Political Organizations versus Individual Rights

[Although he was a lifelong liberal in his politics, this entry — written at the age of 23 — shows that my father looked upon political organizations of all types with a jaundiced eye. He even cites the dictatorial control of John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers of America union, to illustrate how individuals within larger organizations are expected to march in lock-step behind the policies established by the groups’ leaders. In explaining why he could never join a political party (a stance he would later shift) or attempt a career in politics, my father says, “… politics is a game which can be successfully played only by those who regard mass power as more important than individual rights.” It’s hard to argue with that insight.]

May 26, 1946 (Fort Lawton, WA)

In college it was fashionable to be on the liberal side of the fence on questions involving labor, Russia and similar current objects of intellectual controversy. I was a campus liberal, and fancied that some of my opinions were based on personal conviction substantiated by the “facts” in the case. I was enthusiastic over cooperation with Russia during and after the war, and in all struggles with employers the laboring man had my support, qualified only by my disapproval of the feather-bedding practices of certain unions. Apparently I was not cut out , however, in the pattern of a campaigner or a propagandist. Though I was accepted by the more voluble left-wingers as one of their number, I left behind me no record of militant support of the various liberal issues which arose from time to time. I joined the Student Action Assembly, and was actually given a post of some sort on its executive council, but I don’t now recall any contribution I made to the leadership of that organization. I accepted the notion that there was something vaguely laudable in the concern which this organization showed for the freedom of India and the liberation of the US Negro, but its connection with and effect on the actual problems was too indistinct to rouse me to any earnest endeavours on its behalf.

I have read enough history to admit the inevitability of political organizations, and to convince me of their general worthlessness and not infrequent malignancy. I am less and less tempted to become a partisan for any cause or group. If I were to be accused of political apathy, my feelings would not be hurt. In any political organization there are those who run the show and those who perform the paces directed by those at the top. The motives of the leaders may be idealistic or materialistic, or, in the great average, I suppose, a combination of the two. In any case, to fulfill his motives the leader must concentrate on building an organization powerful enough to defeat all organizations which stand in opposition to it. His power comes from the support, voluntary or coerced, of his followers. The organization assumes the right to dictate to its members what their action shall be in any given situation, no matter what the private opinions of these members may be. This “right” is buttressed by every device from flowery propaganda to outright physical intimidation. Thus when John L. Lewis calls a strike in the bituminous coal field, some 400,000 miners stay home from work. No doubt the majority of these men believes in the wisdom of Lewis’ order, primarily because the union’s efficient propaganda machine has made it practically impossible for them to form an independent opinion in questions affecting their livelihood. But even supposing a large minority of the miners did not believe in the wisdom of the strike, there is plenty of evidence to show that it has no practical choice of acting independently of the union. There may be the formality of a strike vote, but the union leaders need never fear that they will be repudiated by their rank and file. I use the union as the most clear cut example today of the dictatorial nature of any political organization.

It is often true that the rank and file members of a political organization exercise the voting power, but the vote is becoming an ever more meaningless symbol of freedom. When candidates and policies are chosen at the top, the individual is given nothing more than the choice of voting yes or no, and he will often be shown convincing “reasons” why it is expedient to vote yes.

Freedom may be an overrated concept, but the fact that I still value it highly will not allow me willingly to become a member of a political organization, no matter how worthy its published aims. Nor do I possess enough of the prophet or of the cynic to let me attempt to become a political leader. In college a favorite thesis of our political science classes was the need for more educated and idealistic young men in politics and public administration. Administrative jobs, I believe, offer a legitimate opportunity for such young men to perform the public service they may feel called upon to offer, but politics itself has no place for them. They will never succeed in “reforming” politics, since politics is a game which can be successfully played only by those who regard mass power as more important than individual rights. The public administrator, on the other hand, can be concerned to his heart’s content with individual rights, but the irony of his position is that he is dependent for his job, more often than not, on the power of a political machine. He may often be faced with the equivocal necessity of playing politics to hold onto his job.

Henry Thoreau demonstrated graphically how difficult it was for a man to be spiritually and economically independent in the world of one hundred years ago. I can’t agree with his ideal of complete independence, if only for the reason that it can obviously never be more than the privilege of a few isolated and fortunate individuals. I believe, in fact, that economic independence is as mistaken an aim for individuals as it is for nations. The great heresy being propagated by political leaders as zealously today as in the past is that which uses man’s inevitable economic dependence as a weapon for striking at his spiritual independence. Of course there are plenty of people who insist that the chief heresy is man’s spiritual independence. Not a few exhibit their intellectual arrogance by arguing that while freedom of thought and expression is desirable for the emancipated class of which they are members, it is too prohibitively dangerous a plaything to allow in the hands of the masses of people. Some men forget very easily by what narrow margins, hollow standards, and lucky accidents they are able to consider themselves above the masses; very few realize that the masses are much easier to find in political theory than in the world of people. Behind the mass reactions, mass demonstrations, and mass opinions reported in the newspaper there are millions of individuals with certain similarities, which are the concern of the politicians, but also with certain differences, which are the concern of the writer of fiction.

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Reflections on John Dos Passos’s “USA”

[Having just read John Dos Passos’s USA, my father reflected on the author’s depiction of society in the early 1900s, including the stagnation of the “propertied class” and the qualified “revolution” of the workers. My father appreciated Dos Passos’s ability to see both sides of the social debate, and my father generally strove to match this kind of balanced objectivity in his own observations and critiques. His analysis that the New Deal prevented, rather than caused, a revolution has meaning today in the context of the various federal efforts to mitigate the current recession’s effects. Unfortunately, it’s no easier today than in the past to counter criticism of the government’s efforts with a “things would have been much worse” defense of those efforts.]

January 26, 1944 (Jefferson Barracks, Mo.)

…Yesterday I finished Dos Passos. In the last paragraph of the narrative, Mary French says, “Say, Rudy, if Ada Cohn calls up again, tell her I’m out of the office… I have too much to do to spend my time taking care of hysterical women on a day like this.” She put on her hat, collected her papers, and hurried over to the meeting of the committee.

When you know the situation and the characters, that paragraph sums up a lot of Dos Passos’ ideas and hopes. Ada Cohn is a rich Jewish girl, a dilettante musician. Mary French is a radical social worker. She and Ada become friends during college days at Vassar. The night before, they’d gone to a Greenwich village party given by Eveline Hutchins, a jaded member of the idle rich. Next morning the papers carry the story of Eveline’s suicide. That’s why Ada’s hysterical. Mary herself is terribly discouraged by the impending failure of the strike on which she’s working. But Mary, you see, has a cause to work for. No hysterics for her. She hurries off to a meeting of the strike committee. The year is about 1928.

That’s Dos Passos’ way of summing up what seemed to him the significant trends in the social history of the USA at that time. The rich propertied class had lost contact with creative living, was collapsing, stagnating; the “revolution” of the workers, on the other hand, was not strong enough to take over the state, as had happened in Russia, but the workers weren’t giving up.

If Dos Passos had been a professor, and written his book as a text, he might have called it The Radical Labor Movement In the United States 1900-1928. But he had more of a mind for people than for statistics, so he wrote as he did. He himself was on the radical side, but he saw more than the shortcomings of those on the other side of the tracks. He understood how faction and treachery within his own ranks had as much to do with the failure of the cause as did interference and persecution from the outside. Because of this objectivity, his work deserves a high rank as history, and powerfully drawn history. It burst far beyond the bounds of narrowly defensive propaganda put out by some “party-line” communists.

The conditions which Dos Passos describes, – the strikes, the beatings, the massacres, the official murder of civil liberties, – have never been part of my America. Yet I know that they happened, and still do happen. But to speak now of a revolution sounds ridiculous. The New Deal wasn’t a revolution. In fact, it probably prevented a revolution by restoring to the working people enough economic security to keep them from resorting to violence. But this security was largely restored through the channels of the existing industrial machine, and the owners of that machine remained in power.

Was this a triumph of the American democratic system? Have the men of property at last learned the responsibility of property? Can the unions settle peacefully their differences with the managers without the domination of both by government? And if government domination of both groups becomes necessary, can the real values of democratic society be maintained and strengthened?

Those are some very general questions for a liberal democrat today. I didn’t ask them to answer them here, because I don’t know the answers. To me now they’re like sign posts on the road.

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Wendell Willkie, Liberal Republican, Backs the Liberal Arts

[Throughout his adult life, my father was a card-carrying Democrat and an unapologetic political liberal. Not surprisingly, as a college student in the 1940s, he was taken with the promise of “democratic socialism,” a subject that his journals of this period address several times. Nonetheless, he also found much to like in the ideas and speeches of a prominent Republican of the times — Wendell Willkie. Willkie, the Republican nominee for the 1940 Presidential election, lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to an historic third term. FDR later brought the philosophically compatible Willkie into his administration as a special ambassador-at-large, promoting “One World” internationalism and an end to imperialism and colonialism.

The following journal excerpt, which quotes Willkie extensively from a speech he delivered at Duke University (presumably reported in The New York Times), is an interesting window into the mind of a “liberal” Republican of the era. Not only are such Republicans an extinct breed today, also all-but extinct are politicians of any party who can articulate moral and philosophic ideas — rather than slogans and sound bites — with the sophistication and intelligence Willkie demonstrated. Even then, however, being a liberal Republican carried significant liability; Willkie dropped out of the 1944 Presidential race because his liberalism lost him the support of the GOP establishment.

As reported by my father, much of the content of Willkie’s speech involved the benefits of a liberal arts education, a conviction shared by my father throughout his life. Willkie’s proposal to defer some men from Army service so they could remain in college and meet future American needs, not surprisingly, finds a sympathetic ear in my father. Despite the ambivalence  about military service that he states in this entry, however, my father would go on to enlist in the Army several months later. One note about the end of this entry, where my father’s personal commentary is interspersed among various Willkie quotes. All of Willkie’s quotes, even if not so identified, are bracketed by quotation marks. ]

January 15, 1943 (Middlebury College)

… Last night Wendell Willkie spoke at Duke in defence[sic] of the liberal arts education. It was a most encouraging talk, and added considerable cement to my conviction that Willkie is the man who must be elected next president of the United States. He himself, of course, reiterated his previous statement that there must be no indispensable man in a democracy. And certainly I won’t go around calling him indispensable. When lined up against all other known aspirants to the presidential office, however, I will gladly call him invaluable.

His ideas were so well phrased that I shall quote some of them here, perhaps as handy material for the Emerson paper, certainly as invaluable material for any man who believes in democracy. “I am speaking of education for its own sake: to know for the sheer joy of understanding; to speculate; to analyze; to compare and to imagine.” He lists the conventional frivolous objections to the liberal arts: “When such arguments gain acceptance, that is the end of us as a civilized nation.”

“… there should be some provision in the manpower program for leaving a nucleus in the colleges of men when aptitudes qualify them as definitely for our long-range needs as, let us say, other men are obviously qualified for medicine.” This statement drew a light blast from the Times editorial, which was otherwise commendatory. The Times maintained that these specially qualified youths still ought to stand the test of fire, to be able to understand and speak the language of the returning veterans. I stick with Willkie. It’s not a matter of courage. Probably it would take more courage to stay in college. It’s a matter of waste. Why throw tomorrow’s leaders into the gamble of physical combat? God knows they are preparing themselves to enter an arena of conflict as demanding on the man as any Libyan battlefield. I feel it myself; certainly I could go into battle of arms, but I am not happy at the risk of losing my chance to fight in the realm that I am much better fitted for, the realm of ideas.

I’m looking for a lifetime battle. Today I can say that I believe. Democracy and Christianity are more than words. They are ideas planted deep in my mind, and now coming to first flower. I am happy in the thought of living for them, not of dying for them. My death on the point of a bayonet would contribute very little to the life of these ideas in the world, and I have the confidence to hope that in a lifetime of study, writing, and teaching, I can make a much greater contribution to these ideas that I love, one that might rank with Emerson’s.

There must be many like me, – eager boys who feel the electric shock of this new age zipping through their nerves, and long to be among its prophets, as I do. Is it timidity that holds us back from asserting what we want to do for our fellow men? Will we accept meekly the grasp of the hand that is drawing us into the Army? With me there is a balance of opinion in this problem that keeps me from declaring openly on Willkie’s side. I imagine that valuable experience will derive from service as a soldier in a great Army, though the few reports I’ve heard don’t lead me to expect too much here. Probably it means entrance into some technical training, which probably wouldn’t hurt any, but would it help? Meanwhile, as the deadline approaches, I have these last three months of college to push as far ahead as possible.

Willkie went on to a discussion of freedom: “It is true that a man cannot be free unless he has a job and a decent income. But this job and this income are not the source of his freedom. They only implement it. Freedom is of the mind.”

…Willkie speaks of the damaging influences of the German universities. “It has encouraged the sacrifice of methods that make for wide intelligence to those who are concerned only with highly specified knowledge; it has held that the subject is more important than the student; that knowledge is more important than understanding; that science, in itself, can satisfy the soul of man; and that intelligent men should not be allowed to concern themselves with politics and the administration of state. Such matters should be left to trained politicians.”

That’s a damning indictment… But on one thing I insist. That science is nothing new in the world, and that it is no more adequate by itself for man today than it has been in the past. Science is generally description and analysis of the workings of natural laws in the material and human worlds. The continued expansion of scientific knowledge can be tremendously valuable for our society, but only when applied to the problems of society by morally sound men. Such men are more than scientists; they are religious men.

“If the humanities, or the humanistic temper which they promote, are permitted to lapse now, we shall have lost the peace before we have gained it, and the real victory after the war will be to the way of life, inhuman, tyrannical, mechanical, of those whom we shall outwardly have conquered.”

Speaking of our trend towards leadership, “hero-worship,” “indispensable men,” he says: “Had we more faith in liberal institutions, we would have, I believe, more faith in ourselves – more faith in the great leavening processes of democracy, which forever pushes new men to the top.” The new men! Emerson yesterday. Willkie today. Tomorrow? I’m trying. “Education is the mother of leadership.”

“More and more the doctrine of telling us what we should know is being adopted… And what has won out In the long battle. Always the truth.” The greatest prize for which man may strive. Each discovery leads one to higher truth, and there is never an end for him who dares to pursue. Melville was one of these, until the climb became too steep even for him.

“We have seen the devolution of human aspiration. It is a tragedy as great as men have ever witnessed.” But men are aspiring even at the darkest hour. Aspiration? It’s becoming the keynote of my life.

“Too many of the planners, I feel, are trying to look ahead by looking backward. Too many are seeking the future in the past.” It is neither in the past nor in the future, but it is now! and not in other men, but in you! Let a man first discover those moral laws that are completely independent of time, and then he will know what his society demands of him.

“Open the books, if you wish to be free.” Better to say, open the books, that they may open your mind. 

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