Individualism, and its economic corollary, laissez-faire liberalism, has not constantly 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 transformation of modern-day times was initially, and continued for a long period of time to be, laissez-faire individualist. Its purpose was to free the private person from the limitations and the shackles, the encrusted caste advantages and exploitative wars, of the feudal and mercantilist orders, of the Tory ancien régime.
Tom Paine, Thomas Jefferson, the militants in the American Transformation, the Jacksonian motion, Emerson and Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison and the extreme abolitionists– all were basically laissez-faire mavericks who carried on the olden battle for liberty and against all kinds of State privilege. Therefore were the French revolutionaries– not just the Girondins, however even the much-abused Jacobins, who were obliged to safeguard the Revolution against the massed crowned heads of Europe. All were roughly in the very same camp. The independent heritage, certainly, returns to the very first modern-day radicals of the 17th century– to the Levellers in England, and to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson in the American nests.
The traditional historical wisdom asserts that while the radical movements in America were certainly laissez-faire lone wolf prior to the Civil War, that later on, the laissez-fairists ended up being conservatives, and the extreme mantle then fell to groups more familiar to the modern Left: the Socialists and Populists. However this is a distortion of the reality. For it was senior New England Brahmins, laissez-faire merchants and industrialists like Edward Atkinson, who had actually funded John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry, who were the ones to leap in and oppose the US imperialism of the Spanish-American War with all their might.
No opposition to that war was more thoroughgoing than that of the laissez-faire economic expert and sociologist William Graham Sumner or than that of Atkinson who, as head of the Anti-Imperialist League, sent by mail antiwar pamphlets to American troops then engaged in conquering the Philippines. Atkinson’s pamphlets advised our soldiers to mutiny, and were consequently taken by the US postal authorities.
In taking this stand, Atkinson, Sumner, and their associates were not being “sports”; they were following an antiwar, anti-imperialist tradition as old as classical liberalism itself. This was the custom of Price, Priestley, and the late-18th-century British radicals that earned them repeated jail time by the British war maker; and of Richard Cobden, John Bright, and the laissez-faire Manchester School of the mid-19th century. Cobden, in particular, had actually fearlessly knocked every war and every royal maneuver of the British routine. We are now so utilized to thinking about opposition to imperialism as Marxian that this type of movement seems nearly unthinkable to us today.
By the advent of World War I, nevertheless, the death of the older laissez-faire generation threw the leadership of the opposition to America’s royal wars into the hands of the Socialist Party. However other, more individualist-minded men participated the opposition, a number of whom would later on form the core of the isolationist Old Right of the late 1930s. Thus, the hardcore antiwar leaders consisted of the lone wolf Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and such laissez-faire liberals as Senators William E. Borah (Republican Politician) of Idaho and James A. Reed (Democrat) of Missouri. It also included Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., daddy of the Lone Eagle, who was a congressman from Minnesota.
Almost all of America’s intellectuals hurried to enlist in the war fervor of the First World War. A leading exception was the formidable laissez-faire lone wolf Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the Nation, grand son of William Lloyd Garrison and previous member of the Anti-Imperialist League. 2 other prominent exceptions were friends and partners of Villard who were later to work as leaders of libertarian thought in America: Francis Neilson and specifically Albert Jay Nock. Neilson was the last of the laissez-faire English Liberals, who had emigrated to the United States; Nock served under Villard throughout the war, and it was his Nation editorial denouncing the progovernment activities of Samuel Gompers that got that concern of the magazine prohibited by the US Post Office. And it was Neilson who wrote the very 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 Publication.
The World War constituted a tremendous injury for all the individuals and groups opposed to the conflict. The total mobilization, the savage repression of opponents, the carnage and the US global intervention on an unprecedented scale– all of these polarized a great deal of varied individuals. The shock and the large overriding fact of the war inevitably drew together the diverse antiwar groups into a loose, informal, and oppositional united front– a front in a brand-new kind of essential opposition to the American system and to much of American society. The fast change of the brilliant young intellectual Randolph Bourne from a positive pragmatist into a drastically pessimistic anarchist was typical, though in a more extreme kind, of this freshly developed opposition. Crying, “War is the health of the State,” Bourne stated,
Nation is a concept of peace, of balance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a principle of power … And we have the misery of being born not only into a nation but into a State … The State is the country acting as a political system, it is the group functioning as a repository of force … International politics is a “power politics” because it is a relation of States which is what States infallibly and calamitously are, huge aggregations of human and commercial force that might be hurled against each other in war. When a country serves as a whole in relation to another country, or in enforcing laws by itself occupants, or in pushing or penalizing individuals or minorities, it is functioning as a State. The history of America as a country is rather 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 methods which it was used … and the carrying out of spiritual ideals … However as a State, its history is that of playing part in the world, making war, blocking worldwide trade … punishing those residents whom society agrees stink, and collecting money to spend for everything.
If the opposition was polarized and forced together by the war, this polarization did not stop 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 seriously about the American system per se; for another, the international system developed by the war was frozen into the status quo of the postwar era. For it was apparent that the Versailles treaty suggested that British and French imperialism had carved up and embarrassed Germany, and after that meant to use the League of Nations as an irreversible world guarantor of the recently imposed status quo. Versailles and the League implied that America might not forget the war; and the ranks of the o opposition were now signed up with 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 union including Socialists and all way of progressives and lone wolves. Considering that they and the coalition were now clearly antimilitarist and anti-“patriotic,” since they were progressively radical in their antistatism, the independents were widely identified as “leftists”; in reality, as the Socialist Celebration split and faded terribly in the postwar age, the opposition was given a progressively individualistic cast during the 1920s.
Part of this opposition was also cultural: a revolt versus hidebound Victorian mores and literature. Part of this cultural revolt was embodied in the popular expatriates of the “Lost Generation” of young American authors, authors revealing their intense disillusion with the wartime “idealism” and the reality that militarism and the war had exposed about America. Another stage of this revolt was embodied in the new social liberty of allure and flapper periods, and the blooming of private expression, amongst increasing numbers of young men and females.
This short article is excerpted from The Betrayal of the American Right, chapter 2, “Origins of the Old Right I: Early Individualism” (2007 ).