Individualism,
and its economic corollary, laissez-faire liberalism, has
not always taken on a conservative hue, has not always functioned,
as it often does today, as an apologist for the status quo. On the
contrary, the Revolution of modern times was originally, and continued
for a long time to be, laissez-faire individualist. Its purpose
was to free the individual person 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 in the American Revolution,
the Jacksonian movement, Emerson and Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison
and the radical abolitionists – all were basically laissez-faire
individualists who carried on the age-old battle for liberty
and against all forms of State privilege. And so were the French
revolutionaries – not only the Girondins, but even the much-abused
Jacobins, who were obliged to defend the Revolution against the
massed crowned heads of Europe. All were roughly in the same camp.
The individualist heritage, indeed, goes back to the first modern
radicals of the seventeenth century – to the Levellers in England,
and to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson in the American colonies.
The conventional historical wisdom asserts that while the radical
movements in America were indeed laissez-faire individualist
before the Civil War, that afterwards, the laissez-fairists became
conservatives, and the radical mantle then fell to groups more familiar
to the modern Left: the Socialists and Populists. But this is a
distortion of the truth. For it was elderly New England Brahmins,
laissez-faire merchants and industrialists like Edward Atkinson,
who had financed John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, who were the
ones to leap in and oppose the U.S. imperialism of the Spanish-American
War with all their might. No opposition to that war was more 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 were consequently seized by the
US postal authorities.
In taking this stand, Atkinson, Sumner and their colleagues were
not being "sports"; they were following an antiwar, anti-imperialist
tradition as old as classical liberalism itself. This was the tradition
of Price, Priestley, and the late eighteenth-century British radicals
that earned them repeated imprisonment by the British war machine;
and of Richard Cobden, John Bright, and the laissez-faire Manchester
School of the mid-nineteenth century. Cobden, in particular, had
fearlessly denounced every war and every imperial maneuver of the
British regime. We are now so used to thinking of opposition to
imperialism as Marxian that this kind of movement seems almost inconceivable
to us today.1
By the advent of World War I, however, the death of the older laissez-faire
generation threw the leadership of the opposition to America’s
imperial wars into the hands of the Socialist Party. But other,
more individualist-minded men joined in the opposition, many of
whom would later form the core of the isolationist Old Right of
the late 1930s. 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 also included Charles
A. Lindbergh, Sr., father of the Lone Eagle, who was a congressman
from Minnesota.
Almost all of America’s intellectuals rushed to enlist in the war
fervor of World War I. A leading 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 other prominent exceptions were friends and associates
of Villard who were later to serve as leaders of libertarian thought
in America: Francis Neilson and especially Albert Jay Nock. Neilson
was the last of the laissez-faire English Liberals, who had
emigrated to the U.S.; Nock served under Villard during the war,
and it was his Nation editorial denouncing the pro-government
activities of Samuel Gompers that got that issue of the magazine
banned by the U.S. Post Office. And it was Neilson who wrote the
first revisionist book on the origins of World War I, How Diplomats
Make War (1915). The first revisionist book by an American,
in fact, was Nock’s Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922), which
had been serialized in LaFollette’s Magazine.
The world war constituted a tremendous trauma for all the individuals
and groups opposed to the conflict. The total mobilization, the
savage repression of opponents, the carnage and the U.S. global
intervention on an unprecedented scale – all of these polarized
a large number of diverse people. The shock and the sheer overriding
fact of the war inevitably drew together the diverse antiwar groups
into a loose, informal and oppositional united front – a front
in a new kind of fundamental opposition to the American system and
to much of American society. The rapid transformation of the brilliant
young intellectual Randolph Bourne from an optimistic pragmatist
into a radically pessimistic anarchist was typical, though in a
more intense form, of this newly created opposition. Crying, "War
is the health of the State," Bourne declared:
Country is a concept of peace, of balance, of living and letting
live. But State is essentially a concept of power. . . . And we
have the misfortune of being born not only into a country but
into a State. . . .
The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the
group acting as a repository of force. . . . International politics
is a "power politics" because it is a relation of States
and that is what States infallibly and calamitously are, huge
aggregations of human and industrial force that may be hurled
against each other in war. When a country acts as a whole in relation
to another country, or in imposing laws on its own inhabitants,
or in coercing or punishing individuals or minorities, it is acting
as a State. The history of America as a country is quite different
from that of America as a State. In one case it is the drama of
the pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and
the ways in which it was used . . . and the carrying out of spiritual
ideals. . . . But as a State, its history is that of playing part
in the world, making war, obstructing international trade . .
. punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive,
and collecting money to pay for it all.2
If the opposition was polarized and forced together by the war,
this polarization did not cease with the war’s end. For one thing,
the war and its corollary repression and militarism were shocks
that started the opposition thinking deeply and critically about
the American system per se; for another, the international system
established by the war was frozen into the status quo of the postwar
era. For it was obvious that the Versailles Treaty meant that British
and French imperialism had carved up and humiliated Germany, and
then intended to use the League of Nations as a permanent world
guarantor of the newly imposed status quo. Versailles and the League
meant that America could not forget the war; and the ranks of the
Opposition were now joined by a host of disillusioned Wilsonians
who saw the reality of the world that President Wilson had made.
The wartime and postwar opposition joined together in a coalition
including Socialists and all manner of progressives and individualists.
Since they and the coalition were now clearly antimilitarist and
anti-"patriotic," since they were increasingly radical
in their antistatism, the individualists were universally labeled
as "leftists"; in fact, as the Socialist Party split and
faded badly in the postwar era, the Opposition was given an increasingly
individualistic cast during the 1920s. Part of this opposition was
also cultural: a revolt against hidebound Victorian mores and literature.
Part of this cultural revolt was embodied in the well-known expatriates
of the "Lost Generation" of young American writers, writers
expressing their intense disillusion with the wartime "idealism"
and the reality that militarism and the war had revealed about America.
Another phase of this revolt was embodied in the new social freedom
of the jazz and flapper eras, and the flowering of individual expression,
among increasing numbers of young men and women.
Thus, see William H. Dawson, Richard Cobden and Foreign Policy
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926).
Randolph Bourne, Untimely Papers (New York: B.W. Huebach,
1919), pp. 229–30.
