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.
I have used the phrase "creating enough liberty"--as if the freedom of
man were a commodity; _and it is_. So long as we think of it as a
great abstraction, it will remain one; the moment we _make_ liberty it
becomes a reality; the Declaration of Independence _made_ liberty,
concretely, out of taxes and land and jury trials and muskets.
Liberty, like love, has to be made; the passion out of which love
rises exists always, but people have to _make love_, or the passion is
betrayed; and the acts by which human beings make liberty are as
fundamental as the act of sexual intercourse by which love is made.
And as love recreates itself and has to be made, in order to live
again, liberty has also to be re-created, or it dies out. Whatever
lovers do affects the profound relation between them, for the passion
is complex; whatever we do affects our liberties, for freedom rises
out of a thousand circumstances; and we have to be not only eternally
vigilant, but eternally creative; we can no longer live on the liberty
inherited from the great men who created liberty in the Declaration of
Independence. All that quantity has been exhausted, stolen from us,
misused; if we want to survive, we must begin to make liberty again
and proclaim it throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof;
and it shall be a jubilee unto them.
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| Typographical errors corrected in text: |
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| Page 54: "what the trust were" replaced with |
| "what the trusts were" |
| Page 83: "given by the the people" replaced with |
| "given by the people" |
| Page 156: enterprizes replaced with enterprises |
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| NOTE that on Page 85 there are words missing from the |
| quoted section of the Declaration of Independence. |
| The missing words "to our British brethren. We have warned |
| them" have been inserted in the paragraph that begins: |
| "Nor have We been wanting in attention (to our British |
| brethren. We have warned them) from time to time of |
| attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable |
| jurisdiction over us." |
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