Without the proper foundation, Liberty will
crumble!
Robert Welch founded The John Birch Society in 1958 and led it
until just prior to his death in 1985. This essay was first delivered as
a speech at the Constitution Day luncheon of We, The People in
Chicago, on September 17, 1961. The principles he espoused in that speech are
timeless. The American Republic will endure only so long as those principles
are sufficiently understood by each succeeding generation of Americans.
[Editor's note: The John Birch Society has a reputation in some circles
as a bunch of extreme right-wing anti-communist kooks. If this is your view,
reading the following essay may lead you to change your mind. It would
seem that the widespread acceptance of this derogatory view of the John Birch
Society is the result of persistent slander by those who wish to destroy the
U.S. republic by turning it into a democracy — the tyranny of the majority.
The only thing that I might differ with in this essay is laying the blame on
"Communists". What Welch meant exactly by this term is not clear, though of
course the old-style Soviet Communists were as about as opposed
to individual liberty (other than their own) as it is possible to be. In
this respect they resemble fascists of all times, including those currently in
positions of power behind their desks in Washington, D.C., New York,
Sacramento, London, Paris, Brussels and many other places. If one reads the
term "communist" in this essay to mean "opposed to libertarian
principles of individual freedom" I think one will not mistake the author's
meaning. — Peter Meyer, 1996]
The Origin of the Idea of a Republic
The first scene in
this drama, on which the curtain clearly lifts, is Greece of the Sixth Century
B.C. The city of Athens was having so much strife and turmoil, primarily as
between its various classes, that the wisest citizens felt something of a more
permanent nature, rather than just a temporary remedy, had to be
developed — to make possible that stability, internal peace, and
prosperity which they had already come to expect of life in a civilized
society. And through one of those fortunate accidents of history, which
surprise us on one side by their rarity and on the other side by ever having
happened at all, these citizens of Athens chose an already distinguished
fellow citizen, named Solon, to resolve the problem for both their
present and their future. They saw that Solon was given full power over every
aspect of government and of economic life in Athens. And Solon, applying
himself to the specific job, time, and circumstances, and perhaps without
any surmise that he might be laboring for lands and centuries other than his
own, proceeded to establish in "the laws of Solon" what amounted to, so
far as we know, the first written regulations whereby men ever proposed
to govern themselves. Undoubtedly even Solon's decisions and his laws
were but projections and syntheses of theories and practices which had already
been in existence for a long time. And yet his election as Archon of Athens,
in 594 B.C., can justly be considered as the date of a whole new approach
to man's eternal problem of government.
There is no question but that the laws and principles which Solon laid down
both foreshadowed and prepared the way for all republics of later ages,
including our own. He introduced, into the visible record of man's
efforts and progress, the very principle of "government by written and
permanent law" instead of "government by incalculable and changeable decrees"
(Will Durant). And he himself set forth one of the soundest axioms of all
times, that it was a well-governed state "when the people obey the rulers and
the rulers obey the laws." This concept, that there were laws which even kings
and dictators must observe, was not only new; I think it can be correctly
described as "Western".
Here was a sharp and important cleavage at the very beginning of our
Western civilization, from the basic concept that always had prevailed in
Asia, which concept still prevailed in Solon's day, and which in fact remained
unquestioned in the Asiatic mind and empires until long after the fall of the
Roman Empire of the East, when Solon had been dead two thousand years.
The Tyrants of Democracy
Unfortunately, while Solon's
laws remained in effect in Athens in varying degrees of theory and practice
for five centuries, neither Athens nor any of the Greek city-states ever
achieved the form of a republic, primarily for two reasons. First, Solon
introduced the permanent legal basis for a republican government, but not the
framework for its establishment and continuation. The execution, observance,
and perpetuation of Solon's laws fell naturally and almost automatically
into the hands of tyrants, who ruled Athens for long but uncertain
periods of time, through changing forms and administrative procedures for
their respective governments. And second, the Greek temperament was too
volatile, the whole principle of self-government was too exciting — even
through a dictator who might have to be overthrown by force — for the
Athenians ever to finish the job Solon had begun, and bind themselves as
well as their rulers down to the chains of an unchanging constitution.
Even the authority of Solon's laws had to be enforced and thus
established by successive tyrants like Pisistratus and Cleisthenes, or they
might never have amounted to anything more than a passing dream. The
ideal was there, of rule according to written laws; that those laws were
at times and to some extent honored or observed constituted one huge step
towards — and fulfilled one prerequisite of — a true republic.
But the second great step, of a government framework as fixed and permanent
as the basic laws were supposed to be, remained for the Romans and other
heirs of Greece to achieve. As a consequence Athens — and the other Greek
city-states which emulated it — remained politically as democracies, and
eventually learned from their own experiences that it was probably the worst
of all forms of government.
But out of the democracies of Greece, as tempered somewhat by the laws of
Solon, there came as a direct spiritual descendant the first true republic the
world has ever known. This was Rome in its earlier centuries, after the
monarchy had been replaced. The period is usually given as from 509 B.C. to 49
B.C., Rome having got rid of its kings by the first of those dates, and having
turned to the Caesars by the second. But the really important early date
is 454 B.C., when the Roman Senate sent a commission to Greece to study
and report on the legislation of Solon. The commission, consisting of three
men, did its work well. On its return the Roman Assembly chose ten men — and
hence called the Decemviri — to rule with supreme power while formulating
a new code of laws for Rome. And in 454 B.C. they proposed, and the Assembly
adopted, what were called The Twelve Tables. This code, based on Solon's laws,
became the written constitution of the Roman Republic.
The Twelve Tables, "amended and supplemented again and again — by
legislation, praetorial edicts, senatus consulta, and imperial decrees —
remained for nine hundred years the basic law of Rome" (Durant). At least in
theory, and always to some extent in practice, even after Julius Caesar
had founded the empire which was recognized as an empire from the time of
Augustus. What was equally important, even before the adoption of The Twelve
Tables, Rome had already established the framework, with firm periodicity for
its public servants, of a republic in which those laws could be, and for a
while would be, impartially and faithfully administered.
For, as a Roman named Gaius (and otherwise unknown) was to write in
about 160 A.D., "all law pertains to persons, to property, and
to procedure". And for a satisfactory government you need as much concern
about the implementation of those laws, the governmental agencies through
which they are to be administered, and the whole political framework
within which those laws form the basis of order and of justice, as with the
laws themselves which constitute the original statute books. And the Romans
contrived and — subject to the exceptions and changes inflicted on the
pattern by the ambitions and cantankerous restlessness of human nature —
maintained such a framework in actual practice for nearly five hundred years.
The Romans themselves referred to their government as having a "mixed
constitution". By this they meant that it had some of the elements of a
democracy, some of the elements of an oligarchy, and some of those of an
autocracy; but they also meant that the interest of all the various classes of
Roman society were taken into consideration by the Roman constitutional
government, rather than just the interests of some one class. Already the
Romans were familiar with governments which had been founded by, and were
responsible to, one class alone: especially "democracies," as of Athens, which
at times considered the rights of the proletariat as supreme; and oligarchies,
as of Sparta, which were equally biased in favor of the aristocrats. Here
again the Roman instinct and experience had led them to one of the fundamental
requisites of a true republic.
Checks and Balances
In summary, the Romans were opposed
to tyranny in any form; and the feature of government to which they
gave the most thought was an elaborate system of checks and balances. In the
early centuries of their republic, whenever they added to the total
offices and officeholders, as often as not they were merely increasing the
diffusion of power and trying to forestall the potential tyranny of one
set of governmental agents by the guardianship or watchdog powers of another
group. When the Tribunes were set up, for instance, around 350 B.C., their
express purpose and duty was to protect the people of Rome against their
own government. This was very much as our Bill of Rights was designed by our
Founding Fathers for exactly the same purpose. And other changes in the Roman
government had similar aims. The result was a civilization and a government
which, by the time Carthage was destroyed, had become the wonder of the world,
and which remained so in memory until the Nineteenth Century — when its
glories began receding in the minds of men, because it was surpassed by those
of the rising American Republic.
Now it should bring more than smiles, in fact it should bring some very
serious reflections, to Americans, to realize what the most informed
and penetrating Romans, of all eras, thought of their early republic.
It is both interesting, and significantly revealing, to find exactly
the same arguments going on during the first centuries B.C. and A.D. about the
sources of Roman greatness, that swirl around us today with regard to the
United States. Cicero spoke of their "mixed constitution" as "the best form of
government." Polybius, in the second century, B.C., had spoken of it in
exactly the same terms; and, going further, had ascribed Rome's greatness and
triumphs to its form of government. Livy, however, during the days of
Augustus, wrote of the virtues that had made Rome great, before the Romans had
reached the evils of his time, when, as he put it, "we can bear neither our
diseases nor their remedies." And those virtues were, he said, "the unity and
holiness of family life, the pietas (or reverential attitude) of children, the
sacred relation of men with the gods at every step, the sanctity of the
solemnly pledged word, the stoic self-control and gravitas (or serious
sense of responsibility)." Doesn't that sound familiar?
But while many Romans gave full credit to both the Roman character and
their early environment, exactly as we do with regard to American
greatness today, the nature and excellence of their early government, and its
contribution to the building of Roman greatness, were widely discussed
and thoroughly recognized. And the ablest among them knew exactly what they
were talking about.
"Democracy," wrote Seneca, "is more cruel than wars or tyrants." "Without
checks and balances," Dr. Will Durant summarizes one statement of Cicero, "a
monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes
mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship." And he quotes Cicero verbatim about the
man usually chosen as leader by an ungoverned populace, as "someone bold and
unscrupulous ... who curries favor with the people by giving them other men's
property."
If that is not an exact description of the leaders of the New Deal, the
Fair Deal, and the New Frontier, I don't know where you will find one. What
Cicero was bemoaning was the same breakdown of the republic, and of its
protection against such demagoguery and increasing "democracy", as we have
been experiencing. This breakdown was under exactly the same kind of pressures
that have been converting the American Republic into a democracy, the
only difference being that in Rome those pressures were not so
conspiratorially well organized as they are in America today. Virgil, and many
great Romans like him were, as Will Durant says, well aware that "class war,
not Caesar, killed the Roman Republic." In about 50 B.C., for instance,
Sallust had been charging the Roman Senate with placing property rights above
human rights. And we are certain that if Franklin D. Roosevelt had ever heard
of Sallust or read one of Sallust's speeches, he would have told somebody
to go out and hire this man Sallust for one of his ghost writers at once.
About thirty years ago a man named Harry Atwood, who was one of the first
to see clearly what was being done by the demagogues to our form of
government, and the tragic significance of the change, wrote a book entitled
Back to the Republic. It was an excellent book, except for one
shortcoming. Mr. Atwood insisted emphatically, over and over, that ours was
the first republic in history; that American greatness was due to our
Founding Fathers having given us something entirely new in history, the first
republic — which Mr. Atwood described as the "standard government", or "the
golden mean", towards which all other governments to the right or the
left should gravitate in the future.
Now the truth is that, by merely substituting the name "Rome" for the name
"United States", and making similar changes in nomenclature, Mr. Atwood's book
could have been written by Virgil or by Seneca, with regard to the
conversion of the Roman Republic into a democracy. It is only to the
extent we are willing to learn from history that we are able
to avoid repeating its horrible mistakes. And while Mr. Atwood did not
sufficiently realize this fact, fortunately our Founding Fathers did. For they
were men who knew history well and were determined to profit by that
knowledge.
Antonyms, Not Synonyms
Also, by the time of the American
Revolution and Constitution, the meanings of the words "republic" and
"democracy" had been well established and were readily understood. And most of
this accepted meaning derived from the Roman and Greek experiences. The two
words are not, as most of today's Liberals would have you believe — and as
most of them probably believe themselves — parallels in etymology, or history,
or meaning. The word "democracy" (in a political rather than a social sense,
of course) had always referred to a type of government, as distinguished
from monarchy, or autocracy, or oligarchy, or principate. The word "republic",
before 1789, had designated the quality and nature of a government, rather
than its structure. When Tacitus complained that "it is easier for a
republican form of government to be applauded than realized", he was
living in an empire under the Caesars and knew it. But he was bemoaning the
loss of that adherence to the laws and to the protections of the
constitution which made the nation no longer a republic; and not to the
fact that it was headed by an emperor.
The word democracy comes from the Greek and means, literally, government by
the people. The word "republic" comes from the Latin, res publica, and
means literally "the public affairs". The word "commonwealth", as once widely
used, and as still used in the official title of my state, "the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts", is almost an exact translation and continuation of the
original meaning of res publica. And it was only in this sense that the
Greeks, such as Plato, used the term that has been translated as "republic."
Plato was writing about an imaginary "commonwealth"; and while he
certainly had strong ideas about the kind of government this Utopia should
have, those ideas were not conveyed nor foreshadowed by his title.
The historical development of the meaning of the word "republic" might be
summarized as follows. The Greeks learned that, as Dr. Durant puts it, "man
became free when he recognized that he was subject to law." The Romans
applied the formerly general term "republic" specifically to that system
of government in which both the people and their rulers were subject
to law. That meaning was recognized throughout all later history, as when
the term was applied, however inappropriately in fact and optimistically in
self-deception, to the "Republic of Venice" or to the "Dutch
Republic". The meaning was thoroughly understood by our Founding Fathers. As
early as 1775 John Adams had pointed out that Aristotle (representing Greek
thought), Livy (whom he chose to represent Roman thought), and Harington
(a British statesman), all "define a republic to be — a government of
laws and not of men." And it was with this full understanding that our
constitution-makers proceeded to establish a government which, by its
very structure, would require that both the people and their rulers obey
certain basic laws — laws which could not be changed without laborious and
deliberate changes in the very structure of that government. When our Founding
Fathers established a "republic", in the hope, as Benjamin Franklin said, that
we could keep it, and when they guaranteed to every state within that
"republic" a "republican form" of government, they well knew the significance
of the terms they were using. And were doing all in their power to make
the feature of government signified by those terms as permanent as possible.
They also knew very well indeed the meaning of the word "democracy", and the
history of democracies; and they were deliberately doing everything in their
power to avoid for their own times, and to prevent for the future,
the evils of a democracy.
The Founders Knew the Difference
Let's look at some of
the things they said to support and clarify this purpose. On May 31,
1787, Edmund Randolph told his fellow members of the newly-assembled
Constitutional Convention that the object for which the delegates had met was
"to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored;
that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the
turbulence and trials of democracy ..."
The delegates to the Convention were clearly in accord with this
statement. At about the same time another delegate, Elbridge Gerry, said: "The
evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want
(that is, do not lack) virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots." And
on June 21,1788, Alexander Hamilton made a speech in which he stated:
It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were
practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that
no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the
people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of
government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure
deformity.
Another time Hamilton said: "We are a Republican Government. Real liberty
is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy." Samuel Adams
warned: "Remember, Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and
murders itself! There never was a democracy that 'did not commit suicide'."
James Madison, one of the members of the Convention who was charged with
drawing up our Constitution, wrote as follows:
... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and
contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the
rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they
have been violent in their deaths.
Madison and Hamilton and Jay and their compatriots of the Convention
prepared and adopted a Constitution in which they nowhere even mentioned the
word "democracy", not because they were not familiar with such a form of
government, but because they were. The word "democracy" had not occurred in
the Declaration of Independence, and does not appear in the constitution of a
single one of our fifty states — which constitutions are derived mainly from
the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the Republic — for the same reason.
They knew all about democracies, and if they had wanted one for themselves and
their posterity, they would have founded one. Look at all the elaborate system
of checks and balances which they established; at the carefully worked-out
protective clauses of the Constitution itself, and especially of the first ten
amendments known as the Bill of Rights; at
the effort, as Jefferson put it, to "bind men down from mischief by the
chains of the Constitution", and thus to solidify the rule not of men but
of laws. All of these steps were taken, deliberately, to avoid and
to prevent a democracy, or any of the worst features of a democracy, in
the United States.
And so our Republic was started on its way. And for well over a hundred
years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a
republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that
distinction. Again, let's look briefly at some of the evidence.
Washington, in his first inaugural address, dedicated himself to "the
preservation ... of the republican model of government." Thomas Jefferson, our
third president, was the founder of the Democratic Party; but in his first
inaugural address, although he referred several times to the Republic or
the republican form of government he did not use the word "democracy" a single
time. And John Marshall, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801
to 1835, said: "Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the
difference is like that between order and chaos."
Throughout the Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth,
while America as a republic was growing great and becoming the envy of the
whole world, there were plenty of wise men, both in our country and outside of
it, who pointed to the advantages of a republic, which we were enjoying,
and warned against the horrors of a democracy, into which we might fall.
Around the middle of that century, Herbert Spencer, the great English
philosopher, wrote, in an article on The Americans: "The Republican
form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it
requires the highest type of human nature — a type nowhere at present
existing." And in truth we have not been a high enough type to preserve
the republic we then had, which is exactly what he was prophesying.
Thomas Babington Macaulay said: "I have long been convinced that
institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or
civilization, or both." And we certainly seem to be in a fair way today
to fulfill his dire prophecy. Nor was Macaulay's contention a mere personal
opinion without intellectual roots and substance in the thought of his times.
Nearly two centuries before, Dryden had already lamented that "no government
had ever been, or ever can be, wherein timeservers and blockheads will not be
uppermost." And as a result, he had spoken of nations being "drawn to the
dregs of a democracy." While in 1795 Immanuel Kant had written: "Democracy is
necessarily despotism."
In 1850 Benjamin Disraeli, worried as was Herbert Spencer at what was
already being foreshadowed in England, made a speech to the British House
of Commons in which he said: "If you establish a democracy, you must in due
time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great
impatience of public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of
public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from
passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace
ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your
authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find
your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete." Disraeli
could have made that speech with even more appropriateness before a joint
session of the United States Congress in 1935. In 1870 he had already come up
with an epigram which is strikingly true for the United States today. "The
world is weary", he said, "of statesmen whom democracy has degraded
into politicians."
But even in Disraeli's day there were similarly prophetic voices on this
side of the Atlantic. In our own country James Russell Lowell showed that he
recognized the danger of unlimited majority rule by writing: "Democracy gives
every man the right to be his own oppressor."
W. H. Seward pointed out
that "Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them." This is an
observation certainly borne out during the past fifty years exactly
to the extent that we have been becoming a democracy and fighting wars,
with each trend as both a cause and an effect of the other one. And Ralph
Waldo Emerson issued a most prophetic warning when he said: "Democracy becomes
a government of bullies tempered by editors." If Emerson could have looked
ahead to the time when so many of the editors would themselves be a part
of, or sympathetic to, the gang of bullies, as they are today, he would have
been even more disturbed. And in the 1880's Governor Seymour of New York said
that the merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but
checks it.
Across the Atlantic again, a little later, Oscar Wilde once contributed
this epigram to the discussion: "Democracy means simply the bludgeoning
of the people, by the people, for the people." While on this side, and after
the First World War had made the degenerative trend in our government so
visible to any penetrating observer, H. L. Mencken wrote: "The most
popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most
despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They
like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goosestep." While Ludwig
Lewisohn observed: "Democracy, which began by liberating men politically, has
developed a dangerous tendency to enslave him through the tyranny of
majorities and the deadly power of their opinion."
The Prerequisite for Revolution
But it was a great
Englishman, G. K. Chesterton, who put his finger on the basic reasoning behind
all the continued and determined efforts of the Communists to convert our
republic into a democracy. "You can never have a revolution", he said,
"in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order
to have a revolution."
And in 1931 the Duke of Northumberland, in his booklet, The History of
World Revolution, stated: "The adoption of Democracy as a form of
Government by all European nations is fatal to good Government,
to liberty, to law and order, to respect for authority, and
to religion, and must eventually produce a state of chaos from which a
new world tyranny will arise." While an even more recent analyst, Archibald E.
Stevenson, summarized the situation as follows:
De Tocqueville once warned us that: 'If ever the free
institutions of America are destroyed, that event will arise from the
unlimited tyranny of the majority.' But a majority will never be permitted
to exercise such 'unlimited tryanny' so long as we cling to the
American ideals of republican liberty and turn a deaf ear to the siren
voices now calling us to democracy. This is not a question relating
to the form of government. That can always be changed by constitutional
amendment. It is one affecting the underlying philosophy of our system — a
philosophy which brought new dignity to the individual, more safety for
minorities and greater justice in the administration of government. We are
in grave danger of dissipating this splendid heritage through mistaking it
for democracy.
And there have been plenty of other voices to warn us.
So — how did it happen that we have been allowing this gradual destruction
of our inheritance to take place? And when did it start? The two
questions are closely related.
For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic, bears within
itself the seeds of its own destruction. The difference is that for a soundly
conceived and solidly endowed republic it takes a great deal longer for those
seeds to germinate and the plants to grow. The American Republic was
bound — is still bound — to follow in the centuries to come the same
course to destruction as did Rome. But our real ground of complaint is
that we have been pushed down the demagogic road to disaster by
conspiratorial hands, far sooner and far faster than would have been the
results of natural political evolution.
These conspiratorial hands first got seriously to work in this country
in the earliest years of the Twentieth Century. The Fabian philosophy and
strategy was imported to America from England, as it had been earlier to
England from Germany. Some of the members of the Intercollegiate Socialist
Society, founded in 1905, and some of the members of the League for Industrial
Democracy into which it grew, were already a part of, or affiliated with,
an international Communist conspiracy, planning to make the United States
a portion of a one-world Communist state. Others saw it as possible and
desirable merely to make the United States a separate socialist Utopia.
But they all knew and agreed that to do either they would have
to destroy both the constitutional safeguards and the underlying
philosophy which made it a republic. So, from the very beginning the whole
drive to convert our republic into a democracy was in two parts. One
part was to make our people come to believe that we had, and were
supposed to have, a democracy. The second part was actually and insidiously to
change the republic into a democracy.
The first appreciable and effective progress in both directions began with
the election of Woodrow Wilson. Of Wilson it could accurately have been said,
as Tacitus had said of some Roman counterpart: "By common consent, he would
have been deemed capable of governing had he never governed." Since he did
become President of the United States for two terms, however, it is hard
to tell how much of the tragic disaster of those years was due
to the conscious support by Wilson himself of Communist purposes, and how
much to his being merely a dupe and a tool of Colonel Edward Mandell House.
But at any rate it is under Wilson that, for the first time, we see the power
of the American presidency being used to support Communist schemers and
Communist schemes in other countries — as especially, for instance, in Mexico,
and throughout Latin America.
It was under Wilson, of course, that the first huge parts of the Marxist
program, such as the progressive income tax, were incorporated into the
American system. It was under Wilson that the first huge legislative steps
to break down what the Romans would have called "our mixed constitution"
of a republic, and convert it into the homogenous jelly of a democracy,
got under way with such measures as the direct election of Senators. And it
was under Wilson that the first great propaganda slogan was coined and
emblazoned everywhere, to make Americans start thinking favorably of
democracies and forget that we had a republic. This was, of course, the slogan
of the first World War: "To make the world safe for democracy." If enough
Americans had, by those years, remembered enough of their own history, they
would have been worrying about how to make the world safe
from democracy. But the great deception and the great conspiracy
were already well under way.
New Deal or Double Dealing?
The conspirators had
to proceed slowly and patiently, nevertheless, and to have their allies
and dupes do the same. For in the first place the American people could not
have been swept too fast and too far in this movement without enough alarms
being sounded to be heard and heeded. And in the second place, after the
excitement of World War I had sunk into the past, and America was
returning to what Harding called "normalcy", there was a strong revulsion
against the whole binge of demagoguery and crackpot idealism which had been
created under Woodrow Wilson, and which had been used to give us this
initial push on the road towards ultimate disaster. And during this period
from 1920 until the so-called Great Depression could be deliberately
accentuated, extended, and increased to suit the purposes of the Fabian
conspirators, there was simply a germination period for the seeds of
destruction which the conspirators had planted. Not until Franklin D.
Roosevelt came to power in 1933 did the whole Communist-propelled and
Communist-managed drive again begin to take visible and tangible and
positive steps in their program to make the United States ultimately
succumb to a one-world Communist tyranny. Most conservative Americans are
today well aware of many of those steps and of their significance; but there
are still not enough who realize how important to Communist plans was the
two-pronged drive to convert the American republic into a democracy
and to make the American people accept the change without even knowing
there had been one. From 1933 on, however, that drive and that change moved
into high gear, and have been kept there ever since.
Let's look briefly at just two important and specific pieces of tangible
evidence of this drive, and of its success in even those early years.
In 1928 the U.S. Army Training Manual, used for all of our men in army
uniform, gave them the following quite accurate definition of a democracy:
A government of the masses. Authority — derived through mass
meeting or any form of 'direct' expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude
toward property is communistic — negating property rights. Attitude toward
law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it be based
upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without
restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license,
agitation, discontent, anarchy.
That was in 1928. Just when that true explanation was dropped, and through
what intermediate changes the definition went, I have not had sufficient time
and opportunity to learn. But compare that 1928 statement with what was
said in the same place for the same use by 1952. In The Soldiers Guide,
Department of the Army Field Manual, issued in June of 1952, we find the
following:
Meaning of democracy. Because the United States is a democracy,
the majority of the people decide how our government will be organized and
run — and that includes the Army, Navy, and Air Force. The people do this by
electing representatives, and these men and women then carry out the wishes
of the people.
Now obviously this change from basic truth to superficial demagoguery,
in the one medium for mass indoctrination of our youth which has been
available to the Federal Government until such time as it achieves
control over public education, did not just happen by accident. It was part of
an overall design, which became both extensive in its reach and rapid in its
execution from 1933 on. Let's look at another, less important but equally
striking, illustration.
Former Governor Lehman of New York, in his first inaugural message in 1933,
did not once use the word "democracy". The poison had not yet reached into the
reservoirs from which flowed his political thoughts. In his inaugural message
of 1935 he used the word "democracy" twice. The poison was beginning
to work. In his similar message of 1939 he used the word "democracy", or
a derivative thereof, twenty-five times. And less than a year later, on
January 3, 1940, in his annual message to the New York legislature, he
used it thirty-three times. The poison was now permeating every stream of his
political philosophy.
Spreading the Big Lie
By today that same poison has been
diffused, in an effective dosage, through almost the whole body of American
thought about government. Newspapers write ringing editorials declaring that
this is and always was a democracy. In pamphlets and books and speeches, in
classrooms and pulpits and over the air, we are besieged with the shouts of
the Liberals and their political henchmen, all pointing with pride to our
being a democracy. Many of them even believe it. Here we have a clear-cut
sample of the Big Lie which has been repeated so often and so long that it is
increasingly accepted as truth. And never was a Big Lie spread more
deliberately for more subversive purposes. What is even worse, because of
their unceasing efforts to destroy the safeguards, traditions, and
policies which made us a republic, and partly because of this very propaganda
of deception, what they have been shouting so long is gradually becoming
truth. Despite Mr. Warren and his Supreme Court and all of their allies,
dupes, and bosses, we are not yet a democracy. But the fingers in the dike are
rapidly becoming fewer and less effective. And a great many of the pillars of
our republic have already been washed away.
Since 1912 we have seen the imposition of a graduated income tax, as
already mentioned. Also, the direct election of Senators. We have seen the
Federal Reserve System established and then become the means of giving our
central government absolute power over credit, interest rates, and the
quantity and value of our money; and we have seen the Federal Government
increasingly use this means and this power to take money from the pockets
of the thrifty and put it in the hands of the thriftless, to expand
bureaucracy, increase its huge debts and deficits, and to promote
socialistic purposes of every kind.
We have seen the Federal Government increase its holdings of land by tens
of millions of acres, and go into business, as a substitute for and in
competition with private industry, to the extent that in many fields it
is now the largest — and in every case the most inefficient — producer of
goods and services in the nation. And we have seen it carry the socialistic
control of agriculture to such extremes that the once vaunted
independence of our farmers is now a vanished dream. We have seen a central
government taking more and more control over public education, over
communications, over transportation, over every detail of our daily lives.
We have seen a central government promote the power of labor-union bosses,
and in turn be supported by that power, until it has become entirely too much
a government of and for one class, which is exactly what our Founding Fathers
wanted most to prevent.
We have seen the firm periodicity of the tenure of public office
terrifically weakened by the four terms as President of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
something which would justly have horrified and terrified the founders of our
republic. It was the fact that, in Greece, the chief executive officers stayed
in power for long periods, which did much to prevent the Greeks from ever
achieving a republic. In Rome it was the rise of the same tendency, under
Marius and Sulla and Pompey, and as finally carried to its logical state
of life-rule under Julius Caesar, which at last destroyed the republic even
though its forms were left. And that is precisely one reason why the
Communists and so many of their Liberal dupes wanted third and fourth terms
for FDR. They knew they were thus helping to destroy the American Republic.
We have seen both the Executive Department and the Supreme Court override
and break down the clearly established rights of the states and state
governments, of municipal governments, and of so many of those diffusers of
power so carefully protected by the Constitution. Imagine, for instance, what
James Madison would have thought of the Federal Government telling the city of
Newburgh, New York, that it had no control over the abuse by the shiftless of
its welfare handouts.
We have seen an utterly unbelievable increase in government by appointive
officials and bureaucratic agencies — a development entirely contrary to
the very concept of government expounded and materialized by our Constitution.
And we have seen the effective checking and balancing of one department of our
government by another department almost completely disappear.
Destroying Our Republic
James Madison, in trying
to give us a republic instead of a democracy, wrote that "the
accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same
hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed,
or elective, may justly be denounced as the very definition of tyranny." The
whole problem for the Liberal Establishment that runs our government today,
and has been running it for many years regardless of the labels worn by
successive administrations, has not been any divergence of beliefs or of
purposes between the controlling elements of our executive, legislative or
judicial branches. For twenty years, despite the heroic efforts of men like
Taft to stop the trend, these branches have been acting increasingly in
complete accord, and obviously according to designs laid down for them by
the schemers and plotters behind the scenes. And their only question has been
as to how fast the whole tribe dared to go in advancing the grand
design. We do not yet have a democracy simply because it takes a lot of time
and infinite pressures to sweep the American people all of the way
into so disastrous an abandonment of their governmental heritage.
In the Constitution of the American Republic there was a deliberate and
very extensive and emphatic division of governmental power for the very
purpose of preventing unbridled majority rule. In our Constitution
governmental power is divided among three separate branches of the national
government, three separate branches of State governments, and the peoples of
the several States. And the governmental power, which is so divided, is
sometimes exclusive, sometimes concurrent, sometimes limited, at all times
specific, and sometimes reserved. Ours was truly, and purposely, a "mixed
constitution."
In a democracy there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple
majority. And that, visibly, is the system of government which the enemies of
our republic are seeking to impose on us today. Nor are we "drifting"
into that system, as Harry Atwood said in 1933, and as many would still
have us believe. We are being insidiously, conspiratorially, and treasonously
led by deception, by bribery, by coercion, and by fear, to destroy a republic
that was the envy and model for all of the civilized world.
Finally, let's look briefly at two or three important characteristics of
our republic, and of our lives under the republic, which were unique in all
history up to the present time.
First, our republic has offered the greatest opportunity and encouragement
to social democracy the world has ever known. Just as the Greeks found
that obedience to law made them free, so Americans found that social
democracy flourished best in the absence of political democracy. And for sound
reasons. For the safeguards to person and property afforded by a
republic, the stable framework which it supplied for life and labor at all
levels, and the resulting constant flux of individuals from one class
into another, made caste impossible and snobbery a joke.
In the best days of our republic Americans were fiercely proud of the fact
that rich and poor met on such equal terms in so many ways, and without the
slightest trace of hostility. The whole thought expressed by Burns in his
famous line, "a man's a man for a' that", has never been accepted more
unquestioningly, nor lived up to more truly, than in America in those
wonderful decades before the intellectual snobs and power-drunk bureaucrats of
our recent years set out to make everybody theoretically equal (except
to themselves) by legislation and coercion. And I can tell you this. When
you begin to find that Jew and Gentile, White and Colored, rich and poor,
scholar and laborer, are genuinely and almost universally friendly to one
another again — instead of going through all the silly motions of a phony
equality forced upon them by increasing political democracy — you can be sure
that we have already made great strides in the restoration of our once
glorious republic.
And for a very last thought, let me point out what seems to me
to be something about the underlying principles of the American Republic
which really was new in the whole philosophy of government. In man's earlier
history, and especially in the Asiatic civilizations, all authority rested in
the king or the conqueror by virtue of sheer military power. The subjects of
the king had absolutely no rights except those given them by the king. And
such laws or constitutional provisions as did grow up were concessions wrested
from the king or given by him out of his own supposedly ultimate authority. In
more modern European states, where the complete military subjugation of one
nation by another was not so normal, that ultimate authority of the ruler came
to rest on the theory of the divine right of kings, or in some instances
and to some extent on power specifically bestowed on rulers by a pope as
the representative of divinity.
In the meantime the truly western current of thought, which had begun in
Greece, was recurrently, intermittently, and haltingly gaining strength. It
was that the people of any nation owed their rights to the government
which they themselves had established and which owed its power ultimately to
their consent. Just what rights any individual citizen had was properly
determined by the government which all of the citizens had established, and
those rights were subject to a great deal of variations in different
times and places under different regimes. In other words, the rights of
individuals were still changeable rights, derived from government, even though
the power and authority and rights of the government were themselves derived
from the total body of the people.
The Key Word is "Inalienable"
Then both of these basic
theories of government, the Eastern and the Western, were really amended for
all time by certain principles enunciated in the American Declaration of Independence. Those
principles became a part of the very foundation of our republic. And they said
that man has certain inalienable rights which do not derive from government at
all. Under this theory not only the Sovereign Conqueror, but the Sovereign
People, are restricted in their power and authority by man's natural rights,
or by the divine rights of the individual man. And those certain inalienable
and divine rights cannot be abrogated by the vote of a majority any more than
they can by the decree of a conqueror. The idea that the vote of a people, no
matter how nearly unanimous, makes or creates or determines what is right or
just, becomes as absurd and unacceptable as the idea that right and justice
are simply whatever a king says they are. Just as the early Greeks learned
to try to have their rulers and themselves abide by the laws they
had themselves established, so man has now been painfully learning that there
are more permanent and lasting laws which cannot be changed by either
sovereign kings or sovereign people, but which must be observed by both. And
that government is merely a convenience, superimposed on Divine Commandments
and on the natural laws that flow only from the Creator of man and man's
universe.
Now that principle seems to me to be the most important addition
to the theory of government in all history. And it has, as I said, at
least tacitly been recognized as a foundation stone and cardinal tenet of the
American Republic. But of course any such idea that there are unchangeable
limitations on the power of the people themselves is utterly foreign
to the theory of a democracy, and even more impossible in the practices
of one. And this principle may ultimately be by far the most significant of
all the many differences between a republic and a democracy. For in time,
under any government, without that principle slavery is inevitable, while with
it slavery is impossible. And the American Republic has been the first great
example of that principle at work.
THE NEW AMERICAN / JUNE 30,
1986
General Birch Services Corp.
P O. Box 8010
Appleton, Wl
54913
For more information send e-mail
to: jbs@jbs.org
© 1995 American Dream Information Network
in Cooperation
with J B S Chapter CVSO / Escondido, California