FREEDOM
E. B. White
E.B. White (1899-1985) wrote this essay and published it in Harper's
magazine in July 1940. It seemed appropriate to put his essay up in reaction
to some of the tactics being used by the Bush camp, and how many American's
are simply ignoring them. If the name sounds familiar, but you can't quite
place it, E. B. White was the co-author, with William Strunk, Jr. (and
reviser) of The Elements of Style. He also wrote the children's
classics Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web.
I have often noticed on my trips up to the city that people have recut their
clothes to follow the fashion. On my last trip, however, it seemed to me that
people had remodeled their ideas too--taken in their convictions a little at
the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve, and fitted themselves out
in a new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design out of the very
latest page of history. It seemed to me they had strung along with Paris a
little too long.
I confess to a disturbed stomach. I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting
his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. Because of its
fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to admit of any compromise
or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of persons who find
in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to
believe that a human being should live free, then I'll gladly arrest my
development and let the rest of the world grow up.
I shall report some of the strange remarks I heard in New York. One man
told me that he thought perhaps the Nazi ideal was a sounder ideal than our
constitutional system "because have you ever noticed what fine alert
young faces the young German soldiers have in the newsreel?" He added,
"Or American youngsters spend all their time at the movies--they're a
mess." That was his summation of the case, his interpretation of the new
Europe. Such a remark leaves me pale and shaken. If it represents the peak
of our intelligence, then the steady march of despotism will not receive any
considerable setback at our shores.
Another man informed me that our democratic notion of popular government was
decadent and not worth bothering about--"because England is really
rotten and the industrial towns there are a disgrace." That was the only
reason he gave for the hopelessness of democracy; and he seemed mightily
pleased with himself, as though he were more familiar than most with the
anatomy of decadence, and had detected subtler aspects of the situation than
were discernible to the rest of us.
Another man assured me that anyone who took any kind of government
seriously was a gullible fool. You could be sure, he said, that there is
nothing but corruption "because of the way Clemenceau acted at
Versailles." He said it didn't make any difference really about this
war. It was just another war. Having relieved himself of this majestic bit
of reasoning, he subsided.
Another individual, discovering signs of zeal creeping into my blood, berated
me for having lost my detachment, my pure skeptical point of view. He
announced that he wasn't going to be swept away by all this nonsense, but
would prefer to remain in the role of innocent bystander, which he said was
the duty of any intelligent person. (I noticed, that he phoned later to
qualify his remark, as though he had lost some of his innocence in the cab on
the way home.)
Those are just a few samples of the sort of talk that seemed to be going
round--talk which was full of defeatism and disillusion and sometimes of a too
studied innocence. Men are not merely annihilating themselves at a great rate
these days, but they are telling one another enormous lies, grandiose fibs.
Such remarks as I heard are fearfully disturbing in their cumulative effect.
They are more destructive than dive bombers and mine fields, for they
challenge not merely one's immediate position but one's main defenses. They
seemed to me to issue either from persons who could never have really come to
grips with freedom so as to understand her, or from renegades. Where I
expected to find indignation, I found paralysis, or a sort of dim
acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill. I was
advised of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment by a man who seemed to be
watching the phenomenon of intolerance not through tears of shame but with a
clear intellectual gaze, as through a well-ground lens.
The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he
stands. I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith,
the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than
a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though
I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being
pressed for time. Actually I do not believe I am pressed for time, and I
apologize to the reader for a false impression that may be created. I just
want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and
that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in,
and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to
fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such
adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.
For as long as I can remember I have had a sense of living somewhat freely in
a natural world. I don't mean I enjoyed freedom of action, but my existence
seemed to have the quality of free-ness. I traveled with secret papers
pertaining to a divine conspiracy. Intuitively I've always been aware of the
vitally important pact which a man has with himself, to be all things to
himself, and to be identified with all things, to stand self-reliant, taking
advantage of his haphazard connection with a planet, riding his luck, and
following his bent with the tenacity of a hound. My first and greatest love
affair was with this thing we call freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this
dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all.
It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives)
of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing herself
through the "I" This elusive sensation is moving and memorable. It
comes early in life; a boy, we'll say, sitting on the front steps on a summer
night, thinking of nothing in particular, suddenly hearing as with a new
perception and as though for the first time the pulsing sound of crickets,
overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification whith the natural company
of insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the
universal perplexing question: "What is 'I'?" Or a little girl,
returning from the grave of a pet bird leaning with her elbows on the window
sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as
part of the complete story. Or to an older youth, encountering for the first
time a great teacher who by some chance word or mood awakens something and the
youth beginning to breathe as an individual and conscious of strength in his
vitals. I think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of
identity with God--an eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense
of divine existence as distinct from mere animal existence. This is the
beginning of the affair with freedom.
But a man's free condition is of two parts: the instinctive free-ness he
experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he
enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is, of the two,
more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently challenged and
discussed. It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. The United
States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the
tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write plays
and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well
as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in
all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to
compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether
the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid
the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events
instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a
fact and should give every person pause.
To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be
free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework. In
Adolph Hitler, although he is a freely flowering individual, we do not detect
either type of sensibility. From reading his book I gather that his feeling
for earth is not a sense of communion but a driving urge to prevail. His
feeling for men is not that they co-exist, but that they are capable of being
arranged and standardized by a superior intellect--that their existence
suggests not a fulfillment of their personalities but a submersion of their
personalities in the common racial destiny. His very great absorption in the
destiny of the German people somehow loses some of its effect when you
discover, from his writings, in what vast contempt he holds all
people. "I learned," he wrote, "...to gain an insight into the
unbelievably primitive opinions and arguments of the people." To him the
ordinary man is a primitive, capable only of being used and led. He speaks
continually of people as sheep, halfwits, and impudent fools--the same people
to whom he promises the ultimate in prizes.
Here in America, where our society is based on belief in the individual, not
contempt for him, the free principle of life has a chance of surviving. I
believe that it must and will survive. To understand freedom is an
accomplishment which all men may acquire who set their minds in that
direction; and to love freedom is a tendency which many Americans are born
with. To live in the same room with freedom, or in the same hemisphere, is
still a profoundly shaking experience for me.
One of the earliest truths (and to him most valuable) that the author of
Mein Kampf discovered was that it is not the written word, but the
spoken word, which in heated moments moves great masses of people to noble or
ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something which
every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual
standards, not by what the man standing next to him thinks. "I
know," wrote Hitler, "that one is able to win people far more by
the spoken than by the written word...." Later he adds contemptuously:
"For let it be said to all knights of the pen and to all the political
dandies, especially of today: the greatest changes in this world have never
been brought about by a goose quill! No, the pen has always been reserved to
motivate these changes theoretically."
Luckily I am not out to change the world--that's being done for me, and at a
great clip. But I know that the free spirit of man is persistent in nature;
it recurs, and has never successfully been wiped out, by fire or flood. I set
down the above remarks merely (in the words of Mr. Hitler) to motivate that
spirit, theoretically. Being myself a knight of the goose quill, I am under
no misapprehension about "winning people"; but I am inordinately
proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself, historically, to be
the hypodermic which inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in
circulation, so that there are individuals in every time in every land who are
the carriers, the Typhoid Marys, capable of infecting others by mere contact
and example. These persons are feared by every tyrant--who shows his fear by
burning the books and destroying the individuals. A writer goes about his
task today with the extra satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will
be the first to have his head lopped off--even before the political dandies.
In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by
force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely
prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it
any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumberance.
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