WEBVTT NOTE A Renegade History of the United States 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:20.000 I admit it. I was looking forward to the release of Thaddeus Russell's new book, A Renegade History of the United States. 3 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:26.000 After all, Russell came pretty highly recommended by no less an authority than our own Tom Woods, 4 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:32.320 Kids, who wrote in a column for LewRockwell.com back in March of last year that Thaddeus 5 00:00:32.320 --> 00:00:37.480 Russell is a progressive historian who is friendly with libertarians and with whom I 6 00:00:37.480 --> 00:00:41.120 myself have had some valuable correspondence. 7 00:00:41.120 --> 00:00:46.600 When Russell's renegade history of the United States came out in late September, Tom provided 8 00:00:46.600 --> 00:00:52.880 him with a blurb, which now appears both on Russell's website and on the Amazon.com page 9 00:00:52.880 --> 00:00:54.200 for his book. 10 00:00:54.200 --> 00:01:00.600 Thaddeus Russell has broken free of the ideological prisons of left and right, Tom wrote, to 11 00:01:00.600 --> 00:01:07.200 give us a real flesh and blood history of America, filled with untold stories and unlikely 12 00:01:07.200 --> 00:01:13.080 heroes, no waving incense before the sacred personages of Washington D.C. here. 13 00:01:13.080 --> 00:01:18.480 This wonderful book follows the best American traditions of iconoclasm, and, what is the 14 00:01:18.480 --> 00:01:21.040 same thing, truth-telling. 15 00:01:21.040 --> 00:01:23.760 This is pretty high praise, as I say. 16 00:01:23.760 --> 00:01:27.760 Russell wondered, then, that I looked forward to getting my hands on a copy of Russell's 17 00:01:27.760 --> 00:01:29.420 renegade history. 18 00:01:29.420 --> 00:01:34.840 And when I finally did, I found that by and large it justified Tom Wood's encomium. 19 00:01:34.840 --> 00:01:39.800 It does seem, for example, that Thaddeus Russell is friendly with libertarians. 20 00:01:39.800 --> 00:01:45.440 Actually, this much became evident to me even before I had managed to lay my hands on a 21 00:01:45.440 --> 00:01:47.300 copy of his new book. 22 00:01:47.300 --> 00:01:52.220 In mid-October, in an article in the Huffington Post, Russell acknowledged that the people 23 00:01:52.220 --> 00:01:57.180 Russell who had helped him reach the conclusions he expresses in the book were an unlikely 24 00:01:57.180 --> 00:02:02.700 mix of influences, including the hippies and other cultural radicals I had encountered 25 00:02:02.700 --> 00:02:09.320 in my early life, black and gay cultures that showed me a way out of the self-imposed limitations 26 00:02:09.320 --> 00:02:14.980 of being white and straight, and libertarians who caused me to question the commitment to 27 00:02:14.980 --> 00:02:19.340 freedom among the left that I had been born into. 28 00:02:19.340 --> 00:02:24.120 Paul also says such kind things about the market that it fairly takes your breath away 29 00:02:24.120 --> 00:02:30.800 to remember with a start that this is a progressive historian putting these words on the page. 30 00:02:30.800 --> 00:02:35.520 He writes, for example, that, today, many on the conservative side of the political 31 00:02:35.520 --> 00:02:41.640 spectrum like to make the founders into champions of a free market economy, while many on the 32 00:02:41.640 --> 00:02:46.360 left claim that they were simply the tools of the rising merchant class. 33 00:02:46.360 --> 00:02:51.340 Neither of these sides understands that the market economy has always been a friend of 34 00:02:51.340 --> 00:02:55.160 renegades and an enemy of moral guardians. 35 00:02:55.160 --> 00:03:00.400 In Russell's revisionist view of American history, you see, there is an enduring civil 36 00:03:00.400 --> 00:03:06.960 war between these two factions, the renegades and the moral guardians, whom he also calls 37 00:03:06.960 --> 00:03:08.680 the disciplinarians. 38 00:03:08.680 --> 00:03:14.020 But it seems to me that to properly understand what these two factions represent and where 39 00:03:14.020 --> 00:03:43.380 Two main kinds of people fled Europe to live in North America in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. 40 00:03:43.380 --> 00:03:48.020 Individualists, who sought freedom from the political interference they were accustomed 41 00:03:48.020 --> 00:03:54.340 to dealing with in Europe, and religious zealots, who sought to create and maintain a Puritan 42 00:03:54.340 --> 00:04:01.060 theocracy on these shores, without interference from the self-same European political authorities 43 00:04:01.060 --> 00:04:04.540 who were also interfering with the individualists. 44 00:04:04.540 --> 00:04:10.540 Some colonists wanted a society in which no one could impose his or her creed on anyone 45 00:04:10.540 --> 00:04:11.540 else. 46 00:04:11.540 --> 00:04:26.540 Both the individualists and the puritans can legitimately lay claim to an authentic American pedigree for their creeds. 47 00:04:26.540 --> 00:04:32.540 Individualism and puritanism originated in Europe, true, but they were never welcomed there. 48 00:04:32.540 --> 00:04:40.540 They were exiled early on, and they caught on in their adopted country as they have never caught on anywhere else in the world. 49 00:04:40.540 --> 00:04:44.540 America proved remarkably hospitable to both creeds. 50 00:04:44.540 --> 00:04:49.540 Both creeds have thrived here, and both richly deserve to be called American. 51 00:04:49.540 --> 00:04:52.540 They are, however, fundamentally incompatible. 52 00:04:52.540 --> 00:04:58.540 In the sort of society an individualist would create, a society based on free choice, 53 00:04:58.540 --> 00:05:03.540 the Puritan would have no way to impose his religious and moral views on others. 54 00:05:03.540 --> 00:05:09.540 In the sort of society a Puritan would create, a society based on duty, 55 00:05:09.540 --> 00:05:18.420 The individualist would be reigned in, prescribed, proscribed, told what to do and told what not to do at every turn. 56 00:05:18.420 --> 00:05:25.380 From time to time, the Puritans and the individualists do see eye to eye on a particular political issue, 57 00:05:25.380 --> 00:05:30.580 abolition of slavery in the years just prior to the U.S. Civil War, for example, 58 00:05:30.580 --> 00:05:33.940 but by and large, they are political antagonists. 59 00:05:33.940 --> 00:05:41.220 As the sociologist Herbert J. Gans put it in his 1988 study of middle American individualism, 60 00:05:41.220 --> 00:05:48.100 individualism is inherently, if selectively, anti-government. In a word, individualists are 61 00:05:48.100 --> 00:05:55.300 libertarians. They believe in small, severely limited government. Puritans are authoritarians. 62 00:05:55.300 --> 00:06:00.740 They believe in strong government, government powerful enough to make sure all their fellow 63 00:06:00.740 --> 00:06:11.560 A third group of individuals left Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries to take 64 00:06:11.560 --> 00:06:17.900 up residence in North America, but these colonists were not fleeing anything or anyone. 65 00:06:17.900 --> 00:06:20.020 They had no reason to do so. 66 00:06:20.020 --> 00:06:23.460 They were neither individualists nor Puritans. 67 00:06:23.460 --> 00:06:28.100 Nor did they harbor any other fringe ideas that would make them unpopular in the home 68 00:06:28.100 --> 00:06:29.180 country. 69 00:06:29.180 --> 00:06:31.980 They were in the European mainstream. 70 00:06:31.980 --> 00:06:37.700 They sought first to establish a beachhead on this new continent on behalf of European 71 00:06:37.700 --> 00:06:41.340 civilization, and then to keep it that way. 72 00:06:41.340 --> 00:06:43.700 Keep it European, that is. 73 00:06:43.700 --> 00:06:48.900 They had little or no interest in American ideas, American traditions, a distinctively 74 00:06:48.900 --> 00:06:50.560 American culture. 75 00:06:50.560 --> 00:06:54.160 They thought of themselves as Englishmen, not Americans. 76 00:06:54.160 --> 00:06:59.440 Their descendants today, not their literal descendants necessarily, but those who continue 77 00:06:59.440 --> 00:07:06.400 their Eurocentric way of thinking, call themselves Americans, but they give away their true orientation 78 00:07:06.400 --> 00:07:10.520 when discussing particular cultural and political issues. 79 00:07:10.520 --> 00:07:14.080 What to do about health care or global warming? 80 00:07:14.080 --> 00:07:20.820 What other industrial democracies, code for Germany, France, England, Sweden, etc. do 81 00:07:20.820 --> 00:07:22.560 about these things? 82 00:07:22.560 --> 00:07:27.620 should be our guide. Interested in reading some fiction, seeing a movie, listening to 83 00:07:27.620 --> 00:07:33.720 some music, discussing some ideas? The only fiction worth reading, the only films worth 84 00:07:33.720 --> 00:07:39.460 seeing, the only music worth listening to, the only ideas worth discussing, are all from 85 00:07:39.460 --> 00:07:46.180 European writers, directors, composers, etc. Except, of course, for the almost equally 86 00:07:46.180 --> 00:07:52.460 worthy contributions of homegrown imitators of European styles and European schools of 87 00:07:52.460 --> 00:07:53.460 of Thought. 88 00:07:53.460 --> 00:07:58.540 The Eurocentrics have no use for either individualism or Puritanism. 89 00:07:58.540 --> 00:08:03.380 As has been noted, these are American ideas, not European ones. 90 00:08:03.380 --> 00:08:07.640 In Europe, they never won the support of more than a despised minority. 91 00:08:07.640 --> 00:08:12.740 But the Eurocentrics tend overall to side politically with the Puritans. 92 00:08:12.740 --> 00:08:18.020 After all, a large, powerful government, a government large enough and powerful enough 93 00:08:18.020 --> 00:08:35.300 American culture as we know it today is an amalgam of these three influences. 94 00:08:35.300 --> 00:08:38.720 Or so at least, it seems, from where I sit. 95 00:08:38.720 --> 00:08:42.500 American culture as Thaddeus Russell sees it is a little bit different. 96 00:08:42.500 --> 00:08:47.860 He leaves the Eurocentrics out of the picture entirely and focuses on the long struggle 97 00:08:47.860 --> 00:08:56.340 He is particularly interested in those among the individualists who are mostly or completely 98 00:08:56.340 --> 00:09:02.740 non-ideological, the individualists whose individualism is not based in their commitment 99 00:09:02.740 --> 00:09:10.060 to any particular ideas or principles, but is based instead in their self-serving behavior. 100 00:09:10.060 --> 00:09:14.380 Particularly interesting in this regard is Russell's chapter on slavery. 101 00:09:14.380 --> 00:09:21.580 It is centered around his report that a majority of the 2300 ex-slaves who offered an evaluation 102 00:09:21.580 --> 00:09:28.060 of slavery to interviewers from the Federal Writers Project in the mid-1930s, field hands 103 00:09:28.060 --> 00:09:35.180 and house slaves, men and women, had a positive view of the institution, and many unabashedly 104 00:09:35.180 --> 00:09:38.020 wished to return to their slave days. 105 00:09:38.020 --> 00:09:43.900 As Russell sees it, the ex-slaves looked back on their days as chattels so nostalgically 106 00:09:43.900 --> 00:09:49.820 because they felt they had greater freedom as slaves than they later enjoyed after slavery 107 00:09:49.820 --> 00:09:51.380 had been abolished. 108 00:09:51.380 --> 00:09:56.760 He quotes the testimony of one former slave who told a Federal Writers Project interviewer 109 00:09:56.760 --> 00:10:03.180 in 1937 that he had worked harder since the abolition of slavery than he had ever worked 110 00:10:03.180 --> 00:10:08.660 on the plantation, and that on the plantation he knew that Master would take care of him 111 00:10:08.660 --> 00:10:14.380 and provide him with food and warm clothing and warm housing in the winter months, even 112 00:10:14.380 --> 00:10:20.940 if, along with all or most of the other slaves, he shirked his work and played sick and devoted 113 00:10:20.940 --> 00:10:27.040 whatever resources he did have to pleasure, chiefly gambling, liquor and whores. 114 00:10:27.040 --> 00:10:33.080 As Russell himself puts it, many and possibly most of the ex-slaves did not restrain their 115 00:10:33.080 --> 00:10:55.080 It is, generally speaking, a good thing, Russell asserts, that this uniquely liberated culture 116 00:10:55.080 --> 00:11:00.600 began spreading from the descendants of the former slaves to white-blue-collar workers 117 00:11:00.600 --> 00:11:07.960 in the 1960s, so that absenteeism, workplace sabotage, insubordination toward managers 118 00:11:07.960 --> 00:11:14.400 and union stewards, and other forms of industrial disobedience became steadily more common in 119 00:11:14.400 --> 00:11:20.160 American industry during those years. Russell also writes approvingly of the workers at 120 00:11:20.160 --> 00:11:27.580 the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, who in 1972 staged a walkout in rebellion 121 00:11:27.580 --> 00:11:32.220 against their employer and their union, the United Auto Workers. 122 00:11:32.220 --> 00:11:38.660 These strikers spoke publicly about committing acts of sabotage on the assembly line, spontaneous 123 00:11:38.660 --> 00:11:45.780 slowdowns and shutdowns, showing up late to work or not at all, general goofing off, and 124 00:11:45.780 --> 00:11:49.300 f***ing up any time I can. 125 00:11:49.300 --> 00:11:56.560 Well as Steve Martin used to say, excuse me, but I don't consider unilateral violations 126 00:11:56.560 --> 00:12:04.160 in terms of contractual obligations you voluntarily agreed to earlier as expressions of individualism. 127 00:12:04.160 --> 00:12:09.120 I don't think of endangering the lives of unwitting and innocent consumers because I 128 00:12:09.120 --> 00:12:13.960 don't like my job as acceptable, much less conscionable. 129 00:12:13.960 --> 00:12:20.040 On the other hand, I remember the furor over Walter Block's now classic libertarian work, 130 00:12:20.040 --> 00:12:24.900 Defending the Undefendable, when it first came out back in the 1970s. 131 00:12:24.900 --> 00:12:30.100 More than a few libertarians back then said, in effect, well, of course Walter is correct 132 00:12:30.100 --> 00:12:35.260 that these people aren't violating anybody's rights and they shouldn't be scapegoated, 133 00:12:35.260 --> 00:12:38.760 but that doesn't really make them heroes, does it? 134 00:12:38.760 --> 00:12:40.740 The litterer as hero? 135 00:12:40.740 --> 00:12:42.620 Give me a break. 136 00:12:42.620 --> 00:12:48.260 I remember thinking at the time, what I still think now more than 30 years later, that Walter's 137 00:12:48.260 --> 00:12:52.980 book was written with a light touch, with a consistently light tone. 138 00:12:52.980 --> 00:12:58.660 was illustrated by humorous drawings contributed by a political cartoonist of the time. 139 00:12:58.660 --> 00:13:03.820 The reader was frankly invited to consider Walter's references to people like literars 140 00:13:03.820 --> 00:13:10.900 and pimps as heroes, as open and unapologetic exercises in hyperbole, the deliberate use 141 00:13:10.900 --> 00:13:16.900 of exaggeration, even exaggeration to the point of absurdity, to emphasize an idea, 142 00:13:16.900 --> 00:13:18.920 a point, an argument. 143 00:13:18.920 --> 00:13:24.640 You know all along that Walter is only half serious in calling these people heroes. 144 00:13:24.640 --> 00:13:27.500 With Thaddeus Russell, you know no such thing. 145 00:13:27.500 --> 00:13:33.360 For all you know, this guy is perfectly serious in using terms like individualism and freedom 146 00:13:33.360 --> 00:13:39.160 to describe the life of sponges who are supported by someone else, and who deliberately render 147 00:13:39.160 --> 00:13:45.040 the very least and most slipshod service they can possibly get away with in return for that 148 00:13:45.040 --> 00:13:46.580 support. 149 00:13:46.580 --> 00:13:51.720 On the other hand, there is far more to Thaddeus Russell's new book than just this. 150 00:13:51.720 --> 00:13:58.260 He makes a good case that most, at times perhaps all, of the founders were disciplinarians, 151 00:13:58.260 --> 00:14:04.100 looking for ways to regulate and control the lives of ordinary people in the new republic, 152 00:14:04.100 --> 00:14:09.900 lest they devote their time and money to things like wine, women, song and gambling, things 153 00:14:09.900 --> 00:14:12.540 of which the founders did not approve. 154 00:14:12.540 --> 00:14:18.020 He provides what may be the best short summary of the major ideas and events of the American 155 00:14:18.020 --> 00:14:25.440 Revolution that I've ever seen, six pages packed with relevant, eye-opening information. 156 00:14:25.440 --> 00:14:31.680 He also includes a remarkable chapter on the New Deal as the American version of fascism, 157 00:14:31.680 --> 00:14:33.240 in which he writes that, 158 00:14:33.240 --> 00:14:40.040 The Second World War appeared to many contemporary observers, and still appears to many historians, 159 00:14:40.040 --> 00:14:45.880 as proof of a fundamental antagonism between fascism and the American way of life. 160 00:14:45.880 --> 00:14:51.380 Many have seen the war as evidence that, in particular, the New Deal liberal way of life 161 00:14:51.380 --> 00:14:53.800 was hostile to fascism. 162 00:14:53.800 --> 00:14:58.920 After all, while many Republicans and other enemies of the New Deal were opposed to fighting 163 00:14:58.920 --> 00:15:05.540 fascism abroad, Roosevelt led the nation to war against Germany, Italy and Japan. 164 00:15:05.540 --> 00:15:11.780 More than 400,000 Americans died in the fight, and the Roosevelt administration made sure 165 00:15:11.780 --> 00:15:16.780 to not just defeat the fascist regimes, but to obliterate them. 166 00:15:16.780 --> 00:15:22.420 But the evidence of their similarities suggests that the New Deal and fascism went to war 167 00:15:22.420 --> 00:15:26.220 not over ideas or values or a way of life. 168 00:15:26.220 --> 00:15:33.440 Rather, it seems, the war was a struggle between brothers for control of the world family. 169 00:15:33.440 --> 00:15:38.480 And there's Russell's excellent chapter on the widespread lack of support for American 170 00:15:38.480 --> 00:15:43.620 involvement in World War II by those who were expected to do the fighting. 171 00:15:43.620 --> 00:15:49.120 And there's his series of informative chapters on American minority groups, the Irish, the 172 00:15:49.120 --> 00:15:55.680 Jews, the Italians, and the ways each of these groups gradually advanced from having a reputation 173 00:15:55.680 --> 00:16:02.240 as little better than sub-human to being accepted as fully human, white Americans. 174 00:16:02.240 --> 00:16:07.240 It had a lot to do, as I'm sure you've guessed by now, with convincing the public that group 175 00:16:07.240 --> 00:16:15.760 members had given up their hedonism and libertinism and fallen into line behind the Puritan leadership. 176 00:16:15.760 --> 00:16:17.320 Now don't get me wrong here. 177 00:16:17.320 --> 00:16:19.460 I have no use for Puritans. 178 00:16:19.460 --> 00:16:24.520 I agree with H. L. Mencken that Puritans are people bedeviled by the haunting fear that 179 00:16:24.520 --> 00:16:27.480 someone somewhere might be happy. 180 00:16:27.480 --> 00:16:34.240 But I also agree with Gustave Flaubert, that great hater of the puritanical bourgeoisie, 181 00:16:34.240 --> 00:16:39.480 the man who said, what a horrible invention, the bourgeois, don't you think? 182 00:16:39.480 --> 00:16:45.260 Flaubert considered it axiomatic that hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom. 183 00:16:45.260 --> 00:16:50.200 He believed that the whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of 184 00:16:50.200 --> 00:16:52.100 bourgeois stupidity. 185 00:16:52.100 --> 00:16:56.980 But he also counseled a young bohemian of his acquaintance to be regular and orderly 186 00:16:56.980 --> 00:17:03.520 in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. 187 00:17:03.520 --> 00:17:09.940 Flaubert knew in the 1870s that what Thaddeus Russell calls the renegade subculture was 188 00:17:09.940 --> 00:17:13.900 inimical to the long-term success of those who practiced it. 189 00:17:13.900 --> 00:17:19.320 Thomas Sowell, in his valuable essay Black Rednecks and White Liberals, published just 190 00:17:19.320 --> 00:17:25.980 six years ago, calls it a counterproductive, dangerous and self-destructive subculture. 191 00:17:25.980 --> 00:17:31.140 Even Thaddeus Russell acknowledges that were the heroes of this book to take control of 192 00:17:31.140 --> 00:17:33.740 society, it would be a living hell. 193 00:17:33.740 --> 00:17:39.240 No one would be safe on the streets, chaos would reign, and garbage would never be collected. 194 00:17:39.240 --> 00:17:45.500 The argument here is not that bad people should replace the disciplinarians, but that in American 195 00:17:45.500 --> 00:17:51.140 history the struggles between the two have determined the breadth of personal liberty. 196 00:17:51.140 --> 00:17:56.380 I make no claims for other parts of the world, where at times renegades have overwhelmed 197 00:17:56.380 --> 00:18:02.740 the guardians of order, but in this country, the more bad people existed, resisted and 198 00:18:02.740 --> 00:18:06.060 won, the more freedom was expanded. 199 00:18:06.060 --> 00:18:10.900 Thaddeus Russell's new book is A Renegade History of the United States. 200 00:18:10.900 --> 00:18:13.140 I recommend it highly. 201 00:18:13.140 --> 00:18:27.780 This is Jeff Rigenbach.