Liberalism and Morality

My daughter and I drove north to visit the lovely Victorian seaside town of Port Townsend last month, and while we were there we stopped into several antique shops, as we usually do. We’ve discovered delightful treasures this way, some bizarre vintage dreck, and a lot of frighteningly familiar crap from my childhood that I never thought I’d see sold in stores years later for premium prices. It’s hard to imagine how Dukes of Hazzard lunchboxes, poodle figurines, Barbie accessory kits and Hamburglar drinking glasses can pass for something of value, but then a lot of folks would wonder why I found the glass washboard, the nonworking typewriter from the 1920s or the clear plastic stiletto shoes with rhinestones embedded in the heels from 1955 necessary to my lifestyle. One man’s trash is another woman’s et cetera.

In Port Townsend Lily and I found a shop full of ephemera being sold at fire sale prices before the lease lapsed. Among the King Kong postcards from the 30s, the campaign buttons from the 50s and newspapers from the 60s was a Ladies’ Home Journal magazine from January 1938. I love vintage magazines; when I was a teenager waiting for rides home from school with my mom (who taught at the same high school that I attended) I would sit in the library leafing through early issues of Life, Time and Look. Bound in big volumes, these magazines were a treasure trove of detail about the daily lives of middle-class Americans from the twenties to the fifties. The ads, the photos, the news stories, the entertainment columns were fascinating, written as they were in a more formal, eloquent and verbose style that I found both charming and educational. It was surprising to see what U.S. journalists were writing about Hitler in the mid-30s, about the war in the early 40s, about health and communism and packaged foods in the 50s. When I found the Ladies’ Home Journal from January 1938, I wondered how the Great Depression and the increasingly disturbing rise of communism in Eastern Europe and fascism in Western Europe might influence the writing, the subject matter and the tone. I didn’t have to look far before I found something fascinating, impressive and as apt today as it was then.

Think about the context in which my Ladies’ Home Journal was written. In the 1930s, the United States was in the throes of a horrible depression; by 1940 the U.S. Census said the population was still 43.5% rural. Most adults felt lucky if they had better than an eighth-grade education. Most women didn’t work outside their homes, although millions who had never worked before had to try to earn the rent and feed their families when their husbands couldn’t find work or couldn’t earn enough to live on. The U.S. unemployment rate in 1938 was 19%.

I can’t help but consider my family’s connection to this time. Until she married my grandfather, her second husband, in 1934, my grandmother, with her eighth-grade education, had to support her mother, invalid sister, young son and herself on what she made doing assembly line work at a stove manufacturing plant. She did this mind-numbing job for years, and felt lucky to have the work. My grandfather’s work as a master tool and die welder at Ford Motor Company allowed my grandmother to quit and start her second family with him. They were luckier than most, and they knew it.

My grandmother’s first husband had been a copper miner like her own father, a man she never knew who abandoned my great-grandmother when she was pregnant with my grandmother in 1900. My own grandmother’s first husband also abandoned her when she was six weeks pregnant and just 19 years old. She spent the next 15 years as the breadwinner for her four-member household. Working long days and then cooking and cleaning at night, she still managed to read novels and poetry, go to the cinema and occasionally to the theater in Detroit, and to catch up on women’s magazines when she had an extra dime. I knew her as a very shy soul who refused to leave the house without a family member with her; to know that she ran a household of four on her own in a time of economic hardship and rampant sexism when women made a fraction of what men made and divorcées were considered scandalous is almost beyond imagining. She was the gentlest soul I ever met, but she could be a tiger when it came to caring for her family.

With the low education rate, the large rural make-up of the country, the scarcity of jobs and money, and the need to work keeping many people from seeking higher education in the 1930s, one might expect that magazine writers would have dumbed down their writing, or tried to lighten it up to distract women at home. One would be wrong. These magazines took their opportunity to educate and elevate very seriously, and they knew that women like my grandmother, with their eighth-grade educations and blue-collar jobs, were no fools. They deserved thought-provoking essays written by some of the greatest minds of the era. On page 4 of my Ladies’ Home Journal, right across from the ad for Baked Armour’s Star Ham Glorified with Cherries, was an article by the great American journalist Dorothy Thompson, who was described by Time magazine in 1939 as one of the two most influential women in America, the other being Eleanor Roosevelt. Thompson was expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934, the first American journalist to be so honored and vilified, and she inspired Katharine Hepburn's character Tess Harding in the 1942 film Woman of the Year. Her work was not only important, it was timeless. Here are some highlights from her article, titled “Liberalism and Morality.”

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All the political tendencies momentarily raging in our times are antiliberal. That is the outstanding fact about the era in which we live. The movement of the world is away from individualism, toward collectivism; away from freedom, toward order and organization; away from personal responsibility, toward discipline, obedience and acceptance.

This antiliberalism goes deeper than a mere desire to change a competitive economic order for a more co-operative one. In that desire there is nothing antiliberal. Antiliberalism seeks to subject the personality, with everything that the word means—conscience, responsibility, free will, the moral sense—to a pattern of work, conduct, behavior and belief imposed upon every member of society. The result of this tendency, carried to its logical conclusion, is the emergence of nations of slaves.

And, so insensitive has the liberal spirit become, that even people who call themselves liberals confine their main interest and argument to the question of whether or not the slaves are well kept!

And this happens after a liberal century—a century to be sure, in which the ideals of liberalism have never been approximated, but in which the mere aura of them has added more to the wealth, knowledge and possibilities of human beings than has been achieved in any previous century in history. Why, then, is mankind revolting against liberalism, after so brief and incomplete an experience of it? . . .

Above all, we have lost sight of the original purpose and philosophy of liberal democracy. We have come to associate liberalism with a certain kind of economics, and even with a certain stage of capitalistic development. To recapture and revitalize its original spirit woud be, at once, revolutionary and conservative: revolutionary, because such revitalization would radically modify our present society; conservative, because it would link us again to our greatest traditions.

As I conceive it, liberalism is pre-eminently a type of mind, a kind of spirit and a sort of behavior, the basis of which is an enormous respect for personality. It is, therefore, above everything else human and humane. Its premise is that there is good in every nature; that a good society is the one in which that goodness can be given the greatest possibility to expand and develop; that this is the quality in man which sets him apart from other animals and therefore makes him human, and is the source of all social power, a constantly replenished spring of good will.

If one goes back to the eighteenth-century philosophers, who were the intellectual and spiritual source of the American revolution, one realizes that they are permeated through and through with the conception of man as an ethical animal. His business on earth is self-perfection. For self-perfection he needs freedom, because freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. . . .

In any civilization, and under any political system, the simplest mind recognizes a good person when he meets one. Courage, kindness, generosity and the sense of justice are his attributes. They are the perennial adornments of the human race. The very essence of liberalism is the realization that none of these qualities can develop to their fullest except in a fully responsible individual, who is free to act and to choose. A slave has no morality, because he cannot choose between good and evil. He has only a derivative morality—that of his masters. . . .

[T]he universal accusation against liberal democracy is that it has resulted in a society without standards. And yet no political philosophy ever started with so high a conception of the nature of man as liberal democracy. . . .

Liberalism . . . places so high a value on mankind, and, by placing the value, demands its justification. Everybody who has ever brought up a child knows how powerful a force in his development can be appeals to his pride, his trustworthiness, his desire to be thought well of, according to a high standard. The spoiled child is one who enjoys indulgences without reciprocal obligations. It seems to me that in a liberal democracy the overwhelming emphasis in all education should be upon encouraging the ideal of self-perfection and the most exquisite sense of obligation. Freedom, as surely as noblesse, obliges. But actually, the critics of liberalism accuse it of creating whole societies of spoiled children, societies clamorous with demands—demands from laborers, from farmers, and now from youth, who even go so far as to “demand” a creative life! The criticism has influence because it has truth! . . .

But by and large, in every day life, liberalism has never even begun to draw upon the reserves of idealism and good will that are present in mankind. That has been its greatest failure. It moved away, almost immediately, from the original premise that man is a reasonable and moral animal, and that the object of society is to increase his reasonableness and his morality. Another conception perverted that idea, dominated most of the nineteenth century, and has gradually plunged the whole western world into moral chaos.

The idea of self-realization, of self-development . . . became perverted into the idea of self-interest. And for nearly three generations that perversion has dominated America. It is a mechanical conception that the unbridled competition of egoistic self-interests will work out automatically, in the long run, in the greatest good for the greatest number. A profoundly ethical conception gave way to a totally amoral one. The ideal of a society of individuals trying to be something, degenerated into the ideal of all individuals trying to get something. The love of fame—the ambition to be of good repute—degenerated into the love of money, of “success.” . . .

[S]elf-interest has raged through society, and bit by bit has disintegrated it, and the dictatorships are rising in the western world on the corpse of this idea of self-interest. . . . Whole civilizations have fled into the arms of dictators, not only because the world has become technically complicated and difficult to run, but because human beings are lonely, fearful, without confidence in themselves or in one another, uncertain of why they were born and dissatisfied with their own behavior. People are actually welcoming enslavement, in order that, without liberty, they may at least have rest and the sense of being caught up into some purpose, however fantastic, however unrealistic, unhuman and grotesque.

It is my belief that this tendency will be arrested by a new revolt in favor of liberalism. . . . But the new liberalism must rise this time on the firm basis of its original humanism, as a form and mind becoming to man.