To Make Men Free

by ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

ENGLISH,”said John Keats, “ought to be kept up.”He meant, by those who use it to write with. He could equally well have meant, by those who use it to govern themselves.

In a country the size of ours, faced with the problems which face us public discourse tends to conduct itself in a currency of words like blank checks: unspecified drafts upon intellectual credit like Freedom and Democracy and Americanism. Unless the language is “kept up” by constant scrutiny and challenge, meanings will be falsified either by negligence or by such deliberate tampering as characterizes the methods of at least one notorious contemporary politician.In Russia, where such tampering is official practice, the word democracy, which once meant the government of the people by themselves, has been falsified to mean the government of the people by the political police.

The word freedom is in danger of the same debasement here. Freedom, in American usage, means the freedom of the individual human being to think for himself and to come to the truth by the light of his own mind and conscience. It is the freedom defined by the American Constitution. Congress is forbidden to make any law abridging the freedom of speech. There is to be no establishment of religious authority or supervision. There is to be no meddling, in other words, by state or by church with a man’s thoughts or what he chooses to say about them. When it comes to thoughts, when it comes to ideas, when it comes to opinions and their expression, a man is free. His freedom is guaranteed by the fundamental law of the Republic. The opinions of others are not to be imposed upon him, no matter whose opinions they may be — the opinions of a church or the opinions of the government or the opinions of his fellow citizens — even the opinions of a majority of his fellow citizens.

A man s freedom to believe, that is to say, docs not depend on what he believes. It does not depend on his being “right “ as others see the right, no matter how numerous they may be or how well entrenched or how powerful. Right and wrong as others judge the right and wrong are irrelevant to the American conception of freedom to think and believe and say. That, of course, is the nub of the whole matter, and the essential distinction between freedom as we mean it and freedom as it is meant in certain other quarters of the earth. In the American conception of freedom, the man and his conscience come first and the established opinions, the accepted verities, the official views come after.

Strangers to the American tradition find this aspect of our historical belief in freedom difficult, if not impossible, to accept. Their inclination is to interpret freedom to mean freedom to think right thoughts. Which means, freedom to think as they think, and, by enlargement, freedom to think as their friends think, or their party, or their church, or their veterans’ organization, or their union, or their professional association, or whatever. The majority, the institution, the accepted opinion comes first with them and the man and his conscience nowhere. Freedom is freedom to be like everybody else, to think as the majority in the town or state or country thinks, to teach what the legislature or the dominant political or religious opinion wants taught, to conform.

Copyright 1951 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

The pressure which the word freedom has been under in the past few years is a pressure of this character: a pressure from those who have never really accepted or wholly understood the meaning of the word in its American use. There are some, of course, who deliberately reject the American meaning — who would destroy it if they could, replacing it with an interpretation more amenable to their own beliefs — but they are not numerous as yet. The real danger to freedom in the United States — to the word and to the thing — is the danger of the impairment of the American usage by negligence and default. Unless we can maintain the pure traditional meaning of the word — unless we can understand in common and as a nation that the only opinion established in this country by the Constitution is the opinion that a man is free to hold any opinion — unless we can agree among ourselves that by freedom we mean precisely freedom, we may end by finding ourselves “free” in the sense in which the Russians now find themselves “democratic.”

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THE process of debasement of the coinage has already gone some distance. Freedom in America has begun to mean not freedom itself but the majority view of freedom: the view held by most of us that freedom, under the conditions of the world we live in, is first and foremost freedom from the Communist police state. The consequence is that freedom is no longer the right of any man to hold whatever opinion he pleases. Freedom is the body of opinion opposed to the establishment of the Communist police state; and the right to hold pro-Communist. opinions is, therefore, not included or protected. The recent decision of the Supreme Court in the case of the Communist leaders, and the reactions of the public and the press to that decision, make the point. Justices Black and Douglas asserted in their dissenting opinions that the effect of the decision was to make opinions and their advocacy punishable without more, and thus to restrict freedom of opinion and freedom of belief as they had not before been restricted in American history. The majority opinion admitted, though it undertook to justify, the restriction. And nevertheless the decision was applauded in the press and throughout the country as a victory for freedom.

To applaud a restriction of freedom as a victory for freedom is — whatever else may be said of it — to corrupt the word. And the case of the Communist leaders is not the only indication that just such a corruption has occurred in the common usage of the word in the United States. Not only legislative committees of the state and federal governments but vigilante groups of private citizens have undertaken, in the name of freedom, to conduct what are, in effect, raids on the essential freedoms of the citizens of the Republic. And political caucuses and conventions have applauded, as services to the cause of freedom, actions which men who understood the meaning of the word could only condemn as offensive to the fundamental concept of individual liberty.

The justification for all this, of course, is a justification with which we are only too familiar. Communism is the mortal enemy and Communism must be destroyed even at the cost of certain of our own liberties — even at the more lasting cost of the integrity of the word central to our purposes as a people. Freedom-from-Communism is now more important than freedom itself, and since we must choose between the two it is the first we must elect. The difficulty with this position is that, even if it provided a convincing justification for the acts committed under cover of its rhetoric, it would not be true. When freedom is sacrificed, freedom-fromCommunism suffers also. For the most powerful defense against Communism in any country is precisely the people’s realization of the distinction between Communism in action and freedom itself.

What men detest in Communism is its denial in theory, and its destruction in practice, of the human attribute we have declared in our constitution, and asserted in our actions, we value above anything in this world: the singularity, the uniqueness, the spiritual personality of the individual human being. Men hate and detest Communism because it turns men into Members: because it suppresses and eradicates those differences and those distinctions between one man and another which we have defended as the principal worth and richness of human life: because it imposes on all men the kind of intellectual conformity, of subservience to official opinion, which we have rejected in our fundamental law and which earlier generations of Americans rejected in their lives.

To blur or to smudge this distinction between the Communist world and our own is not to injure the Communists but powerfully to assist them. And the moment we tamper with the meaning of the word freedom to make it describe conformity instead of individuality — the moment we speak of the mutilation of individual freedom as a victory for freedom — the distinction begins to disappear. The United States Senator who is applauded in freedom’s name for assaults upon the individual freedom of American citizens — assaults even upon their means of livelihood and their dignity ns men

— is obscuring the distinction between the Communist tyranny and the democratic hope; and those who applaud him are helping to obscure it.

The Texas legislature which votes, 130 to 1, to demand the ouster from the State University of a professor who has described free enterprise as decadent, and which cuts by $6500 the salary of the University Chancellor who, supported by his Board of Regents, refuses to comply, is turning freedom in Texas into something which begins to resemble what the Communists also call freedom.

The majority of the Board of Regents of the University of California which attempts to impose a special loyalty oath on the University’s teachers, in order to protect the freedom of American institutions, is bringing American institutions that much closer to those very different institutions which special oaths and special penalties protect the institutions of the totalitarian world: Stalin’s and Franco’s and perón’s and Mao’s.

The California Court which passed on the constitutionality of the Regents’ action had the courage to say as much: ” While the Court is mindful of the fact that the action of the Regents was, at the outset, motivated by a desire to protect the University from the influence of subversive elements dedicated to the overthrow of our constitutional government . . . we are also keenly aware that, equal to the danger of subversion from without by means of force and violence is the danger of subversion from within by the gradual whittling away and disintegration of the very pillars of our freedom.”

The Court’s language is worth pondering. Why “subversion from within by the gradual whittling away . . . of the very pillars of our freedom”? What “freedom” was being whittled away by the action of the Board of Regents of the University of California? The freedom of those to whom their action applied: the l niversity s teachers. But what freedom of the University’s teachers was affected? The freedom to think for themselves without the meddling of the state or its authorities. But why is the freedom to think for one’s self - the mere freedom of a teacher to think for himself

— why is this freedom a “pillar” of the great freedom which is the Republic? Because the freedom of the mind is the freedom of the man and the freedom of the man is what the Republic is.

Hut why is the whittling away of this freedom of the mind, of the man, “subversive”? Why is it “subversive” even though it is undertaken in the name of the defense of the United States against subversion? Because it is this freedom of the mind, of the man, which is the rock on which the United States is founded. To diminish it is to diminish the country. Even though it is diminished in the country’s name. Even though those who diminish it declare their opinion that, without some limitation upon the freedom of the mind, the freedom of the man, the country will be lost.

The Court’s reasoning is plain enough. The moment you allow a government’s conviction, or an institution’s conviction, or a majority s conviction of its own rightness to justify its power to silence those who disagree with it, just at that moment you surrender the fundamental American Proposition, and the moment you surrender the American Proposition you surrender the Republic. There is no stopping place beyond: no halfway mark. It makes no difference whether the conviction of scltrightness is religious, as it was with the majority in Massachusetts Hay three hundred years ago and has been since with majorities made up of other sects, Protestant as well as Catholic; or whether the conviction is economic, as it is now with the believers in economic determinism and was once with the believers in laissez-faire; or whether the conviction is political or racial or social or whatever it is. Once you permit those who arc convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and restrict the opinions of others, you open the gate to the silencing and the suppression of the opinions of others, and once you permit the silencing and the suppression of opinions because governments or institutions or majorities don’t like them, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered. For the American citadel is a man. Not man in general. Not man in the abstract. Not the majority of men. But man. That man. His worth. His uniqueness. His quality in himself. That in him which is uniquely his and which enriches, therefore, the world.

You cannot defend that citadel, and you cannot defend this country, by ambiguity either of word or action. Above all you cannot defend them by giving freedom a double meaning — by saying that freedom in the country has won a great victory when freedom in the man has suffered a mortal wound. Freedom in American usage means freedom of the man, and freedom of the man means freedom of t the man’s mind. The man comes first and everything else comes after—the establishments of opinion — the official views. The American Proposition refers not, as the editors of Fortune magazine have recently suggested, to American industry, but to the American people. It is an American Proposition as to man’s place in the universe, not as to the production of durable goods. And what it advances is the worth of man, the worth of the human individual — not the superiority of a given economic or religious or political system.

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THE American Proposition is the proposition, advanced at the beginnings of the Republic and enacted into law when the Constitution was adopted, that a man’s freedom to be a man, and to find and speak the truth that is in him, is more important than the protection of any accepted belief, any official verity, against criticism, against challenge, against dissent) More important not only to that man but to all men, to the society which all men compose, to the nation, to the world, to life itself. It is a proposition, in other words, which rests upon an act of faith, the most courageous of all earthly acts of faith — an act of faith in man and in the God whom man, in the freedom of his conscience and his though, can find.

When il was first enacled inlo law the American Proposition was new. It is still new: the one wholly new and revolutionary idea the modern world has produced, for all its triumphs in science and technique an idea so new and so revolutionary in its literal and explicit meaning that half ihe patriotic societies which celebrate their attachment to the American Revolution have yet to understand it or accept it. But it is new and revolutionary, not solely because it proclaims human liberty, nor solely because it founds its conception of human liberty on the freedom of the individual human mind, defending that freedom in the most explicit and peremptory terms against the tyranny of organized opinion. It is new and revolutionary because of the ad of faith which it expresses.

Our reliance in this country is on the inquiring, individual human mind. Our strength is founded there: our resilience, our abilily to face an ever changing future and to master it. We are not frozen into the backward-lacing impotence of those societies, fixed in the rigidness of an official dogma, to which the future is the mirror of the past. We are free to make the future for ourselves. And we are free because it is the man who counts in this country: always and at every moment and in any situation, the man Not the Truth hut the man: not the truth as the state sees the trulh or as the church sees the truth or as the majority sees the the man sees it, as the man finds it, for himself as mail. Our faith is in the infinite variety of human beings and in the God who made them various and of many minds; in their singularity, their uniqueness, the creativeness of the differences between them. Our faith, in simple, sober truth, is in the human Being, the human spirit, ihe hungers and the longings that lead it toward its images of truth, its perceptions of the beauty of the world,

Those who launched the great human adventure which this Republic is, dared to put their trust in the individual man, the man alone, the man thinking for himself. They dared to believe in a people, which is a nation of individual men constituting among themselves a society; for a people is not what the lotalitarians call “the masses"; a people is an agreement of main alone to make together a world in which each one of them can live as himself. I he founders of the American Republic believed in a people. Tliev not only provided no censors for the t houghl s of those who were to come after them; tliey prohibited censors. They not only provided no moral or intellect ual or religious authority to govern the beliefs of their successors: they rejected forever the eslablhhment of any such authority. They trusted men.

It is in that trust that the Republic can still he defended. Indeed it is only in that trust that il can he defended as the kind of country it is. To attempt to defend it otherwise — to attempt, above all, to defend it by debasing the coinage of meaning in which ils nature is expressed is to lose both the country itself and the struggle against Communism which is cited us justification of the fraud. If freedom can come tit mean something less than freedom in the general mind, it can come to mean the opposite of freedom If freedom ceases to express the American faith in man and in man’s unqualified right to find the truth for himself, it will shortly express a faith in established truth, in the rightness of official opinion. When that happens we shall have lost both the American Proposition and the fight against Communism. For the one idea that can triumph over the police-state notion that the truth is already known, once for all. and that the trulh is therefore entitled to impose itself by force, is the American Proposition that a man is free to find the trulh for himself. It is the one idea that can triumph because, as long as it is held, man himself is the cause of those who hold it. And against that cause no enemy has prevailed for long.