Hoover ran on a chicken for every pot in the bubble of 1928: In May 2024 everyone's go-to cheap protein costs more than ever

 

Famous supporters of the original America First Committee, just a bunch of Nazis to Rush Limbaugh, included presidents Ford, Kennedy, Hoover

Obama's $500 tax relief is so George W. Bush 2.0

Obama is to announce tonight not even inflation-adjusted George W. Bush-type tax relief to middle class families, as reported here, but just another gimmick:

"Among the highlights of President Obama’s State of the Union address plans to pull the American family out of economic plight is a $500 tax credit for two-earner families."

George W. Bush bookended his administration with similar gimmicks.

OK, the first one wasn't exactly a gimmick. The first was part of the then-temporary tax reduction passed by the Congress. You know the one. The check in the mail was a result of the implementation of the tax rate schedule which existed for the rest of Bush's presidency but was set to expire by the time of Obama. Obama finally agreed to make that schedule permanent, something George W. Bush wasn't able to make happen but Speaker John Boehner was. (Why is that? And how come no one except maybe two people on the planet recognize and applaud that? I am one of them. A Forbes columnist, Ralph Benko, is the other. But I digress.)

Flashback to the San Francisco Chronicle in June 2001, here, just six months after Bush assumed office after the narrowest presidential election victory in living memory:

Bush signed the $1.35 trillion tax cut -- which includes soon-to-be-mailed rebate checks of up to $600 -- amid the kind of presidential pomp he usually disdains: a formal ceremony in the East Room, with a Marine band playing "Hail to the Chief." ... In Congress yesterday, a few Republicans talked about making the current bill permanent. One of its odd features is that it expires on Dec. 31, 2010, a sunset provision put in because of congressional rules governing spending more than a decade into the future.

Bush's second and real gimmick came at the end of his presidency in 2008, just before all hell broke loose in the economy with massive bank failures, massive bankruptcies, massive foreclosures, massive job losses, and massive stock market declines. It was a minor echo of Herbert Hoover trying to stop the Great Depression, double, triple, and quadruple-downed on by his successor FDR but to no avail.

Market Watch had the story here in February 2008, detailing the very liberal character of the Republican stimulus plan, which at the time met with no criticism from candidate Obama (why? because it was Obama's brand of liberalism also):

President Bush signed a $168 billion economic stimulus package on Wednesday that will extend rebates to U.S. taxpayers, give tax breaks to businesses and make more-expensive mortgages available through the government and government-sponsored mortgage-finance companies. ... Bush said the U.S. economy has clearly slowed but that the package is "a booster shot for our economy." Approved by lawmakers last week, the package provides a tax rebate of up to $1,200 per working couple, plus $300 per child. ... Taxpayers will not have to apply for the rebate; it would come automatically based on their 2007 tax return. ... Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wove the stimulus package into a speech in Janesville, Wisc., on Wednesday, touting a plan he offered a few weeks ago. He proposed sending each working family a $500 tax cut and each senior a $250 supplement to their Social Security check. "Neither George Bush nor Hillary Clinton had that kind of immediate, broad-based relief in their original stimulus proposals, but I'm glad that the stimulus package that was recently passed by Congress does," Obama said.

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These crumbs from the Master's table aren't going to help Americans do anything except survive as dependents, maybe for a week. What Americans need is jobs, decent jobs, and the decent wages which go with them, and liberals know nothing about how to provide them with those.

Pittsburgh Tribune Review Agrees Obama Is Essentially A Fascist

According to an editorial in Saturday's Pittsburgh Tribune Review, here, agreeing with John Mackey the CEO of Whole Foods, Obama is essentially a fascist. The editorial approvingly quotes this definition of fascism by libertarian Sheldon Richman:

“As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. For those with the hubris to think they, not free markets, could better serve society, ‘fascism‘ (or as we prefer, 'fascistic economics') was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone (classic) liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism.”

Just when you thought there's been no progress defining for the public who and what is Obama, a businessman and a newspaper provide some:

"The general parallels to Obamanomics are glaring. Throw in the specifics of ObamaCare — then consider forays into national industrial policy and state protection of organized labor cartels — and the parallels are blinding", the editorial says.

Not that America's odd mixture of socialism and capitalism is something new.

It was Herbert Hoover, as far as I know, who was the first liberal to identify the American phenomenon of a mixed economics. Hoover located it in the blended strongman presidency of FDR, which was based more on Roosevelt's admiration for Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler as leaders than it was on substantive convictions about the dismal science. The alphabet soup of government which we take for granted today is the direct descendant of Roosevelt's impulse to try something, try anything, until it worked. Well, they're still trying.

Under Roosevelt, perfectly good food was deliberately destroyed by government to keep it from reaching the market in order to support prices in a deflationary economy even as people went hungry all across the country. Today we deliberately devote half the corn crop to produce an expensive, politically correct fuel boosting the cost of food animals while the number of people on food stamps is at an all time high and consumer demand has fallen like a rock. In the immortal words of Curly, if at first you don't succeed, keep on sucking until you do succeed.

But Hoover the loser was on to something, even if calling the man who beat him an un-American dictator lover was beyond the pale for some people. History eventually proved Hoover right when FDR broke with American tradition dating from the founding by running for a third term, and then a fourth. It took until 1951 for the American people to wake up and put a stop to that, with the ratification of the 22nd Amendment. Some dictators are assassinated, others just end up in the circular file. In many ways, Roosevelt simply out-Hoovered Hoover's own liberalism. People forget that FDR ran on what amounted to a repudiation of Republican liberal economic interventionism in the economy, and promptly ramped it up beyond anyone's imagination after he was elected.

But the blended system in America surely began much earlier. We could dial it back probably all the way to Lincoln himself, which would be fitting if only because the current occupant of The White House who practices fascism goes to such great pains to style himself after him, the president who chose to make the principle of national union over sovereign States the new definition of America. That fact of working a revolution, of remaking the country, should trouble everyone who has an ounce of independence left flowing through his veins, which is what troubles so many people who hear Obama speak of transforming the country. For half of us, one such revolution was enough.

This year we might do well to reflect on a later example, however, seeing that it is the anniversary of the abolition of private banking 100 years ago. It's strangely coincidental. The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in 1913 by a fanatical progressive Presbyterian named Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who hated the encumbrances placed upon government by the constitutional order and wanted to forge a new world where nations disarmed, lived in peace and cooperated toward a common goal, with the US not at its then natural place, at the head. The Federal Reserve Act was passed in thoroughly partisan fashion by Democrats who had swept to power in the election of 1912 and rammed it through the Congress without Republican support. Their dollar then is now worth 4 cents.

If Woodrow Wilson doesn't yet remind you of Obama and ObamaCare, maybe its because after 100 years of the pernicious effects of American style fascism, you're just too poor to pay attention.

Imported British "Conservative" Condescends To Instruct Us About Communism

John Derbyshire

Here:

"But Barack Obama was never about the downtrodden masses. If he associated with revolutionaries such as Bill Ayers, it was only to feed off them and advance himself. Once he’d advanced, they went under the proverbial bus, as did the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Barack Obama has always been about Barack Obama. ...

"To be a real communist is to make a serious commitment to a cause. Communism is a hard dogma, completely at odds with the soft-handed girlish narcissism of a late-20th-century American leftist such as Obama, who has never risked, fought, struggled, or suffered."

Well, by this standard most businessmen, and most people who work with and for them, aren't real Americans either because the only thing they're committed to is the advancement of number 1. Nor are they real capitalists, but fascists, ever seeking preferments in law to protect their fiefdoms. Nor are they real Christians, eschewing renunciation of the world and service to the poor.

Serious commitment to anything hardly exists anywhere at any time for very long. There are only degrees of commitment, the few outstanding examples of which momentarily intrude upon our attention, as when devotees of a 7th century bandit religion would just as soon blow them- and ourselves to smithereens as live another day.

Just because Obama is a hypocritical communist fellow-traveler doesn't invalidate classifying him as one. After all, Obama also claims to be a Christian but believes things about the unborn and human sexuality which many a Catholic bishop would say destine him for hell, but people still say he is a Christian. Obama's lavish expenditures on his own presidency, which mark him out as a tyrant according to Aristotle ("the good of one man only"), stand alongside his belief in redistribution of income, in spreading the wealth around, in the same way that his friendship with and fundraising among the rich coexists with his sustained inveighing against them because in his opinion they do not pay their fair share in taxes.

The real problem with calling Obama a communist isn't that it isn't true but that the term doesn't exhaust the possibilities. What is instructive about Obama is that he is a blend of enthusiasms and idealisms, a character Herbert Hoover would have recognized as in the mould of FDR who admired the strong men of Europe, who were at once fascist, Nazi and communist. Obama may be a dilettante communist, but you'll still get an alphabet soup of statist experiments at his dinner table. 

But, of course, communist purists would demur at this point, Stalin having been an "aberration". Yet we still call Stalin a communist dictator and his rule a communist dictatorship even though Stalin's partnership with capitalism and people like Henry Ford arguably aligned Stalinism more with fascism than with communism.

Over time the terms lose their adequacy, primarily because they are invented by human beings who will do nothing if not disappoint, eventually. There's a word for that, but like "communist" the word "sinner", to quote our British instructor, is just not "ironic enough for our very ironic age".

Obama's Enthusiasm For Bailouts Becomes National Socialism in Colorado Remarks

Obama views the GM auto bailout as an example of a successful government investment in the private sector, never mentioning, of course, that the success is at the expense of the former private investors in GM, its non-union elements, and of the tax-paying public. Without those, GM is still a failure, and should be again.

That Obama now says in Colorado that he wants to similarly rescue more companies, however, indicates that the bailout model was more to him than a one-off which he fortuitously inherited from the Republican establishment, an intellectually lazy cohort of Baby Boomers which long ago had betrayed free market principles. Obama's commitment to a model of government superintendence of private industry marks a new public face for an old familiar mixture of State and industry, the inspiration for which Herbert Hoover noted in his memoirs FDR had derived from Mussolini and the other strong men of Europe.

We all know what is the result of this type of thinking because we've already experienced it, not just in FDR's long failure, and not just in the recent auto company bailouts, but also in the rescue of the financial industry:

• more moral hazard which has allowed so-called private banking players like the five or ten biggest banks to take even more unwarranted risks and grow ever larger and more too big to fail than ever, knowing the public purse is backing them up;
• taxpayer-funded bailouts whose pain is never really felt by the taxpayers because, like most public spending, the bailouts are simply financed by more borrowing, which in their turn have only worsened the fiscal health of the nation and contributed to the loss of its once vaunted AAA rating;
• corruption of elected public officials and bureaucrats whose crimes destroy the public's consent to be governed, as witnessed by the rise of protest movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and by the capital strike by individual investors;
• picking winners like multinational GE and Wall Street firms who reaped huge rewards in the form of tax breaks and bonuses because of their close relationship with government, and therefore by definition also picking losers on Main Street like small banks and entrepreneurs who can't beat the system because it is rigged against them, crushing confidence in "capitalism";
• a complete repudiation of free market principles in which failure and bankruptcy become as unacceptable as saying "No" to the kids or as marking an "F" on a report card, unless for unrelated political reasons your industry happens to become a target for elimination, you know, like Chick-Fil-A, or the Roman Catholic Church in America.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Obama's remarks in Colorado is the way he is now touting his commitment to this model in explicitly nationalistic terms, emphasizing his as a patriotic concern for the American people to bring their jobs home, and Romney's as an unpatriotic intent to export those jobs.

Obama's socialism has been deemed a distraction by establishment Republicans, who find all the purported links between Obama and the communist left made by conservatives just a little too disturbing for polite conversation. It reminds them too much of the McCarthy era. But now explicitly linked to nationalism, Obama's remarks become an opportunity to refocus the conversation on the coincidence of these elements in fascism, which the left has hitherto succeeded in attacking and marginalizing as a phenomenon of the right, of conservatism.

Locating Obama in fascism actually makes better sense of his presidency to date. It explains the disillusionment of the left with him as a sell-out who has had the temerity to spend so much of his time enjoying himself instead of pushing their agenda, crafting policy to maximize campaign contributions from favored industries, and throwing his weight around as Commander In Chief. After one year progressives were already ridiculing his administration as a squandered presidency. And fascism also coheres with the interpretation of his experience in Chicago where he allied himself with financial, insurance and real estate interests and the Democrat Party to take over the property of the South Loop,  enrich themselves, and further their political careers. The president's friendship with Jeffrey Immelt is not a bug. It's a feature. 

The historical reality is that the fight between the communists and the fascists was always a fight on the common ground of socialism, rather like the fight between Democrats and Republicans has been a fight on the common ground of liberalism. The radicalization which occurred in the arguments between socialists culminating in the Second World War occurred because the conservatism of a prior monarchical age had completely lost its tempering force in society. The civilization of Europe was completely overcome from within by a capitulation to eschaton-immanentizing ideologies before it destroyed itself from without in war. In that process, liberalism was the vanguard softening up the enemy for the totalitarianism to come. Conservatism was beside the point then, but not here, not now.

In the arguments between Democrats and Republicans in our time, matters have not yet degenerated into such violence because the unique contributions of conservatism from the American Founding still inform much of the body politic. And the most important of those contributions, derived from human and religious experience both, has been the self-limiting conviction that human nature is not perfectible and always remains a mixture of good and evil which no rearrangement of human affairs can alter.  In the person of Barack Obama, however, we have met with someone who explicitly asserts otherwise, as an ideologue, that the union is perfectible. He deliberately goes out of his way to attack those individuals and institutions who know, believe and say otherwise. And armed with the imperial accoutrements gathered by his predecessors in the presidency, one might say that the people actually face for the first time a real and foreign threat in charge of the executive, a foreigner in his heart, mind, and affections who keeps his past sealed precisely because the revelation that he once presented himself as a foreigner for his own advantage even though he was born in Hawaii would offend more than actually being a foreigner.

Liberalism is defenseless against this because it drinks from the same cup of idealism. This is why it keeps quiet and doesn't look too deeply into President Obama. It is afraid it might see its own reflection. And this is also why a liberal like Mitt Romney can't bring himself to entertain Obama's socialism, let alone his national socialism. If it worked, he'd actually agree with it.

ABC News has the most recent formulations of Obama's national socialist vision here:

"When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, more than 1 million jobs at stake, Gov. Romney said, let’s ‘let Detroit go bankrupt.’ I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now, I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry. I don’t want those jobs taking root in places like China. I want them taking root in places like Pueblo.  Gov. Romney brags about his private sector experience, but it was mostly investing in companies, some of which were called “pioneers” of outsourcing.  I don’t want to be a pioneer of outsourcing.  I want to in-source.  I want to stop giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas.” ...

"When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, 1 million jobs at stake, Mr. Romney said, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt.’  I said, let’s bet on America’s workers.  And we got management and workers to come together, making better cars than ever. And now, GM is number one again and the American auto industry has come roaring back.   So now, I want to say what we did with the auto industry, we can do it in manufacturing across America.  Let’s make sure advanced, high-tech manufacturing jobs take root here, not in China.  Let’s have them here in Colorado.  And that means supporting investment here.”

How The World Will End: The Myrmikan Edition

Good stuff from Daniel Oliver, here, describing how the banking system has become the key institution through which American-style fascism expresses itself:

[T]his is why politicians engage in complicity with the bankers to lower interest rates: first, because money flowing into sovereign debt enables them to spend more money and, second, because the promise of higher asset prices makes for happier voters. But none of this adds to wealth, merely the perception and distortion of wealth.

Moreover, Bernanke’s thesis is not working: the transmission mechanism into higher general assets prices is broken. The banks are insolvent. They flee from one safe haven to another. As Herbert Hoover once lamented: “capital is acting like a loose cannon on the deck of a ship in the middle of a storm.” The banks buy Treasuries not for the income, but because they can pledge them as collateral for more credit, which they require to remain liquid. They are pushed into taking sovereign duration risk because they are too weak to take business risk.

When the market does finally overpower the manipulations, sovereign debt markets will pop, interest rates will rise, the banks will tumble along with the markets they have rigged, and then the real witch-hunts will begin. It is this outcome, not more rounds of money printing, that will send gold up vertically in terms of the major currencies. The current inflation/deflation seesaw is merely the prelude to debt failure and currency revaluation.

Vern McKinley Connects Long History Of Bailouts In US Especially With 1930s

Vern McKinley's new book on 100 years of bailouts in the US is reviewed here, including this quotation from the book:

“the number of agencies deploying bailouts multiplied, the safety net became bigger and bigger, and the primary beneficiaries were soon concentrated among the largest of financial institutions, who came to rely on and demand this ready source of government backstopping…” 

The word "fascism" never occurs in the review, but the smell is unmistakeable and Herbert Hoover would have recognized it.

When the People Lose Control of the Public Finances, Tyranny Often Follows

Herbert Hoover has captured the imagination of a number of writers recently, from Walter Russell Mead to R. Christopher Whalen.

Now James Grant weighs in too at The Wall Street Journal, here, contrasting Hoover's fear of tyranny with our desire for it:

Herbert Hoover, who learned a thing or two about debt and adversity, warned in his memoirs that, unless the dollar was convertible into gold, the people would lose control of the public finances, "their first defense against tyranny." Simon Johnson and James Kwak, the authors of "White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You" could not seem to disagree more. To them, the problem today isn't paper money but a government that hovers too little and taxes too lightly. More regulation—especially financial regulation—and selectively higher taxes are the answers, they contend. ...

Johnson and Kwak are special pleaders. Human life being uncertain, they wish to protect us from it. How much risk of sickness, unemployment or indigence do you, a mere individual, wish to bear on your own? "The question we leave you with is this," the pair write: "Are you and your family willing to face these risks alone, not knowing what will happen in the future, or do you want to live in a society that will protect you from misfortunes that lie beyond your control? For that is what the debate over the national debt boils down to, and its outcome depends on you."

More than likely, the outcome does not depend on you, whoever you are. It rather turns on the intellectual climate in which the people at the top frame public choices.

And Mr. Grant makes another good case for the choice of free men: gold.

The Hitch on G.K. Chesterton as Fascist Fellow Traveler

Seen here:

"[Chesterton's] idea of a body [the Roman Catholic Church] that actually did all the official thinking was probably not unrelated to the Mussolini concept of the corporate state. This would be repulsive to the English and American tradition."

Only until FDR, of course, who paved the way in America for the acceptance of the concept of the president as the blended strong man, as described in the memoirs of President Herbert Hoover.

In Spengler's phrase: "There is no contradiction between economic liberalism and socialism."

Can there be any other explanation for the three year somnolence of the 30 million strong Catholic Church in America while a ne'er-do-well poseur attempts to overthrow the country? Roman Catholics are incapable of recognizing tyranny, let alone stopping it, since they actually identify with a divine one. In fact, until recently Obama's social program and Catholics' have been virtually indistinguishable. Which is rather the point of Hitchen's critique of religion, and its heaven as the "Celestial North Korea."

Like many religious groups in America, Catholicism represents a country within the country and is only the most recent but vivid example of our continuing Balkanization and inevitable dissolution as one nation under the Protestant God.

The wall separating church and state in America was not built by Rome.

The Eerie Way 'Obama' Rhymes With 'Hoover'

From Walter Russell Mead:

Like Obama, Hoover was the child of a broken home with an unconventional background. He was far more widely traveled than most Americans in his day, and his time overseas made him a globalist in his thinking in many ways. His wife (Lou Henry Hoover) was unusually well educated and assertive — at a time when few women went to college, she graduated from coeducational Stanford with a degree in geology. Hoover was an unconventional candidate who came into office on a tidal wave of support.  Hoover, Secretary of Commerce during the Roaring Twenties, had never held elected office before winning the presidency. His campaign went deep into enemy territory, winning over solidly Democratic states in what was still the deep blue South including (like Obama) Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.  Hoover was the great progressive hope of his day — he had supported Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose campaign and was seen as much more forward looking and progressive than the party machine.  He ran on the most diverse presidential ticket until Barack Obama’s own election in 2008; Hoover’s running mate, Kaw nation member Charles Curtis, was the first Native American and the first American with significant non-European ancestry to serve as Vice President of the United States. Hoover continued to burnish his diversity credentials in the White House; he was the first president since Theodore Roosevelt to invite an African American to a White House dinner and he wanted progress on Native American issues to be a hallmark of his administration. Hoover was also deeply concerned about the health of the middle class and the condition of the poor. He was an early backer of the long term, low interest mortgage that became the cornerstone of middle class finance, and he came into office hoping that prosperity would eliminate poverty in the United States.

The similarities in office are just as interesting, here.

Former Supporter Perceives the Blended Strongman in President Obama

In remarks available here from the president of the Black Chamber of Commerce.

Harry Alford likens Obama to both a fanatical Marxist and to a brown-shirted Fascist.

R. Christopher Whalen has called attention to the blend here, relying on defeated Herbert Hoover's reflections in retirement.

It is a useful hermeneutic for explaining otherwise disparate tendencies in American politics.

It also kind of gives new meaning to being "a mutt like me."

RC Whalen Wants Us To Declare FDR's 'Emergency' Over Already

Some excerpts:

President Herbert Hoover said of the New Deal that it was an attempt to crossbreed Socialism, Fascism and Free Enterprise, part of a collectivist revolution led by FDR and carried within the Trojan horse of economic emergency. ...

The second half of volume three of President Hoover’ s memoir, The Great Depression, contains a scathing critique of his successor -- and also an admission of personal responsibility for the catastrophe. It features several times the word “ fascism ” to describe many Roosevelt-era prescriptions for fighting the Depression, a blunt reminder that much of what FDR did during these dark years was borrowed from the strong men of Europe — Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Stalin in Russia.

Don't miss the rest, here.

Who is the revolutionary? Who has threatened the violence? You patriots, or Obama and his leftist radicals?

Obama is the one pursuing the radical course of action, which is why he is forever talking about healthcare, trying to defend his reforms and persuade doubters even after it's passed! He is the rebel. It is he who wants to destroy the American post-war way of healthcare. It is his party which has attempted to pervert the American constitution. It is he who means death to private health enterprise. It is he who means to expose millions to the risks of losing private coverage. It is he who will preside over the demise of Medicare benefits for seniors who need them most. Thwarting him and defeating him would mean a return, a rolling back, to the old constitutional order, a defense and preservation of life. It would be a healthy reaction, no violence and no innovation, to bring his program to an end and reverse it. His failure would be a shot heard round the world.

The following may be found here:

“A Revolution Not Made But Prevented”

Russell Kirk

WAS THE AMERICAN War of Independence a revolution? In the view of Edmund Burke and of the Whigs generally, it was not the sort of political and social overturn that the word “revolution” has come to signify nowadays. Rather, it paralleled that alteration of government in Britain which accompanied the accession of William and Mary to the throne, and which is styled, somewhat confusingly, “The Glorious Revolution of 1688.”

The most learned editor of Burke’s works, E. J. Payne, summarizes Burke’s account of the events of 1688-89 as “a revolution not made but prevented.” Let us see how that theory may be applicable to North American events nine decades later.

We need first to examine definitions of that ambiguous word “revolution.” The signification of the word was altered greatly by the catastrophic events of the French Revolution, commencing only two years after the Constitutional Convention of the United States. Before the French explosion of 1789-99, “revolution” commonly was employed to describe a round of periodic or recurrent changes or events, that is, the process of coming full cycle; or the act of rolling back or moving back, a return to a point previously occupied.

Not until the French radicals utterly overturned the old political and social order in their country did the word “revolution” acquire its present general meaning of a truly radical change in social and governmental institutions, a tremendous convulsion in society, producing huge alterations that might never be undone. Thus when the eighteenth-century Whigs praised the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which established their party’s domination, they did not mean that William and Mary, the Act of Settlement, and the Declaration of Rights had produced a radically new English political and social order. On the contrary, they argued that the English Revolution had restored tried and true constitutional practices, preservative of immemorial ways. It was James II, they contended, who had been perverting the English constitution; his overthrow had been a return, a rolling back, to old constitutional order; the Revolution of 1688, in short, had been a healthy reaction, not a bold innovation.

The Whigs, Burke among them, here were employing that word “revolution” in its older sense.

This shift in usage tends to confuse discussion today. If we employ the word “revolution” in its common signification near the end of the twentieth century, what occurred in 1688-89 was no true revolution. In the Whig interpretation of history, at least, the overturn of James II was a revolution not made, but prevented (according to the later definition of “revolution”).

But what of the events in North America from 1775 to 1781? Was the War of Independence no revolution?

That war, with the events immediately preceding and following it, constituted a series of movements which produced separation from Britain and the establishment of a different political order in most of British North America. Yet the Republic of the United States was an order new only in some aspects, founded upon a century and a half of colonial experience and upon institutions, customs, and beliefs mainly of British origin. The American Revolution did not result promptly in the creation of a new social order, nor did the leaders in that series of movements intend that the new nation should break with the conventions, the moral convictions, and the major institutions (except monarchy) out of which America had arisen. As John C. Calhoun expressed this three quarters of a century later, “The revolution, as it is called, produced no other changes than those which were necessarily caused by the declaration of independence.”

To apprehend how the leading Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century thought of their own revolution, it is valuable to turn to the arguments of Edmund Burke, which exercised so strong an influence in America, an influence more telling, indeed, after the adoption of the Constitution than earlier. (Until my own generation, Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with the American Colonies was studied closely in most American high schools.)

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, as earlier, Burke strongly approves the Revolution of 1688. “The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty,” Burke declares.

"The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any [scion] alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay I am persuaded, that all those which possibly may be made hereafter, will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example."

The Whig apology for the expulsion of James II, then, here so succinctly expressed by Burke, was that James had begun to alter for the worse the old constitution of England: James was an innovator. As Burke writes elsewhere in the Reflections, “To have made a revolution is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology.” A very similar apology, we shall see, was made by the American leaders in their quarrel with king and Parliament, and for their act of separation. The Whig magnates had prevented James II from working a revolution; the American Patriots had prevented George III from working a revolution (a revolution, that is, in the twentieth-century sense of the word). If the events of 1688 and 1776 were revolutions at all, they were counter revolutions, intended to restore the old constitutions of government. So, at any rate, runs the Whig interpretation of history.

One will perceive that already, by 1790, Burke and the Old Whigs were involved in difficulty by this troublous word “revolution.” For the same word was coming to signify two very different phenomena. On the one hand, it meant a healthy return to old ways; on the other hand, it meant (with reference to what was happening in France) a violent destruction of the old order. The English Revolution and the French Revolution were contrary impulses, although for a brief while, with the summoning of the long-dormant Three Estates, it had appeared that the French movement too might be in part a turning back to old political ways.

In America, the dominant Federalists, and soon not the Federalists only, were similarly perplexed by the word. Here they stood, the victors of the American Revolution, Washington and Hamilton and Adams and Madison and Morris and all that breed; and they were aghast at the revolution running its course in France. They had fought to secure the “chartered rights of Englishmen” in America, those of the Bill of Rights of 1689; and now they were horrified by the consequences of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, borrowed in part from that very Declaration of Independence to which they had subscribed. The same revulsion soon spread to many of the Jeffersonian faction, to such early egalitarians as Randolph of Roanoke, Republican leader of the House of Representatives. It spread in England to the New Whigs, so that even Charles James Fox, by 1794, would declare, “I can hardly frame to myself the conditions of a people, in which I would not rather desire that they should continue, than fly to arms, and seek redress through the unknown miseries of a revolution.” In short, Whig revolution meant recovery of what was being lost; Jacobin revolution meant destruction of the fabric of society. The confounding of those two quite inconsonant interpretations of the word “revolution” troubles us still.

The Whig interpretation of history has been most seriously criticized, and perhaps confuted, by such recent historians as Sir Herbert Butterfield. No longer do most historians believe that James II could have worked fundamental constitutional alterations, nor that he intended to; and James was more tolerant than were his adversaries. What ruined him with the English people, indeed, was his Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, indulging Catholics and Dissenters; and what impelled William of Orange to supplant James was William’s dread of a popular rising that might overthrow the monarchy altogether and establish another Commonwealth. William, too, preferred preventing a revolution to making one. For a convincing brief study of the period, I commend Maurice Ashley’s The Glorious Revolution of 1688, published in 1966. Ashley doubts whether the overturn of 1688 did indeed constitute a “Glorious Revolution”; but he concludes that the event “undoubtedly contributed to the evolution of parliamentary democracy in England and of a balanced constitution in the United States of America.”

However that may be, Edmund Burke repeatedly and emphatically approved what had occurred in 1688 and 1689. The Whig interpretation was the creed of his party: it was the premise of his Thoughts on the Present Discontents and of his American speeches. It would not do for Burke, so eminent in Whig councils, to be found wanting in zeal for the Glorious Revolution that had dethroned a Papist. For Irish Tories had been among his ancestors; his mother and sister were Catholics (although that fact appears not to have been widely known); Burke was the agent at Westminster for the Irish Catholic interest; early in his career he had been accused by the old Duke of Newcastle of being “a Jesuit in disguise,” and a caricaturist had represented him in a Jesuit soutane. “Remember, remember the fifth of November”: Burke had been compelled to draw his sword to defend himself during the Gordon Riots. It was prudent for Burke to subscribe conspicuously to the Whig doctrines of 1688 and 1689.

Certainly Burke in part founded his vehement denunciation of the French Revolution upon his approbation of the English Revolution, of that “revolution” which had been a return, in Whig doctrine, to established political modes of yesteryear. Upon the same ground, Burke had attacked mordantly the American policies of George III, advocating a “salutary neglect” of the American colonies because it was to Britain’s interest, as to the colonies’ interest, that the old autonomy of the colonies should be preserved. It was King George, with his stubborn insistence upon taxing the Americans directly, who was the innovator, the revolutionary (in the French sense of the word), in Burke’s argument; Burke, with the Rockingham Whigs, sought to achieve compromise and conciliation.

But it does not follow that Burke approved what came to be called the American Revolution.

The notion that Burke rightly supported the American Revolution but inconsistently opposed the French Revolution is a vulgar error often refuted, by Woodrow Wilson, for one, in his article “Edmund.Burke and the French Revolution,” in the September 1901 issue of The Century Magazine. Burke advocated redress of American grievances, or at least tacit acceptance of certain American claims of prescriptive right; he never countenanced ambitions for total separation from the authority of Crown in Parliament. Burke’s stand is ably summed up by Ross Hoffman in his Edmund Burke, New York Agent (1956):

"Burke had no natural sympathy for America except as a part of the British Empire, and if, when the war came, he did not wish success to British arms, neither did he desire the Americans to triumph. Peace and Anglo-American reconciliation within the empire were his objects. After Americans won their independence, he seems to have lost all interest in their country."

During the decade before the shot heard round the world, Burke seemed a champion of the claims of Americans. That sympathy, nevertheless, was incidental to his championing of the rights of Englishmen. It was for English liberties that the Rockingham Whigs were earnestly concerned. If the king should succeed in dragooning Americans, might he not then turn to dragooning Englishmen? It was the belief of the Whigs that George III intended to resurrect royal prerogatives of Stuart and Tudor times; that he would make himself a despot. That peril the Whigs, and Burke in particular, with fierce invective, considerably exaggerated; but it is easy to be wise by hindsight. George III was a more formidable adversary than ever James II had been. Where James had been timid and indecisive, George was courageous and tenacious; and often George was clever, if obdurate, in his aspiration to rule as a Patriot King. At the end, Burke came to understand that in the heat of partisan passion he had reviled his king unjustly; and in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) he called George “a mild and benevolent sovereign.”

Yet neither to the American Patriots nor to Burke, in 1774 and 1775, had George III seemed either mild or benevolent. Upon the assumption that King George meant to root up the liberties of Englishmen, to trample upon the British constitution, the dominant faction of Whigs in America determined to raise armies and risk hanging. They declared that they were resisting pernicious innovations and defending ancient rights: that they were true-born Englishmen, up in arms to maintain what Burke called “the chartered rights” of their nation. They appealed to the Declaration of Rights of 1689; they offered for their violent resistance to royal authority the very apology offered by the Whigs of 1688. In the older sense of that uneasy word “revolution,” they were endeavoring to prevent, rather than to make, a revolution. Or such was the case they made until a French alliance became indispensable.

II

THE THESIS THAT the Patriots intended no radical break with the past, that they thought of themselves as conservators rather than as innovators, scarcely is peculiar to your servant. It is now dominant among leading historians of American politics. It is most succinctly stated by Daniel Boorstin in his slim volume The Genius of American Politics (1953):

"The most obvious peculiarity of our American Revolution is that, in the modern European sense of the word, it was hardly a revolution at all. The Daughters of the American Revolution, who have been understandably sensitive on this subject, have always insisted in their literature that the American Revolution was no revolution but merely a colonial rebellion. The more I have looked into the subject, the more convinced I have become of the wisdom of their naivete. 'The social condition and the Constitution of the Americans are democratic,' de Tocqueville observed about a hundred years ago. 'But they have not had a democratic revolution.' This fact is surely one of the more important of our history."

The attainment of America’s independence, Boorstin makes clear in his writings, was not the work of what Burke called “theoretic dogma.” What most moved the Americans of that time was their own colonial experience: they were defending their right to go on living in the future much as they had lived in the past; they were not marching to Zion. To quote Boorstin directly again:

"The American Revolution was in a very special way conceived as both a vindication of the British past and an affirmation of an American future. The British past was contained in ancient and living institutions rather than in doctrines; and the American future was never to be contained in a theory."

This point is made with equal force by Clinton Rossiter in his Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (1953). In the course of his discussion of Richard Bland, Rossiter remarks that

"Throughout the colonial period and right down to the last months before the Declaration of Independence, politically conscious Americans looked upon the British Constitution rather than natural law as the bulwark of their cherished liberties. Practical political thinking in eighteenth-century America was dominated by two assumptions: that the British Constitution was the best and happiest of all possible forms of government, and that the colonists, descendants of freeborn Englishmen, enjoyed the blessings of this constitution to the fullest extent consistent with a wilderness environment."

Men like Bland, and those, too, like Patrick Henry, more radical than Bland, regarded themselves as the defenders of a venerable constitution, not as marchers in the dawn of a Brave New World. As Rossiter continues in his chapter on the Rights of Man: “Virginians made excellent practical use of this distinction. When their last royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, pro- claimed them to be in rebellion, they retorted immediately in print that he was the rebel and they the saviors of the constitution.” It was the case of James II and arbitrary power all over again.

Or turn to H. Trevor Colbourn’s study The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (1963). He writes:

"In insisting upon rights which their history showed were deeply embedded in antiquity, American Revolutionaries argued that their stand was essentially conservative; it was the corrupted mother country which was pursuing a radical course of action, pressing innovations and encroachments upon her long-suffering colonies. Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it, men who furnished intellectual as well as political leadership to a new nation."

Here we have for authority the famous sentences of Patrick Henry in 1775: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.” The appeal of even the more passionate leaders of the American rising against royal innovation was to precedent and old usage, not to utopian visions.

The men who made the American Revolution, in fine, had little intention of making a revolution in the French sense (so soon to follow) of a reconstitution of society. Until little choice remained to them, they were anything but enthusiasts even for separation from Britain. This is brought out in an interesting conversation between Burke and Benjamin Franklin, on the eve of Franklin’s departure from London for America; Burke relates this in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791).

"In this discourse Dr. Franklin lamented, and with apparent sincerity, the separation which he feared as inevitable between Great Britain and her colonies. He certainly spoke of it as an event which gave him the greatest concern. America, he said, would never again see such happy days as she had passed under the protection of England. He observed, that ours was the only instance of a great empire, in which the most distant parts and members had been as well governed as the metropolis and its vicinage: but that the Americans were going to lose the means which secured to them this rare and precious advantage. The question with them was not whether they were to remain as they had been before the troubles, for better, he allowed, they could not hope to be; but whether they were to give up so happy a situation without a struggle? Mr. Burke had several other conversations with him about that time, in none of which, soured and exasperated as his mind certainly was, did he discover any other wish in favour of America than for a security to its ancient condition. Mr. Burke’s conversation with other Americans was large indeed, and his inquiries extensive and diligent. Trusting to the result of all these means of information, but trusting much more in the public presumptive indications I have just referred to, and to the reiterated, solemn declarations of their assemblies, he always firmly believed that they were purely on the defensive in that rebellion. He considered the Americans as standing at that time, and in that controversy, in the same relation to England, as England did to King James the Second, in 1688. He believed, that they had taken up arms from one motive only; that is, our attempting to tax them without their consent; to tax them for the purposes of maintaining civil and military establishments. If this attempt of ours could have been practically established, he thought, with them, that their assemblies would become totally useless; that, under the system of policy which was then pursued, the Americans could have no sort of security for their laws or liberties, or for any part of them; and that the very circumstance of our freedom would have augmented the weight of their slavery."

Such were the language and the convictions of the American Patriots, as Rossiter puts it, “right down to the last months before the Declaration of Independence.” Then what account do we make of the highly theoretical and abstract language of the first part of the Declaration of In- dependence, with its appeal to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” to self-evident truths, to a right to abolish any form of government? Why is Parliament not even mentioned in the Declaration? What has become of the English constitution, the rights of Englishmen, the citing of English precedents, the references to James II and the Glorious Revolution?

These startling inclusions and omissions are discussed penetratingly by Carl Becker in The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, first published in 1922. Indeed the language of much of the Declaration is the language of the French Enlightenment, and, more immediately, the language of the Thomas Jefferson of 1776, rather than the tone and temper of the typical member of the Continental Congress:

"Not without reason was Jefferson most at home in Paris. By the qualities of his mind and temperament he really belonged to the philosophical school, to the Encyclopaedists, those generous souls who loved mankind by virtue of not knowing too much about men, who worshipped reason with unreasoning faith, who made a study of Nature while cultivating a studied aversion for “enthusiasm,” and strong religious emotion. Like them, Jefferson, in his earlier years especially, impresses one as being a radical by profession. We often feel that he defends certain practices and ideas, that he denounces certain customs or institutions, not so much from independent reflection or deep-seated conviction on the particular matter in hand as because in general these are the things that a philosopher and a man of virtue ought naturally to defend or denounce. It belonged to the eighteenth-century philosopher, as a matter of course, to apostrophize Nature, to defend Liberty, to denounce Tyranny, perchance to shed tears at the thought of a virtuous action."

The Francophile Jefferson, in other words, was atypical of the men, steeped in Blackstone and constitutional history, who sat in the Continental Congress. Yet the Congress accepted Jefferson’s Declaration, unprotestingly. Why?

Because aid from France had become an urgent necessity for the Patriot cause. The phrases of the Declaration, congenial to the philosophes, were calculated to wake strong sympathy in France’s climate of opinion; and, as Becker emphasizes, those phrases achieved with high success precisely that result. It would have been not merely pointless, but counterproductive, to appeal for French assistance on the ground of the ancient rights of Englishmen; the French did not wish Englishmen well.

Here we turn again to the quotable Daniel Boorstin (who differs somewhat with Becker). It is not to the Declaration we should look, Boorstin suggests, if we seek to understand the motives of the men who accomplished the American Revolution: not, at least, to the Declaration’s first two paragraphs. “People have grasped at ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ forgetting that it was two-thirds borrowed and, altogether, only part of a preamble,” Boorstin writes. “We have repeated that ‘all men are created equal’ without daring to discover what it meant and without realizing that probably to none of the men who spoke it did it mean what we would like it to mean.” Really, he tells us, the Revolution was all about no taxation without representation. “It is my view that the major issue of the American Revolution was the true constitution of the British Empire, which is a pretty technical legal problem.”

Amen to that. Burke declared, looking upon the ghastly spectacle of the French Revolution, that nothing is more consummately wicked than the heart of an abstract metaphysician who aspires to govern a nation by utopian designs, regardless of prudence, historical experience, convention, custom, the complexities of political compromise, and long-received principles of morality. The men who made the American Revolution were not revolutionaries of the meta- physical sort. They had practical grievances; they sought practical redress; not obtaining it, they settled upon separation from the Crown in Parliament as a hard necessity. That act was meant not as a repudiation of their past, but as a means for preventing the destruction of their pattern of politics by King George’s presumed intended revolution of arbitrary power, after which, in Burke’s phrase, “the Americans could have no sort of security for their laws or liberties.” That is not the cast of mind which is encountered among the revolutionaries of the twentieth century.

III

THE CAREFUL STUDY of history is of high value, among other reasons because it may instruct us, sometimes, concerning ways to deal with our present discontents. I do not mean simply that history repeats itself, or repeats itself with variations, although there is something in that, and particularly in the history of revolutions on the French model, which devour their own children. (Here I commend Crane Brinton‘s The Anatomy of Revolution and D. W. Brogan’s The Price of Revolution.) I am suggesting, rather, that deficiency in historical perspective leads to the ruinous blunders of ideologues, whom Burckhardt calls “the terrible simplifiers,” while sound historical knowledge may diminish the force of Hegel’s aphorism that “we learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”

The history of this slippery word “revolution” is a case in point. Political terms have historical origins. If one is ignorant of those historical origins, powerful statesmen are ignorant of them, great errors become possible. It is as if one were to confound the word “law” as a term of jurisprudence with the word “law” as a term of natural science. If one assumes that the word “revolution” signifies always the same phenomenon, regardless of historical background, one may make miscalculations with grave consequences, perhaps fatal consequences.

The French Revolution was a very different phenomenon, as was its successor, the Russian Revolution. These were philosophical revolutions, or, as we say nowadays with greater precision, ideological revolutions: catastrophic upheavals, in the later signification of the term “revolution.” Their objectives were unlimited, in the sense of being utopian; their consequences were quite the contrary of what their original authors had hoped for.To apprehend the French Revolution, we still do well to turn to the analyses by Tocqueville and by Taine; for the Bolshevik Revolution, we have the recent books by Solzhenitsyn, Shafarevich, and others. “To begin with unlimited liberty,” says Fyodor Dostoievski, “is to end with unlimited despotism.” Or, as Burke put it, to be possessed liberty must be limited.

The American Revolution, or War of Independence, was a preventive movement, intended to preserve an old constitutional structure for the most part. Its limited objectives attained, order was restored. It arose from causes intimately bound up with the colonial experience and the British constitution, and little connected with the causes of the French Revolution. In intention, at least, it was a “revolution” in the meaning of that term generally accepted during the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century.

A considerable element of the population of these United States has tended to fancy, almost from the inception of the Republic, that all revolutions everywhere somehow are emulatory of the American War of Independence and ought to lead to similar democratic institutions. Revolutionary ideologues in many lands have played upon this American naivete, successfully enough, from Havana to Saigon. This widespread American illusion, or confusion about the word “revolution,” has led not merely to sentimentality in policy regarding virulent Marxist or nationalistic movements in their earlier stages, but also to unfounded expectations that some magic overnight “democratic reforms," free elections especially, can suffice to restrain what Burke called “an armed doctrine.” How many Americans forget, or never knew, that in time of civil war Abraham Lincoln found it necessary to suspend writs of habeas corpus?

Knowledge of history is no perfect safeguard against such blunders. It did not save Woodrow Wilson, who had read a great deal of history, from miscalculations about the consequences of ”self-determination” in central Europe. It did not save his advisor Herbert Hoover, who knew some history, from fancying that an improbable “restoration of the Habsburg tyranny” in central Europe was a more imminent menace than live and kicking Bolshevism or the recrudescence of German ambitions. Nevertheless, knowledge of history generally and knowledge of the historical origin of political terms are some insurance against ideological in- fatuation or sentimental sloganizing.

The crying need of our age is to avert revolutions, not to multiply them. Recent revolutions have reduced half the world to servitude of body and mind, and to extreme poverty, in Ethiopia and Chad, in Cambodia and Timor, and in fifty other lands. What we call the American Revolution had fortunate consequences because, in some sense, it was a revolution not made, but prevented. Folk who fancy the phrase “permanent revolution” are advocating, if unwittingly, permanent misery. The first step toward recovery from this confusion is to apprehend that the word “revolution” has a variety of meanings; that not all revolutions are cut from the same cloth; that politics cannot be divorced from history; and that “revolution,” in its common twentieth-century signification, is no highroad to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.