

56. LE THANH KHO. Le Vietnam, Histoire et Civilization: Le Milieu et l’histoire. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955). Historical survey of Vietnam by a Vietnamese writer sympathetic to the Communist cause.

57. LEWIS, John W. (see KAHIN, George M., jt. auth., no. 51 above).

58. LIBER MAN, Robert. Medical and Social Consequences of the War in Vietnam (April, 1967). A short pamphlet which documents the concerns raised by 7000 health professionals in their petition to President Johnson.

59. LOWENFELS, Walter. Where is Vietnam? (New York: Doubleday, 1967). Poems on the horrors of war, mostly motivated by Vietnam, by some of America’s finest poets.

60. LU, Shih-p’eng. Vietnam During the Period of Chinese Rule (IIId Century B. C. to Xth Century A. D.) - A History of Sino-Vietnamese Relations, Vol. I, Monograph Series no. 3), Southeast Asia Studies Section, . . . Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 1964). The first of a series of documentary volumes, in Chinese; this one deals with the annexation of Vietnam by China in 111 B. C.

61. LYND, Staughton and HAYDEN, Thomas. The Other Side (New York: New American Library, 1967). This account by Herbert Aptheker’s “fellow travellers” (see no. 4 above) illustrates the “New Left’s” basic posture on international affairs.

62. McCARTHY, Joseph E. Illusion of Power: American Policy Toward Vietnam, 1954-1966 (New York: Carleton Press, 1967), An argument that U. S. support of such figures as Diem is necessary lest Chinese-backed wars of national liberation spread in the third world.

63. McCARTHY, Mary. Reports from Vietnam (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967). Adding to the eyewitness reports, which appeared in the New York Review of Books, April-May 1967, in perceptive on-the-spot observations of an eminent American novelist, new material on anti-war tactics in the U. S.

64. McDERMOTT, John. “The History of Vietnam”, in three parts, plus a bibliography, Viet-Report, I (June-November, 1965). A useful condensation of the history of the war-torn nation based largely upon secondary sources. This author’s “Welfare Imperialism in Vietnam”, The Nation (July 25, 1966), suggests that the U. S. is primarily motivated by misguided idealism in Vietnam, a position from which McDermott retreats in “Vietnam is No Mistake”, The Nation (February 13, 1967), reprinted in no. 33 above. Mr. McDermott is associate editor of Viet-Report (see no. 101 below).

65. McGOVERN, Senator George C. “A Proposal for Vietnam,” The New York Review of Books, VI (July 7, 1966). Presents an alternative policy that the Johnson administration refuses to countenance. In a brilliant and courageous speech (Congressional Record, Senate, April 25, 1967), Senator McGovern has warned of the grave dangers involved in the present collision course.

66. MENASHE, Louis and RADOSH, Ronald. Teach-Ins U. S. A.: Reports, Opinions, Documents. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967). A many-sided examination of the political, academic and social phenomenon of the teach-Ins. MENASHE, Louis (ed). Berkeley Teach-In: Vietnam. An LP documentary of the Berkeley Teach-in with introductory notes on the background of the teach-in movement by the editor. (Folkways Records; 2 LP records: FD 5765). Texts of sixteen of the speeches delivered at this celebrated teach-in are also contained in We Accuse (Berkeley, Calif.: Diablo Press, 1965), introduction by James Petras; afterword by the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee. MENASHE, Louis and WELLS, Rosalind (eds). The Original Town Hall Read-in for Peace in Vietnam, is another LP documentary including poetry readings by many authors (New York: Broadside Records, BR 452: 1967).

67. MERMELSTEIN, David (see GETTLEMAN, Marvin, jt. auth., no. 33 above).

68. MODELSKI, George, “The Vietminh Complex,” in Cyril E. Black and Thomas P. Thornton, Communism and Revolution: The Strategic Uses of Political Violence. (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 185-214. Contains many shrewd insights into Vietminh strategy.

69. MONTAGUE, Frank D. “United States Postwar Policy Toward Indochina” (unpublished M. A. thesis in International Relations, University of Chicago, 1953). An analysis and justification of the course taken by U. S. policy makers to come to France’s aid in Indochina.

70. MOORE, Robin. Green Berets (New York: Crown, 1965). A long-time bestseller, which, in the spirit of American tough-guy literature, heaps praise on the U. S. Army Special Forces. (See no. 28, above).

71. MORGENTHAU, Hans J. Vietnam and the United States (Washington D. C.: Public Affairs Press, 1965). A collection of essays by a consistent advocate of the primacy of “national interest” and of Realpolitik.

72. MURTI, B. S. N. Vietnam Divided: The Unfinished Struggle (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1964). A useful account of the work of the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam (see no. 49) by an Indian official of the Commission.

73. NEWMAN, Bernard. Background to Vietnam. (New York: Signet, 1966). A journalistic survey, uncritically accepting the official U. S. rationale for being in Vietnam.

74. NICOLAUS, Martin. “The Professors, the Policemen and the Peasants: The Sociology of the Michigan State University Group Vietnam Project, 1955-1962.” (Graduate Seminar Paper, Brandeis University, 1966) is a far better study of MSU than the journalistic expose in Ramparts (April, 1966). Selections from Nicolaus’ study, under the title “The Professor, The Policeman and the Peasant,” appear in Viet-Report, II (Februrary-April, 1966).

75. OSBORNE, Milton E. Strategic Hamlets in South Vietnam: A Survey and a Comparison (Ithaca, N. Y. Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1965). A full assessment of the disastrous South Vietnam experiment, in the light of earlier programs in Malaya.

76. PIKE, Douglas. Viet Cong: Organization and Technique of the National Liberation Front (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966). Rich with the use of masses of captured NLF material, this book is a unique work of scholarship. Though Pike concludes that the NLF is controlled from Hanoi, much of his data suggests local independence.

77. RAMPARTS Magazine, “Vietnam Primer” (Menlo Park, California, Ramparts, 1966). Containing the famous “I Quit” statement by former Special Forces Sergeant Donald Duncan, and a selection of articles mainly by Robert Scheer.

78. RASKIN, Marcus G. and FALL, Bernard B. The Vietnam Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). An anthology much different in focus than no. 32 above. See the joint review by Robert Wolfe in Viet-Report, II (January, 1966).

79. REPUBLICAN Policy Committee, U. S. Senate, The War in Vietnam. (Washington, D. C.: Public Affairs Press, 1967). The famous Republican “White Paper”, sharply critical of American involvement in Vietnam.

80. ROY, Jules. The Battle of Dienbienphu. Tr. by Robert Baldick. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). A chronicle based on Roy’s interviews with participants in the battle of Dienbienphu. See also Roy’s eloquent “Letter to Americans” in Viet - Report. I (October, 1965), pp. 28-31.

81. RUSSELL, Bertrand. War Crimes in Vietnam. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). A powerful and angry statement by one of the great minds of our century.

82. SAHLINS, Marshall. “The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam,” Dissent, XIII (January/ February, 1966), pp. 36-62. Making brilliant use of his skills as a professional anthropologist. Shalins studies the transformations of American soldiers at war in Vietnam.

83. SALISBURY, Harrison. Behind the Lines - Hanoi: December 23-January 7 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). This distinguished New York Times writer reported that civilian targets were being bombed in North Vietnam.

84. SALMON, Malcolm. Focus on Indo-China. (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961). A comprehensive historical survey by an Australian journalist.

85. SCHEER, Robert. How the United States Got Involved in Vietnam. (Report to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions). (Santa Barbara, California: Fund for the Republic, 1965). An analysis by a young American journalist and political activist of the role of the Catholic hierarchy, Michigan State University, The New Leader, The American Friends of Vietnam, and sundry others in molding U. S. policy towards Vietnam. Substantial portions on this study are reprinted in no. 32 above.

86. SCHESCH, Adam. “The Organizing Tactics of the Vietnamese Communist Party Before World War II” (unpublished M. A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1967). Although an immature exercise in analysis, this study contains some valuable data, especially from French sources. Schesch’s An Outline History of Vietnam (Madison, Wise., n. d.) is a useful compilation of facts and quotations.

87. SCIGLIANO, Robert. South Vietnam: A Nation Under Stress (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1963). A full and fairly objective survey, down to just before the overthrow of Diem.

88. SCHLESINGER, Arthur M., Jr. The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941-1966 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). A member of the Kennedy “government in exile”, this prize-winning historian enters a mild dissent from the Johnson Administration’s policy.

89. SCHURMANN, Franz and others. The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). Incisive analysis of ten episodes in U. S. policy toward Vietnam. Presented as a “citizen’s white paper” to LBJ.

90. SHAPLEN, Robert. The Lost Revolution: the Story of Twenty Years of Neglected Opportunities in Vietnam and of America’s Failure to Foster Democracy There. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). A critical account which attributes U. S. policy to “indecision, stupidity or sheer laziness.”

91. SNOW, Edgar. The Other Side of the River: Red China Today. (New York: Random House, 1962). Chapter 85 is a good, short survey of recent Vietnamese history. It is also published separately as a pamphlet by Marzani and Munsell, Publishers, New York City.

92. STONE, I. F. “Vietnam: An Exercise in Self-Delusion,” New York Review of Books (April 22, 1965). Brilliant examination of American misunderstandings. See also no. 1 above, Stone’s careful “Reply to the White Paper,” I. F. Stone’s Weekly, XII (March 8, 1965), reprinted in no. 32 above.

93. TABOULET, Georges. La Geste Francais en Indochina. (Paris: Adrien-Maissonnueve, 1955-1956). A two-volume collection of documents illustrating French colonialism in Indochina to 1913 (one selection printed in no. 32 above).

94. TANHAM, George K. Communist Revolutionary Warfare: The Vietminh in Indochina. (New York, Praeger, 1961). A RAND study, highly revealing of the popular and organizational bases of Vietminh success.

95. A THREAT to the Peace: North Vietnam’s Effort to Conquer South Vietnam. 2 vols. U. S. Department of State Publication 7308; Far Eastern Series 110. (Washington, D. C., December 1961). The “White Paper” or “Blue Book” of 1961, indicating the Kennedy administration’s deepening commitment in Vietnam. (Brief selections appear in nos. 32 and 78 above).

96. TOYNBEE, Arnold J. “The Failure of American Foreign Policy,” Fact. II (September/October, 1965), pp. 3-7. A bitter excoriation of what the eminent historian calls American “aggression” in Vietnam and elsewhere.

97. TRAGER, Frank. Why Vietnam? (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966). Commissioned by the U. S. State Department for a substantial sum, this crude work of sub-scholarship approaches the falsifications committed by Stalinist historians in Russia.

98. UNIVERSITY of New South Wales, Study group on Vietnam. Vietnam and Australia: History, Documents, Interpretations (Gladesville, N. S. W., 1966). A balanced historical survey to which is added a sharp critique of Australian commitment. Available from the Study Group, 48 Milling Street, Gladesville, N. S. W., Australia.

99. VIETNAM Lao Dong (Communist) Party. Thirty Years of Struggle of the Party. (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1960). Party history, often in the rigid mold of the genre covering the period 1930 to 1945.

100.VIETNAM: Voices of Policy and Protest. An LP documentary of Vietnam debate. Excerpts from speeches by opponents of the war and by members of the Johnson and Kennedy administrations; with narration. (Rostrum Records, 153 East 57th St., NYC 10022).

101.VIET REPORT: An Emergency News-Bulletin on Southeast Asian Affairs (133 West 72d Street, N. Y. C., 10023). An important and useful publication, covering the history and present situation.

102.WEINSTEIN, Franklin B. Vietnam’s Unheld Elections: The Failure to Carry Out the 1956 Reunification Elections and the Effect on “Hanoi . . . (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1966). A full study of the question.

103.WHITE, Ralph K., and others. “Misperception and the Vietnam War.” Journal of Social Issues XXII (July 1966). An entire issue of this journal is devoted to the exploration of the psychological factors behind U. S. involvement.

104.ZAGORIA, Donald S. “Communism in Asia,” Commentary XXXIX (February, 1965), pp. 53-58. A careful investigation into the vast differences between Asian and East European Communism.

105.ZINN, Howard. Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). Brief, educated, angry analysis of such questions as the “Munich analogy,” revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence, and the possibility and desirability of U. S. withdrawal.

___________

* Compiled and annotated October 19, 1967 by Marvin E. Gettleman, Assistant Professor of History, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, with the assistance of Sanford L. Silverman, Liberal Arts Bibliographer, The Libraries, Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. An earlier version of this bibliography, prepared by Gettleman and Silverman in July 1967, was published in STACKS, July, 1967, a publication of The Libraries of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.

A

BERNARD FALL

RETROSPECTIVE

On February 21, 1967, while on patrol with U. S. Marines north of Hue, in South Vietnam, Bernard Fall, distinguished French-born expert on Vietnam and a professor at Howard University, was killed by a land-mine. Left and Right here presents reviews of Fall’s last two works, recently published, on Vietnam.

Bernard B. Fall, Viet-Nam Witness 1953-66, New York, Praeger, 1966, 363 pages, $6.95.

BY LEONARD P. LIGGIO

Bernard Fall has been the principal source for the American public of detailed information and analysis of the political and social developments in South-East Asia and the United States’ reaction to them. Time and again, Professor Fall has demonstrated that the facts have been the reverse of the ‘official history’ presented through the newspapers and magazines by the State Department and the Pentagon. Yet, despite the personal courage which this consistency has required, it is less a compliment to him than a condemnation of the academic and journalistic institutions in this country. That the United States government controls and manipulates information, using it as an instrument of the Administration’s policy objectives, and seeks to defame, harass and punish those who seek out and report the actual facts, is well-known to any realistic observer. But, that the academic and journalistic institutions, and thus almost all scholars and journalists, cooperate in the objectives and methods of the government in foreign policy matters, remains one of the unrecognized facts of contemporary America. As Fall expresses it in his introduction to Viet-Nam Witness:

When social-science research has reasons-of-state limitations placed upon its conclusions, it runs into heavy risks of losing its validity . . . In the case of Viet-Nam, that situation was finally pushed to a tragic extreme in which practically all specialists dealing with the country were operating under contract either with the Saigon government or with one of the American aid programs . . . University and foundation reports indicate only too clearly and too often that scholarship has in many cases become a new kind of “big business.” In the long run, this may well stifle the yearning for the unexplored paths and for dissent of a higher level and greater import than a medieval theologians’ debate around safely established basic verities.

Nevertheless, Fall himself established his role with greater sophistication “around safely established basic verities.” He expresses the view that the role of the independent scholar or journalist is not to change the direction and objectives of the country’s foreign policy but to influence, benefit, or improve the methods of achieving the direction and objectives, the “safely established basic verities,” of United States foreign policy. In his Epilogue to Viet-Nam Witness, and despite the evidence he has marshalled over many years, Fall affirms the purpose of aiding the United States to achieve its ends and to work its will in South-East Asia behind the ever-present facade of anti-communism. His subtle recommendation to divide the National Liberation Front from solidarity with North Vietnam, to turn the NLF into an instrument of United States policy, forgets the ultimate fact of contemporary Vietnamese history—popular hostility to Western influence and rejection of any government which may cooperate with the United States. Unable to suffer military defeat, the role of either the NLF or North Vietnam with regard to the South Vietnamese would be totally reversed if either undertook cooperation with the United States, a policy incompatible with national popularity.

Fall’s major contributions have been analyses of the military and the social-political aspects of the quarter century of conflict that has centered around the Vietnamese people; many of these analyses, drawn from the New Republic, Nation, New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Viet-Report among others, have been collected to form Viet-Nam Witness. The major themes of Fall’s analyses are United States policy, the limits of military power in the Vietnam conflict, and the social foundations and political methods of the Vietnamese guerrillas. The theme of United States policy, real and ideal, is generally considered indirectly by Fall. Just as he projects for the future the achieving of continued “American control” in South-East Asia, and thereby in all Asia beyond China’s borders, by gaining NLF cooperation with the United States, so Fall projected a similar means for a similar objective in discussing the advantages to the West of the Geneva agreement of July, 1954. In March, 1954 Fall suggested that should a demarcation line be drawn between the Vietminh strongholds of Ho Chi-minh in northern Vietnam and the southern provinces, there would be a “great opportunity” for the application of American foreign aid—the vanguard of American political objectives since Fall speaks of “political successes almost entirely due to the intelligent dispensation of economic aid.” Ho’s government, according to Fall, would have had to depend upon the West, essentially the United States, given the economic weakness of the Soviet Union and China in 1954, if the Geneva conference could deprive Ho of the rice-surplus Mekong delta. “Therein lies the great opportunity for the West; massive economic aid might swing the balance.” Although United States policy was being implemented by different alternatives (as Fall intimated: “it is certainly not by sheer coincidence that General Donovan, wartime OSS chief, is now Ambassador to Thailand”), it is clear that Ho’s government could not have counted on its popular support had it cooperated in these United States designs. The same may be said for Fall’s alternative of United States aid and influence on Ho Chi-minh in 1946 to create a center of Western policy against the Soviet Union and China; and again, despite Fall’s ambivalence, post-war United States policy was evident from USA markings on the armed vehicles and bombers with which the French returned to Vietnam and from the agreement to sell the French one hundred and sixty million dollars of U. S. military equipment.

“The French, thanks to their U. S. -donated air force, had destroyed every visible target in the Communist-held areas for eight long years.” Repeatedly, with reference to the French war against the Vietnamese as well as the American war, Fall emphasizes that faith in the value of air power is an illusion. “The Indochina War had confirmed once more—the Korean conflict being, by and large, another example—the limited usefulness of air superiority in wars involving underdeveloped areas.” (Italics Fall’s.) Perhaps it may be useful to stress here again the overwhelming ineffectualness of combat airpower in that type of operation (jungle warfare).” (Fall, of course, is referring to the military ineffectiveness and not to the results of such bombing upon the civilian population.) The same limitations apply to the effectiveness of other heavy weapons and to advanced delivery vehicles. In the final article in Viet-Nam Witness, dated a year ago, Fall compares the airborne operations of the French and the Americans:

At least four offensives, with airborne and armoured “pincers,” and supplemented by navy landing craft, involved more than 20,000 troops. (The largest offensive thus far undertaken by U. S, forces in Viet-Nam involved a total of 12,000 troops.) Yet in every case the enemy refused to fight except on his own terms. The French armored pincers would close on a melee of frightened peasants . . . Americans have encountered similar frustration.

For those who are impressed by the firepower and transportation superiority of the United States forces in Viet-Nam, Fall warns: “the technological differences, for all their magnitude and importance, are thus far more superficial than is often realized.”

Fall’s final comparison between the French war which ended at Geneva in 1954 and the present United States War concerns the State Department-Pentagon claim that the French effort was defeated by the “collapse” of public support in France. Fall answers that it was the military defeat of the French forces (for which the United States paid 80% of the costs) which caused the French public to demand an end of the war in Vietnam.

It was not civilian morale at home that placed 16,000 troops at Dien Bien Phu and allowed them to be defeated there. Noisy students on U. S. college campuses cannot be held responsible because 96,000 South Vietnamese troops left their units at one time or another this year . . .

When the French war in Vietnam ended at Geneva in 1954 the United States was already a major participant, paying almost the entire cost of the war and already committing U. S. Air Force units to the effort. Bernard Fall has been the major source for information on the early United States involvement in domestic Vietnamese politics beginning with the end of the Second World War. Much of this was involvement in the hands of the OSS (of which the CIA is the successor). In The Two Viet-Nams (New York: Praeger, 1963) Fall notes that there was a belief in 1946 that the United States was preparing the former emperor Bao Dai, who remained as an adviser to President Ho Chi-minh, as an alternative to Ho; when Bao-Dai abandoned his office in Ho’s government for exile in Hong Kong in March, 1946 he left Hanoi on a United States military plane. A year later, after the French had decided to overthrow Ho’s elected government, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and had driven it from its capital, Hanoi, into the jungle, Bao-Dai was asked by Ho to act as mediator. Bao-Dai rejected this on the advice of “Dr. Phan Quang Dan, American-trained and an OSS operative during World War II.” (Dr. Dan, after two decades of involvement in Vietnamese politics and residence in the United States, was currently a vice-presidential candidate in the newest of many attempts to create a “constitutional” government as rival to the popularity of Ho Chi-minh and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.)

Later in 1947 Bao-Dai agreed to the French offer that he become the “constitutional” chief of state of an “independent” Vietnam regime supported by the French army and the American Treasury, following discussions in Hong Kong, with former Ambassador William C. Bullitt. Through United States foreign aid, especially the Marshall Plan, France was able to offset the costs of the war in Vietnam. The United States advanced formal recognition to the Saigon regime of Bao-Dai in February, 1950 to repay the French, who had joined the United States in January, 1950 in vetoing the U. N. membership of the People’s Republic of China. China responded within a month by recognizing Ho Chi-minh’s Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam. American economic and military aid for the Saigon regime was announced in May, 1950 and as it became dominant in the war so did the United States’ political influence. The most significant aspect of Fall’s account of the municipal and provincial elections of 1953, held under restricted suffrage in safe districts, is the role of the United States. In Hanoi, where the United States Information Service supported a Vietnamese newspaper, American sympathizers were elected over the official candidates. When the United States arranged the appointment of Diem as Premier of the Saigon regime in 1954, United States control became complete.

Fall’s Viet-Nam Witness analyzes the situation in Vietnam at the time that Diem came to power in 1954-55, during the Diem regime, and in the most recent period. The Geneva Agreement of 1954 provided for a temporary line to permit the evacuation of foreign (French) forces—“the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be considered as constituting a political or territorial boundary”—and for general elections to be held in July, 1956. At that time Fall felt that the Diem regime had several advantages for building itself into a successful rival for national leadership with Ho Chi-minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. South Vietnam, little damaged by war, and enriched by the refugees from the North and American aid, was the rice-surplus region. Furthermore, the Geneva Agreement gave Diem’s regime larger population and territory than the Saigon regime had controlled before the Agreement and gave it a better chance of governing by the completed withdrawal of Vietminh guerrillas to the north under the Agreement. “In other words,” Fall concluded, “with an even moderately intelligent policy, southern Viet-Nam should be able to turn the tables on the Viet-Minh and carry out the promises which the Viet-Minh has made during the past seven years, and will find difficult to fulfill in the now greatly impoverished and war-ragged North.” Fall was disappointed with the early policy of Diem, especially his failure to exercise the power of the central government in the localities, which merely continued the methods of the past administrations. Soon, Diem did make a complete break with the past by turning upon and destroying the political and military power of the armed Buddhist sects: Cao Dai, Hoa-Hao and Binh Xuyen. Southern Vietnam was little damaged by war because very early after the return of the French these three armed politico-religious sects of the Mekong region, which had been allied against the French with Ho’s Vietminh, entered into a benevolent neutrality with the French. The sects had turned against the Vietminh, whose leadership in southern Vietnam had attempted to fight both the French and the sects. The autonomous political and military power which the sects exercised in the regions inhabited by their adherents made them both “a solid barrier against Viet-Minh infiltration” and “an element of instability” in a Westernized, bureaucratic state. The destruction of the political and military power of the sects by Diem in the spring of 1955, however, merely transformed the struggle to the swamps, jungles, and rice fields of the Mekong Delta where the sects’ adherents lived. “The armed remnants of the sects are still able to carry on extensive harassing operations,” Fall said in July, 1955,” . . . but it is unlikely that they will ever regain even part of their erstwhile political strength.” Yet, the sects had “3,000 or more officers” whose political and military training formed a reservoir of leadership should full-scale popular opposition develop against the Saigon regime.

Previous to the Geneva Agreement Fall had written of the importance of the traditional autonomy of the Vietnamese peasants’ village; although under Ho Chi-minh’s leadership the old village notables were replaced by the “armed adolescents” who had joined the Vietminh,

the very fact that village autonomy was so deeply rooted made an ideal breeding ground for the type of local administration found in the early postrevolutionary years in the Soviet Union. Indeed, the decentralizing policy practiced by the revolutionary government presented great analogies with that applied by the Communist government of Soviet Russia.

Following upon the defeat of the sect armies the Diem regime struck at this village autonomy; according to Fall, “South Viet-Nam had been converted into a full-fledged dictatorship at the village level—where it is most keenly felt in that kind of society—as early as 1956, when Diem abolished elected village government.” Besides the maintenance of feudal taxes and the failure to introduce land reform, a series of presidential decrees threatened large numbers of people in the Vietnamese villages: January, 1956, indefinite detention in concentration camps; June, 1956, abolition of the elected village councils (both of these were preliminary to Diem’s refusal to hold reunification elections as provided by the Geneva Agreement); and March, 1957, reprisals against “former resistance members” (former Vietminh guerrillas) contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Agreement. Thus, “faced with physical extermination along with the sect units, some of the former Viet-Minn guerrillas simply banded together for survival.” In 1958 the U. S. Ambassador to Vietnam declared that “the Communists and sect remnants have regrouped” in the Mekong Delta. At that time Fall described the resurgence of guerrilla activity:

Guerrilla activities in South Viet-Nam during 1957 and 1958 no longer represent a last-ditch fight of dispersed sect or Communist rebel remnants. On the contrary, they have taken on a pattern of their own which is quite different from that followed by the Viet-Minh during the struggle against the French.

This unique pattern of operations and organization culminated in the formation of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam on December 20, 1960. With understandable pride Bernard Fall notes that he was the first person to establish “the fact of the resurgence of revolutionary war in South Viet-Nam in 1957.” With such credentials Fall is well-qualified to determine the real origins of the National Liberation Front. In 1965 he stated:

It is, therefore, highly immaterial to attempt to trace back Communist intentions at subverting South Viet-Nam to a particular meeting of the North Vietnamese Communist Party Central Committee in May, 1959, or to a particular resolution of the same party’s Third National Congress, held in Hanoi in September, 1960. Long before those dates the Second Indochina War had assumed its basic pattern . . .

On his return from a visit to Hanoi in 1962 Fall noted the absence of any popular support for the Saigon regime: “Without that support, American helicopters and modern weapons cannot do very much.” At the same time, on the basis of statements by administration spokesmen such as Walt W. Rostow, Fall concluded that “the present trend is to go so far as to say that popular support is not particularly relevant to the outcome of a guerrilla war.” This attitude explains the United States military’s carelessness about civilians in Vietnam, as well as the conscious implementation of a policy of genocide against the Vietnamese people. Fall’s expert conclusion that popular support is vital and that modern military power is inadequate does not reduce or eliminate the responsiblity of Americans for confronting the destruction of the Vietnamese people sanctioned in their name.

POSTSCRIPT:

FIRST THOUGHTS ON THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE DEATH OF BERNARD FALL

Like many who came to politcal consciousness during the second world war, Bernard Fall possessed a sixth sense about political issues. But. in the case of Fall this sense was enriched by his seizing upon an active political role—as a young guerrilla in the French Forces of the Interior. The French resistance produced a diverse group of post-war tendencies: careerists who entered government posts or the bureaucracy and parliamentary seats of the so-called Left in France, as well as some who maintained their principled independence. However, the latter phrased their opposition in terms of a politics of regret or disappointment—misunderstanding the resistance to be a totally independent movement. The premises of such politics have been that the government has good intentions and is free to change its direction once the truth is presented to it. This has meant a search for dialogue with the ‘Left’ in the Surete and Foreign Legion, or in the CIA, State Department and Marines—a dialogue with the officials who use revolutionary literature to give political meaning to their torturing, regroupment, napalming and extermination of the civilian population in the guerrilla conflicts with the Vietminh, the FLN in Algeria and the National Liberation Front of So. Vietnam.

The illusions of the resistance, especially the army as a revolutionary force, explain Fall’s close ties to the military—French and American. This tie brought him to the main world battle front—Vietnam—in 1953; and in the following year he wrote incisively about the significance of the Geneva Agreements. From that time he became the major, almost the sole, independent commentator in American periodicals about Vietnam. Yet, his view of such an independent role was not to question the assumptions which were the foundation of the policies he analyzed.

Bernard Fall visited the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on several occasions; an unusual event for a scholar in America. His work on the DRV is according to the highest standards of contemporary professional political science: it is mechanical and his least valuable contribution. In South Vietnam, despite his anti-Communist and original pro-Diemist bias, or because of it, he was the earliest to realize that there was a renewal of popular insurgency. It was more with horror than hope that he described the evidence of the widespread popular support for the NLF. His negative or ambivalent attitude toward the NLF reflected his lack of comprehension of them. Familiar with Hanoi and Saigon, he never visited the liberated zones of South Vietnam, his information on the NLF (as his information on the Vietminh) came from printed materials, not observation and contact with the NLF leadership or rank-and-file. Do the requirements of professional academic standards—travel grants from Nato, Seato or Asia Foundation, government-paid visiting professorships abroad, lectureships at the War College and the University strategy institutes—preclude visiting and reporting about the single most important element in the Vietnam situation—the popular insurgents?

Fall knew that the contemporary historian must confront contemporary events directly. But, he was drawn to confront contemporary events alongside the Foreign Legion and Marines, and not alongside the guerrillas. Although expressed in this manner, the crucial point is that Fall did have the courage to meet events directly, “to dare all, and then see.” As a military historian, Fall would appreicate the analogy to the slogan of the wars of the French Revolution that in a revolutionary period every soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack; the American public has awarded him a symbolic baton for the highest public service: independent criticism of government policy. Will his courageous confrontation with reality be an isolated event, or will scholars in America assume the tasks accepted by Fall and continue them in their logical direction whatever the consequences—“to dare all, and then see”?

A Frenchman’s

Viewpoint

Bernard B. Fall, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu (“Great Battles of History,” Hanson W. Baldwin, General Editor) (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1966). pp. 515 + xii $8.95.

By Marvin E. Gettleman*

What does Bernard Fall mean when he tells us that “Only General Vo Nguyen Giap, in Hanoi, is truly qualified” to narrate the siege of Dien Bien Phu? Is it that since history is written mainly by the victors, the Chief of Staff of the People’s Army of Vietnam is the appropriate chronicler of the 1954 victory of his forces in that fateful valley near the Laotian border? Does Fall imply that he himself will try to write the book that Giap never managed to do? He falls short of this aim, in this narrowly conceived, poorly written (yet exhaustively researched) study of the battle of Dien Bien Phu. (The account by Jules Roy, published in English in 1965, is far superior.)

No doubt it is this book we will turn to if we need to find out what French battalions and companies occupied just which of the strongpoints in the valley, or what sorts of girls were available for the French troops at the two mobile field bordellos at Dien Bien Phu. Fall has had access to documentation in Paris that no other scholar has used. Armed with this data, he demolishes such myths as the belief that Foreign Legion regiments were exclusively manned by Germans (though the “3/3” battalion was so composed). He also reveals hitherto unexplored facets of French strategy leading up to the battle. But while we are given ample explanation of the French defeat, we get little insight into what certainly was a Vietnamese victory. And that victory is what Giap would have written about, and indeed has written about in Dien Bien Phu (3d ed,, Hanoi, 1964), which Fall dismisses as an inconsequential pamphlet.

Fall’s approach to the military history of Vietnam in 1954 is narrowly confined to the French viewpoint. The “communists”, as troops of the People’s Army of Vietnam are consistently called, invariably lay down “murderous barrages,” attack “like hungry wolves,” and fire “ferocious” artillery shells. The trenches of General Giap’s forces are “communist trenches,” their bullets are “communist bullets,” roads under their control are “communist roads,” etc. The adjective “Vietnamese” is reserved for the locally recruited troops fighting more or less half-heartedly on the French side. Contemporary usage in 1954 was different, and possibly more accurate. The French had no special word for their Vietnamese allies, but the enemy was universally called the “Viets.” These Viet forces of General Giap called their countrymen who fought against them by the not unapt name, “puppets.” Fall’s departure from the terminology of 1954 brings no greater clarity to the events he narrates.

His pro-French bias is not only revealed in his choice of adjectives; it pervades the substance of his interpretations as well. When things go badly for the French garrison (almost every page!) the situations are described as “grim” and “tragic.” French troops are credited with heroic feats; the Viets, never. Their bravery is pictured as fanaticism. Whereas too often historical works slight the losing side, here we have a book in which the winners are shadowy and obscure, their victory ultimately unexplained. Instead, Fall waveringly offers us a series of pseudo-explanations of the final denouement in early May. First we are told that the basic mistake was to garrison the valley in the first place without providing sufficient reserve forces. Again, using purely military reasoning, Fall ascribes the French defeat to inadequate artillery, and to failures in combat engineering. Yet other, more profound analyses constantly threaten to show through the dense fog of Fall’s military prose. At one point he concedes that there was something more to the war than military or strategic considerations. In another place Fall deplores the fact that the local population into whose midst a French garrison was introduced in late 1953 had not been prepared beforehand by proper political indoctrination. But here’s the rub! Under what ideological guise could the French have masqueraded as anything but the reconquerers of their Indochinese empire?

It is ultimately his failure to come to grips with these political realities of the First Indochinese War that makes it difficult to apply Fall’s insights to the current struggle in Vietnam, the Second Indochinese War. He is full of useful suggestions on how the French might have won the battle—more efficient application of firepower, better methods of provisioning a garrison in every territory, and fuller use of aircraft. Fall candidly states that “. . . similar situations are likely to recur in other wars of this type.” The promoters of such wars will do well to study Fall’s book.

As for the rest of us, we may well ponder the words of a French paratroop commander at Dien Bien Phu, which Fall reports without comment. Col. Marcel Bigeard told Fall, ten years after the battle, “If you had given me 10,000 SS troops we’d have held out.” The implication is that it will be necessary in the Indochinese wars of the present and future to send Storm Troopers of some sort into the fields against the insurgents. But what kind of a society produces Storm Troopers? What kind of movement generates a force that only Storm Troopers can supress? Bernard Fall makes no attempt to answer these questions.

____________

* Marvin E. Gettleman is Assistant Professor of History at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He is the author of Vietnam: History. Documents and Opinions (New York: Fawcett, 1965), and co-author (with David Mermelstein) of The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism (New York: Random House, 1967).

LEFT AND RIGHT

A Journal Of Libertarian Thought

Editors: MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

LEONARD P. LIGGIO

H. GEORGE RESCH

CONTENTS

1968

Volume IV

EDITORIAL

Harry Elmer Barnes, RIP

NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS

HARRY ELMER BARNES,

Pearl Harbor After A Quarter Of A Century

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EDITORIAL

HARRY ELMER BARNES

RIP

On August 25, 1968, less than a week after completing the final draft of the article which constitutes this issue of LEFT AND RIGHT, Harry Elmer Barnes died at the age of 79.

All persons leave an irreplaceable gap when they die; but this gap is truly enormous in the case of Harry Barnes, for in so many ways he was the Last of the Romans. He was the last, for example, of that stratum of rural Protestant boys who shed their religion at college and went on to constitute almost the entire founding generation of American scholars and university teachers. More specifically, he was the last of the founders of the “New History”, that movement at the turn of the century which, headed by Barnes’ friends and mentors Charles A. Beard, Carl L. Becker, and James Harvey Robinson, virtually founded the profession of historian in America and placed its entire stamp on historiography until the advent of World War II. And Harry Barnes was the last of the truly erudite historians. In a field of accelerating narrowness and specialization where the expert on France in the 1830’s is likely to know next to nothing about what happened to France in the 1840’s, Harry Barnes ranged over the entire field of historical study and vision. He was the Compleat Historian; and it was the historical approach that informed his work in all the other social science disciplines in which he was so remarkably productive: sociology, criminology, religion, economics, current affairs, and social thought. Surely his scholarly output was and will continue to remain unparallelled, as even a glance at a bibliography of his writings will show.

The quantity and scope of his productive output would alone stamp Harry Elmer Barnes as a memorable scholar, but this alone barely begins to scratch the surface of how remarkable a man he was. For he was that rarity among scholars, a passionately committed man. It was not enough for Harry to discover and set forth the truth; he must also work actively and whole-heartedly in the world on behalf of that truth. His was the opposite attitude from the detached irony of his friend Carl Becker. He believed, properly but increasingly alone, that it was the ultimate function of the vast and growing scholarly apparatus to bring about a better life for mankind; that the ultimate function of the scholarly disciplines is to aid in carving out an ethics for mankind and then to help put such ethics into practice. As devoted as he was to the discipline of history throughout his lifetime, he was just as devoted to putting its lessons to the service of man. Not for Barnes was the antiquarian “scholarship for scholarship’s sake”; for him the guiding star was scholarship for the sake of man. Hence the appropriateness of Carl Becker’s affectionate label for Barnes: “The Learned Crusader”.

It was Harry’s passionate commitment to truth that lost for him the applause of scholars and multituee alike and cast him, for the last two decades of his life, into outer darkness. During the 1930’s, Harry Banres was acclaimed, by scholars and laymen, as one of the foremost intellectual leaders of his time. His books were reviewed, invariably favorably, on the coveted Page One of the New York Sunday Times Book Review. His column in the Scripps-Howard papers was read attentively by millions. But, in terms of continuing wordly eminence, Harry made one fatal mistake: he insisted, for ever and always, on being true to his convictions and to his principles, let the chips fall where they may. Hence, when liberal opinion, shortly before America’s entry into World War II, began to flip-flop en masse from its previous devotion to neutrality and non-intervention, and beat the drums for war, Harry Barnes, like his fellow liberals John T. Flynn and Charles A. Beard, stood steadfast. He refused to be stampeded by the interventionist war hysteria and he refused to keep his mouth shut over an issue so vital for mankind. He refused, like so many of his friends who knew better and had less to lose, to take the safer and more opportune course. He stood foursquare against the drive to war, and for his pains was summarily removed from his post as columnist by Roy Howard, who again knew better but felt that he had to bow to the intense pressure of interventionist advertisers against Harry Barnes. Like Beard and Flynn, Barnes found himself hounded by former friends and colleagues and denounced as a “Nazi” merely for cleaving to the liberal and pro-peace principles which all alike had shared a few short months before.

As America emerged from World War II as the world’s mightiest militarist and imperialist power, and prepared to launch the Cold War to maintain and expand that Empire, the Liberal Establishment, now vital in operating and apologizing for the Empire, would have been prepared to forgive and forget, as they did for many others. All Harry would have had to do was to keep quiet, to at least silently accept the New Order and the New America, and, above all, to refrain from taking the lead, as he had done after World War I, in revising the myths about the war and in calling the crimes of his own and allied governments to account at the bar of history and justice. Other historians, still “isolationist” about World War II, were willing to shut up and remain unpunished by the Establishment; but not Harry Elmer Barnes. Harry was a learned crusader; other men might grow more conservative and timid and accommodating to the powers-that-be as they grew older and more settled; but never Harry Elmer Barnes. That was to be his great burden during the remaining years of his life; but that was also to be his undying glory.

For two decades after World War II Liberal scholars and intellectuals led the way in the great “consensus” celebration of what America had become. But Harry Barnes could not participate in this jejune celebration. He reviled the militarism, the witch-hunts, the imperialism, the military-industrial economy, the “totalitarian liberalism” as he called it, that now characterized America, as well as the detached and Mandarin nature of the social science disciplines. He attacked all of these new trends, but he saw also that their roots lay in America’s entry into World War II, and that therefore a new general insight into the truths behind that war was vital if America were ever to throw off the shackles of its New Order.

And so Harry Barnes devoted much of the remainder of his life to creating a whole body of revisionist scholarship about the origins of World War II. As the Field Marshal of Revisionism after the first World War, Barnes had been in the company of the bulk of younger historians as well as the whole intellectual world. But now he was virtually alone, scorned by historians and laymen alike. But not for a moment did Harry allow himself to become discouraged or defeated. Single-handed, he virtually created a new revisionism. For every book and article revising the official myths about America and the Second World War, Harry Barnes was there in the forefront, discovering, inspiring, cajoling, admonishing, editing, promoting. He was the father and the catalyst for all of World War II Revisionism, as well as personally writing numerous articles, editing and writing for the Revisionist symposium Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, and launching the whole struggle immediately after the war with the first of numerous editions of his hard-hitting, privately-printed brochure, The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout. Fortunately, Harry lived long enough to see the tide begin inexorably to turn among the historical profession, to see a New Left emerge that is beginning to call into question not only America’s current imperial wars but also World War II itself: especially in the work of William Appleman Williams and his students in modern American history. To his friends and colleagues the fact that Harry lived to see the emergence of his own vindication after so many years is the only slight consolation for suffering his loss.

Friendship: this brings us to Harry’s remarkable qualities as a teacher and as a friend. That Harry Barnes was one of the great teachers of his era is attested to by innumerable students, a large number loyal to the end despite fundamental disagreements on policies and points of view. His personal charm, his great generosity toward friends and students, as well as his own prodigious work and erudition, were able to inspire great loyalty and devotion among his students, and spur their own productive efforts. As a friend, Harry put all of us to shame with the quantity and quality of his letters; surely here was one of the most remarkable letter-writers of our time. Never could any of us write more than one letter for every three or four of Harry’s; and in them he would pour forth a seemingly endless stream of learned and candid comment, analysis, news, criticism, and generous praise. For Harry, friendship was never casual or superficial; it was devoted and deeply felt, and to it he gave as much concern and passion as he poured into his work as an historian or as a crusader. Inevitably, then, these friendships were often stormy; and I don’t believe there was any friend with whom Harry did not, at one time or other, break or almost break relations. But those who knew Harry only by reputation or in his uncompromising writings can never come to understand or savor Harry in person, as he unfailingly was: cheery, courteous, a witty and often ribald raconteur, a marvelous and lovable companion. We shall miss him terribly.

Fortunately, Harry’s friends and colleagues have, for several years, been at work on a Festschrift, which has grown into a monumental testimonial volume describing and celebrating every aspect of Harry Barnes’ life and work. Forthcoming soon, it will be entitled Harry Elmer Barnes: The Learned Crusader, and it is the sorrow of all of us that Harry, while having read all of the manuscript, did not have the opportunity to see it in print. The book deserves the widest possible audience.

In the meanwhile, LEFT AND RIGHT is privileged to present what tragically turned out to be Harry Barnes’ last work, a work which he believed to be the final word on the task which had occupied him for the last quarter of a century: the true story of Pearl Harbor. Characteristically, Harry spent literally years adding to, revising, and checking the entire article, so that it would pass the highest and most rigorous standards. His friend, the Pearl Harbor expert Commander Charles C. Hiles, helped immeasurably in repeated reading and checking over the material. We have been delighted and honored that Harry chose the pages of LEFT AND RIGHT to present what he proposed to be his final word on the subject, the culminating synthesis of a quarter century of revisionist inquiry.

Some readers might ask: why? What’s the point? Isn’t this just a raking up of old coals? Aren’t we merely pursuing an antiquarian interest when we examine in such detail what happened over a quarter-century ago? The answer is that this subject, far from being antiquarian, is crucial to the understanding of where we are now and how we got that way. For America’s entry into World War II was the crucial act in expanding the United States from a republic into an Empire, and in spreading that Empire throughout the world, replacing the sagging British Empire in the process. Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription. It was the crucial act in creating a Mixed Economy run by Big Government, a system of State-Monopoly-Capitalism run by the central government in collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism. It was the crucial act in elevating Presidential power, particularly in foreign affairs, to the role of single most despotic person in the history of the world. And, finally, World War II is the last war-myth left, the myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a good war, here was a war in which America was in the right. World War II is the war thrown into our faces by the war-making Establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II. It is because of its enthusiasm for World War II and its leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, that the Old Left has never been able to understand the straight and true line that leads from the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt which they adore, to the Great Society and Lyndon Johnson which they despise. Lyndon B. Johnson is absolutely correct when he refers to FDR as his “Big Daddy”. The paternity is clear.

It is this much-needed stripping away of the last remaining good-war and good-war-President myth that Harry Elmer Barnes accomplishes in his final article. It is a fitting note for Harry to leave us, for it is in a cause for which Harry fought and suffered all of his life: the cause of peace and justice and historical truth.

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

A NOTE TO

OUR SUBSCRIBERS

LEFT AND RIGHT is proud to present this special Harry Barnes-Pearl Harbor issue as our giant 1968 issue. Somewhat more than double the length of one of our normal issues, we are charging $1.25, or much less than three-fold our usual price per copy. But our subscribers should be assured that, while this issue will constitute our entire 1968 volume, it will only count as two issues on each person’s subscription. Those who have subscribed for 1968, for example, will receive one more issue, in 1969, on their subscriptions.

PEARL HARBOR

after a

Quarter of a Century

by HARRY ELMER BARNES

I. THE LESSONS OF PEARL HARBOR MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER BEFORE

The surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, is regarded by most persons who recall it at all as an isolated dramatic episode, now consigned to political and military archeology. Quite to the contrary, on account of our entry into the war, it became one of the most decisive battles in the history of the human race. It has already proved far more so than any of the “fifteen decisive battles” immortalized by Sir Edward Creasy.

The complex and cumulative aftermath of Pearl Harbor has played the dominant role in producing the menacing military pattern and political impasse of our time, and the military-industrial-political Establishment that controls this country and has sought to determine world policy. It created the four most likely focal points for the outbreak of a thermonuclear war which may lead to the extermination of the human race—Berlin, Formosa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East—unless future sudden flare-ups like that in Cuba in 1962 may turn the lethal trick. Hence, while Creasy’s battles may have decided the fate of important political entities and alignments in the past, Pearl Harbor may well have deeply affected the fate of mankind. American entry into the war produced atomic and nuclear warfare as well as Russian domination of Central Europe and the triumph of Communist China in Asia.

Moreover, a detailed study of how Pearl Harbor came about provides ominous lessons as to the uncertainties of human judgment and the eccentricities in personal conduct that control the outbreak of wars, an ever more crucial consideration in determining the destinies of the human race as we move on in the nuclear era. The damage done to our Pacific Fleet, although its significance was exaggerated at the time, was impressive and devastating. But it was a trivial matter compared to the fact that the Japanese attack put the United States actively into the second World War. The personal and political ambitions, professional stereotypes, public deceit and mendacity (the credibility gap), ruts and grooves of thinking and action, and the martial passions that brought on Pearl Harbor would, if repeated in such a crisis as that raised by the Cuban incident of 1962, or a future one in Berlin, Formosa, Vietnam, or the Middle East might very well destroy civilization.

As the military episode that brought the United States into the second World War, the results of Pearl Harbor already indicate that this produced drastic and possibly ominous changes in the pattern of American relations to the rest of the world. We voluntarily and arbitrarily assumed unprecedented burdens in feeding and financing a world badly disrupted by war. The international policy of George Washington and the “fathers” of the United States, based on non-intervention but not embracing isolation, was terminated for any predictable period.

President Truman continued the doctrine of the interventionist liberals of the latter part of the 1930’s, to the effect that the United States must be prepared to do battle with foreign countries whose basic ideology does not conform with that of the United States. He further elected to create and perpetuate a cold war until actual hot warfare breaks out, as it did in Korea in 1950 and in southeast Asia a decade later. The United States sought to police the world and extend the rule of law on a planetary basis, which actually meant imposing the ideology of our eastern seaboard Establishment throughout the world, by force, if necessary, as in Vietnam. By the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the United States was being informed by both official policy and influential editorials that we must get adjusted to the fact that we face permanent war, an especially alarming outlook in a nuclear era in which the two major powers are already amply prepared to “overkill” their enemies. “Perpetual war for perpetual peace” has become the American formula in relation to world affairs.

Drastic changes in the domestic realm can also be attributed to the impact of our entry into the second World War. The old rural society that had dominated humanity for millennia was already disintegrating rapidly as the result of urbanization and technological advances, but the latter failed to supply adequate new institutions and agencies to control and direct an urban civilization. This situation faced the American public before 1941 but the momentous transformation was given intensified rapidity and scope as a result of the extensive dislocations produced by years of warfare and recovery. These gave rise to increasing economic problems, temporarily fended off by a military-industrial-political complex that provided no permanent solution. The social problems of an urban age were enlarged and intensified, crime increased and took on new forms that became ever more difficult to combat, juvenile disorganization became rampant, racial problems increased beyond precedent, and the difficulties of dealing with this unprecedented and complicated mass of domestic issues were both parried and intensified by giving primary but evasive consideration to foreign affairs in our national policy and operations. Hence, a discussion of the lessons of Pearl Harbor for today reveals a situation which is more than a matter of idle curiosity for military antiquarians.

Moreover, as will be pointed out during our treatment of the Pearl Harbor problem, we had by 1941 entered into a system of diplomatic secrecy and international intrigue and deception which had already committed this country to world war several days before the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, and without the slightest knowledge of this on the part of the American public. The implications of such a contingency in a nuclear age are as obvious as they are astounding and ominous.

Despite the crucial importance of the Pearl Harbor story for American citizens, it is certainly true that, although the twenty-seventh anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack has now arrived, only a small fraction of the American people are any better acquainted with the realities of the responsibility for the attack than they were when President Roosevelt delivered his “Day of Infamy” oration on December 8, 1941. The legends and rhetoric of that day still dominate the American mind.

Interestingly enough, the American people narrowly missed having an opportunity to learn the essential truths about Pearl Harbor in a sensational and fully publicized manner less than three years after the event. As a result of research by his staff, and possibly some “leaks” from Intelligence officers of 1941, Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate for the presidency, had learned during the campaign of 1944 that President Roosevelt had been reading the intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages in the Purple and other codes and was aware of the threat of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at any time after November 26, 1941, but had failed to warn the commanders there, General Walter C. Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, in time to avert the attack or to meet it effectively. Dewey considered presenting these vital facts in a major campaign speech.

Roosevelt learned of this through the Democratic grapevine planted at Republican headquarters and, in understandable alarm, pressured Mr. Dewey through General George C. Marshall to abandon his plan, on the ground that it would endanger the war effort by revealing that we had broken Japanese codes. Marshall twice sent Colonel Carter W. Clarke to urge Dewey not to refer to Pearl Harbor during the campaign. To cover up for Roosevelt, Marshall has contended that he operated on his own initiative in sending Clarke to importune Dewey. As Clarke knew by this time, the basis of his plea was spurious, namely, that such a speech by Dewey would first reveal to the Japanese that we had broken their Purple diplomatic code. Actually, the Japanese had learned of this from the Germans by the end of April, 1941, over three years before the 1944 campaign. Dewey did not know this at the time and, as a supposedly patriotic duty, he suppressed the speech and the publicity which might have won the election for him.

In a column written for the King Features Syndicate and widely published on the eve of the 1964 election, the famed journalist, John Chamberlain, described Dewey’s lugubrious retrospective observations on his deception by Roosevelt and Marshall in 1944:

Nixon’s 1960 agony recalls that of Thomas Dewey in 1944, when the Republicans knew practically all the details about the surprise at Pearl Harbor yet were loath to put the issue into the campaign lest they reveal to the Japanese that the United States had broken a critical code.

This columnist vividly recalls riding in a car from Elmira to Geneva, New York, in August of 1945 with Dewey and listening to his rueful account of the decision to say nothing about Pearl Harbor, The worst of it, from Dewey’s standpoint, is that he had a suspicion that the Japanese had changed their codes long before 1944, which would have made campaign revelations about Pearl Harbor harmless to the U. S. from a military standpoint.

When I talked to Tom Dewey in 1945, he thought he might have been cheated out of a winning issue in 1944.

Chamberlain made similar revelations in an article in Life while the Congressional Pearl Harbor investigation was still in progress, yet Mr. Dewey was never called to testify. John T. Flynn gave me much more detail about Pearl Harbor and the Dewey campaign by personal correspondence and conversation in the autumn and early winter of 1944. Flynn had been active at Republican headquarters during the campaign.

My suggestion to Mr. Dewey in 1966 that he publicize the facts of the 1944 situation in connection with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor proved fruitless. This is entirely understandable. In 1966, Mr. Dewey was not a candidate for the presidency. He was the responsible head of a great legal firm, and publicity so damaging to Roosevelt’s public reputation might have alienated important clients not only among Democrats but also Republicans who were interventionist-minded relative to World War II. It might, however, also have done more to give the American public some idea of the realities of Pearl Harbor than the combined writings of revisionist historians in a whole generation since 1944.

An intriguing and not fully resolved point stems from the fact that the Japanese learned from the Germans at the end of April, 1941, that the United States had broken their Purple code in which they sent top secret diplomatic messages. Why, then, did they continue to use the code? Some authorities believe that, despite the reliability of their informants, the top level Japanese officials could not bring themselves to believe that their code had actually been cracked, and that this vanity was abetted by the officials who had been responsible and wished to cover up the leak. Other authorities assert that the Japanese went ahead with the Purple code because they did not care if we did read it, since reading it would make it all the more clear to the American officials that Japanese peace efforts were sincere and that the Japanese would go to war if the peace negotiations should fail. This explanation, which I find more convincing, is also confirmed by Tojo’s repeated deadlines set for the end of negotiations during November, 1941.

During the nearly quarter of a century since 1944, and despite a series of official investigations, the defenders of Roosevelt among historians, journalists and politicians have been able to keep the vital information about the responsibility for war with Japan and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor from the American people. In this article the attempt will be made to set forth as much of this withheld information as can be put down within the space available.

II. ROOSEVELT’S POLICIES PRIOR TO PEARL HARBOR

Since this article is to be devoted mainly to explaining why and how Pearl Harbor was surprised on December 7, 1941, we can provide only a very brief summary of Roosevelt’s basic foreign policies and diplomatic actions which bear directly upon this problem.

He was chiefly concerned with the planning and operation of his New Deal domestic policy down to 1937, even to 1939, but he did not forget armament and possible war, even diverting NRA funds to finance naval expansion, chiefly directed against Japan. In early January, 1933, even before he had been inaugurated, and against the urgings of Raymond Moley and Rexford G. Tugwell, he had accepted as the basis of his policy toward Japan the bellicose attitude of Henry L. Stimson which would have led the United States into war with Japan in 1932 or 1933 had Stimson not been checked by President Hoover’s firm stand for peace, a situation explained to me in detail by former President Hoover.

Whenever his domestic policy struck reverses and hard sledding Roosevelt turned to foreign policy with aggressive implications. The first such trend appeared following the rebuff to his main political measures in Congress in 1937, as well as the sharp economic recession that began in the summer of 1937. It produced the inciting quarantine doctrine of his Chicago Bridge Speech of October 5, 1937. With the outbreak of war in Europe in September, 1939, his aggressive foreign policy continued unceasingly until the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt’s attempt to purge a no longer docile Congress in the election of 1938 proved an ignominious failure, and the New Deal appeared to be in a permanent slump. It obviously had not solved the depression. Nor had the increasing expenditures for armament succeeded in providing full prosperity.

When war broke out in Europe in early September, 1939, this gave Roosevelt an ominous impulse and continuous inspiration. The war had hardly begun when, on September 11th, Roosevelt wrote Churchill, then only First Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting that they work together through a secret system of communication: “What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. You can always send sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.” Churchill is said to have responded enthusiastically, including the statement: “I am half American and the natural person to work with you. It is evident that we see eye to eye. Were I to become Prime Minister of Britain we could control the world.” A method of secret communication was agreed upon in which Roosevelt would sign himself “Potus” (President of the United States), and Churchill would sign as “Former Naval Person”. About 2000 messages were exchanged in this way prior to Pearl Harbor, and Churchill is our authority for the statement that the really important negotiations and agreements between Britain and the United States from 1939 to Pearl Harbor were handled in this way, all quite unknown to the American public.

It has since become obvious that while Roosevelt was assuring this country of his peaceful aims he was also actually doing all possible in cooperation with Churchill to get us into war as soon as practicable. In addition to other sources, I have this information personally from Tyler Kent, the code clerk in the American embassy in London, who read all of this material from September, 1939, to the time of his arrest in May, 1941. Two telegrams that have been recovered from this secret correspondence, indicate the tenor and objectives of their collaboration. Roosevelt told Churchill that the United States was firmly isolationist and could not be induced to enter the war in behalf of Poland. Churchill responded: “Every chain has its weakest spot and the weak link in the Axis chain is Japan. Goad Japan into attacking the U. S. and you will have the U. S. in the war.” While this proved to be the strategy followed by Roosevelt, it is unlikely that the policy originated with Churchill.

As Professor William L. Neumann has made clear in his America Encounters Japan (pp. 235-230) this plan to enter a war with Japan, even to provoke Japan to war, was opposed by the overwhelming mass of the American people in the late 1930’s. Even the annual conventions of the American Legion in 1937 and 1938 demanded “absolute neutrality”. The Veterans of Foreign Wars started a campaign to secure 25 million signatures for a petition to “Keep America out of War”. Even the Ludlow Resolution requiring a national referendum on the declaration of war only failed of passage because of the tremendous pressure exerted by Roosevelt through influential public figures.

Despite the strong American isolationist sentiment, Roosevelt never really gave up hope of getting the United States into the war after October, 1937, first and directly in Europe until at least the end of July, 1941. During the spring and summer of 1941 he did everything possible to provoke Germany and Italy to produce some “act of war” in Europe or on the Atlantic that he could use to get the United States into the European conflict, especially through our illegal convoying of munitions and supplies to Britain and Russia, but neither Germany nor Italy would rise to the bait. He had not, however, neglected the possibility of war with Japan. The extensive and quasi-secret increases in the American navy after 1933 obviously pointed the finger at Japan. As far back as the winter of 1937-1938 he had sent Captain Royal E. Ingersoll to Europe to discuss with the English the possibilities of collaboration in the event of war with Japan.

In January, 1941, Roosevelt and Hull rejected the amazingly generous Japanese effort to settle Japanese-American relations by peaceful methods presented by a commission with full Japanese authorization. The rebuff of this really sensational overture from Japan seriously undermined the hope of the latter in arriving at a peaceful settlement with the United States, but the effort was continued for over ten months. Japan offered to retire from the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in return for a guaranty of peace with the United States.

Although Roosevelt had campaigned in 1940 on the basis of promising to keep the United States out of war, he quickly reversed his position. In January, 1941, he sent Harry Hopkins to London to confer with Churchill. Hopkins informed the latter that:

The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it.

He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him—there is nothing that we will not do so far as he has human power.

Arrangements were also quickly made for joint-staff conferences with the British to arrange a plan for military collaboration: ABC-1. These were held in Washington from January through March, 1941. In April, another conference was held in Singapore, and this time the Dutch were included to provide for a triangular arrangement: ADB. Combined, they came to be known as the ABCD agreement. The Singapore ADB provided that, if the Japanese moved southward beyond an arbitrary line—100’ East and 10’ North—or even threatened to attack British or Dutch possessions in the Southwest Pacific, the United States would join them in war against the Japanese even though the Japanese did not attack American possessions, forces or flag.

On the basis of this ABCD agreement, the American military services drew up a general war plan known as Rainbow 5, also usually called WPL 46 when used to describe the Navy basic war plan. WPPac46, the U. S. Pacific fleet coordinating plan, governed Admiral Kimmel’s operations. These were promulgated in April, 1941, and orally approved by Roosevelt in May and June. Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, informed his leading commanders that it was no longer a question of whether the United States would be involved in war but only one of when and where. This ABCD agreement and the resulting war plans greatly extended the range of possible provocations to war and provided the first important impulse that led some American military leaders, especially after July, 1941, to consider the likelihood that war might break out in the southwest Pacific rather than by an attack on Pearl Harbor. It thus fatally blurred the basic assumption in our Pacific naval strategy which had long been based on the probability that the Japanese would first attack the Pacific fleet to protect their flank before making extensive military movements in the Far East.

The ABCD agreement also exposed Roosevelt to the possibility of serious political embarrassment. He had frequently promised that we would not enter any war unless attacked, but the ABCD agreement and the associated war plans were based on the pledge to make war if the situation so demanded without an attack on the United States.

At first, this did not worry Roosevelt too much, for he fully expected that Hitler would provide provocative action on the Atlantic in response to illegal American procedure in convoying war materials to Britain and later to Russia. When this did not eventuate and it appeared that Japan would be the actual opponent, it became essential for Roosevelt to do all possible to assure that Japan would provide the indispensable attack that was needed to unite the American people behind him in war. To bring this about it appeared necessary to prevent the Hawaiian commanders from taking any defensive action which would deter the Japanese from attacking Pearl Harbor which, of necessity, had to be a surprise attack.

From March to November, 1941, Roosevelt encouraged Secretary of State Hull to stall the obviously ardent desire of the Japanese, based on self-interest, to arrive at a reasonable and peaceful settlement of Japanese-American relations. By the latter part of July, Roosevelt had about given up hope of getting an act of war from Germany or Italy, and decided to increase pressure on Japan which would make war virtually certain. On July 25th-26th he froze all Japanese assets in the United States and soon placed an embargo on trade with Japan, in which the British and Dutch followed suit, thus facing Japan with economic strangulation unless she could get supplies from the southwest Pacific area, presumably by force.

Washington authorities, especially Admirals Stark and Richmond Kelley Turner, chief of Naval War Plans, recognized that this would force Japan to move rapidly into this forbidden region to secure vital materials which had been placed under an embargo by the ABCD countries. General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, and Stark sent notices to American commanders in leading outposts that they should take this situation and outlook into serious consideration.

This was a second factor which led many of the top military brass in Washington to shift some of their attention from the traditional Pacific strategy based on a probable Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, even in the face of the Bomb Plot intercepts after September, 1941, which clearly pointed to Pearl Harbor as the first Japanese target. War might start in the Far East. It also helps to account for the fact that the lower or operating units in Army Intelligence and the Signal Corps and in Navy Intelligence and Communications at Washington, who were less fully informed on the partly secret top strategic commitments of ABCD and Rainbow 5 and were devoted to studying the current facts, remained insistent that due attention should be given to the threat to Pearl Harbor and that the Hawaiian commanders should be fully warned of the Japanese menace.

On August 9-12, 1941, Roosevelt met with Churchill at Argentia, off the coast of Newfoundland, and arranged the details of entering the second World War through the backdoor of a war with Japan. Churchill wished immediate war but Roosevelt insisted on having at least three months to “baby” the Japanese along so as to have more time to get ready for war, to allow Russia to take more heat off Britain, and to extend the possibility that Germany or Italy would still provide an act of war on the Atlantic, now that Russia was at war with Germany. These aggressive moves were disguised to the American public by issuing a high-sounding but morally deceptive Atlantic Charter, actually only a press release, the terms of which had been violated before the ink was dry on the document; indeed, by actions before the meeting at Argentia.

The official adoption of the “back door” policy and strategy at Argentia produced a powerful impulse to the top military brass to shift their primary concern to Japan and the Far East. Stark had previously been assuring Kimmel that Germany was our main enemy and that Roosevelt did not wish to get into a two-front war, involving both Germany and Japan. It was now apparent that, if necessary, Roosevelt intended to provoke Japan in the Far East and that the United States would enter the war in this manner.

Immediately on his return from Newfoundland, Roosevelt, with the approval of Churchill, called in the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, and administered to him an unprovoked and gratuitous tongue-lashing that even Stimson regarded as an ultimatum. This was done to undermine the Japanese peace party that was still in office, and to strengthen the war party. This aim was fully accomplished when Roosevelt and Hull unceremoniously brushed off the impressive effort of Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye of Japan to reach a final peaceful adjustment with the United States, including meeting Roosevelt at any reasonable designated spot and accepting in advance the “four principles” that Hull had announced in April, 1941, as the required basis of a peaceful settlement of Far Eastern problems with Japan.

Konoye was replaced as premier by General Hideki Tojo on October 16, 1941. Even the Tojo government offered terms of settlement in November which protected all legitimate American interests in the Far East, but Roosevelt and Hull rejected these, threw over the temporary modus vivendi that General Marshall and Admiral Stark wished in order to complete adequate plans for a Pacific war, and sent to Japan on November 26 an ultimatum which Hull frankly announced took our relations with Japan out of the realm of diplomacy and placed them in the hands of the military: Roosevelt and Secretaries Stimson and Knox. It was recognized by the Washington authorities, who were reading the Japanese diplomatic messages in the Purple code, that this would mean war when the Japanese replied to Hull. Steps were taken to insure that the Hawaiian commanders, General Walter C. Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, would not be forewarned of any impending Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor.

Since we shall be mentioning the problem of warning Short and Kimmel, it may be well here to clear up some elementary details. The overall protection of the Hawaiian District, including Pearl Harbor, was entrusted to General Short as commander-in-chief of the Hawaiian District. Cooperating with him was Admiral Claude C. Bloch, commander of the Fourteenth Naval District. His function was to protect the Pearl Harbor naval base. The Naval Communications Intelligence staff, headed by Commander Joseph J. Rochefort, was nominally under the control of Admiral Bloch. Admiral Kimmel was commander-in-chief of the Pacific fleet and the supreme naval authority at Pearl Harbor. His duties were primarily strategic and related to preparing naval hardware and personnel for controlling the mid-Pacific and, if necessary, moving the fleet both to protect Pearl Harbor and to wage war in accordance with orders from Washington based on WPL 46. Important communications from General Marshall, such as warnings of an attack, were sent directly to General Short. Similarly, such warnings from Admiral Stark were sent directly to Admiral Kimmel, who had his own Fleet Intelligence service. Communications from Washington relative to the protection of the Hawaiian naval base at Pearl Harbor were normally sent to Admiral Bloch.

It has been maintained by some critics that Roosevelt was one of the most determined war-mongers of all history. This is a needless overstatement. It is nearer to the truth to state that in his foreign policy Roosevelt was one of the more notable opportunists in the historical record. Churchill may have been an opportunist on domestic policies, but he was consistent in being a partisan of the war.

As Assistant Secretary of Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt was an ardent interventionist in regard to the first World War, and later was a strong supporter of the League of Nations. In 1932, he repudiated the League to get the support of Hearst, which was indispensable if he were to win the Democratic nomination. In his campaign of 1936, he described our folly in entering the first World War and questioned Wilson’s wisdom in leading us into it. After the 1936 election, when at Buenos Aires, he condemned nations that maintained prosperity through an armament economy, but by early 1939 he had adopted precisely this program to bolster the New Deal and assure himself a third term.

From this time until Pearl Harbor Roosevelt followed a combined policy of announcing peaceful intentions while planning for war. He informed the American public that he was determined to keep the peace. He told Churchill that he would bring the United States into the war as soon as possible without going so rapidly as to upset their whole plan. His diplomacy all during 1941 was provocative of war, involving this country both in Europe and the Far East, while he was assuring the American public that everything he did was “short of war” and designed to keep us out of war. This brief review provides the essential background against which we must view the developments leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

III. WASHINGTON SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SURPRISED WHEN THE JAPANESE ATTACKED PEARL HARBOR

1. The Probable Place of a Japanese Attack the Event of War with the United States

No item in the revisionist presentation of the causes and merits of the second World War is better established than the fact that no top military or civilian authority in Washington on December 7, 1941, should have been surprised at either the place or time of the Japanese attack on the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. The only element of surprise, if any, should have been over the damage that the Japanese planes delivered to the fleet.

After the Japanese had abandoned dependence on their Red diplomatic code, which American cryptanalysts had earlier broken, American experts in the Army Signal Corps, directed by Colonel William F. Friedman, had broken the top Japanese Purple diplomatic code by mid-August, 1940, and for a year and a half before Pearl Harbor Washington had been intercepting and reading the secret Japanese diplomatic messages to their officials all over the world. Less difficult diplomatic codes, such as J-19 and PA-K2, were also easily read. Among other things, this breakthrough had enabled the Washington authorities to know that the Japanese peace offers were sincere and not mere window dressing for sinister later designs of an aggressive nature. The Japanese messages also revealed equally clearly that if even extreme Japanese efforts to reach a peaceful settlement with the United States failed, the Japanese would go to war for self-preservation and self-respect. We may first consider the extensive evidence that, if Japan did attack the United States, it would be where the American fleet was then located, namely, at Pearl Harbor.

For years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, naval maneuvers had been held off the island of Oahu in Hawaii to test the feasibility of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The results were far from reassuring to the United States, and were equally a definite warning of the danger and practicability of a Japanese task force attack there. As early as 1932, Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, one of our earliest air-minded naval officers, made the first carrier-based task force test and he was able to execute a surprise attack when operating only sixty miles off Pearl Harbor. These maneuvers were continued, and in 1938 a successful air attack was launched from the carrier Saratoga one hundred miles off Pearl Harbor. The Japanese task force in December, 1941, operated from over 200 miles away. In April, 1941, General Frederick L. Martin and Admiral Patrick N. L. Bellinger, commanders of the Army and Navy air forces respectively at Pearl Harbor, described in detail the nature of a possible Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor which was uncannily identical with Yamamoto’s plan for the actual Japanese attack a few months later. This was forwarded to the Army and Navy headquarters in Washington but no positive response or protective operation took place.

Long before Admiral Kimmel assumed command at Pearl Harbor in January, 1941, it had become basic in Pacific naval strategy to accept the fact that if the Japanese ever started a war with the United States they would first strike our Pacific fleet, especially if based at Pearl Harbor, to protect their flank before they could safely move large naval forces south or north from Japan. This had been constantly emphasized to Washington from the time of the assertions of General Hugh Drum in 1935 and of General George V. Strong in 1940, to the observations in 1941 of Commander Arthur N. McCollum, head of the Far Eastern Section of Naval Intelligence, the man who had probably the best informed conceptions of the naval and diplomatic situation in the Far East, with the possible exception of Colonel Otis K. Sadtler of the Army Signal Corps and Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, Chief of the Far Eastern Section of Military Intelligence.

Viewed most generally, then, it had long been assumed that the Japanese would not go to war with the United States without first protecting their flank by trying to destroy the American Pacific fleet, wherever it was stationed. It was also clear that the American fleet would be both more inciting and more vulnerable to a Japanese attack if stationed at Pearl Harbor, as compared to its relative safety before the spring of 1940, when it had been based on the Pacific coast of the United States, mainly at San Diego. Admiral James O. Richardson, Kimmel’s able predecessor as commander of the Pacific fleet, bitterly protested the fleet’s permanent retention at Pearl Harbor, after maneuvers in the spring of 1940, and labelled Pearl Harbor “a damned mouse trap” for the American navy.

Indeed, it is certain that Richardson’s untimely removal as head of the fleet was brought about by his determined resistance to what he considered the folly of keeping the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Frank E. Beatty, a well informed authority, has told me that it may also have been due in part to the animosity of Harry Hopkins, who sat in on Richardson’s conferences with Roosevelt. Richardson was annoyed by Hopkins’ interjection of his opinions into the debate and understandably commented unflatteringly on Hopkins’ lack of qualifications as an authority on naval strategy.

Added to this generalized conception of our Pacific naval strategy centering around Pearl Harbor was a precise statement from our Ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, in January, 1941, that he had received a friendly warning from the Peruvian Minister in Tokyo, which the latter had obtained from several sources, one Japanese, to the effect that, if Japan could not reach peaceful relations with the United States, it would start war by a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. After the successful Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, the Washington authorities, who were desperately trying to cover up their bad guessing or actual guilt, tried to represent this warning as worthless hearsay, but it was not so regarded by Ambassador Grew and some top Washington officials in January, 1941, notably Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox.

It was not necessary, however, to rely on generalized strategic considerations, however sound. From September, 1941, to December 7th Washington authorities intercepted a considerable number of Japanese messages between Tokyo and Honolulu that specifically and most obviously indicated that, in the event of war between Japan and the United States, the first Japanese move would actually be a surprise attack on the Pacific fleet—that Pearl Harbor would be the target. These messages came to be known as the “Bomb Plot” messages and consisted of requests from the Japanese government in Tokyo to the Japanese consul-general in Honolulu, Nagoa Kita, for detailed and specific information as to the nature, number and types of vessels in the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, their location and movements, and other relevant information connected with the American military establishment located there, together with Kita’s replies to these requests. These requests from Tokyo to Kita became more insistent, frequent and detailed as we approach December 7, 1941.

The first of these was sent in the J-19 Japanese code to Kita on September 24, 1941, and was decoded, translated and read on October 9th at Washington. This requested very detailed information on the composition, location, and operations of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. From this time onward, Washington should have had no doubt that the Japanese were planning a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, if negotiations failed. The Bomb Plot messages clearly pinpointed Pearl Harbor as the target of any Japanese surprise attack on the United States.

When relations became more tense after the fall of the Konoye Cabinet in October, 1941, Tokyo ordered that these espionage reports from Kita should be sent at more frequent intervals. On November 15th, Kita was ordered to send his reports twice each week. On November 18th and 20th, orders were given to inform Tokyo in regard to all our warships and others anchored in areas adjacent to Pearl Harbor. On November 29th, Kita was ordered to make his reports, even though there had been no movements of the warships at Pearl Harbor.

No such detailed or comprehensive reports, containing as they did grids and coordinates, were demanded of any Japanese officials and spies at any other American outpost or naval base anywhere in the world, not even those on the Pacific coast. Those who have sought to minimize the significance of these Kita Bomb Plot messages have pointed out that Japanese spies were frequently detected making inquiries at leading American naval bases but these were routine and trivial matters and not in any way to be compared or rated with the Kita messages. All these Bomb Plot messages were available to the appropriate top Washington officials in the Army and Navy and to Roosevelt and Hull, and they thoroughly established the probability that if the Japanese made any surprise attack on the United States it would be at Pearl Harbor.

The most crucial Kita report available in Washington before Pearl Harbor was sent to Tokyo by Kita on December 3rd. He informed the Japanese government that he had set up an elaborate system of window code signals at Lanikai Beach which were easily visible to boats off the coast. From this spot he would signal passing Japanese fishing craft and submarines as to the nature and movements of the Pacific fleet. These boats and submarines could then pass this vital information back to the Japanese task force as it was nearing Pearl Harbor for the attack.

This sensational and revealing message was intercepted at the army monitoring station at Fort Hunt, Virginia, on the 3rd, was decoded by Naval Communications in Washington before noon on the 6th, and was translated and ready for reading and distribution before 2:30 P.M. on that day. This finally confirmed the pin-pointing of Pearl Harbor as the place of the Japanese attack. Due to the fact that the Kita message implied that the signals would end on the night of the 6th, this December 3rd intercept also clearly indicated that the Japanese task force under Admiral Nagumo was moving on toward Pearl Harbor and intended to organize off Oahu on the night of the 6th, and make ready for the attack on Pearl Harbor the next morning. Hence, this message not only made it clear that Pearl Harbor would be the place of the Japanese attack but also revealed the time of this attack, unless something happened to slow down or divert Nagumo’s expected arrival on the 6th as anticipated.

How far Roosevelt, Hull, and the top military brass in Washington were informed of the nature, contents and implications of this vital and revealing Kita message that was available on the 6th has, naturally, been the subject of much controversy. It was actually far more revealing than the fourteen-part reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message as to the time, place and certainty of an immediate Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. If it could be proved that its contents had been known to the top officials in Washington by early evening of the 6th, then their failure to warn Kimmel and Short would appear to be far more culpable than that connected with the replies to Hull that were not available until the late evening of the 6th and the morning of the 7th, and even then did not make the time and place of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor anything more than trained and informed guesswork. Hence, there would be every effort to indicate that no information about this Kita message was available until after the attack.

Certain of the important facts about the Kita message are established beyond any reasonable doubt. Its interception on December 3rd has been described. It was decoded sometime between the 3rd and 6th and was given to the translating section of Naval Communications for translating. This was done by a Mrs. Dorothy Edgers, a competent expert on the Japanese language, between 8:00 A.M. and 2:30 P.M. on the 6th. Her immediate superior was Yeoman Bryant, and the chief of the section was Commander Kramer. Both of these men knew during the time that Mrs. Edgers was working on the translation that she regarded it as a very important document and that she gave it careful attention. She was supposed to leave at noon, but was so much interested in the document that she worked until after 2:00 P.M. to complete and revise her translation. She handed it over to Yeoman Bryant to discuss with Commander Kramer with respect to its distribution to toplevel civil and military officials entitled to receive such material. While there is controversy over whether Kramer read the Edgers’ translater carefully, there is little doubt that Bryant did so. The main dispute is over whether Kramer distributed the message to at least a few key officials in the Army and Navy on the afternoon of the 6th.

The accepted legend is that when Kramer looked over the Edgers’ translation after she left the office he found that it was so imperfect that it was unsuitable for immediate distribution. The excitement that followed with the arrival of the Plot Message and the Japanese reply to Hull, together with Kramer’s responsibility for distributing the reply to Hull during the evening of the 6th, made him decide to delay reworking the Edgers’ translation until Monday, the 8th, when it was too late to be of any value in warning Kimmel and Short.

The circumstantial evidence tends to support the probability that Kramer read the Edgers’ translation well enough to recognize its great and immediate significance and showed the message to some of the leading officers in the Navy, and possibly in the Army, and was ordered by these persons, who recognized its importance, to suppress it for the time being. Mrs. Edgers was a competent translator, and she remembered the essential parts and the full implications of the message well enough so she could describe the contents on the witness-stand some three and a half years later without ever refreshing her memory by seeing the document during that long interval. If she could remember the message, it is likely that Kramer could have quickly grasped its significance.

He was familiar with the Bomb Plot messages from the time of the first one decoded on October 9th, the importance of which he was the first to recognize. Since the reply to Hull was in English, Kramer did not have to be busy translating this on the afternoon of the 6th and should have had plenty of time to study the Edgers’ translation and call it to the attention of his responsible superiors. Kramer was the most severely intimidated of all the witnesses in the post-Pearl Harbor investigations—to the extent of bringing on a nervous breakdown. Hence, he was not likely to come clean in his testimony on the Kita message if he did suppress it. He has declined to answer personal questions on the matter since his retirement. Although Yeoman Bryant was present in the room during the investigation he was not called to testify.

Hence, we are likely to remain as much in the dark about documenting the distribution of this final and most sensational of the Bomb Plot messages as we are about Captain Kirk’s frustrations in regard to the first one on October 9th. The best discussion of the controversy to reach print is that by Commander Charles C. Hiles which was published in the Pearl Harbor supplement to the Chicago Tribune on December 7, 1966, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Why these Bomb Plot messages were not sent to Hawaii by the Washington authorities, so they could be used by Kimmel and Short and enable them to be prepared for the Japanese attack has never been adequately explained. In naval headquarters at Washington, they were suppressed chiefly by Admiral Richmond Kelley Turner, whose ignorance of the details of the cryptanalytic set-up and operations at Pearl Harbor was only exceeded by his arrogant self-confidence, and Admiral Stark backed him up instead of keeping his promise to Admiral Kimmel to have him fully and speedily informed on all such matters. At the army headquarters the responsibility was mainly that of General Marshall and General Sherman Miles, chief of Military Intelligence. Until December 3rd, most of these messages were intercepted by the Army Signal Corps station MS5 at Fort Shafter, General Short’s headquarters near Honolulu, and were transmitted to Washington for decoding, translation and reading. They were also usually intercepted at several other monitoring stations in the United States.

When the first one was decoded, translated and read on October 9th, Commander Alwyn D. Kramer, who was in charge of the translation work for the Far East section of Naval Communications, noted that this was a very significant message that needed further study. It must have received such study for Captain Alan G. Kirk, the able, forthright and experienced Director of the Office of Naval Information at the time, insisted that the October 9th message must be sent to Admiral Kimmel. He was blocked in this proposal by Admiral Turner, who was supported in this by Admiral Stark. Frustrated and disgusted, Kirk left his post and sought the sea duty he needed to become an admiral, and later rendered very distinguished service in naval operations in Europe. The details of Kirk’s leaving for sea duty have been furnished to me in person by Admiral Beatty, at that time chief aide to Secretary Knox.

It is most unfortunate that Admiral Kirk was not thoroughly interviewed after the war concerning the refusal of Stark and Turner to permit him to transmit this first Bomb Plot message to Kimmel. I had arranged to have this done in 1962 when Kirk was residing in New York City. Being on the opposite side of the continent at this time, I could not do it personally, but had arranged that a trained interviewer and an expert on Pearl Harbor would carry it out. He delayed briefly to make more complete preparation, and in the meantime Kirk was appointed American ambassador to Formosa (Taiwan). Another student of the situation, without my approval, took the chance of writing Admiral Kirk in Formosa about the incident. It was hardly to be expected that Kirk could give any detailed answer under these circumstances. He might well have been expected to ignore the letter but he gave a courteous reply, making no categorical denial and thus by indirection implying that he may have been prevented from transmitting the information to Kimmel. He soon retired due to ill-health, was then in no condition to accept the request for an interview, and died soon after his retirement. This ended the possibility of clearing up the October problem in any final and definitive manner. That the situation in the Office of Naval Intelligence was confused in 1941 is evident from the fact that by the end of October there had been four chiefs of this organization: Captains Anderson, James, Kirk and Wilkinson.

It is certain that Turner was directly responsible for frustrating Kirk, but there is no proof that this was the result of any conspiracy to keep Kimmel in the dark. Turner was a very able but conceited officer, sure of himself. His mind was mainly on the Atlantic, and so far as the Pacific was concerned he still believed that the Japanese would attack Siberia. He was unpardonably ignorant about Pearl Harbor intercepting facilities at the time, actually believing that it had a Purple machine and was reading the Japanese diplomatic messages on the spot. The main responsibility for Kirk’s frustration was, however, that of Stark, who had promised Kimmel that he would transmit to him all significant information about any possible Japanese menace to Pearl Harbor, and Kirk had been fully informed of this. Why Stark deferred to Turner in this episode has never been cleared up. Admiral Beatty informed me that Turner often dominated Stark in the matter of naval decisions. Stark refused to clarify matters in a long interview with Percy Greaves in mid-December, 1962. It has been alleged on good authority that an attempt was made to falsify the Naval Directory for 1941 to indicate that Kirk had left his post as Director of ONI before October 9, 1941.

Kirk was succeeded by an able but far less experienced and more pliant person, Captain Theodore S. Wilkinson, who may have feared to repeat Kirk’s insistence with Turner. This has come to be known as “the October Revolution” in the Office of Naval Intelligence. In any event, both the Army and Navy Departments had these crucial Bomb Plot messages at hand and if they neglected them, then it was no less than a criminal neglect and it was an important factor in leading to the destruction of the Pearl Harbor fleet. The place—and through the Kita message of December 3rd even the probable time—of the Japanese surprise attack no longer needed to be a mystery. Not only the Japanese inquiries as to the fleet, facilities and supplies at Pearl Harbor but also the general strategic logic of all the circumstances connected with the launching of a Japanese war against the United States at any time, and especially in 1941, made it all but certain that the first drastic move would be against Pearl Harbor. Japan did not need to be attacked to start a war, as Roosevelt did. It needed to destroy the American Pacific fleet, and it would be difficult to do this after war had started elsewhere. Admiral Kimmel would then deploy and scatter his forces as they moved to Wake, Midway and the Far East and they would never again be bunched up as they were at Pearl Harbor in peacetime.

It should also be emphasized that although the treatment of the Bomb Plot messages in the preceding pages has stressed the role of the Navy in receiving and handling them, the Army also obtained them, and alert officers therein were impressed as Captain Kirk had been by the threat to Pearl Harbor which they revealed. Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, chief of the Far Eastern section of Military Intelligence, delivered the original Bomb Plot message, decoded on October 9th, to Secretary of War Stimson, General Marshall and General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of the War Plans division of the Army. These messages were discussed by officers in Military Intelligence and the Signal Corps and most of them recognized the desirability of sending them to General Short at Fort Shafter, but they were no more able to get past Marshall and do so than Kirk, Wilkinson, Noyes and McCollum could get by Turner and Stark. Just as Turner was the chief navy obstacle to getting the Bomb Plot messages through to Kimmel, so Marshall constituted the main blockage in passing them on to Short, although he could delegate the action to General Miles, chief of Military Intelligence. Marshall was also the person mainly responsible for the slow transmission of the Bomb Plot messages from MS5 at Fort Shafter to Washington, compelling them to be sent by the China Clipper, every two weeks, or by ordinary boat mail, when they could have been sent at once by cablegram or RCA radiogram. In other words, General Short was as much victimized as Admiral Kimmel in being deprived of these vitally important Bomb Plot messages.

2. The Time of the Japanese Surprise Attack

Washington also possessed extensive and diversified advance knowledge of the time when the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor; by the morning of December 7th almost to the minute when the attack would be launched. The Kita message, which had been prepared for distribution by 2:30 P.M. on the 6th, also indicated even more directly that the attack would in all probability take place on the morning of the 7th.

On November 5th, Tokyo informed the Japanese embassy at Washington that negotiations must be satisfactorily concluded by November 25th. Unknown to Washington was the fact that the latter was also the date that the Japanese task force was getting ready to leave the Kurile Islands for Pearl Harbor if negotiations were broken off, but with orders to return if negotiations were resumed. On November 14th, Tokyo informed the Japanese consul at Hong Kong that Japan would declare war on the United States and Great Britain, if the negotiations with the United States failed. On November 11, 15 and 16, Tokyo repeated to the Japanese ambassador in Washington that the deadline for completing negotiations with the United States was November 25th. On November 22nd this deadline was extended to the 29th, but the Japanese embassy in Washington was then emphatically informed that Tokyo meant business this time and there would be no further extension of the deadline. After that “things are automatically going to happen.” On November 27th and 28th, Tokyo informed the Japanese embassy in Washington that Hull’s ultimatum of November 26th was entirely unsatisfactory and Japan would not negotiate any further on that basis. Hull himself had said on the 27th that he knew his ultimatum meant war and that, henceforth, affairs between the United States and Japan were in the hands of Stimson and Knox, the Secretaries of War and the Navy, both of course under the control of President Roosevelt. On November 30th, Tokyo informed Germany that negotiations with the United States had ended.

Yet, on November 27, 28, 30 and December 1st there was a succession of messages from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington warning them not to reveal that negotiations were over, but to indicate they were being stretched out. This move was both a last ditch attempt at a peaceful settlement and, if that failed, an effort to cover up the actual nature of “the things that are automatically going to happen” after negotiations had ended, which was really on the 26th. These “things” were the departure of the Japanese task force from the Kuriles to Pearl Harbor. There had been no effort whatever to conceal the extensive movement of large Japanese convoys and task forces to the southwest Pacific, and, hence, these were clearly not the things which were “automatically going to happen.”

The policy of sending extensive Japanese convoys and task forces southward helped to distract responsible attention in Washington from a possible attack on Pearl Harbor, even if it should not have done so, and thus worked well for the Japanese program. This was one reason why many top officials in Washington seemed to neglect the traditional Pacific strategy in regard to Pearl Harbor and the Bomb Plot messages and after early November concentrated most of their attention right down to December 7th on the probability of an attack in the Far East, either on the Philippines, along the coast of southeast Asia, or on the British possessions and the Dutch East Indies. A little thought should have been sufficient to convince the Washington authorities that Japan would not be likely to make its first major onslaught in the Far East. Admiral Thomas C. Hart’s Asiatic fleet was so small that its destruction would not protect the Japanese flank from a major and immediate American naval attack.

The most important factor in this distraction from Pearl Harbor was the basic strategic plan for a possible Pacific war with Japan, Rainbow 5 (WPL 46), which had been drawn up by our military services on the basis of the Washington joint staff conferences ending with that at Singapore in April, 1941, and confirmed orally by Roosevelt in May and June. This plan was based on the assumption that, if war came with Japan, it might start in the Far East as a result of American commitments to come to the aid of the British and Dutch, even if there were no attack on American ships or territory. This naturally helped to divert the attention of top military brass in Washington from the traditional Pacific strategy related to an attack on the Pacific fleet, wherever located, especially during the week before Pearl Harbor.

Washington had all the numerous intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages indicating by November 27, 1941, that war was in all probability only a matter of days away, but Kimmel and Short knew nothing whatever about any of this. They did not even know that Hull had sent an ultimatum to Japan on November 26th or that the Japanese had warned that negotiations were to be ruptured on the 29th if no settlement had been arranged. They obviously knew nothing about the details of the Japanese-American diplomatic negotiations from August to November 26th; Short was in the dark after July.

By November 27th, war with Japan seemed almost certain, and it was expected in Washington official circles that it would probably come coincident with the Japanese reply to Hull’s ultimatum. Since Japan usually made its surprise attacks on a weekend, when opposing forces were most likely to be relaxed and off-guard, some Washington authorities, including Roosevelt, thought that the attack might come on November 30th, but that was too soon for Japanese plans, which were centered on the task force’s departure from the Kuriles and its movement toward Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese did not attack on the 30th, there was special apprehension in Washington that it might come on December 7th, but no plans were made or steps taken to warn Kimmel and Short of this possibility.

On November 19th, the Japanese announced in their J-19 diplomatic code, which we could and did read, the setting up of a so-called Winds System, which Japanese diplomatic officials and consulates could intercept and learn of Tokyo’s intentions in the event of breaking off diplomatic relations and going to war with the United States. The Winds signals were as follows: “East Wind Rain” for the war on the United States; “West Wind Clear” for war on Great Britain; and “North Wind Cloudy” for war on Russia. This Winds system, as we shall see, was executed on December 4th.

Evidence of the approach of war became ever more apparent after November 30th. On December 1st and 2nd it was learned that Tokyo had ordered its main embassies, with the exception of that at Washington, to destroy their main code machines, including Purple, and burn their documents. This was a measure that usually precedes immediate war and is rarely, if ever, otherwise if ordered on any such scale as in December, 1941. The Washington Purple machine was to be retained until December 7th so that Tokyo could keep in touch with the Japanese embassy and be able to send Ambassador Nomura the reply to Hull, which would be the last “peaceful” communication, even though it would also mean, in all probability, the actual onset of war.

On the morning of December 4th a Japanese message was intercepted at the important naval monitoring station at Cheltenham, Maryland. This did not need to be decoded for it was written in plain Japanese language and was transmitted in the Japanese Morse code. This was done in order to enable Japanese officials, who were without decoding equipment after the codes-destruction order, to be able to understand this critical message. This intercept was the all-important execution of the Winds system set up by Japan on November 19th. It is known as the “Winds Execute” message and the information therein revealed that war would be made on the United States and Britain, but not on Russia.

Later on, when the frenzied effort was made to cover up the responsibility for the failure of Washington to inform Kimmel and Short, there was a desperate attempt made to deny that any Winds Execute message had ever been received, and most—perhaps all—copies of it were destroyed. The last copy ever seen was identified by Commander Laurance F. Safford when Commander Kramer was assembling documents for the Roberts Commission a week after the Pearl Harbor attack. But honest and courageous experts, notably Safford, chief of the Security Division of Naval Communications, who had received the intercept from Kramer after translation and handed it over for distribution, stuck by the facts and demolished all efforts to repudiate the authenticity of Winds Execute. Safford was able to list some fourteen persons, including Admiral Thomas C. Hart, commander of the Asiatic fleet, who said that they had seen the Winds Execute message or had discussed it with a responsible official who had seen it. The Naval Court of Inquiry, which met from July to October, 1944, established beyond any doubt that the Winds Execute message was received on December 4th. Colonel Otis K. Sadtler, acting chief of the Army Signal Corps, not only testified that he had seen the Winds Execute message but said that he regarded it as the most important intercept he had ever handled. On it he based a forthright warning to Marshall’s subordinates, presumably with Marshall’s approval. The investigations by the Army Pearl Harbor Board and the Clarke Inquiries indicated that the Army authorities knew that the Navy had intercepted the Winds Execute message on December 4th.

Some of the apparent excitement and confusion which seemed to prevail in Washington military circles on December 4th, when Winds Execute was received, may have been due to the fact that this was also the day that the Chicago Tribune published the implications of Rainbow 5, thus revealing Roosevelt’s deception of the American people as to his war plans and his promise not to go to war unless attacked. At least we know that Marshall was far more concerned about this vital leak than he was about the reception of Winds Execute. Colonel John R. Deane was still working on this problem when he saw Marshall in his office at 10:00 on the morning of the 7th.

Winds Execute was not only the first explicit assurance that Japan was going to make war, but it also made it clear that the war would be declared against the United States. All that remained to be revealed was the moment of the Japanese attack, and it was expected that this would be when the Japanese handed in their reply to Hull’s ultimatum of the 26th, which turned out to be the case.

It was not necessary to wait long. The final and decisive Kita Bomb Plot message, sent to Tokyo on December 3rd, was intercepted at Fort Hunt, Virginia, on the same day. By December 6th it was decoded, translated and available for distribution at 2:30 P.M. in the communications section of the Navy Department in Washington. This revealed that the Japanese task force was nearing Pearl Harbor and was expected to arrive off Hawaii by the night of the 6th.

On the heels of processing the Kita message came the so-called Pilot Message from Tokyo, which announced that Japan was sending to the Japanese embassy in Washington its ominous and anxiously awaited reply to Hull’s ultimatum. The Pilot Message was decoded, translated and ready for distribution before mid-afternoon on the 6th and enabled the Washington authorities to know that the Japanese reply to Hull was arriving, that negotiations were over, and that war was now at hand. The whole fourteen-part message told little more than this, aside from a summary of the negotiations. There was no doubt that Japan would attack the United States in a matter of hours. Short and Kimmel should have been warned at once. This would have provided their last fair and decent opportunity to take action to avert, evade or repel the Japanese attack. Of course, they should and could have been warned weeks earlier, and certainly by November 27th.

Some thirteen parts of a total of fourteen in the complete reply to Hull came in during the afternoon of the 6th, were decoded from the Purple code, and were ready for distribution by that evening. Since the reply to Hull was in English it did not need to be translated. A copy was delivered to Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins at the White House about nine o’clock that night. After reading it, Roosevelt acknowledged that it meant war but he took no steps to order any warning sent to Pearl Harbor. As we shall point out later on, Roosevelt knew by the forenoon of the 6th, if not on the 5th, that the United States was already at war with Japan due to our commitments to the British and Dutch under ABCD and Rainbow 5.

The thirteen-part message was delivered on the evening of the 6th to the available Army officers entitled to Magic and to Hull under the supervision of Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, chief of the Far East section of Military Intelligence of the Army, and to the appropriate Navy officers, except for Stark, who was at a theater, by Commander Alwyn D. Kramer of the Far East section of Naval Communications. A copy for Marshall was left by Bratton with Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, who was Marshall’s secretary and the man, short of Roosevelt himself, most likely to know where Marshall was to be found. It was Smith’s duty to deliver such messages to Marshall.

The final or fourteenth part, also in English, arrived during the night of the 6th and was decoded by early morning on the 7th. It confirmed the Pilot Message’s implication that negotiations between Japan and the United States were over, hardly news to Washington. Following this fourteenth part of the reply to Hull was another and far more important short message from Tokyo, the crucial so-called Time of Delivery message. It ordered the Japanese ambassador, Admiral Nomura, and his associate, Kurusu, to deliver the full fourteen-part Japanese reply to Secretary Hull in person at 1:00 P.M., Washington time, about 7:30 A.M. Pearl Harbor time.

The fourteenth part was intercepted, decoded, and ready for distribution by 7:30 A.M. and the Time of Delivery message by 9:00 A.M., if not earlier. One authoritative report indicates that both were ready for distribution before 7:00 A.M. They had been received before 5:00 A.M. This does not make too much difference because Admiral Stark did not get to his office before 9:00 and General Marshall was either on a horseback ride or hiding out in some place. When these late intercepts were shown to Admiral Stark, chief of Naval Operations, about 9:00 by Admiral Leigh Noyes, chief of Naval Communications, Captain Wilkinson, chief of Naval Intelligence, and Commander McCollum, chief of the Far East section of Naval Intelligence, they pointed out to Stark that 1:00 P.M. in Washington was about 7:30 in Pearl Harbor and that this could very well mean that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor at 1:00 P.M. Washington time. Stark had four hours remaining in which to warn Kimmel, whom he could have reached in ten minutes or less by his fast naval transmitter, but he ignored the appeal of Admiral Noyes, Captain Wilkinson and Commander McCollum that he send a separate warning to Kimmel, and did nothing for the time being beyond phoning to Roosevelt, who certainly did not order him to warn Kimmel.

Marshall’s conduct on the morning of the 7th was even more mysterious than that of Stark. According to the accepted legend, supported by sworn testimony of himself and prominent army associates, he abruptly left his office in the old Munitions Building on Saturday afternoon right after he learned from the Pilot Message that the Japanese reply to Hull was about to start coming into Washington, which was exactly the moment Marshall should have settled down in his office, warned Short of the prospect of immediate war, and spent the night with him discussing the best manner of dealing with the imminent attack. Of course, if he had given Short an honest and adequate warning on November 27th, there would have been no attack to discuss on the night of the 6th.

Where Marshall spent the rest of the afternoon and the night of the 6th has never been determined in any final fashion. When examined in the Joint Congressional Committee Investigation of 1945-1946, although known for his excellent memory, Marshall contended that he could not remember where he spent the night of December 6th, probably the most significant, critical and exciting night of his professional life, at least down to that time. Later on, after his wife had gallantly refreshed his memory, Marshall stated that he spent it at home with Mrs. Marshall, who was recovering from an accident at the time. During the Joint Congressional Committee investigation Senator Homer Ferguson reported to his colleague, Senator Owen Brewster, and to his research aide, Percy L. Greaves, that a few days after Marshall’s attack of amnesia on the witness stand, he overheard Marshall tell Senator Alben W. Barkley, chairman of the JCC: “I could not tell you where I was Saturday night (the 6th). It would have got the chief (Roosevelt) into trouble.”

Continuing the official legend, the next morning Marshall rose leisurely, had a late breakfast with his wife, and then took a long horseback ride when, for all he is alleged to have known, the Japanese could have already attacked the United States. While washing up after his return from the relaxing ride, he was summoned to his office by Colonel Bratton, who had been greatly alarmed by the clear implications of the Time of Delivery message relative to an attack on Pearl Harbor.

Arriving at his office about 11:25, so the story goes, Marshall allegedly read for the first time the fourteen-part reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message, and decided to send a warning to Short, which he did at 11:50. Despite more rapid means of communication that were available, it was sent by Western Union to San Francisco and from there to Hawaii by RCA, not marked urgent, and was not actually put on the wires until 12:17. It did not reach Short until after the Japanese planes had returned to their carriers, over 200 miles from Pearl Harbor. This delay in delivery did not, however, make too much difference, since the message was sent far too late, even if telephoned, to have given Short enough time to have taken effective steps to repel the Japanese attack and it did not even suggest to Short that there was any reason to expect that a Japanese attack might take place immediately. Kimmel and Short thus remained entirely unwarned even after leading experts in both Army and Navy Intelligence had concluded by around 9:00 A.M. that the fourteen-parter and the Time of Delivery messages meant that the Japanese would probably attack Pearl Harbor at about 1:00 P.M., Washington time.

Another much different version of Marshall’s activities from mid-afternoon on the 6th to noon on the 7th appears to be far closer to the truth than the traditional legend, and it is supported by persons of umimpeachable integrity. This version also accepts the fact of the complete mystery of Marshall’s disappearance from the mid-afternoon of the 6th to the morning of the 7th and our lack of precise knowledge as to where he was during all this time, when he should have been constantly in touch with Short at Fort Shafter. But it does eliminate the horseback ride and Marshall’s incredibly late arrival at his office on the morning of the 7th. Colonel John R. Deane, then an aide of Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, who was Marshall’s secretary at the time, has asserted that he saw Marshall at his office at about ten o’clock on the morning of the 7th. Commander McCollum has twice stated, once under oath, that Marshall came to Stark’s office with a military aide about 9:00 that morning. Marshall and Stark, along with others in Stark’s office, notably Admiral Noyes, discussed the fourteen-part and Time of Delivery messages, and formulated the message that was to be sent to Short by Marshall. Admiral Stark asked, later that morning, that the message sent to Short should also be handed on to Kimmel.

Marshall delayed sending this message for nearly two hours after he left Stark’s office, thus making it too late to enable Short to go on an alert that might frighten off the Japanese attack, and did not hand over his message to be sent to Short until 11:50. He further assured its late delivery by refusing to use the quick methods provided by his scrambler telephone connection with Short or the more powerful Navy and F. B. I. transmitters which were offered to him. It was sent by Western Union at 12:17 from Washington to San Francisco and from there to Short at Fort Shatter by R.C.A., not even marked urgent, with the results noted above.

Both versions of Marshall’s conduct on the morning of the 7th agree upon the content of the “warning” message Marshall finally sent to Short and make it clear why it has been dubbed the “too-little-and-too-late” message. This is the message:

Japanese are presenting at one p.m. Eastern Standard Time what amounts to an ultimatum also they are under orders to destroy their Code machine immediately. Just what significance the hour set may have we do not know but be on the alert accordingly. Inform naval authorities of this communication.

Marshall

There was nothing in the message to indicate any immediate emergency for Pearl Harbor or that there was any knowledge or conviction at Washington that the Japanese might be attacking Pearl Harbor within about an hour. Marshall deliberately deceived Short in telling that the significance of the Time of Delivery message was unknown. Even Admiral Samuel E. Morison admits this. Actually, when Marshall read over the fourteen-part reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message, his associates in his office state that he exclaimed, “This means immediate war!” There was no such interpretation, even by way of implication, in what he sent to Short, and the same message was to be transmitted to Kimmel. That Marshall was capable of sending a clear and incisive warning when he wished to do so is shown by the message he sent to General Herron, the commander of the Hawaiian District, on June 17, 1940. In what was little more than a practice alert to impress the Japanese Marshall ordered Herron to: “Immediately alert complete defensive organization to deal with possible trans-Pacific raid.”

The defenders of Roosevelt and Marshall have contended that Marshall knew nothing of the fourteen-parter or the Time of Delivery messages until he read these in his office after 11:25 on Sunday morning. To accept this requires the utmost credulity, even naivete. If he did not know about them, then this proves carelessness and callous indifference to his official duties quite sufficient to justify his dismissal from office as Army chief-of-staff. He needed to be well informed about these documents just as much if he were to practice clever deception as though he were doing his duty in getting the facts and cooperating with Short in meeting the Japanese attack. Roosevelt would not have allowed him to get out of touch with Army Intelligence or the Signal Corps. There is no reasonable doubt that Marshall, informed of the Pilot Message, had arranged for receiving these messages, had read them, and was fully informed by the time he reached his office or Stark’s on Sunday morning, whatever time that was. This is the only reasonable explanation of why he sought an early conference with Stark. Those who have sought to indicate otherwise are better known for their proclivity to cover up the facts in this situation than for their zest for revealing the truth. The only reasonable motive for Marshall’s disappearance would have been to make himself inaccessible to those who might plead with him to send a warning to Short and Kimmel.

Another important qualification bearing on the validity of the traditional account of Marshall’s conduct on the morning of December 7th has been pointed out by Commander Hiles. He made a very careful estimate of the time which would have been required for Marshall to have done all the things he is stated to have accomplished in the twenty-five minutes between 11:25 and 11:50 in his office on the morning of December 7th, and conservatively concluded that it would have required at least two hours.

There is no space here to go into the complicated question of where Marshall was from mid-afternoon of the 6th until 11:25 on the morning of the 7th, when he is represented as reaching his office in the Old Munitions Building to examine for the first time the messages that had come in from Japan during this interval. I sought to do this as well as possible in the Pearl Harbor Supplement published by the Chicago Tribune on December 7, 1966. It is obvious that one must choose between the traditional legend and the statements of Admiral McCollum, made during the post-Pearl Harbor investigations, and before a luncheon at the Army and Navy Club in Washington on May 3, 1961, as reported in the notes of Admiral John F. Shafroth that were twice checked and confirmed with minor revisions by Admiral McCollum. They are also supported by the statement of Colonel (now General) Deane that he saw Marshall at his office about 10:00 A.M. on the morning of the 7th, and by a direct report to me by Professor Charles C. Tansill who was present at the meeting on May 3rd.

It obviously makes a great deal of difference, factually, whether Marshall was off on a horseback ride during the morning of December 7th and did not reach his office until 11:25, where he first saw the reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message, or whether he came to Stark’s office shortly after 9:00 on the morning of the 7th, discussed the reply to Hull and the Time of Delivery message with Stark, McCollum, Noyes and Wilkinson, formulated there the warning to be sent by him to Short before 10:00 A.M., but delayed sending it until 11:50 that morning.

Personally, I prefer to accept the statements of Admiral McCollum as being far better supported by documentation and circumstantial evidence and motivated only by a courageous desire to establish the truth. Most of the documentation supporting the traditional story has been destroyed or kept a close secret. On December 17th General Sherman Miles, chief of Military Intelligence, prepared an honest account of what went on in Marshall’s office on the morning of December 7th and showed it to Marshall. It made the latter furious and he banished Miles to the post of military observer in Brazil and allowed him to stay in the service on condition of making no further revelations. Later on, Marshall summoned the officers who were acquainted with the facts to a room, locked the door, walked around the room, shook hands with each of those present, and told them that the facts relating to the events of December 6th and 7th and associated developments must remain a secret with them “to the grave”. One of those present decided not to have this situation on his conscience until he reached the grave and revealed the facts to Professor Tansill and myself. Whatever Marshall did on the morning of December 7th, it was all too late for any effective warning of Pearl Harbor.

It is probable that even revisionist historians have erred in putting exclusive emphasis on the Time of Delivery message as the sole or best basis for deciding that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th. Intelligence experts like Bratton and McCollum did this only by clever guessing and logical inference. But the Kita message, which was ready in all essential parts for distribution by 2:30 P.M. on the afternoon of the 6th, left nothing to guesswork. Kita’s complex system of signals to be passed back to the approaching Japanese task force was to end on the night of the 6th, clearly implying that the task force was expected to be arriving at Hawaii by the night of the 6th, organizing off Oahu and put in readiness for the attack the next morning.

Such was the situation in Washington. There was an impressive accumulation of evidence by the morning of December 7th which made it certain that war with Japan was coming in a matter of a few hours, with every probability that the attack would be made on Pearl Harbor. Even as early as December first, it was probable that war was about to start somewhere, and by December 4th it was certain that Japan would attack the United States. Surely, by then, it was mandatory to warn Short and Kimmel in clear and definite fashion. If they had been so informed on the 4th they would have taken steps to go on an effective alert that would have led the Japanese task force to turn back. It was not until December 5th that Tokyo sent its vital radio message directing Admiral Chiuchi Nagumo (who commanded the Japanese task force) to “climb Mount Niitaka”, which meant that he was to proceed to Pearl Harbor with no further delay or interruption unless negotiations were resumed.

Of course, Short and Kimmel should have been told of the negotiations with Japan in November, 1941, and warned when Tojo began to set deadlines for the end of these negotiations, notably after he set November 29th as the date when they must be settled unless “things were automatically going to happen.” But neither Kimmel nor Short received any warning whatever of an impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor until the Japanese bombing planes appeared over the fleet and the military establishment about 7:50 on the morning of December 7th.

IV. Keeping Short and Kimmel in Ignorance of a Surprise Japanese Attack

We may now turn to the account of the incredible extent to which General Short and Admiral Kimmel were kept in ignorance of any Japanese threat to Pearl Harbor down to the moment of the attack. Both these men had special personal reasons to believe that Washington would keep them informed of any developments that directly endangered Pearl Harbor.

Short was a personal friend of Marshall, and like Marshall one of the few important generals who was not a West Point graduate, and he had been promoted and placed in charge of the Army establishment in Hawaii by Marshall. He had every reason to believe that Marshall would keep him thoroughly informed of any information available in Washington that was of vital significance for Pearl Harbor. Probably, he should have begun to have some doubts about this before December, 1941, in the light of the manner in which Washington ignored his demands for material and equipment to complete the defensive installations that were required, and the almost complete failure to send planes that he needed for reconnaissance and repelling Japanese bombing attacks. Short received no information about intercepts of the Japanese Purple diplomatic code after the economic measures taken against Japan at the end of July, 1941.

Kimmel had even more personal reasons to believe that he would not be double-crossed or blacked out by Washington. He had been an aide to Roosevelt when the latter was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Wilson and had maintained pleasant relations with him after that time. He was an especially close friend of Stark, who was then Chief of Naval Operations, the supreme authority over naval affairs. Soon after Kimmel succeeded Admiral Richardson as commander of the Pacific fleet, he wrote Stark in February, 1941, that he would expect to be sent all relevant information collected by Naval Communications and the Office of Naval Intelligence. In March, Stark promised that this would be done, and that Captain Kirk, the able and alert Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, fully understood this to be one of his most important duties. There can be no doubt that Kirk intended to keep Kimmel informed and that his being blocked in this by Turner and Stark when the first Bomb Plot intercept was decoded in early October was a main reason why he resigned as head of the Office of Naval Intelligence and sought sea duty. In June, Kimmel went to Washington, had a long talk with Stark, and the latter assured him that he would be furnished with full information about all developments of interest to Pearl Harbor and by the most rapid methods which were also secure.

There is good reason to believe that Stark meant to do this, but his hands were tied in many ways. He was a genial and modest person, and had the bad luck to be closely associated with Admiral Turner, chief of Naval War Plans, who, while a mentally superior officer, was also an arrogant, conceited, overbearing and opinionated bully. He tended to override Stark, almost to the extent of assuming to be in charge of the Navy. Admiral Beatty, who, as aide to Secretary Knox, attended many top naval conferences, told me that, more often than not, when Knox asked a question of Stark, Turner would do the answering. He regarded his own opinions as more reliable than the facts, of which he was often careless. He even believed that Pearl Harbor had a Purple machine and could decode Japanese diplomatic messages on the spot. Until mid-November, 1941, he labored under the obsession that Japan would move into Siberia and attack Russia rather than make war in the southwest Pacific. There is no doubt that Turner did more than anybody else in the Navy to prevent the Bomb Plot messages from getting to Kimmel and to frustrate the efforts of Commander McCollum to warn Kimmel decisively in the days immediately before the Pearl Harbor attack. How far he was directly influenced by Roosevelt in this is not revealed in the documents.

Stark kept up a friendly correspondence with Kimmel down to December, 1941 and from this Kimmel learned indirectly most of what little he knew about the negotiations with Japan, but Stark stressed the fact that the only actual threat of war in the Pacific existed in the Far East and never at any time even implied any direct menace to Pearl Harbor. While he sometimes mentioned our negotiations with Japan, he would never go into detail or indicate the sources of the information about our diplomatic dealings since this information was derived from our Magic operations which Stark has always maintained he was not allowed to divulge. In June, 1961, Stark told two college professors, Paul Burtness and Warren Ober, that he had to swear a “horrendous oath”, which superseded all other oaths, never to divulge the existence or contents of Magic operations.

Kimmel had never heard of the Purple machine or of our breaking the Japanese Purple code. Pearl Harbor had been denied a Purple machine in the summer of 1941, when the one which was originally designed to go to Pearl Harbor was sent as a “spare” to London, which already had two Purple machines. But Kimmel had been given clearly to understand that he would immediately obtain all information of any significance in safeguarding his operations at Pearl Harbor and believed he was getting it. Actually, Kimmel never received any of the intercepts from the diplomatic messages in the Purple code after the meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill at Argentia early in August, 1941, and no details about Japanese-American negotiations at any time.

On the whole, one may assume that Stark personally wished to keep Kimmel informed so far as he could without violating his orders from Roosevelt about Magic and other secret restraints. When accused of improper action, Stark’s invariable defense was that he always acted in accordance with a “higher authority”, who could only have been Roosevelt. He was often confused himself, partly by Turner and partly because he became one of those who seemed to be both beguiled by the movement of Japanese forces down the southeastern coast of Asia and distracted by the strategic implications of the naval war plan WPL 46, derived from ABCD and Rainbow 5, which envisaged war in the southwest Pacific. He actually may have come to believe that the first Japanese attack would surely take place in the Far East. Of course by December 4th, Stark was hogtied by Roosevelt’s order that all warnings to Pearl Harbor must be cleared through Marshall, and on the night of the 6th and the morning of the 7th Roosevelt may have seen to it that Stark was reminded of this order by telephone.

The truth of the matter is that Short and Kimmel never received any of the intercepted Japanese messages in the Purple code that would have told them of the diplomatic negotiations with Japan during the autumn of 1941. Without these the mention of such items as the “ending of diplomatic negotiations” could not make any real sense to them or cause any serious alarm.

Kimmel and Short were not even sent the Bomb Plot messages that were obtained between September 24th and December 7th, although they were sent in the J-19 and PA-K2 codes which were less secret than Purple and could have been read at Pearl Harbor at any time by Commander (now Captain) Joseph J. Rochefort, Admiral Bloch’s talented and experienced cryptanalyst and Communications Intelligence officer, if he had been assigned this duty. These Bomb Plot messages, as we have seen, pinpointed Pearl Harbor as the first target of any Japanese surprise attack. If these had been read by Rochefort they would have been even more of a warning of a direct Japanese threat to Pearl Harbor than the Purple diplomatic messages some of which actually encouraged top naval authorities in Washington to believe that if there was any war with Japan it would probably start in the Far East.

Most of these Bomb Plot messages were picked up by the Army Signal Corps station MS5, located at Fort Shafter, General Short’s army headquarters near Honolulu. The station was actually controlled and operated by Colonel Carroll A. Powell operating under the Army Signal Corps in Washington. Kimmel did not even know that Station MS5 existed. Short knew it was stationed at Fort Shafter but he did not know what it was actually doing. He had been informed that it was operated by the Army Signal Corps at Washington and, hence, assumed that if anything of significance to Hawaii was picked up by MS5 the information would be sent back to him from Washington, which never actually occurred.

Station MS5 intercepted the Japanese messages to and from Tokyo and Honolulu as raw and undecoded material, and, at Marshall’s order, sent them on by mail to Washington, making use of the China Clipper from Honolulu to San Francisco which made the trip once every two weeks. When the Clipper missed a trip they were sent by boat mail which further slowed down their arrival in Washington. These Bomb Plot messages were also usually intercepted by the Navy monitoring station S at Bainbridge Island on Puget Sound, and by the Army Signal Corps Stations MS2 at the Presidio in San Francisco, and MS7 at Fort Hunt, Virginia. Duplicates of these intercepts were thrown away, depending on the time of their arrival in Washington. Those retained were decoded, translated, read and filed away. Their nature and crucially important contents were never revealed to General Short or Admiral Kimmel.

Colonel Powell had no personnel capable of decoding and translating these Bomb Plot messages, and they would not have dared to do so without authorization if they had been able to do so. But, as we have noted, Admiral Bloch had in Commander Rochefort a trained and veteran cryptanalyst—one of the very best in the Navy—and a master of the Japanese language who could have decoded and translated these J-19 messages with great ease if he had been assigned to do this as one of his duties. But he was kept very busy at research work on Japanese naval codes, direction-finding, and traffic analysis. It was customary for these specialists in cryptanalysis and related operations to stick to their own assignments. Therefore, Rochefort, who did know that MS5 existed, would not have considered investigating its operations and would not have been welcomed if he had done so.

If he could have received these J-19 and PA-K2 messages that carried the Bomb Plot material, decoded and translated them, and turned them over to Kimmel and Short, there can be no reasonable doubt that these commanders would have taken defensive actions long before November 25th that would have called a halt to Yamamoto’s plan to send a task force to attack Pearl Harbor.

Commander Rochefort has told me that if he could also have had the diplomatic messages sent in the Purple code he would have been even more impressed with the significance of the Bomb Plot messages and, in that event, Pearl Harbor would most surely have gone on an alert in ample time to have led to the cancellation of Yamamoto’s attack program. Even some of the Purple material that he needed for this was also actually being intercepted at MS5 and transmitted to Washington, but Rochefort could not have decoded and translated this in the autumn of 1941 because Pearl Harbor had been denied a Purple machine for the benefit of the British. Hence, it is both paradoxical and calamitous that the very material which would have frustrated the attack on Pearl Harbor was intercepted right at Hawaii but could not be used there, by either the design or the stupidity of Washington, mainly that of the Army officials, specifically, General Marshall himself.

As to the precise attitude and opinion of the military authorities at Pearl Harbor concerning the probability that the Japanese would start a war with the United States in 1941, I have discussed this matter several times with Captain Rochefort, twice with Admiral Kimmel, and once with General Short. Admiral Kimmel assured me once more in June, 1966, that he and Short were in agreement on this. Lacking any specific warning information whatever from Washington or any other reliable source, they had to make up their own minds from general considerations. It seems perfectly clear that all the responsible personnel at Pearl Harbor rather completely discounted the probability of war with Japan. They arrived at this conclusion because they did not believe that Japan would be unwise enough to start a war that it could not ultimately win. The resources of the United States were so great that we would ultimately wear down Japan, even if we did not win a quick and brilliant victory. They were proved to be right about this, but not about Japan’s willingness to risk defeat if they started a war.

V. THE SO-CALLED WARNINGS TO SHORT AND KIMMEL

Now that we have seen that Short and Kimmel were denied the extensive body of valid and relevant information which would have enabled them to learn of the probability of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in ample time to have taken proper action to have averted or repelled it, we may consider the so-called “warnings” that were sent to them. These have been presented by the defenders of Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall and Stark as clear and precise warnings that Pearl Harbor was definitely threatened by an imminent Japanese air attack, and it has been asserted that if Short and Kimmel had taken proper cognizance of the information they would have been prepared for the Japanese attack that came on the morning of December 7th. Actually, these so-called warnings to Short and Kimmel on November 27th and 28th were nothing of the sort. Commander Hiles has stated the reality clearly: “A genuine, forthright, and honestly inspired war warning can be expressed most lucidly, concisely, intelligently and forcibly in one sentence—the shorter the better. The warnings to Short and Kimmel were lacking in all these virtues. They were probably the most profuse collection of misleading verbiage ever to grace two military messages that purported to warn two important field commanders of a war already known in Washington to be a fait accompli. They were a great contrast with the warning that Marshall had sent to General Herron in Hawaii in June, 1940.

On November 27th, General Short received from Washington the following message which has been represented as a warning of approaching war, with the direct implication that he was being informed of a probable attack by Japan “at any moment’’:

Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes with only the barest possibilities that the Japanese Government might come back and offer to continue. Japanese future action unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat cannot be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act. This policy should not, repeat not, be construed as restricting you to a court of action that might jeopardize your defense. Prior to hostile Japanese action you are directed to undertake such reconnaissance and other measures as you deem necessary but these measures should be carried out so as not to alarm civil population or disclose intent. Report measures taken. Should hostilities occur you will carry out the tasks assigned in Rainbow five so far as they pertain to Japan. Limit dissemination of this highly secret information to minimum essential officers.

The message just cited did not even imply any threat of a Japanese attack at Hawaii. It stated that negotiations with Japan, of which Short had no specific knowledge, had come to an end, with little prospect that the Japanese would renew them. Hostile action, which could have meant either distant war or local sabotage, might start at any time, but it was essential that Japan must commit the first overt act. Prior to any hostile act, Short was to take all protective measures deemed necessary, but they must not alarm the civil population. If hostilities did start, Short was to operate in accord with War Plan Rainbow 5, so far as it applied to Japan.

The message to Short bore Marshall’s signature although he was away from Washington that day watching maneuvers in North Carolina. Its inception was conceived by Secretary of War Stimson, possibly at Roosevelt’s suggestion, and it was written by Stimson and General Leonard T. Gerow, chief of Army War Plans, with some aid from Colonel Charles W. Bundy of the Army General Staff. They consulted Roosevelt, Hull and Knox, Admirals Stark, Turner, and Ingersoll, and General William Bryden, Deputy Army Chief-of-Staff. Commander Hiles has appropriately observed that it was both strange and suspicious that such a large group and range of toplevel signatories had to be assembled if the purpose was actually to formulate a clear and precise warning of imminent war, which could have been prepared by any bright second lieutenant or ensign in ten minutes. To prepare a war warning that was not a war warning required, however, the pooling of much skill in obfuscation and deception. From the statements of Stimson and Gerow, it appears certain that the message was originally conceived and formulated to guide General MacArthur in the Philippines, to whom substantially the same message was sent. It was also sent to the Caribbean Defense Command in the Panama Canal zone and to the Fourth Army headquarters at the Presidio in San Francisco.

Short logically replied to the November 27th message as follows: “Department alerted against sabotage.” His reply was ready by Stimson, Marshall and Gerow. Since Short received no reply from Washington he correctly assumed that these men were satisfied with his report.

Three other messages were sent from Washington to Fort Shafter on the 27th and 28th, amplifying the directions as to measures to be taken by Short against local sabotage. One was sent by General Sherman Miles, chief of Army Intelligence in Washington, to Colonel Kendall J. Fielder, chief of Army Intelligence in Hawaii; one by Adjutant General Adams to Short, and one by General Henry H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Corps in Washington, to General Frederick L. Martin, chief of the Hawaiian Air Force. All of these indicated to Short that he had been correct in instituting an alert against local sabotage.

These messages merely added more detailed directions as to how Short should apply his alert against local sabotage. They stressed the need to assure security against the danger of hostilities, by which was plainly implied local subversive activities in Hawaii, to avoid publicity and not excite the public at Honolulu, and to maintain strict legality in all actions. To the Army authorities in Hawaii, it appeared obvious that the main fear in Washington, as expressed in the messages to Short and his subordinates, was that subversive activities, such as rioting in Honolulu, might produce some overt act by Americans that Japan could regard as justifying a declaration of war. The United States could then be accused of having precipitated war without any attack. It was Roosevelt who, personally, directed that the stipulation that Japan must be permitted to commit the first overt act of war should be included in the message to Short of November 27th and in that of Stark to Kimmel on November 29th. This was the basic formula of Roosevelt as the situation approached hostilities, and was immortalized by the statement of Stimson in his Diary after the meeting of the War Cabinet on November 25th: “The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.”

On November 29th and December 4th, Short and Martin sent detailed reports to Marshall and Arnold, as to the manner in which they had carried out the directions on instituting and operating the alert against local sabotage. Once more, there was no reply from Washington, and Short again felt assured that Washington was satisfied with what they were doing in Hawaii. Marshall admitted, when being examined by Senator Homer Ferguson during the Joint Congressional Committee Investigation in 1945-46, that Short was entirely correct when he assumed that, since there were no replies to his reports on the operations he had instituted to check local sabotage, what he had done was fully satisfactory to Washington.

In assessing the nature and significance of these bogus “warning” messages to Short, one may well start with pointing out that they were not in any way even labelled as a “war warning”. Nothing indicated any thought of war at Hawaii. It is obvious that the vague reference to Japanese hostility in the message to Short had been inserted for the benefit of MacArthur who was located at the Philippines in the Far East, the area where the authorities in Washington were becoming ever more convinced that, if any Japanese attack occurred, it would take place. This overlooked the fact that an attack on the Philippines and the destruction of Hart’s small fleet would not serve the main purpose of the first Japanese attack, which was to destroy the Pacific fleet and protect the Japanese flank against their further campaigns in the Far East.

The emphasis in all four messages to Short was placed primarily on watching and suppressing local subversive activities and on handling such operations with care and with studied legality. Subversive activities were obviously what were meant by “hostilities”, so far as Hawaii was concerned, although they doubtless envisaged possible military activities in the case of MacArthur. This throttling of subversive activities was to be effective but executed with restraint and caution. Neither any subversive activities nor Short’s restraint of them should be allowed to get out of hand and make it possible for Japan to regard some extreme incident as an overt and plausible “act of war”, which, according to Roosevelt’s policy, must be left for the Japanese to provide.

All this restraining action must be so executed as not to alarm the civilian population or create excitement or demonstrations which might lead the Japanese consul-general and spies in Honolulu to interpret them as a genuine Pearl Harbor alert against a possible Japanese attack and report this to Tokyo. The latter could send such information on to Admiral Nagumo in command of the task force enroute to Pearl Harbor, which on the 27th was still not too far from its point of departure in the Kurile Islands. Nagumo was jittery enough about the venture as it was without any suspicion that Hawaii was already getting ready for an attack. It was this unusual combination of insistent directives and qualifying restrictions in the Washington messages to Short which led the Army Pearl Harbor Board, when investigating the responsibility for the surprise attack, somewhat cynically to designate the Marshall message of the 27th to Short as the “do-and-don’t message”.

But more important than the above comments on the so-called warning messages to Short on the 27th and 28th is this crucial observation: If the men who wrote or approved these messages to Short really suspected any probability of an immediate Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and then ordered Short to go on an alert against local sabotage, they would have had to be nothing short of military idiots or political traitors, which would scarcely be true of Stimson, Generals Marshall, Gerow, Bryden, Miles, Arnold and Adams, and Colonel Bundy, or of Admirals Stark and Turner.

Concentration on local sabotage and civilian responses constituted a complete reversal of the attitudes and operations which would have been required to prepare for a possible enemy attack by warships and airplane bombers. Local sabotage turned attention inward and groundwise rather than outward and upward from which an air attack by Japan would take place—local sabotage in Honolulu from the air was very unlikely. An attack by Japan, and there were no other possible assailants, would come from the outside and the air.

Exclusive devotion to suppressing local sabotage also demanded operations which would be militarily suicidal, such as bunching the planes in a circle, wing to wing, where they could be more easily guarded and protected, but would be helpless in the event of a surprise air attack, as proved to be the case when the Japanese struck on the early morning of December 7th. Experienced military officers like Marshall, Gerow, Bryden, Miles, Arnold, Adams, and Bundy were very well aware of this.

Suppressing local sabotage without alarming civilians also encouraged giving very restricted attention to checking and preparing anti-aircraft protection. Concentrating on local civilian activities also naturally shifted emphasis away from detecting any possible approaching enemy task forces. Further, the special and repeated directions to avoid arousing civilian curiosity or excitement precluded any serious military operations, even increased reconnaissance, that would have been involved in getting ready for an attack by aircraft. It would have been impossible even to carry out an alert involving artillery operations without causing great excitement in Honolulu. Some of the heavy coast artillery was located right in the center of the city, and live ammunition had to be taken from magazines and placed by the guns. Fort de Russey was situated close to Waikai Beach and the most important hotel in the city.

Hence, it can safely be maintained that, if Washington had desired to tell Short indirectly and obliquely, but very clearly and obviously that the top military “brass’’ at Washington apparently did not expect in any immediate period a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they could hardly have done better than the messages sent to Short on November 27th and 28th. They were a masterly achievement in the way of producing a “war warning” that did not warn against war, at least at Hawaii. The Washington brass knew that these were no actual war warnings, but some of the authors or advisers, notably Admiral Turner, acted, even before the attack, as though they thought they were. When Short was caught off guard by the surprise attack, the men who fashioned and sent these fake warning messages tried to pass them off as genuine and adequate warnings, and so have their defenders among publicists, historians, and journalists over the last quarter of a century.

The question naturally arises as to whether Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall, Bryden, Gerow, Miles, Adams, Bundy, Arnold, Stark, Turner, and Ingersoll, in reality meaning Roosevelt, Stimson, and Marshall, deliberately intended the fake “warnings” to deceive Short and give him additional assurance that there was no probability of an attack on Pearl Harbor in order to insure that he would take no action which might frighten Admiral Nagumo and lead him to turn back with the task force that Yamamoto was sending to Pearl Harbor. Many of the more critical students of the Pearl Harbor episode have contended that the warnings to Short were actually intended to be misleading, and good arguments can be produced to support this interpretation, notably in the case of Stimson.

At this time (November 26-27), it appears that Roosevelt and most of the top military brass in Washington may have been pretty well convinced that, if Japan struck at all, it would probably do so at the outset in the southwest Pacific. Apparently, it was not before the afternoon or evening of December 3rd, at the earliest, that Roosevelt became finally convinced in his own mind or actually learned that the Japanese were planning to strike at Pearl Harbor on or about the 7th, confided this to Marshall and Arnold on the 4th, and immediately bottled up all possible warnings to Short and Kimmel by making it necessary to clear them through Marshall, who would certainly not forward any such warnings in violation of Roosevelt’s wishes and orders. Even on the 4th, as will be shown later on, while Roosevelt may have been convinced that the Japanese were on their way to attack Pearl Harbor, he was still waiting anxiously for an attack on one of the “three small vessels” that he had ordered sent out from the Philippines to draw Japanese fire, thus being able to start war after an attack and yet in time to save Pearl Harbor.

It was not until after the attack and the bad planners and bad guessers had been exposed that the attempt got underway to make Short and Kimmel the scapegoats for the surprise attack and try to interpret the fake warnings to them on the 27th and 28th as definitive and adequate warnings of an approaching Japanese attack. This malicious mendacity reached its most contemptible and despicable depths in some of the post-Pearl Harbor investigations, beginning with the kangaroo court of the Roberts Commission, thus creating what has been well designated as the “American Dreyfus Case”.

We now come to the alleged “warning” sent to Kimmel by Stark on the 27th. It has already been pointed out that Kimmel had casual but friendly relations with Roosevelt for a quarter of a century before he assumed command at Pearl Harbor, and was a close personal friend of Stark. Hence, he was justified in expecting a fair deal from Washington. He was told by Stark that he would promptly receive all the relevant information concerning any threats to Pearl Harbor and he had every reason to expect that he would get them. He did not. He did not receive any of the diplomatic intercepts in Purple after the Argentia meeting at Newfoundland in early August, 1941. He did not even get the Bomb Plot messages in J-19 and PA-K2 that were intercepted by MS5 from September 24th onward right at Fort Shafter. The fact that, before the Argentia meeting, Kimmel did obtain some of the contents of a few of the Japanese diplomatic messages from the Purple code, although there had been no mention of Purple or Magic in them, actually deceived him. This made him believe that he was getting all that came in after that time, whereas he received none.

Stark wrote Kimmel frequently and in a friendly manner but the main theme of his letters before September was that Germany was our main enemy, that Roosevelt wished to get into the war directly in Europe, and that the administration did not desire to be drawn into waging a two-front conflict by having a war with Japan on its hands. When Stark did begin later on to write Kimmel about a possible war with Japan, he stressed the fact that it would probably begin thousands of miles away in the Philippines, the southwest Pacific, or in the English possessions and the Dutch East Indies, and even here was as likely to be one of Japan against Britain and Holland as directly against the United States. Of course, Stark was fully aware that any Japanese attack on British or Dutch territory would immediately bring the United States into war against Japan, as arranged in ABCD and Rainbow 5. Never once did Stark hint of any early Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and it is very possible that he did not expect one until December 4th, when Roosevelt by his order to Marshall bottled up any Navy warnings to Pearl Harbor and Stark was so informed.

The actions of the Washington authorities which related to Kimmel’s and Bloch’s operations at Pearl Harbor supplemented Stark’s letters in giving Kimmel a definite impression that no attack on Pearl Harbor was expected by Washington. When Kimmel took over the command of the Pacific fleet in February, 1941, the Japanese Navy was, in Kimmel’s own words, superior to our Pacific fleet “in every category of fighting ships”. Nevertheless, in April and May, 1941, Kimmel was ordered to send about a fourth of his fighting force to the Atlantic to engage in what was described to him by Washington as the “first echelon of the battle of the Atlantic”—surely an unwise act if Washington was expecting to get involved in a prior war with Japan.

This early impression was reinforced by the failure of Washington to send Short and Bloch the additional planes they needed and requested if they were to maintain effective reconnaissance around the Hawaiian area and repel any Japanese air attack. Knox had indicated the need of more planes for Pearl Harbor in January, 1941, and Bloch had requested one hundred additional patrol planes, but not one had been sent before December 7th, 1941. Only six usable B-17 flying fortresses had been sent to Short before Pearl Harbor, although he had been officially allocated one hundred and eighty. Planes of all types were being shipped to Europe, especially to Britain and Russia, and B-17’s were being ferried to the Philippines and the Far East to bolster the defense there.

Furthermore, it is essential once more to recall Kimmel’s assignment and role as commander of the Pacific fleet. While he was in supreme command of all naval vessels stationed at Hawaii, the actual naval defense of Pearl Harbor was vested in Admiral Bloch, commander of the Hawaiian Coastal Frontier—the Fourteenth Naval District. To be sure, Bloch consulted with Kimmel and took orders from him when necessary, but Bloch and Short were responsible for protecting Pearl Harbor, and even here the main responsibility was that of Short and the Army. Kimmel’s function was to train personnel, provide and improve equipment, recondition ships, and, when so directed, to send them westward to Wake and Midway, and even to the Far East to raid the Japanese islands if war broke out between the United States and Japan. By assignment, duties, and activities, his role was offensive and oriented toward the mid-Pacific and the Far East, in accordance with the naval phases of Rainbow 5, based on the ABCD agreement.

We are now in a position to examine the so-called war-warning to Kimmel that he received from Stark on November 27th. To get a better idea of what was on the mind of Stark and his associates in Washington at this moment, we may note that Kimmel had received a dispatch from Stark on the 24th which included the following statement: “Chances of favorable outcome of negotiations with Japan very doubtful. This situation coupled with statements of Japanese Government and movements of their Naval and Military forces indicate that in our opinion that a surprise aggressive movement in any direction including an attack on the Philippines or Guam is a possibility.” On the next day, Stark wrote a letter to Kimmel. Although Kimmel did not receive it until December 3rd, it reveals the trend of Stark’s thinking on the 25th. He stated that a Japanese attack on the Philippines would be the most embarrassing thing that could happen to the United States and that some Washington authorities thought that this might occur. Stark went on to say that he, personally, was inclined to “look for an advance into Thailand, Indo-China, Burma Road area as the most likely.” Stark concluded by stating that: “Of what the United States may do, I’ll be damned if I know. I wish I did. The only thing that I do know is that we may do almost anything.” This well illustrates Stark’s frequent personal confusion and uncertainty.

One may observe that the “almost anything” did not include an attack on Pearl Harbor, despite Stark’s knowledge of the Bomb Plot messages from the time of the decoding and translation of the first one on October 9th. By the 24th and 25th of November, his thinking appeared to be almost entirely dominated by the thought that the Japanese would first attack in the Far East, indeed in the furthest East.

Kimmel, of course, knew nothing about the negotiations with the Japanese or the details of the Japanese movements which had led Stark to these conclusions. He did not even know that Hull had sent an ultimatum to Japan on November 26th, which Washington expected would lead to war with the United States in a few days—when the Japanese sent their reply to Hull. On November 27th, Kimmel received from Stark the following so-called “war warning” message, which has been represented by Roosevelt’s defenders as sufficient to alert Kimmel as to the possibility of an imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, although this was not even mentioned by implication:

This despatch is to be considered a war warning. Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected in the next few days. The number and equipment of Japanese troops and the organization of naval task forces indicate an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines, Thai, or Kra peninsula, or possibly Borneo. Execute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL 46. Inform District and Army authorities. A similar warning is being sent by War Department. SPENAVO inform British. Continental Districts Guam Samoa directed take appropriate measures against sabotage.

Not only the content of Stark’s “war warning” message but also the method used in transmitting it further emphasized to Kimmel that Stark and Washington were concentrating on the threat of Japanese movements in the Far East. Just as the message sent to Short on the 27th was drafted with MacArthur primarily in the mind of Washington authorities, so Stark’s message to Kimmel clearly indicated that Washington framed it primarily for Admiral Hart, commander of the Asiatic fleet in the Far East. This Navy “war warning” message was addressed as follows:

For Action: Cincaf (Hart), Cincpac (Kimmel).

For Info: Cinclant (King, USN, Ghormley, London) Spenavo (Creighton, Singapore) . . .

It would, of course, be quibbling to contend that Kimmel did not know that the message was designed for him as well as for Hart. But it is also a fact that, as shown by the prior listing of the lower ranked Hart, that it was the latter whom the drafters had primarily in mind. Admiral Ingersoll actually testified that the warning of the 27th was intended primarily for Hart. It is equally true that Kimmel noted this order of address and naturally interpreted it as deliberately intended to emphasize that Washington believed that the real danger from Japan lay in the Far East. With never one mention of a threat to Hawaii, Stark’s message diverted attention to the Far East. Nevertheless, Kimmel faithfully carried out the directions in this message of the 27th, as well as in the supplementary messages from Stark, just as though he had been the sole addressee in the “war warning” message. Stark testified on the witness stand that Kimmel had done all that was required of him in the message of the 27th.

Stark’s statement started off with the assertion that “This dispatch is to be considered as a war warning.” This carried a much weaker and more generalized connotation than, “This is a war warning.” It went on to state that negotiations with Japan, of which Kimmel knew no details, had ceased and aggressive action by Japan might be expected within the next few days. All known Japanese equipment and activities indicated an “amphibious expedition against the Philippines, Thai or Kra Peninsula, or possibly Borneo.” Kimmel was ordered to “execute an appropriate defensive deployment preparatory to carrying out the tasks assigned in WPL 46” if war broke out.

Two later supplementary messages were sent to Kimmel by Stark on the 27th. One dealt with sending infantry divisions to defend adjacent bases in the Pacific. The other ordered, if Kimmel thought it feasible, sending Army patrol and pursuit planes to Wake and Midway on carriers then at Pearl Harbor. There was no suggestion of an extensive offensive deployment by the Pacific fleet to the Marshalls to restrain Japanese movements toward the Malay barrier. Commander Hiles has suggested that if the Stimson message to Short on the 27th was a “do-don’t message”, those of Stark to Kimmel on the 27th constituted “do nothing” messages, so far as preparing Hawaii for an attack on Pearl Harbor. On November 29th, Stark sent Kimmel another message directing him to take no action under WPL 46 until “Japan has committed an overt act”, thus matching the similar order sent to Short on the 27th.

Kimmel carried out these orders promptly. On November 28th, Admiral William F. Halsey was sent to Wake with the carrier Enterprise, three heavy cruisers and nine destroyers. On December 5th, Admiral John H. Newton was sent to Midway with the carrier Lexington, three heavy cruisers and five destroyers; and also on the 5th, Admiral Wilson Brown was sent to Johnson Island on a practice operation with some cruisers and destroyers, there being no remaining carrier for him. The carrier Saratoga had been sent to the Pacific coast for reconditioning and equipment with radar and was just starting to return to Pearl Harbor. It was fortunate that the carriers and heavy cruisers had been sent out of Pearl Harbor before the 7th; otherwise, the naval disaster from the surprise attack would have been far more serious. The battleships which were destroyed or injured were of very secondary importance in the type of naval warfare which ensued.

Of course, if Kimmel had been actually warned of imminent danger on the 27th, as he could and should have been, the battleships, carriers, and heavy cruisers at Pearl Harbor would all have been deployed and directed in such fashion as possibly to have detected, intercepted and surprised the Japanese task force under Nagumo and inflicted serious injury upon it, even though it was outnumbered by the Japanese in carrier and planes: that is, provided that the Japanese consul-general and spies in Honolulu had not become alarmed by this desertion of Pearl Harbor, informed Tokyo, and the latter had not recalled Nagumo, which is probably what would have happened. Even if Nagumo had proceeded to Pearl Harbor, there is little probability that he would have sent his bombers to attack an empty naval base.

Kimmel ordered the planes that were taken on the carriers by Halsey and Newton to conduct reconnaissance sweeps to detect any possible enemy movements or threats. This was done promptly and on an extensive scale—about two million square miles of ocean area.

There was no valid reason why Kimmel should have regarded these messages that he received from Stark on the 27th and 29th as, in any sense, a warning that Japan might strike at Pearl Harbor within any immediate period. The first message received on the 27th was obliquely labelled a “war warning” but it meant nothing at all in this respect, when considered in connection with the remaining portion of the message and those that followed. Indeed, their total implications were quite to the contrary. “War warning” as used by Stark was only a formal label and a vague, convenient and routine semantic “catch-all”, as Kimmel has well described it. Since Kimmel had been denied any knowledge of Magic operations, was not sent a Purple machine, and was ignorant of diplomatic negotiations with Japan after the Argentia meeting in August, the statement that negotiations with Japan had ceased could not have meant anything specific or alarming to him.

He not only had no knowledge of the details of the negotiations revealed in the intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages that were kept from him after August but he was not informed of even such fundamental items as Hull’s having sent an ultimatum to Japan on November 26th. The only possible war mentioned was one that might start in the southwest Pacific, East Indies, or Philippines, some thousands of miles away, as the result of a possible Japanese amphibious expedition and attack, and no assurance was expressed by Stark that even this expedition would inevitably mean an attack on the United States unless it was made on the Philippines. All the orders or suggestions for action contained in the messages received by Kimmel on the 27th and 29th clearly indicated that Kimmel was to get ready for possible war in the Far East, and if feasible to send ships to Wake and Midway with planes and reinforcements. Only in the event of war in the Far East was he to make forays against the Marshalls, and try to draw Japanese strength away from the Malay barrier.

Just as the order to go on alert against local sabotage and concentrate attention on civilians in Honolulu and environs made Short believe that Washington had no suspicions of any imminent attack on Hawaii, so the measures Kimmel was directed to take, as laid down in the messages of the 27th and 29th, gave him the inevitable impression that Washington had no suspicion of any immediate Japanese action against Pearl Harbor. The Naval Court of Inquiry, which met from July to October, 1944, asserted that the so-called war warning message sent by Stark to Kimmel on November 27th “directed attention away from Pearl Harbor rather than toward it.”

The orders given to Kimmel also involved the further depletion of the already inadequate defensive personnel and equipment at Pearl Harbor—sending more sailors and soldiers to the mid-Pacific, along with robbing Pearl Harbor of pursuit and patrol planes, which were in almost fantastically short supply there, and sending all the carriers away. In the same way that ordering Short to go on alert against local sabotage convinced him that there was no fear in Washington of any attack on Hawaii, so the orders to Kimmel further to deplete his Pearl Harbor supplies, equipment and personnel were tantamount to telling him that Pearl Harbor was not in any danger of attack, so far as Washington was aware, on November 26th and 27th. He received no direct warnings of any probable attack there after that time.

One item that has been especially seized upon by defenders of Roosevelt to demonstrate that Kimmel was adequately informed of the threat of a Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor is that he did receive the information that on December 1st and 2nd that Japan had ordered the destructions of its codes and code machines.

This contention will not hold up under the most elementary analysis. In the first place, Kimmel is expected to have reacted to this information as though he had been informed of everything that the Washington authorities knew by December 4th: the whole complex of Magic, the breaking of the Purple code in August, 1940, our reading of all Japanese diplomatic messages from that time to December, 1941, all the negotiations that had taken place since August, 1941, the deadlines set by Tojo in November, 1941, his statement of “the things that are automatically going to happen” if negotiations had not been settled by November 29th, Hull’s ultimatum of November 26th, which Washington was convinced the Japanese would reply to by a declaration of war, and the whole Winds set-up and its execution on December 4th. None of these vital facts, which gave the codes destruction orders their real significance and implications, were known to Kimmel. On the other hand, in Washington, the codes destruction orders were a dead giveaway as to imminent war when taken in the context of all the other vast array of intercepts and intelligence that was available there.

Despite all this, even at Washington the codes destruction orders were not taken as an infallible sign that Japan was going to make war, especially war on the United States. Even Commander Safford did not consider that the codes destruction orders meant certain war until Winds Execute was intercepted on December 4th. The latter did make it clear that Japan was going to make war and would start it against the United States and Great Britain, but not against Russia. This is precisely why Winds Execute was so vitally important in incriminating the Washington authorities and why it was frantically suppressed and so emphatically declared non-existent by those who sought to conceal their guilt after December 7th.

While Kimmel was informed of the Winds code and Commander Rochefort had experts monitoring on it, neither Kimmel nor Rochefort was told that Winds Execute had been intercepted by Washington on December 4th. Rochefort’s staff was unable to intercept it at Pearl Harbor because they were monitoring the voice circuit from Japan. Winds Execute actually came over the Japanese Morse code and Safford was lucky enough to pick it up at Cheltenham, Maryland, as indicated earlier.

Further, there is actual evidence that the codes destruction messages did not inevitably mean war in December, 1941. This news came to Washington on December 1st and 2nd. Nagumo was not ordered to climb Mount Niitaka until the 5th. If the United States had offered to resume negotiations on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th, his task force could have been called back and most probably would have been. It was so arranged in his orders. It is very possible that an American offer to resume negotiations as late as early on December 6th might have led to calling off the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Roosevelt, Hull and Stimson were determined that negotiations would not be resumed after Hull sent his ultimatum on November 26th. Its terms assured that they would not be.

Moreover, the routine destruction of codes was a not unusual occurrence, and had often taken place without an ensuing war. It can be only a casual or formal process. Kimmel had known that the Japanese consulate in Honolulu had frequently burned its papers, which might have been codes, for all that he knew. It is true that, when taken in their full context, as known by Washington, the Japanese code destruction orders of December 1st and 2nd were extreme and sweeping and very probably were a conclusive sign of war, but Kimmel knew nothing of this context. Along with this was the fact that all the information and so-called war warnings that Kimmel and Short received on November 27th, 28th and 29th distracted attention away from Hawaii and emphasized the Far East. Further, any appropriate action by Kimmel, if based on a full recognition of the meaning of the codes destruction order, would have required a complete alert which would have been wholly at variance with the orders to Short not to alarm the civilian population at Hawaii, and these orders to guard against local sabotage were not lifted prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, not even on the West Coast by General Arnold until December 6th at Sacramento. Stark’s message to Kimmel on the 29th had also ordered Kimmel not to take any sweeping offensive action under WPL 46 until after Japan had commited an overt act of war.

Hence, one can safely conclude that Kimmel’s having received the news of the Japanese code destruction orders of December 1st and 2nd was no more of a war warning that the Japanese might strike Pearl Harbor from the air almost immediately than were the messages received by him and Short on the 27th, 28th, and 29th.

In short, the “warnings” received by Kimmel on the 27th and 29th hardly went much further as to details or the imminence of war than Admiral Stark’s release to his Admirals after the Singapore Conference of April, 1941, and the formulation of Rainbow 5, to the effect that the question of the United States entering the war was no longer one of whether but of when and where.

Short and Kimmel have been vigorously criticized on the ground that, in the light of the traditional strategic assumptions about naval warfare in the Pacific, they did not, on their own knowledge and initiative, recognize the probability that, in the event of war, the Japanese would first attempt a surprise attack on the American Pacific fleet, wherever it was stationed, even though top authorities in Washington seemed to overlook this. As a matter of fact, they never lost sight of this possibility at any time; indeed, they seemed far more aware of it than Stimson, Marshall, or Stark. Knox had stressed this possibility in January, 1941.

From the time Kimmel assumed command at Pearl Harbor in February, 1941, both he and Short had frequently mentioned and discussed the possibility of a surprise Japanese attack there, and recognized the action and supplies needed to detect and turn back such an attack. They had vainly requested the equipment required effectively to carry out such a protective policy, especially the planes necessary to carry out adequate and continued reconnaissance and to destroy or cripple any Japanese task force approaching Pearl Harbor, but they had received virtually nothing down to the Pearl Harbor attack. As noted earlier, on April 9, 1941, General Frederick L. Martin and Admiral Patrick N. L. Bellinger, commanders of the Army and Navy air forces in Hawaii, handed in a report about the feasibility and danger of a Japanese surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor that was virtually identical to the plan Yamamoto actually carried out under Admiral Nagumo’s command. It was carefully studied by Short and Kimmel and was forwarded to Marshall in Washington on April 14th but without any response directing appropriate defensive operations at Pearl Harbor or supplying adequate equipment.

Early in 1941, Admiral Bloch had asked for one hundred additional patrol planes that would be needed for effective reconnaissance, and Short had requested 130 B-17 bombers needed for both reconnaissance and attacking an approaching Japanese task force. These planes were promised but never delivered. None of the hundred was ever sent to Admiral Bloch for naval reconnaissance at Pearl Harbor, and a scant twelve B-17 bombers were sent to Short, only six of which were suitable for use after they arrived. Planes needed by Short and Kimmel at Pearl Harbor had been diverted to the Atlantic and Europe to aid Britain and Russia, along with one-fourth of Kimmel’s naval force, sent there in April and May, 1941. Other planes were belatedly sent to the Philippines and to China.

Throughout 1941, Short and Kimmel were actually far more alert and apprehensive to the danger of a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in the event of war with Japan than was Washington, even though they had been denied the Bomb Plot messages. They were simply refused the equipment required to meet and allay their apprehensions in this matter. Nevertheless, despite the blackout of Pearl Harbor, the patrol planes at Pearl Harbor carried out limited reconnaissance and the planes on the task forces sent out under Admirals Halsey and Newton did conduct extensive reconnaissance in the days just before Pearl Harbor in the effort to detect any evidence of a Japanese task force moving against Pearl Harbor, covering no less than two million square miles of the surface of the Pacific.

In conclusion, it is abundantly clear that Short and Kimmel were not adequately informed, or literally even warned at all, about the prospect of an imminent Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. What were later dishonestly described as warnings by defenders of Roosevelt actually confirmed and intensified their impression that Pearl Harbor was not in any immediate danger of a surprise attack. This almost criminal failure to warn Short and Kimmel was fully realized in Washington in late November and early December, 1941, by such outstanding operating experts as Colonel Otis K. Sadtler, acting chief of the Army Signal Corps, Colonel Rufus S. Bratton, chief of the Far East Section of Naval Intelligence, and Commander Arthur N. McCollum, chief of the Far East Section of Naval Intelligence.

These men sought to have Short and Kimmel directly and adequately warned, only to have their efforts ignored or frustrated. McCollum believed that Kimmel should have a better warning on the 27th of November. He was probably the best informed person in Washington at the time on the situation in the Pacific, and he prepared a general survey and evaluation of the state of affairs in the Pacific area, suggesting what should be done, and showed this to Turner, Noyes, and Wilkinson, but it got no further. It would have been invaluable to Kimmel, and if sent to Pearl Harbor would doubtless have led to preparations that would have frustrated Yamamoto’s plan to carry through the task-force attack. McCollum then prepared a precise warning to Kimmel on December 1st and another on the 4th, but neither was sent. They were killed by Stark and Turner, which in this case meant Turner, who stubbornly contended that the “warnings” sent on November 27th provided all necessary information to put the Hawaiian commanders on the alert. When McCollum, along with Admiral Noyes and Captain Wilkinson, suggested to Stark on the morning of the 7th that he warn Kimmel at once, both were ignored.

No honest and competent Intelligence, Signal Corps, or Naval Communications officer who was in Washington in November and December, 1941, has ever contended, at least not prior to being intimidated during the post-Pearl Harbor investigations, that Short and Kimmel were clearly and adequately warned of any probable impending attack on Pearl Harbor, despite the increasing abundance of material available in Washington from early October onward to justify and validate such a warning and make it mandatory.

There is no substantial evidence whatever that either Short and Kimmel failed in their duties in any way whatever at Pearl Harbor or were in any manner responsible for not anticipating and repelling the arrival of the Japanese task force that made the attack on the morning of December 7, 1941. They did not have divine wisdom or insight, but it is very doubtful if two men better fitted or more competent for the posts they were occupying in 1941, or officers more diligent in executing their duties, could have been found in the United States. They were clearly more competent, energetic and alert with respect to all matters connected with their assigned duties at Pearl Harbor than their superior officers, General Marshall and Admiral Stark, were in Washington.

The allegation of Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, backed up by Admiral Ernest J. King, after the Hewitt Inquiry, that Kimmel failed to demonstrate the superior judgment necessary for exercising command commensurate with his rank and assigned duties, and the order that Forrestal then issued that Kimmel should never again hold any position in the United States Navy which required the exercise of such superior judgment, was one of the most unfair, malicious, and mendacious statements ever made by prominent American public figures in their official capacity. It flew directly in the face of the conclusions of the Naval Court of Inquiry. The criticisms of General Short in the post-Pearl Harbor investigations were equally biased and unfounded and were completely refuted.

Since substantially the same “warning” message that was sent to General Short on the 27th was also sent to General MacArthur in the Philippines at the same time, it is instructive to point out significant differences in the message sent to the latter. These variations all stem primarily from the fact that there was little to hide from MacArthur and Hart. Both Washington and Manila knew that war with Japan was coming soon and that the Philippines were almost certain to be attacked soon after it started. Hence, MacArthur and Hart were left free to take all measures they deemed essential to get ready for the blow. The only exception was that Japan must be allowed to fire the first shot. MacArthur and Hart expected that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor before they struck the Philippines because they needed to destroy the Pacific fleet and protect their flank before they could safely carry on extensive campaigns in the Far East and the southwest Pacific.

There was nothing in the message to MacArthur relative to refraining from alarming the civilian population; nothing forbidding the disclosure of intent; and nothing restricting the dissemination of the “highly secret information to minimum essential officers”. Manila was to operate under a “Revised Rainbow 5”, which had been brought out to Mac-Arthur personally by General Brereton. There was no reference to any “Revised Rainbow 5” in the message to Short or any indication that he knew of any such revision. Finally, MacArthur was directed to inform Hart of the contents of the November 27th message, while no suggestion was made to Short that he notify Kimmel. As Commander Hiles characterizes the situation:

The conclusion seems obvious and incontestable. The Far East Commands at Manila were given a free hand with no special admonitions or restrictions whereas the Hawaiian Commands were handcuffed and hogtied. It required some finagling to do the trick and fit it nicely into a pattern of intrigue and deceit in such fashion as to appear plausible for the record. To devise and express in words a war warning that is not a war warning calls for some nice mental gymnastics, but it was done and it worked, even though it involved the coöperation of a considerable number of the highest functionaries of the government and no end of conferences, memoranda, and the like.

It is interesting and illuminating to know that while Mac-Arthur and Hart were favored in the above manner by Washington, they did not really need such special concern. They were far more fortunate in having a Purple machine at Manila and were also assisted by a special arrangement unique in all pre-Pearl Harbor communications connected with Japanese-American relations and any probable Japanese attack on American forces or territory.

When MacArthur felt the need of being well informed as to the diplomatic situation between the United States and Japan, he requested that he be sent one of the best experts from the Army Signal Corps in Washington, and specified Colonel Spencer Akin as the man he desired. Colonel Akin had access to Magic and was fully aware that neither Manila nor Fort Shafter had been fully informed of the increasingly tense situation in Japanese-American relations. He was especially concerned over the failure to send the Bomb Plot messages to Hawaii. Hence, Akin arranged with Colonel Otis K. Sadtler, acting head of the Signal Corps in Washington, that Sadtler would send him such information as would be required to keep MacArthur fully informed of the increasingly alarming developments. Akin was shrewd and foresighted enough to insist on being promoted to Brigadier General before he would consent to accepting MacArthur’s request to come to Manila. Sadtler worked just as honestly and patriotically but lived and died a colonel.

Sadtler sent Akin all the information he thought necessary to keep MacArthur fully informed as to the likely time and place of any Japanese attack, whereas Short did not receive any Purple, J-19 or PA-K2 messages after the end of July. A specially important item in the information sent over this secret Sadtler-Akin pipeline were the Bomb Plot messages being intercepted at MS5 at Fort Shafter and other monitoring stations in the United States and forwarded to Washington to be decoded, translated, read, filed away and kept from Short.

Hence, MacArthur had been adequately informed of the imminence of war with Japan before he received the Marshall message of the 27th. He did not need it, but he was able to read far more into it than could Short, who had been kept completely in the dark about the ominous developments during November, 1941. MacArthur was ready for the attack and had cleared his beaches in anticipation of the approaching Japanese assault that he expected to take place immediately after an attack on Pearl Harbor.

One of the main myths circulated by the “blackout” and “blurout” historians is that MacArthur was actually surprised by the Japanese, even six hours after he had learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that his airplanes had remained huddled helplessly on the ground and were destroyed by the Japanese bombers as Short’s had been that morning at Hawaii. They had actually been in the air on reconnaissance during the morning of the 7th, and had just returned to refuel when the Japanese attack came, quite unexpectedly at the moment. It had been doubted that the Japanese bombers could fly from Formosa to Manila and return, and weather conditions were also such that it seemed unlikely that they would even make the attempt on the 7th.

MacArthur and Akin knew that Short was being deprived of this alarming information that they received from Sadtler in Washington, but had to sit quietly by and await a Japanese attack. They did not dare pass on this crucial information to Short because any resulting precautionary action on the part of Short might reveal the existence of the Sadtler-Akin pipeline and lead to its suppression, which would have been a serious loss for Manila.

Commander Laurance F. Safford, chief of the Security Section of Naval Communications in Washington, thought at the time that all such disturbing information was being sent from Washington to Admiral Bloch at Pearl Harbor. Hence, he made no attempt to set up a secret Safford-Rochefort pipeline which would have given Commander Rochefort, chief of Naval Communications Intelligence at Pearl Harbor, essentially the same information that Sadtler was sending Akin. Rochefort has told me several times that if this had been done, Pearl Harbor would have gone on alert long before Nagumo approached Pearl Harbor, in all probability before he left the Kurile Islands.

Rochefort has criticized Safford for even failing to give him some clear hints of the dangerous developments in Japanese-American relations after November 26th, or even earlier, since they were close friends and in constant communication. Even a few allusions about the actual situation would have led Rochefort to intensify precautionary monitoring action. He could not decode Purple, for Pearl Harbor had no Purple machine, but he could have decoded and read messages sent in J-19 and PA-K2, many of which, notably the Bomb Plot messages, indicated a serious threat to Pearl Harbor.

Safford asserts that he supplied Rochefort with the changing keys for these codes but did not feel that it was necessary to suggest that Rochefort use them for intercepting and reading the Japanese diplomatic messages because he thought that Kimmel and Bloch were getting all the relevant information from their superior officers in Washington. He remained misled about this for nearly two years after the Pearl Harbor attack, when he first discovered that Bloch and Kimmel had not been sent the relevant information on Japanese-American relations at any time before the attack. Until then, he had believed that Kimmel had actually been seriously derelict in not heeding his warnings and executing his duties. Safford made this discovery when he was examining the Navy files and found that the incriminating documents relative to Pearl Harbor had been removed. Fortunately, he found where they had been hidden before they could be destroyed and restored them to the files. Later on, this enabled the Army Intelligence officers to discover that most of the incriminating documents had been removed from the Army files and not replaced.

VI. THE BLACKOUT OF HAWAII ON THE EVE OF PEARL HARBOR

We may now deal with the problem of why, how and by whom Short and Kimmel were, during the more than a week before the Pearl Harbor attack, deprived of the, large and varied mass of information that had been accumulated in Washington and demonstrated, surely by October, 1941, that war with Japan was now definitely in the making, that by November 27, 1941 it might start at any time, but most likely when Japan submitted its reply to Hull’s ultimatum of November 26th, that by December 1st and 2nd it was at hand, that by December 4th Japan would declare war against the United States and Great Britain, that by the early afternoon of the 6th war could come at any moment, and that by the morning of the 7th the Japanese would in all probability attack Pearl Harbor about 1:00 P.M. Washington time, or 7:30 A.M. Pearl Harbor time. This leaves out of consideration the Kita message, which had been processed by 2:30 on the afternoon of the 6th and definitely indicated that the Japanese would arrive off Hawaii by the evening of the 6th and be prepared to attack Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th.

The blacking out of Short and Kimmel relative to the Japanese threat at Pearl Harbor is a highly complicated situation involving many facts, issues and changes of policy and operations, especially during the year 1941. The only consistent item and unvarying policy in all the tortuous maze of developments from October 5th, 1937, to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was the determination of Roosevelt from the autumn of 1939 to put the United States into the war, but his conception of the enemy to be fought at the onset of war changed markedly throughout this period. At the outset, it was Japan, as revealed by his suggestion at the first Cabinet meeting, the largely secret strengthening of the American navy, the Chicago Bridge speech of October 5, 1937, and Captain Ingersoll’s mission to Britain in the winter of 1937-1938. After the outbreak of war in Europe in September, 1939, it became Germany, where Churchill was exerting his main pressure for collaboration. It was not until this seemed almost impossible to accomplish by mid-summer of 1941, because Hitler provided no casus belli, that Roosevelt finally decided that he would have to enter war through the back door of Japan.

No other prominent American official except Stimson was clearly determined to support war with Japan at this time. Stimson first became publicly very influential in this policy only by the summer of 1941 when Roosevelt decided that Japan would probably have to become the main initial target of his bellicosity. After this date Stimson, already appointed Secretary of War in June, 1940, logically became the most undeviating member of Roosevelt’s entourage so far as upholding the war motif with Japan was involved.

There are a number of relevant questions which have to be raised, some of which have not been entirely resolved even today and may never be wholly cleared up. The first one is how and why many of the top military officials in both the Army and Navy at least appeared to ignore at the most crucial period, November and December, 1941, the basic Japanese strategy of a Pacific war—an initial attack on the American Pacific fleet—which had been demonstrated to be sound and practical and had been given special reievance after the Pacific fleet had been based at Pearl Harbor in the spring of 1940? How could they have disregarded the numerous Bomb Plot messages and the Martin-Bellinger Report, both of which clearly pinpointed Pearl Harbor as the inevitable target of any Japanese air attack if war came?

How could this top military personnel appear to be unaware of the special threat to Pearl Harbor when all the operating groups in the lower echelons, who were devoted to matters of Magic and intelligence, were discovering and emphasizing this danger and were persistently seeking to get this evidence presented to their superiors and have Short and Kimmel properly warned while there was still an abundance of time in which to alert Hawaii and avert an attack there? Why did the most concerted effort to blackout Hawaii begin when Roosevelt’s shift of policy to direct bellicosity toward Japan obviously increased the danger of an attack there? Short was blacked out as to negotiations with Japan after the latter part of July and Kimmel after the Argentia meeting in August,

How were the top military echelons able to keep the impressive evidence of danger to Hawaii suppressed? Were they ordered by Roosevelt to suppress this material and withhold it from Hawaii? If so, how many were so ordered, and who were those who suppressed the evidence without any order to do so? Why, when the threat to Hawaii became more clear and evident, did most of the top military echelons turn their attention to the Far East and apparently neglect Hawaii?

Who in the upper civil and military echelons in Washington wanted the United States to go to war, and if they did, was it to be war against Germany or Japan? Neither Marshall nor Stark really wanted any kind of war at the moment, with either Germany or Japan, because they believed that this country needed to get better prepared to wage a world war; they were especially opposed to war with Japan in 1941. Hull was apparently satisfied to continue feeding his banalities and platitudes to Nomura and assuring the probability that no peaceful settlement could be made with Japan. He hated both the Germans and the Japanese and, as an old Tennessee feudist, was hardly opposed to a little killing on principle, but he was surely not a leading protagonist of open hostilities although he knew that they would almost surely result from his operations as Secretary of State.

Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, as one of the leading warmongers of the time, was eager to get us into any available war, although he preferred one with Germany, but he wished to have Hawaii well prepared for war and seems to have played no decisive role in precipitating war with Japan or blacking out Hawaii. By the latter part of November, when the Japanese began to send extensive forces southward and it seemed possible that the Japanese would make their first attack in the southwest Pacific, on the islands or mainland, Knox was especially vigorous in maintaining that the United States must stick by the arrangements in ABCD and Rainbow 5 and resist the Japanese by force even though there was no attack on American territory and forces.

When I was teaching at the University of Colorado in 1949, one of my mature students was a nephew of Knox. Learning of my interest in Pearl Harbor, he brought up the subject of Knox in relation to this question. He said that the Knox family had always believed that the Secretary’s death was hastened by his sense of shame and humiliation over what he had discovered to be the deliberate failure of Washington to warn Short and Kimmel about the coming surprise attack, and the subsequent attempt to make Short and Kimmel the scapegoats for the quasi-criminal neglect by the guilty parties.

Since Knox died on April 28, 1944, he did not live to learn the revelations brought forth in most of the post-Pearl Harbor investigations, but the Naval Intelligence and Communications experts of 1941 knew and resented the failure to warn Short and Kimmel, and Knox may have called them in for questioning. Indeed, all he would have needed to do was to talk to his friend, the distinguished Admiral William H. Standley, about the “kangaroo court” conducted by Justice Owen Roberts, where this disgraceful smearing of Short and Kimmel, especially the latter, got off to a running start. A similar impression was given to me by Admiral Ben Morreell, who was closely associated with Knox and travelled thousands of miles with him between Pearl Harbor and Knox’s death. He assured me that Knox was “clean as a hound’s tooth” with respect to any complicity in blacking out Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, and became increasingly suspicious of Roosevelt’s role in this matter.

Only Stimson, who had been brought into the Cabinet in June, 1940, clearly stood with Roosevelt in strongly favoring war with both Germany and Japan, He had been one of the leaders in the interventionist group in the East from 1937 onward who had urged our entering the European war; but he had also been the outstanding Japanophobe among the top civilian figures in the United States for a decade. How were Roosevelt and Stimson able to steer the country into war in the face of the great strength of non-interventionist sentiment in the country at large?

The year 1941 brought all these confused policies and personal attitudes to a head, partly due to new international developments and partly as a result of the unexpected responses of leading personalities involved, notably Hitler. Although keeping Japan as a martial ace-in-the-hole, Roosevelt started out the year with his interventionist policy mainly centered on Germany, an attitude which was supplemented by strong pressure from Churchill. Hitler was to be provoked into starting war by challenging American unneutral action in convoying supplies to Britain and Russia on the Atlantic, but Hitler refused to rise to the bait as he had earlier declined to do in the case of the Destroyer Deal of 1940 with Britain and the lavish shipment of arms to Britain. By the end of June, 1941> the prospect of provoking Hitler had greatly dimmed and it seemed likely that the most effective way in which to get into the war was to incite Japan to take some action which would inevitably mean war. At this moment, Roosevelt, most appropriately, brought Secretary Stimson into direct action to implement the Japanese policy that the had “sold” to Roosevelt with great ease on January 9, 1933.

Although there is no doubt that after September, 1939, Roosevelt definitely preferred to get into the war directly in Europe, he had always kept Japan as an ace in his sleeve ever since his meeting with Stimson in January, 1933, and the first meeting of his Cabinet in March, 1933, as we have been told by then Postmaster-General James A. Farley. He had secretly built up the American navy, and our only likely naval enemy was Japan. His Quarantine Speech in Chicago in October, 1937, straight Stimson doctrine, emphasized Japan more than Germany. In the winter of 1937-1938, he sent Captain Royall E. Ingersoll to Europe to consider possible American operations with the British in the event that they became involved in a war with Japan. Roosevelt early adopted measures aiding the Chinese in their war with Japan, and there is much evidence that the financial and diplomatic policies of the United States played a very considerable role in bringing about the renewal of war between Japan and China in July, 1937. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 only provided a temporary interlude which distracted Roosevelt from his underlying aggressive program relative to Japan, The Roosevelt-Stimson policies and actions with reference to Japan after June, 1941, that led to the outbreak of war on December 7, 1941, were summarized early in this article and need not be repeated here.

Much has been written on the possible communist influence on Roosevelt’s decision to make war on Japan, but even revisionist historians have concentrated mainly on that exerted by Chiang kai-Shek and Owen Lattimore through pro-communist officials among Roosevelt’s associates at the White House, such as Lauchlin Currie and Alger Hiss, in leading Hull to kick over the modus vivendi and send his ultimatum to Japan on November 26, 1941, It was a far more complicated and far-reaching operation than this, but to deal with it adequately would require much more space than is available here. Moreover, it does not require extensive treatment here, for Roosevelt, Stimson, and Hull did not need any encouragement and support from the Communists in their determination to pressure Japan into war with the United States.

Most basic, perhaps, was the fact that Litvinov sold his doctrine of “collective security” to the Popular Front politicians in Europe, and this was adopted by the American Liberals as the dominant consideration in their pro-war propaganda in the United States. This matter has been treated in detail by Professor James J. Martin in his American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931-1941. The liberal propaganda was most potent in supporting American intervention in the European War until Hitler failed to provide the expected provocation to war on the Atlantic.

In Asia, the predominant motive of the Communists in supporting war against Japan was provided by the fact that Japan was the main bulwark against Communism in the Far East. But Russia left this propagandist operation chiefly in the hands of the Communists of Asia, mainly those in China, since Russia had to move cautiously to avert vigorous Japanese defensive movements against Siberia. The Chinese Communists pressured Chiang kai-Shek to act aggressively against Japan, and they were encouraged by the pro-communist figures in Roosevelt’s entourage in Washington. After England became involved in war in Europe, and especially after Hitler attacked Russia, the latter stepped up its pressure on the Chinese Communists to involve the United States in war with Japan. But it was not until the Russian spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, informed Stalin in mid-October 1941 that Japan would move southward and not molest Siberia, that Russia began in earnest to influence American action against Japan. Prior to Hitler’s attack on Russia on June 22, 1941, the most publicized Soviet attitude in the United States had been anti-interventionist. American Communists sought to line up with the America First organization until they became embarrassing to the latter and its leaders repudiated any communist support, which evaporated after Hitler’s attack. But Russia had never abandoned its previous cautious support of pressure against Japan in the Far East.

The Lauchlin Currie-Owen Lattimore episode was only a dramatic item in this broader campaign of the Communists against Japan in the Far East. Lauchlin Currie, an assistant-President in the White House circle, was a strong pro-communist sympathizer, perhaps a member of the party. Owen Lattimore, who was similarly pro-Communist, but not personally a Communist, occupied the somewhat curious position of American adviser to Chiang kai-Shek in China. When Roosevelt, Hull, and even Stimson, at the insistence of Marshall and Stark, were considering a modus vivendi with Japan to gain time in order better to prepare for a Pacific war, Lattimore sent a strongly worded cablegram to Currie protesting against any such temporary truce with Japan. The cablegram was vigorously supported by Currie and it has been regarded by many historians as constituting the final item which induced Hull to kick over the modus vivendi and send his ultimatum to Japan.

There were other far more basic, communist influences on items with regard to Hull’s ultimatum to Japan which have been overlooked even by many revisionist historians. The most interesting of these is the extent to which the terms of Hull’s ultimatum reflected the views of Harry Dexter White, the pro-communist brains of the Treasury Department, Felix Frankfurter having once observed that Secretary Morgenthau did “not have a brain in his head”.

On November 18, 1941, Morgenthau sent to Hull a memorandum drafted by White setting forth proposed terms that should by presented to Japan by Hull. They were so drastic that it was obvious that Japan would never accept them. Nevertheless, Maxwell Hamilton, the chief of the Far Eastern division of the State Department, read the Morgenthau-White memorandum and said that he found it the “most constructive one which I have yet seen”. He revised it slightly and filed it with Hull, who had this Hamilton revision before him when he drafted his ultimatum of November 26th to Japan. Actually, no less than eight of the ten points in Hull’s ultimatum to Japan embodied the drastic proposals of the Morgenthau-White memorandum.

Despite all this volume of evidence of communist pressure in the Far East for war between the United States and Japan, I remain unconvinced that it exerted any decisive influence upon Roosevelt, who, after all, determined American policy toward Japan. Roosevelt had made up his mind with regard to war with Japan on the basis of his own attitudes and wishes, aided and abetted by Stimson, and he did not need any persuasion or support from Communists, however much he may have welcomed their aggressive propaganda. If he had desired to preserve the modus vivendi he would have had no hesitation in repudiating Hull s action. Hence, it remains my conviction that the contention that Soviet Russia exerted any preponderant influence in pushing the United States into war with Japan must be discarded. This also applies to the belief that Churchill, who was then working hand-in-glove with the Russians, exerted decisive influence on Roosevelt in his pressuring the Japanese into war. Roosevelt was in no way dependent on Churchill’s support; the reverse was the case. The responsibility for the final action in pressing Japan into war was that of Roosevelt, and this must be judged solely on the basis of its wisdom with respect to the national interest of the United States at this time. The apologists for Roosevelt, from Thomas A. Bailey to T. R. Fehrenbach, have contended that our national interest required our entry into the war and justified Roosevelt’s “lying” the country into the conflict to promote our public welfare.

For at least fifteen years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, most revisionist historians still believed that by December 4th or 5th, at the latest, virtually all the top officials in Washington, civilian and military, were convinced that, in the event of war, the Japanese would first attack Pearl Harbor. They based this conclusion chiefly on the whole broad historical background and the traditional naval strategy in the Pacific: the assumption that Japan would never start a war without making her first move an attempt to destroy the American Pacific fleet, wherever it was stationed. This was necessary to protect the Japanese flank before they could safely move into the southwest Pacific and the East Indies or go north to attack Siberia, unless they could be assured of American neutrality, and nothing in Roosevelt’s foreign policy gave the Japanese any reason to expect American neutrality. By mid-summer of 1941 it seemed evident that Roosevelt and Stimson were determined to wreck Japan by either economic pressure, military operations, or both.

These revisionist historians were also familiar with the series of Bomb Plot messages which clearly pinpointed Pearl Harbor as the target of any Japanese surprise attack on the United States. They were also well acquainted with the fact that our Navy had been holding maneuvers for years off Hawaii, long before the Pacific fleet was retained there in the spring of 1940, to discover the nature and prospects of a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the prospect of success for Japan seemed very good indeed, and hence it was taken for granted for years that any evidence of imminent hostilities between the United States and Japan would bring with it prompt action on the part of Washington to keep Pearl Harbor on the alert for a prospective Japanese attack, and ready to anticipate and repel one when it came. When this Japanese action did not take place before December, 1941, it was logically assumed that the top officials in Washington, acquainted with all the evidence that war was at hand, must have been personally prevented from warning Short and Kimmel, and only one man could give such an order and have it obeyed. That person was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Hence, he must have ordered all these top officials not to warn Short and Kimmel until it was too late for them to detect and repel the attack.

We now know that this interpretation needs some qualification, even though, as presented by Admiral Robert A. Theobald and other informed experts, it seemed to be soundly based upon both the factual historical background and sound logical inference. In the first place, any such general order by Roosevelt might have been very difficult to sustain. There were just too many important officials to be restrained by such an order without a considerable possibility that there would be a leak or disobedience somewhere. This is one point on which the views of Admiral Samuel E. Morison, in his article in the Saturday Evening Post, of October 28, 1961, are in my opinion worthy of consideration, although the reasons he gives for it are in part erroneous. It would obviously have been rather risky for Roosevelt. Some of these numerous officials who had to be warned to keep silent might reveal Roosevelt’s order to black out Pearl Harbor, and this would have been disastrous to both Roosevelt’s political career and military plans.

It is only fair, however, to present Commander Hues’ defense of Admiral Theobald’s contention that Roosevelt could have ordered that Short, Bloch and Kimmel were not to be warned of the threat to Pearl Harbor without any great personal risk of exposure. The so-called chain-of-command procedure would have made this possible without too much risk. Roosevelt did not have to reach all of his important subordinates personally. The Joint Board of Command was the highest military authority in the land, except for the President. It was made up exclusively of the armed forces, with Marshall and Stark at its head. Even the Secretaries of War and the Navy were not members and had no voice in the deliberations of the Joint Board, although as a matter of routine its reports to the President were submitted through the Secretaries and the latter could add such comments as they wished to make for what value they might have from the military point of view. No person except Roosevelt had any jurisdiction over the Joint Board. Consequently, it is not at all difficult to discern how Roosevelt could control the situation with no great difficulty or risk; from the Joint Board on down it was solely a matter of the chain-of-command. Certainly, there might be some minor leaks and some disobedience, as in the “contact Rochefort” message in connection with Winds Execute, the “October (1941) revolution” in the Office of Naval Intelligence, and in the Sadtler-Akin “pipeline” arrangement, not to mention the efforts of Sadtler, Bratton and McCollum to get past the Marshall barrier. Roosevelt was well covered up because he would almost never place any orders in writing—they were nearly invariably verbal.

At any rate, Roosevelt appears to have kept Hawaii in the dark about the threat to Pearl Harbor without any blackout orders of which we have any definite evidence save those to Marshall, Arnold and Stark, and then not until December 4th.

Finally, and most important, it appears that Roosevelt may not have needed to order many of his leading subordinates against warning Short and Kimmel. These top officials seem to have become unduly absorbed by the fact that all the known Japanese military movements, and these were on a grand scale and rather conspicuously displayed, indicated that Japanese task forces were moving down into the southwest Pacific and the East Indies, and there were no known Japanese fleet movements that appeared to threaten Pearl Harbor. Some writers believe that this virtual parading of Japanese power moving southward was in part deliberately designed to distract attention from Pearl Harbor. This is doubtful. The extensive movement southward was a basic part of the campaign connected with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and had to be timed accordingly.

To this, and a very important consideration, was added the concentration of the top brass naval authorities on the strategic implications of the ABCD agreement and the Pacific War Plans, Rainbow 5 (WPL 46), drawn up in April, 1941, and approved verbally by Roosevelt in May and June, which envisaged the launching of the first Japanese attacks in the Far East. The extensive Japanese task force movements southward in November, 1941 appeared to confirm this assumption. The top naval officers, Stark and Turner, had warned that the economic strangulation of Japan in late July would certainly mean that Japan would have to move southward to get, by force if necessary, the indispensable vital supplies that were denied to her by the July embargo imposed by the United States, Britain and Holland. Both the navy and the army leaders were fully aware that Rainbow 5 (WPL 46) provided that the United States would make war on Japan if the latter went too far in this quest, even if there was no Japanese attack on American forces or territory.

Very significant evidence of this concentration on the Far East, especially by the Navy, on the eve of Pearl Harbor is provided by Admiral Beatty, the aide of Secretary Knox in 1941. He recalls that, at the last meeting of the top officers of the Navy with Knox on the afternoon of December 6th, Knox inquired as to whether the Japanese were about to attack the United States. Turner, who, as usual, spoke for Stark, answered rather dogmatically in the negative, and went on to say that he believed Japan would first strike the British in the Far East. Beatty asserts that there was no dissenting voice from any of the navy officers present, from Stark down. Perhaps more conclusive as evidence of the shift of interest and concern from Pearl Harbor to the Far East is provided by the agenda and discussions of Roosevelt’s “War Cabinet”, made up of Roosevelt, Stimson, Knox, Marshall and Stark, on November 28th, and of the final conference of Stimson, Knox and Hull on the forenoon of December 7th. In both cases the main subject and problems discussed were the movements of Japanese forces to the southwest Pacific, the obligations of the United States under ABCD and Rainbow 5 to check these by war, if necessary, and the question as to whether the country would unite to support a war which had not been started by an attack on American territory or forces.

It is desirable to point out, however, that the newer Revisionism on Pearl Harbor, which is based on the assumption that most of the top civilian and military authorities in Washington expected that the Japanese would almost surely begin their aggressive action in the Far East, also needs qualification, just as does the older view that Roosevelt specifically ordered them all not to send any warnings to Pearl Harbor.

This newer interpretation, stressing the Far Eastern fixation of most top Washington officials from early November to the Pearl Harbor attack, does not account for the failure to supply Short, Bloch, and Kimmel with the planes and other equipment which they had requested early in 1941 to enable them to carry out the necessary reconnaissance to detect and repel any Japanese attack; the failure in the summer of 1941 to provide Pearl Harbor with a Purple machine or even to assign Commander Rochefort and his large and capable cryptanalytical group the task of intercepting, decoding, and reading the other Japanese diplomatic messages in J-19 and PA-K2; the blacking out of Short after the economic strangulation of Japan in July and of Kimmel after Argentia with respect to the nature of American negotiations with Japan; or the reasons why Stark and Turner, as well as the responsible army officials, refused to permit the Bomb Plot messages to be sent to Pearl Harbor in October 1941, and later on.

Their concentration on the Far East may account for the attitude and operations of the top echelons in the Army and Navy after the extensive ship movements of the Japanese into this area in November, 1941, but it fails to provide an adequate explanation of the obvious efforts to keep Short and Kimmel from getting the essential information available in Washington long before that time or of sending them bogus “warnings” on November 27th.

Pending a better explanation, which has never been provided by Roosevelt’s defenders, it must be assumed that this long continued and unbroken effort to keep Short and Kimmel in the dark as to the tense diplomatic situation between the United States and Japan was keyed to Roosevelt’s persistent recognition that he must have an attack by Japan, once it became rather clear that Hitler would not rise to the provocative bait provided by American convoying on the Atlantic. The situation surely calls for something more fundamental than the trivial and impersonal “noise”, which is offered by Roberta Wohlstetter in her defense of Roosevelt and his bellicose collaborators in Washington.

As late as December 1st, it is very possible that Roosevelt himself feared lest Japanese aggressive action might start in the southwest Pacific and the East Indies and not provide any prior and direct attack on the United States. On that date, he sent a note to Admiral Hart at Manila ordering three “small vessels” to be fitted out at Manila, each manned by Filipino sailors, commanded by an American naval officer, flying the American flag, and carrying a machine gun and a visible cannon. They were to be sent out to specified positions where they could be fired upon by the Japanese task forces that were moving southward. This would give him the attack on American ships that he vitally needed to get the United States into the war by the back door of Japan, unite the country behind him, and also save the Pearl Harbor fleet if the Japanese attacked this bait in the Far East before Nagumo reached Pearl Harbor.

The Democratic platform of 1940 had declared that the United States would not enter the war unless attacked. The anti-interventionist sentiment in the United States was so overwhelming in 1940 that, during the campaign of that year, Roosevelt thought it necessary repeatedly and vigorously to assure the American public that he would avoid war, culminating in his famous speech in Boston on October 30, 1940, in which he told American mothers and fathers, “again and again and again” that their sons would not be sent into any foreign war.

But on the heels of his victory in the election of 1940, Roosevelt, as noted earlier, started military conferences with the British which, in April 1941, ended at Singapore with the ADB agreement, to include the Dutch. It was all implemented by ABCD and Rainbow 5, which specified that if the Japanese went beyond a certain arbitrary line in the southwest Pacific--100°E and 10°N-- and even threatened the British and Dutch possessions there, the United States would enter the war against Japan even if American territory, forces and flag were not attacked by the Japanese. Roosevelt actually desired, above all, to avoid having to enter the war in this manner. If this happened, he would have to reveal that he had deceived the American public in his campaign promises and would not have anything like a united country behind him.

This was obviously what induced Roosevelt to order the three “small vessels” to move out from Manila into the path of the Japanese task forces as they sailed southward. Aside from a futile trip by the dispatch ship, Isabel, which was not even repainted, only one of the “small vessels” had left Manila harbor before the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor, and this ship, the little schooner Lanikai, was not able to proceed beyond Manila harbor into the path of the Japanese task forces before the attack on Pearl Harbor. This so-called Cockleshell ship stratagem of the three “small vessels”, first noted among revisionist writers by Dr. Frederic R. Sanborn in his Design for War (1951) has been vividly described by Admiral Kemp Tolley, commander of the Lanikai, the second ship that was ready to leave as “bait” for the Japanese, in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings of September, 1962, and October 1963.

Commander Hiles, a close and well-informed student of the Pearl Harbor episode, believes that, although Roosevelt was in all probability convinced before December 1st that the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor, he devised the three “small vessels” scheme to get a prior attack which would start the war in a politically satisfactory manner without sacrificing the Pearl Harbor fleet. This is undoubtedly true, but if this was his motive Roosevelt thought up the plan some days too late. The Japanese hit Pearl Harbor before even one of the three “small vessels” could get fired on. The order to equip and dispatch them should at the latest have been sent coincidental with Hull’s ultimatum on November 26th. Indeed, it should have been sent by November 5th, when it was evident that the Japanese proposals for settling American-Japanese relations peacefully which were to be offered in November were the final Japanese gesture that could preserve peace, and Roosevelt knew that the situation built up by Stimson, Hull and himself precluded the possibility of accepting any Japanese proposals short of a virtual surrender. The memory of the sinking of the Panay on December 12, 1937, and the bellicose excitement caused by the accidental attack on one small American vessel should have inspired an order identical with that he sent to Admiral Hart on December 1, 1941. Roosevelt should not have needed the report on the Japanese hostility to the gunboats passing Formosa on November 29th and 30th to inspire the note to Hart.

Secretary Henry Morgenthau tells of a conversation with Roosevelt as late as the morning of December 3rd in which the latter seemed frustrated, despairing of any Japanese attack, and feared that he and Churchill might have to plan and strike the first blow, an emergency which Roosevelt desperately wished to avoid for political reasons, as Stimson has revealed in his Diary and was stipulated in the messages to Short on November 27th and to Kimmel on November 29th.

On December 4th, everything seemed changed. Roosevelt appeared assured that the Japanese had decided to attack Pearl Harbor as their first stroke, and he now seemed convinced that all possible emphasis and effort in Washington must be placed on keeping Short and Kimmel from being warned of an impending attack, although he was still hoping for an attack on one of the three “small vessels” before the Japanese could reach Pearl Harbor.

There is no definitive documentary evidence which has thus far been revealed and fully proves that Roosevelt had been explicitly informed by December 4th that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor as the first act of war. There may be none until the voluminous secret correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill, which began in September, 1939, is opened to reputable investigators. Even in this event, it is likely that so incriminating a document will have been removed from any American copy of the files, following the pattern of the removal of so much incriminating material from the American Army and Navy files dealing with Pearl Harbor.

There are three reputable reports from British intelligence in the Far East that, between November 30th and December 7th, London was informed that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th. If these reports, or any one of them, are accurate, then there is little doubt that Churchill would have passed the information on to Roosevelt. General Bonner Fellers, who was in Army Intelligence in the Near East and located at Cairo, has given me personally and by letter the following relevant information. Here, quoting from his letter of March 6th, 1967:

About 10:00 A.M., Saturday, December 6, 1941, I walked into the Royal Air Force Headquarters in Cairo. The Air Marshal who was then in command of the RAF Middle East sat at his desk. Immediately, he opened with: “Bonner, you will be at war within 24 hours.” He continued: “We . . . have a secret signal Japan will strike the U. S. in 24 hours.” . . . I had been in Egypt for about fifteen months. During that time no word whatsoever had been sent to me from G-2 in Washington that Japanese-American relations were strained.

In the confession of the Russian spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, he stated that in October, 1941, he had informed Stalin that the Japanese intended to attack Pearl Harbor within sixty days. Stalin may well have passed this on to Roosevelt in return for Sumner Welles’ helpful gesture in informing him of Hitler’s plan to attack Russia. One of the last things that Stalin would have wished to have happen at this time in the Far East was the destruction of the American Pacific fleet. Most important of all is the fact that a very prominent American Army Intelligence officer in service in the Far East during 1941, whose name I am not yet free to mention, had gained knowledge of the Yamamoto plan to send a task force to attack Pearl Harbor and sent three separate messages to Washington revealing this information, and at least two of these reached the Army files well before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Moreover, as will be clear later on when we deal with the Merle-Smith message, it is entirely possible that Roosevelt could have read this on the evening of December 4th, Washington time, and known that the United States was already involved in war because the Dutch had implemented ABCD and Rainbow 5 (A-2) on December 3rd, Washington time. The message must have been available in Washington by the 5th. Perhaps even more instructive and revealing is the fact that some time before 5:30 P.M. on December 4th, Roosevelt had discussed the Far Eastern situation with Stark and had approved Stark’s informing London and the Dutch that Roosevelt was in favor of warning Japan that if its forces crossed the magic line in the southwest Pacific this would be regarded as a hostile act and Japan would be attacked by the ABCD powers. Roosevelt was thus approving the ABCD (ABD) agreement more than 24 hours before Halifax approached Hull, and he should have been well prepared for the contents of the Merle-Smith message.

Another unimpeachable item of information which indicates that Roosevelt was in all probability informed by December 4th that the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th has not previously been presented, but, fortunately, it has neither been destroyed nor suppressed. This is an entry in the History of the Sacramento Air Service Command for December 6, 1941. This History, declassified in 1948, had been casually lying around for some time but had not been carefully examined even by revisionist historians. A copy was noticed by a revisionist student who was working for his master’s degree at Indiana University on the subject of logistic failures at Pearl Harbor. Having plenty of money, he had travelled about looking for sources. When visiting the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, Ohio, he found the History of the Sacramento Air Service Command available for inspection by interested parties admitted to the Base. Reading the entry for December 6, 1941, he was immediately impressed with its significance and sent it to Commander Hiles, who was assisting him in locating source-material for his study. Hiles has been the first revisionist expert to develop the full significance of this material.

General Henry H. Arnold was the chief of the Army Air Corps and one of Marshall’s deputy chiefs-of-staff. Few men could have been more vitally needed at this critical time in Washington, the center of activities in getting ready for the war with Japan which had been regarded as imminent ever since Hull sent his ultimatum on November 26th. Its approach was amplified and confirmed by the codes destruction intercepts of December 1st and 2nd and by the Winds Execute intercept of December 4th, the latter revealing that when war came Japan would attack the United States and Britain, and not Russia. Against this background, it is obvious that Arnold could have been spared from Washington only if he were to carry out an assignment of the utmost confidential and strategic significance in the face of a Japanese attack at any moment. On December 5th, Marshall ordered Arnold to make a transcontinental trip to Hamilton Airfield in California.

Arnold’s mission was ostensibly to expedite the departure of a small squadron of some twelve B-17 bombers from Hamilton Airfield to the Philippines via Hawaii, and to repeat orders concerning the continuation of reconnaissance while en route over Japanese mandated islands in the mid-Pacific. This assignment surely did not justify a long trip by an officer of Arnold’s rank, experience and ability, even if there had been no crisis in Japanese-American relations and he had all the time in the world. It was something that could have been executed by any experienced captain, major or colonel in the Air Force at Washington. There was nothing complicated or unusual about it, since this was by no means the first time that a squadron of B-17 bombers had been sent to the Philippines via Hawaii and had photographed the Japanese islands. It does not seem reasonable, or even credible, that such a lofty and capable a military figure as General Arnold would have been sent from Washington to carry out so relatively trifling a mission as watching a few bombing planes depart from the Pacific Coast, especially when it was assumed that the first Japanese moves in the approaching hostilities would be made in the air and require Arnold’s full attention at Washington. Hence, we are compelled to look for the actual reason behind the Arnold mission.

It so happened that December 4th was the day on which the Chicago Tribune published the implications of Rainbow 5, which fully proved that Roosevelt had been planning war over many months, if necessary without any attack on American forces, while at the same time he was assuring the American people that all his actions were designed to keep the United States out of war. Naturally, this sensational exposure created great excitement in Washington, and Roosevelt ordered Marshall to try to locate the source of this embarrassing leak.

After the war, it was revealed that it was an emissary from General Arnold’s office who facilitated the leak of Rainbow 5 to Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who, in turn, showed it to the Washington representative of the Tribune. all three of them patriotically motivated by the hope of forcing more adequate attention to the needs of the Army Air Corps if the United States was to become engaged in a farflung Pacific war. Some writers, working mainly on hindsight, have alleged that Marshall wished to get Arnold out of Washington for the moment as soon as possible, lest his relation to the “leak” be discovered. I personally doubt this explanation, although Marshall was feverishly active in searching for the sources of the leak, and Colonel Deane was working for him on this subject when he saw Marshall at his office in the Old Munitions Building about 10:00 on the morning of December 7th.

Whatever the basis of Arnold’s mission, it had to be one of a secret, serious and responsible nature, commensurate with Arnold’s rank, distinction and ability. The account of what Arnold actually did when he was on the coast provides the soundest explanation of his mission and it rests on facts that cannot be refuted. They are the following:

The same message that had been sent to General Short on November 27th, ordering action at Hawaii to prevent local sabotage had also been sent to the Army headquarters on the Pacific Coast at the Presidio in San Francisco. Accordingly, appropriate steps had been taken at the McClellan airfield and the planes had been bunched there to safeguard them against local sabotage. Presumably, they were also bunched at the Hamilton airfield, but neither Arnold nor the Sacramento History mentions this matter. As the entry in the History of the Sacramento Air Service Command for December 6th puts it: “It looked like all the planes on the Pacific coast were at McClellan field.” General Arnold “brought word of the imminence of war, expressed stern disapproval of the planes being huddled together and ordered them dispersed. “This was done at once and as rapidly as possible, despite heavy rain and special local difficulties at the moment. There were no revetments, so the planes had to be flown to other airfields.

This dispersal of the planes was an order that would not have been accepted or obeyed if given by a junior officer however capable and well informed. It superseded the Washington order of November 27th to the Hawaii air command in which Arnold had participated and had supplemented by later directions on how to assure full protection against local sabotage.

The action taken by Arnold can only be explained on the ground that Marshall and Arnold had learned through December 4th that the Japanese were planning to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Fearing an attack on the Pacific coast, as well, they decided to order the dispersal of the planes that had been bunched there in accordance with the orders of November 27th and 28th. Marshall and Arnold did not dare to order the dispersal of Short’s planes at Hawaii, although Hawaii is 2500 miles closer to Japan than California, and hence far more vulnerable to a Japanese air attack, but they decided to take a chance on alerting the Air Force on the Pacific coast. Both Marshall and Arnold were well known for their fear of an attack there.

In other words, Marshall and Arnold were greatly alarmed over the information that the Japanese would attack at Pearl Harbor on the 7th. While their hands were tied with respect to alerting Short and Martin at Hawaii, they did have momentary freedom of action on the Pacific coast and could surreptitiously alert McClellan airfield without creating any great excitement or publicity. In any event, by the next morning any possible adverse reaction to alerting the Air Command in California would be rendered redundant by the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is instructive to note that nowhere in his testimony about his trip to California did Arnold mention actually visiting McClellan airfield, which indicates that he wished to leave this visit in obscurity for obvious reasons. Moreover, he made it a surprise visit, thus avoiding the normal honors and publicity attending a visit by the head of the Air Corps in Washington.

This would seem to be the only rational and valid explanation of Arnold’s mission to California on the eve of Pearl Harbor; the expediting of planes to Hawaii and the Far East was only the excuse or coverup. Otherwise, we face the double paradox of the century for Roosevelt’s defenders to explain: (1) pulling Arnold out of Washington during the two most critical days of the whole crisis for a perfunctory and routine operation, and (2) keeping Short’s planes bunched in Hawaii, while dispersing the planes in California. The Arnold mission and action is surely one of the best proofs which we shall have that Roosevelt had advance knowledge that the Japanese planned to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7th until the time comes when we can produce absolute documentation of this fact.

One can well imagine Arnold’s feelings as he sent off the B-17’s to Hawaii, unwarned that they might in all probability be heading for destruction the next morning. Their guns were unfit for use and there was no ammunition for them, the latter having been dispensed with to provide more room for fuel. Having been sent to California ostensibly to dispatch these planes, not even Arnold dared to restrain them and cancel their flight. His emotions must have been even deeper when he thought of Short’s huddled planes, which would also be destroyed on the ground by Japanese bombers the next morning, and of Kimmel’s battleships that would actually provide sitting-ducks for the Japanese bombing and torpedo planes, but he did not dare to alert Short, Martin, Bloch and Kimmel as to their impending fate.

That Arnold gave the officers at the Sacramento Air Service Command the definite impression that war was right at hand is evident from the statement in the History that: “When word came on December 7th, 1941, that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor it did not cause any surprise!”

I shall only mention in passing a possibly significant slip of the tongue on the part of Roosevelt at an important meeting of Roosevelt, Hull, Stimson, Knox, Marshall and Stark at noon on November 25th, which has attracted the interest of some revisionist scholars. Roosevelt observed: that the United States might be attacked “perhaps next Monday for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning.” One revisionist critic has queried: “Why did he say ‘Monday’, which is Sunday in the United States? A dispatch from the Orient from any one except our military or diplomatic services normally used the Far East date rather than ours. Somehow, I just cannot believe that Roosevelt would even have said Monday unless it slipped out inadvertently as a result of his having read some warning message from the Far East.” I am not inclined to overplay this item, and will leave it merely with the suggestion that Roosevelt’s defenders give a better explanation for his mentioning “Monday” rather than “Sunday”. This is something that had long aroused my curiosity.

Many revisionist historians now regard the above material as adequate to demonstrate that Roosevelt must have received impressive and precise information by December 4th that Japan was planning to attack Pearl Harbor as the first act of war. Nevertheless, it is probably best to recognize the plausibility and relevance of this assumption but to depend more upon circumstantial evidence, based chiefly on the trend of events from the 4th to the 7th which has now been presented in detail. This is actually overwhelming, while the circumstantial evidence—and there is no other evidence—supporting the contention that even after December 4th Roosevelt still did not expect an attack on Pearl Harbor is extremely fragile and unconvincing, as we shall now indicate.

One argument for Roosevelt’s ignorance of an impending attack is that, as a lover of ships and especially our naval ships, he would never have sacrificed our Pacific fleet to insure his needed attack. But he could have known or seen to it by December 5th that the carriers, the heavy cruisers, and most of the destroyers and pursuit planes had been sent out of Pearl Harbor, leaving mainly the battleships, which were chiefly of sentimental concern in the light of contemporary methods of naval warfare. This had been done as a result of Stark’s order to Kimmel on November 27th. When Roosevelt was trying to “sell” his idea of a long patrol line, rather than a double line, to the Orient, he did not seem disturbed about the prospect of losing even a few cruisers. He wanted to see them “popping up here and there” to fool the Japanese. He may have loved ships but he loved politics and his own political ambitions far more.

Even less plausible is the contention that Roosevelt would not have sacrificed the lives of thousands of American sailors, soldiers and marines to obtain the attack. He was then playing for high and crucial political stakes in which a few dreadnaughts or a few thousand human lives were hardly a consideration to override policy, however regrettable their loss. Roosevelt’s program was primarily political rather than military or humanitarian. He surely knew that the war into which he was seeking to put the United States would cost millions of lives. Moreover, it is well established that Roosevelt did not anticipate as great destruction of ships and life as the Japanese bombers actually wrought. As Secretary Knox observed after he visited Roosevelt in the White House immediately following the news of the attack: “He expected to get hit but did not expect to get hurt.” There can be little doubt that the Cockleship plan of December 1st was designed to get the indispensable attack by a method which would precede the Pearl Harbor attack, avert the latter, and save the Pacific fleet and American lives.

It is maintained that Roosevelt could have had his Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor without its being a surprise and the forces of Short and Kimmel could have been alerted as to the prospective attack and repelled it with no serious losses. This fantastic suggestion runs counter to all the well-known facts. Walter Lord and Gordon W. Prange, the main writers on this subject, have shown with impressive evidence that Admiral Nagumo would have been ordered to turn back if there was any impressive evidence that Pearl Harbor had been fully alerted to the prospect of an attack, even after the order of December 5th to “climb Mount Niitaka.” Of course, we do not need the testimony of Lord and Prange for these facts are fully supported by the available official documents. There could not have been any Japanese task-force attack on Pearl Harbor unless it was a surprise attack.

Finally, there is the fact that Roosevelt sent a message to the Japanese Emperor on the night of December 6th, after he knew that the negative reply to Hull was coming in, suggesting a peaceful settlement, but even Hull has admitted that this was only sent “for the record” after it was too late. Roosevelt had stressed this point of having a good formal record to Harry Hopkins when Lieutenant Schulz brought to him, on the evening of December 6th about 9:30, the detailed Japanese reply to Hull, which everybody in top Washington circles had assumed would be the moment when Japan would attack this country. Moreover, as will be indicated later, on the afternoon of the 6th Roosevelt had approved the implementation of Rainbow 5 by the Dutch and British, which meant that we were already at war with Japan, actually had been since December 3rd, Washington time when the Dutch invoked Rainbow 5 (A-2).

There is an alternative cogent, logical and completely factual explanation of Roosevelt’s decision on December 4th to concentrate on preventing any warnings from being sent to Short and Kimmel. This does not rest upon circumstantial evidence or any assumption that Roosevelt must have received precise information by that time that Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor.

Through the three “small vessels” stratagem he had done all that he could to secure his indispensable attack in the Far East. There was nothing left here except to wait and hope that one of the “small vessels” would be fired on. This left Pearl Harbor as the only other remotely probable place that would invite and be vulnerable to a surprise Japanese attack. Hence, nothing should be allowed to obstruct or divert this final crucial necessity. There is no doubt that he would have preferred a prior attack on one of the three “small vessels” and thus save the Pearl Harbor battleships. He hoped for this until the morning of December 7th.

It is my firm personal opinion that this is the one unassailable and impregnable explanation of Roosevelt’s action on December 4th for revisionist historians to accept prior to published documentary evidence that Roosevelt had been definitely and personally informed of an imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This is sound and true, even though the circumstantial evidence of his having received such information is overwhelmingly more convincing than the Blackout and Blurout contention that he was surprised and shocked by the attack at Pearl Harbor, at least beyond the shock over the actual extent of the devastation produced by the attack. By December 4th he had brought the country to the brink of war. Its outbreak had to come through an attack on American forces if he was to have a united country behind the war effort. The Far East, via the three “small vessels”, and Pearl Harbor were the only places that remained at which he could reasonably expect a surprise attack. The Philippines, as has been indicated, had been so well informed of Japanese intentions and operations through the Sadtler-Akin pipeline and their own intercepts that MacArthur could hardly have been surprised by hearing of immediate Japanese aggression. Moreover, Admiral Hart’s Asiatic Fleet was so small that to destroy it would not have furnished much protection for the extensive movements that the Japanese had planned in the Pacific, once the war had started. Kimmel’s powerful Pacific fleet would have remained intact.

Now that it has been shown that apparently few top officials in Washington except Roosevelt, Marshall and Arnold—and possibly Stark after the 4th—expected that the Japanese would first attack at Pearl Harbor, and that Roosevelt may not have ordered all the top brass to refrain from warning Short and Kimmel, we may indicate how he did prevent any warning from being sent to Short and Kimmel between December 4th and 7th.

Roosevelt first passed on his logical conclusions or specific information relative to the impending attack on Pearl Harbor to Generals Marshall and Arnold on the 4th of December. Marshall had very special reasons for being subservient and trustworthy to Roosevelt. The latter, influenced by Mrs. Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, had rescued Marshall from obscurity after his conspicuous failure in the armed command of the famous Eighth Regiment, and MacArthur had relegated him to the post of an instructor of the National Guard in Illinois. Roosevelt promoted Marshall to be full general over some thirty-four superior officers, and even made him Chief-of-Staff of the Army. There is no doubt that Marshall also greatly admired Roosevelt personally and, as the events of December 4-7 demonstrated, put his loyalty to the President above his loyalty to the military services and his country.

Nothing else could account for Marshall’s strange behavior from December 4th to 7th, right down to his delayed sending of the “too-little-and-too-late” message to Short at 11:50 A.M. on the 7th, which we have already described. Neither Marshall nor Stark personally wished the United States to go to war with Japan in 1941 because they did not feel we were prepared to wage a large-scale Pacific war, to say nothing of a two-front war in Europe and the Pacific. They so reported on November 5th. They favored the modus vivendi of late November which Roosevelt and Hull kicked over, followed by Hull’s sending an ultimatum to Japan on the 26th. There is no reasonable doubt that if Marshall had been left to his own convictions and impulses he would have sent Short a real warning at least as early as November 27th, elaborated it repeatedly, and been in his office on the afternoon and night of the 6th of December conferring with Short, if this had been needed. Obviously it would not have been needed to deal with any immediate attack on Pearl Harbor if Short had actually been warned on the 27th. Even the Army Pearl Harbor Board stated that a clear and definite warning to Short on November 27th, indicating the threat of an immediate Japanese movement against Pearl Harbor, would have led to action by Short which would have averted the attack.

As Admiral McCollum and others have revealed, Roosevelt quietly directed on December 4th that no warning communications could be sent to Pearl Harbor unless cleared by Marshall, which bottled up Army Intelligence and the Signal Corps. Marshall immediately informed Stark of this directive, thus preventing any leak to Pearl Harbor through the Navy. This precluded sending Short or Kimmel the Winds Execute message which was received on the 4th and was the most important and decisive intercept that had been received indicating immediate war with Japan, as well as all later evidence of an attack on Pearl Harbor.

Whether Roosevelt personally emphasized to Stark this arrangement to black out Pearl Harbor before the night of the 6th is uncertain. When the news of the arrival of the Japanese reply to Hull was brought to him about 9:30 on the evening of the 6th, Roosevelt called Stark on the telephone, found that he was out for the evening at the theater, and left word that Stark was to call him on his return, which Stark did.

The next morning, when Noyes, McCollum and Wilkinson showed Stark the “Time of Delivery” message, and indicated to him that this probably meant a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor about 7:30 A.M. Pearl Harbor time, Stark called Roosevelt, rather than Kimmel, and thereafter showed no interest in contacting Kimmel, even ignoring the pleas of Noyes, McCollum and Wilkinson for a separate warning message to Kimmel. After discussing with Marshall the desirable content of the message to be sent to Short—the “too-little-too-late” farce—Stark only suggested, as a sort of afterthought, that this also be handed on to Kimmel by Short.

We have already dealt with Marshall’s strange behavior from December 4th to 7th and especially on the 6th and 7th. How much influence he had on the frustration and killing of McCollum’s clear message of precise warning to Kimmel on the 4th by Stark and Turner is not known. As reported in the officially accepted legend, on the afternoon of the 6th, as soon as he learned that the Japanese reply to Hull’s ultimatum would be coming in, which the Pilot Message clearly indicated meant immediate war, Marshall abruptly left his office and hid out somewhere, which he could not for a time remember but later on reported to be his official quarters. On the morning of December 7th, the Washington-Times-Herald published an item stating that Marshall attended a banquet of alumni of the Virginia Military Institute on the evening of the 6th, but this has never been confirmed or denied. Marshall did not appear again officially until Sunday morning, whether some time around 9:00 at Stark’s office, which seems most likely, or not until 11:25 at his own office. According to normal military procedure he should have been in his office all of Saturday afternoon and most of the night further informing Short and conferring about protecting Pearl Harbor.

If we accept the official legend of Marshall’s activities on December 6th and 7th, Japan might have attacked the Pearl Harbor fleet on the afternoon or night of the 6th and Marshall would have known nothing about it until he came out of hiding late the next morning. When he did, he only sent Short at 11:50 the brief, vague, ambiguous and equivocal “too-little-and-too-late” message, which was in no sense any warning that war was about to start and, least of all, that the Japanese would probably attack Pearl Harbor in about an hour. It gave Short little or no information that he did not already have, except for the Time of Delivery message, and Marshall deceived Short in withholding the significance he had attached to this when reading it in his office. Finally, he refused to use three rapid means that he had available to send his already “too-late” message to Short, but let it be sent by Western Union to San Francisco, and R.C.A. from San Francisco to Fort Shafter—not even marked urgent—with the result that it did not reach Short until the Japanese planes had returned to their carriers after the attack. The delay in sending the message and Marshall’s refusal to use a rapid method of transmitting it can only be explained as due to a desire to have it arrive too late for Short to take any action that might frighten off the Japanese attack. If we accept the more probable version, earlier described, that the message to be sent to Short had been agreed upon during Marshall’s conference in Stark’s office before 10:00 on the morning of the 7th, then the delay in sending it until 11:50 becomes all the more significant and unpardonable, to indulge in understatement.

Marshall saw to it that no warnings were sent to Pearl Harbor between the 4th and the 7th. The only alleged attempt to do so came on the night of the 6th, when Knox has asserted that he made a serious effort to send a clear and definite warning to Kimmel and to Admiral Hart, commander of the Asiatic fleet at Manila. This never arrived at Pearl Harbor or Manila and Knox could not find any record of what happened to it in Washington. Only Marshall had the authority to kill it if Knox actually ordered such a message to be sent of which there is some doubt.

As conduct on the part of a trained soldier, assumedly dominated by the ideals and professional stereotypes of those high in his profession, and having the supreme military responsibility for the protection of his country, it would seem both fair and reasonable to contend that Marshall’s conduct can be explained on only three grounds: mental defect, deliberately treasonable behavior, or carried out under orders from President Roosevelt. The last seems the only plausible and sensible interpretation. One thing is certain: however much Marshall was dominated and controlled by Roosevelt, his behavior during the brief period between December 4th and 7th perfectly performed the function of keeping Short and Kimmel in the dark about the danger of Japanese attack until the Japanese bombers appeared over the Pacific fleet. And this was all achieved with a minimum of risk and exertion on the part of Roosevelt. He only needed to give his blackout order directly to Marshall.

While we are on or near that subject, it is desirable to point out that altogether too much emphasis has been laid by both the defenders of Roosevelt and his “Day of Infamy” rhetoric and the revisionist critics on the alleged significance of possible “last minute” warnings late on the night of the 6th or the morning of the 7th, whether sent or unsent.

Unless the Japanese task force could have been frightened back more easily than is likely, even in the light of its jittery and timid commander, Admiral Nagumo, any warnings sent immediately after the first thirteen points of the Japanese reply to Hull’s ultimatum had been received, decoded and delivered before midnight of the 6th might not have made any great difference with respect to Nagumo’s carrying through the attack. The results could have been even more disastrous to the Pacific fleet than it turned out to be. As Admiral Nimitz and others have suggested, there might have been just time enough to get the ships out of port and on the ocean, in which case they might have been sunk in deep water and could not have been raised, salvaged and restored for action. There would have been plenty of Japanese planes available for a supplementary attack on the Army installations, machine shops, supplies and most important of all, the oil supplies, still above ground, which would have been far more of a disaster to the United States than the destruction of the battleship fleet.

There is little doubt that Short, Martin and Bellinger could have got many of their planes distributed, fueled, and ready for battle and some in the air for reconnaissance, probably only to be shot down by the greatly superior air force on the six Japanese carriers. The unarmed B-17 bombers that came in on the morning of the 7th, some of them only to be immediately destroyed or damaged, might have been turned back. There is little doubt that greater damage could have been inflicted on the attacking Japanese bombers than took place in the actual attack, but it is doubtful if the devastation wrought by them would have been greatly lessened.

If a warning had been sent to Short and Kimmel when the Pilot Message had been decoded and read and the Kita message had been processed by mid-afternoon of the 6th, it might have been a quite different story. Defensive movements at Hawaii connected with an alert put in operation during the afternoon of the 6th might have caused the Japanese task force to abandon their bombing mission and turn back or to face an empty harbor. That would have made a great difference in the fate of the ships at Pearl Harbor. In this case, Kimmel could have put to sea with all his available ships, joined Halsey who was returning from Wake, linked up as soon as possible with Newton and Brown, and through a surprise attack perhaps have inflicted a serious surprise blow on at least a part of the returning Japanese task force whose location could have been rather precisely determined by Commander Rochefort at Pearl Harbor. Nagumo could have had no knowledge of the location of Kimmel’s reorganized fleet. In any event, Nagumo’s bombers would have found an empty harbor at Pearl Harbor and all of Kimmel’s warships out of sight beyond the horizon.

When it comes to later warnings that could have been given, but were not, such as Knox’s mysterious alleged message to Kimmel and Hart late on the night of the 6th, a warning to Kimmel by Stark shortly after 9:00 on the morning of the 7th, when Noyes, McCollum and Wilkinson explained to him the significance of the Time of Delivery message, and Marshall’s “too-little-and-too-late” message at 11:50, or even a clear and forthright one by Marshall at least two hours earlier, there is only a gambling chance that the disaster to the Pacific fleet would have been greatly lessened. As pointed out above it would have been worse had the ships been sunk in the deep Pacific beyond hope of salvage and repair. The failure to get off these last minute warnings promptly, or not at all, may have great significance for the historian and the moralist but they are far less important strategically.

It is only fair, however, to present here an informed critique by Commander Hiles of my opinions on the probable results of a warning if sent by Stark to Kimmel even as late as 9:30 A.M. on the morning of the 7th, when Stark was made to realize that the Time of Delivery message implied the probability of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at around 7:30 A.M. Pearl Harbor time. Actually, the bombers did not arrive until about 7:50. If, as McCollum maintains, Marshall was also in Stark’s office between 9:00 and 10:00 on the morning of the 7th and they had there decided to send a real warning to Short, this could have been sent by 10:00 A.M. instead of 11:50. Hiles admits that even a clear warning sent at 11:50 by the most rapid method, would not have made possible an effective averting of the Japanese attack, although both Short and Kimmel would have had time to get some of their anti-aircraft armament in shape for action and Short might have got more of his planes off the ground by the time the Japanese bombers arrived, thus increasing the damage to the Japanese. But let us stick to the approximately four hours that Short and Kimmel would have had in which to take action if Stark and/or Marshall had sent clear warnings to them by around 9:30 on the morning of the 7th. According to Hiles:

It would have required only four hours at the most for the Pacific fleet that remained at Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th to sortie from the harbor, and still less time for Short to have re-oriented his planes and anti-aircraft defense against the attack. Kimmel could have sortied and dispersed his entire force and perhaps rendezvoused with the three main task forces later on, but most likely he would have kept his ships dispersed until he learned the composition of the attacking force. After this, it is problematic as to just what he would have done. Admiral Kimmel has told me that he is not sure just what action he would have taken. Two American carriers against six for the Japanese might have been too great a risk to take, although the battle of Midway was won in June, 1942, against a much superior Japanese naval force and the four Japanese carriers were mainly destroyed by one American carrier, the Enterprise.

Now let me set the stage for you, assuming a four-hour alert. It would have been 3:30 A.M. at Hawaii. It would have been dark and would remain so for several hours. There would have been no need to wait and recall the liberty section which was ashore. The ships could always function with the duty sections in an emergency. Long before daylight all the major units would have been clear of the harbor and well scattered beyond visual distance. A few of the smaller ships might have been visible by the time the Japs arrived but even this is not likely because a large part of the fleet was already away with Halsey, Newton and Brown, and four hours would have been adequate for the depleted fleet to have sortied and dispersed.

It is safe to say that the Japanese would have found both the horizon and the harbor empty. This also presupposes that Nagumo would not have been alerted by Japanese spies in Honolulu as to the sortie during these four hours and withheld the attack, even have got ready to turn back to Japan. Several scouting planes preceded the attack waves to report back to Nagumo as to the state of the fleet and it is unlikely that Nagumo would have ordered an attack on an empty harbor.

Let us assume, however, that the bombing planes did proceed to Pearl Harbor and found nothing there. The targets were gone and well scattered out over the broad Pacific. The Japanese planes had no spare fuel to go flying around completely blind, looking for targets they knew not where; as it was, some of them ran out of fuel before they got back to their carriers after the attack. With this unexpected denouement, Genda and Fuchida (the Japanese bombing commanders) would have had no other choice than to recall the planes or bomb the off-shore installations and the shops, machinery and oil, which is not very likely under the circumstances. And up to this point we have assumed perfect conditions for Fuchida and have ignored the fact that Short and Martin would also have had that same four-hour warning and that their planes would have been in the air and the anti-aircraft guns ready to greet the bombers.

It is well to have this authoritative and detailed portrayal of what might have happened at Pearl Harbor and Fort Shafter on the morning of December 7th if Stark and Marshall had sent warnings to Hawaii by or before 9:30—10:00 Washington time.

Of course, Commander Hiles is assuming that all would have worked out smoothly if the warning had been received about 3:30 A.M. on the morning of the 7th, but how a situation looks on paper may be quite different from how it will take shape in action. It would have been quite a shock to officers, crews and soldiers to have been rudely awakened at 3:30 A.M. with the news that Oahu was about to be shattered by a Japanese bomber attack when there had been no previous warning of any such move and nearly every one in the armed forces there had been convinced that Japan would not make war on the United States, a rich and powerful country that no small island empire could hope to overcome.

Events might have worked out as Commander Hiles has indicated. On the other hand, there might have been much confusion, with the ships not all out of sight when the Japanese bombers arrived. The channel leading out of Pearl Harbor was so shallow that the battleships had to move slowly, and in the haste and confusion one of them might have run aground and made it impossible for ships behind it to reach the open sea. But it is certainly true that, if a clear warning had reached Fort Shafter and Pearl Harbor between 3:00 and 4:00 on the morning of the 7th, the Army and Navy forces and equipment on Oahu would have suffered s smaller loss than occurred, unless Kimmel’s battleships had been sunk in deep water as the Repulse and Prince of Wales were shortly afterward in the southwest Pacific.

It is, of course, utterly abhorrent to have to conceive of Kimmel’s being subjected, as a result of Washington neglect or treachery, to any such shock and crisis as being warned of a Japanese attack at 3:30 on the morning of the 7th, when he could and should have been effectively warned days, weeks or months before, and there would not have been any Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The main reason for deploring overemphasis on the failure to send last minute warnings is that this obscures and confuses the real nature and the extent of the guilt for failing to warn Hawaii in plenty of time. There was every reason for sending a clear warning there on November 27th, and any delay after December 4th was nothing less than criminal neglect, if one wished to save the American forces at Pearl Harbor. If one limits main consideration of the warning period to the late night of the 6th and the morning of the 7th, the Blackout and Blurout writers can conjure up all sorts of confusing alibis about timing and the possible disastrous results of warnings sent at this late hour, but there is no such way to counter or explain the failure to warn the Hawaiian commanders at any time during the previous nine days, or even as far back as when the first Bomb Plot message was decoded and read on October 9th. Nor was there any excuse for having failed to provide Pearl Harbor and Fort Shafter with a Purple Machine to intercept, decode and read the Japanese diplomatic messages right there, thus learning of the danger on the spot.

It is also futile and misleading to exaggerate the minor acts of incompetence or mis-judgment at Pearl Harbor between very early morning on the 7th and the attack at 7:50, so much stressed by Roberta Wohlstetter at the beginning of her book on Pearl Harbor. Such were the failure properly to interpret the discovery of a Japanese scouting submarine right off Pearl Harbor on the early morning of the 7th, the apparent indifference shown by Lieutenant Kermit Tyler of the Army Air Corps to the report from the Army radar station about some strange approaching planes, which might have been thought to be those of Admiral Halsey who was returning with his task force from Wake or the approaching B-17’s, and the official closing down of this radar station at 7:00 on the morning of the 7th, as had been ordered, but was not actually closed. These have some curious interest as minor deficiencies and mistakes of judgment, greatly bolstered by the impact of hindsight, but they had little to do with the approach, diverting or repulse of the Japanese bombing planes, which were already well on their way from their carriers to attack Pearl Harbor.

Incidentally, technically speaking and as a matter of curious interest, despite the repeated orders of Roosevelt and his associates that Japan must be allowed to fire the first shot, this was actually fired when the commander of the American destroyer Ward fired upon and sank a Japanese submarine off Pearl Harbor about an hour before the first wave of Japanese bombers arrived there.

Defenders of Roosevelt and Washington have sought to equate these trifling and exaggerated errors, due to surprise, confusion and haste at Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, with the failure of Washington to pass on the Bomb Plot messages to Short and Kimmel, the refusal to give them the Purple diplomatic messages, the denial of a Purple machine to Pearl Harbor, and the killing of the efforts of McCollum, Noyes, Sadtler, Bratton and others after November 26th to warn Short and Kimmel about the approaching danger of a Japanese attack. These were the main deliberate delinquencies of Washington which made possible the successful Japanese attack—to say nothing of the fact that most of the top Washington officialdom, civil and military, involved in such matters, appear to have permitted the movement of Japanese task forces down the southwest Pacific and the strategic assumptions of Rainbow 5 (WPL 46) to drive the whole traditional Pacific naval strategy relative to the threat to Pearl Harbor from their minds.

The time to have started warning Pearl Harbor was with the decoding, translating, reading and evaluation of the first Bomb Plot message on October 9, 1941, obviously by November 5th when it announced that Japan had set a deadline for negotiations, and certainly by November 26th when Hull rejected the Japanese diplomatic plans, kicked over the modus vivendi. and sent his ultimatum to Japan. Literal warnings even if sent by the time the codes destruction intercepts were at hand on December 1st and 2nd, and when Winds Execute was received on the 4th, would most certainly have averted the Pearl Harbor attack. And, surely, a Purple machine should have been sent to Pearl Harbor by July, 1941, where the competent operating force, headed by Commander Rochefort, could have intercepted and read the revealing diplomatic messages from Tokyo. If they had been ordered to do so, they could have read the Bomb Plot messages in the J-19 and PA-K2 codes without a Purple machine.

The overwhelming responsibility for the war and the attack was, of course, Roosevelt’s deliberate refusal to settle the relations between the United States and Japan in a peaceful manner by honest diplomatic negotiations, to achieve which Japan made unusually impressive gestures and offered very reasonable terms that protected all legitimate vital American interests in the Far East. As I pointed out in an article in the Progressive, December 6, 1941, we were surely more thoroughly and logically involved in continuing our profitable and peaceful relations with Japan in 1941 than with supporting Chiang’s tottering and corrupt regime, even though Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather may have made no money out of trade with Japan. Japan had no military designs against the United States except for self-protection in the event of war. Japan made two genuine but vain offers to withdraw from the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis in return for peaceful relations with the United States; these were unceremoniously brushed off.

Roosevelt was, however, so deeply involved in his anti-Japanese war plans and his commitments to Churchill and others by the late summer of 1941 that it is extremely doubtful if he would have accepted any Japanese diplomatic proposals short of complete surrender. He would have been surprised, shocked and annoyed if the Tojo government had been willing to humiliate themselves enough to resume negotiations on the basis of Hull’s ultimatum of the 26th. The desire to prevent this was a major consideration of Roosevelt and Stimson in connection with formulating the fake warnings to Short and Kimmel on the 27th.

VII. THE OVERALL RESPONSIBILITY OF ROOSEVELT FOR THE SURPRISE ATTACK

The essential facts and details explaining why and how Pearl Harbor was surprised on Sunday, December 7, 1941, have now been presented. There remians the question of the responsibility for the overall trends and developments which led to the attack itself. Here, I believe that fundamental responsibility can also be overwhelmingly—almost solely—attributed to Roosevelt and his policies, in which there was far more deliberation than inadvertence.

Our entering the second World War was mainly the product of a political program: Roosevelt’s turning to armament and war to bail himself out of the difficulties created by the failure of his domestic program. The surprise attack was a political rather than a military scandal. It may, of course, be open to argument as to whether Roosevelt’s New Deal was not ideologically and morally superior to the program and methods of his conservative political opponents at home and that the latter must share the responsibility for his shift to armament and war because of their stupid hostility and often malicious resistance to domestic reforms.

Secretary of State Hull has been vigorously criticized for his arrogant and pharisaical diplomacy, based on unrealistic platitudes, beatitudes, and banalities, and designed to make it impossible to arrive at a fair and decent understanding with Japan over Far Eastern problems. But for all this Roosevelt was primarily responsible. He had no hesitation whatever in being his own Secretary of State when Hull’s policies did not coincide with his own, even to the extent of insulting Hull by relying heavily on Raymond Moley, Stimson and Henry Morgenthau in such matters. Roosevelt permitted Hull to carry on diplomatic relations with Japan in the manner which he did because Hull’s policies, strongly influenced by his principal advisor on Far Eastern matters, the Japanophobe scholar, Stanley K. Hornbeck, agreed perfectly with Roosevelt’s program. There has rarely been a greater meeting of minds between a president and his secretary of state than in the accord between Roosevelt and Hull over our negotiations with Japan in 1941. If Hull had entertained contrary views Roosevelt would no more have hesitated to push Hull aside over Japan than he did in the case of the Morgenthau Plan dealt with at the Quebec Conference in September, 1944.

So far as the economic background of Pearl Harbor is concerned, the responsibility was almost solely that of Roosevelt, whether we consider the effort to save and prolong his political career by creating a military economy to replace the New Deal or his use of economic and financial methods to produce the economic strangulation of Japan and force her into war. In the latter, he was vigorously opposed, at least when instituted, by the top army and navy officials. Even Admiral Turner strongly criticized this move.

Roosevelt’s militant program was thoroughly in accord with his personal attitudes and aims. His hostility to Japan went back to a deep-seated boyhood affection for China and antipathy to Japan that were closely related to his China-oriented family financial history, and to the alleged bad impression of the traits, behavior and political ambitions of the Japanese people made on him by a “Japanese schoolboy”, who was a fellow student with Roosevelt at Harvard. Months before he was inaugurated, he had a long conference on January 9, 1933, with Stimson, the most eminent and passionate Japanophobe among the prominent American statesmen of the present century. They were brought together by Roosevelt’s close adviser, Felix Frankfurter, who had been a subordinate of Stimson in Frankfurter’s early legal career. Stimson’s hatred of Japan and his erratic ideas about “aggressor nations” appealed to Roosevelt, and these became the basis of the latter’s Japanese policy from January 9, 1933, when he met Stimson, to the attack on Pearl Harbor. When Raymond Moley and Rexford G. Tugwell vigorously urged Roosevelt not to accept Stimson’s bellicose attitude toward Japan, he answered that he could not very well help doing so in the light of very satisfactory personal and financial relations that his maternal grandfather had enjoyed with China.

Roosevelt’s first striking gesture in revealing his aggressive foreign policy, the Quarantine formula enunciated in the Chicago Bridge speech of October 5, 1937, was straight Stimson political and diplomatic ideology, and Stimson almost immediately released an approving statement. It would be unfair, however, to attribute to Stimson full responsibility for Roosevelt’s hostile behavior toward Japan. He did not have to accept Stimson’s position, and he did so only because it was in full agreement with his own personal attitude and public policy. Late in 1937, as noted earlier, Roosevelt sent the very able American naval officer, Captain Royal E. Ingersoll, to London, and in January, 1938, Ingersoll discussed the possible relations and operations of the United States and Great Britain in case they “were involved in a war with Japan in the Pacific which would include the Dutch, the Chinese, and possibly, the Russians.” From this time onward Ingersoll had no doubt that Roosevelt had war with Japan in the back of his mind and made no bones of this fact in his confidential discussions with his professional associates.

In the summer of 1941, when Roosevelt felt ready really to put the screws on Japan, he logically summoned Stimson, already made Secretary of War, to come forth and actively implement the Stimson doctrine, while Hull proceeded with his evasive and procrastinating diplomatic homilies. When Roosevelt allowed or directed Hull to kick over the modus vivendi on November 26th, he did this in direct opposition to the policy of Marshall and Stark, who wished more time to get ready for war with Japan.

Roosevelt has been criticized by some on the ground that he got entangled with Churchill, and that the latter dragged him into war. There is no doubt of the powerful but un-needed efforts of Churchill in pressing Roosevelt towards military action, but Roosevelt opened the door for British importuning when he sent Ingersoll to Europe in the winter of 1937-38, asked for an opportunity to collaborate in September, 1939, and later agreed with and cooperated in the Anglo-American joint effort against Germany. The over two years of voluminous secret communications between Roosevelt and Churchill, which determined the course of relations between the United States and Britain, completely hidden from the American public, were instituted at Roosevelt’s request.

Marshall’s directed behavior from December 4 to 7, 1941, which so cleverly and successfully helped us into war by assuring the launching of a successful Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, was one of the most masterly products of Roosevelt’s genius for deception but was directly opposed to Marshall’s personal views about starting war at this time. Indeed, it is certainly high time that revisionist scholars should cease placing the main blame for compelling Short and Kimmel to remain unwarned on foreign collaborators or on Roosevelt’s American agents or stooges, like Hull, Marshall, Stark and Turner, and put it squarely where it belongs, on the source of their directions and operations: Roosevelt himself.

Anti-revisionist partisans of Roosevelt will pounce upon the above conclusions as a striking example of the “devil theory of history”. Even if it were, which I do not concede, it is fully as valid as their own “saint theory of history”: the portrayal of Roosevelt as “Saint Franklin”! They utilize the latter unhesitatingly and almost invariably in defending Roosevelt against all charges of duplicity and responsibility in producing war with Japan and in bringing about the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. They proclaim him a superb statesman and a major benefactor of all mankind through his encouraging the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 and bringing the United States into the war as soon as he was able to do so in the face of the strongly anti-interventionist public opinion in the United States right down to Pearl Harbor. This “saint theory” in regard to Roosevelt has been valiantly, even aggressively in some cases, upheld by writers like Admiral Samuel E. Morison, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Thomas A. Bailey, Herbert Feis, Samuel Flagg Bemis, Roberta Wohlstetter and T. R. Fehrenbach; indeed, by virtually every opponent of the revisionist approach to 1939 and 1941. Revisionist historians can logically insist that, if the anti-revisionist writers wish to attack the “devil theory” mote in the eyes of revisionist scholars, the “saint theory” devotees must remove this saintly beam from their own eyes.

More important, however, is the fact that the indictment of Roosevelt as overwhelmingly responsible for war with Japan and the surprise at Pearl Harbor is in no sense any literal application of the devil theory of history. We are here concerned only with the rejection of peaceful overtures from Japan long preceding Pearl Harbor and American responsibility for a successful surprise attack there on December 7, 1941. For these deeds and actions Roosevelt was primarily and personally responsible. There is no pretense here of dealing thoroughly with the causes of wars in general, the responsibility for the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, the reasons why Roosevelt turned from peace to armament and war after the campaign of 1936, the basis of Roosevelt’s desire for the glamor of being a war president, the wisdom of his domestic opponents in opposing the New Deal system, and the like.

Even less is there any attempt here to present and analyze the basic geographical, biological, economic, sociological and psychological causes of wars in general, which account for the genesis of all modern wars including the second World War. Neither the devil nor the saint theory is any explanation of such fundamental considerations. Nobody understands this fact better than I do. Whatever defects my writings on Revisionism and diplomatic history may have, it is beyond reasonable dispute that I have given more attention to the fundamental causes of wars in my writings than any professional diplomatic historian who has ever dealt with the subject. Not even the case of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the second World War can induce me to abandon this basic approach to wars.

VIII. HOW WE ENTERED WAR WITH JAPAN FOUR DAYS BEFORE PEARL HARBOR

Our naval losses at Pearl Harbor that resulted from the surprise attack there have become a major item in American and world history primarily because it is almost universally believed that it was the Japanese attack that brought the United States into war with Japan. Actually, the United States had been put into war with Japan by the action of the Dutch authorities at Batavia, approved by the Dutch government, on December 3rd, Washington time, four days before the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor.

Roosevelt remarked, when, about 9:30 P.M. on December 6th, he read the first thirteen parts of the Japanese reply to Hull’s ultimatum of November 26th, that “This means war.” He had known by the forenoon of the 6th, if not two days earlier, that we were already involved in war with Japan. How this had come about requires a brief review of the plans, arrangements and agreements whereby the United States could be involved in war without any attack by Japan upon American territory, forces or flag, a situation which was a repudiation of Roosevelt’s promises to the American people and of the Democratic platform of 1940, They were the ultimate development and implementation of Captain Ingersoll’s visit to Europe in the winter of 1937-38.

Unneutral American acts even prior to Roosevelt’s election in 1940 on the platform of avoiding war had furnished Germany with a legitimate basis for making war on the United States. Such were the Destroyer Deal of September, 1940, and the allotting of large quantities of arms and ammunition to the British. Immediately following the election of 1940, plans to involve us in war with Japan got under way in real earnest, in case the Axis Powers should not rise to the bait afforded by “Lend Lease” and convoying on the Atlantic. These have been mentioned earlier but may be reviewed here.

Anglo-American joint-staff conferences in Washington held from January through March, 1941, drew up general plans for coöperation in war against the European Axis Powers and also envisaged a containing war with Japan. They were known as the ABC-1 plans (land and sea) and ABC-2 (air). In April, another conference was held in Singapore, and the Dutch were brought in more directly through ABD. While still regarding Germany as the main immediate enemy, provisions were also made for joint action against Japan if the latter proceeded beyond the line 100° East and 10° North or 6 ° North and the Davao-Waigeo line, or menaced British or Dutch possessions in the southwest Pacific or independent countries in that area. This agreement between the United States, the British and the Dutch was known as ADB. Together, the agreements were known as ABCD. Stimson and Knox approved the ABC-1 plan for the United States to make it look good for the record. Although approving them verbally, Roosevelt did not officially sponsor these agreements in writing, and they did not call for congressional approval. Marshall and Stark balked at ADB and its inclusion in ABCD because it introduced political considerations in a military program, but they had to play along with Roosevelt and did so to the very end in early December, 1941.

When the joint-staff conferences were over, the American military services drew up specific war plans to implement these staff agreements ending in ABCD. The joint Army and Navy basic war plan was known as Rainbow 5, also usually called WPL 46 in relation to naval operation in the Pacific. The subsidiary part that related to the operations of the Pacific fleet under Admiral Kimmel was known as WPPac 46. It was developed to implement the basic war plan and to coordinate the Pacific fleet operations with the provisions of Rainbow 5 (WPL 46).

Roosevelt apparently had indicated to Marshall and Stark that he intended to place the basic war plans before Congress prior to their being implemented, but whether he so intended or not, he had failed to do so when his hand was called on December 5th and 6th. The essence of the matter is that Roosevelt had approved an agreement that the United States would go to war to protect the interests and territory of allies in the Antipodes, thousands of miles from the United States, without even the semblance of an attack on the United States by Japan. On the heels of these ABCD agreements and the derived war plans, Admiral Stark, when promulgating Rainbow 5 (WPL 46), sent word to his admirals in leading outposts that the question of war was no longer a matter of whether, but of when and where. Marshall distributed Rainbow 5 to his field commanders, and Roosevelt unofficially approved it in May and June.

The ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 hung like a sword of Damocles over Roosevelt’s head. It exposed him to the most dangerous dilemma of his political career: to start a war without an attack on the American forces or territory, or refusing to follow up the implementation of ABCD and Rainbow 5 by Britain or the Dutch. The latter would lead to serious controversy and quarrels among the prospective allies, with the disgruntled powers leaking Roosevelt’s complicity in the plan and exposing his mendacity.

He apparently took this risk rather lightly until July, 1941, because he had felt confident that Hitler would give him a valid pretext for war on the Atlantic. But when Hitler had failed to provide a suitable provocative act it became apparent that the United States must enter the war through the back door of Japan. When the latter had been consigned to economic strangulation in July 1941, when the back door plan had apparently been definitely implemented at the Argentia meeting, and when the peace efforts of Konoye had been rejected, this agreement to start a war on Japan without an attack on American forces or territory became a pressing and serious political problem for Roosevelt if he wished to have a united country behind him to support his war effort. It became increasingly so when the Japanese began to send extensive convoys of troops and equipment into the southwest Pacific in November. These convoys might pass the magic line specified by the ABCD agreement, and the Dutch, British and Australians might call his hand by invoking the American promise to act jointly against the Japanese as envisaged in ABCD and Rainbow 5 (WPL 46). The matter of getting a suitable Japanese attack somewhere now became the most vital of all Roosevelt’s political problems. There would no longer be any serious difficulty in inciting Japan to accept war, but Japan had to commit the “first overt act” and it had to be against the United States.

There was always the probability that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor because this action had been implicit in Pacific naval strategy for years, but a Japanese task-force attack at Hawaii involved a long ocean voyage and there was always a possibility that it might be intercepted en route. It was this consideration, as well as the fact that this belated plan might also save the fleet at Pearl Harbor, which led Roosevelt to turn to his “three small vessels” stratagem on December 1st, to which reference has already been made several times.

Roosevelt appears to have obtained his inspiration to set up this scheme through reports of the menacing attitude and behavior of Japanese naval ships toward two American Yangtse River gunboats, the Luzon and Oahu, as they approached and passed Formosa on a voyage from Shanghai to Manila on November 29th and 30th (Washington time). Hitherto, the Japanese had not paid any serious attention to routine American ship movements off the coast of Asia. But on the 29th and 30th, they all but fired on the gunboats Luzon and Oahu.

On December 1st, immediately after his return from Warm Springs, Roosevelt summoned Admiral Stark and instructed him to order Admiral Hart, commander of the Asiatic fleet stationed at Manila, to select, equip and man three “small vessels” which could move out into the path of the Japanese task forces going southward and draw fire from Japanese planes or ships, thus giving Roosevelt his all-important and indispensable attack, and one that was on an American ship. The ostensible purpose of equipping and sending out the three “small vessels”, as explained by Stark to Hart, was to have them carry out reconnaissance operations relative to Japanese ship movements and to reports—to act as a “defensive information patrol”.

Admiral Hart, as also did Stark, recognized from the outset that any such operation for these little ships was palpably “phony”. Hart was carrying out the needed reconnaissance and reporting the results to Washington. For this he had suitable vessels and planes, while for such a role the use of the three “small vessels” was nothing short of fantastic. To retain Hart’s respect, Stark had made it clear that the whole conception of equipping and dispatching the three “small vessels” for reconnaissance was Roosevelt’s and not his, a fact which Mrs. Wohlstetter characteristically conceals in her treatment of the three “small vessels” episode.

Only two of the “small vessels” had been made ready to sail out into the path of the Japanese convoys and invite attack before the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor. To get this baiting stratagem under way promptly, Roosevelt had Stark suggest to Hart that he might use the converted yacht Isabel, which had been made over into the dispatch boat of the Asiatic fleet and the Japanese had been acquainted with its identity for some time. Hart realized that on this assignment the Isabel was to be bait for a Japanese attack, which displeased him since the vessel was very useful to the fleet. Yet he did not wish to seem to be defying the President’s wishes. He sensibly solved his dilemma by sending the Isabel out as directed but under instructions which rendered it as unlikely as possible to be attacked and sunk by the Japanese. These instructions were directly contrary to Roosevelt’s plans and intentions, and Hart knew they were. The Isabel was not even repainted before being dispatched, which assured that the Japanese would be able to recognize it, and the sailing orders given by Hart were such as to make it appear very unlikely to the Japanese that it was a provocative “man-o-war”.

These precautions may well have saved the Isabel from attack; the Japanese recognized it and were not stupid or rash enough to fire on it. Although out on its mission for some five days, only one Japanese plane even buzzed the Isabel. Despite his protective directions Hart had feared that the Isabel would be sunk, and he told the commander when he returned that he had never expected to see him alive again after his departure. If the Isabel episode had been handled in the manner that Roosevelt wished and provided the maximum provocation to trigger-happy Japanese pilots or gunners there might not have been any attack on Pearl Harbor and the fleet there could have been saved.

The second “small vessel”, the little schooner Lanikai, which was commanded by Lieutenant (now Admiral) Kemp Tolley, although equipped with a cannon and machine gun to bait the Japanese into thinking it was a warship, had only a dilapidated radio unfit either to receive or transmit messages. If Tolley had seen the whole Japanese fleet assembled in front of him he could not have sent back any report. Although Tolley at once reported its useless condition, there was no attempt to replace his radio equipment and provide him with suitable instruments to report his observations. The Lanikai was awaiting dawn on December 7th to leave the entrance to Manila Bay and expose itself to Japanese gunfire when news came of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the “small vessel” turned back. The combination of the utter lack of usable radio equipment and the haste shown in trying to get the Lanikai manned and sent out in the path of Japanese planes and ships provides the best evidence of the real purpose of the “three small vessels” scheme. The third “small vessel” had not even been selected because of lack of time, but there is no reason to believe that it would have been superior in nature or equipment to the Lanikai.

Roosevelt’s timing of the three “small vessels” stratagem was, as noted earlier, much too belated to work out as he had hoped. The order to equip and dispatch them should have been issued at least as early as Hull’s ultimatum of November 26th. As a result of Hart’s sensible evasion of Roosevelt’s wishes, the Isabel sought to avert a Japanese attack. The Lanikai was not able to put to sea effectively to challenge Japanese fire before the attack on Pearl Harbor on the 7th, and, as will be shown shortly, the United States had been already involved in war with Japan without any attack on this country through the Dutch implementation of the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (Rainbow A-2 for the Dutch) on December 3rd, Washington time. Roosevelt gave the order concerning the three “small vessels” as soon as the idea occurred to him, but he appears to have forgotten the Panay incident of 1937 and he could not have known of the menacing Japanese behavior toward the Luzon and Oahu before the afternoon or evening of November 30th. Hence, he could not have sent out the order to equip and dispatch the “three small vessels” before he did on the forenoon of December 1st as soon as he returned from Warm Springs. The brilliant and ingenious inspiration came too late.

That the United States was involved in war with Japan by 10:40 A.M. on the morning of December 6th because of the British invocation of ABCD and Rainbow 5 has been shown in detail by Charles A. Beard in his book President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941. and by George Morgenstern in his chapter (6) in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. But there was authentic evidence presented during the post-war Pearl Harbor investigations that this country was actually involved in war with Japan by December 3rd, Washington time, when the Dutch at Batavia, with the approval of the home government, invoked the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (A-2) because Japanese forces had passed the line 100 East and 10 North and was thought to be threatening the Dutch possessions as well as the Kra Peninsula and Thailand. The Dutch reported that the Japanese might arrive within sixty hours.

This astonishing information was revealed in the so-called Merle-Smith message sent out of Melbourne, Australia, on the morning of December 5, 1941 (December 4th, Washington time) to Generals MacArthur and Short. It is remarkable that even most American revisionist historians have missed its full significance. The essential facts about the message were noted by George Morgenstern in his Pearl Harbor, published in 1947 and the first comprehensive book on the subject, and some six years later by Percy L. Greaves on pages 430-431 of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. But Morgenstern and Greaves failed to follow through because they accepted as valid the official statement by Washington that the Merle-Smith message did not reach Washington until 7:58 on the evening of December 7th, several hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The full import of the Merle-Smith message was first revealed by Commander Hiles in the spring of 1967, and it was precisely mentioned and briefly described a little later by Ladislas Farago in his book The Broken Seal, (Chapter 26) but Farago, who learned the significance of the message from Hiles, did not develop its full significance.

Colonel Van S. Merle-Smith was the American military attache in Melbourne, Australia, in December, 1941, and his aide was Lieutenant Robert H. O’Dell. Most of our information about this Merle-Smith message comes from the testimony of O’Dell before the Clarke Inquiry and the Army Pearl Harbor Board in 1944, especially the testimony before Colonel Carter W. Clarke, who allowed O’Dell to testify in straightforward fashion. Merle-Smith had died in the interval between 1941 and 1944.

About 5:00 P.M. on Thursday, December 4th, Australian time (Wednesday, December 3rd, Washington time), Merle-Smith and O’Dell were invited to a conference at which were present Air Chief Marshal Charles Burnett, commander of the Australian air force, and Commander Saom, the Dutch liaison officer from Batavia.

Burnett told Merle-Smith that he had received information from Vice-Admiral C. E. L. Helfrich, commander-in-chief of the Dutch Navy in the East Indies, that Japanese naval forces had crossed the magic line of 100 East and 10 North and were threatening the Dutch or American possessions. Commander Saom then informed Burnett, for the special benefit of Merle-Smith, that the Dutch authorities in Batavia had ordered the execution of ABCD, and Rainbow 5 (A-2), the Dutch phase of Rainbow 5, which was to be invoked only in the case of war. He further told Burnett and Merle-Smith that the order to execute Rainbow 5 (A-2) had already gone into effect and that the Dutch counted on the assistance of the American Navy. Burnett then brought the conference to a close because he had to attend an Australian War Council meeting that evening.

When Merle-Smith returned to his office, he discussed this sensational information with Captain Charles A. Coursey, the American naval attaché at Melbourne, but the latter apparently declined to send any warning to naval authorities in coöperation with Merle-Smith. If he sent one to Hart, Kimmel or Stark it must have been suppressed and destroyed later on. Merle-Smith remained determined to alert MacArhtur and Short. Hence, he drafted an identical message to each of them, and ordered O’Dell to code it, which was done. At Burnett’s request by telephone that evening the message was held up until the forenoon of December 5th, Australian time (December 4th, Washington time.) It was sent to MacArthur and Short by fast cablegram about 11:00 A.M. the morning of the 5th, Australian time (4th for Washington). Short was requested to decode and read it and then transmit it to Washington. The message should have reached Manila and Fort Shafter on the early afternoon of the fifth (the 4th at Washington), and Short could have been able to forward the message to Washington before evening.

The evidence indicates that the message was not decoded by Short at Fort Shafter, possibly due to lack of trained personnel or proper code keys, but was sent on to Washington, where it was suppressed for at least two, and possibly three, days. It could have reached the Army Signal Corps in Washington during the evening or night of December 4th, Washington time, since it was sent from Melbourne to Hawaii at about 11:00 A.M. on December 5th, Australian time, or December 4th, Washington time. According to the official Signal Corps report in Washington, however, the Merle-Smith message was not received in Washington until 7:59 P.M. on December 7th.

Commander Hiles has cogently pointed out that this alleged late arrival of the Merle-Smith cable in Washington is most probably a fraudulent evasion: “We are not dealing here with intercepts of Japanese messages but with regular service communications whereby such functions normally proceed promptly and in an orderly fashion. Encoded messages from military attaches in time of crisis such as this one do not lie around neglected unless for ulterior purposes of no honest portent or through gross negligence.”

At any rate, nothing in the Merle-Smith message was sent back to Short after being decoded and read by the Signal Corps in Washington. Had it been sent back to Short in full immediately after it should have been received and processed, it could have produced a full alert at Hawaii on the early morning of the 5th, Washington time. It certainly could have been sent back to Short in time to produce an alert during the 5th, Washington time, and averted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When O’Dell was called to testify before the Army Pearl Harbor Board, the government only presented a paraphrase of the original Merle-Smith message which arbitrarily changed some of the dates and modified the content in other places. For instance, it represented the defensive action of the Dutch and Australian planes as starting at 8:00 A.M. on the 7th, when this actually took place on December 5th, Australian time, or December 4th Washington time. Even the original copy of the Merle-Smith message in the Clarke Inquiry exhibits bears a phony date for the transmission of the message from Melbourne, giving it as December 6th when it should have been the 5th, Australian time, or the 4th Washington time.

The crucial and decisive news about the ominous movement of a Japanese convoy beyond the magic line established by the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (Rainbow Plan A-2 to the Dutch in this instance) and the defensive action of the Australian and Dutch planes, which had been confided to Merle-Smith on the afternoon of the 4th and morning of the 5th, Australian time (3rd and 4th Washington time), definitely meant that Holland, Great Britain and the United States were now committed to war with Japan. The Far Eastern situation was in full conformity with the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (A-2), as confirmed by the American “War Cabinet”, made up of Roosevelt, Stimson, Hull, Knox, Marshall and Stark, at noon on November 28th.

The United States, Britain and the Dutch were already discussing the critical situation created by the obligations under ABD, ABCD and Rainbow 5 (A-2) and the southward movement of Japanese forces even before the Merle-Smith message could have reached Washington, At 5:30 P.M. on December 4th, Admiral Stark was advising London that the Dutch warning of the possibility of a Japanese attack against the Philippines and the Netherland East Indies could not be ruled out, and went on to say: “If Dutch authorities consider some warning should be given Japan CNO[Stark] believes that it should take the form of a declaration to Japan that in view of the current situation Japanese naval vessels or expeditionary forces crossing the Davao-Waigeo line would be considered hostile and would be attacked. Communicate these views to the Admiralty and Dutch Naval Command in London.” In discussing this statement with Hull, Stark indicated that he had shown it to Roosevelt and the latter had approved it. If Washington had been directly and independently informed of the Australian-Dutch action on the afternoon of December 3rd or the 4th (Washington time) before the Merle-Smith message could have arrived there is no record of it.

The next move to activate the understanding and actions related to ABCD and Rainbow 5 came on the early evening of the 5th when Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, called on Secretary Hull at his apartment in the Carlton Hotel, and informed Hull, who had already been well primed by Stark’s message to London on the 4th, that the British Foreign Office believed that the time had now come for the immediate coöperation of the British and Americans with the Dutch in defending the Far East against the Japanese movements in the southwest Pacific according to the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5. Hull may have told Halifax that Stark’s message to London, and also informing the Dutch, on the afternoon of the 4th, approved by Roosevelt, indicated that the latter agreed with Halifax. At any rate, Hull expressed his “appreciation” of Halifax’s call and information, and Halifax left, apparently content. At least, he informed London that the United States would back up the implementation of the ABCD agreement and Rainbow 5 (A-2) by the Dutch and Australians with armed support.

London sent this critically important information to Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, commander of the British forces in the Far East, with headquarters in Singapore. Brooke-Popham forthwith informed Captain John H. Creighton, the American naval observer in Singapore, about the definitive message he had received from London that the United States was approving the Anglo-Dutch implementation of ABCD. Creighton immediately sent the information to Admiral Hart at Manila.

On December 6th, two messages from the American ambassador in London, John G. Winant, were received in Washington and were immediately put into the hands of Roosevelt and Hull. The first reached Roosevelt and Hull at 10:40 A.M.; and the second at 3:05 P.M. The first called attention to the Japanese violation of the magic line in the Far East and to the threat to the Dutch and British possessions and independent countries in the Southwest Pacific. The second gave further information about the menacing Japanese movements and stated that Britain was hard-pressed for time in getting information from the United States that was needed to be able to guarantee the protection of Thailand, which the Dutch had reported on December 3rd might by reached by the Japanese in sixty hours.

These two messages confirmed the information given by Halifax to Hull on the evening of the 5th to the effect that Britain regarded the situation in the Far East as activating the ABCD agreement for Anglo-American-Dutch coöperation in the Far East to repel Japan in that region. The conditions required for cooperation and war according to ABCD and Rainbow 5, and the decision of the Washington War Cabinet on November 28th had all been met by the Japanese movements.

The crucial agreement that war against Japan had now begun in the Far East was made in an all-important top secret conference at the White House on the afternoon of the 6th at which Roosevelt, Hull, Halifax and Robert G. Casey, the Australian Minister in Washington, were present. Halifax was apparently satisfied that Roosevelt was backing up Hull’s response of the previous evening, for he at once informed the British Foreign Office to that effect. Indeed, there had never been any valid reason for imagining that Roosevelt would repudiate his agreements under ABCD and Rainbow 5, as much as he may have regretted having to enter a war before he had an attack on either one of the three “small vessels” or on Pearl Harbor. As was usual in such vital situations, Roosevelt kept no notes or official record of this crucially significant conference on the afternoon of the 6th.

Roosevelt had given Halifax and Casey this confirmation without in any way informing or consulting Congress. Although he approved the Anglo-Dutch-Australian implementation of ABCD and Rainbow 5 that involved war in the Far East with full American participation, he informed Casey that he would postpone public announcement of this fact until Tuesday, December 9th, when he would officially warn Japan. Doubtless, this decision to delay was based on the hope that in the interval between Saturday and Tuesday he would get the desperately desired news of an attack on either one of the three “small vessels” or on Pearl Harbor. He would have preferred the former but he got the latter.

The first definite information given to an American representative in the Far East that Roosevelt had confirmed the participation of the United States in the war that was now under way after having been initiated by the Dutch implementation of ABCD and Rainbow 5 (A-2) on Wednesday, December 3rd, Washington time, came in the precise and conclusive statement of Air Marshal Brooke-Popham to Captain Creighton at Singapore to which reference has already been made. This contained London’s confirmation that Roosevelt had approved the Dutch and British implementation of Rainbow 5. Captain Creighton sent this information to Admiral Hart from Singapore on December 6th, at which time Hart was being visited by Vice-Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, who had just been placed in command of all British naval forces in China. Hart showed the Creighton message to Phillips, who immediately departed to return to Singapore. As he left Hart’s office, the latter told him that he would send the American destroyers then based on Borneo to aid Phillips and the British naval forces, thus confirming the agreement that the United States was at war in the Far East.

The importance of the Creighton statement, in establishing the case against Roosevelt in regard to the violation of his “sacred” promises to “American fathers and mothers” and his repudiation of the Democratic platform of 1940 by abandoning his assurance that this country would not enter war without an attack on American forces, is emphasized by the desperate effort made during the Joint Congressional Committee Investigation of Pearl Harbor in 1945-46 to blot out the validity, if not the very existence, of Creighton’s crucial statement that he sent to Hart.

By this time Admiral Hart had retired from military service and was a U. S. Senator from Connecticut. When Senator Ferguson pressed him about the Brooke-Popham message before the JCC, he “passed the buck” and refused to discuss it, stating that Creighton, who was to follow him on the witness-stand, was the best qualified person to know the facts. Creighton was not present but he heard about Hart’s statement, contacted Hart, and told him that he had no knowledge whatever that any such message as that from Brooke-Popham and allegedly forwarded by him to Hart had ever existed. Hart informed Creighton that he had the latter’s own copy with him in a locked case and directed that Creighton should come at once to get it for his testimony the next day. Creighton did so and had it in his possession when he appeared the next day before the Joint Congressional Committee. He was compelled to produce it and admitted that it must be authentic because it bore his code signature and was signed in Singapore. When, even then, Creighton persisted in maintaining that he could not recall ever having sent such a message and, if he did, his statements therein were only a matter of hearsay, Senator Barkley, chairman of the JCC, came to Creighton’s rescue and by devious rhetoric was able to dismiss this critically important message as nothing more than a rumor. It was emasculated and buried despite Ferguson’s efforts, which were really not up to par on this occasion. Senator Brewster might have done much better.

There were a number of disillusioning collapses of integrity on the part of witnesses during the post-Pearl Harbor investigations but probably no other was as pathetic as that of Creighton. His behavior on the stand has been exposed and castigated by Beard and Morgenstern, although they and other fair-minded students of the affair have recognized the tremendous pressure that seems to have been exerted on Creighton to falsify his testimony, which may have been even greater and more intimidating than was evident on the surface at the time when he was testifying before the JCC. This had happened with other witnesses whose testimony departed impressively from the facts with which they were acquainted.

A friend of mine, who was very familiar with military Magic and messages and the post-Pearl Harbor investigations and was a personal friend of Creighton, has informed me that the latter was, at the time of his testimony before the JCC, already sadly afflicted with a serious tropical disease contracted at Singapore that had virtually ruined his memory. His health failed steadily and he died prematurely. Hence, it is possible that Creighton actually could not remember the message he had sent to Hart. In that case, his condition should have been recognized and he should not have been subjected to the ordeal of testifying. If this is not the explanation, then he was either obviously intimidated or was consciously trying to put on a show to muddle up the Brooke-Popham episode. Fortunately, it does not really matter for other corroborative evidence we now have enables us to complete the picture and the patterns.

While we are discussing testimony, it may be well to call attention to the nature of O’Dell’s testimony before the Clarke Inquiry and the Army Pearl Harbor Board. O’Dell knew he was in on a big secret, had heard of the Pearl Harbor investigations, and wanted to get his story into the record. He had stirred up too much curiosity safely to be ignored. As it turned out, it would have been better for the Roosevelt record to have ignored him. The Clarke Inquiry had been designed solely to deal with the question of military Magic for General Marshall, and O’Dell was the only witness that Clarke called who did not have some relation with Magic, of which O’Dell knew nothing. But he could not prudently be ignored any longer and apparently Clarke thought he would let O’Dell testify and then leave his story to be buried in the record.

It is quite evident that Clarke and Gibson, his assistant, were nonplussed when O’Dell got started and poured forth like an opened floodgate, letting more cats out of the bag than any other witness in any of the post-Pearl Harbor investigations. He was one of the few witnesses who did not have to be prompted or have information wormed out of him; he could not get it out fast enough. It was vital information, spontaneously offered and with no punches pulled, and his testimony was dynamite for the defenders of the Administration. This is emphatically proved by the bogus three-day delay alleged by Washington in “receiving” the Merle-Smith message. Although it could have reached Washington by the evening of the 4th, Washington time, and must have arrived by the 5th, it has been represented as arriving at 7:58 P.M. on the 7th, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

When the Army Pearl Harbor Board examined O’Dell later on the same day, they treated him far more cautiously, and produced only the partly falsified paraphrase of the Merle-Smith message and sought unsuccessfully to confuse O’Dell. The Joint Congressional Committee very carefully kept O’Dell from testifying at all, even in the light of the vital material he had revealed before Clarke and the APHB.

When, by the afternoon of December 6th, Roosevelt recognized that war in the Far East was under way beyond possible recall he decided to send to the Japanese Emperor his appeal for peace which had been discussed with Hull and others but left unsent for some time. He summoned his personal secretary and dictated the final revision of the message to the Emperor which he sent off to Hull to be dispatched to Hirohito. Both Roosevelt and Hull recognized, and Hull openly admitted, that this was solely for the “record”. That his “record” was understandably much on Roosevelt’s mind during the evening of the 6th is apparent from his remark to Harry Hopkins when Lieutenant Schulz brought him the first thirteen parts of the Japanese reply to Hull’s ultimatum at about 9:30.

It is also highly probable that the report of the very relaxed condition of Roosevelt when he received the message brought by Schulz was also prepared for the “record”. It is repeated by Farago, right on the heels of a crisp summary of how Roosevelt had a few hours before put this country into war, even if not attacked, in violation of his assurances to American fathers and mothers and the 1940 platform and campaign pledges. It is far more likely that Roosevelt’s state of mind was more like that of Wellington who, when on the afternoon of June 18, 1815, Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Waterloo seemed within reach of victory, looked nervously at his watch and, according to the legend, wished “for night or Blücher” (the Prussian general who was bringing decisive armed aid to Wellington.) On the evening of Decmeber 6, 1941, Roosevelt was longing for news of an attack on American forces on one of the three “small vessels” or at Pearl Harbor. These had now exhausted the only possibilities for a surprise Japanese attack on American forces or territory.

The material reviewed in this section makes all the more edifying and illuminating Roosevelt’s remark about 9:30 on Saturday evening, after he read the first thirteen parts of the Japanese reply to Hull: “This means war!” Before 4:00 P. M. on the preceding afternoon, at the very latest, he must have learned that the Dutch had unleashed the fateful chain of events that had put this country into war on the previous Wednesday. His remark to Hopkins that: “We have a good record” does not look so “good” against the facts, implications and results of the Merle-Smith message. Roosevelt’s sole responsibility for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor may still be debated for years. There is little ground for valid debate in connection with the reality and results of the secret ABCD commitments to the Dutch and British under which he had placed this country and would surely have immediately brought us into active warfare with Japan even if Pearl Harbor had not been attacked.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor may have saved Roosevelt’s political record at home, from the point of view of Japanese military interests it would certainly have been far better for the Japanese to have refrained from attacking Pearl Harbor. They would have gained much more from Roosevelt’s desperate embarrassment and formidable handicaps in being involved in a war that started in the distant East Indies without any attack on American forces or territory or Congressional sanction than they did by sinking the battleships at Pearl Harbor and uniting the country behind Roosevelt’s war effort. War started under such circumstances as the invocation of Rainbow 5 (A-2) in behalf of the Antipodes could have provided a Roman holiday for the anti-interventionist forces in the United States led by America First.

IX. ROOSEVELT LUCK!

On the face of it, President Roosevelt’s daring gamble in providing a Japanese surprise attack on an unwarned Pearl Harbor appeared at the time to be a glorious success. Considering the magnitude of the political stakes in the game he was playing, the loss of a few strategically antique dreadnaughts and the death of three thousand men were trivial, indeed. Roosevelt’s operations had enabled him to bring the United States into the war with a country strongly united behind him. That it turned out in this manner was only because of several strokes of almost incredibly good luck which could hardly been expected and which he did not deserve. But for these the surprise attack might well have proved the major military disaster in the history of the United States.

First of all, was the personality, policy and operations of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who commanded the Japanese task force that made the attack. He was a member of the Japanese moderate party which wished to keep peace with the United States. He was a personal friend of Saburo Kurusu who had been sent to Washington in the autumn of 1941 to aid Ambassador Nomura for this purpose, and he opposed precipitating war with the United States. Moreover, as a matter of naval strategy, Nagumo never approved of Admiral Yamamoto’s bold plan to attack Pearl Harbor, believing it far too risky and likely to end in disaster. Nevertheless, due to the rigorous Japanese seniority rule, he had to be placed in command of the task force assigned to attack Pearl Harbor although his record as a naval officer was not distinguished.

Nagumo was nervous and worried during the trip from the Kurile Islands to Hawaii. As soon as the successful attacks of the Japanese planes on Pearl Harbor on the morning of the 7th was reported to him, Nagumo ordered the task force to head back toward Japan. If Commander Minoru Genda, who had handled the strategic planning and details of the surprise attack, or Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who directed the actual attack on the 7th, had been in command of the task force and attacked Pearl Harbor again on December 8th, the Pacific War might have been turned in favor of Japan in the course of the next few days, or even few hours. As the most favorable outcome for the United States, victory could have been postponed for several years, at great additional expense and appalling losses of war vessels and manpower.

The machine shops and other mechanical equipment, the army and navy supplies, and the large store of oil at Pearl Harbor were highly vulnerable to bombing. The oil was still above ground. The planes that remained available at Pearl Harbor after the attack on the morning of the 7th could have put up no decisive resistance to Japanese fighter planes and bombers. The anti-aircraft batteries were not sufficient to repel another Japanese bombing attack, although they might have inflicted more damage than was the case on the morning of the 7th. With the machine shops, military equipment and oil supplies destroyed, the heavy cruisers and carriers that had been sent on to Wake, Midway and Johnston Islands might have been rendered helpless as soon as their oil supply ran out and been captured by the Japanese unless they had been scuttled by their own commanders. The damaged or sunk ships at Pearl Harbor could not have been reconditioned.

Admiral Yamaguchi, commander of the second Japanese carrier division, announced that he was ready to send out fresh planes for a third attack even on the afternoon of the 7th, and those which had been used on the morning of the 7th could have been made ready for a better planned attack on the morning of the 8th. Yamaguchi, Genda and Fuchida begged Nagumo to remain and continue the destruction at Pearl Harbor, but Nagumo refused, and Yamamoto declined to intervene and compel Nagumo to remain and press the attack, which would surely and inevitably have destroyed Pearl Harbor for a year or two, at least, as our great Pacific naval base in the mid-Pacific. To have recaptured Hawaii from the Japanese or defeated Japan from the Western coast of the United States would have been a colossal, prolonged and expensive undertaking and would have seriously reduced or slowed down our effectiveness on the European front.

It has been said that the Japanese could have landed and taken over the Hawaiian Islands immediately after attacks on the 7th and 8th. This is not likely because the task force did not have any landing craft for an extensive occupation. But with the American heavy cruisers and the carriers rendered useless after their oil and gasoline ran out, the Japanese could certainly have returned with all the landing craft and other equipment needed and very possibly taken over the Hawaiian Islands before the United States could have provided successful resistance. To be sure, General Short had an excellently trained army of over 30,000 troops in Hawaii, but with their facilities, equipment and armament devastated by Japanese attacks on the afternoon of the 7th and the morning of the 8th, their effectiveness would have been greatly impaired. All of these possibilities were clearly foreseen in a panicky message sent by the top Washington military brass to the Pearl Harbor command on the morning of December 9th which is described below.

Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who ultimately succeeded Admiral Kimmel and directed the naval warfare which delivered the decisive victories over the Japanese in the Pacific, agreed with Genda and Fuchida: “Future students of our naval war in the Pacific will inevitably conclude that the Japanese commander of the carrier task force missed a golden opportunity in restricting his attack on Pearl Harbor to one day’s operations, and in the very limited choice of objectives.” Hence, it is no exaggeration to maintain that it was Admiral Nagumo’s timidity, hesitation and lack of strategic vision and courage which transformed Roosevelt’s desperate gamble of goading the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor from a major national calamity into a great American strategic and political success for the moment.

Nagumo did have some relatively minor considerations to support his hesitation about remaining to renew the attack on the 7th and 8th. He knew that the carriers Enterprise and Lexington were somewhere between Wake and Pearl Harbor with their escorts of heavy cruisers, and he did not know when the carrier Saratoga might be returning from the West Coast. He feared they might all converge on his task force if he lingered to devastate Pearl Harbor and the Army installations. He needed more fuel to indulge in any prolonged further action. His worries were actually unjustified, for Kimmel, right after the attack, had ordered Halsey and Newton to take their station with the two carriers southeast of Wake to await Nagumo’s return and launch an attack on all or a part of his task force, and the Saratoga was only just leaving the West Coast. Nagumo would have been safe in remaining until he destroyed the installations and equipment at Pearl Harbor on the 8th.

Even with the benefit of Nagumo’s stubborn timidity, the naval war with Japan might not have turned out to be a string of naval victories if our naval cryptanalysts had not been able to break the Japanese Naval Code JN-25 for the late summer of 1940. Through Commander Rochefort and others it was then possible to supply Nimitz and other naval commanders with the Japanese naval battle plans before the major conflicts. This breaking of JN-25 and earlier Japanese naval codes was a long and slow process, the result of good organization and teamwork rather than the feat of any one genius in cryptanalysis. The work was started by Commanders Safford and Rochefort in 1923-1927 and not completed until late summer in 1940. Further checking was, of course, constantly required to deal with minor changes in the code, new ciphers and the like.

This assertion of the indispensable services of Rochefort and his associates is well confirmed by our defeat at Savo in August, 1942, when our naval forces were commanded by Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner and met heavy losses, only escaping virtual annihilation because the Japanese commander did not recognize the seriousness of the losses he had inflicted. As a leading naval expert on the Pacific War, and himself a crucially important participant, wrote me: “Savo was a more disgraceful defeat than Pearl Harbor, but whereas Kimmel, who was surprised in the bargain, was dismissed in disgrace, Turner came through his disgraceful performance at Savo in a blaze of glory and was allowed to continue as head of amphibious operations.” My informant did not add that Turner was saved from possible further disgrace later on mainly by the genius of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, our real expert in directing amphibious warfare.

Even with the aid of Nagumo, Nimitz, Safford, Rochefort, and Spruance, Roosevelt’s gamble might have been temporarily frustrated if he had not had aid from across the Atlantic and from, of all persons, Adolf Hitler, through the latter’s idiotically precipitate declaration of war on the United States on the Thursday after Pearl Harbor. Japan had failed to support Hitler in 1939, and especially in the summer and autumn of 1941. Hence, he did not have the slightest moral reason for honoring his formal commitments to Japan in the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, but had every political and military reason for ignoring them. If he had been adroit and realistic, after the fashion of Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would have sent the American people a strong note of condolence over our losses as a result of the “treacherous Japanese surprise attack”, and declared his firm neutrality in the forthcoming war between Japan and the United States. This would have seriously upset Roosevelt’s intrigues with Churchill and their joint arrangements with Russia, as well as gravely hampering and delaying the prosecution of the war in both Europe and the Pacific.

Instead, in one of the most rash, ill-considered and fateful acts of his whole career, Hitler did not wait long enough even to discover the reactions of the American people to the Pearl Harbor attack, once the initial shock of our losses had worn off. He declared war on the Thursday after the Japanese attack on Sunday. This virtually destroyed the possibility of American anti-interventionists being able soon to demonstrate that the attack was due to Roosevelt’s withholding warning information from Pearl Harbor. Of this the Intelligence and Communications operating groups in Washington were well aware at the time and might have leaked the information as a result of their indignation. Sombody, apparently, did leak this information to Dewey’s headquarters in the autumn of 1944.

The directors of America First were actually debating about continuing operations when a rumor of Hitler’s imminent decision on war arrived and frustrated this possible decision. Confirmation of this is contained in a letter written to me by the distinguished American industrialist and railroad magnate, Robert R. Young, on June 2, 1953. Young wished America First to continue even after Hitler’s declaration of war:

I happened to be one of the three dissenting voices when the Directors of the America First Committee voted to disband on the Wednesday after Pearl Harbor. I felt then and still feel that if the Committee could only have been kept going some of these people who will become national heroes could have been made to pay for their sins by their liberty or even by their lives. If the Republicans had not been equally corrupted they could have had the whole damned crowd in jail.

At any rate, Roosevelt’s gamble paid off handsomely for the moment, within the pattern of his bellicose program. Whether it paid off in the long run for the benefit of the United States, the Far East, or the world, can best be left to those who are now assessing our domestic and political crises, the current political and military conditions in the Far East, our military budget, and the battle mortality of men and planes in Vietnam. The Korean War, the wars in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, and the bloody conflicts and confusion in Africa, as well as the communization of Eastern Europe and China and its threat to the Far East, all grew directly out of the second World War and, to a large extent, out of American participation in it.

It might be well to observe in conclusion that Admiral Nagumo may have had his share of good luck as a result of panic and misjudgment at Washington during the days immediately after Pearl Harbor, in which Roosevelt does not seem to have been involved, although Stimson, Marshall, Stark and Turner were.

Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kimmel ordered all the craft that could still move at Pearl Harbor to leave at once and join the heavy cruisers, destroyers and carriers that had previously been sent out to Wake and Midway under Halsey and Newton. Rochefort had informed Kimmel that Nagumo would probably deploy some of his task force to attack Wake on his return, and Kimmel ordered Halsey to take his station with the combined forces of the two carriers and heavy cruisers southeast of Wake and await the arrival of any of Nagumo’s task force diverted to Wake.

There was a real possibility of surprising a considerable part of the Japanese task force on its way back to Japan and inflicting serious damage upon it. The total Japanese task force, of course, outnumbered anything the United States could muster at Wake at the time, except in the matter of heavy cruisers, in which we were much superior, but the element of complete surprise might have outweighed this disparity in armament in favor of the United States. Both carriers, the Enterprise and the Lexington, had a complement of planes and plenty of fuel. Since it was unlikely that more than a portion of Nagumo’s task force would be sent to Wake on the return trip, the American force gathered there might have equalled or surpassed the Japanese. It is doubtful if the American forces could have run down Nagumo’s whole task force on the return trip for the latter would have had a considerable head start and had proved to be a fast-moving group of ships.

Admiral Nagumo did not have the Slightest precise knowledge as to the actual location of any of the American warships except for those at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. But Commander Rochefort, who was in charge of the direction-finding and ship-location operations at Pearl Harbor, knew the location of the returning Japanese task force. He has assured me repeatedly, and no other authority dead or alive could be better informed on the matter, that he believes that the rallied and concentrated American naval force could have inflicted very serious injury on the returning Japanese task force if a substantial portion of it had been diverted to Wake. It might even have accomplished almost as much as was achieved at Midway in June, 1942, thus markedly shortening the time required to defeat Japan. We should recall that the most decisive damage done to the Japanese fleet, especially to their carriers, at the Battle of Midway was accomplished mainly by the planes from the carrier Enterprise, and the Japanese fleet moving on Midway in June, 1942, was vastly larger than Nagumo’s task force that attacked Pearl Harbor. And it was the same Admiral Nagumo who was to lose the battle at Midway by his hesitation and lack of strategic genius, even when he was not surprised. It is likely that he would have proved even more imcompetent if he had been surprised and attacked by the American forces in early December, 1941.

All this was nullified by a panicky message sent out of Washington with top priority on the morning of the 9th by Stark and Turner, with the approval of Stimson and Marshall, indicating their belief that there was grave danger that the Hawaiian Islands could not be defended successfully against further expected Japanese raids, ordering that aggressive naval operations around Wake and Midway should be abandoned, and directing that all naval resources controlled by the Pearl Harbor command should be devoted to the defense of the Pearl Harbor area, pending the possible retirement of American forces to the Pacific coast. Washington authorities have sought to defend the panicky message of the 9th by alleging that the Navy could not afford serious damage to or the loss of our two carriers, that the latter had never delivered a successful naval attack, and that the leadership for a carrier operation in war was as yet untested.

The receipt of this message on the 9th led Admiral W. S. Pye, who had replaced Kimmel, to call off the plan that Kimmel had ordered, thus possibly saving Nagumo from undetermined losses, which might have been decisive, and if so preventing the United States from having an early and glorious naval victory that would have more than offset the humiliation and naval losses in the Pearl Harbor attack and notably shortened the war in the Pacific.

This Washington panic relative to the Pearl Harbor situation, until it was evident that the Japanese task force was on its way home and there was no probability of any further immediate Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, was momentarily so extreme that even some persons of high rank in Washington envisaged an actual Japanese occupation of the west coast of the United States. The United States would then trade space for time and meet the advancing Japanese forces at the crest of the Rocky Mountains, with a final rampart around Denver. Stimson was one of those who were much alarmed and this may have suggested to him the cruel and precipitate action in moving the Japanese off the Pacific coast for which he was mainly responsible.

That Roosevelt was not involved in sending this panicky message of the 9th seems to be proved by the fact that both Secretary Knox and Admiral Beatty, who was Knox’s aide and accompanied Knox on his trip to Pearl Harbor right after the attack, assert that Roosevelt was more disappointed by the cancelling of Kimmel’s plan for operations against Nagumo than he was by the losses at Pearl Harbor. This, of course, raises the question of why Roosevelt did not countermand Pye’s order.

X. THE FINAL QUESTION

We may well close the discussion of Pearl Harbor with reference to some basic considerations that relate to the historiography of the subject. The critics of the revisionist historians dealing with Pearl Harbor have violently criticized the latter for placing the responsibility for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor overwhelmingly on Roosevelt. They reveal thereby a strange lapse of logic. Actually, Roosevelt’s success in producting a surprise attack was an immensely, even uniquely, adroit achievement in piloting an overwhelmingly pacifically-inclined country into the most extensive and destructive war of history without any threat to our safety through aggressive action from abroad.

These selfsame anti-revisionist critics, who so heatedly denounce Revisionists for revealing and underlining Roosevelt’s responsibility, are the very ones who also vehemently contend that, as a fundamental moral imperative, we simply had to enter the second World War to preserve our national self-respect and promote the safety and preserve the civilized operations of the human race. Hence, Roosevelt’s success in putting us into this war should appear to them to be greatly to his credit as a statesman—“a good officer”, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has described him in this connection. Elementary logic would make it seem clear that the anti-revisionist writers should be grateful to Revisionists for having demonstrated Roosevelt’s responsibility for this great and benign achievement far more definitively and clearly than the anti-revisionists have ever done. By denying his responsibility for what is to interventionists a superlative act of humanitarian statesmanship the anti-revisionists are depriving him of the credit due him for his allegedly comprehensive services to mankind.

Two historians, Professor Thomas A. Bailey of Leland Stanford University and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. of Harvard, were very early logical in this matter. They admitted decades back that Roosevelt lied us into war, but contend that he did so for the good of our country, which was not wise enough to know what was for its best interests at the time. At the Republican convention of 1944, Clare Boothe Luce called attention to Roosevelt’s lying the United States into war, but with a somewhat more cynical and sardonic leitmotif. A complete and frank treatment of the matter is provided by T. R. Fehrenbach in his F.D.R.’s Undeclared War (1967).

If political deception was required to save the human race in 1941, then it was fortunate that Roosevelt was at the helm in the White House at this moment and a superb virtuoso in public mendacity (the “credibility gap”) was thus directing the destiny of mankind. An eminent American general, and a personal friend of mine, sent me this reminiscence:

The day that F.D.R. died, I drove General Mac-Arthur home. We talked of those who had disappeared from the scene since the war started, especially of F.D.R. As MacArthur got out of the car, he turned to me and said: “Well, the Old Man has gone; a man who never told the truth when a lie would suffice!”

It may be conceded that MacArthur’s appraisal of Roosevelt’s veracity is possibly a bit exaggerated, but it is certainly an understatement to observe that the material presented in this article makes it clear that the “credibility gap” in the White House did not begin with Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War. Moreover, those who believe that it was indispensable for the welfare of humanity for the United States to enter World War II, should not speak too unkindly of the “credibility gap”. According to their own assumptions, it was the sole means of saving the human race from September, 1939, to December, 1941. At least one interventionist historian has possessed the logic and honesty to agree with my contentions. Writing in the Chicago Tribune of December 20, 1967, Professor John H. Collins of Northern Illinois University, summarizes the situation more competently than any other statement that I have read:

Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes . . . has produced a detailed account of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor (as reported in The Tribune. Dec. 7), using documents generally unknown to the public. And what does it all come to?

That Roosevelt, while hypocritically pretending to desire peace, was actually provoking, or rather plotting, a Japanese attack, and that Roosevelt was driving for war against the Axis from 1939 on, and never meant his “again and again” statement of the campaign of 1940.

I say Barnes is bringing a microscope to show us an elephant. If there were naive souls in 1940 who did not know that Roosevelt was for war, and was pulling every wire known to political manipulation to get war, their simplicity cannot now be set right by any documentary proof.

As to Pearl Harbor, it was what Roosevelt had been hoping for. If he was very pious, it was what he had been praying for. If there had been any incantation that could have summoned it up out of a witches’ caldron, he would have been boiling newts’ heads and snakes’ eyes in the White House kitchen.

But wherefore all the moral indignation? It was Roosevelt’s highest duty to get the United States into the war by whatever means would achieve that result. Because the American people were so stupid, ignorant, and complacent as to believe in ignoble ease and complacent sloth, Roosevelt was compelled to lie, bamboozle, and scheme behind a facade of pacifism.

He had the courage to disregard morality to save the country, and his Machiavellian policy should be given its proper meed of historical praise.

Whether our entry into the second World War was for the good of America and the world will be debated for a long time, and how it is settled should depend on the ultimate verdict as to whether the world and the United States did benefit from our entry. The opposing viewpoints are still as sharply drawn and vigorously stated today as at the time of Pearl Harbor. In an article in the New York Times of August 21, 1966, Professor A. J. P. Taylor, the popular British historian, contended that:

There was, in my opinion, one statesman of superlative gifts and vision between the wars. This was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is likely to appear to posterity as the greatest man of his age.

The opposing view was set forth vividly and with more factual support in a private letter to me by Henry Beston, one of the most learned and cultivated American scholars, literary critics, and publicists of this century:

Roosevelt was probably the most destructive man who ever lived. He left the civilized West in ruins, the entire East a chaos of bullets and murder, and our own nation facing for the first time an enemy whose attack may be mortal. And, to crown the summit of such fatal iniquity, he left us a world that can no longer be put together in terms of any moral principle.

As a realistic appraisal of the second World War, I know of nothing better than the following comments of the distinguished journalist, author and critic, Malcolm Muggeridge, in Esquire. February, 1968:

In all the immense literature about the 19391945 war, one may observe a legend in process of being shaped. Gradually, authentic memories of the war—of its boredom, its futility, the sense it gave of being part of a process of inevitable decomposition—fade in favor of the legendary version, embodied in Churchill’s rhetoric and all the other narratives by field marshals, air marshals and admirals, creating the same impression of a titanic and forever memorable struggle in defense of civilization. In fact, of course, the war’s ostensible aims—the defense of a defunct Empire, a spent Revolution, and bogus Freedoms—were meaningless in the context of the times. They will probably rate in the end no more than a footnote on the last page of the last chapter of the story of our civilization.

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