The Liberty Bell
Above all things our function is to proclaim liberty, to proclaim it as the soil on which we grow and as the air we breathe, to make the world understand that liberty is what we fight for and live by. We have to keep the word always sounding so that people will not forget—and we have to create liberty so that it is always real and people will have a goal to fight for, and never believe that it is only a word. We do not need to convert the world to a special form of political democracy, but we have to keep liberty alive so that the peoples who want to be free can destroy their enemies and count on us to help. We will do it by the war we are waging and the peace we will make and the prosperity of the peoples of the world which we will underwrite. For in the act of proclaiming and creating liberty we must also give to the world the demonstration we have made at home: that there is no liberty if the people perish of starvation and that alone among all the ways of living tried in the long martyrdom of man, freedom can destroy poverty.
We have been bold in creating food and cars and radios and electric power; now we must be bold in creating liberty on a scale never known before, not even to ourselves. For we have to create enough liberty to take up the shameful slack in our own country. We all know, indifferently, that people (somewhere—where was it?—wasn't there a movie about them?) hadn't enough to eat. But we assume that Americans always have enough liberty. The Senate's committee report on the fascism of organized big-farming in California is a shock which Americans are not aware of; in the greater shock of war we do not understand that we have been weakened internally, as England was weakened by its distressed areas and its Malayan snobbery. We do not yet see the difference between the misfortune of an imperfect economic system and calculated denials of liberty. We have denied liberty in hundreds of instances, until certain sections of the country, certain portions of industry, have become black infections of fascism and have started the counter-infection of communism. Most of the shameful occasions we have cheerfully forgotten; in the midst of our war against tyranny, any new blow at our liberty is destructive. Here are the facts in the California case, chosen because the documentation comes from official sources:
"Unemployment, underemployment, disorganized and haphazard migrancy, lack of adequate wages or annual income, bad housing, insufficient education, little medical care, the great public burden of relief, the denial of civil liberties, riots, strife, corruption are all part and parcel of this autocratic system of labor relations that has for decades dominated California's agricultural industry."
The American people do not know that such things exist; no American orator has dared to say "except in three or four states, all men are equal in the eyes of the law"—or, "trial by jury is the right of every man except farm hands in California, who may be beaten at will." When the Senate's report is repeated to us from Japanese short-wave we will call it propaganda—and it will be the terrible potent propaganda of truth. We will still call for "stern measures", if a laborer who has lost the rights of man on American soil does not go into battle with a passion in his heart to die for liberty, and we will not understand that we have been at fault, because we have not created liberty. We have been living on borrowed liberty, not of our own making.
We have not seen that some of our "cherished liberties" are heirlooms, beautiful antiques, not usable in the shape they come to us. We have the right to publish—but we cannot afford to print a newspaper—so that we have to create a new freedom of the press. We have the right to keep a musket on the wall, but our enemies have ceased to prowl, the musket is an antique, and we need a new freedom to protect ourselves from officious bureaucrats. We have the right to assemble, but men of one mind, men of one trade, live a thousand miles apart, so we need a new freedom to combine—and a new restriction on combination, too.
Freedom is always more dangerous than discipline, and the more complex our lives, the more dangerous is any freedom. This we know; we know that discipline and order are dangerous, too, because they cannot tolerate imperfection. A nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free, but it can exist 90% free, especially if the direction of life is toward freedom; that is what we have proved in 160 years. But a nation cannot exist 90% slave—or 90% regimented—because every degree of order multiplies the power of disorder. If a machine needs fifty meshed-in parts, for smooth operation, the failure of one part destroys forty-nine; if it needs five million, the failure of one part destroys five million.
That is the hope of success for our strategy against the strategy of "totality"; the Nazis have surpassed the junkers by their disciplined initiative in the field, a genuine triumph; but we still do not know whether a whole people can be both disciplined and flexible; we have not yet seen the long-run effect of Hitler's long vituperation of Bolshevism, his treaty with Stalin, and his invasion of Russia—unless the weakening of Nazi power, its failure to press success into victory at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad reflect a hesitation in the stupefied German mind, an incapacity to change direction.
Whether our dangers are greater than those of fascism may be proved in war; it remains for us to make the most of them, to transform danger into useful action. We have to increase freedom, because as freedom grows, it brings its own regulation and discipline; the dangers of liberty came to us only after we began to neglect it or suppress it; freedom itself is orderly, because it is a natural state of men, it is not chaos, it begins when the slave is set free and ends when the murderer destroys the freedom of others; between the tyrant and the anarchist lies the area of human freedom.
It is also the area of human cooperation, the condition of life in which man uses all of his capacities because he is not deprived of the right to work, by choice, with other men. In that area, freedom expands and is never destructive. The flowering of freedom in the past hundred years has been less destructive to humanity than the attempted extension of slavery has been in the past decade; for when men create liberty, they destroy only what is already dead.