Mavericks and Misfits

Non-Conformists Who Changed the World for Better or Worse

Lawrence W. Reed

FEE’s mission is to inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society.

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Foundation for Economic Education

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2021
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Table of Contents

Introduction

Caligula: Plumbing the Depths of Ancient Tyranny

How a Lowly Monk Ended Rome’s Bloody Gladiator Duels

Pelatiah Webster: America’s Adam Smith and a Forgotten Founder

Arthur Guinness: The Man Behind the World-Famous Beer

The Heroines of British Abolition

Edmund Burke’s Little-Known Speech That Eroded the British Monarchy’s Command of Money and Power

Francois-Noel Babeuf: The Marxist Before Marx

Olympe de Gouges, Heroine of the French Revolution

Sir Robert Peel: A Man Who Deserves His Statues

Hats Off to John B. Stetson

Jenny Lind: The Swedish Nightingale Who Sang Her Way to Fame and Fortune in America

The First Female Presidential Nominee

The Man Who Bankrupted a Legislature

The Spirit of Nellie Bly

Diamond Jim: Gilded-Age Greed or Heart of Gold?

The Courage of a Nurse: The Story of Edith Cavell

Cal and the Big Cal-Amity

Milton Hershey Showed that Persistence Is Key to Success

How a German Housewife Fed Up With Grounds in Her Coffee Revolutionized the Famous Drink

Rube Foster: “The Father of Black Baseball”

The Uncommon Life of Bessie Coleman

Ralph Lazo, the Man Who Voluntarily Lived in an Internment Camp

Still Crying for Argentina

The Man Who Can Still Liberate Mexico

C.S. Lewis Saw Government as a Poor Substitute for God

Remembering Solzhenitsyn: Observations on the Gospel, Socialism, and Power

About That Che T-Shirt

Nat King Cole: Remembering a Christmas and Musical Icon

Of Marxism and Murder: The Professor in the Peruvian Prison

Leonard Read, the Man

Louis Armstrong Broke Barriers With Music, Optimism, and the Sheer Force of His Personality

Jan Ernst Matzeliger: The Henry Ford of Shoes

How a Polish Entrepreneur Went from Death Row in a Nazi Concentration Camp to ‘the Sam Walton of Brazil’

Introduction

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

In a profoundly important sense, no two human beings ever step to the music of life in identical ways. That’s because each one of us is his or her own uniquely singular amalgam of ideas, thoughts, traits, responses, and endless other elements that comprise our personalities. No evidence in history exists to suggest that the same person lived twice, a further testimony to the differences that make each one of us incomparable and unequaled.

When I study history, I focus on biography. I want to know who the notable people were who inspired movements, left remarkable impacts, even changed history itself. Not all those movements and impacts were positive, so I study bad people as well as good ones. In this anthology, the good outnumber the bad but we can learn from them all.

From Roman history, you will read here about the evil of Caligula and the good of Telemachus. From the British experience, you will be entertained by the beer maker Arthur Guinness, uplifted by female abolitionists and nurses like Edith Cavell, educated by theologian C.S. Lewis, and inspired by liberty-loving statesmen such as Edmund Burke and Robert Peel. From the French Revolution, you will be heartened by the courage of Olympe de Gouges and appalled by the lunacy of Francois-Noel Babeuf. You will find Russia’s Solzhenitsyn to be as exhilarating as the Peróns of Argentina and Abimael Guzman of Peru and Che Guevara of Cuba are depressing.

More than half of the 33 people I write about in this anthology were Americans—from the days of the nation’s founding to the 20th century. Some are genuine heroes, like aviator Bessie Coleman, musician Nat King Cole, entrepreneur Milton Hershey, economist Pelatiah Webster, and FEE’s founder, Leonard Read. I managed to work in Ralph Lazo, Rube Foster, Diamond Jim Brady, John Stetson and Calvin Coolidge too.

Fascinating people from other countries are to be found herein as well—notably, Jenny Lind from Sweden and Melitta Bentz from Germany.

In every case, the good and bad people in this book made a mark. Their lives teach lessons. We can learn from them even though separated by time, miles and culture. Ultimately, this is what history should be: People today being informed by people who came before.

Caligula: Plumbing the Depths of Ancient Tyranny

During the question-and-answer period after a lecture on ancient Rome, an audience member asked me, “Who would you rank as the Empire’s worst Emperor?”

That was a tough one. I deplore concentrated power so I really don’t like any of them. Of the grand total of 178 emperors—81 in the Western Empire and 97 in the Eastern—dozens of them were loathsome tyrants with little redeeming value. The worst, as Hayek told us, really do find their way to the top.[1]

Power does so much more than corrupt. It attracts the already-corrupted and gives them the wherewithal to administer their corruption. It feeds on arrogance, narcissism, and self-deception. It dements the mind until it embraces schemes that ruin the lives of others. It rots the soul. I can think of no more destructive motivation than the lust for it. Rare is the individual who emerges a better person for having possessed it. Roman history demonstrates these truths vividly.

An Embarrassment of Riches Despots

Could the most reprehensible of the emperors be Nero, who burned Christians as human torches, commenced the process of diluting the precious metal content of Roman money, and murdered his own mother? One Roman historian claims that Nero once rubbed his hands together as he proclaimed, “Let us tax and tax again. Let us tax until no one owns anything.”

For sure, put Nero on the short list.

How about Commodus, a megalomaniac if there ever was one? He ordered the months of the year renamed in his honor because he thought he was a god. He maintained a harem of 300 female concubines and 300 young boys—many of them kidnapped and all of them, effectively, enslaved. He allowed corruption in the government to reign supreme while he indulged his depravities.

Don’t forget Diocletian, who tried in vain to stem the effects of his predecessors’ currency debasement by imposing draconian price controls. Death was the penalty for charging more than the Emperor deemed appropriate. It was not history’s only successful experiment with price controls because there just isn’t one. It failed.

Then there’s the absolute nutcase whose name, Elagabalus, sounds like the sound you’d make if you tried to say “elderberries” with a mouthful of marbles. British historian Edward Gibbon wrote that Elagabalus “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures and ungoverned fury.” The German historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr asserted that “The name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others” on account of his “unspeakably disgusting life.”

This being a family-friendly website, I won’t even begin to describe what he did but I can tell you this much: He did it all in the space of four years as emperor before his unlamented assassination at the tender age of 18.

Picking a really bad despot out of 178 despots is like shooting fish in a barrel. You’ll get one no matter where you aim.

And the “Winner” Is. . .

So, it’s with a healthy dose of caprice that I commend to you the name of Caligula as my personal choice for Worst Roman Emperor Ever. His story was even made into a bad movie in 1979. It remains a cult classic among sadists and those with poor taste in film.

He was only the third of the 178 emperors, ruling for three years and ten months, from March of 37 A.D. to January of 41 A.D. He was 28 when his rule came to an end by assassination. Some might say that because he held high office, Caligula was a “public servant.” Though contemporary sources are sparse, I believe large swaths of the Roman public might have had good reasons to differ in their opinion of him.

It wasn’t always so. Very early in his reign, Caligula was apparently a decent chap. But whether it was epilepsy as some allege or some other ailment, or simply the unwholesome effects of his power-lust, it didn’t take long for him to evolve into a beastly monster of epic proportions. He reminds me of another political figure of nearly 18 centuries later—Maximilien Robespierre, the architect of “The Terror” of the French Revolution, who only a few years before had opposed the death penalty. I think power went to his head, as it likely did with Caligula, too.

He butchered people mercilessly, often for trivial offenses. When there was a shortage of cattle to feed the beasts in public arenas, he ordered humans to be fed to them. Of his own citizens, he famously declared, “I wish the Roman people had but a single neck” so he could hang them all at once.

He couldn’t get along with the Senate and made sure senators were killed because of it. In fact, he apparently couldn’t get along with anybody, not even with his many wives, relatives, and lovers of both sexes.

His economic policies weren’t much better. When a financial crisis gripped the Empire in 38, his administration responded with a massive issuance of zero-interest credit. That introduced distortions from which the economy never fully recovered. He spent lavishly on “public works” including many intended to simply glorify himself, all of which added to a growing burden of taxation and debt. Ancient historians such as Suetonius and Cassius Dio report that when his taxes were insufficient to cover his spending, “he began falsely accusing, fining and even killing individuals for the purpose of seizing their estates.” This was 1,800 years before Karl Marx turned that into a philosophy.

As if there weren’t enough problems at home, Caligula expanded the empire by annexing the kingdom of Mauretania (in Africa) after inviting its ruler to Rome, only to have him executed for accepting the invitation.

Late in his tenure, Caligula convinced himself (but likely few others) that he was divine. Historian Chris Scarre reports that he “built a temple to himself on the Palatine, and forced leading citizens to pay enormous sums for the honour of becoming his priests.”

Caligula attracted many would-be-but-unsuccessful assassins before three of them finally got the job done. They stabbed him 30 times in January of 41.

The Intoxicant Known as Power

The Senate briefly debated the idea of restoring the old Republic, then folded under pressure from the military and the mob of citizens who preferred handouts from the Emperor over responsibility and freedom for themselves. It was the last time that debate ever happened. Rome would suffer 78 more emperors before succumbing to the crushing burdens of a welfare/warfare tyranny and foreign invasion in 476.[2]

The intoxicant known as power knows no equal. It is malevolent by its very nature. It has enslaved, tortured, and murdered more people than any other poisonous impulse in history. Perhaps the philosopher Eric Hoffer put it best when he wrote,

The corruption inherent in absolute power derives from the fact that such power is never free from the tendency to turn man into a thing, and press him back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen. For the impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

Originally published at FEE.org on August 7, 2018.

[1] See my article “Hayek Was Right: The Worst Do Get to the Top”: https://fee.org/articles/hayek-was-right-the-worst-do-get-to-the-top/

[2] For more on Roman history and its lessons, see https://www.fee.org/rome.

How a Lowly Monk Ended Rome’s Bloody Gladiator Duels

Fought in stadiums before tens of thousands of boisterous onlookers, ancient Roman gladiator duels are well known today—more than 1,600 years since the last one was fought. Too few people, however, know of the one man who deserves the most credit for bringing those bloody spectacles to an end. A lowly monk from either Turkey or Egypt, his name was Telemachus.

By the old Julian calendar of Telemachus’s day, he performed his famous duel-ending deed on January 1, 404 A.D. You can wait a couple of weeks and celebrate it on January 14 if you choose, because that’s the corresponding date in the Gregorian calendar the world uses today. Before I tell you what this humble humanitarian did, allow me to provide some historical background.

The History of Gladiators

The Latin root of “gladiator” is “gladius,” meaning “sword.” Gladiators (swordsmen) were combatants armed with swords but also with spears, daggers, and nets. They sparred in the arenas throughout the welfare/warfare state of the late Roman Republic and for the great majority of the period of the Roman Empire.

The most famous of all Roman gladiators was Spartacus (not to be confused with New Jersey Senator and presidential flame-out Cory Booker). He fought fiercely in the arenas, escaped, and led a failed slave revolt in 73–71 B.C.

Gladiators entertained the increasingly morbid sentiments of a public thirsty for blood. Most were free men. A small number were women. Professional gladiators were a privileged class in ancient Rome, even endorsing products as idolized athletes. An especially illuminating article about them is “Misconceptions About Roman Gladiators” by Indiana University historian Spencer Alexander McDaniel.

Emperor Commodus, who joined in the killing as a gladiator himself on numerous occasions, once decapitated an ostrich in an amphitheater. Then, holding the head aloft, he signaled to the senators present that they might be next. Power corrupts, just as Lord Acton told us.

The bloodiest shows in Roman arenas, the still-surviving Coliseum being the best-known, did not involve the professional gladiators. The combatants in those instances were prisoners of war or criminals condemned to death. Others were slaves and were forced to fight to their last breath. They not only fought each other but frequently even wild animals—including lions, tigers, and bears (oh, my!).

A Simple Monk and a Declining Rome

By January 404, the remaining days of the western Roman Empire were numbered. Its decadence moderated slightly by the legalization of Christianity in the previous century, it would nonetheless fall like ripe fruit to barbarian invaders in 476. In 410, Rome itself was briefly occupied and sacked by the Visigoths. The place had largely become a moral cesspool run by brutal and often megalomaniacal tyrants—men who controlled whatever aspects of other people’s lives their whims fancied.

In this environment, Telemachus made his appearance. Rome was his destination after a long sojourn from Asia Minor. A stadium packed with raucous, sadistic pagans may not sound like a place that would attract a pious pilgrim, but Telemachus was on a mission. What happened on that fateful January day in 404 was recorded as follows by Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus in Book V of his Ecclesiastical History:

There, when the abominable spectacle was being exhibited, he went himself into the stadium, and stepping down into the arena, endeavored to stop the men who were wielding their weapons against one another. The spectators of the slaughter were indignant and inspired by the fury of the demon who delights in those bloody deeds, stoned the peacemaker to death.

When the admirable Emperor (Honorius) was informed of this he numbered Telemachus among the victorious martyrs and put an end to that impious spectacle.

Another account claims that as he raised his arms between dueling gladiators, Telemachus repeatedly cried out, “In the name of Christ, stop!” Yet another, though likely spurious one, reports that the spectators fell silent at the monk’s murder and then, one by one, quietly filed out of the stadium. There’s no real dispute over this central fact, however: Moved by those last, courageous moments of Telemachus’s life, Emperor Honorius immediately stopped the killing games of ancient Rome—forever.

One Person Can Make a Difference

One man made a difference. He was a man of little note before January 1, 404. We know almost nothing else about him but what I’ve told you here. It’s likely that few, if any, in the stadium that day noticed him when he entered, but they all knew afterward what he came for and what he did.

Without knowing the outcome, Telemachus gave his life for something in which he strongly believed. He surely realized that the odds he could succeed were long at best. It’s doubtful he put himself in danger because he thought that doing so would result in earthly fame, fortune or power for himself. While it might be tempting to dismiss him as nuts or stupid or naively altruistic, I suspect his motivation was quite noble: He loved and valued life—the lives of others at least as much as he cherished his own.[1]

Some people write or speak about their principles, and that’s perfectly fine. I do that a lot myself. But one graduates to a higher level of conviction and commitment when he (or she) assumes the ultimate risk and pays the ultimate price on behalf of those principles. Though they are a small minority, such heroes appear again and again in human history.

I’m grateful for that fact, and I am inspired by it. I hope you are too.

Happy New Year!

Originally published at FEE.org on January 1, 2020.

[1] For more related information, see www.fee.org/rome.

Pelatiah Webster: America’s Adam Smith and a Forgotten Founder

Everybody knows who America’s first president was, but can you identify the country’s first economist?

If any man or woman deserves that description, it is surely the one who wrote this and so much more:

I propose. . . to take off every restraint and limitation from our commerce. Let trade be as free as air. Let every man make the most of his goods in his own way and then he will be satisfied.

The “American Adam Smith”

His name was Pelatiah Webster. Largely forgotten today, he was regarded as “the American Adam Smith” after his death in 1795 at the age of 68. His wisdom, especially on trade and money matters, deserves a renewed appreciation today.

Webster was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1726. Twenty years later, he graduated from Yale and became a minister in Massachusetts. By 1755, however, the lure of entrepreneurial opportunities took him to the business world of Pennsylvania. He was an almost instant success as a merchant, amassing a small fortune in the process. His reputation as an authority on matters of trade, finance, and currency was unmatched by anyone in the 13 colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. The Second Continental Congress regularly sought his advice.

In 1776, the same year the Declaration of Independence appeared in America and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations debuted in Scotland, Webster started publishing a series of essays on economic matters. In 1777, he authored a famous letter to George Washington in which he reported on the awful conditions suffered by Americans imprisoned by the British. The revelations in that letter and in other writings landed him behind British bars himself for four months in 1778. The Brits ripped off a sizable chunk of his personal wealth, as well.

In 1783, Webster published his Dissertation on the Political Union and Constitution of the United States of North America. It proved to be enormously influential in the run-up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the ratification of the Constitution itself. In 1791, he published a compilation of his pamphlets and articles under the title Political Essays on the Nature and Operation of Money, Public Finances, and other Subjects during the American War.[1] It remains accessible, insightful, and fascinating to this day.

A 1907 article in the Yale Law Journal by Hannis Taylor titled “Pelatiah Webster: The Architect of our Federal Constitution” praises Webster profusely, claiming that “among our nation-builders, Pelatiah Webster stands second to Washington alone.” Taylor argued that Webster was sadly neglected by historians “not through any conscious omission, but because of a careless historical scholarship which has failed to present his great achievement in its true light.”

Price Controls in Early American History

Indisputably, Webster’s behind-the-scenes contributions to the Constitution were immensely significant, though he was squarely in the camp of the Federalists of his day. Personally, I would have planted myself in the opposing camp of the Anti-Federalists,[2] so I would have differed from him on important issues of governance.

On economics, however, Webster penned many excellent insights that make him worthy of the moniker “America’s First Economist.” Here are just a few:

In my 2008 essay, “The Times That Tried Men’s Economic Souls,” I recounted the Continental Congress’s mistake in resorting to paper money inflation. Webster opposed the practice from the start and later noted its disastrous consequences:

The people of the states had been. . . put out of humor by so many tender acts, limitations of prices, and other compulsory methods to force value into paper money. . . and by so many vain funding schemes, declarations and promises, all of which issued from Congress but died under the most zealous efforts to put them into operation and effect.

Within a year of cranking up the printing presses, Congress decreed that the army could requisition supplies at fixed prices. It was a ruinous experiment in price controls that ensured not ample provision but outright destitution. If Congress hadn’t heeded the warnings of men like Webster and abolished them quickly, America might well have lost the war. As our first economist observed:

We have suffered more from this cause than from any other cause or calamity. It has killed more men, pervaded and corrupted the choicest interests of our country more, done more injustice even than the enemies.

Webster’s experience as a successful businessman undoubtedly influenced his thinking on the virtue of free trade. His pamphlets are laced with eloquent defenses of commercial liberty. “Trade, if left alone,” he declared, “will ever make its own way best, and like an irresistible river, will ever run safest, do least mischief and most good, if suffered to run without obstruction in its own natural channel.” Furthermore, he wrote:

Freedom of trade, or unrestrained liberty of the subject to hold or dispose of his property as he pleases, is absolutely necessary to the prosperity of every community, and to the happiness of all individuals who compose it. . . . All experience shows that the most effective way to turn a scarcity into a plenty, is to raise the price of the articles wanted. . . In times of danger, distress, and difficulty every man will use strong endeavors to get his goods to market, in proportion to the necessity and great demand for them; because they will then bring the best price, and every man is fond of embracing golden opportunities and favorable chances. . . .

In times of scarcity, every man will have strong inducements to bring all he can spare to market, because it will then bring the highest price he can ever expect, and consequently the community will have the benefit of all that exists among them, in a much surer manner than any degree of force could extort it, and all to the entire satisfaction of buyer and seller.

My favorite Webster quote on free trade comes from an essay he penned in 1780. This was a guy who knew his economics and didn’t hold back when stupid interventions predictably backfired.

Let every man be at liberty to get money as fast as he can; and let the public call for it as fast as public exigence requires. Limitations of our trade have been so often tried, so strongly enforced, and have so constantly failed of the intended effect, and have, in every instance, produced so much injustice and oppression in our dealings, and excited so many quarrels, so much ill-will and chagrin among our people, that they have, in every instance, after some time of most pernicious continuance, been laid aside by a kind of general consent, and even most of their advocates have been convinced of their hurtful tendency, as well as utter impracticability.

When a government goes to war, the pressure to print money proves irresistible. Some people actually think the printing press allows the government to secure labor and material more cheaply than if it raised taxes to pay for them.

But Webster knew that there was nothing magical about a printing press. Everything must be paid for, if not by higher taxes now, then by higher taxes later—in the form of higher prices, as well as higher taxes. His advice to the Congress was to refrain from debauching the currency and pay for what it needed as much as possible by raising taxes. The rest, he argued, could be financed by issuing minimal debt backed by a promise to redeem in precious metal.

Webster wasn’t a fan of government debt. When emergencies are over or coffers swell, he urged debt retirement. I wish his advice would be taken in Congress today, where deficit spending is soaring in spite of a booming economy.

. . . [I]t is a plain maxim that people should always pay their debts when they have a good run of business and have money aplenty; many a man has been distressed for a debt when business and money were scarce, which he had neglected to pay when he could have done it with great ease to himself, had he attended to it in its proper season; this applies to a community or state as well as to a private person.

So much of sound economics reduces to what Pelatiah Webster would likely regard as common sense: Don’t spend what you haven’t got. Don’t mortgage your children’s future. Leave free people alone to produce and create. Refrain from cheating your creditors or your customers. Be honest with money. Let trade be unfettered by superstition, fallacy, or the arrogance of officialdom. Honor your contracts. Establish a stable framework under the rule of law so people can go about their business. Keep the peace.

And that’s why America’s first economist is worth listening to more than two centuries after he lived.

Originally published at FEE.org on July 21, 2019.

[1] You can read it at Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/webster-political-essays-on-the-nature-and-operation-of-money.

[2] See “Constitutional Intentions” by Wendy McElroy: https://fee.org/articles/constitutional-intentions/.

Arthur Guinness: The Man Behind the World-Famous Beer

With what liquid refreshment will you toast the New Year at midnight tonight? A bubbly champagne? A festive cocktail? Or perhaps a fine wine, a funky ale, or a guiltless soft drink?

How about a Guinness? Maybe the real dark one, the Guinness Black Lager?

With that, you could kill two birds with one stone: You could welcome 2020 and pay tribute to a great entrepreneur at the same time. That would be one Arthur Guinness, revered as a hero in Ireland and one of the few Irishmen to appear on two different issues of Irish postage stamps. His booze has been called “Ireland’s unofficial national intoxicant.”

Guinness was so confident his beer would be a hit that on this date in 1759—December 31—he famously signed a 9,000-year lease for a brewery on four acres of land near Dublin. The annual rent was fixed at 45 British pounds, or about 60 US dollars in today’s money.

I lost my taste for beer 40 years ago when, as a young university professor, I served as a fraternity advisor (enough said). I’ve never once even sipped a Guinness of any kind. So it’s not for taste or alcoholic content that I make this recommendation. It’s purely out of boundless respect for Arthur.

Incidentally, I knew an illustrious gentleman who loved the stuff. His name was Nicholas (“Nicky”) Winton. He was responsible for saving the lives of 669 children in 1939. I’ve written about him in “Nicholas Winton: The Humblest Hero.” Every time I took him to lunch at a pub near his home in Maidenhead, England, he ordered a tall glass of very dark Guinness. He died in 2015 at the age of 106. When I once asked him, “To what do you attribute your long life and good health?” he hoisted his lager and replied, “Drink a little poison every day.”

Arthur Guinness and the Archbishop

Arthur Guinness, born to a family of very modest means, lucked out when at the age of 27, he inherited the equivalent of four years’ wages from an Archbishop of the Church of Ireland. Young Arthur put the deceased minister’s money to good use by opening his first brewery.

The Archbishop himself was a brewer, so he may not have objected to Arthur’s investment. Both men undoubtedly knew, as every good Irishman will tell you, that drunkenness is the sin, not drinking per se. Proverbs 20:31 tells us that “Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler; whoever is led astray by them is not wise.” The key word there is “astray.”

In any event, Arthur sure knew how to brew a dark, creamy stout. Long before he died in 1803, his beer enjoyed top notoriety. It’s been one of the world’s most successful beer brands for generations now, as well as Ireland’s most popular alcoholic drink. The Guinness Storehouse on the site of Arthur’s original operation is Dublin’s most-frequented tourist attraction to this day. Every happy visitor gets a free, generous sample—which may explain why visitors keep coming back.

The founder’s personal popularity—in his day and still now, more than two centuries since he died—is a testimony to the power of product over politics. Arthur was a Protestant in Roman Catholic Ireland. He was a Unionist, meaning he supported Ireland remaining a part of the United Kingdom. But because his company has always produced a product gulped with gusto by the Irish, those very same Irish are pleased to put politics aside when it comes to Arthur Guinness.

Fun with Guinness

Other interesting bits of information about Guinness are these:

- Arthur and his wife had 21 children, though just 10 survived to adulthood, a sad but not uncommon fact in those days before capitalism improved the lot of both rich and poor.

- He was a prominent supporter of the Irish House of Commons leader Henry Grattan, perhaps because Grattan was a big supporter of cutting the beer tax. That may sound self-serving but lower beer taxes made for many a happy Irishman too.

- Arthur’s magniloquent signature still adorns every bottle of Guinness.

- The famed Guinness Book of World Records, first published in 1954, was conceived by a managing director of the company, Sir Hugh Beaver.

- Arthur was a huge supporter of the arts and numerous charitable causes. He could afford that generous philanthropy because he knew how to create wealth in the first place.

Of Irish descent himself, President Ronald Reagan was fond of telling a joke in which Guinness figured prominently. It went like this:

Two men were sitting in a pub in Wexford County, drinking some Guinness lager, when one of them turns to the other and says, “You see that man over there? He looks just like me. I’m goin’ over there and talk to him.”

So he goes over to the man, taps him on the shoulder and says, “Excuse me, sir, but I noticed that you look just like me!”

The second man turns around and says, “Yeah, I noticed the same thing. Where you from?”

“I’m from Dublin,” says the first. Stunned, the second says, “Me too! What street do you live on?”

The first one replies, “McCarthy Street,” to which the second one responds, “Me too! What number is it?”

“162” announces the first man. Shocked, the second one declares, “Me too! What are your parents’ names?”

The first man answers, “Connor and Shannon,” to which the awestruck second man says, “Mine too! This is unbelievable!”

Delighted to make each other’s acquaintance and amazed at these various coincidences, both men order some more Guinness. They’re marveling at their astonishingly similar backgrounds when the bartenders change shifts.

The new bartender says to the departing one, “What’s new today?”

“Not much” is the reply. “The Murphy twins are drunk again.”

No matter how or where you ring in the New Year tonight: Be safe, sober (or reasonably so), and tip your hat to the world’s wealth creators like Arthur Guinness.

Originally published at FEE.org on December 31, 2019.

The Heroines of British Abolition

When Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act took effect in August 1834, a full year after Parliament passed it, one of the largest peaceful emancipations in world history was set into motion.[1] At least 800,000 slaves in the British possessions of the Caribbean, South America, and Canada were freed. In a world that has known mostly authoritarianism in one form or another, it surely ranks as one of the major landmarks in the never-ending struggle for individual liberty.

Activism and Abolitionism

The abolitionist movement in Great Britain began in the 1780s, secured the cessation of the slave trade in 1807, and ultimately won liberation for the enslaved with that famous Act in the 1830s. It was a triumph of the power of ideas. Crusading campaigners awakened and transformed the conscience of a nation on a matter as important as life or death. Notably, enlightened business people, Quaker activists, and Anglican evangelicals supplied the lion’s share of the funding and leadership of this remarkable effort.

The male figures in the movement are names still familiar to lovers of liberty today—names like William Wilberforce,[2] the Parliamentarian who doggedly waged an annual battle in the House of Commons until his colleagues saw the light; Thomas Clarkson,[3] who devoted 61 years of his life to the cause and provided Wilberforce with much of the evidence that eventually convinced Parliament; Olaudah Equiano, the former slave whose bestselling autobiography made the evils of slavery vivid and unforgettable; and John Newton,[4] an ex-slave trader who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace” and inspired millions to join the abolitionist campaign on both sides of the Atlantic.

Women played a critical role, too, a fact often overlooked. Everywhere in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, legal rules and social customs dictated that females meet quietly by themselves, minimize their political involvement, and otherwise leave society for the men to shape. But the British abolitionist movement marked the first sustained endeavor for political change in which women in large, effective numbers made their voices heard.

As mothers, female abolitionists often invoked heartbreaking stories of the mistreatment of slave women and the separation of slave children from their families. On those matters, they spoke with a moral authority that even men couldn’t quite muster. The most prominent of these heroines deserve to be remembered for their work and their boldness.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

Recognized as the first libertarian feminist, the London-born Mary Wollstonecraft is appreciated for her persuasive advocacy of equal rights for women in the 1780s and ’90s before her untimely death at age 38 in 1797.[5] Less known but just as eloquent are her anti-slavery appeals. Referring to the slave trade as “this abominable traffic,” she argued for the “natural rights” of all men and women, of whatever color, to “be allowed to enjoy their birthright—liberty.”

In a reply to Edmund Burke’s observations of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft raised the issue of slavery in no uncertain terms.[6] She stated that previous, unenlightened generations lacked an understanding of “the native dignity of man” and that they had “sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion.” She spurred women to break out of their shells and take on the injustices of the world. A good example would be one of her many friends, Helen Maria Williams, who became an outspoken abolitionist and rabble-rouser in both Britain and revolutionary France.

Writing for the BBC, Elizabeth Crawford notes that Wollstonecraft “repeatedly likened men’s domination of women to the planters’ domination of slaves.” In her 1792 essay, “Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” she was referring to slave-produced sugar when she asked indignantly,

Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them. . . only to sweeten the cup of men?

Hannah More (1745–1833)

In the wake of Britain’s loss of the American colonies, the 1780s birthed many formal and informal groups intent on social and political reform. A particularly influential one was the Clapham Sect, composed of wealthy Anglicans who lived in a part of what is now southwest London. Wilberforce became their best-known figure, but among their number was a very well-educated intellectual, Hannah More. She first made a name for herself as a playwright and poet before joining the abolition movement.

More put her pen to good use with a famous poem, “Slavery,” which she intended for Wilberforce to use in opening the anti-slavery campaign in Parliament in 1788. He invoked her work then and on numerous occasions thereafter. Here’s a portion of that poem, the first of many she wrote for the abolitionist cause:

Perish the illiberal thought which would debase

The native genius of the sable race!

Perish the proud philosophy which sought

To rob them of the powers of equal thought!

What? Does the immortal principle within

Change with the casual color of a skin?

Does matter govern spirit? Or is mind

Degraded by the form to which it’s joined?

No. They have heads to think, and hearts to feel,

And souls to act, with firm, though erring zeal;

For they have keen affections, soft desires,

Love strong as death, and active patriot fires.

As a philanthropist, More gave generously to the emancipation effort, helping it to produce the paraphernalia—from pamphlets to posters—that made it a genuine and visible grassroots movement. Elizabeth Crawford notes that a friend of More’s, Lady Margaret Middleton, may have been instrumental in convincing young Wilberforce and Clarkson to take up the cause.

Mary Morris Knowles (1733–1807)

Mary and her husband Thomas were Quakers whose moral consciences never countenanced slavery. Thomas died in 1785, leaving Mary a wealthy widow. She became an active supporter of the nascent abolition movement. When a friend requested she provide an inscription for the box of a popular brand of tobacco, she chose slavery as her topic and wrote these lines:

Tho various tints the human face adorn

To glorious Liberty Mankind are born;

O, May the hands which rais’d this fav’rite weed

Be loos’d in mercy and the slave be freed!

In the 1790s, boycotting slavery’s products became an important tool in the abolitionist tool kit. By encouraging people to abstain from the consumption of things like tobacco, rum, and sugar, the movement sought to hit the slave traders in their bottom lines. Mary Knowles was one of the earliest to stoke those passions, her tobacco box couplet being the best example.

In film director Michael Apted’s 2007 movie, Amazing Grace, Wilberforce’s wife Barbara—an avid abolitionist—tells her husband, “My poor father almost went mad when I told him I’d stopped taking sugar in my tea. I was 14, reading your name in the papers, willing you to win. I told my friends there was actual slave blood in every lump of sugar.” She was taking a cue from activists like Mary Morris Knowles.

Estimates are that eventually, several hundred thousand British women were faithfully boycotting sugar and other slave-related goods. They supported the movement by purchasing items like hairpins, plates, and jewelry adorned with images designed to convey an anti-slavery message.

More and Knowles were not the only abolitionist women to employ poetry as a persuasive device. So did Mary Birkett Card (1774–1817), an Irish Quaker who wrote an influential anti-slavery poem aimed directly at fellow women in 1792.

Elizabeth Heyrick (1789–1831)

After Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807, some abolitionists retired, at least temporarily, because they thought slavery itself would soon die out. After two decades of agitation, perhaps it was time to find other things to do and let nature take its course.

A certain radical named Elizabeth Heyrick saw things differently. It was largely because of her that in the 1820s, the abolition cause picked up a second wind. Believing that every moment of continued bondage constituted a heinous sin, Heyrick demanded the immediate liberation of all slaves and reproached those who took a more “gradualist” position. In a famous 1824 pamphlet, she wrote:

The perpetuation of slavery in our West India colonies. . . is one in which we are all implicated. . . The West Indian planter and the people of this country stand in the same moral relation to each other as the thief and the receiver of stolen goods. The West Indian planters have occupied too prominent a place in the discussion of this great question. . . [and] the abolitionists have shown a great deal too much politeness and accommodation towards these gentlemen.

The final decade before the 1833 Abolition Act produced an explosion of female activism. Heyrick is a big reason why, though sadly she didn’t live to see the climax herself.

Lucy Townsend (1781–1847)

Though the abolitionist cause rightly revered William Wilberforce, he could be a quirky traditionalist. For a long time, he couldn’t bring himself (until the late 1820s) to support the idea of women in activist roles. In her 2004 book, Women Against Slavery, historian Clare Midgley quotes him objecting to the creation of anti-slavery ladies’ associations: “For ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions—these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture.” He relented when it was clear that the women were going to do those things whether he liked it or not.

Lucy Townsend was one of them. In her home in 1825, and with the help of her friend Mary Lloyd, she founded the first women’s anti-slavery organization, the Ladies’ Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves, later renamed the Female Society for Birmingham. Midgley explains:

In its founding resolutions the society stated that it intended to achieve its aims through diffusing information to arouse public abhorrence of slavery, through dispatching an ‘Appeal from British Ladies to the West India Planters’, and through using surplus funds to aid charitable and educational work by missionaries among the free black population of the West Indies. . . The foundation of the Female Society for Birmingham was followed by the formation of a network of other ladies’ anti-slavery associations. Together these groups marked the change from abolition as an individual woman’s commitment to anti-slavery as a collective female endeavor. It was to be a change with major repercussions not only on the role of women in the movement but also on the nature of the anti-slavery campaign as a whole and on the role of women in British society.

Townsend’s group grew quickly in influence, even helping form at least 20 other ladies’ associations before emancipation was won by a vote of Parliament in 1833. Midgley reports that by 1830, “ladies’ associations were raising more money for the abolition movement than their corresponding male associations.” Women not only helped hugely in funding the larger movement but also actively took on the cases of individual slaves by buying them and then immediately freeing them.

Only men petitioned Parliament before 1825. The custom was broken in that year when 2,000 members of Townsend’s Female Society for Birmingham signed a petition demanding that the House of Commons enact an emancipation bill. It was the first snowball in an avalanche. Hundreds of thousands of women signed similar petitions until the Abolition Act was finally passed in 1833.

At Last, Liberty

A year later, slavery within the vast British Empire was officially no more. The emancipation effort, a half-century after it began, went down in history as one of the greatest and most successful single-issue crusades ever.

The faint-hearted joined opponents of emancipation in warning of calamitous consequences. Troops were dispatched to the Caribbean to discourage violence. But on that momentous occasion of August 1, 1834, calm and jubilation prevailed. Of the typical British island of the Caribbean that day, philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson observed:

On the night of the 31st of July, they met everywhere at their churches and chapels, and at midnight, when the clock struck twelve, on their knees, the silent, weeping assembly became men; they rose and embraced each other; they cried, they sang, they prayed, they were wild with joy, but there was no riot. . . . The first of August came on Friday, and a release was proclaimed from all work until the next Monday. The day was chiefly spent by the great mass of the negroes in the churches and chapels. The clergy and missionaries throughout the island were actively engaged, seizing the opportunities to enlighten the people on all the duties and responsibilities of their new relation, and urging them to the attainment of that higher liberty with which Christ maketh his children free.

The liberation by Great Britain of an entire race from the scourge of slavery was an achievement of, by, and for not just men but also of both men and women. It should forever be celebrated as such.

Originally published at FEE.org on August 7, 2019.

[1] For more information, see my article “The Power of Ideas and the Great Emancipation of 1834”: https://fee.org/articles/the-power-of-ideas-and-the-largest-peaceful-emancipation-in-history/.

[2] See my article “You Can Never Again Say You Did Not Know”: https://fee.org/articles/you-can-never-again-say-you-did-not-know/.

[3] See my article “Thomas Clarkson: A Moral Steam Engine That Never Quit”: https://fee.org/articles/real-heroes-thomas-clarkson/.

[4] See my article “A Movie No One Should Miss”: https://www.mackinac.org/V2007-04.

[5] See my article “Mary Wollstonecraft: Libertarian Feminist”: https://fee.org/articles/mary-wollstonecraft-libertarian-feminist/.

[6] See “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery” by Moira Ferguson in Feminist Review, no. 42 (Autumn 1992): https://www.jstor.org/stable/1395131.

Edmund Burke’s Little-Known Speech That Eroded the British Monarchy’s Command of Money and Power

The advance of liberty in the British Isles is a fascinating, 800-year journey. It remains central to the story of human progress in the world, and a giant of that long struggle was the parliamentarian and political philosopher Edmund Burke.

The rise of British liberty began in 1215 in a meadow at Runnymede, 20 miles west of London. It was there that King John was compelled by English barons to approve the Magna Carta (Latin for “Great Charter”).[1] Taxation, the document demanded, must secure the approval of the people through their representatives in Parliament. Harassment of merchants would have to stop. And, among other things, property could not be seized except through judgment of one’s peers in a court of law. This was not “moderate” stuff. It was truly radical.

Though the King reneged on his promises, he died a year later. Subsequent monarchs felt obliged to reinstate the Great Charter; some followed it more faithfully than others, and the battle to curtail the powers of the Crown and broaden the liberties of the people persisted for centuries.

Wat Tyler’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1382 was motivated by the spirit of Magna Carta,[2] as were the civil wars of the 1640s and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. All of this and more is brilliantly portrayed in the two-part 2017 documentary, Secrets of the Magna Carta.

Edmund Burke hailed from British-controlled Ireland but moved to London in 1750. He served as an elected member of the House of Commons from 1766 to 1794 and died in 1797 at the age of 68. Though he is best known for his critique of the French Revolution, a collection of his writings and speeches could easily fill many volumes. A 1997 sampler of simply his best absorbed a hefty 702 pages. His political career condensed and personified the advance of British liberty, focused as it was on shrinking the arbitrary power of the State (the monarchy in particular) and expanding the room for civil society, individual rights, and personal initiative.

“All who have ever written on government are unanimous,” he wrote, “that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.” This was a man who appreciated the indissoluble relationship between liberty and character.

It is to Burke’s speech to the House of Commons of February 11, 1780 that I wish here to call the reader’s attention. Little known today, it prompted considerable attention when delivered. Titled (in abbreviated form) Speech on Economical Reform, it aimed to take advantage of the King’s preoccupation with the war in America to further erode the monarchy’s command of money and power. He began his remarks with a clear statement of his intent, which was to achieve “a considerable reduction of improper expense,” “a provident administration of public money,” limits on the government’s ability to incur debt, and an end to “corrupt influence which is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality.” He understood that better government required less government—a lot less.

Burke intended with this speech to introduce some broad precepts, to be followed later by bills that would implement them by enacting specifics. Igniting a great debate from a lofty start, he hoped his fellow MPs would muster the courage to do the right thing. He knew the job would not be easy because some of his fellow members were personally on the receiving end of special privileges, subsidies, connections and wasteful layers of redundant government. Nonetheless, he spoke truth to power—one of the great qualities of Burke the statesman, or, for that matter, of any statesman worthy of the name.

Here is a selection of Burke’s eloquence from that important address, beginning with his no-holds-barred description of what he was up against. Think of his words in the context of how refreshing it would be to hear them resonate today from a courageous member of either the British Parliament or the US Congress:

The private enemies to be made in all attempts of this kind are innumerable; and their enmity will be the more bitter, and the more dangerous too, because a sense of dignity will oblige them to conceal the cause of their resentment. Very few men of great families and extensive connections but will feel the smart of a cutting reform, in some close relation, some bosom friend, some pleasant acquaintance, some dear, protected dependent. Emolument is taken from some; patronage from others; objects of pursuit from all. Men forced into an involuntary independence will abhor the authors of a blessing which in their eyes has so very near a resemblance to a curse. . . . I risk odium if I succeed, and contempt if I fail. My excuse must rest in my and your conviction of the absolute necessity there is that something of the kind should be done.

People who consider themselves “moderate” often straddle an issue rather than resolve it. To draw a Solomonic analogy, moderation cuts the baby in half to avoid casting an unequivocal lot with one side or the other. Take, for example, the spending by a government agency that itself is obsolete, corrupt, unconstitutional, or harmful. The moderate approach might be to curtail it but keep it in place, which then allows it to grow again later. To his credit, Burke was both right and radical on such matters, which he described as questions of “whether we ought to economize by detail or by principle.” He advised his colleagues:

First, That all jurisdictions which furnish more matter of expense, more temptation to oppression, or more means and instruments of corrupt influence, than advantage to justice or political administration, ought be abolished.

Second, That all public estates which are more subservient to the purposes of vexing, overawing, and influencing those who hold under them, and to the expense of perception and management than of benefit to the revenue, ought, upon every principle both of revenue and of freedom, to be disposed of.

Before Burke’s time, Kings and Queens were typically vain, greedy and incompetent. They bestowed titles on themselves and their favored subjects with abandon. They granted monopolies and privileges. They built local bureaucracies and tax-collecting entities as instruments of royal power. To get them to reduce, eliminate or consolidate anything was well nigh impossible most of the time.

Burke noted how ridiculous it was to traverse the country, only to find the King of England pop up as the Prince of Wales, the Earl of Chester, the Duke of Lancaster, and various other officious designations lording it over principalities, duchies, palatinates or other such jurisdictions. For the sake of both efficiency and liberty, he argued, England should rid itself of the worst of these redundancies and amalgamate the rest:

When a government is rendered complex, which in itself is no desirable thing, it ought to be for some political end which cannot be answered otherwise. . . To avoid, therefore, this minute care, which produces the consequences of the most extensive neglect, and to oblige members of Parliament to attend to public cares, and not to the servile offices of domestic management, I propose, Sir, to economize by principle.

At the time of Burke’s 1780 speech, George III had been King for 20 years and would go on to be King for 40 more. He was at the height of his reign while attempting to subdue the rebellious American colonies but Burke was not intimidated by George or his court:

Kings are naturally lovers of low company. They are so elevated above all the rest of mankind that they must look upon all their subjects as on a level. They are rather apt to hate than to love their nobility, on account of the occasional resistance to their will. . . It must, indeed be admitted that many of the nobility are as perfectly willing to act the part of flatterers, tale-bearers, parasites, pimps, and buffoons, as any of the lowest and vilest of mankind can possibly be. . . The Roman emperors, almost from the beginning, threw themselves into such hands; and the mischief increased every day till the decline and final ruin of the empire.

In his concluding paragraph, Burke announced he would propose a bill that would fulfill the principles he had so eloquently defended. And that he did. As early as 1782, even before the war in America ended, some of Burke’s recommendations were deemed so compelling that they passed Parliament. Others were enacted to one degree or another in subsequent years.

In earlier times, Burke’s words would have dispatched him to a dungeon. His proposals would have gone nowhere. But the Britain of 1780 had come a long way, thanks to principled “radicals” like this statesman of Irish birth. The steady retrenchment of the State would accelerate in the nineteenth century, positioning Britain on the eve of World War I as the planet’s freest and most prosperous enclave.

Most of the credit for that amazing outcome goes not to moderation but to radicalism. The Magna Carta was radical, and so were the heroes and heroic documents it spawned, century after century. More than two centuries after his death, Edmund Burke as a radical hero deserves the admiration of lovers of liberty everywhere.

For additional information, see:

- “War and Taxes—What Prompted Magna Carta?” by Lawrence W. Reed

- “King John Tried to Butcher the Authors of Magna Carta” by James Bovard

- “The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381” by Lawrence W. Reed

- “Edward Coke: Common Law Protection for Liberty” by Jim Powell

- “Edmund Burke: Eloquence and Conviction” by Lawrence W. Reed

- “How Edmund Burke Pressed for Trade Between America and Britain in the Eighteenth Century” by Gregory Collins

- “Big Government is Bad Government Because Power Attracts the Corrupt” by Lawrence W. Reed

- Secrets of the Magna Carta (video)

Originally published at FEE.org on September 9, 2020.

[1] For more information, see my article “War and Taxes: What Prompted the Magna Carta?”: https://fee.org/articles/war-and-taxes-what-prompted-the-magna-carta/.

[2] For more information, see my article “The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381: A Ripsnorter of a Tax Revolt”: https://fee.org/articles/the-peasants-revolt-of-1381-a-ripsnorter-of-a-tax-revolt/.

Francois-Noel Babeuf: The Marxist Before Marx

The French Revolution produced a parade of fascinating characters, many of them deranged by power and vampire-like in their quest for blood. One of the period’s lesser-known figures was Gracchus Babeuf, whose ideas were shelved with his death in 1797 only to reappear decades later in the writings of Karl Marx. Babeuf was, as the title of a biography attests, the world’s first revolutionary communist.

Babeuf’s Mental Condition

He was born Francois-Noel Babeuf in 1760 in northeastern France. He changed his first name twice in later life—first to “Camille” and later to “Gracchus.” The latter was in deference to the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who sought to redistribute land in the late Roman Republic. As a young adult in the 1780s, he made his living as an expert in feudal law, keeping records of what the peasants owed in rent and fees to the privileged nobility. The injustices of this medieval form of state-sanctioned oppression were, of course, endemic and profuse, and they upset Babeuf immensely.

Babeuf’s mental condition on the eve of the French Revolution is open to question. This is important because his political philosophy was beginning to take shape at this time. One disturbing indication that his seat back and tray table may not have been in their locked and upright positions involved the loss of his four-year-old daughter Sofie. She died in 1787, and her untimely death grieved him profoundly. Even Babeuf admirer and biographer Ian Birchall (The Specter of Babeuf) terms his reaction “bizarre”:

Babeuf apparently cut the heart out of the corpse, ate part of it, and wore the rest in a locket on his chest. It was an odd mixture of superstition and materialism, indicative of the way that Babeuf’s view of the world was developing. Without hope that his daughter’s soul might achieve immortality [he was rabidly atheist], he was seeking to preserve the object of his affections by fusing his body with the remnant of hers.

Babeuf in Politics

When the French Revolution began in the summer of 1789, Babeuf’s interest in politics soared. He played a bit part in the first five years, spending much of his time privately fleshing out and radicalizing his political philosophy. When the guillotine claimed the architect of the Reign of Terror, Maximilien Robespierre, in July 1794, Babeuf burst onto the scene with his newspaper, Tribun du Peuple.

He became a minor celebrity immediately. At first, he denounced Robespierre in vicious terms, a perspective that later changed to a fawning adoration of the departed Jacobin once the new government called the Directory consolidated its power.

The economic conditions the Directory inherited in mid-1795 were desperate. Within a year, they were even worse. Hyperinflation roared as the new government pumped out billions of paper notes. War with Europe drastically reduced commerce. Food supplies dwindled. Starvation killed thousands. In that environment, Babeuf saw an opportunity. He would use it to call for a radical egalitarianism and ultimately, another revolution. His efforts toward those ends would be known in history as “The Conspiracy of the Equals.”

In Volume 2 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995), economist Murray Rothbard summarized the views of this Marxist-before-Marx and his Conspiracy of the Equals.

The ultimate ideal of Babeuf and his Conspiracy was absolute equality. Nature, they claimed, calls for perfect equality; all inequality is injustice: therefore, community of property was to be established. . . . In the ideal communist society sought by the Conspiracy, private property would be abolished, and all property would be communal and stored in communal storehouses. From these storehouses, the goods would be distributed “equitably” by the superiors—apparently, there was to be a cadre of “superiors” in this oh so “equal” world!

Of the half dozen books on Babeuf, most are hagiographies by adoring Marxists who offer one lame excuse after another for their subject’s eccentricities. The best and most objective treatment of Babeuf was also the first full-length biography of the man, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist. Written in 1978 by Professor R.B. Rose of the University of Tasmania, it’s worth the attention of anyone interested in Babeuf as a precursor to Karl Marx.

Marx and Babeuf

Separated by half a century, the similarities between the two communist theoreticians are striking. On many matters, it’s as if Marx simply pilfered the thoughts of Babeuf and then superimposed the complaints of his French predecessor onto capitalism instead of onto medievalist France.

Most of the big stuff you find in Marx, you can find in Babeuf: Workers are exploited; the value of their labor is expropriated by profiteers. Private property is the root of all evil. To create the communist utopia, there must first be a period of dictatorship marked by violence to expunge society of its bad ideas and behavior. Christianity is an opiate for the masses. Blah, blah, blah. Boilerplate babble—superficial, arrogant, and devoid of genuine economic analysis. To quote from Rothbard again:

An absolute leader, heading an all-powerful cadre, would, at the proper moment, give the signal to usher in a society of perfect equality. Revolution would be made to end all further revolutions; an all-powerful hierarchy would be necessary allegedly to put an end to hierarchy forever.

But of course, as we have seen, there was no real paradox here, no intention to eliminate hierarchy. The paeans to “equality” were a flimsy camouflage for the real objective, a permanently entrenched and absolute dictatorship, in Orwell’s striking image, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Almost nothing in the manifestos, declarations, and proposals of Babeuf and his conspirators was original. They were echoes of earlier thieves, mountebanks, and crackpot philosophers. As even socialist and Babeuf sympathizer Ernest Belfort Bax admits in his biography, Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals:

The only point that was new in the theory of the Equals. . . was the notion of the transformation of the entire French republic, by the seizure of political power, into one great communistic society. . . . Babeuf was the first to conceive of Communism in any shape as a politically realizable ideal in the immediate or near future. . . .

What distinguishes Babeuf from his revolutionary predecessors is his placing communism, involving the definite abolition of the institution of private property, in the forefront of his doctrine. . . and in his bold idea of its prompt realization by political means, through a committee of select persons placed in power by the people’s will as the issue of a popular insurrection. . . . Gracchus Babeuf and his movement cannot fail to be for the modern socialist of deepest possible historical interest. Gracchus Babeuf was, in a sense, a pioneer and a hero of the modern international Socialist party.

Bax also offers this telling concession: “With all our admiration of Babeuf’s energy and heroism as a revolutionary figure, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was intellectually unstable.” How about just plain nuts?

The Tribun

Babeuf’s newspaper, Tribun, became the official mouthpiece of his new movement. Nightly meetings were held at which articles and commentary from Tribun were read and discussed by the faithful.

Once Babeuf determined that a violent overthrow of the government of the Directory was necessary and desirable, to be followed by a new communist regime, his secret Insurrectionary Committee belched out one screed after another. It ordered the “extermination” of all opponents, including any foreigners found on the streets. Slogans were adopted for banners proclaiming “the people’s” this or “the people’s” that.

One document that Babeuf likely wrote himself, humbly entitled Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf, Tribune of the People, included these statements within its fifteen paragraphs:

“Nature has given to every man an equal right to the enjoyment of all goods.”

“In a true society there ought to be neither rich nor poor.”

“The object of a revolution is to destroy any inequality, and to establish the well-being of all.”

This rabid thrust for equality in all things in economic life always was, and remains today, a destructive and futile assault on human nature. Not even identical twins are truly identical; each of us is a unique assortment of millions of traits and thoughts.

Equality before the law is one thing, and a noble goal, but expecting people to generate identical incomes regardless of their contributions to the marketplace is pure baloney. As I wrote in a chapter on the subject in Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism:

To produce even a rough measure of economic equality, governments must issue the following orders and back them up with firing squads and prisons: “Don’t excel or work harder than the next guy, don’t come up with any new ideas, don’t take any risks, and don’t do anything differently from what you did yesterday.” In other words, don’t be human.

Utopian Communism

Another of the Babeuf committee’s decrees, bearing the title Equality, Liberty, Universal Well-being, contained a litany of pipe-dreams and the coercion necessary to put them into effect. I excerpt from it liberally here:

“A great national community of goods shall be established by the republic.”

“The right of inheritance is abolished; all property at present belonging to private persons on their death falls to the national community of goods.”

“Every French citizen, without distinction of sex, who shall surrender all his possessions in the country, and who devotes his person and work of which he is capable in the country, is a member of the great national community.”

“The property belonging to the national community shall be exploited in common by all its healthy members.”

“The transfers of workers from one community to another will be carried out by the central authority, on the basis of its knowledge of the capacities and needs of the community.”

“The central community shall hold. . . those persons, of either sex, to compulsory labor whose deficient sense of citizenship, or whose laziness, luxury, and laxity of conduct, may have afforded injurious example; their fortunes shall accrue to the national community of goods.”

“No member of the community may claim more for himself than the law, through the intermediary of the authorities, allows him.”

“In every commune, public meals should be held at stated times, which members of the community shall be required to attend.”

“Every member of the national community who accepts payment or treasures up money shall be punished.”

“All private trade with foreign countries is forbidden; commodities entering the country in this way will be confiscated for the benefit of the national community; those acting to the contrary will be punished.”

“The republic coins no more money.”

“Every individual who is convicted of having offered money to one of its (the national community’s) members shall be severely punished.”

“Neither gold nor silver shall be imported into the republic.”

In its essence, the utopian communism promulgated by Babeuf and his friends would have made Robespierre’s Reign of Terror seem like a frolic in the doggie park. It would compel men and women back to the Stone Age.

Under orders from the Directory, none other than General and future-Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte forcibly dissolved Babeuf’s organization and arrested much of its membership in February 1797. Babeuf went to prison, and his newspaper was permanently shuttered. His short-lived political career lasted less than three years.

At his trial for attempted insurrection, Babeuf chattered like a drunken cockatiel. Using the occasion to spew his communist ideals before judge and jury and as much of the public as might be reached, the atheist Babeuf even allied himself with Jesus Christ, whom he praised for his alleged “hatred of the rich” and his supposed socialist teachings. Of course, Babeuf possessed no better understanding of Jesus’s words than he did of either human nature or basic economics. As I’ve written in Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus A Socialist?, Jesus was neither a hater nor a socialist.

Given Babeuf’s role as the ideological and tactical ringleader of the 1796–97 revolt, the verdict in his trial was a foregone conclusion.

“We demand real equality or death. . . And we shall have it, this real equality; it matters not at what price!” proclaimed a manifesto Babeuf’s associates had issued in 1795. On May 27, 1797, both were delivered to the 37-year-old Babeuf himself by way of the guillotine.

Equality in Death

In death, Gracchus Babeuf finally achieved his dream of absolute equality—equality with dead people, which is as equal as it gets and which is precisely the point. The equality Babeuf was committed to foisting on others is both unfit and impossible for the living and achievable only when you’re six feet under.

The truly sad part of the story is that Babeuf’s communist/socialist gibberish was born again with Karl Marx 50 years later.

Animated by the evil scribblings of Babeuf and Marx, power-hungry demagogues would seize power in diverse places, killing and enslaving millions. They include Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, the Maoists in China, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and fellow travelers in nations from North Korea to Cuba to Venezuela. All are intellectual heirs and disciples of Babeuf and Marx.

Will the world ever put behind it the rantings of these murderous ideologues? Not so long as evil is a force afoot amongst mankind, I fear. So men and women of conscience must be both vigilant and courageous in the face of these destroyers in our midst.

Originally published at FEE.org on June 11, 2019.

Olympe de Gouges, Heroine of the French Revolution

Despite the tendency of French historians to depict the events of 1789–1799 in a more favorable light than they deserve, heroes of the ghastly French Revolution are few in number.

Hundreds of thousands of people perished in a decade-long spasm of violence, tyranny, hyperinflation, and war—with precious little to show for it. Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 accomplished far more lasting good than the French mayhem of the 1790s.

The French Revolution Was Anti-Woman

The French Revolution produced no admirable generation of “Founders” as in America. Many of the noble ideals of its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, issued within a month of the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, were largely trashed by the radicals who commandeered events and imposed the dreaded Reign of Terror. It all ended in a coup masterminded in 1799 by Napoleon Bonaparte, who crowned himself emperor five years later. When he was exiled after Waterloo in 1815, the Bourbons were restored to the French throne.

As I wrote “Edmund Burke: Eloquence and Conviction,” Edmund Burke was spot-on when he lambasted the Revolution. He saw it as the deadly fruit of fuzzy-headed intellectuals deploying power to impose their academic abstractions. “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine?” he asked. “The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor.”

Me too, and I used to be one (a professor, that is)!

What about women? Didn’t they win some long-sought freedom from oppression in the male-dominated society of the ancien regime? Not much. In his splendid book, The French Revolution and What Went Wrong, historian Steven Clarke says these minor advances for the female gender are the extent of it: daughters were enabled to inherit as much as their brothers, divorce was allowed, women over 21 could finally marry whom they wanted without parental consent, and females were given permission to sign legal documents as witnesses.

“But apart from those concessions,” writes Clarke, “the Revolution was one long campaign to enforce male supremacy.” Indeed, every single one of many female political societies was dissolved by law in 1793. Two years later, women were banned from attending any political meetings, and female gatherings of more than five for any purpose were declared illegal.

“Get back to your chores!” was the unmistakable message.

A Heroine with Integrity and Honor

The Revolution produced at least one hero, however, and it was a woman.

History buffs might be thinking, “He must be referring to Charlotte Corday!” She was the woman known for one decisive act and almost nothing more—the stabbing of a bloodthirsty, lunatic, fake news journalist, Jean-Paul Marat, in his bathtub. Corday said she “killed one man to save 100,000.”

Though it’s tempting, my choice for the greatest hero of the Revolution is not Corday. It’s Olympe de Gouges. She possessed more integrity and honor than any of the big-name male rabble-rousers of her day.

(For an excellent account of the French Revolution and its savage turn, see my FEE colleague Dan Sanchez’s article, “How Nationalism and Socialism Arose from the French Revolution.” In a recent conversation, I asked Dan if he could name a real hero of the period. He suggested perhaps the Marquis de Lafayette, of American Revolution fame, might be considered such. I agree that Lafayette was a voice of reason in a sea of ridiculous fanaticism, but he spent most of the Revolution in exile or as a prisoner of the Austrians. He would be my second choice after Gouges.)

Born in 1748, Gouges earned a national reputation as an accomplished playwright and an outspoken opponent of the slave trade before her 30th birthday. She was among the earliest defenders of the rights of women, demanding the same as those for men. Growing up in a society in which women hadn’t yet graduated to the status of second-class citizens, she knew what she was talking about.

Forced to marry when she was 16, she later said this of the “beau” selected for her:

I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born. I was sacrificed for no reason that could make up for the repugnance I felt for this man.

Mr. Gouges died within a year under unusual circumstances. We’ll have to leave it at that for now. She never remarried.

Anti-Slavery Actress

Death threats resulted from one of her earliest plays, The Lucky Shipwreck, about the terrors of slavery and the slave trade. She narrowly escaped being locked up in the Bastille, but the powers-that-be settled on simply banning the play. Her work inspired riots in Paris and across the Atlantic in the Caribbean.

In one of her anti-slavery plays of 1788, a Gouges character prophetically declares:

The power of one Master alone is in the hands of a thousand Tyrants who trample the People under foot. The People will one day burst their chains and will claim all its rights under Natural law. It will teach the Tyrants just what a people united by long oppression and enlightened by sound philosophy can do.

Gouge was very much a revolutionary, but not the bloodthirsty, vengeance-seeking, power-hungry type that would take over in 1793. She earned great fame in her day for declaring, “Women, isn’t it high time that we too held a revolution?”

Clarke depicts her as “fairly moderate in her politics,” noting that she endorsed a constitutional monarchy on the order of Great Britain’s, with drastically reduced powers for the king. She even spoke up against the trial and execution of Louis XVI in 1792–93, preferring exile to regicide. In addition to asserting that women were entitled to the same rights as men, her message was humane, anti-violence, and supportive of ending special privileges granted by the state.

Her Fight for Equal Rights for Women

Gouge despised both customs and laws that advantaged some at the expense of others because she believed every individual was entitled to the upward mobility their character, abilities, and ambitions would naturally give them if unobstructed. Clarke writes:

In 1791 Gouges penned her most famous text, the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen, a reaction to the male-only declaration at the heart of the new Constitution. Her text opens with the forceful line, “Man, are you capable of being just?” and goes on, “Tell me, who gave you the sovereign right to oppress my sex?”

Two years into it, the Revolution ostensibly devoted to “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” needed a mid-course correction. Gouges was determined to do what she could to see it live up to its ideals.

Her Declaration followed almost verbatim the original one enshrined in the short-lived Constitution of 1791, but she essentially feminized it. Wherever men alone were emphasized, she included women. Here and there she added a well-turned phrase such as her Clause Number 10, in which she asserted that if “a woman has the right to ascend to the scaffold (to be guillotined), she must also have the right to ascend to the political rostrum.”

To the radicals like Jean-Paul Marat, Georges Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre, this was more than a little annoying. This upstart woman was daring to challenge the direction they were charting for the Revolution. Amid their calls for ever more violence, Gouges was shouting, “Blood, even that of the guilty, if shed cruelly and profusely, sullies revolutions forever.”

She publicly denounced Marat as “an abortion of humanity” and Robespierre as “loathsome, a disgrace to the Revolution.” They were dragging the country, she rightly claimed, down the path to a new form of dictatorship and senseless war against the rest of Europe.

Second Woman Guillotined

Imprisoned for three months with no access to legal counsel, she was subsequently tried for treason on November 2, 1793, and guillotined the next day. That earned her the status in history as the second woman in revolutionary France, after Marie Antoinette, to lose her head to a basket.

Biographer Sophie Mousset, in Women’s Rights and the French Revolution, quotes an anonymous Parisian witness to the execution of Gouges:

[She] had thrown herself in the Revolution, body and soul. But having quickly perceived how atrocious the system adopted by the Jacobins was, she chose to retrace her steps. She attempted to unmask the villains through the literary productions which she had printed and put up. They never forgave her, and she paid for her carelessness with her head.

What that observer saw as “carelessness” would be far more aptly described as courage. This was a woman who gave her life for what she thought to be right, for things like equal rights, individual liberty, and limited government. She faced death with as much steely fortitude as any man.

Once again from Steven Clarke’s book comes this passage. It cites one of the more fanatic revolutionaries who, shortly after Gouges was killed, wanted to be sure that women got the message:

Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the public prosecutor for Paris, wrote a lecture to women saying that: “The man-woman, the impudent Olympe de Gouges, the first to set up women’s societies, abandoned the care of her household to go into politics, and committed crimes [by which he meant, speaking her mind and criticizing the Revolution’s worst leaders].”

Talking of the women who were demanding equal rights, he went on: “All these immoral beings have been eliminated by the avenging blade of the law, and you want to imitate them? No, you will only be worthy of esteem if you force yourselves to be what Nature intended.”

Can you imagine Chaumette today getting through a guest appearance on The View? He would surely be guillotined, verbally at the least.

Three cheers to Olympe de Gouges. She was ahead of her time, a hero in a time and place that produced so few.

Originally published at FEE.org on June 6, 2019.

Sir Robert Peel: A Man Who Deserves His Statues

In London on this date 170 years ago—July 2, 1850—a good man died from injuries suffered when thrown from his horse three days before. His death prompted the greatest outpouring of public sorrow in nearly half a century. Queen Victoria wrote, “Everyone seems to have lost a personal friend.” He was only 62.

His name was Sir Robert Peel, one of the best of Britain’s 55 Prime Ministers. He served in that position twice, 1834–35 and 1841–46, for a total of five years and 57 days. A sketch of him hangs proudly in my home office. Why? Because he was an example of something common with cheese or wine but rare in politicians: He improved with age.

To this day, London policemen are still called “bobbies” in deference to Peel, who, as Home Secretary, created the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. Its widely used metonym almost two centuries later is none other than Scotland Yard. The principles Peel introduced at its formation are collectively known as “policing by consent” (in contrast to policing by fear) and deserve to be revisited in light of present-day controversies.

“The police are the public and the public are the police,” Peel famously declared. He argued that policing should be professional, transparent, accountable, and rooted in a broad, public consensus. Its effectiveness should be measured by a lack of crime and a high degree of public support, not the number of arrests. Police, he argued, should be citizens in uniform as opposed to agents of a hostile, concentrated power. Whenever possible, physical force should be a measured last resort, deployed after persuasion and warning prove futile. Defense of life, rights, and property should be the objective of policing.

Peel’s views on criminal justice matters started out as liberal (in the classical, British sense) and changed little over his lifetime. He sought to streamline the system and make it more obvious and predictable. Fewer rules, he believed, would foster respect for those that remained. Toward that end, he began the process of vastly reducing the huge number of capital offenses in Britain. You could be hanged just for cutting down somebody’s hop vines until Peel cleared the books of such draconian penalties.

When Peel changed his mind on the major issues of the day, it was almost always in the right direction—toward liberty. When he was first elected to Parliament in 1809 at the age of 22, he maintained at best an indifference to the abandonment of the gold standard and the adoption of paper fiat money during the war with Napoleon. He supported legal discrimination against Catholics (such as the longstanding ban on their serving in Parliament). And he endorsed the trade protectionism that benefited the landed aristocracy of his own Tory Party. With time, reflection, and the influence of the classical liberals of the time, he “grew” in office and reversed himself.

When Waterloo ended hostilities with France in 1815, some politicians wanted to keep the paper money system of the war years. Robert Peel chaired the Bullion Committee and introduced the bill that restored the gold standard. He had become a convert to the cause of honest money.

“Catholic emancipation” as it came to be known in the 19th century was the idea that Anglican Britain should rid itself of laws that denied equal rights to Catholics and other “nonconformists.” Many public offices from Parliament on down were closed to all but those of the Anglican faith. In the late 1820s, Robert Peel led the efforts in Westminster to repeal those laws.

In the 1840s, the cause of free trade burst onto the political scene. The culmination of decades of hard work by the Anti-Corn Law League of John Bright and Richard Cobden, the issue came to a head with crop-destroying rains in Britain and the disastrous potato famine in British-ruled Ireland. What sense did it make for Britain to prevent foreign grain from entering the country when cheaper imports could feed hungry people? It was Robert Peel, as Prime Minister, who convinced Parliament to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, though it cost him his job on the very same day. He had founded the modern Conservative Party but it turned him out of office over the issue of free trade. He never regretted that he had put principle above party.

Announcing his resignation, Peel was defiant. He had secured “cheap bread” for the people and that was worth so much more than the applause of the vested interests he once supported but later fought. He declared,

I shall leave a name execrated by every Monopolist. . . but it may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of good-will in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour. . . when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice.

Peels’ good friend and colleague in government, William Ewart Gladstone,[1] would go on to found the Liberal Party, serve four times as Prime Minister, and get rid of almost every remaining tariff.

On the very morning he died, Peel attended a meeting of the commission that would oversee the magnificent Exhibition of 1851.[2] It was a glorious tribute to the economic freedoms he helped to bring about.

Millions of Brits were distraught over his untimely death in 1850. Taken from them was a man unsullied by scandal and unyielding in his desire to get bad government out of the way of good people.

During my research for this article, I was dismayed to discover that Sir Robert Peel is under attack by the radical Left in Britain at this very moment. A statue of him in Glasgow was vandalized in early June. An online petition seeks removal of statues of him in Manchester and across Britain. The main reason? His father—repeat, his father, not him—opposed the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Peel himself campaigned to abolish slavery entirely in 1833. He likely did more to liberate people from oppression and ignorance than the nihilistic radicals of today will ever do in their combined lifetimes.

The name of Robert Peel deserves the admiration of good people everywhere, not only on this anniversary of his death, but forever.

For additional information, see:

- “The Humble Farm Boy Who Made Britain Great” by Lawrence W. Reed

- “John Bright: Voice of Victorian Liberalism” by Nicholas Elliott

- “How Free Trade Triumphed and Made Britain Great” by Richard Ebeling

- “Free Trade and the Irish Famine” by John P. Finneran

- “From Crystal Palace to White Elephant in 150 Years” by Lawrence W. Reed

- “William Ewart Gladstone: A Decades-Long Defense of Liberty” by Lawrence W. Reed

- Sir Robert Peel by T.A. Jenkins

- Robert Peel: A Biography by Douglas Hurd

Originally published at FEE.org on July 2, 2020.

[1] See my article “William Ewart Gladstone: A Decades-Long Defense of Liberty”: https://fee.org/articles/when-the-power-of-love-replaced-the-love-of-power/.

[2] See my article “From Crystal Palace to White Elephant in 150 Years”: https://fee.org/articles/from-crystal-palace-to-white-elephant-in-150-years/.

Hats Off to John B. Stetson

In the spirited history of the old American West, who was known as “the Boss of the Plains”? The Sioux chief Sitting Bull? The outlaw Billy the Kid? The trapper and frontiersman Kit Carson?

It was none of them. Nor was it any other man or woman. It’s a trick question. It’s not a matter of who, but what.

The “Boss of the Plains” was none other than a hat—a durable, weather-resistant and waterproof head topper invented in 1865 by John Batterson Stetson. We know it today as the iconic and quintessentially American “Stetson,” most commonly called the “cowboy hat.” Sometimes it was also monikered the “10-Gallon Hat” because, in the dry climate of the High Plains, it doubled as a water bucket (though it really held less than a gallon).

The Story of Stetson

The story of the Boss contains all the elements of a great Western. Hollywood, drop the guns and pick up a Stetson. Here’s your chance to make a movie for the whole family: Eastern city-slicker goes West, overcomes a handicap, becomes an inventor, solves a problem, moves back East, makes millions of customers happy, and leaves a legacy inseparable from the history of half the country.

The son of a hatter (a maker of hats, for those of us too young to have ever seen one), John Stetson was a sickly child as he grew up in Orange, New Jersey, in the 1830s and 40s. Years before Horace Greeley popularized the phrase, “Go west, young man,” that’s exactly what Stetson did. He went to ameliorate his tuberculosis and in the belief that he probably didn’t have long to live in any event.

In his twenties and thirties, the kid from Jersey was awed by cattle drivers and rustlers, horse-savvy cowboys and the freewheeling culture of the territories west of the Mississippi. But one thing that failed to impress him were the hats of the day. Everybody wore one, but they seemed worse than useless. The fancy-pants derby he brought with him was not fit for harsh weather. Beaver-pelt hats were infested with fleas and ticks. Coonskin caps soaked the head when it rained. Feathers were for Indians.

So drawing on what he learned in his father’s hat shop and on his own insights, Stetson set about to fix the problem. He designed a hat for himself that was perfect for the West—“big and picturesque” because of its wide brim and high crown.

“I’ll give you my five-dollar gold piece for that hat,” said a mule driver when he saw it. Stetson sold it to him on the spot. That was the moment his entrepreneurial light flashed green. He decided to go back East (to Philadelphia), start the John B. Stetson Company with just a hundred dollars of capital, and mass-produce the hat. It was 1865.

The sickly kid whose doctor said he’d be lucky to make it to 25 lived to the ripe old age of 75, and his company lasted more than a century. It’s not far-fetched to think that the mental focus and physical demands of building a business prolonged his life by years, if not decades. Honest labor and good living are known to do that, you know.

A Huge Success

The newfangled hat made the wearer look like he was in charge of something important, so Stetson labeled it the “Boss of the Plains.” The initial price was roughly a whole month’s wages for the average cowboy, but in no time at all the hat became the most popular headgear from St. Louis to San Francisco. Stetson cut the price and improved the quality. Even some Easterners swallowed their regional pride and donned the increasingly fashionable Stetson. TrueCowboy.com says,

The hats were a big hit in the thinly populated West, where taking a beating was a requirement for clothes (and for people). The Stetson was heavy enough to knock a man down in a fight. In a celebrated incident, a Stetson kept its shape after being hit by 20 bullets. The rugged individualism of the West was perfectly represented by a hat that could be shaped differently by each wearer—a punched-in crown, a bended brim, a braided leather band were all different ways for to make a Stetson one’s own.

Big-city Easterners scoffed at these hats at first, unaware of their practicality. But Stetson didn’t give up. He knew that as sales grew, word would circulate about his product. He was right. Variations of the hat eventually appealed to city slickers and to cowboys alike. It was a hat for all seasons; it catered to whatever position in life you had—whether you were rich or poor, whether it was dress, work or play.

By 1886, Stetson owned the world’s biggest hat factory in Philadelphia and employed nearly 4,000 workers. The factory was putting out about 2 million hats a year by 1906. John B. transformed hat-making from a manual to a mechanized industry. He introduced iron cutting and shaping machines, improving quality control.

By 1915, almost a decade after Stetson died, the company employed 5,400 people in Philadelphia and turned out 3.3 million hats a year, reports author Michael Mink. His workers were among the happiest and most highly-paid in the city, holding jobs thousands of others eagerly sought.

John Stetson earned a fortune, and who could blame him for it? He baked the proverbial bigger pie by inventing, producing, and marketing a bigger and better hat. Though this one-percenter would have hurt no one if he had just kept his earnings for himself, the fact is that he gave almost everything away. He built rescue missions, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, grammar schools, and even universities. One of his great beneficiaries is his namesake university, Stetson University in central Florida.

My hat is off to John B. Stetson—an American original. Every cowboy-at-heart should remember his name.

Originally published at FEE.org on May 24, 2018.

Jenny Lind: The Swedish Nightingale Who Sang Her Way to Fame and Fortune in America

One hundred and seventy years ago, on September 1, 1850, a 29-year-old Swedish woman arrived in America for her first visit. By the following spring, she earned (in today’s money) more than $10 million. It was easily one of the quickest and biggest fortunes ever made in this country by a foreigner.

Now you may be asking yourself, especially if you are a “progressive,” who did she swindle? How many victims did she exploit along the way? At a time when we did not yet have a federal income tax, did we find another way to punish her for her success? Or did she escape to Sweden before we could vilify her and swipe her money?

You would not only be wrong to ask such loaded questions, you would be utterly uninformed, perhaps even motivated by envy, one of the most low-brow and destructive attitudes imaginable.

The woman’s name was Jenny Lind. She did not swindle or exploit anyone. When she returned to Stockholm in 1852, she left behind millions of adoring American fans who did not want to see her go. Back then, nobody of any consequence sought to punish her and thankfully, we did not yet have a government big enough or dumb enough to try.

Jenny Lind was already famous in Europe for a decade before she disembarked in New York in late summer 1850. Her trade? Singing. She was an opera soprano with such a gifted voice that she became world-renowned as “the Swedish Nightingale.” Throngs greeted her when she arrived and even bigger, sellout crowds showed up for performance after performance in city after city. American media dubbed it “Lind Mania.”

The great showman P.T. Barnum of circus fame convinced Jenny to contract with him to perform in America. Barnum and Lind parted ways amicably in 1851 and Jenny continued her tour but under her own management for another year.

In all, she regaled American audiences at nearly a hundred concerts—in cities like New York, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Wilmington, Charleston, New Orleans, Natchez, Memphis, St. Louis, Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, Wheeling and Pittsburgh. She even found time to sing in Havana, Cuba between engagements in Charleston and New Orleans.

Usually she sang in theaters and concert halls but biographer Sarah Jenny Dunsmure, in the book Jenny Lind: The Story of the Swedish Nightingale, tells of an incident in a most unlikely place:

The company gave three successful concerts in Louisville but then suffered a low moment at Madison, Indiana: 800 people had crammed into a pork butcher’s shed to hear the Swedish Nightingale but the organizer refused to pay the agreed fee. Barnum wanted to cancel the whole event. Jenny refused, saying it was not the people’s fault and she was prepared to sing—indeed, she wished to sing—and thanks to her determination the concert went ahead. [Then] at Cincinnati they were greeted by a crowd of 2,000. Audiences were so enthusiastic that Barnum added an extra evening and Jenny was able to give $3,000 [about 90,000 in 2020 dollars] to the mayor for charities.

The 2017 movie, The Greatest Showman (so bad I ejected the DVD after a half hour), suggests an adulterous relationship between Barnum and Lind. By all accounts of the day and biographers since, that never happened. It’s another case of Hollywood rewriting history for hype at the expense of accuracy. If you did not see the film, pat yourself on the back for good judgment.

So what did Jenny Lind do with all that money those many happy audiences freely gave her? She could have invested it and earned even more, providing lots of jobs for workers and products for consumers. But she chose to give most of it away to charities she loved—primarily music scholarships and private schools. Some of the recipients were in the US and the rest were mostly in England and Sweden.

Not only are streets named for this remarkable singer in a dozen or more American cities, but two towns bear her name as well: Jenny Lind, Arkansas and Jenny Lind, California. Her name is honored at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and her image adorns the Swedish 50-krona banknote, among numerous recognitions still visible more than 130 years since she died in 1887.

Don’t let Jenny Lind’s wealth bother you. Count your blessings, not hers. Jenny Lind was a great and talented entertainer who earned every penny. In free societies, unlike socialized ones, you can get rich by serving others and never exploit anybody. Most Americans knew that back then and it’s not a compliment to our times that we have to re-teach it so often today.

For additional information, see:

- Jenny Lind: The Story of the Swedish Nightingale by Sarah Jenny Dunsmure

- P.T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind by W. Porter Ware and Thaddeus C. Lockard

- “P.T. Barnum Brings European Opera Star Jenny Lind to New York” by History.net

Originally published at FEE.org on August 7, 2020.

The First Female Presidential Nominee

Here’s a presidential campaign trivia question for you: Who was Frederick Douglass’s running mate in the 1872 election?

That’s right, Frederick Douglass—the famous former slave and abolitionist whose eloquence stirred the conscience of America.[1] He appeared on the general election ballot in 1872 as the vice-presidential candidate of the Equal Rights Party. Who was at the top of the ticket?

Time’s up. Douglass’s running mate was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States. Don’t feel bad if her name didn’t spring to mind. She deserves more recognition than she presently gets, for both good and bad reasons. To end this on a positive note, I’ll list the bad ones first.

Woodhull’s Shortcomings

Before approving a suggestion that Douglass be her running mate, Woodhull didn’t bother to ask him about it. He wasn’t among the 668 delegates at the Equal Rights Party convention, didn’t consent to his nomination, and campaigned not for the Woodhull/Douglass ticket but for her Republican opponent, incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant. Oops.

Under the terms of the US Constitution, which sets the minimum age to be president at 35, Woodhull couldn’t take office even if she had won. She didn’t turn 35 until 10 months after the election. Running a half-century before women were even given the vote, she garnered microscopic support at the ballot box. Grant, of course, was re-elected in a landslide.

Woodhull and her sister Tenny (short for “Tennessee”) were deep into spiritualism, earning a living for a time as spiritualists before becoming stockbrokers and newspaper publishers. In their day, that meant a belief that they could communicate with the dead.

Victoria and Tenny conducted seances, read palms, and claimed to be active mediums through which dead people spoke. Using both their alleged paranormal skills and their very real sexual appeal, they even conned a tidy sum of money out of one of America’s richest men, steamship and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Whacky? Undoubtedly. But don’t forget that today, we have presidential candidates who advocate a kind of economic spiritualism called socialism—the belief that elites can make dumb, disastrous ideas cooked up by dead scribblers a winning formula for running other people’s lives.

“Christian Communism”

Woodhull possessed a minimal grasp of economics, which may explain why she embraced the oxymoronic claptrap she called “Christian communism.” She regarded it as “an idealized political expression of spiritualism,” according to biographer Lois Beachy Underhill, and “made no attempt to rationalize her capitalistic brokerage business with the new doctrines she was expounding so enthusiastically.” She claimed that Jesus Christ was himself a communist, a disgraceful delusion that defies the facts.[2]

Woodhull personally bankrolled the Equal Rights Party’s 1872 convention, so it should come as no surprise that its platform called for wealth redistribution, nationalization of industries, a graduated income tax, communal ownership of land, the abolition of interest payments, guaranteed jobs for all, and world government. Those dubious propositions overshadowed the party’s laudable endorsement of women’s suffrage and the equality of rights between the sexes.

Scandal (both real and alleged) followed Woodhull wherever she went, largely related to her public profession in favor of “sexual experimentation.” She was a leader of the nascent “free love movement,” which in its most charitable form is the belief that government should not interfere in the private, consensual activities of adults. To many Americans of the Victorian era, “free love” sounded like rationalizing licentiousness and promiscuity.

Women’s Suffrage

Victoria Woodhull was no saint, but neither was she all sinner. She was way ahead of her time on matters related to suffrage and women’s equality. She had some weird notions but possessed the courage to let you know what they were. She didn’t just pontificate; she put herself out there—delivering hundreds of speeches, forming a political party, running for president, and managing both a brokerage business and a newspaper. Even though women couldn’t legally vote, she showed up at a polling place once demanding a ballot; when it was denied, she didn’t leave until she delivered a blistering jeremiad about the injustice.

Nor was she afraid to call out a hypocrite when she saw one (even though she never quite grasped that she was one herself when as a capitalist she denounced capitalism). On the Saturday before the presidential election in 1872, she outed the sanctimonious Rev. Henry Ward Beecher as a serial Don Juan. Though she was right about him (and was later acquitted of obscenity charges), she spent election day behind bars for it.

Sadly, many of Woodhull’s friends deserted her after the election. Even fellow suffragettes disowned her because of her radicalism and eccentricities. At age 39, she divorced her husband and sailed with her children and sister Tenny to England, where she lived out her days.

Women won the right to vote in the United States when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. Seven years later at age 89, a largely forgotten Victoria Woodhull died, but she was probably smiling when she did.

For additional information, see:

- The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull by Lois Beachy Underhill

- Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored by Mary Gabriel

- A Woman for President: The Story of Victoria Woodhull by Kathleen Krull

- Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria by Barbara Goldsmith

- Scandalous: Fame, Infamy and Paradise Lost by Neal Katz

- The Presidential Fringe: Questing and Jesting for the Oval Office by Mark Stein

- Was Jesus A Socialist? by Lawrence W. Reed

Originally published at FEE.org on February 19, 2020.

[1] See my article “The Stirring Elocution of Frederick Douglass”: https://fee.org/articles/the-stirring-elocution-of-frederick-douglass/.

[2] See my essay “Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus A Socialist?”: https://fee.org/resources/rendering-unto-caesar-was-jesus-a-socialist/.

The Man Who Bankrupted a Legislature

My first choice for a headline for this article was “The Scoundrel Who Bankrupted a Legislature” but upon reflection, I think the legislature had it coming. So I changed “scoundrel” to a more neutral term.

The name “William Sharon” meant nothing to me until I recently read Irving Stone’s 1956 masterpiece, Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840–1900. The book has been appropriately lauded as “an unforgettable pageant of giants”—men who scaled the Rockies, made deserts bloom, dug deep for gold and silver and surveyed territories west of the Mississippi into 22 states in the continental US. Those men (and yes, the women too) weren’t all saints; Stone recounts the exploits of more than a few rascals.

The tale of William Sharon comprises but a few pages of Stone’s book but it was enough for me to search additional sources. It turns out that Sharon was the quintessential “crony capitalist.” Perhaps his one saving grace was that he taught a painful lesson to his cronies in government.

Sharon was born in Smithfield, Ohio in 1821. After studying law and gaining admittance to the bar, he moved to California just as the 1849 Gold Rush commenced. He made a small fortune in real estate as land values soared, then moved to Nevada to pursue a growing interest in silver mining. He was in the right place at the right time when the Comstock Lode was found in 1859, the first major discovery of silver ore in American history.

As owner of the Virginia City branch of the Bank of California, Sharon specialized in cheap loans to struggling mines and mills. When the undercapitalized or inefficient ones failed, Sharon foreclosed and took them over. He was a shrewd wheeler-dealer but I can find no fault in that. It was when he turned his eye to politics that the dirtbag in him came out.

William Sharon proved himself a smart investor and a capable banker but that wasn’t enough. He wanted to be a United States Senator from the newly-minted state of Nevada, which had entered the Union in 1864. In those days, legislators chose who would represent the state in the US Senate. If you could get their attention, you might get yourself a coveted seat in Washington. So Sharon went to work on it.

To curry favor with Nevada legislators, he offered them confidential and convincing financial advice: Buy stock in the Ophir silver company because it was heading to $300 a share. The year was 1875. Stone writes,

Most of the legislators sank their life savings in Ophir, and started a speculative frenzy on the San Francisco Exchange which observers called maniacal.

With the Ophir stock only a few dollars below $300 a share, the Nevada legislature elected William Sharon to the United States Senate. When his election had been certified to the federal government, Sharon secretly sold all of his own Ophir stock; he also sold it short. The sale of his large block on the San Francisco Exchange plummeted the Ophir shares to their real value, which was almost nothing. . . .

The Nevada legislature was wiped out, which some people said was little more than it deserved. The $500,000 Sharon had spent to get himself elected he earned back on his short sales. No one got the better of William Sharon.

For the next six years, the man who swindled his way into politics “served” his single term in the Senate. His cronies back in Nevada seethed in anger. It didn’t matter much to Sharon because he was 2,500 miles and a long stage-coach ride away.

He wasn’t done making money in either silver or politics, either. In 1878, Congress passed the Bland-Allison Act at the behest of inflation advocates and silver-state senators like Sharon. He was one of the Act’s most prominent cheerleaders because with his extensive financial interests in silver mines, he stood to profit hugely. Bland-Allison was a blatant subsidy to silver, sold publicly as a monetary measure that would help the country by increasing the money supply. As I wrote in “The Silver Panic”:

The Act provided for the purchase by the Treasury of not less than two, nor more than four, million dollars’ worth of silver bullion per month, to be coined into dollars each containing 371 1/4 grains of pure silver (which coincided with the lawful ratio of 16 to 1, since the gold dollar still contained 23.22 grains of pure gold). These dollars were to be legal tender at their nominal value for all debts and dues, public and private. Paper silver certificates were to be issued upon deposit of the bulky silver dollars in the Treasury.

Get the suckers in government to use taxpayer money to buy your product at a price well above market value. Now that’s cronyism for you! Incidentally, but not surprisingly, Senator Sharon “served” as the chairman of the Committee on Mines and Mining. Try not to laugh.

After his time in the Senate, a very wealthy Senator Sharon moved to San Francisco, where he died four years later at the age of 64 in 1885.

As for all those legislators in Nevada who sent Sharon to the Senate and were burned by him—well, you know what they say about playing with fire.

Originally published at FEE.org on August 8, 2018.

The Spirit of Nellie Bly

On this date—January 25—in 1890, 25-year-old Nellie Bly arrived in New York to great fanfare. She had just become the first woman in history to travel completely around the world. She did it in 72 days, six hours, and 11 minutes—by herself, no less.

Such daring, uncommon people dazzle and amaze me—especially when they defy conventional wisdom, set new records, and show just what a person can do if they put their mind to it. Without the spirit of achievement and enterprise they represent, the world would surely be a dull place. Bly accomplished her record-breaking feat by steamship and train, a journey of about 24,900 miles full of adventures and surprises along the way.

Bly reminds me of another famous jet-setter before jets: Joshua Slocum.[1] He was the first man to circumnavigate the globe alone by sailboat. That was 46,000 miles over a three-year period from 1895–1898. He was 61 when he set sail.

Bly’s Inspiration

The inspiration for Bly’s globetrotting was Phileas Fogg, the lead character in the famous 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. She was out to prove she could get the job done in less time than the fictional Phileas.

In a letter to The New York Times a few days ago,[2] Matthew Goodman, the preeminent authority on Nellie Bly and author of a riveting bestseller about her, reveals that she had a secondary motive, as well:

In taking only a single bag for a trip that lasted nearly three months, Bly was attempting to give the lie to the timeworn notion that a woman could not travel without taking along several pieces of luggage.

In that one small, sturdy leather gripsack she managed to pack an astonishing array of items, including a silk bodice, three veils, a pair of slippers, a toiletry set, an inkstand, pens, paper, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a flask and drinking cup, several changes of underwear and handkerchiefs. Also included was a jar of cold cream to prevent her skin from chapping in the various climates she would encounter.

Goodman’s 2013 biography, Eighty Days, is a masterpiece of historical storytelling. It makes you feel at times that you’re right at Nellie’s side as she races against the clock to meet her objective. Here are some highlights:

This wasn’t Nellie’s first adventure. In 1887 as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World, she pretended insanity to gain admittance to the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in the East River (known today as Roosevelt Island). She “performed” so well that she had the doctors and hospital staff completely fooled. Her own book, Ten Days in a Mad House, exposed the cruelties of the place and led to substantial reforms. She was every bit as good at pretending insanity as Bill Murray was at acting normal in What About Bob?

Nellie first suggested the idea of an around-the-world adventure to her editor in 1888, but he refused to dispatch a woman on such a perilous assignment. A year later, he changed his mind and gave Nellie just two days’ notice to pack her bag and catch a steamship to England. She departed from New York’s harbor on November 14, 1889.

From England, it was on to France, where Nellie met with Jules Verne, who strongly endorsed her mission to prove that a woman could do better than his Phileas Fogg. The countries and British possessions she visited in the following two months were Italy, Egypt, Japan, Aden, Arabia, Ceylon, Singapore, and Hong Kong. One of the few things along the way that disappointed her was the Suez Canal, which impressed her as nothing more than a dirty ditch in the sand.

Nellie didn’t know it until she reached Hong Kong, but another New York newspaper (The Cosmopolitan) had simultaneously dispatched one Elizabeth Bisland to “race” Bly around the world. While Bly went east, Bisland headed west, traveling the US by train and then the Pacific by steamship. Bisland arrived back in New York four days later than Bly, so she ended up more as a footnote than a story.

Readers of The World were offered an impressive prize for whoever could most closely guess when Nellie would arrive back home in New York. The winner was a man named F.W. Stevens, whose guess was a mere 15 seconds off.

Nellie took gold and cash with her but intended to buy food and little else during the journey. She couldn’t run the risk of taking on souvenirs or other “stuff” that might slow her down. She made one big exception, however. In Singapore, she bought an adorable monkey (a macaque) and took her furry friend with her on the rest of the trip.

When she could do so without missing a connection or otherwise losing time, Nellie would send messages back to New York by way of telegraph or underwater cable networks. The World kept its anxious readers informed by publishing them immediately and adding a little hype, as well. Readers were able to learn, for instance, of her brief visit to a leper colony in China within a few days of it.

At age 25, Nellie Bly became a celebrated woman of world renown because of her remarkable undertaking. In The Race Around the World, author Nancy Castaldo notes that a hotel, a racehorse, and a train were named after her, and her face was painted on serving plates. She continued to work as an investigative reporter for The World for many years, becoming the very first female journalist on the Eastern Front of World War I. She died of pneumonia in New York City at the age of 57 in 1922.

Nellie Bly lived life to its fullest. What an experience it would be to sit next to her and listen to the endless, true, and personal stories she could tell! There was nothing boring about this woman.

A quote widely attributed on the internet to simply “Anonymous” reads:

If you never try, you will never know. You will never reach your destination, if you never go. Choose adventure!

Nellie Bly would undoubtedly agree.

Originally published at FEE.org on January 25, 2020.

[1] For more information, see my article “The Entrepreneur as Voyager: The Story of Joshua Slocum”: https://fee.org/articles/the-entrepreneur-as-voyager-the-story-of-joshua-slocum-1/.

[2] The New York Times, January 16, 2020, “What One Woman Packed and Another Woman Thought” by Matthew Goodman: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/books/review/what-one-woman-packed-and-another-woman-thought.html.

Diamond Jim: Gilded-Age Greed or Heart of Gold?

By what criteria should we judge people of the past? Their strengths alone? Only their foibles? No more than a few select moments? Or by the fullness of their lives? Is a horse race over when the starting gun goes off or when the last animal crosses the finish line?

It’s not self-evident by our behavior that everyone could honestly answer these questions in the same way. Rushing to judgment on a small slice of knowledge is a national pastime, and it happens for many reasons: to avoid deep thought, to affirm a preconception or ideology, to signal virtue, or to run with the pack, for example. As an economist and historian, I have often noticed men and women who fancy themselves “intellectuals” leaping to conclusions about an entire economic system based upon the flaws of a few people.

One of the most colorful Americans of the storied Gilded Age—from 1870 to 1910—provides a vivid and classic case in point. His name was James Buchanan Brady (1856–1917), known to history as “Diamond Jim” because he wore precious stones in superabundance. I first heard his name from a history teacher who presented Brady as “typical” of the greedy capitalists and capitalism of his day. According to a New York Times story reporting his death in April 1917,

Mr. Brady began to gather jewels about twenty-five years ago. He had a peculiar fondness for diamonds, but his passion extended to all sorts of precious stones. “My pets,” he often called them. He wore a $9,000 watch and in the handle of an umbrella he had set a jewel worth $1,500. His garter clasps, his suspender buckles, and even his underwear were ornamented with jewels.

To translate 1917 dollars roughly into those of 2020, multiply by 21. So adjusted for inflation, that $9,000 watch would go for about $189,000 today.

Brady wore a different, extensive set of jewelry every day of the month. For each set, he paid about $100,000—meaning that in 2020 dollars, he was decked out in more than $2 million of precious stones each day. The $6,500 he shelled out for a pair of rose diamond eyeglasses for his dog would cost more than $136,000 now. No kidding.

Diamond Jim was no braggart. He didn’t boast of his wealth, but then he didn’t have to; the jewels said it all. Brady biographer Parker Morell writes about Jim’s pride of ownership:

Such a spectacular display may not have been in the best possible taste, but according to Jim’s standards, it was the most beautiful thing in the world. As he said on more than one occasion when his more fastidious friends remonstrated: “You fellers can talk all you like about what’s done and what ain’t. As for me, I’ve always noticed that them that has ’em wears ’em!”

Today, it’s doubtful anybody so gaudily decked out in dozens of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds could safely walk the streets of the Big Apple for long. But Brady never feared thieves or thugs. In a speech to some 800 members of the New York Society of Restaurateurs one year before his death, he praised the safety of the city:

There is no place in this country, or in any other country today, where a man is more safe than he is in one of the restaurants controlled by you gentlemen. I know that, and I know it well, because night after night and morning after morning I have gone to your places with more valuable jewelry on my person than anyone else in the world, and not once have I lost anything or been molested.

Brady’s critics then and now are quick to point out another extravagance, namely, his ravenous passion for food. At the table, it seemed Diamond Jim would eat anything and everything but the table itself. George Rector, who owned a fashionable seafood restaurant in Times Square, absolutely loved to see his bejeweled friend walk in the front door. He famously claimed that Brady was “the best 25 customers I ever had.” In his entertaining biography, Diamond Jim: Prince of the Gilded Age, H. Paul Jeffers writes:

A typical lunch consisted of two lobsters, deviled crabs, clams, oysters, and beef. He finished with several whole pies. Dinner included a couple dozen oysters, six crabs, and bowls of green turtle soup. The main course was likely to be two whole ducks, six or seven lobsters, a sirloin steak, two servings of terrapin, and a variety of vegetables. . . . Because Jim did not partake in alcohol, all this was washed down with carafe after carafe of orange juice.

In his 2009 book, Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York, author William Grimes breathlessly declared that Diamond Jim exemplified “the rich at play” and “the outsized appetites of a gaudy, grasping, exuberant America.” Take one man’s eccentricities, project them onto millions of others, and then leap to a stunning, negative generalization that fits your ideological narrative: That is the rush to judgment I’m complaining about.

If all you knew about Diamond Jim Brady was his jewelry and his appetite, you might think of him as interesting at best, disgustingly grotesque at worst. You might even buy into the superficial perspective of the Gilded Age fault-finders, the ones who make Brady’s habits into a sweeping indictment of everything capitalist. But you would miss so much of this man’s incredible life that your assessment would be more than a little incomplete. It would be grossly unjust and uninformed.

The fullness of Jim Brady’s six decades of life tells us volumes that should lead most fair-minded people to a more favorable view of him. Here’s a sample:

- His was a true rags-to-riches story. Raised in poverty, he grew up brimming with ambition and a tireless work ethic. After a stint as a bellhop, he earned his way through the railroad business—from serving as a clerk to a builder of railroad cars to becoming the best salesman of equipment to railroads the industry has ever known. He proudly, and accurately, claimed that he had never spent a dollar until he had earned it.

- In his spare time he was a savvy investor in stocks and bonds, generating a substantial fortune in those financial instruments. In the process, he encouraged the formation of capital for the building of all kinds of employment-providing, invention-producing enterprises.

- He knew racehorses too. The focus of his equine interests was the track at Saratoga, New York. He paid $30,000 once for a colt named “Accountant” that the experts thought was worth maybe half that. When Accountant won Jim more than $80,000 in one year at Saratoga (1906), he earned the right to crow, “I didn’t know a thing, eh?”

- He was a fun guy to be around, a genuinely nice person and a big tipper. Even that New York Times story on his passing noted, “Personally, he was an exceptionally sweet-tempered man, who would go to the limit for a friend or to help someone in distress.” One of his closest friends, another prominent New York businessman by the name of Fred Housman, said that “Jim Brady was one of the greatest men this country has produced. Not only as a salesman, but as a real man. There never was an appeal made to him for money or clothes by man or woman to which he did not respond.”

- What about all those jewels that critics like to disparage him for? He didn’t take them with him. He generously left them to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. And he was so grateful for the treatment he received once at Johns Hopkins University Hospital that it was that institution to which he bequeathed the bulk of his fortune—several hundred million in the dollars of today. He also left behind many grateful farmers, fishermen, and restaurateurs who hated to see him go.

So on balance, what are we to make of Diamond Jim Brady? Take it or leave it, here’s my assessment:

He certainly had his quirks and eccentricities (who doesn’t?). He spent his money in ways I wouldn’t have. He ate too much and his penchant for jewelry was not my cup of tea. But so what? He didn’t steal. He didn’t mooch. He didn’t demand anything from others that wasn’t owed him. Like the privileged nobles of governments past, he enjoyed the finer things of life with one big difference: He earned it. Being in charge of yourself, making unconventional choices, enjoying in your own way what your efforts and genius produce: Isn’t that what freedom is all about?

Diamond Jim Brady lived large and he was large. At Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn where he now rests in peace, he’s buried in a very large casket. Good for him! Even the casket maker benefited from this fascinating, one-of-a-kind American.

So unless you’re prepared to donate more to a hospital than Diamond Jim Brady gave to Johns Hopkins, don’t judge him too harshly—or anyone else, for that matter, until you know their full story.

For additional information, see:

- “The Legendary Appetite of Diamond Jim Brady” (Ephemeral New York website)

- “The (Mostly) True Legend of ‘Diamond Jim’ Brady” by Brien Bouyea

- “The Sparkling King: Diamond Jim Brady’s Voracious Appetite for Jewels and Grub” by Mara Bovsun

- “‘Diamond Jim’ Brady Dies While Asleep” (New York Times, April 14, 1917)

- Diamond Jim Brady: Prince of the Gilded Age by H. Paul Jeffers

- Diamond Jim: The Life and Times of James Buchanan Brady by Parker Morell

Originally published at FEE.org on September 28, 2020.

The Courage of a Nurse: The Story of Edith Cavell

Nazi Germany forced France to surrender on June 22, 1940. A day later, Adolf Hitler himself toured the conquered capital of Paris, where he personally ordered the destruction of two memorials to heroes from the First World War. Today—December 4, 2019—is the 154th anniversary of the birth of one of them, a remarkable woman named Edith Cavell.

Her story is an example of the age-old tragedy that repeats itself every single minute somewhere in the world: a genuinely good individual whose life is snuffed out by some lousy government for a pointless purpose.

Born in 1865 in Swardeston, England, Edith Cavell was 30 when she chose nursing as a professional career. The inspiration had come to her while caring for her father during a serious illness, from which he recovered. During her training, she worked at several hospitals and later traveled around southeastern England treating patients in their homes for diseases from appendicitis to cancer. She earned a sterling reputation for her attention to detail, a congenial bedside manner and, says one biographer, a “ferocious sense of duty.”

At the insistence of a surgeon in Brussels, she went to Belgium in 1907 and became instrumental in the founding of Belgium’s first school of nursing. According to Kathy Warnes of the website Windows to World History, Cavell was soon training aspiring nurses for three hospitals, 24 schools, and 13 kindergartens in Belgium. She became the first matron of the Berkendael Institute in Brussels.

“The War to End All Wars”

Then, the guns of August 1914 heralded the beginning of World War I. It was supposed to be “the war to end all wars,” the conflict that would “make the world safe for democracy.” It would prove to be, of course, nothing of the sort. It was one of the most senseless and destructive conflicts ever started by fools with political power. As I wrote in an essay about another hero of the time,[1] Siegfried Sassoon,

More than a century after its end, World War I remains an enigma to people everywhere. We take history courses and still ask, “What was it all about?” or “What could possibly have justified the unimaginable slaughter and devastation it caused?”

Its main result was to make inevitable an even deadlier conflagration a quarter-century later. Perhaps few adventures in history were more absurd in origin, outrageous in duration, and counterproductive in their consequences than the one that began when an obscure, royal Austrian oddball was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914. . . .

One of every eight British men who served on the western front in World War I died in the trenches or in the ghastly death zones that separated them. Casualties—the wounded in addition to the killed—totaled a staggering 56 percent.

Though it was the first war in which disease claimed fewer men than combat, that may not be due to medical advances as much as to the ruthless precision of machine guns and shell fire and the endless, violent gridlock of trench warfare.

When Germany occupied Belgium in the fall of 1914, the Kaiser’s troops allowed Cavell, a citizen of an enemy country (England), to stay in charge of her Institute but they kept their eyes on her as she treated combatants from both sides in the hospital and training school.

Smuggling Soldiers

Who could find fault with Cavell if she had chosen to flee for home in England? A testimony to her courage, she not only remained, she joined the Belgian Underground at the first invitation. Her new mission was to rescue Allied soldiers separated from their units. In Silent in an Evil Time: The Brave War of Edith Cavell, Jack Batten writes that for the next nine months, she

sheltered escaping soldiers in her hospital, using trickery to keep the suspicious Germans from discovering them. She helped arrange a secret route to neutral Holland and back to England at great personal risk, enabling soldiers of all ranks to slip through German lines. Using the institute as part of an elaborate Allied escape route, Edith Cavell was responsible for one thousand soldiers eventually making their way home.

Catherine Butcher’s 2015 biography, Edith Cavell: Faith Before the Firing Squad, reports that Brussels at the time was teeming with an estimated 6,000 German spies. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Cavell’s activities were uncovered. More than once, she narrowly escaped capture. Butcher writes,

Edith was always on the lookout, ready to respond if the secret police visited the hospital. She hid Charlie Scott, a Norfolk-born soldier, in a barrel one night when the Germans sprang a surprise search on them. Once he was inside the barrel, she tipped apples on top of him so he would not be found.

German suspicions led to Cavell’s arrest on August 3, 1915. Accused of treason, she was court-martialed, found guilty, and sentenced to death by firing squad.

Without Fear and Without Hate

Among the notes she wrote while incarcerated was a September 14 letter to a group of nurses, thanking them for flowers they had sent to the jail. She ended it with these words:

In everything one can learn new lessons of life, and if you were in my place you would realize how precious liberty is and would certainly undertake never to abuse it. To be a good nurse one must have lots of patience; here, one learns to have that quality, I assure you.

At her subsequent trial, the prosecution posed only a dozen questions. From the first, she answered truthfully and boldly. Yes, she had helped hundreds to escape and she was proud of it. When asked if she realized what she was doing was “to the disadvantage of Germany,” she bravely replied that her preoccupation was “to help the men who applied to me to reach the frontier; once across, they were free.”

At dawn on October 12, at the age of 49, she “met her fate with fortitude and without the slightest sign of fear.”

She had told her chaplain the night before, “Standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone.” That would be a tall order for any mortal in a similar situation, but Cavell was a woman of profound faith and confidence.

At the time, the word of Cavell’s execution produced worldwide outrage. She was seen as a brave martyr, a gentle hero amid the carnage of savage warfare. Brits and Belgians rallied around her name and vowed to keep her memory alive. In 1939, a film about her starring Anna Neagle and George Sanders appeared to worldwide acclaim.[2] You can now understand why just a year later, Hitler sought to erase her from history by destroying a monument.

Today, however, Edith Cavell is commemorated in many ways and places—in her native Britain and well as on the Continent. My personal favorite is the stunning statue of her next to St. Martin’s-in-the-Field Church in London’s Trafalgar Square. The plinth is emblazoned with her name and those words she spoke to her chaplain. This five-foot-three woman of slight build, brown hair, and gray eyes towers over the street her image surveys.

Putting one’s own life on the line in defiance of earthly power—especially in the defense of the lives and freedoms of others—is a powerful inspiration. I am grateful for it and hopeful that if ever I found myself in circumstances similar to those of Edith Cavell in 1915, I could muster even half the courage that she did.

Originally published at FEE.org on December 4, 2019.

[1] See my essay “Siegfried Sassoon: Conscience on and off the Battlefield”: https://fee.org/articles/antiwar-hero/.

[2] The film “Nurse Edith Cavell” (1939) directed by Herbert Wilcox.

Cal and the Big Cal-Amity

I washed my car this morning and it rained this afternoon. Therefore, washing cars causes rain.

So-called “progressives” tell us that Calvin Coolidge was a bad president because the Great Depression started just months after he left office.

This is precisely the same, lame argument expressed in two different contexts.

In five years (August 2023), we will mark the 100th anniversary of the day that Silent Cal became America’s 30th President. I intend to celebrate it along with others who believe in small government, but you can bet there’ll be plenty of progressives trying to rain on our parade. So let’s get those umbrellas ready.

Let’s remember that the eight years of Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) were economically disastrous. Taxes soared, the dollar plummeted, and the economy soured. A sharp, corrective recession in 1921 ended quickly because the new Harding-Coolidge administration responded to it by reducing the burden of government. When Harding died suddenly in 1923, Coolidge became President and for the next six years, America enjoyed the unprecedented growth of “the Roaring ’20s.” Historian Burton Folsom elaborates:

One measure of prosperity is the misery index, which combines unemployment and inflation. During Coolidge’s six years as president, his misery index was 4.3 percent—the lowest of any president during the twentieth century. Unemployment, which had stood at 11.7 percent in 1921, was slashed to 3.3 percent from 1923 to 1929. What’s more, [Coolidge’s Treasury Secretary] Andrew Mellon was correct on the effects of the tax-rate cuts—revenue from income taxes steadily increased from $719 million in 1921 to over $1 billion by 1929. Finally, the United States had budget surpluses every year of Coolidge’s presidency, which cut about one-fourth of the national debt.[1]

That’s a record “progressives” can only dream about but never deliver. Yet when they rank US presidents, Coolidge gets the shaft. If you can get your hands on a copy of the out-of-print 1983 book, Coolidge and the Historians by Thomas Silver, buy it! You’ll be delighted at what Coolidge actually said, and simultaneously incensed at the shameless distortions of his words at the hands of progressives like Arthur Schlesinger.

Coolidge could have run for another four-year term in 1928 (and surely would have won) but he declined and retired from politics. His Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, won the presidency that year and assumed office in March 1929. The stock market collapsed in October and a recession gave way to full-scale depression in the summer of 1930.

Should Coolidge get any of the blame for the Great Depression? The Federal Reserve’s expansion of money and credit in the 1920s certainly set the country up for at least a mild fall, but that wasn’t Coolidge’s fault. He saw the Fed as the “independent” entity it was supposed to be and didn’t meddle with it. At least once he expressed concern that the Fed might be fostering a bubble but he otherwise didn’t make a stink about it. “Not my bailiwick,” he believed.

We can legitimately say that Coolidge should have criticized the Fed’s easy money policy more loudly. But if he had, it’s not likely that it would have made much difference over at the Fed.

In any event, far worse than the Fed’s inflation was its deflation, which didn’t begin in earnest until the final weeks of the Coolidge administration. After years of depressing interest rates artificially with easy money, the Fed by early 1929 was jacking them up and choking off money and credit. It continued to do so by either deliberate intent or actual effect for the next three years.

Every good economist concedes that erratic monetary policy at the Fed was at least a minor cause of the 1920s boom and surely a major cause of the 1930s bust. You can’t blame that on Coolidge. You should point the figure at the monetary “central planners” that progressives empowered and told the rest of us we could put our trust in.

Even six months after the October 1929 stock market crash, the economy wasn’t yet in a deep funk. Markets were, in fact, making a comeback in the spring of 1930 and unemployment had not yet hit double digits. Not until June 1930, when Congress and President Hoover raised tariffs and triggered an international trade war, did recession cascade into depression. Two years later, they flattened just about everybody who was still standing by doubling the income tax.

In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt beat Hoover on a platform promising less government, not more. He then delivered just the opposite when he got to the White House. His absurd interventions kept the economy in depression for another seven years. The painful details are all in my essay, Great Myths of the Great Depression.

Coolidge takes heat from progressives because any other stance ruins their narrative and undermines their agenda. Silent Cal practiced small government. Progressives can’t admit that small government works or that big government doesn’t, so guess who they vilify and who they praise? Small-government Coolidge delivers prosperity and he’s the villain. The statist Roosevelt prolongs the Depression but he’s the savior. The high tax/high tariff/big spending Hoover is dismissed as another Coolidge-style laissez faire advocate, though he was nothing of the sort.

When Coolidge left office in March 1929, the federal budget was smaller than it was six years earlier. Knowing that fact is key to understanding why progressives either ignore him or smear him but never rank him high.

Our 30th President, it turns out, was infinitely smarter and more honest than an awful lot of progressives. Of solid personal character, this frugal New Englander grew up respecting the hard-earned property of others. He believed that the strength of America was not in its politicians and bureaucrats. Once, as Governor of Massachusetts, he asserted,

In a free republic a great government is the product of a great people. They will look to themselves rather than government for success. The destiny, the greatness, of America lies around the hearthstone. . . Look well to the hearthstone; therein all hope for America lies.

Progressives don’t like Calvin Coolidge because they know it wasn’t the government’s hearthstone he was talking about. It’s as simple as that, so don’t get suckered by the false claim that he or his policies produced calamities. Get to know this good man by reading the truth about him, such as you’ll find in this fine essay by another Cal (Cal Thomas).[2]

Calvin Coolidge. The Great Depression. Association is not causation. Not even close.

Originally published at FEE.org on July 25, 2018.

[1] “Andrew Mellon: The Entrepreneur as Politician” by Burton W. Folsom: https://fee.org/articles/andrew-mellon-the-entrepreneur-as-politician/.

[2] See “Silent Cal Speaks: Why Calvin Coolidge is the Model for Conservative Leadership Today” by Cal Thomas at The Heritage Foundation’s website: https://www.heritage.org/political-process/report/silent-cal-speaks-why-calvin-coolidge-the-model-conservative-leadership.

Milton Hershey Showed that Persistence Is Key to Success

What’s your favorite candy bar?

When I was asked that question, I had to think about it for a moment because I like a lot of them. However, there’s one that I consume far more of than any other so I decided that one must be my favorite: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, marketed by the famous Hershey Company. The firm is one of the largest and most successful chocolate manufacturers on the planet today (about $8 billion in sales in 2019), though it’s worth noting that its founder tasted failure before he ever enjoyed the flavor of success.

Hershey’s History

Milton S. Hershey’s story began in southeastern Pennsylvania and you can’t do it justice without noting the impact of business failure on his early life. Even before any of his own businesses flopped, Milton had a front-row seat to his father Henry’s seemingly endless entrepreneurial misfires.

Hershey family biographers figure Henry to have been an affable man, not nasty or violent in any way, but a dreamer who never could translate his visions into a bottom line with a positive number. To little avail, he chased after investments and businesses of a stunning variety. Here’s a partial list of the ventures in which he lost money from Pennsylvania to Colorado: a perpetual motion machine, oil wells, farming, farm equipment, cough drops, cabinetry, silver, livestock remedies, picture-painting, and second-hand junk dealing.

On one unfortunate occasion, Henry filled a basement with canned tomatoes, intending to sell them but they fermented and exploded. The police caught him dumping the mess without a permit and forced him to clean it up and dump it someplace else. Henry wanted to get rich quick, but only got poorer even quicker—until in his twilight years his far more accomplished son was able to bail him out.

Hershey’s Persistence

Still, I admire Henry for doing what the old adage instructs: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again.” He possessed in bushels at least one trait Milton inherited from him: persistence. America’s 30th president, Calvin Coolidge, had a few good words to say about that:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On!’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Henry Hershey’s persistence never paid off for himself, but it ultimately did for his son. To Milton’s credit, he never let his own failures or those of his father slow him down. The rest of us have enjoyed of a few billion pounds of chocolate as a pleasant consequence.

In 1872 at age 14, Milton took a job at Royer’s Ice Cream Parlor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After a short period, he convinced the owner to move him from the ice cream section into the candy side of the business. It made him a life-long confectioner.

Milton took what he learned from Mr. Royer’s shop and set off at age 19 for Philadelphia, where he aimed to cater to the huge crowds attending the country’s Centennial Exhibition. There he started his first company, Spring Garden Confectionary Works, and sold taffy to many a happy customer. He loved to experiment with candy recipes and soon came up with a soft, chewy caramel that proved to be a big hit. Things went well for the company for a while, even after the Exhibition ended, but Milton increasingly found it hard to deal with emerging competition and keep his costs under control. In the year he turned 24, the Spring Garden Confectionary Works went belly-up.

Next stop was Colorado, where Milton’s dad Henry was in the midst of a flop in the silver business. The two of them teamed up and then headed to Chicago, where they opened a candy shop they abandoned after a few months’ struggle. Milton decided to try his luck in New York but not before stopping in Lancaster long enough to borrow some money from relatives. Henry opted to stay behind and try something else.

“If failure is the best instructor,” writes biographer Michael D’Antonio, young Milton Hershey “could argue that he had earned a doctorate in Philadelphia, Denver, and New York.” Why D’Antonio didn’t include Chicago in there, I don’t know. In any event, Milton’s New York adventure ended in 1886 just as the ones in the other cities did—in bankruptcy. Penniless and now approaching 30 years of age, he went back to Lancaster where he first learned to make candy a decade and a half before.

Some people in the same predicament might have given up, changed professions, or simply found a job working for somebody else. Not Milton Hershey. He was determined to be the success his father wasn’t, and in the one business he loved more than any other. His own relatives gave up on him and turned him down for another loan. But he formed a new enterprise nonetheless—the Lancaster Caramel Company—and prepared to give it whirl.

This time, Milton got it right. He had learned much from his earlier mistakes. His exceptional caramels took off. D’Antonio writes,

Hershey spent days at his kettles, tinkering with the caramels. He added nuts to some, and covered others with sugar icing. He found that a little corn syrup. . . improved the “chew.” Gradually, he added new premium brands—named Lotus, Paradox, and Cocoanut Ices. . . For less wealthy customers he produced Uniques, which were made with skim milk and priced at eight for a penny.

Milton and his company prospered quickly. He became a prominent and respected Pennsylvania businessman, employing hundreds of people by the time of the Columbian Exposition (or “World’s Fair”) in Chicago in 1893. That’s when Milton, attending the fair, visited a German company’s extensive chocolate exhibit equipped with a small factory that transformed cocoa beans into candy bars.

Hershey’s Reflections

Chocolate at the time was a rich man’s luxury, unaffordable to the average American. So smitten with it was Milton that when the Exposition closed, he arranged to buy the entire exhibit, factory and all. He had made his money in caramels but decided in Chicago that caramel was a passing fad. The future was in chocolate. For the little town of Derry Church, where he opened his first chocolate factory in 1894, that proved to be an understatement. The town was renamed and has been known ever since as Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Milton never again worried about bankruptcy. He and his wife founded a famous school for orphan boys, now one of the richest schools in the world because of the endowment they bequeathed it. Milton died in 1945 at the age of 86, beloved by the citizens of Hershey, PA and legions of chocolate lovers in some 70 countries. He was to chocolate was Henry Ford was to automobiles and Steve Jobs was to computers: He revolutionized a luxury for the few into a treat for the masses.

Reflecting late in his life on the success that eluded him in his earliest days, Milton offered these observations:

I didn’t follow the policies of those already in the business. If I had, I would never have made a go of it. Instead, I started out with the determination to make a better nickel chocolate bar than any of my competitors made, and I did so.

I believed that, if I put a chocolate on the market that was better than anyone else was making, or was likely to make, and keep it absolutely uniform in quality, the time would come when the public would appreciate it and buy it.

Business is a matter of human service.

About those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, there’s something else I should tell you. Among Milton Hershey’s many candy innovations, that wasn’t one of them. They were the creation of a former dairy farmer named H.B. Reese who actually worked for Milton for a time, then left the Hershey Company in 1923 to start his own candy business in his basement. His peanut butter cups were so popular that he eventually abandoned his other products and focused on them exclusively. When H.B. died in 1956, his six sons took over the company and merged it seven years later with the Hershey Company, where it remains a delectable subsidiary to this day.

I hope this glimpse into the Hershey story inspires the reader to more than just another chocolate bar. If it encourages you to learn more about the importance of persistence in the face of failure, that would please me immensely. Toward that end, I’ve included links to a number of excellent articles on that very topic, below.

Thank you, Milton Hershey, for never giving up! You finally made it to the top, hurt no one along the way, and benefited the world more than all but a few of your fellow citizens. Henry would be VERY proud!

For additional information, see:

- “Failure Made Disney Great” by Lawrence W. Reed

- “The Bright Side of Failure” by Walter Block and Matthew Ragan

- “Failing Well is the Key to Success” by Brittany Hunter

- “The Only Failure We Have to Fear is the Fear of Failure” by Dwight R. Lee and Richard B. Mackenzie

- “The Success of Failure” by Thomas W. Hazlett

- “The Rise and Fall of the Edsel” by Anthony Young

- Hershey: Milton S. Hershey’s Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams by Michael D’Antonio

- Built on Chocolate: The Story of the Hershey Chocolate Company by James D. McMahon

- Milton Hershey and the Chocolate Industry by Katie Kawa

Originally published at FEE.org on May 10, 2020.

How a German Housewife Fed Up With Grounds in Her Coffee Revolutionized the Famous Drink

Sipping more coffee these days? Laboring at home and traveling less, I find myself more frequently appreciating a good brew, as well as an invention that is to coffee what the slicing machine is to bread. I’m referring not to a burr grinder or a French press or a Keurig machine, but to the lowly paper filter invented just 112 years ago.

More on the filter and its female inventor in a moment. First, some interesting coffee facts I learned from personal experience or during research for this article.

The Evolution of Coffee

In the last 500 years, coffee went from an exotic libation confined to east Africa to as universal a beverage as there is, aside from water itself. According to historian Jonathan Morris in his Coffee: A Global History,

Coffee is a global beverage. It is grown commercially on four continents, and consumed enthusiastically in all seven: Antarctic scientists love their coffee. There is even an Italian espresso machine on the International Space Station.

I’ve been drinking coffee since 1982, but until a visit to Taiwan about five years ago, nothing else had eaten the beans before they became the grounds that made all the brown stimulant I drank.

It was in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei that I tried my first cup of coffee made from the droppings of civets, a tropical forest cat. The animal first eats the coffee cherries that fall to the ground, then excretes the beans—a truly “natural” de-pulping process. I couldn’t discern any special taste to the costly concoction, but I brought some home anyway just to introduce it to others. A long-time friend in Fuzhou, China still emails me from time to time and asks me if I’ve had any “sh*tty coffee” lately.

Coffee was likely first cultivated in Ethiopia in the 14th century but a hundred years later, the epicenter of the coffee trade moved to Yemen, which then dominated the business for at least 200 years.

If you like a little chocolate mixed with your coffee, in what we today call a café mocha or a mochaccino, you’re drinking something whose name came from the city of Mocha in modern Yemen. From the late 15th century to the early 18th, Mocha was the world’s leading port from which coffee was dispatched. By ship it traveled to cities throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean and east Africa.

The first coffee houses in Istanbul opened in 1554 and within 40 years, their number reached 600. They attracted people who enjoyed the drink while gossiping against the regime. Scorning the coffee houses as dens of subversive iniquity, Sultan Murad IV ordered them all closed in Istanbul in 1633 and throughout the Ottoman Empire shortly thereafter. Just like America’s prohibition of alcohol three centuries later, this one simply drove coffee drinking underground until the government surrendered a few years later.

By the 1780s, an astonishing 80 percent of the world’s coffee poured forth from Caribbean islands, and most of that from what is now the Dominican Republic. It wasn’t until the 19th century that Brazil emerged as a major producer, followed by Colombia and the Central American states.

The Coffee-Sugar War

A fascinating but brief coffee-sugar war erupted between 1897 and 1903. The principal figures involved were the American entrepreneurs Henry Osborne Havemeyer of American Sugar Refining Company and John Arbuckle of the giant coffee firm, Arbuckle Brothers. When Arbuckle decided to challenge Havemeyer by entering the sugar market, Havemeyer retaliated by muscling in on the coffee business.

The result was a price war from which both sugar and coffee consumers greatly benefited, but which yielded millions of dollars in losses for the two companies. It’s one of many failures of that great bogeyman theory, predatory price cutting.[1]

It may come as a surprise but it’s the natural oils in coffee to which we owe the entirety of its glorious taste. As Antony Wild explains in Coffee: A Dark History,

Most coffee oils are immensely complex and have foiled the best efforts of scientists to simulate them adequately, which explains why artificial coffee flavoring is without exception of a poor standard. Although these oils constitute less than 3 percent of the end product by weight, without their presence coffee would neither smell nor taste of anything. In effect, 97 percent of the coffee one buys by weight is tasteless, baked vegetable matter and caffeine, which is unaffected by the roasting process and constitutes between 3 and 6 percent of the final weight of the coffee.

Until the early 20th century, all the major names associated with coffee were those of men—from sultans to shippers to industrialists. Then along came a diminutive housewife in Dresden, Germany named Melitta Bentz. In classic entrepreneurial fashion, she was alert to a problem, solved it, then took the risk of creating a company to market her invention, and succeeded.

Melitta’s Contribution

Melitta Bentz was 35 in 1908 and frustrated with grounds in her coffee. It was a common complaint but one the rest of the world seemed willing to tolerate. Percolators of the day over-brewed coffee at the expense of its taste, imparting an annoying bitter flavor. Linen rags would retain the grounds but were messy and required frequent cleaning. Surely, something else could provide an appealing compromise, she thought, and be quicker, easier and cleaner.

She experimented with several materials. She wasn’t satisfied with any of them until she grabbed some blotting paper from her son’s school book, punctured it multiple times with a nail, put it in a brass pot she filled with coffee grounds, then poured hot water over it. Bingo! No bitterness, no grounds! It was an instant hit with her friends, switching on the proverbial light in Melitta’s entrepreneurial brain.

Melitta was granted a patent for her filter in July 1908 and within months, her company was up and running with its initial four employees: Melitta herself plus her husband Hugo and sons Willy and Horst. Producing filters at first within their home, they sold more than a thousand of them at the Leipzig Fair in 1909. Demand for the simple, newfangled invention exploded thereafter. In 1936, Melitta improvised her original design and turned her filter into the now-famous cone shape with which we are all familiar.

Melitta’s Legacy

Production of the filters was paused briefly by World Wars I and II but surged again afterwards in each case. But for those interruptions, the family-owned business flourished for decades, even after Melitta’s death in 1950. Today it employs thousands in Germany, Florida and New Jersey. A belated obituary in The New York Times in 2015 quoted a company spokesperson as saying,

Most Melitta locations still have a photograph of her on the wall. Every employee knows Melitta Bentz and her exceptional role as the mother of the corporation.

I don’t know if the millions of coffee filters sold by her company made Melitta Bentz rich or not. I’m guessing she might well have made it into the income category some envious people disparagingly label as “the one-percent.” If so, that would actually make my coffee taste even better.

Melitta Bentz is an important figure in the storied history of one of the world’s most popular beverages. She came up with a better idea. She possessed the courage to invest in it. She earned the willing patronage of millions of happy customers. She employed thousands of people. She hurt no one in the process; indeed, she left the world in a small way better than when she found it.

Not bad for a housewife from Dresden.

For additional information, see:

- “The Predatory Bogeyman” by Lawrence W. Reed

- Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed the World by Mark Pendergrast

- Coffee: A Global History by Jonathan Morris

- Coffee: A Dark History by Antony Wild

- A Rich and Tantalizing Brew: A History of How Coffee Connected the World by Jeannette M. Fregulia

- “Overlooked No More: Melitta Bentz, Who Invented the Coffee Filter” by Claire Moses

- “Melitta Bentz, Beating the Grinds”—A 4-Minute Video

Originally published at FEE.org on April 9, 2020.

[1] For even more information, see “John Arbuckle: Entrepreneur, Trust Buster, Humanitarian” by Clayton A. Coppin: https://fee.org/articles/john-arbuckle-entrepreneur-trust-buster-humanitarian/.

Rube Foster: “The Father of Black Baseball”

Each one of my favorite baseball personalities of all time—Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente—is widely remembered for both athletic prowess and sterling character.

Robinson endured slings and arrows when his 1947 hiring by the Brooklyn Dodgers began the integration of the major leagues. In his first year, he led the Dodgers to the National League championship. Black and Puerto Rican by birth, Clemente was a Pittsburgh Pirate who transcended race, nationality, and culture to become the game’s first Latino superstar.

The Negro National League

But have you ever heard of Rube Foster? Few Americans today ever have. I can think of no better time than Black History Month (February) and today (February 13) to rectify that. On this date exactly 100 years ago—February 13, 1920—Andrew “Rube” Foster founded and became the first president of the now-largely-forgotten Negro National League (NNL). It was the first black baseball network to last more than a single season, surviving for 11 years and composed of 24 teams from Kansas City to Pittsburgh to Birmingham.

Starting the NNL is one of many reasons Foster is regarded as “the Father of Black Baseball.” He achieved acclaim for multiple talents in the sport—as a player, as an owner, and as a manager. When he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, more than 50 years after his death in 1930, he was lauded as one of the best black pitchers of all time. He also founded and managed the most successful black team of the pre-integration era, the Chicago American Giants. A century ago, Americans of all colors and creeds from coast to coast knew his name and admired him.

What Foster did was all the more remarkable considering the interracial temper of the times. Prejudice and segregation, even in northern states, were mainstream in 1920. The president of the United States, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, was himself a racist, and one who harbored a pro-eugenics view common to “progressives” at the time. Wilson promoted segregation throughout the federal government and once expelled a delegation of black civil rights leaders from the White House.[1] He was an awful president for many other reasons, too.[2]

Foster’s Rise to Fame

Foster’s achievements were not the result of wealth. He was born in poverty in a small Texas town in 1879. His father was a pastor in a local AME (American Methodist Episcopal) Church. Young Andrew worked hard at everything he did, including the sport of baseball, which he loved from an early age. He was 18 in 1897 when he signed on to the Waco Yellow Jackets. He pitched so powerfully that he quickly earned a fan base among blacks and whites alike, leading to his recruitment by teams in Michigan, then Illinois and Pennsylvania. He struck out batters by the dozens. It was his talent and determination that made him a few bucks, not the other way around.

While pitching for the Giants of Philadelphia in 1905, young Foster attracted high praise from local fans and media. In his excellent biography, Rube Foster in His Time: On the Field and in the Papers with Black Baseball’s Greatest Visionary, author Larry Lester reports:

On August 22, 1905, Foster pitched his fifth no-hitter, this one against the Camden (NJ) club. . . Soon after, the Philadelphia Telegraph wrote, “If Andrew Foster had not been born with a dark skin, the great pitcher would wear an American or National League uniform. . . Foster has never been equaled in a pitcher’s box. Out of 49 games pitched this season he has won 45. . .” The Indianapolis Freeman echoed the sentiment, adding that “Andrew Foster deserves every word of praise ever said of him. He is undoubtedly among the very best pitchers that America affords.”

Not even a broken leg in 1909 could slow Foster down for very long. He went on to create his own team in 1911, the Chicago American Giants. He continued to play the game, as well, pitching until 1917. He simultaneously gained a superb reputation as a manager and team owner. One biographer notes that “he asserted control over every aspect of the game, and set a high standard for personal conduct, appearance, and professionalism among his players.” Four years in a row, his team won the western black baseball championship.

White players had enjoyed the support of leagues from the time the National League was founded in 1876. The American League came along in 1901. Both employed the unwritten “color bar” that prevented teams from hiring blacks until Branch Rickey hired Jackie Robinson in that pathbreaking decision of 1947. So if black baseball players were to have a league that could establish some uniform rules, coax new teams into existence, and promote the sport, they would have to start one of their own.

The first two decades of the 20th century produced several aborted attempts to create a league of black baseball teams. None lasted more than a season, failing financially because they were either undercapitalized or they underestimated such expenses as transporting teams around the country. The dream of a successful league for black teams, however, didn’t die. It was Rube Foster who finally made it happen in 1920. He managed the new National Negro League until ill health sidelined him in 1926. He died in 1930 at the age of 51.

Rube Foster longed for the day when whites and blacks would play baseball side-by-side on the same teams and for the same leagues. If he could join his fellow Americans today at almost any baseball game, he would surely be proud that the day he hoped for finally did arrive.

For additional information, see:

- “The Cost of Segregation to the Detroit Tigers” by Burton W. Folsom

- The Silver Trumpet of Freedom: Black Emancipators and Entrepreneurs, edited by Lawrence W. Reed

- Rube Foster at the National Baseball Hall of Fame

- The Negro Leagues, 1869–1960 by Leslie A. Heaphy

- Invisible Men: Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues by Donn Rogosin

Originally published at FEE.org on February 13, 2020.

[1] For more information, see “The Racist Legacy of Woodrow Wilson” by Dick Lehr: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/wilson-legacy-racism/417549/.

[2] See my article “Beware of Years That End in 13”: https://fee.org/articles/beware-of-years-that-end-in-13/.

The Uncommon Life of Bessie Coleman

How many times have we heard praises sung for “the common man” or “the common woman”? Far more than I can count, and it bothers me every time the phrase comes up. Why? Because it is not the common to which we owe our highest gratitude. That honor belongs to the uncommon.

Imagine a parent advising a child, “Work hard and some day you might become common!” or “Never let your aspirations rise above commonness!” or “Don’t be different, just blend in with the crowd.” I would pity a child raised in a home of such low aspirations. What a bore humanity would be if no one were uncommonly good or uniquely talented or singularly inspirational or unusually courageous.

In studying history, my attention is drawn to uncommon people, those who do extraordinary things that raise our standards and leave the world a better place. I have no interest in leveling their spirits or accomplishments until they are no higher than average. I leave that nasty business, which has become all too common today, to others.

I recently learned of another inspiring non-commoner and I’m eager to tell you about her right here. Her name was Bessie Coleman.[1]

She was born in Atlanta, Texas in 1892 but when she was two, the Coleman clan moved to Waxahachie, Texas where Bessie grew up as one of 13 children in a poor family of cotton sharecroppers. Her mother was African American; her father was part African American and part Native American (either Cherokee or Choctaw). A century ago, being both poor and of minority blood presented you with significant obstacles just about anywhere in the world. You could sulk, complain, or get mad—or you could do what Bessie Coleman did. She overcame barriers with spunk and ambition. She made something of herself.

Bessie aimed high from an early age. She studied hard, read all she could, and dreamed big. She left rural Texas and the dirt-floor cabin of her birth and headed to Chicago in 1915 at the age of 23. While working in a barber shop there, she learned of people flying airplanes in war-torn Europe. She set her sights on becoming a pilot, which meant she would have to go to France to take lessons. All the pilots in America then were white men, and none had any interest in teaching a black woman how to fly.

She worked two jobs. She saved every penny she could. She even learned French in a Berlitz language school. By 1920, Bessie Coleman was ready for Paris. In less than a year, she was the world’s first black woman and its first Native American to earn an aviation pilot’s license.

Returning to America, she became a sensation as a barnstorming stunt flyer and a huge attraction for air shows all over the country. For five years as the world’s greatest female civil aviator, she earned the cheers of large crowds thrilled by her daredevil flying.

Biographer Connie Plantz writes,

Every loop-the-loop, barrel roll, and figure eight showed the audience on the ground that an African American could fly a plane. As Bessie Coleman zipped through the sky, her message was as clear as skywriting: Don’t be afraid to take risks. Fly!

Racial discrimination always bothered Bessie. Once she became a famous figure, she used her status to strike at it. She steadfastly refused to participate in any events that prohibited African Americans from attending. Any air show that discriminated paid a high price: They would not get one of the biggest star attractions in the circuit. On another occasion, a movie company flew her to New York to appear in a film called Shadow and Sunshine. When she realized they wanted her in a role that accentuated old stereotypes about blacks, she literally walked off the set.

Tragedy brought Bessie Coleman’s amazing career to an abrupt and early end. In Jacksonville, Florida in April 1926, she was thrown from her plane when it nosedived. She was only 34.

In her book, Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator, Doris L. Rich reveals that at the flyer’s funeral in Jacksonville, “More than 5,000 attended the service, among them hundreds of schoolchildren who had heard Bessie speak the day before she was killed.” Three days later when her body arrived in Chicago, another 10,000 filed past her coffin. The next day, five thousand more packed the church for the final service before burial.

Though she did not live long enough to realize her dream of creating a school for black aviators, she inspired countless people precisely because she was so uncommon.

God bless Bessie Coleman, a hero for all people and for all time.

For additional information, see:

- The Life of Bessie Coleman by Connie Plantz

- Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator, by Doris L. Rich

- Fly High: The Story of Bessie Coleman by Louise Borden

- The Legend: The Bessie Coleman Story (video)

Originally published at FEE.org on October 12, 2020.

[1] For more information, see “Bessie Coleman (1892–1926)” by Kerri Lee Alexander: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/bessie-coleman.

Ralph Lazo, the Man Who Voluntarily Lived in an Internment Camp

The last New York Times editorial that made economic sense to me was headlined “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.” It was January 14, 1987.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the editorial writer discovered that the minimum wage isn’t the only thing that can lose your job for you.

However, I find at least the obituaries in The Times to be frequently fascinating and factual, which is why I post them on my Facebook page from time to time. One that ran in the newspaper on July 3, 2019, riveted my attention. It prompted me to learn some fascinating history from our own website, FEE.org.

Lazo’s Journey to the Internment Camp

The deceased, a man named Ralph Lazo, died more than 27 years before—in January 1992 at the age of 67. His belated obituary was part of the paper’s ongoing “Overlooked No More” series in which people who didn’t get the attention they deserved when they died are now given some recognition. The headline read, “Ralph Lazo, Who Voluntarily Lived in an Internment Camp.”

Voluntarily lived in an internment camp? Who in the world would choose to do such a thing and why? You should read the obit by Veronica Majerol in full yourself,[1] but I’ll summarize it for you here:

Ralph Lazo, a Mexican-American from southern California, was 17 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He had grown up around many youngsters of Japanese ancestry and counted some of them as his best friends. When he saw them rounded up by the US government to be shipped off to desert camps, he went with them. He thereby became “the only known person to pretend to be Japanese so he could be willingly interned.”

Majerol writes:

What compelled Lazo to give up his freedom for two and a half years—sleeping in tar-paper-covered barracks, using open latrines and showers and waiting in long lines for meals in mess halls, on grounds surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and watched by guards in towers? He wanted to be with his friends.

Irrational National Security Concerns

The internment of almost 120,000 Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor remains one of the blackest marks against the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the same man who snubbed Olympic medalist Jesse Owens because Owens was black. It flew in the face of the very report Roosevelt commissioned from his State Department’s Special Representative, Curtis B. Munson, who told the president that Japanese Americans were loyal and posed no threat. “There is no Japanese ‘problem’ on the Coast,” wrote Munson. “There is far more danger from Communists and people of the [Harry] Bridges type on the Coast than there is from Japanese.”

Archived on FEE.org are tens of thousands of articles (as well as hundreds of videos, eBooks, and online courses) representing more than 60 years of content—all free and easily accessible. When I read the Lazo obituary, I wondered what we had published on the subject of “Japanese internment.” So I popped those two terms into the search engine, and three particularly good pieces came up instantly.

In July 1995, FEE published “Special Interests and the Internment of Japanese-Americans During World War II” by Melody Hill and Steven Caudill of Auburn University. The authors explained that, as the Munson report’s findings would suggest, concerns for national security were neither valid nor were they the main reason for FDR’s infamous Executive Order 9066 of February 19, 1942. They note that “no mass detainment of people of Japanese ancestry occurred in Hawaii,” which was, of course, not yet a state but far closer to Japan than California and home to even larger numbers of Japanese.

Special Interests at Play

So why the mass internment in California? Hill and Caudill offered this startling explanation:

The answer: special-interest groups seeking protection from the competition of Japanese and Japanese-Americans residing on the West Coast. Labor unions and farmers wanted the Japanese out of California and off the land long before the attack on Pearl Harbor. World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor provided a handy opportunity for these groups to complete a task that they started several years earlier.

What follows in the Hill/Caudill article is a shocking chronology of anti-Japanese legislation at both the state and federal level—pushed largely by organized labor because unions hated competition from Japanese workers. FDR catered to his political allies in the union movement throughout his presidency. Locking up Japanese Americans was yet another favor to a Democratic Party constituency. If your unionized, government-school history teacher who reveres FDR forgot to tell you this, you really need to check out the Hill/Caudill article.

If you’re tempted to dismiss these facts before you read them, think about this: In 1988, the US government itself, under President Ronald Reagan, formally apologized for the internments and publicly admitted they were not justified by legitimate security reasons.

Roosevelt’s Deep-Seated Resentment of Japanese

In November 2015, FEE republished “The Census Helped Imprison Japanese Americans” by James Bovard. It first appeared in USA Today. The author revealed that the US Census Bureau “brazenly violated federal law by providing key information on Japanese Americans so that the Army could round them up for internment camps.”[2]

The Census Bureau denied its involvement for six decades until a trove of official documents was discovered and conclusively proved otherwise. Bovard warned:

Americans rarely find out about government abuses until long after the deed is done. If politicians decide to order another mass roundup of unpopular minorities, the Census will likely again serve up the names and addresses on a silver platter.

In December 2015, FEE published “America’s Concentration Camps Are a Warning, Not a Model” by Gary McGath. Though the term “concentration camp” would take on a more sinister and deadly connotation with later revelations from Nazi-occupied Europe, FDR himself used it to describe the camps he ordered set up in the deserts of the American Southwest.

Roosevelt’s disdain for the Japanese, asserts McGath, was a prejudice he harbored for years before he ever became president. McGath cites the exceptional book, The New Dealer’s War. There, the noted historian Thomas Fleming pointed out that when FDR suggested removing and interning even the larger number of Japanese in Hawaii, “the military objected because so many of them were skilled workers who were necessary to the war effort.” McGath concludes:

For the sake of a false sense of security, the US government ruined countless lives, imprisoned tens of thousands without charges, without even accusation, with only the mere fact of their skin color and ancestry. The internment stoked hatred against a minority group, squandered potential assets in the war, and fueled the Axis’s anti-American propaganda.

The story in Ralph Lazo’s belated obituary reminded me of a Biblical passage. In John 15:13, Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Lazo survived internment, as did all but a few of those he chose to be incarcerated with. But when he made that courageous decision to join them, he couldn’t have known what lay ahead. I’ll bet he would have given his life for his Japanese-American friends if it had come to that.[3]

Probe deeply enough, and every country in the world could cough up some ugly moments from its past. Official apologies, no matter how long delayed, are rare. Fortunately, this story includes one.

We must never forget, however, what Franklin Roosevelt did, and we must be vigilant that nothing like it ever happens again.

Originally published at FEE.org on July 14, 2019.

[1] “Overlooked No More: Ralph Lazo, Who Voluntarily Lived in an Internment Camp” by Veronica Majerol can be found at the New York Times website: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/obituaries/ralph-lazo-overlooked.html.

[2] For more information, see “The Japanese Camps in California: World War II West Coast Camps for Japanese-Americans” by Mark Weber at the Institute for Historical Review website: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v02/v02p-45_Weber.html.

[3] Editor’s Note: In addition to Ralph Lazo’s obituary cited in this article, see this half-hour 2004 film titled Stand Up For Justice: The Ralph Lazo Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfCjfa75h-U.

Still Crying for Argentina

Her rags to riches story is tied inextricably to politics. She loved to be close to power; the more she had of it herself, the more she felt entitled to another dose of it. She craved attention and adoration so much that she once admitted, “My biggest fear in life is to be forgotten.”

She demagogued her way to a cult following among those who depended on the favors she dispensed and stepped on anyone who stood in her way. A law which obstructed her ambitions was, in her view, a law to be bent or broken. Any fair assessment of her must note that she delivered numerous vapid harangues and gave away lots of other people’s money, but she never invented, created or built anything.

No, I’m not talking about Hillary Clinton. The woman I have in mind, however, was sort of the Hillary Clinton of Argentina. Her name was Eva Perón, known affectionately by admirers as “Evita.” She is not yet forgotten, a sad fact that requires a refresher on just who she was and what she stood for.

Evita, the popular 1978 stage production featuring the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, followed 18 years later by the film adaptation starring Madonna (whose last name escapes me), glamorized Eva for new generations the world over. Who hasn’t heard the chart-topping single, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” a dozen times?

In May 1919, she was born Eva Duarte, the out-of-wedlock daughter of a working-poor mother and a philandering rancher who abandoned them early. Suffering poverty and the stigma of illegitimacy in rural Argentina, she ran off to Buenos Aires at the age of 15 with dreams of becoming an actress. For the next decade, she earned a modest living as a B-grade actress in a few films and on radio. Her life took a fateful turn in January 1944 when, at the age of 25, she met Argentina’s Secretary of Labor and future President, Army Colonel Juan Perón. A year before, Col. Perón was a key figure in a military coup that deposed President Ramón Castillo. Eva became the colonel’s second wife in October 1945.

She would live only another seven years, but it’s hard to imagine a more eventful period. Three months after their marriage, Juan was elected President of Argentina and his new wife, nearly 25 years his junior, became First Lady. Together, they trashed an economy and eroded a nation’s liberties.

The Perón regime expanded the power of labor unions, spent lavishly on welfare schemes and waged class warfare against the rich. For a brief time, it seemed to work. Argentina was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and easily the richest in South America. More cronyism and bigger government appeared affordable but such things always set in motion trends and policies that are unsustainable. It wasn’t long before the debts, deficits and paper money, on top of higher taxes and crippling labor turmoil, drove the peso down and the economy with it. As Britain’s Margaret Thatcher put it, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Socialism of the fascist variety was exactly what Perón and the Perónists were building, though it didn’t “mature” into the full-throated form of the Hitler or Mussolini or Hugo Chavez types. To the core, it was nationalist, populist, interventionist, demagogic and authoritarian.

More ominous even than its economic policy were the regime’s assaults on civil liberties. Many of those attacks were indirect and wrapped in velvet. The charismatic colonel and his devoted cheerleader, Eva, always claimed that whatever they did was “for the people,” especially the poor descamisados or “shirtless ones.”

In their biography, “Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón,” Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro quote an opposition attorney who described Juan Perón’s ruling style this way: “He is subtle, devious, charming. He does not come out into the open and crack skulls. . . He does his work silently and cynically. You see, there is so little we can put our hands on these days—everything he does is in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘social betterment’—and yet we sense the smell of evil in the air, and the thin edge on which we walk.”

Juan Perón dissolved the Labor Party that elected him and formed his own, which he dubbed the “Perónist Party.” If you opposed the move, you were politically excommunicated, jailed or worse. One legislator who decried the emergence of Perón’s “totalitarian junta” found himself repeatedly attacked in the streets of Buenos Aires by Perónist thugs. “Where the law made the strategy of legal coercion possible, Perón made use of it; otherwise he resorted to dire threats and petty intimidation,” report Fraser and Navarro.

Newspapers that criticized the Peróns were frequented by government inspectors who issued fines and mandates on trumped-up charges such as abuse of workers or tax evasion. One was shut down altogether simply for using “noisy” trucks to distribute its papers. By 1948, the government took monopoly control of all printing ink and used it to intimidate the remaining private publishers. “Without fanaticism” declared Eva, “we cannot accomplish anything.” And she meant it.

Eva even went into the newspaper business herself. In 1947, the central bank was pressured to grant her a low-interest loan to buy the tabloid, “Democracia.” Thereafter, it faithfully published Juan’s boring speeches and Eva’s silly lectures on how housewives could deal with rising prices as the peso plummeted.

Once her tabloid was re-staffed with Perón loyalists, Eva was free to regale the nation with her omnipresence. Biographers Fraser and Navarro write,

These were years in which Evita was incessantly in the public eye. No occasion—the opening of a swimming pool, a factory, a trade union building, a presentation of a medal, a lunch with a visiting foreigner—was too trivial for her presence. If a company launched a new product, it would require her sponsorship and thus the government’s approval. If a sportsman, a football player or motor-racing driver left the country or returned, then he too was required to be photographed with Evita. . .

Evita’s cult of Perón probably first occurred in her speeches to shore up her own political identity and to reflect her own real admiration for Perón, but by 1949, the cult was institutionalized, and Evita was its priestess.

Her husband was more than just another Latin caudillo, gushed Eva; he was the “ideal incarnate.” Her hype was both shameless and boundless. “Perón is everything,” she declared. “He is the soul, the nerve, the hope and the reality of the Argentine people. We know that there is only one man here in our movement with his own source of light and that is Perón. We all feed from his light.”

Strange, isn’t it, that the statist Left always claims to be for “the people” as it bestows enormous, concentrated political power on a very few. Also, the statist Left often ridicules faith in a deity but then demands faith in an anointed mortal. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ceausescu, the Kims of North Korea—the very worst of them—all expected their subjects to fawn over them.

Eva loved herself almost as much as she loved Juan. In a two-month tour of Europe, the 29-year-old First Lady spent a small fortune on the best of everything, from hotels to cars to dresses. Wherever she went, she demanded the highest awards and honors each country offered. British diplomats regarded her as “a corrupt egomaniac presiding over a pantomime regime,” according to journalist Neil Tweedie of The Telegraph.

Eva formed her own political party, just as her husband did. Called the “Perónist Women’s Party,” it wasn’t aimed at empowering the newly-enfranchised females of Argentina but rather, it was intended to consolidate power in the hands of Juan and Eva. “To be a Perónist,” she told its first assembly, “is, for a woman, to be loyal and to have blind confidence in Perón.” No kidding.

My long-time Argentinian friend (and fellow Grove City College alum), Eduardo Marty, President of Foundation for Intellectual Responsibility in Buenos Aires, told me, “The most ugly sentence coming from Eva was one that parallels the reasoning of Karl Marx: Where there is a need, there is a right. She was an expert in manipulating the media and education.”

If you needed it (or just really wanted it and were loyal to Perón), you were entitled to it and Eva would get it for you. She routinely bullied private businesses to cough up cash or goods so she could redistribute the loot. She steered public tax money to her pet causes and loyal friends, always reminding them who they owed allegiance to. It never mattered to her what the economic cost of her largesse was because, after all, she was “doing good.” She once said, “Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can’t stop to count it.”

In reporting on her European tour in 1947, Time magazine made the mistake of mentioning what had heretofore been verboten in Argentina, namely, that Eva had been born out of wedlock. She made sure the magazine was banned for months.

Socialists love “infrastructure” spending and Juan Perón didn’t disappoint them in this regard. His administration made massive investments in public housing, hospitals, schools, dams, roads and the electric grid. In spite of the waste and corruption that came with the spending, many Argentinians still fondly credit him with such “modernizations.” But to civil and economic libertarians, improvements in Argentine life could have been accomplished better and cheaper and without the heavy hand of authoritarianism, and certainly without Eva’s incessant cultism.

The Juan and Eva circus performed to big crowds year after year. Juan would consolidate power while Eva bought constituencies with both public and private money. He was the ringleader and she was the impresario who glorified it all. Proving that if you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can count on the support of Paul, they built a political empire that was headed for re-election (one way or the other) in 1952—until tragedy struck.

Eva was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1950. A year later, believing she could overcome it, she angled for the vice-presidency before publicly declining to run on the ticket with her husband in 1952. Her health quickly deteriorated and in July of that year, just weeks after Juan’s successful re-election, she died at the age of 33. The “Spiritual Leader of the Nation”—an official title bestowed upon her by her husband—was gone. In the crush of mourning throngs eager to view her corpse, eight people were killed and several thousand were injured.

The Perónist drama didn’t end with Eva’s death. While awaiting interment, her body disappeared and didn’t show up again for 16 years, after a long stint in a crypt in Milan, Italy. With the economy reeling from soaring inflation, corruption, and statist controls, Juan Perón was overthrown in 1955. The military dictatorship that followed banned the possession of pictures of the Peróns as well as any public mention of their names.

After 18 years in exile, Juan Perón returned to Argentina in 1973, got himself re-elected as President for a third time, then died the following year. His third wife, Isabel, was also his vice president. She became president upon his death (and held the office for nearly two years until a military coup in 1976). At 87, Isabel is still living today. In 1987, Juan’s grave was desecrated and in a crime as yet unsolved, his hands were cut off with a chainsaw. Again, no kidding.

You’re probably thinking at this point that the Peróns were weird in both life and death—and you’d be right.

Perónism never completely died out in Argentina. Economist Nicolas Cachanosky—a native Argentinian and now an economist at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado says, “the figure of Evita Perón is today like a religious myth: Her populist use of the poor remains concealed behind the false but strong image of a devoted politician. She played an important role in the political propaganda that supported Juan’s political ambitions and their ideology is embedded one way or another in almost every political movement in Argentina. Her early death contributes to her image of a martyr in the class warfare of the poor against the wealthy.”

The legacy of the Peróns and Perónism is a costly one, for which Argentina is still paying the price. It’s ranked #144 in the Index of Economic Freedom, in spite of the efforts of a recent government to reverse the negative effects of many Perónist policies. So much damage could have been avoided if this warning of F.A. Hayek was heeded when he wrote The Road to Serfdom in the 1940s:

To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values is to assume responsibilities which commit one to the use of force; it is to assume a position where the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral. This is true even if we assume the dominant power to be as idealistic and unselfish as we can possibly conceive. But how small is the likelihood that it will be unselfish, and how great are the temptations!

Because of Juan and Eva Perón, decades after they held power, I still cry for Argentina.

Originally published at FEE.org on July 11, 2018.

The Man Who Can Still Liberate Mexico

According to the 2019 edition of The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, the economy of Mexico is the 66th freest in the world—anemic but still above the regional and world averages. In the most recent Economic Freedom of the World Report from Canada’s Fraser Institute, Mexico fared marginally lower, earning a ranking of 82.

Mises’ Magnum Opus

Somewhere between a third and a half of the world’s economies are freer than Mexico’s. If the country’s leaders and intelligentsia had followed the advice of a distinguished visitor almost 80 years ago, Mexico might well be in the top five today—right up there with Switzerland and Singapore. Some Mexican politicians might even be calling for a border wall to keep out all those California job-seekers.

Who was that distinguished visitor who gave the Mexicans such good advice in January and February 1942? It was none other than Ludwig von Mises. His magnum opus, Human Action, debuted on the world stage 70 years ago this very week in 1949—seven years after his first visit to Mexico—but by 1942, he already had more than two prolific decades behind him as an insightful thinker of international renown. In my view, Mises

remains not only the pre-eminent economist of the Austrian school, but also a towering figure within the science of economics itself. It is a tragic oversight that a Nobel Prize never came his way while the award has often been bestowed upon individuals of fewer insights and lesser consequence. If only the world appreciated how he brilliantly and thoroughly demolished socialism nearly a century ago, millions of early deaths and untold misery could have been avoided in the decades since. Fifty Nobels would be insufficient to appropriately honor the man, but the world we know is hardly fair.[1]

If everything goes according to plan, Mises will get the documentary film he deserves when Mises the Movie premieres in late 2020. (You can help the project with a financial contribution.) In preparing for an interview with the film’s makers last week, I re-read the 1976 book, My Life with Ludwig von Mises, by the great economist’s wife, Margit. A short chapter titled “Two Months in Mexico” captured my attention in a way it didn’t when I first read it over 40 years ago, probably because of my more recent interests in Latin America and my involvement with the exciting new initiative, FEE en Español.

As Hitler’s onslaught engulfed one nation after another in the summer of 1940, Ludwig and Margit von Mises departed Europe. They had plenty of good reasons to flee given the hostility of the Nazis to Ludwig’s world stature as a defender of classical liberal ideas, his withering critiques of socialism and, of course, his ethnic Jewishness.

Montes de Oca’s Story

The following winter in New York, the couple met with a gentleman from Mexico City whom they came to regard with immense affection. His name was Señor Luís Montes de Oca, a prominent bank official and former secretary of the treasury (1927 to 1932) under three presidents of the republic. Margit wrote of him admiringly.

Though he was of small stature, he was a great man, and bore himself as such. He had an all-encompassing knowledge of politics, economics, and world affairs, spoke four languages fluently, was widely read, and knew everything Lu had ever written. He immediately invited Lu and me to come to Mexico for a series of lectures at the university, which he would sponsor.

In her 2016 book, The Origins of Neoliberalism in Mexico: The Austrian School, María Eugenia Romero Sotelo cites prominent Mexicans who knew Montes de Oca personally as “an enemy of official interventions to influence the national economy” and “a man of extraordinary culture.” He strongly opposed government budget deficits, knowing that they burden a country with dubious spending and debt.

He courageously defended freedom and capitalism, and Mises was his hero for doing the same. Montes de Oca believed that, in his own words, “the inevitable consequence” of interventionist central planning was “the creation of disturbing conditions that do not solve the problem that was to be remedied and instead raise others that complicate and make the situation worse.”

From Margit’s description, Montes de Oca was the perfect host. Life in the US for the first year or so after she and Lu arrived in New York was tough. Lu’s spirits were low. He had lost not only much of his personal property but his Austria, as well. Finances were troublesome. After German, his second language was French, not English.

But starting with a reception at the Mexico City airport that “almost befitted royalty,” the nearly two months the couple spent in Mexico marked a turning point. It was a marvelous time, with Lu delivering many university and public lectures. The Miseses were entertained almost every day by stimulating conversations, cultural events, and site-seeing excursions. Margit later reflected:

I shall always remember Montes de Oca as one of the finest men I ever met. And I shall always be grateful to him for his hospitality and his great understanding with which he advanced Lu’s work in Mexico and South America and, without knowing it, helped re-establish Lu’s confidence and optimism after our trying escape from Europe.

Montes de Oca promised Lu that he would arrange for a Spanish edition of Lu’s extraordinary 1922 book Socialism. Nearly a century later, that book remains today perhaps the most incisive challenge to socialist theoreticians ever written. It kicked off the great “calculation” debate in which Mises roundly criticized socialism as economically irrational—a charge still essentially unanswered.

Montes de Oca’s Legacy

Unfortunately, Montes de Oca did not live to see the appearance of the first Spanish edition of Socialism in 1961. After a period of ill health, he died in 1958. He deserves to be remembered for his service to his country, for his love of liberty, and for his exceedingly generous relationship with the 20th century’s greatest economist and his wife.

I’ve said little here about what Ludwig von Mises told his Mexican audiences in 1942. As those acquainted with Misesian thought might expect, he spoke eloquently on a wide range of topics—socialism, capitalism, sound money, economic development, and more. For details, I refer readers to “Mises on Mexico” by Eduardo Turrent, published by FEE in March 1999. It’s a thoughtful tribute to the man and his ideas from a Mexican who deeply appreciated both.

September 14, 2019, will mark the 70th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises’s most remarkable volume, Human Action. The occasion will likely be noted in different ways by the many people and institutions influenced by this remarkable genius. FEE, which Mises regarded as almost his second home from 1946 until his death in 1973, will be one of them.

In the meantime, I just wanted our readers to know—in Mexico especially—that thanks to a man named Montes de Oca, there’s Misesian history and tradition in America’s southern neighbor. And it’s never too late for new generations of Mexicans to get acquainted with him. We hope that in the coming months and years, FEE en Español will assist toward that end.

For additional information, see:

- The Origins of Neoliberalism in Mexico: The Austrian School by María Eugenia Romero Sotelo

- Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism by Jörg Guido Hülsmann

- “Understanding Austrian Economics” by Henry Hazlitt

- The Essential Von Mises by FEE

- “Mises Never Gave In to Evil” by Dan Sanchez

- “Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973): A Prophet Without Honor in His Own Land” by Bettina Bien Greaves

- “Mises was Right: The Hampered Market Is Unsustainable” by Sandy Ikeda

- “The Significance of Mises’s ‘Socialism’” by Peter Boettke

- “Salute to Von Mises” by Henry Hazlitt

Originally published at FEE.org on September 11, 2019.

The author wishes to thank Mexico City students Daniel Buenrostro and Edwin Arturo Portillo for their assistance with this article and for their good work on behalf of liberty, free markets, and FEE in Mexico.

[1] From my Foreword to Mises’s “Human Action”: https://fee.org/articles/what-human-action-means-to-me-and-to-fee/.

C.S. Lewis Saw Government as a Poor Substitute for God

“Friendship,” wrote C.S. Lewis in a December 1935 letter, “is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was just the sort of person I would give an arm to have as a friend across the street. I can only imagine the thrill of listening to him for hours on end. This distinguished scholar and thinker was, of course, a prolific author of works in Christian apologetics and of the seven-part children’s fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia (which have sold more than 100 million copies and have been adapted into three major motion pictures).

While teaching literature first at Oxford and then at Cambridge, he cranked out more than a score of books, from the dense but highly regarded Mere Christianity to the entertaining The Screwtape Letters, plus hundreds of speeches, essays, letters, and radio addresses. Some regard him as the greatest lay theologian of the 20th century. His influence, substantial while he was alive, may be even greater in the world today. Visit the C.S. Lewis website and you’ll see just how copious and wide-ranging this amazing Irishman’s interests were.[1]

The Politics of C.S. Lewis

Stacked against his literary and theological offerings, Lewis’s commentary on political and economic matters is comparatively slim—mostly a few paragraphs scattered here and there, not in a single volume. Lewis scholars have examined those snippets to discern where he might be appropriately placed on the spectrum. Was he a socialist, a classical liberal, an anarchist, a minarchist, a theocrat, or something else?

Personally, I believe Lewis might be perfectly happy to be labeled a Christian libertarian. He embraced minimal government because he had no illusions about the essentially corrupt nature of man and the inevitable magnification of corruption when it’s mixed with political power. He knew that virtuous character was indispensable to a happy life, personal fulfillment, and progress for society at large—and that it must come not by the commands of political elites but from the growth and consciences of each individual, one at a time. He celebrated civil society and peaceful cooperation and detested the presumptuous arrogance of officialdom.

In these very pages, other writers have made the case that Lewis was a lover of liberty. In a 2012 article titled “C.S. Lewis: Free Market Advocate,” Harold B. Jones Jr. argued that it was Lewis’s belief in “the rules of logic” and “premises that are fixed realities” that produced his embrace of markets and free exchange. I think Lewis’s literal interpretation of Jesus’s words led him to the same perspective I explained in my essay, “Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus A Socialist?”

Calvin College’s David V. Urban answered the question “Was C.S. Lewis a Libertarian?” with a resounding Yes! And thirty-five years earlier, in “C.S. Lewis on Compelling People to Do Good,” Clarence Carson dissected Lewis’s statements and arrived at a similar conclusion. More recently, Marco den Ouden brilliantly drew out Lewis’s sobering insights into the tyrannical potential of pure democracy in “Why the Devil Loves Democracy.” All these essays are well worth your time even if your interest in Lewis is minimal.

It’s the primary source of Lewis’s own words, of course, that should clarify where his political and economic sympathies were. Allow me to present the following selections for you to consider.

“Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”

Lewis’s 1958 essay, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” (published that year in The Observer and then later revised and included in his excellent 1970 anthology, God in the Dock) is a goldmine of insights about government and its proper relationship to the individual.[2] One of my favorite passages is this:

To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death—these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilized man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.

While advocates for the interventionist welfare state argue that government programs produce happiness and security, Lewis suggests they are seriously mistaken. There is a far better way to achieve those ends, namely, freedom:

I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has “the freeborn mind.” But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?

Elsewhere in the essay, Lewis is unequivocal in his disdain for the pretensions of government, as much for its overblown claims of “rule by experts” in the modern day as for its medieval insistence on rule by “divine right.” In every age, he says, “the men who want us under their thumb” will advance the particular myths and prejudices of the day so they can “cash in” on hopes and fears.

That, he says, opens the door wide to tyranny in one form or another. Such men are no more than self-exalting, self-aggrandizing mortals. While they may proclaim to be “of the people and for the people,” they inevitably establish self-serving oligarchies at the people’s expense. The following three paragraphs from “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” (appearing at different points in the essay) express profound skepticism toward the “planners of society” among us:

“I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord’, it lies, and lies dangerously.”

“The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?”

“The modern state exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good—anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers.’ We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”

The notion that the welfare state will take good care of us is, to Lewis, delusional. Doing so is to sell short one’s own capabilities and those of voluntary, social networks and organizations. It also ensnares one in a fool’s errand that cannot end well:

What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about “Man taking charge of his own destiny.” All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?

“Equality”

Lewis believed that men and women should be equal before the rule of law. He disdained arbitrariness, caprice, racism, or classism in the law’s application. Consistent with those principles, he believed just as firmly that the law should not aim to make people equal in other ways, such as in material wealth. That could only be done through ugly force.

In a 1943 essay entitled “Equality,” he warned against applying economic equalness as a “medicine” for society’s ills. When we do that, he said, “we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked.”

Though he found the egalitarian impulses of democracy offensive, he wasn’t averse to using the term “democrat” to describe his own feelings about government. It’s important to note that he used the term in its broadest sense, namely, to mean popular participation in decisions about who served in government and what they could justifiably do. At the end of the day, he readily acknowledged the danger of a pure democracy combining with rotten character to ultimately produce its precise opposite, dictatorship. In Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966), he wrote:

Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organization will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi. The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.

The Screwtape Letters

The Screwtape Letters (1942) remains one of Lewis’s most popular satirical pieces. It was written as a series of missives from a senior demon, named Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, who carries the official title of Junior Tempter. Screwtape is training Wormwood in how to corrupt mankind, to turn society into a Hell on Earth. It’s very revealing of Lewis’s political thinking that the senior demon instructs his pupil to “equalize” and “democratize” to achieve their nefarious objectives:

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement toward the discrediting, and finally elimination, of every kind of human excellence—moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy is now doing for us the work that once was done by the ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? . . . Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own.

If Lewis were a statist of any persuasion, I don’t see how he could write any of the above. And if he were a statist, he would likely glorify the ambitions of central planners, which he never did. He was just not impressed by the pomposity of politicians. In his 1960 essay titled “The World’s Last Night,” he wrote,

The higher the pretensions of our rulers are, the more meddlesome and impertinent their rule is likely to be and the more the thing in whose name they rule will be defiled. . . . Let our masters. . . leave us some region where the spontaneous, the unmarketable, the utterly private, can still exist.

“A Tyranny Sincerely Exercised”

If I had to choose a favorite among Lewis’s pithy put-downs of big government, it would be this clip from his 1949 essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” which also appeared later in his anthology, God in the Dock:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

Lewis’s worldview was internally consistent. He couldn’t bring himself to look upon government as God, a substitute for God, or a reasonable facsimile of God. Government was composed of imperfect mortals, period. That means it contains all the flaws and foibles of mortals so a free people must confine it, restrain it, and keep a wary eye on it.

He was humble enough to admit what so many other mortals won’t, namely, that not even his own good intentions could justify lording it over others. To him, good intentions plus political power equals tyranny all too often. He believed that bad consequences flow directly from bad ideas and bad behavior. In The Abolition of Man, he says:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Finally, I love his scathing criticisms of the education establishment of his day—dominated as it was (and is even more so today) by the centralizers, the faddists, and the practitioners of pedagogical malpractice who are empowered by virtue of government’s involvement. If education is to be saved, I think he would see that salvation coming from private initiative, not from the costly, mind-numbing conformity of bureaucrats in the Department of Education:

Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.

If the world is no smarter today than it was when C.S. Lewis died in 1963, we certainly can’t blame him. He gifted us wisdom by the bushels—wisdom we ignore or dismiss at our peril.

Originally published at FEE.org on December 19, 2018.

[1] The C.S. Lewis website can be found here: http://www.cslewis.com/us/.

[2] You can read the whole essay here: https://uncommonvelour.blogspot.com/2014/07/cs-lewis-essay-willing-slaves-of.html.

Remembering Solzhenitsyn: Observations on the Gospel, Socialism, and Power

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died 10 years ago (in 2008) at age 89, men and women of conscience in every country mourned the passing of a towering figure. His unending courage in the face of brutal tyranny was astonishing. His prolific contributions to Russian literature earned him a Nobel Prize, while his bravery on behalf of freedom gained him the gratitude of oppressed peoples everywhere.

At great risk to themselves, some people muster the courage to speak truth to power. In a world teeming and cursed with the corrupt and power-besotted, that’s a supremely admirable quality. We should hope and pray for a lot more of it. Solzhenitsyn confronted power with truth until that power literally dissolved.

His revelations gave President Ronald Reagan all the ammunition he needed to brand the Soviet regime an “Evil Empire.” Another Nobel laureate in Literature, Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, declared,

The extraordinary political and intellectual feat of Solzhenitsyn was to emerge from the hell of a concentration camp to tell the story in books whose moral and documentary force has no parallel in modern history.

December 11, 2018, will mark the centennial of Solzhenitsyn’s birth—a perfect occasion to once again celebrate his remarkable legacy.

“So Were We Any Better?”

Soviet communism had just marked its first birthday when Solzhenitsyn was born. He grew up knowing nothing else. During World War II, while in his mid-20s, he fought in the Red Army against the Nazi German invasion—for which he was twice decorated. His war-time service, when he witnessed Soviet atrocities against both soldiers and civilians, led him to start questioning the moral legitimacy of the Soviet regime and the Marxist ideology upon which it rested. Recalling this time many years later, he wrote:

There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain’s shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: So were we any better?

Being a very thoughtful and introspective intellectual, Solzhenitsyn could not dismiss what he saw as simply the failure of a few bad people. He sensed something rotten in the system itself. And of course, he was right. Bad people are everywhere, but nothing brings them forth and licenses them to do evil more thoroughly than concentrated power and the subordination of morality to the service of a statist ideology.

Even before the war ended, he ventured a few critical comments about the system in letters to a friend, which fell into the hands of the authorities and led to his arrest. For his thoughts, he was incarcerated. He endured nearly a decade in the hard-labor camps he later christened The Gulag Archipelago in the title of his most famous work.

Beating Labor Camps, Cancer, Ricin, and Exile

In an October 2017 essay noting the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution,[1] I wrote about a particularly notable experience that deeply affected Solzhenitsyn. A fellow inmate at the Ekibastuz prison camp, a recent convert to Christianity named Boris Kornfeld, imparted a few kind words and personal attention. Solzhenitsyn would later credit Kornfeld with giving him enormous mental and spiritual strength.

After his release in 1953, Solzhenitsyn was forced into three years of internal exile. He endured (and recovered from) a deadly cancer. Quietly, he spurned Marxism and its progeny, communism and socialism. He became a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. He reflected on his wartime and prison experiences. And he began to write, though only one of his many full-length books was ever allowed to be printed in the Soviet Union, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, though Soviet authorities would not permit him to leave the country to accept it.

All of his books, short stories, and poems are literary gems and/or historical masterpieces, but none surpasses The Gulag Archipelago in importance to the world. It remains a gripping account of life in the vast network of Soviet prison camps where people were enslaved, overworked, tortured, and killed for—in many cases—nothing more than opposing socialism, communism, Stalin, the Party, or some other aspect of the vaunted “workers’ paradise.” It’s been described as “an unrelenting indictment of communist ideology.” Terror was the modus operandi from its founding philosophical father Karl Marx to his acolytes in Russia, Lenin and Stalin.

Solzhenitsyn secretly labored on the manuscript for ten years, from 1958 to 1968. Then he had to solve the problem of how to get it smuggled out of the country for publication. Soviet authorities were keeping an eye on him 24/7. In August 1971, he was poisoned with the deadly toxin ricin, but he survived. More than once, the secret police raided his living quarters, seized his papers, and interrogated his associates, one of whom hanged herself afterward. Fortunately, he had produced more than one copy, so even after the police had confiscated one, he was eventually able to get another spirited to Paris, where it was published in 1973.

Much credit is due to the famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who sheltered Solzhenitsyn in the early 1970s and was later expelled from Russia because of it. Every so often, I watch the YouTube video of Rostropovich playing Bach’s cello suites to remind myself of what a great man he was, too.

In His Own Words

The book was an instant sensation, and the rest is great history. The Soviet Union would never be the same. It disappeared less than 20 years later under the weight of its own inherent evil, from the challenge of domestic opposition emboldened in part by Solzhenitsyn and because of international pressure from Westerners including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.

Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union in early 1974. He settled in the US (in Vermont), where he resided for almost 20 years. In 1994, he returned to a post-communist Russia, where he lived out his remaining days until his death in 2008. Since 2009, Gulag has been mandatory reading as part of the curriculum in Russian schools.

In his honor, I devote the balance of this essay to some of my favorite words of Solzhenitsyn himself.

From a February 2003 Interview with Joseph Pearce, Sr., published in the St. Austin Review:

In different places over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion.

Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as “we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology.” The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion.

From The Gulag Archipelago:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?. . . .

This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: Is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one’s conscience to someone else’s keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend the people against evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the service of evildoers and against the people!

From The First Circle (1968):

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

From his Nobel lecture (printed version, since it was not personally delivered for reasons explained above):

Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print,” it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another.

And finally, this profound warning from The Gulag Archipelago:

Oh, Western freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers! Oh, left-wing laborists! Oh, American, German and French progressive students! All of this is still not enough for you. The whole book has been useless for you. You will understand everything immediately, when you yourself—“hands behind the back”—toddle into our Archipelago.

Originally published at FEE.org on October 19, 2018.

[1] See my article “A Revolution to Always Remember but Never Celebrate”: https://fee.org/articles/a-revolution-to-always-remember-but-never-celebrate/.

About That Che T-Shirt

Let’s say that all you knew about Adolf Hitler was that he painted scenic pictures, postcards, and houses in Vienna, loved dogs and named his adorable German Shepard “Blondie,” and frequently expressed solidarity with “the people.” You might sport a T-shirt adorned with his image if you thought such a charismatic chap was also good-looking in a beret. But your education would be widely regarded as incomplete.

If you later found out that the guy on your T-shirt was a mass murderer, you might ask your oppression studies professor why she left out a few important details.

This hypothetical resembles a real-world phenomenon seen today on numerous college campuses. Fifty-two years after his demise in Bolivia—on October 9, 1967—the maniacal socialist Ernesto “Che” Guevara is still making headlines and spoiling perfectly good clothes.

In film and pop culture, Che comes off as an adventurous motorcyclist, a humble-living commoner, a romantic egalitarian revolutionary, and a swashbuckling sex symbol. His ghastly history as one of Fidel Castro’s favorite thugs routinely gets whitewashed because, in spite of all the murders, he supposedly had good intentions (read: hate the rich, concentrate power, eliminate dissent, help the poor by creating more of them).

In his remarkable 2007 volume, Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him, acclaimed journalist Humberto Fontova contrasted the fiction with the facts in these terms:

Who Was “Che” Guevara?

Myth: International man of the people. Humanitarian. Brave freedom fighter. Lover of literature and life. Advocate of the poor and oppressed.

Reality: Cold-blooded murderer. Sadistic torturer. Power-hungry materialist. Terrorist who inspired destruction and bloodshed through Latin America.

Here are some lesser-known info bits about the psychopath-on-the-T-shirt, drawn from Fontova’s book and other sources:

- He publicly applauded the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and denounced the student protesters battling Soviet tanks in Budapest as “fascists.”

- Upon the victory of the 1959 communist revolution in Cuba, Che commandeered for himself one of the most luxurious mansions in Havana—complete with a yacht harbor, monster swimming pool, seven bathrooms, sauna and massage salon, and five television sets.

- Che played a leading role in the Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961 and, at the same time, helped direct the regime’s brutal policy of crushing dissenting opinion and opposition media. As Fontova documented in his biography, Che “promoted book burning and signed death warrants for authors who disagreed with him.” Communist despots routinely teach reading and writing but work even harder at making sure you only read and write what they want you to. Che’s first public book-burning set more than 3,000 books ablaze on a Havana street.

- Even Che’s adoring hagiographer, Jorge Castaneda, admits that Che “played a central role in establishing Cuba’s security machinery” in the early days of the Castro regime. In that capacity, Che supervised the torture and execution of untold thousands of Cubans without trial. He had a special affection for firing squads.

- Cuban poet and diplomat Armando Valladares, author of Against All Hope: My 22 Years in Castro’s Gulag, says Che “was a man full of hatred” who executed people “who never once stood trial and were never declared guilty” and who declared, “At the smallest of doubt we must execute.”

- Che was no equal opportunity oppressor. He held special dislike for gays, whom he incarcerated in multiple prisons. He was a well-known racist, as well.

- Fidel Castro appointed Che Guevara as communist Cuba’s first “Economics Minister” and president of the country’s National Bank. Within months, the Cuban peso was practically worthless. Castro appointed him Minister of Industries, too. In that job, Che proved equally incompetent. He once bought a fleet of snowplows from Czechoslovakia because he thought they would make excellent sugar cane harvesters but, sadly, the machines simply squashed and killed the plants.

- Che was Castro’s economic czar, though he knew nothing about economics beyond Marxist bumper stickers. His former deputy Ernesto Betancourt said Che was “ignorant of the most elementary economic principles.” Nonetheless, he actually wrote communist Cuba’s agrarian reform law, limiting the size of all farms and creating state-run communes. Production plummeted and is still lower today than before the revolution.

- The Soviet missiles in Cuba that nearly precipitated a world war in 1962 were Che’s idea. When the Soviets were pressured by the Kennedy administration to remove them, Che publicly declared that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have been fired at the US because the cause of socialism was worth “millions of atomic-war victims.”

- Che left Cuba in 1965 to foment violent insurrections first in Africa and then back in Latin America. He was captured by the Bolivian military on October 8, 1967, and administered a dose of his own summary medicine the next day.

Bottom line: Think twice (actually, just once ought to be enough) about adding a Che Guevara T-shirt to your Christmas giving this year.

For additional information, see:

- “Students Celebrate Marxist Che Guevara” (video)

- “Che Guevara Was a Racist” by Joseph Hammond

- “A Sad Reflection of our Time” by Nigel Jones

- “A Murderer Called Che” by Yucatan Times

- “Five Reasons Why Che Guevara Is Not Cool” at VictimsofCommunism.org

Originally published at FEE.org on October 8, 2019.

Nat King Cole: Remembering a Christmas and Musical Icon

As someone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I can’t imagine a Christmas without a few tunes from a certain musical legend. He died at the young age of 45, fifty-three years ago. His renditions of “O Holy Night” and “The Christmas Song” (more commonly known by its opening line, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”) are summed up in a single word that happened to be the title of another of his greatest hits, “Unforgettable.” One of the most beloved American entertainers of all time, he was, in the words of a fellow artist, “the best friend a song ever had.”

That’s enough for most old-timers to immediately recognize who I’m talking about. Before I reveal his name, allow me to say a little more about him: He was a jazz pianist, a composer, a pop singer, and a television and movie star. His distinctive voice was described at various stages of his career as a “warm and haunting tenor,” a “dulcet-toned baritone,” and “liquid gold.”

His demeanor was often described as “elegant” and “suave.” His smile and twinkling eyes melted the hearts of millions. Next to the Christmas hits he sang, my favorites from this remarkable performer remain the memorable “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer.” And don’t forget “Mona Lisa.”

Why am I writing about a man that too few people younger than 60 know about? For one, his music was good enough to be immortal. Another reason is that from his life, people of all ages can learn some critically important lessons.

I’m referring of course to the great Nat “King” Cole, born Nathaniel Adams Cole, 100 years ago next March in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Life of Nat

When Nat was four (in 1923), the family moved to Chicago where his father Edward became a Baptist minister. Three of Nat’s four siblings pursued musical careers, no doubt greatly influenced by their mother Perlina, a church organist who taught that music is important to a happy and well-rounded life. A major new hit around the country in 1923 was “Yes, I Have No Bananas,” and four-year-old Nat sang it proudly at his very first public performance.

At age 15, Nat dropped out of high school to put his musical talents to work. If ever the proverbial proof was in the pudding, that was a very smart decision. Within three years, he was recording singles with Decca Records, performing in major musicals and on radio, leading a big band, and playing piano at some of the best-known nightclubs.

Audiences loved his distinctive voice, though he never regarded singing as his greatest strength. “I’m a musician at heart; I know I’m not really a singer,” he later said. “I couldn’t compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.” He intended to make a career as a jazz pianist but explained, “In the meantime, I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that’s just the way it came out.”

Before he died of lung cancer so tragically early, he logged over 100 hits on the pop charts. He hired bassist Wesley Prince and guitarist Oscar Moore and formed the King Cole Trio in the 1940s, a model ensemble that influenced the entertainment world for decades. He appeared in film, on Broadway, and on television many times. In fact, he made history as the first black man to host an American television series.

His fame at the time rivaled that of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. I doubt that more than a single-digit percentage of Americans didn’t know who this Grammy Award-winning artist was or that the vast majority of them didn’t mourn when he passed.

The Fight against Prejudice

Cole’s illustrious career was sadly pockmarked by some ugly attitudes of the day, however. America had made some racial progress by that time, but much more remained undone. Though he just wanted to please audiences without regard to color, that wasn’t kosher to some. He was attacked by radical activists, both black and white—black ones because he performed before integrated Southern audiences, white ones simply because he was black.

When he bought a home in an all-white Los Angeles neighborhood in 1948, he confronted racism head-on. The KKK burned a cross in his front yard. Informed by some other homeowners that they didn’t want any “undesirables” around, he famously responded, “Neither do I. And if I see anybody undesirable coming in here, I’ll be the first to complain.”

His television show, though widely popular, struggled financially. It never nailed down a national sponsor, most likely because advertisers thought it might produce a racist backlash. It lasted just 13 months, prompting Cole to complain that “Madison Avenue was afraid of the dark.” He never let it turn his own soul dark, thankfully.

About the same time, at a 1956 concert in Birmingham, Alabama, Cole was assaulted by three racist thugs who rushed the stage intending to kidnap him. Though police thwarted the attempt, Cole injured his back in the melee and never again performed in Southern states. Because of a few bad apples, millions of adoring fans in the South were denied the chance to see and hear him in person.

Meanwhile, he was targeted for opprobrium by leaders in the civil rights movement. He strongly supported civil rights and was a lifetime member of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP. He declared publicly that he opposed racial segregation “in any form.” But that wasn’t enough for some.

Because he continued to perform for white audiences, he was denounced as a “traitor” to his race. Future US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall called him an “Uncle Tom” and derisively advised he perform with a banjo. The black press savaged him because he didn’t crusade for their cause as much as they thought he should. In reality, Cole just treated everybody the way the activists claimed all of us should—equally and without regard to color. He was bringing people together through music.

The Ugliness of Discrimination

A decent person who would naturally view such treatment as deplorable could hardly read of Cole’s life or listen to his songs without thinking, “What’s wrong with these people? Here’s a good soul with enormous talent, bringing joy to millions, and he has to deal with this crap? And why? For no more reason than the color of his skin. How stupid! How de-humanizing!”

I’m reminded of these memorable lines from a great black writer of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Zora Neale Hurston. In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she wrote,

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It is beyond me. But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?

Discrimination for the most reprehensible reasons was never peculiar to America. It has reared its ugly head in all parts of the world since time immemorial. It remains a curse and a blight in many places. Just last week, Wall Street Journal reporter Alexandra Wexler shed light on a current crackdown in Tanzania against people for no more reason than their sexual orientation.[1]

Gay people, and others suspected of being gay, are being systematically rounded-up, arrested, jailed, and even tortured for the victimless crime of gayness. I think both Nat King Cole and Zora Neale Hurston would see this the same way they saw racial bias: vicious, moronic, anti-individualist, and ultimately harmful to society at large.

In late October, a gunman stormed a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people. Why? Because they were members (almost exclusively by birth, not conversion) of a group he didn’t like. They were Jewish. Like almost all people when things like that happen, I immediately mourn the dead and pray for their families. Then the next thing I do is ponder all the good things the world was denied because those 11 people could no longer live, love, and create.

Why You Should Choose Liberty

To all the numerous reasons to support the philosophy of liberty,[2] add this one: It is the most inclusive political philosophy imaginable. It starts with the foundation of each person’s unique and precious individuality. It respects human rights that are universal, owned at birth by each and every one of us. It encourages us to judge individuals not by some collectivist irrelevance or group assignment but by, as Dr. Martin Luther King put it, “the content of their character.” You can’t be a racist or a homophobe or a xenophobe or an anti-Semite or any other fill-in-the-blank, hate-them-for-the-group-God-put-them-in Neanderthal and a consistent defender of liberty.

At Nat “King” Cole’s 1965 funeral, comedian Jack Benny paid tribute to Nat the man, not Nat the black man. And that’s as it should be. He described this remarkable performer as:

. . . a man who gave so much and still had so much to give. He gave it in song, in friendship to his fellow man, devotion to his family. He was a star, a tremendous success as an entertainer, an institution. But he was an even greater success as a man, as a husband, as a father, as a friend.

Nat “King” Cole was, first and foremost, an entertainer of all people. Those who spurned him for his color are mostly gone and forgotten. He, on the other hand, left the world a more joyous place. If people of all ages will get reacquainted with him, I guarantee that his music will brighten lives for generations to come.

Originally published at FEE.org on December 11, 2018.

[1] See “Behind the Curtain: In Tanzania, a Crackdown Sends LGBT People Into Hiding” by Alexandra Wexler: https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-curtain-in-tanzania-a-crackdown-sends-lgbt-people-into-hiding-1544101201.

[2] See my article “Liberty as a Life Philosophy”: https://fee.org/articles/liberty-as-a-life-philosophy/.

Of Marxism and Murder: The Professor in the Peruvian Prison

To waste your life chasing delusions is bad enough. To sacrifice innocent lives without remorse as you pursue those fantasies is downright criminal. It defines you as a sociopath and a homicidal maniac.

Abimael Guzmán is all of that and worse. At age 85, he presently resides in a maximum-security prison at a Peruvian naval base near Lima. Unrepentant and unlamented but for a handful of radical sycophants, he is living testimony to the terrible power of socialist extremism. Thirty years ago, he was Peru’s most wanted man.

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it,” economist Thomas Sowell once observed. “The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”

Guzmán came from one of those very institutions Sowell was describing. He was an academic.

I started my career as a college professor, so I am quick to note that academia isn’t monolithic, and its ranks aren’t universally rotten. Nonetheless, especially in the social sciences, it’s a world glutted with otherwise-unemployable, socially-dysfunctional pontificators.

Often protected from reality by tenure and taxes and dripping with self-importance, the worst of them revel in gossip, nit-picking and department politics—and that’s in their spare time when they’re not poisoning idealistic young minds with discredited dogmas.

Few of them could manage or market or strategically plan their way out of a soggy paper bag, which is why a smart hiring rule at productive businesses is to steer clear of academics. Many harbor a deep resentment of free enterprise; they hate that it rewards individuals not for the academic degrees they’ve purchased but for the value they create in the marketplace. Today, they are a significant source of the “ideas” that are laying waste to parts of our inner cities and college campuses.

Two years ago, faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh held a bicentennial birthday bash for Karl Marx. As Grove City College’s Paul Kengor noted,[1] addressing the 100 million killed by Marxist regimes was not on the agenda. Maybe this is what British philosopher Bertrand Russell had in mind when he famously said, “Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, Guzmán taught philosophy at a university in Ayacucho, Peru. From his earliest days in the classroom, he drenched his students in Marxism and became ever more radical as he did so. He was arrested more than once for participating in violent street protests. He enjoyed denouncing other faculty members and visiting speakers who did not share his viewpoint (intellectual integrity and objectivity were not his strong points). He formed an underground terrorist organization called Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) and in 1980, he and his merry band of senderistas declared war on Peru—its government and any expendable peasants who stood in their way. The result was two decades of rampaging mayhem which claimed the lives of 70,000 Peruvians.

Also dead was a 25-year-old American named Gus Gregory of Torrance, California. He was in Peru to teach poor campesinos techniques for raising superior sheep and alpaca. The jeep he and a Peruvian veterinarian friend were driving was ambushed by Comrade Guzmán’s men. Gregory was shot in the back of the head as a warning to anyone not yet signed up for the “people’s” revolution. Ironically, Gregory considered himself a leftist but he wasn’t left enough for Shining Path.

For his thoughts on Guzmán I asked my friend Edwar Escalante, a native of Peru and now a professor (a good one!) at Angelo State University in Texas. He wrote:

Abimael Guzman became Peru’s number one enemy. Though his Marxist revolution promised a change to favor the poor, the Shining Path’s repression was ruthless against the most impoverished communities. Guzmán had a disdain for the peasantry’s local arrangements. He believed the poor would adhere to his cause without question. However, it was the poorest of the poor who rejected his rules and initiated the massive self-defense movement that defeated him.

Another Peruvian friend, Luna Vladimir of the Association for Economic Education in the Andes advised me that the 2001 Truth and Reconciliation Commission charged Shining Path with deliberate mass murder against any people it regarded as enemies to their plan for power:

This translated into slogans such as “beat the land,” which involved the murder of authorities, especially local ones: mayors, governors, judges. The diabolical characteristics of the Shining Path are described in its own political party documents, and in the directives to its militants, to “pay the blood fee” and “induce genocide” since they had calculated that “the triumph of the revolution will cost a million dead people.”

Guzmán’s trail of death and destruction included blowing up voting booths, bombing buildings and intersections, torturing for the sake of torture, and other “vanguard of the proletariat” amusements. Karl Marx was one of the former philosophy professor’s intellectual inspirations for these crimes but his God was China’s Mao Zedong. Guzmán visited China in 1965. He took the official sucker tour and departed with admiration for Mao’s brutal policies that killed 20 million people in the name of creating a socialist paradise. In 1988, during a rare interview amid the war, Guzmán said this:

With regard to violence, we start from the principle established by Chairman Mao Zedong: violence, that is the need for revolutionary violence, is a universal law with no exception. Revolutionary violence is what allows us to resolve fundamental contradictions by means of an army, through people’s war.

Theodore Dalrymple is an English psychiatrist, former prison doctor and a distinguished fellow at New York City’s Manhattan Institute. In a 2006 article for the New English Review,[2] he wrote:

The worst brutality I ever saw was that committed by Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, in the days when it seemed possible that it might come to power. If it had, I think its massacres would have dwarfed those of the Khmer Rouge. As a doctor, I am accustomed to unpleasant sights, but nothing prepared me for what I saw in Ayacucho, where Sendero first developed under the sway of a professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzmán. I took photographs of what I saw, but the newspapers deemed them too disturbing to be printed.

Where the means justify the end, as they do for most ideologies, mass murder becomes more likely, perhaps even inevitable in ideologized states. The capacity for cruelty, and the enjoyment of cruelty, that lies latent in almost every human heart, then allies itself to a supposedly higher, even transcendent purpose. Original sin meets social conditioning. A vicious circle is set up: and eventually, viciousness itself is taken to be a sign both of loyalty and of higher purpose.

The greatness of a crime is thus a guarantee of the greatness of its motive: for who would order the deportation of whole nations, for example, cause famines, work millions to death, shoot untold numbers, unless he had some worthy higher purpose? And the more ruthlessly he did all these things, the higher his purpose must be to justify them. To participate in the worst of crimes is then to be the best of men.

Guzmán’s ivory red tower collapsed when he was arrested in September 1992 in the house of a Lima dance teacher. That event is loosely told in a 1995 novel, The Dancer Upstairs, and in a 2002 film of the same title produced and directed by John Malkovich. Guzmán was sentenced to life imprisonment for his murder spree; in 2018, he was retried and sentenced to a second life term.

If you’re interested in the details of the wasted, blood-soaked life of this nutty professor, you won’t be disappointed in the 2019 book by Orin Starn and Miguel La Serna, The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes. It would make a great Christmas present for any Antifa friends you might have. A reader will see first-hand how bad ideas must inevitably produce bad results, even if the perpetrators think they have “the common good” as their motivation. I close with a paragraph from that book:

Everything began with praiseworthy, even noble intentions. The great Communist longing to redeem humanity from misery and injustice motivated Shining Path to its war. When the gaunt Franciscan friars came ashore in Peru with the Spanish conquerors, they offered salvation in the next life. The senderistas and their Communist faith promised the more immediate earthly heaven of a new socialist order. . . In the shiny new world, as Marx somewhat vaguely imagined it, a liberated humankind would renounce profit’s unhappy pursuit. The evolutionary destiny of our species lay in Communism’s blessed state of mutual responsibility and the common good.

If you take that last sentence with anything but a grain of salt, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

For additional information, see:

- The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes by Oren Starn and Miguel La Serna

- “Shining Path” by InSight Crime:

- “The Shining Path: A Tragic Period in Peru’s History” by Thomas Adams

- How Difficult It Is To Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980–1999 by Carlos Iván Degregori

- From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship by Paul Hollander

- Inside American Education: The Decline, the Deception and the Dogmas by Thomas Sowell

Originally published at FEE.org on June 26, 2020.

[1] See “Celebrating Marx at Carnegie Mellon University” by Paul Kengor at The American Spectator website: https://spectator.org/celebrating-marx-at-carnegie-mellon-university/.

[2] See “The Realities of Evil” by Theodore Dalrymple at the New English Review’s website: https://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm?frm=3895.

Leonard Read, the Man

The fullest appreciation of Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” derives from this understanding: The gentle, persuasive, and irresistible appeal of the essay is a direct reflection of the personality of its author. What you see in the essay is what you got in the man himself.

He Who Strikes the Second Blow Starts the Fight

I can offer this observation from personal experience, but I can also affirm that it’s a view widely shared by those who knew Leonard and worked with him for far longer than I did. I was fortunate to know him only in the final six years of his long life, from when I first met him in 1977 until he passed in 1983. This account of an incident in Leonard’s career comes from someone who knew him for decades—his long-time FEE colleague, Bettina Greaves, in her 1998 article, Leonard E. Read, Crusader:

One day the mail brought a vicious three-page diatribe from a labor-union organizer who attacked Read’s position, expressed in an article about a recent airline dispute, that there was no moral right for workers. . . to forcibly prevent willing workers from occupying vacated jobs [of strikers].

Read took no notice of the correspondent’s ill temper, but used a “turn-the-other-cheek approach”; he sent a serious and courteous reply with two small books.

Some weeks later the union man, “Whitey,” wrote back, authorizing Read “to become my director of reading. Send me anything which in your judgment will help my thinking, and with invoice.” Whitey changed his occupation and eventually the two men met in Seattle when Whitey drove Read to the airport after a lecture. Read reminded Whitey of his first letter. Read wrote later that Whitey felt “crushed to think he had written in such a vein to one who reacted as [Read] had.”

“Suppose I had replied in kind?” Read recalled asking. “Would you and I be riding together?”

“I’ll say we wouldn’t!”

“Whitey, let me explain what I did to you.” Holding his plane ticket against the windshield, Read asked, “What holds it there?”

“The tension of your finger.”

“You are right, Whitey. It is known as the law of polarity or the tension of the opposites. Now observe what happens when the tension is removed.” The ticket fell to the floor. “Well, that’s precisely what I did to you. I removed the tension; I gave you nothing to scratch against.”

Read then quoted an old Arab proverb, “He who strikes the second blow starts the fight.” “When I didn’t strike back,” Read said, “there was no fight; you and I could become friends.”

This story has a sequel. “Perhaps two years later, there came a period of three months with no word from Whitey—most unusual. Finally, a letter arrived, explaining that he had been in a head-on auto collision. He was still in the hospital after 90 days. And then this: ‘but, Mr. Read, you should see the interest my three doctors are showing in our philosophy!’”

That story provides a revealing peek into a defining quality of Leonard’s personality. Though he knew as well as anyone that the stakes were high in the intellectual battle for liberty, his weapons looked nothing like those deployed on physical battlefields. He never aimed to insult a foe, let alone annihilate him. He saw every opponent as a potential ally, never an incorrigible enemy. And if you were already part-way to embracing liberty as a life philosophy, it would never occur to him to berate you until you came the full distance. He was a humble encourager, never a pompous, breast-beating turn-off. He intended to build a movement by building individuals, one at a time. He understood that one accomplishes that far more effectively with honey than with nettles.

Of Talks and of Walks

Do you know someone who professes liberty but whose personality (which is essentially the delivery mechanism) is night and day apart from Leonard’s? I think we all do. One of many that I know, in fact, comes readily to mind. So rather than contrast Leonard with some imaginary figure, allow me to use that real person I know. Let’s call him Mr. X because it would be so un-Leonard-like for me to reveal his name. It’s the point that counts here, not the person. The vast majority of you wouldn’t know him, anyway.

Mr. X exudes self-importance, far beyond anyone else’s assessment of him. His ego is insufferable, and it leads him to come across often as bombastic and overbearing. He’s frequently angry. His first impulse when he finds something he disagrees with, even if it’s from someone with whom he has wide agreement, is to get nasty. There’s a streak of jealousy and self-focus in him that prevents a compliment from ever escaping his lips. If he had received the same letter from Whitey that Leonard did, he would have denounced its author on social media. How effective do you think that approach would have been in Whitey’s case?

Now that you’ve read “I, Pencil,” you know how remarkably inoffensive it is, even when Leonard is gently chiding the “mastermind” mentality so hostile to the essay’s message. How many more people might be drawn to the philosophy of liberty if this positive approach were the default position of its advocates?

Intellectual Humility

The late Tibor Machan, who wrote many articles for FEE, once interviewed Leonard for Reason magazine.[1] From that exchange, I extract these responses from Leonard for your review:

It was Socrates who said, “That man thinks he knows everything, whereas he knows nothing. I on the other hand, know nothing, but I know I know nothing.” And it is not until a person empties himself of know-it-allness that he can possibly rise in wisdom and understanding and excellence. And in that respect I resemble Socrates. . . .

I just received a letter this morning from a friend in Australia who said, “Do you not get distraught because people do not let you know how much they’re benefiting from what you and the Foundation do?” And my answer is, “I do not.” The only way I would get distraught would be if I were not doing the best possible for me in realizing my own capabilities.

Those passages illustrate another critical aspect of Leonard’s persona. It showed up in all of his writing and especially in “I, Pencil.” In a phrase, it’s intellectual humility. He knew that when he started learning as a child, the universe of knowledge he didn’t know was as great then as it would still be on the last day of his earthly life. That meant he was introspective, focused on self-improvement and character-building. He never presumed more than he knew. He wouldn’t tell you how to run your business or your life. He even wrote a book, The Free Market and Its Enemy, in which he identified “the enemy” as “know-it-allness.”

My Mr. X, on the other hand, is a know-it-all. He’s certain of everything, including how your business should be run. He finds fault in your hiring, firing, and editorial decisions, though he’s privy to virtually none of the details and apparently doesn’t care to understand them. He second-guesses anything that bothers him. He’s a pure pontificator, not a builder of anything. He’s never created or managed a company or organization; never met a payroll; never wrestled with the vicissitudes of management, marketing, or fundraising. He slings arrows from his protected ivory tower and makes enemies of friends for no more reason than the perverse, personal satisfaction he derives from it. Perhaps he’s like the pre-Leonard version of Whitey.

Which personality is more likely to build a movement, to encourage progress in both people and causes—that of Leonard Read or that of Mr. X? Rather obvious, isn’t it?

“I, Pencil” is the epitome of intellectual humility in every dimension. The pencil doesn’t take all the credit for his existence, does he? He doesn’t claim that he could make himself. No one, he argues, can make something as seemingly simple as a pencil all by himself. Grasp that key point fully, and you can’t help but be humbled. Both the story and the storyteller (the pencil) exude humility, as did the story’s author, Leonard Read.

“Hatching”

Roger Ream, FEE’s board chairman and a personal friend of mine for 40 years, is president of a leading organization in the liberty space, the Fund for American Studies. He worked with Leonard on the FEE staff in the 1970s. In Freedom’s Champion, Roger noted:

If I were to summarize Leonard’s vision, it would be by way of a quotation from the 17th-century essayist and poet Abraham Cowley, who wrote, “Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves up to liberty. It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.”

Leonard was committed to spiritual growth, or what he would sometimes call “hatching.” He believed freedom was inextricably linked with the practice of self-improvement. Each of us should seek to continually develop our talents and our understanding. Leonard himself reached what he called the third level of libertarian leadership: a level of learning that leads others to seek one’s tutorship. Leonard’s philosophy was to “go only where you are called, but do everything in your power to be called.” He was often called by those seeking to learn about the freedom philosophy, and he traveled the world to speak, teach, and inspire people to commit to self-improvement.

As important a figure as Leonard Read was to the cause of liberty in the 20th century, he was never “full of himself.” At every turn, he focused the limelight on ideas, not personalities. He was happy to remain in the background as he promoted others, from Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises to any young student or professor who had yet to make a name for himself.

The Happiest of Happy Warriors

Mr. X is just the opposite. He craves attention and whines or lashes out when he doesn’t get it. He wants you to notice him so badly that he’ll even bore you with endless updates on his health, diet, and whereabouts. He’s the center of the universe, if you know what I mean. You’d never get any such impressions from Leonard Read. Which persona do you think attracts the most newcomers to liberty—or any philosophy, for that matter? Which is lastingly effective, and which is quickly forgotten?

The secrets to Leonard Read’s effectiveness—the reasons he is celebrated 35 years after his passing—lie in the magnetism of his character. He was the happiest of happy warriors, as suggested in this further passage from his interview in Reason:

Machan: You don’t have some secret formula that you would divulge on how to keep fit in old age?

Read: Not exactly. But I would suggest that you control yourself against fretting, worry, anger, all the forms of stress. That’s the main thing in life—keep away from stress—because it kills you. Keep happy; have fun!

“I, Pencil” reflects Leonard Read’s inner happiness. There’s not a whiff of sanctimony or pomposity in it. It’s a happy story with the happiest of uplifting, visionary tidings: Free people accomplish miraculous things! So let’s liberate, not denigrate. Let’s unleash, not hobble. Let’s have faith that freedom and goodwill can take humanity to levels of achievement unlimited by anything but our imaginations.

Thank you, Leonard Read, for cultivating the kind of remarkable personality that produced “I, Pencil” and which serves to this day as a model we all should seek to emulate!

Originally published at FEE.org on December 28, 2018.

[1] See “A Rare and Insightful Interview with Leonard Read” by Tibor R. Machan: https://fee.org/articles/a-rare-and-insightful-interview-with-leonard-read/.

Louis Armstrong Broke Barriers With Music, Optimism, and the Sheer Force of His Personality

Rarely do we hear the term “reform school” these days. But for years it was a running gag in episodes featuring the slapstick comedy team, The Three Stooges. Larry, the curly-haired stooge, attended one (a kind of correctional institution for juveniles).[1]

Whether or not reform school did Larry any good was never revealed. But I can tell you of one that made a pivotal difference for a renowned black musician—the inimitable Louis Armstrong, King of Jazz. He ranks as one of the greatest and most beloved entertainers of the twentieth century.

Armstrong dropped out of fifth grade in his hometown of New Orleans in 1912, when he was just 11. On New Year’s Eve that year, he borrowed his stepfather’s revolver (without permission) and headed out to the streets for some holiday fun. He fired six times in the air. They were blanks but were more than enough to get him arrested. He was subsequently remanded to the Colored Waif’s Home, a reform school, where he spent the next year and a half.

Music, he later wrote in his autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, had “been in my blood from the day I was born.” Before his arrest, he played a horn and sang on street corners with friends. At the reform school, he jumped at the chance to join the band, and that’s where he honed his skills at the cornet. The rest is history.

Upon release from the Colored Waif’s Home, Armstrong played wherever he could wangle an invitation. Some venues at first were on the seedy side. You get a sense of that, as well as Armstrong’s addiction to music, from this passage in his autobiography:

In all my whole career the Brick House [in New Orleans] was one of the toughest joints I ever played in. It was the honky-tonk where levee workers would congregate every Saturday night and trade with the gals who’d stroll up and down the floor and the bar. Those guys would drink and fight one another like circle saws. Bottles would come flying over the bandstand like crazy, and there was lots of just plain common shooting and cutting. But somehow all that jive didn’t faze me at all. I was so happy to have some place to blow my horn.

In the Roaring ’20s, Armstrong played the trumpet and the trombone for the famous Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, the biggest and best black band of the day. By the end of that decade, he was gaining a reputation as a remarkable vocalist as well. People said he had a voice like gravel, and they meant it as a high compliment. He could improvise with his own amazing innovations on whatever he played, and on whatever he sang. His imprint on Jazz, on the Harlem Renaissance, and on the broader musical scene in America and in Europe remains immense.

In the video “Louis Armstrong: Broke Down Barriers for African American Artists” from Bio.com, Ricky Riccardi, author of What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years, the musician’s pioneering spirit comes through:

Armstrong broke down many barriers throughout the 1930s. He becomes the first African American to have it in his contract that he would not play at a hotel he could not stay at. He becomes the first African American star to get featured billing in a Hollywood movie. Just through his music and the sheer force of his personality, the barriers start falling. . . He makes over 35 films. He was the first jazz musician to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Louis was the real King of Jazz.

At 63, he became the oldest performer to hit #1 on the Pop Chart, with his rendition of Hello Dolly!. Four years later at age 67, What a Wonderful World made him the oldest male to top the UK Singles Chart. Among other Armstrong firsts was the fact that he hosted a nationally broadcast radio show before any other black man or woman.

Aside from his innovative music and his unforgettable voice, what I remember the most about Louis Armstrong was his smile. It was no ordinary one. Not only was it ever-present, it was also the widest smile I’ve ever seen. It was so infectious that I still find myself smiling back any time I watch one of his recorded performances.

It’s just my conjecture but I think that characteristic Armstrong smile reflected his naturally happy and optimistic outlook on life. He loved making others smile. He grew up in a world where racial animosity was all too common, and in a part of the country where segregation was the norm. But he never let it darken any corner of his own soul.

Friends in the growing civil rights movement often urged Armstrong to get more personally involved in the struggle. They wanted him in the streets and in the halls of Congress, but he believed his less confrontational approach that focused on putting his talent on display for all would prove more productive in the long run.

Once, when he felt frustrated at President Eisenhower’s initial inaction in the 1957 school segregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, Armstrong did speak out in no uncertain terms. But he mostly worked to bring blacks and whites together by his effervescent personality and the universal appeal of his music.

When he died in 1971, fellow Jazz great Duke Ellington said of him, “He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt anyone along the way.”

Watch Armstrong sing “What a Wonderful World” and you’ll likely discover it’s physically impossible not to smile as you do. He made the words, inspirational to begin with, resonate in a way that many find to be magnetically uplifting:

I see trees of green, red roses too.

I see them bloom for me and for you

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

I see skies of blue, and clouds of white.

The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky

Are also on the faces, of people going by.

I see friends shaking hands, saying, “How do you do?”

They’re really saying, “I love you!”

I hear babies cry, I watch them grow.

They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

Oooh yeah!

If Louis Armstrong were alive today and a witness to the many dark moments and sad days we Americans have experienced recently, could he still think of the world as “wonderful”? I think he could, and he would. He was always more interested in the good in people than he was the bad. That’s just the way he was, and probably the way the rest of us ought to be.

For additional information, see:

- Louis Armstrong: Broke Down Barriers for African American Artists by Bio.com (video)

- When the Saints Go Marching In (video)

- What a Wonderful World (video)

- Hello, Dolly! (video, with Barbra Streisand)

- Ain’t Misbehavin’ (video)

- Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong

- Rowlf the Muppet Dog Sings What a Wonderful World to a Puppy (video)

- What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years by Ricky Riccardi

- Who Was Louis Armstrong? By Yona Zeldis McDonough

- Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout

Originally published at FEE.org on February 24, 2021.

[1] See a montage of the running gag in “Great 3 Stooges Running Gag: ‘Reminds Me Of The Reform School’”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxW_2Yj9RGA.

Jan Ernst Matzeliger: The Henry Ford of Shoes

Suppose that I figured out a way to revolutionize the shoe industry. An invention of my own design would double shoe production and cut shoe prices in half. It would provide thousands of new jobs for mostly young or poor people. I could do it without a penny of taxpayer money. Indeed, I faced some major disadvantages to overcome, not the least of which was the fact that I’m a poor immigrant from Dutch Guiana (now Surinam) and my mother was a black slave.

If you met me, knowing what I have just told you about myself, which of the following would you want to say to me?

1. You didn’t build that!

2. You need to pay more taxes and be regulated.

3. Were you motivated by greed?

4. Who did you exploit along the way?

5. You’re a hero!

If you answered 1, 2, 3, or 4, that probably says a lot more about you than it does me, and it isn’t good. If 5 was your answer, go to the head of your Sociology class.

Of course, I (Lawrence Reed) cannot lay claim to any of the accomplishments cited above. But a remarkable young man named Jan Ernst Matzeliger (1852–1889) certainly can. If you wear shoes, you owe him a debt of gratitude.

Born in 1852 in Paramaribo, Matzeliger was the son of a Dutch engineer and a Surinamese black woman who was a household slave. Jan grew up working in his father’s workshops, where he exhibited a very promising aptitude for handling and fixing machines.

At the age of 19, he spent his savings sailing the world on a merchant ship before he settled two years later in Philadelphia—without a job or friends and speaking only Dutch. But he learned English and made friends fast. When offered employment in a shoe factory in 1877 in Lynn, Massachusetts, he grabbed it. His English was then so good that he taught Sunday school at one of the few churches in the city that welcomed blacks into its congregation.

Shoes in those days were made as they had been for centuries—mostly by hand, one at a time. It was a laborious task, as one author explains:

For proper fit, the customer’s feet had to be duplicated in size and form by creating a stone or wooden mold called a “last” from which the shoes were sized and shaped. Since the greatest difficulty in shoe making was the actual assembly of the sole to the upper shoe, it required great skill to tack and sew the two components together. It was thought that such intricate work could only be done by skilled human hands.

Matzeliger’s inventive mind zeroed in on the solution. If a machine could be developed that would automate the “lasting” process—attaching the sole to the upper shoe—the result would be an explosion in productivity. It took him several years of trial and error but such a machine is precisely what he invented and received a patent for in 1883.

The most expert shoe laster, using standard hand tools, would be lucky if he could turn out 50 pairs of shoes in a day. With Matzeliger’s machine, he could produce upwards of 700. It was like going from horse and buggy to a Ferrari overnight.

Two years later, the young inventor sold a working model and the rights to replicate the machine to venture capitalists, who paid him the equivalent in today’s money of about $400,000. In no time, it became the standard throughout the industry. Important elements of it are still in use in shoe factories today.

Tragically, Matzeliger had worked so hard on the invention, often going without food so he could afford materials, that he put his health in jeopardy. He contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of 36 in 1889.

The University of Houston’s John Lienhard describes Matzeliger’s final five years as happy ones:

He’d gained membership in the North Congregational Church. He’d gained friends. He taught Sunday school, and he taught oil painting. He also poured out his inventive genius on new machines. Meanwhile, he’d cut the cost of making shoes in two.

When tuberculosis claimed him, his will left a big piece of his fortunes to the Church that’d seen beyond the color of his skin. He made special provisions for his drawing instruments, his Bible, and his technical books—the things that’d really mattered to him.

In 1984, Lynn, Massachusetts, finally named a bridge after this good and quiet man who’d done so much for the city, who’d done so much for all America. Finally, they honored this triumph of the mind, against all odds.

In September 1991, the US Postal Service issued a 29-cent stamp in memory of Jan Ernst Matzeliger. It was an honor he richly deserved.

For additional information, see:

- Jan Matzeliger, Black Inventor (video)

- Did You Know?—Jan Matzeliger (video)

- Hidden Figures: Jan Matzeliger (video)

- Jan Matzeliger: Automatic Shoe Laster Sculpture (video)

- Great Moments in Shoe History (video)

- Jan Earnst Matzeliger: A Lasting Invention by Peggy U. Plet

- Shoes for Everyone: A Story About Jan Matzeliger by Barbara Mitchell

Originally published at FEE.org on February 1, 2021.

How a Polish Entrepreneur Went from Death Row in a Nazi Concentration Camp to ‘the Sam Walton of Brazil’

For honest, successful entrepreneurs, the fabled journey from rags to riches is peppered with initiative, misfortune, reward, luck (good and bad), and lessons galore. In the remarkable life of the late Samuel Klein, all those elements were present in such superabundance as to render his true story almost unbelievable. It is certainly one of the most incredible I have ever run across, and it involves two of my very favorite countries as well.

Rags to riches is, in this instance, an understatement. At his lowest point, Klein was on death row in a Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland. At the other extreme some years later, he was one of the richest men in Brazil, a world away.

The Son of a Carpenter

Klein was born to Jewish parents on November 15, 1923 in Zaklików in southeastern Poland. It is a small town even today, boasting barely 3,000 inhabitants. Notably, its citizens engaged in a year-long uprising in 1863–64 against the Russians in a failed but courageous attempt to resurrect the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.[1]

Samuel’s father worked as a carpenter. It earned him a very modest income he stretched to feed himself, his wife, and nine children. Samuel attended only the first four years of elementary school, then went to work assisting his father. Being Jewish, the Klein family faced immediate, mortal danger when Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939. For three years they endured constant harassment until the Nazis forcibly separated them. Mrs. Klein and five of the children were dispatched to the infamous Treblinka extermination center, where most of them perished. Samuel and his father were transported to another camp, Majdanek.

With seven gas chambers, two gallows and well over 200 buildings, Majdanek was where Samuel might well have expected to breathe his last. Some 80,000 prisoners were murdered there. Fortunately, Samuel Klein was not one of them. He mustered the audacity to attempt escape, and in July 1944, he succeeded. During the next ten months, he dodged authorities while living in the woods and fields of southern Poland, aided by Christian Poles who protected him.

From Carpenter to ‘the Sam Walton of Brazil’

After World War II in Europe ended in May 1945, Klein moved to Germany and took up the carpentry skills he had learned from his father. It was there that he showed the first spark of entrepreneurship. He discovered he could make more money selling vodka and cigarettes to Allied troops than he could in woodworking. He also opened a delicatessen in Berlin. Then in the early 1950s, he decided it was time to move on. He left Germany with a wife, a two-year-old son, and about $6,000 in savings—a sum that proved crucial in his next venture.

Klein’s first choice was the United States, but immigration quotas blocked his entry. America’s loss was Brazil’s gain, as he and his small family headed then for São Paulo by way of a short stint in Bolivia. His savings bought him a house, a horse, and a wagon that included a list of the previous wagon-owner’s 200 customers. For nearly five years, while speaking only rudimentary Portuguese, Klein peddled blankets, sheets and towels and grew a loyal customer base to about 5,000.

On New Year’s Day 1958, Klein opened his first store in Brazil. It marketed the linens he previously sold door-to-door and later, appliances, furniture and other housewares too. Over the next 50 years, the Polish-born former concentration camp prisoner built Casas Bahia into a network of more than 500 stores in 15 Brazilian states with 55,000 employees and millions of happy customers each year.

Before he died in November 2014 at the age of 91, he gained a reputation as one of the most beloved business figures in the country, “the Sam Walton of Brazil.” From the rags he wore when he escaped Nazi clutches, he traveled all the way to a net worth just shy of a billion dollars.

A Truly Uncommon Marvel

Along the way, Klein did some remarkable things that earned the company endless awards for retail excellence. He became a life-long friend of Brazilian soccer star Pelé, who became a company spokesman. He built Latin America’s largest network of warehouses. He focused laser-like on customer service. He created a popular installment plan that made his goods affordable to low-income people and inspired a Brazilian rock group to include this repeating chorus line in a hit song: “My happiness is a Casas Bahia payment book.” And he was a generous philanthropist, giving millions to new schools and charities.

Pedro Tavares Fernandes, President of Observatório do Empreendedor in Florianopolis, Brazil, assisted me in translating one of Klein’s obituaries from Portuguese to English.[2] He ranks Klein as a model of entrepreneurial achievement:

Because of a history of poverty, it has always been tough for Brazilians to buy furniture and household appliances. Samuel Klein developed a very effective system of credit so the poor could buy them. He reached a huge crowd of buyers with reasonable interest rates and they rewarded him with low default rates and customer loyalty. It is very common here to say, when you’re about to buy something expensive, that you’re paying for it over 24 months in a Casas Bahia financing program. I never heard anything bad about Samuel Klein.

Three-quarters of a century after he left Poland, Klein still has admirers there too. Mikołaj Pisarski, President of the Mises Institute of Economic Education in Wroclaw, told me this:

Had Samuel Klein lived in Poland at the time of his death he would be the 5th richest Pole. Not unlike other post-communist countries, many among the richest here owe their wealth either to close relations with the former regime or illicit government deals shortly after the transformation. Klein stands out as an example of what a true entrepreneur should be. What he achieved he owed only to his hard work and ingenuity. He achieved it despite not having friends in high places and in the process, he made the lives of the people in a country that welcomed him as an immigrant so much better.

According to Pisarski, the Klein story is just one of several involving Polish achievers in South America. Another fascinating one is that of Ernest Malinowski,[3] who engineered the Ferrovias Central in the Peruvian Andes. In the late 19th century, it was the highest railway in the world.

Barriers to economic success stand in the way of almost everyone, big and small, to one degree or another. Little that is truly worthwhile is easy to come by, let alone a large fortune. Some people give up easily and quickly.

Then there are the Samuel Kleins of the world—the truly uncommon marvels who overcome the unimaginable to become the unexpected. They are heroes, builders, creators of wealth, and servants to the millions whose lives they improve.

A Final Word from Samuel Klein Himself

No essay about the remarkable Samuel Klein should conclude without a few words from the great man himself. I offer these to the reader because they epitomize Klein’s spirit of service and enterprise:

I trust the human being. Otherwise I would not open the doors of my stores every single day. What helps keeping me alive is the trust I have in others.

One plus one equals two. But the sum of an idea plus an idea is not two ideas, but thousands of them.

The wealth of a poor man is his name. . . Whether the customer is a janitor or a mason, if they are good payers, Casas Bahia will give them lines of credit; that way they are able to make their dreams come true.

My motto is trust. Trusting patrons, suppliers, employees, friends and mainly trusting myself.

The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity.

For additional information, see:

- The Samuel Klein Institute

- AP News: “Founder of Brazil’s Largest Retail Chain Dies” (November 20, 2014)

- A History of Casas Bahia

Originally published at FEE.org on December 2, 2020.

[1] See my article “Why the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s Legacy of Liberty Is Worthy of Our Appreciation Today”: https://fee.org/articles/why-the-polish-lithuanian-commonwealth-s-legacy-of-liberty-is-worthy-of-our-appreciation-today/.

[2] The original obituary can be found at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2014/11/1550927-morre-samuel-klein-fundador-da-casas-bahia-aos-91-anos.shtml.

[3] You can read about Malinowski at https://culture.pl/en/article/ernest-malinowski-the-19th-century-engineer-who-defended-peru and https://greatpoles.pl/index.php/historical-poles/28-ernest-malinowski.

About the Author

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became President of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. He previously served for 21 years as President of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan (1987–2008). He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its department of economics from 1982 to 1984.

In May 2019, he retired to the role of President Emeritus at FEE and assumed the titles of Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty.

He holds a B.A. in economics from Grove City College (1975) and an M.A. degree in history from Slippery Rock State University (1978), both in Pennsylvania. He holds two honorary doctorates, one from Central Michigan University (public administration, 1993) and Northwood University (laws, 2008).

Reed has authored nearly 2,000 columns and articles in newspapers, magazines and journals in the United States and abroad. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Examiner, Christian Science Monitor, Intellectual Takeout, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, The Epoch Times, Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, among many others. He has authored or coauthored eight books, the most recent being Was Jesus a Socialist? (a major expansion in 2020 of an earlier essay) and Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction. Additionally, he co-authored and edited five e-Books. See the “Books” section of this website for more info. He is frequently interviewed on radio talk shows and has appeared as a guest on numerous television programs.

Reed delivered at least 75 speeches annually between 1985 and 2019 in virtually every state and in dozens of countries from Bulgaria to China to Bolivia. His best-known lectures include “Seven Principles of Sound Policy” and “Great Myths of the Great Depression,” both of which have been translated into more than a dozen languages and distributed worldwide.

His interests in political and economic affairs have taken him as a freelance journalist to 87 countries on six continents. He is an adviser to numerous organizations around the world. He served for 15 years as a member of the board (and for one term as president) of the State Policy Network. His numerous recognitions include the Champion of Freedom Award from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Distinguished Alumni Award from Grove City College and the Citizen Warrior Award from Heirs of the Republic.

Over his nearly 11 years as the 10th President of FEE, the organization experienced explosive growth by all measures of output and impact—in contributions, seminar attendance, web page visits (www.fee.org), online courses, school and campus events, online content, publications, videos, etc. His presidency was the longest and most consequential of any since that of the organization’s founder, Leonard E. Read.

He serves on the board of directors of Just Facts.com, the Frontier Institute in Montana, the Bear Creek Nature Center in Chattahoochee Hills, GA and the Newnan (GA) Carnegie Library Foundation, and on numerous advisory boards around the world.

He is a native of Pennsylvania and a 30-year resident of Michigan, and now resides in Newnan, Georgia, where he writes a column for the Newnan Times-Herald.

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You can reach Mr. Reed via email at lreed@fee.org.

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