Reason Magazine - Contributors

Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt

info@reason.com (David Boaz) — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:24:00 EDT

Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, New York: Metropolitan Books, 242 pages, $26

On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.…America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, she added, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.”

That article isn’t quoted in Three New Deals, a fascinating study by the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. But it underscores his central argument: that there are surprising similarities between the programs of Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler.

With our knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II, we find it almost impossible to consider such claims dispassionately. But in the 1930s, when everyone agreed that capitalism had failed, it wasn’t hard to find common themes and mutual admiration in Washington, Berlin, and Rome, not to mention Moscow. (Three New Deals does not focus as much on the latter.) Nor is that a mere historical curiosity, of no great importance in the era following democracy’s triumph over fascism, National Socialism, and communism. Schivelbusch concludes his essay with the liberal journalist John T. Flynn’s warning, in 1944, that state power feeds on crises and enemies. Since then we have been warned about many crises and many enemies, and we have come to accept a more powerful and more intrusive state than existed before the ’30s.

Schivelbusch finds parallels in the ideas, style, and programs of the disparate regimes —even their architecture. “Neoclassical monumentalism,” he writes, is “the architectural style in which the state visually manifests power and authority.” In Berlin, Moscow, and Rome, “the enemy that was to be eradicated was the laissez-faire architectural legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism, an unplanned jumble of styles and structures.” Washington erected plenty of neoclassical monuments in the ’30s, though with less destruction than in the European capitals. Think of the “Man Controlling Trade” sculptures in front of the Federal Trade Commission, with a muscular man restraining an enormous horse. They would have been right at home in Il Duce’s Italy.

“To compare,” Schivelbusch stresses, “is not the same as to equate. America during Roosevelt’s New Deal did not become a one-party state; it had no secret police; the Constitution remained in force, and there were no concentration camps; the New Deal preserved the institutions of the liberal-democratic system that National Socialism abolished.” But throughout the ’30s, intellectuals and journalists noted “areas of convergence among the New Deal, Fascism, and National Socialism.” All three were seen as transcending “classic Anglo-French liberalism”—individualism, free markets, decentralized power.

Since 1776, liberalism had transformed the Western world. As The Nation editorialized in 1900, before it too abandoned the old liberalism, “Freed from the vexatious meddling of governments, men devoted themselves to their natural task, the bettering of their condition, with the wonderful results which surround us”—industry, transportation, telephones and telegraphs, sanitation, abundant food, electricity. But the editor worried that “its material comfort has blinded the eyes of the present generation to the cause which made it possible.” Old liberals died, and younger liberals began to wonder if government couldn’t be a positive force, something to be used rather than constrained.

Others, meanwhile, began to reject liberalism itself. In his 1930s novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote, “Misfortune had decreed that…the mood of the times would shift away from the old guidelines of liberalism that had favored Leo Fischel—the great guiding ideals of tolerance, the dignity of man, and free trade—and reason and progress in the Western world would be displaced by racial theories and street slogans.”

The dream of a planned society infected both right and left. Ernst Jünger, an influential right-wing militarist in Germany, reported his reaction to the Soviet Union: “I told myself: granted, they have no constitution, but they do have a plan. This may be an excellent thing.” As early as 1912, FDR himself praised the Prussian-German model: “They passed beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people,” he said in an address to the People’s Forum of Troy, New York.

American Progressives studied at German universities, Schivelbusch writes, and “came to appreciate the Hegelian theory of a strong state and Prussian militarism as the most efficient way of organizing modern societies that could no longer be ruled by anarchic liberal principles.” The pragmatist philosopher William James’ influential 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” stressed the importance of order, discipline, and planning.

Intellectuals worried about inequality, the poverty of the working class, and the commercial culture created by mass production. (They didn’t seem to notice the tension between the last complaint and the first two.) Liberalism seemed inadequate to deal with such problems. When economic crisis hit—in Italy and Germany after World War I, in the United States with the Great Depression—the anti-liberals seized the opportunity, arguing that the market had failed and that the time for bold experimentation had arrived.

In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” He wasn’t hallucinating. FDR’s adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done “many of the things which seem to me necessary.” Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt who lived in the White House for a spell, wrote approvingly of a local official who had said, “If [President] Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere.” She added that if she were younger, she’d like to lead “the Fascist Movement in the United States.” At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”

Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.…Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”

In Rome, Berlin, and D.C., there was an affinity for military metaphors and military structures. Fascists, National Socialists, and New Dealers had all been young during World War I, and they looked back with longing at the experiments in wartime planning. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt summoned the nation: “If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army.…I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”

That was a new tone for a president of the American republic. Schivelbusch argues that “Hitler and Roosevelt were both charismatic leaders who held the masses in their sway—and without this sort of leadership, neither National Socialism nor the New Deal would have been possible.” This plebiscitary style established a direct connection between the leader and the masses. Schivelbusch argues that the dictators of the 1930s differed from “old-style despots, whose rule was based largely on the coercive force of their praetorian guards.” Mass rallies, fireside radio chats—and in our own time—television can bring the ruler directly to the people in a way that was never possible before.

To that end, all the new regimes of the ’30s undertook unprecedented propaganda efforts. “Propaganda,” Schivelbusch writes “is the means by which charismatic leadership, circumventing intermediary social and political institutions like parliaments, parties, and interest groups, gains direct hold upon the masses.” The NRA’s Blue Eagle campaign, in which businesses that complied with the agency’s code were allowed to display a “Blue Eagle” symbol, was a way to rally the masses and call on everyone to display a visible symbol of support. NRA head Hugh Johnson made its purpose clear: “Those who are not with us are against us.”

Scholars still study that propaganda. Earlier this year a Berlin museum mounted an exhibit titled “Art and Propaganda: The Clash of Nations—1930–45.” According to the critic David D’Arcy, it shows how the German, Italian, Soviet, and American governments “mandated and funded art when image-building served nation-building at its most extreme.…The four countries rallied their citizens with images of rebirth and regeneration.” One American poster of a sledgehammer bore the slogan “Work to Keep Free,” which D’Arcy found “chillingly close to ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ the sign that greeted prisoners at Auschwitz.” Similarly, a reissue of a classic New Deal documentary, The River (1938), prompted Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott to write that “watching it 70 years later on a new Naxos DVD feels a little creepy.…There are moments, especially involving tractors (the great fetish object of 20th-century propagandists), when you are certain that this film could have been produced in one of the political film mills of the totalitarian states of Europe.”

Program and propaganda merged in the public works of all three systems. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the autobahn, and the reclamation of the Pontine marshes outside Rome were all showcase projects, another aspect of the “architecture of power” that displayed the vigor and vitality of the regime.

You might ask, “Where is Stalin in this analysis? Why isn’t this book called Four New Deals?” Schivelbusch does mention Moscow repeatedly, as did McCormick in her New York Times piece. But Stalin seized power within an already totalitarian system; he was the victor in a coup. Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt, each in a different way, came to power as strong leaders in a political process. They thus share the “charismatic leadership” that Schivelbusch finds so important.

Schivelbusch is not the first to have noticed such similarities. B.C. Forbes, the founder of the eponymous magazine, denounced “rampant Fascism” in 1933. In 1935 former President Herbert Hoover was using phrases like “Fascist regimentation” in discussing the New Deal. A decade later, he wrote in his memoirs that “the New Deal introduced to Americans the spectacle of Fascist dictation to business, labor and agriculture,” and that measures such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act, “in their consequences of control of products and markets, set up an uncanny Americanized parallel with the agricultural regime of Mussolini and Hitler.” In 1944, in The Road to Serfdom, the economist F.A. Hayek warned that economic planning could lead to totalitarianism. He cautioned Americans and Britons not to think that there was something uniquely evil about the German soul. National Socialism, he said, drew on collectivist ideas that had permeated the Western world for a generation or more.

In 1973 one of the most distinguished American historians, John A. Garraty of Columbia University, created a stir with his article “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression.” Garraty was an admirer of Roosevelt but couldn’t help noticing, for instance, the parallels between the Civilian Conservation Corps and similar programs in Germany. Both, he wrote, “were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth ‘off the city street corners,’ Hitler as a way of keeping them from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets.’ In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.”

And in 1976, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan incurred the ire of Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), pro-Roosevelt historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and The New York Times when he told reporters that “fascism was really the basis of the New Deal.”

But Schivelbusch has explored these connections in greater detail and with more historical distance. As the living memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust recedes, scholars—perhaps especially in Germany—are gradually beginning to apply normal political science to the movements and events of the 1930s. Schivelbusch occasionally overreaches, as when he writes that Roosevelt once referred to Stalin and Mussolini as “his ‘blood brothers.’ ” (In fact, it seems clear in Schivelbusch’s source—Arthur Schlesinger’s The Age of Roosevelt—that FDR was saying communism and fascism were blood brothers to each other, not to him.) But overall, this is a formidable piece of scholarship.

To compare is not to equate, as Schivelbusch says. It’s sobering to note the real parallels among these systems. But it’s even more important to remember that the U.S. did not succumb to dictatorship. Roosevelt may have stretched the Constitution beyond recognition, and he had a taste for planning and power previously unknown in the White House. But he was not a murderous thug. And despite a population that “literally waited for orders,” as McCormick put it, American institutions did not collapse. The Supreme Court declared some New Deal measures unconstitutional. Some business leaders resisted it. Intellectuals on both the right and the left, some of whom ended up in the early libertarian movement, railed against Roosevelt. Republican politicians (those were the days!) tended to oppose both the flow of power to Washington and the shift to executive authority.

Germany had a parliament and political parties and business leaders, and they collapsed in the face of Hitler’s movement. Something was different in the United States. Perhaps it was the fact that the country was formed by people who had left the despots of the Old World to find freedom in the new, and who then made a libertarian revolution. Americans tend to think of themselves as individuals, with equal rights and equal freedom. A nation whose fundamental ideology is, in the words of the recently deceased sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, “antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism” will be far more resistant to illiberal ideologies.

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and editor of Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World (Cato).

Ginsburg in the "Balance"

info@reason.com (David Boaz) — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST

Remember all those news stories in 1993 about how the nomination of former ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to replace conservative Justice Byron White on the United States Supreme Court would "tilt the balance of the court to the left?"

Of course you don't. Because there weren't any.

In the past three months, the major media have repeatedly hammered away at the theme that Judge Samuel Alito Jr. would "shift the Supreme Court to the right" if he replaced retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

According to Lexis/Nexis, major newspapers have used the phrase "shift the court" 36 times in their Alito coverage. They have referred to the "balance of the court" 32 times and "the court's balance" another 15. "Shift to the right" accounted for another 18 mentions.

Major radio and television programs indexed by Lexis/Nexis have used those phrases 63 times. CNN told viewers that Alito would "tilt the balance of the court" twice on the day President Bush nominated him. NPR's first-day story on "Morning Edition" was headlined "Alito could move court dramatically to the right."

Now maybe all this is to be expected. Alito is a conservative, he's been nominated to replace a centrist justice, and he probably will move the Supreme Court somewhat to the right—which is probably what at least some voters had in mind when they elected a Republican president and 55 Republican senators.

But note the contrast to 1993, when President Bill Clinton nominated the liberal Ginsburg to replace conservative White. White had dissented from the landmark decisions on abortion rights in Roe v. Wade and on criminal procedure in the Miranda case, and he had written the majority opinion upholding sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick. Obviously his replacement by the former general counsel of the ACLU was going to "move the court dramatically to the left."

So did the media report Ginsburg's nomination that way? Not on your life.

Not a single major newspaper used the phrases "shift the court," "shift to the left," or "balance of the court" in the six weeks between Clinton's nomination and the Senate's ratification of Ginsburg. Only one story in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer mentioned the "court's balance," and that writer thought that Ginsburg would move a "far right" court "toward the center."

The only network broadcast to use any of those phrases was an NPR interview in which liberal law professor Paul Rothstein of Georgetown University said that Ginsburg might offer a "subtle change...a nuance" in "the balance of the court" because she would line up with Justice O'Connor in the center.

No one thought that some momentary balance on the Court had to be preserved when a justice retired or that it was inappropriate to shift the ideological makeup of the Court. And certainly no one had made that point during 60 years of mostly liberal appointees from Democratic presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson—even as they replaced more conservative justices who had died or retired. ut suddenly, we are told by senators, activists, and pundits that a nominee should not change the makeup of the Court.

For another striking contrast, take a look at The Washington Post's respective headlines on the days the two judges were nominated. For Ginsburg:

"Judge Ruth Ginsburg Named to High Court; Clinton's Unexpected Choice Is Women's Rights Pioneer"

"A Mentor, Role Model and Heroine of Feminist Lawyers"

"Nominee's Philosophy Seen Strengthening the Center"

For Alito:

"Alito Nomination Sets Stage for Ideological Battle; Bush's Court Pick Is Appeals Judge with Record of Conservative Rulings"

"With a Pick from the Right, Bush Looks to Rally GOP in Tough Times"

"Comparisons to Scalia, But Also to Roberts"

"Judge Participated in 2002 Vanguard Case Despite Promise to Recuse," and "Alito Leans Right Where O'Connor Swung Left"

Despite the Post's claim that Ginsburg was a centrist, she has in fact been a consistently liberal vote on the Supreme Court. Research by Richard J. Timpone, director of the Political Research Laboratory at Ohio State, finds that she is the most liberal member of the Court on economic issues and virtually tied with Justices John Paul Stevens and Steven Breyer on civil liberties. The Institute for Justice reviewed three years of Court terms and found: "The justices least likely to constrain government power and protect individual liberties were Justices Ginsburg and Breyer." Three years later they found the same results for Ginsburg's first seven terms: she and Breyer voted against protecting civil and economic liberties more often than any other justice.

The issue is not Ginsburg's record, but the media's notion that the Supreme Court exists in some sort of delicate balance which will be upset by the introduction of a conservative justice. The Senate has every right to consider whether Judge Alito will be too conservative, too accommodating to executive power, or too dismissive of discrimination claims. But the Supreme Court's current ideological makeup is not divinely ordained, and we should stop wringing our hands over whether he will "shift the court" in some direction.

�

The Bridges are Back

info@reason.com (David Boaz) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST

Whether you've gotten a card or not, rest assured that Alaska thanks you for the $454 million Christmas present. Remember those "bridges to nowhere" that were finally taken out of the federal budget? Well, they're back. You may recall the highway bill that Congress passed in July. It was the biggest porkfest in history -- more than 13,000 individual projects awarded federal tax dollars in an orgy of logrolling and back-scratching. Among the most notorious projects were two bridges in Alaska, dubbed the "bridges to nowhere." The bill included $223 million for a bridge linking Gravina Island to the town of Ketchikan in Alaska. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, federal taxpayers will eventually pay $315 million for this bridge. Here's the deal: Ketchikan is a town of 8,000 people (13,000 in the whole county, and population is declining). Its airport is on the nearby Gravina Island. Right now you have to take a 7-minute ferry ride from the airport to the town. To save people that 7-minute ride, Alaska wants to build a $315 million bridge. The highway bill also awarded Alaska $231 million for the Knik Arm Bridge, which was renamed "Don Young's Way" in honor of Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and master porkbearer. According to the Alaska Wilderness League, "Construction of the Knik Arm Bridge would connect the city of Anchorage to hundreds of square miles of unpopulated wetlands to the north. Preliminary cost estimates for the bridge are upwards of $2 billion." But then Hurricane Katrina changed things. In the wake of the devastation of the Gulf Coast and demands for massive federal spending there, critics said Congress should revisit the highway bill and transfer some of the more outrageous spending to Katrina relief. The bridges to nowhere came in for special criticism, with fiscal conservatives and Katrina relief advocates joining forces to insist that the bridge funding be revoked. It got so bad that Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, roared, "If the Senate decides to discriminate against our state . . . I will resign from this body." Taxpayer advocates could only pray that he would keep his word. And sure enough, Congress acted. Headlines across the country echoed this one in the New York Times: "Two 'Bridges to Nowhere' Tumble Down in Congress." The Times story began, "Congressional Republicans decided Wednesday to take a legislative wrecking ball to two Alaskan bridge projects that had demolished the party's reputation for fiscal austerity." Good news indeed. Except � Ted Stevens didn't resign from Congress. Why not? Because it was all a show, just smoke and mirrors. Congress removed the requirement that Alaska use the money for the bridges to nowhere. But the state still got the money � a $454 million blank check. And sure enough, Gov. Frank Murkowski has included money for both bridges in his new state budget. Murkowski, who used to be a senator himself, works closely with the state's congressional delegation. Indeed, when he was elected governor, he searched the length and breadth of the great state of Alaska to find a qualified replacement and eventually found her across the breakfast table � his daughter, Lisa, who now works hand in hand with Stevens and Young to keep the funding pipeline flowing. The federal money for the bridges was real gravy. Alaska has a $1 billion budget surplus, so Governor Murkowski could satisfy all sorts of special interests in his munificent budget proposal. Oil-rich Alaska also has $32 billion in its Permanent Fund. And here's a real kicker: The agency building Don Young's Way is advertising for lobbying firms to represent it in Washington at a cost of up to $150,000. The firms would engage in "lobbying, educating, reporting, communicating and coordinating." So some of the $454 million that taxpayers in New York and California and Georgia and every other state are sending to Alaska will be used to hire lobbyists to milk the federal Treasury for even more money. Merry Christmas, taxpayers.

Base Closing Blues

info@reason.com (David Boaz) — Fri, 20 May 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Last week, the Defense Department announced its recommendations for Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC. Thirty-three major military bases are slated for closure and over 100 other smaller installations (some staffed with as few as three people) would be downsized or shut down. Some of the bigger closures include the naval submarine base in New London, CT; Fort McPherson in Atlanta, GA; the naval support activity in New Orleans, LA; the naval shipyard in Portsmouth, ME; Fort Monmouth in New Jersey; Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico; Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota; Brooks City Base, Naval Station Ingleside, and Red River Army Depot in Texas; and Fort Monroe in Hampton, VA.

Almost immediately, officials representing communities that would be affected by BRAC announced that they would fight to reverse the decision. For example, Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) said, "We pledge to fight tooth and nail to overturn this decision. Today is not the end of the road—not even the end of the beginning." According to New Mexico's governor Bill Richardson, "I unequivocally state that I am determined to do my utmost to overturn the Department of Defense recommendation to close Cannon Air Force Base." Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) vowed to "spare no effort in putting our case for all our facilities before the Commissioners and their staff—as often as it takes, for as long as it takes." And Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) claimed, "Our fight to save Ellsworth isn't over. I plan to work with the Ellsworth Task Force—and the entire South Dakota Congressional delegation—to demonstrate to the members of the BRAC Commission that closing Ellsworth is wrong."

Although advocates of keeping military bases open insist that those bases are essential to U.S. national security, their arguments emphasize another reason: jobs, jobs, jobs. For example, shutting down the submarine base in New London, CT—the single largest base closure—will result in the exodus of over 8,500 military and civilian personnel, as well as the potential loss of over 3,600 jobs and $1.3 billion to the state's economy according to a Connecticut economic impact analysis. According to Senator Johnson, Ellsworth Air Force Base is critical to the "economic livelihood of the Rapid City area. In 2004, Ellsworth contributed $278 million to local economy, and it generates a substantial number of civilian jobs at the base."

But U.S. military bases do not exist to support local economies. They exist to defend U.S. national security. Gone is the Cold War and gone with it is the need for U.S. attack submarines to hunt and track Soviet ballistic missile submarines that might launch a nuclear attack against the United States. So it's easy to see why the submarine base in New London, CT made the BRAC list. Although the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard has a better cost and performance record than Norfolk, VA—which is where the work and jobs would be transferred—Portsmouth services primarily nuclear attack submarines. Norfolk is larger (over 1,200 acres vs. slightly less than 300 acres) and can repair, overhaul, and maintain virtually all naval craft—both surface ships and submarines.

Other closures may not be quite so clear cut. For example, why close Cannon and Ellsworth Air Force Bases and keep other bomber and fighter bases open? These decisions are harder and may be more subjective, but still reflect the overarching need to downsize base capacity. For example, we don't need to keep as many strategic nuclear bombers on alert status as we did during the Cold War, which reduces the need to have as many bomber bases.

But even if a military base closes, it doesn't automatically mean that the surrounding community will wither and die. Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, TX and Fort Ord in Monterey, CA (casualties of the 1991 round of BRAC) are both examples of areas that flourished after a base closure—despite warnings at the time that the end was nigh. Bergstrom was converted into an international airport that has 25 gates and serves 7.2 million passengers annually. Fort Ord is now home to the California State University at Monterey Bay campus, a University of California at Santa Cruz research center, and the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

The chances that any community will be able to reverse a BRAC decision are slim. Past experience is that 85 percent of the recommendations are accepted. So instead of lamenting the loss of a military base, communities should expend their efforts to turn a loss into a gain. As Rhea Perlman said in Canadian Bacon, "sometimes when life gives you lemons, you've got to crush them into lemonade."

Virginia Is for (Homoracial, Heterosexual, Mentally Adequate) Lovers

info@reason.com (David Boaz) — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EDT

By a razor-thin vote (49-48), the Virginia State House passed a bill in late February that would allow private companies to extend health insurance coverage to members of employees' households other than spouses or dependent children. The measure was surprisingly controversial, given that it included no legal requirement for companies to cover anybody and that every other state in the union already allowed private firms to offer such coverage. Why was the Republican-dominated State House so reluctant to allow greater freedom of private contract?

In a letter circulated to colleagues, delegate Richard H. Black (R - Loudoun) framed the issue in terms that are becoming all-too-familiar to gay Virginians. Black acknowledged that the bill did not "mandate same-sex benefits" but he warned that the "ultimate objective is to mandate such benefits for same-sex partners," so legislators should not push the state down this slippery slope.

The state of Virginia has been busy shoring up its footing for the past several years. Not content to trust that the federal Defense of Marriage Act would allow the state to refuse to recognize gay marriage, the state in 2004 passed a law prohibiting civil unions with the Orwellian title the "Marriage Affirmation Act."

The language of the Marriage Affirmation Act is incomprehensibly broad. Does its ban on "partnership contract or other arrangement" include wills, custody agreements, medical powers of attorney, or joint bank accounts? Is my mortgage, for instance, shared with my partner, an "arrangement...purporting to bestow the privileges of marriage"? This session the legislature moved to make the marriage and civil union bans immune to legal challenge by passing them as a constitutional amendment. If the same body approves the bill again next year, it will go to voters to decide in 2006 whether to write this blatant discrimination against a class of people into the state constitution.

By my conservative estimate, the effort to circumscribe gay relationships is not the Virginia legislature's first attack on private, contractual relationships in the past century; it's the third. The first two efforts are now almost universally condemned, if not always well remembered.

The first push occurred in 1924. At the urging of "progressive" advocates of eugenics, Virginia enacted a law requiring the sterilization of people in state institutions "who shall be found to be afflicted with a hereditary form of insanity or imbecility." Only three months after the bill took effect, Virginia officials found a good case to test the validity of the law. Carrie Buck had been committed by her foster father to the State Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble-Minded after she gave birth to an illegitimate child at the age of 17. The superintendent of the facility asked a state board to order her to be sterilized because she was a "moral delinquent . . . of the moron class."

As William E. Leuchtenberg writes in The Supreme Court Reborn, Buck had been "branded as wayward because of her allegedly licentious behavior though, in fact, she had become pregnant because she had been raped by a relative of her foster parents." Her biological mother had also been committed to the same institution, and a representative of the Eugenics Record Office submitted the results of a test supposedly showing that Carrie's seven-month-old daughter Vivian was mentally below average—thus showing a hereditary pattern of mental defectiveness. (In fact, Vivian made the honor roll in public school before she died of a childhood ailment at the age of seven.)

The head of the Eugenics Record Office, who never met Carrie or any of her family, testified that she suffered from hereditary feeble-mindedness. He relied on a nurse who had said, "These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South." Virginia's Supreme Court of Appeals eventually found that Buck, "by the laws of heredity, is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring likely affected as she is."

It took three years for the case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the state. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the country's most respected jurist, wrote that there is a state interest in preventing "those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." In conclusion, he wrote, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Carrie Buck was sterilized. And thanks to the case of Buck v. Bell, so were another 8,000 Virginians and more than 60,000 other Americans. They were forcibly deprived of the chance to have children based on flimsy evidence of their low intelligence.

More than 30 years later, Virginia's longstanding law against interracial marriage—dating back to colonial times and reaffirmed in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924—came under fire. Mildred Jeter, who was black, and Richard Loving, who was white, grew up near each other in Caroline County, Virginia. Eventually, barred from marriage in Virginia, they went to Washington, D.C. to marry. They then returned to Caroline County and lived together.

The Lovings were indicted for violation of the anti-miscegenation law and pled guilty. They were sentenced to a year in jail; the state's law didn't just ban interracial marriage, it made such marriage a criminal offense. However, the trial judge suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

The Lovings moved to Washington, but in 1963 they filed suit to have their sentences overturned under the Fourteenth Amendment. They didn't expect an easy time of it; a Gallup Poll indicated in 1965 that 42 percent of Northern whites supported bans on inter-racial marriage, as did 72 percent of Southern whites. The case found its way to the Supreme Court, which unanimously overturned the law against interracial marriage in 1967. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the majority, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival."

Neither of these now-derided laws is a perfect match with the predicament facing gays in Virginia, but both flowed from an arrogant desire by the state to control private relationships. The state is schizophrenic about such things, but if the past is any indicator, things do not look good for gay Virginians. In the 1995 case of Sharon Bottoms, the Virginia high court took a two-year-old child away from his lesbian mother, because of her sexual orientation. If voters pass the amendment against gay marriage and civil unions next year, it would have real teeth. Already, many gays in Virginia are talking about moving to Washington or Maryland if what they view as an anti-gay crusade doesn't recede. If things continue on their present course, the state might have to amend its slogan, "Virginia is for lovers," to include the caveat, "some exceptions apply."

The Man Who Told the Truth

info@reason.com (David Boaz) — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Robert Heilbroner, the bestselling writer of economics, died early this month at the age of 85. He and John Kenneth Galbraith may well have sold more economics books than all other economists combined. Alas, their talents lay more in the writing than the economics. Heilbroner was an outspoken socialist; if only a libertarian could write an introductory book on economics that could—like Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers—sell 4 million copies.

Reading some of Heilbroner's essays over the years, I admired his honesty about the meaning of socialism. Consider this excerpt from a 1978 essay in Dissent:

Socialism...must depend for its economic direction on some form of planning, and for its culture on some form of commitment to the idea of a morally conscious collectivity....

If tradition cannot, and the market system should not, underpin the socialist order, we are left with some form of command as the necessary means for securing its continuance and adaptation. Indeed, that is what planning means...

The factories and stores and farms and shops of a socialist socioeconomic formation must be coordinated...and this coordination must entail obedience to a central plan...

The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal... Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.

Few socialists outside the Communist Party are willing to acknowledge that real socialism means trading our "Millian liberties" for the purported good of economic planning and "a morally conscious collectivity."

He was not entirely impervious to new evidence, however. In 1989, he famously wrote in The New Yorker:

"Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won... Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism."

In The New Yorker again the next year, he reminisced about hearing of Ludwig von Mises at Harvard in the 1930s. But of course his professors and fellow students scoffed at Mises's claim that socialism could not work. It seemed at the time, he wrote, that it was capitalism that was failing. Then, a mere 50 years later, he acknowledged: "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right" about the impossibility of socialism. I particularly like the "of course." Fifty years it took him to grasp the truth of what Mises wrote in 1920, and he blithely tossed off his newfound wisdom as "of course."

Alas, in that same article he went on to say that while socialism might not in fact produce the goods, we would still need to reject capitalism on the grounds of...let's see...I've got it—environmental degradation. Yeah, that's the ticket. While he had managed to wriggle free of the ideas he learned in the 1930s, he was still stuck in the 1970s when, like Paul Ehrlich, he issued dire predictions about the imminent exhaustion of natural resources. In his 1974 book An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, Heilbroner wrote, "Ultimately, there is an absolute limit to the ability of the Earth to support or tolerate the process of industrial activity, and there is reason to believe that we now are moving toward that limit very rapidly."

On the big issue of capitalism vs. socialism, though, he did continue his rueful acknowledgment of error. In 1992, he explained the facts of life to Dissent readers:

Capitalism has been as unmistakable a success as socialism has been a failure. Here is the part that's hard to swallow. It has been the Friedmans, Hayeks, and von Miseses who have maintained that capitalism would flourish and that socialism would develop incurable ailments. All three have regarded capitalism as the 'natural' system of free men; all have maintained that left to its own devices capitalism would achieve material growth more successfully than any other system. From [my samplings] I draw the following discomforting generalization: The farther to the right one looks, the more prescient has been the historical foresight; the farther to the left, the less so.

He also noted then that "democratic liberties have not yet appeared, except fleetingly, in any nation that has declared itself to be fundamentally anticapitalist."

May the socialists in Cambridge and Cambridge, and the people struggling to create decent societies around the world, especially in Africa, the Arab world, and the ex-Communist countries take the frank (albeit delayed) honesty of Robert Heilbroner to heart.