The Character of American Individualism

Individualism, and its financial corollary, laissez-faire liberalism, has not at all times taken on a conservative hue, has not at all times functioned, because it usually does at this time, as an apologist for the established order. Quite the opposite, the revolution of contemporary occasions was initially, and continued for a very long time to be, laissez-faire individualist. Its function was to free the person individual from the restrictions and the shackles, the encrusted caste privileges and exploitative wars, of the feudal and mercantilist orders, of the Tory ancien régime.

Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, the militants within the American Revolution, the Jacksonian motion, Emerson and Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison and the novel abolitionists—all have been mainly laissez-faire individualists who carried on the age-old battle for liberty and in opposition to all types of State privilege. And so have been the French revolutionaries—not solely the Girondins, however even the much-abused Jacobins, who have been obliged to defend the Revolution in opposition to the massed topped heads of Europe. All have been roughly in the identical camp. The individualist heritage, certainly, goes again to the primary trendy radicals of the seventeenth century—to the Levellers in England, and to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson within the American colonies.

The standard historic knowledge asserts that whereas the novel actions in America have been certainly laissez-faire individualist earlier than the Civil Battle, that afterwards, the laissez-fairists grew to become conservatives, and the novel mantle then fell to teams extra acquainted to the fashionable Left: the Socialists and Populists. However it is a distortion of the reality. For it was aged New England Brahmins, laissez-faire retailers and industrialists like Edward Atkinson, who had financed John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, who have been those to leap in and oppose the US imperialism of the Spanish-American Battle with all their may.

No opposition to that conflict was extra thoroughgoing than that of the laissez-faire economist and sociologist William Graham Sumner or than that of Atkinson who, as head of the Anti-Imperialist League, mailed antiwar pamphlets to American troops then engaged in conquering the Philippines. Atkinson’s pamphlets urged our troops to mutiny, and have been consequently seized by the US postal authorities.

In taking this stand, Atkinson, Sumner, and their colleagues weren’t being “sports activities”; they have been following an antiwar, anti-imperialist custom as previous as classical liberalism itself. This was the custom of Value, Priestley, and the late-18th-century British radicals that earned them repeated imprisonment by the British conflict machine; and of Richard Cobden, John Brilliant, and the laissez-faire Manchester Faculty of the mid-Nineteenth century. Cobden, particularly, had fearlessly denounced each conflict and each imperial maneuver of the British regime. We are actually so used to considering of opposition to imperialism as Marxian that this sort of motion appears virtually inconceivable to us at this time.

By the appearance of World Battle I, nonetheless, the demise of the older laissez-faire era threw the management of the opposition to America’s imperial wars into the arms of the Socialist Social gathering. However different, extra individualist-minded males joined within the opposition, a lot of whom would later kind the core of the isolationist Previous Proper of the late Thirties. Thus, the hardcore antiwar leaders included the individualist Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and such laissez-faire liberals as Senators William E. Borah (Republican) of Idaho and James A. Reed (Democrat) of Missouri. It additionally included Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., father of the Lone Eagle, who was a congressman from Minnesota.

Virtually all of America’s intellectuals rushed to enlist within the conflict fervor of the First World Battle. A number one exception was the formidable laissez-faire individualist Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the Nation, grandson of William Lloyd Garrison and former member of the Anti-Imperialist League. Two different outstanding exceptions have been pals and associates of Villard who have been later to function leaders of libertarian thought in America: Francis Neilson and particularly Albert Jay Nock. Neilson was the final of the laissez-faire English Liberals, who had emigrated to the US; Nock served below Villard in the course of the conflict, and it was his Nation editorial denouncing the progovernment actions of Samuel Gompers that bought that difficulty of the journal banned by the US Submit Workplace. And it was Neilson who wrote the primary revisionist e book on the origins of World Battle I, How Diplomats Make Battle (1915). The primary revisionist e book by an American, in actual fact, was Nock’s Delusion of a Responsible Nation (1922), which had been serialized in LaFollette’s Journal.

The World Battle constituted an incredible trauma for all of the people and teams against the battle. The overall mobilization, the savage repression of opponents, the carnage and the US international intervention on an unprecedented scale—all of those polarized a lot of various individuals. The shock and the sheer overriding truth of the conflict inevitably drew collectively the varied antiwar teams right into a free, casual, and oppositional united entrance—a entrance in a brand new sort of elementary opposition to the American system and to a lot of American society. The speedy transformation of the sensible younger mental Randolph Bourne from an optimistic pragmatist right into a radically pessimistic anarchist was typical, although in a extra intense kind, of this newly created opposition. Crying, “Battle is the well being of the State,” Bourne declared,

Nation is an idea of peace, of steadiness, of dwelling and letting dwell. However State is basically an idea of energy.… And we’ve got the misfortune of being born not solely into a rustic however right into a State.…

The State is the nation appearing as a political unit, it’s the group appearing as a repository of pressure.… Worldwide politics is a “energy politics” as a result of it’s a relation of States and that’s what States infallibly and calamitously are, big aggregations of human and industrial pressure which may be hurled in opposition to one another in conflict. When a rustic acts as a complete in relation to a different nation, or in imposing legal guidelines by itself inhabitants, or in coercing or punishing people or minorities, it’s appearing as a State. The historical past of America as a rustic is sort of completely different from that of America as a State. In a single case it’s the drama of the pioneering conquest of the land, of the expansion of wealth and the methods during which it was used … and the finishing up of religious beliefs.… However as a State, its historical past is that of enjoying half on this planet, making conflict, obstructing worldwide commerce … punishing these residents whom society agrees are offensive, and amassing cash to pay for all of it.

If the opposition was polarized and compelled collectively by the conflict, this polarization didn’t stop with the conflict’s finish. For one factor, the conflict and its corollary repression and militarism have been shocks that began the opposition considering deeply and critically in regards to the American system per se; for one more, the worldwide system established by the conflict was frozen into the established order of the postwar period. For it was apparent that the Versailles treaty meant that British and French imperialism had carved up and humiliated Germany, after which supposed to make use of the League of Nations as a everlasting world guarantor of the newly imposed establishment. Versailles and the League meant that America couldn’t neglect the conflict; and the ranks of the o opposition have been now joined by a number of disillusioned Wilsonians who noticed the truth of the world that President Wilson had made.

The wartime and postwar opposition joined collectively in a coalition together with Socialists and all method of progressives and individualists. Since they and the coalition have been now clearly antimilitarist and anti-“patriotic,” since they have been more and more radical of their antistatism, the individualists have been universally labeled as “leftists”; in actual fact, because the Socialist Social gathering break up and pale badly within the postwar period, the opposition was given an more and more individualistic forged in the course of the Twenties.

A part of this opposition was additionally cultural: a revolt in opposition to hidebound Victorian mores and literature. A part of this cultural revolt was embodied within the well-known expatriates of the “Misplaced Era” of younger American writers, writers expressing their intense disillusion with the wartime “idealism” and the truth that militarism and the conflict had revealed about America. One other part of this revolt was embodied within the new social freedom of the jazz and flapper eras, and the flowering of particular person expression, amongst growing numbers of younger women and men.

This text is excerpted from The Betrayal of the American Proper, chapter 2, “Origins of the Previous Proper I: Early Individualism” (2007).