- Hoover, Herbert.
American Individualism.
Introduction by George H. Nash.
Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, [1922] 2016.
ISBN 978-0-8179-2015-9.
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After the end of World War I, Herbert Hoover and the American
Relief Administration he headed provided food aid to the
devastated nations of Central Europe, saving millions from
famine. Upon returning to the United States in the fall of
1919, he was dismayed by what he perceived to be an inoculation
of the diseases of socialism, autocracy, and other forms of
collectivism, whose pernicious consequences he had observed
first-hand in Europe and in the peace conference after the end
of the conflict, into his own country. In 1920, he wrote,
“Every wind that blows carries to our shores an infection
of social disease from this great ferment; every convulsion
there has an economic reaction upon our own people.”
Hoover sensed that in the aftermath of war, which left some
collectivists nostalgic for the national mobilisation and
top-down direction of the economy by “war socialism”,
and growing domestic unrest: steel and police strikes, lynchings
and race riots, and
bombing
attacks by anarchists, that it was necessary to articulate
the principles upon which American society and its government
were founded, which he believed were distinct from those of
the Old World, and the deliberate creation of people who had come
to the new continent expressly to escape the ruinous doctrines of
the societies they left behind.
After assuming the post of Secretary of Commerce in the newly
inaugurated Harding administration in 1921, and faced with
massive coal and railroad strikes which threatened the
economy, Hoover felt a new urgency to reassert his vision of
American principles. In December 1922, American Individualism
was published. The short book (at 72 pages, more of a long
pamphlet), was based upon a magazine article he had published
the previous March in World's Work.
Hoover argues that five or six philosophies of social and
economic organisation are contending for dominance: among them
Autocracy, Socialism, Syndicalism, Communism, and Capitalism.
Against these he contrasts American Individualism, which he
believes developed among a population freed by emigration and
distance from shackles of the past such as divine right
monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, and static social classes.
These people became individuals, acting on their own initiative
and in concert with one another without top-down direction
because they had to: with a small and hands-off government, it
was the only way to get anything done. Hoover writes,
Forty years ago [in the 1880s] the contact of the individual
with the Government had its largest expression in the sheriff
or policeman, and in debates over political equality. In those
happy days the Government offered but small interference with
the economic life of the citizen.
But with the growth of cities, industrialisation, and large
enterprises such as railroads and steel manufacturing, a threat
to this frontier individualism emerged: the reduction of workers
to a proletariat or serfdom due to the imbalance between their
power as individuals and the huge companies that employed them.
It is there that government action was required to protect the
other component of American individualism: the belief in equality
of opportunity. Hoover believes, and supports, intervention
in the economy to prevent the concentration of economic power in
the hands of a few, and to guard, through taxation and other
means, against the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy of
wealth. Yet this poses its own risks,
But with the vast development of industry and the train of regulating
functions of the national and municipal government that followed from
it; with the recent vast increase in taxation due to the
war;—the Government has become through its relations to economic
life the most potent force for maintenance or destruction of our
American individualism.
One of the challenges American society must face as it adapts
is avoiding the risk of utopian ideologies imported from Europe
seizing this power to try to remake the country and its people
along other lines. Just ten years later, as Hoover's presidency
gave way to the New Deal, this fearful prospect would become a
reality.
Hoover examines the philosophical, spiritual, economic, and political
aspects of this unique system of individual initiative tempered by
constraints and regulation in the interest of protecting the equal
opportunity of all citizens to rise as high as their talent and effort
permit. Despite the problems cited by radicals bent on upending the
society, he contends things are working pretty well. He cites
“the one percent”: “Yet any analysis of the
105,000,000 of us would show that we harbor less than a million of
either rich or impecunious loafers.” Well, the percentage of
very rich seems about the same today, but after half a century of
welfare programs which couldn't have been more effective in destroying
the family and the initiative of those at the bottom of the economic
ladder had that been their intent, and an education system which, as
a federal commission was to
write in 1983,
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on
America …, we
might well have viewed it as an act of war”, a nation with
three times the population seems to have developed a much larger
unemployable and dependent underclass.
Hoover also judges the American system to have performed well in
achieving its goal of a classless society with upward mobility
through merit. He observes, speaking of the Harding administration
of which he is a member,
That our system has avoided the establishment and domination of class has
a significant proof in the present Administration in Washington, Of
the twelve men comprising the President, Vice-President, and
Cabinet, nine have earned their own way in life without economic
inheritance, and eight of them started with manual labor.
Let's see how that has held up, almost a century later. Taking the 17
people in equivalent positions at the end of the Obama administration
in 2016 (President, Vice President, and heads of the 15 executive
departments), we find that only 1 of the 17 inherited wealth (I'm
inferring from the description of parents in their biographies)
but that precisely zero had any experience with manual labour. If
attending an Ivy League university can be taken as a modern badge of
membership in a ruling class, 11 of the 17—65%, meet this test (if
you consider Stanford a member of an “extended Ivy League”,
the figure rises to 70%).
Although published in a different century in a very different America,
much of what Hoover wrote remains relevant today. Just as Hoover
warned of bad ideas from Europe crossing the Atlantic and taking
root in the United States, the
Frankfurt School
in Germany was laying the groundwork for the deconstruction of
Western civilisation and individualism, and in the 1930s, its leaders
would come to America to infect academia. As
Hoover warned, “There is never danger from the radical himself
until the structure and confidence of society has been undermined by
the enthronement of destructive criticism.” Destructive
criticism is precisely what these “critical theorists”
specialised in, and today in many parts of the humanities and social
sciences even in the most eminent institutions the rot is so
deep they are essentially a write-off.
Undoing a century of bad ideas is not the work of a few years, but
Hoover's optimistic and pragmatic view of the redeeming merit of
individualism unleashed is a bracing antidote to the gloom one may
feel when surveying the contemporary scene.
December 2016 