Redux - July 1940: A word from E.B. White

Notes on Freedom in an Extraordinary Time

Tomorrow is July 4th, when Americans observe the day in 1776 when, having had more than enough of taxation without representation, the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Where I live, in Connecticut, there is evidence of the importance of this day and its aftermath everywhere: located a quarter of a mile from where I live sits the oldest house in Newtown, built in 1691 by local land surveyor Daniel Crofut on five acres of property granted by King William III and Queen Mary II (and, for a while, owned by a woman whose surname was, ironically, Grant, and from whom we bought some furniture when she moved). Almost directly across the street from that house is a 1780 Colonial the residents of which were known for tapping their maples and boiling the sap every spring; I was inside that house once, when I found the owner’s ancient and massive Labrador wandering down the road, confused, loaded him into my car with the help of another driver who stopped, and brought him home to his worried owner. (The house was lovely then as it is now, with ancient, Revolutionary War-era floorboards and a ceiling so low that even I, at five feet two, could stand flat-footed with my palm resting on it.) Newtown during the Revolutionary War was also a known Tory stronghold, and many houses to this day still fly both the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes, side by side. This would have been unthinkable 249 years ago, but civility reigns supreme, at least it did, back before the apparent cruelty we’re now witnessing daily invaded the consciousness of so many in such an unthinkable way. Some of my dearest and oldest friends are what I like to call old-school Republicans, and even I have, on very rare occasions, voted for local Republican candidates because I thought that they were better than their counterparts on my own side (they were — a scoundrel knows no party); my friends are good and kind and deeply intelligent people, and a few of them devoutly religious, and when I hear them say But we didn’t know he’d be like this, or make gentle excuses for utterly villainous behavior, I cringe. Because the rest of us knew what was going to happen, and how bad it was going to be. Again: when someone tells you who they are, believe them.

But: July 4th. When I was a kid at sleepaway camp and we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the founding of our country in 1976, we did so with storytelling and song, and a lot of fried chicken and corn on the cob. When I got older, beer was added to the mix. My grandmother, Clara, who until the day she died in 1982 had a photograph of FDR hanging in her living room over the television set and took her American heritage and what it meant to be a Democrat very seriously and responsibly, marked the holiday by reciting — from scratch, in its entirety — the Longfellow poem, Paul Revere’s Ride. When I was a young child, she plunked me down on her couch and made me sit still, and spoke those words to me without benefit of book, and then, when I went off to camp and she spent her holidays alone, she recited the poem in her dark and dreary apartment in Queens with no one listening but the four walls. After she died, we found her collection of Longfellow on a small table in her living room, next to The Bible (Old and New Testaments, pages marked at The Book of Ruth and 1 Corinthians; Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres) and a collection of all of Shakespeare’s works. Her favorites: Richard III and Julius Caesar, both plays about broken men whose egos had run amok and destroyed scores in the process.

July 4th has a different meaning this year, so I thought it would be appropriate to re-post Freedom, a 1940 essay by E.B. White. Collected in One Man’s Meat published by Tilbury House in a beautiful edition. I first posted this in November, shortly after the election. I am grateful to Martha White and Tilbury House for not coming after me with guns blazing — this is something I rarely do; as both an author and former publisher, I am very careful about whose work I repost and how — but I hope that every person who reads it will buy the book, and read more of White’s work on what it means to live a good and decent life, and to call oneself an American in the way my grandmother meant it, all those years ago. No people are perfect, heaven knows, and our history is littered with deplorable tragedy and horror. But we can always strive, and I think that’s what White always hoped for. - elissa

The same man who sat tapping on his Underwood typewriter at a small desk overlooking Allen Cove in Brooklin, Maine, and who gave us stories about spiders and rats and swans and a pig called Wilbur, was (if you don’t know this, and please, I hope you do) fiercely protective of democracy. This is his essay, Freedom, first published in 1940 in Harper’s Magazine two months after the Germans invaded France, and two months before the start of the Blitz. It is collected in the brilliant One Man’s Meat.

This essay is required reading — and given recent events — the clearest evidence that history repeats itself.

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Freedom

I have often noticed on my trips up to the city that people have recut their clothes to follow the fashion. On my last trip, however, it seemed to me that people had remodeled their ideas too—taken in their convictions a little at the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve, and fitted themselves out in a new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design out of the very latest page of history. It seemed to me they had strung along with Paris a little too long.

I confess to a disturbed stomach. I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. Because of its fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to admit of any compromise or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I'll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.

I shall report some of the strange remarks I heard in New York. One man told me that he thought perhaps the Nazi ideal was a sounder ideal than our constitutional system "because have you ever noticed what fine alert young faces the young German soldiers have in the newsreel?" He added, "Or American youngsters spend all their time at the movies—they're a mess." That was his summation of the case, his interpretation of the new Europe. Such a remark leaves me pale and shaken. If it represents the peak of our intelligence, then the steady march of despotism will not receive any considerable setback at our shores.

I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell arises. I pinch my nose.

Another man informed me that our democratic notion of popular government was decadent and not worth bothering about "because England is really rotten and the industrial towns there are a disgrace." That was the only reason he gave for the hopelessness of democracy; and he seemed mightily pleased with himself, as though he were more familiar than most with the anatomy of decadence, and had detected subtler aspects of the situation than were discernible to the rest of us.

Another man assured me that anyone who took any kind of government seriously was a gullible fool. You could be sure, he said, that there is nothing but corruption "because of the way Clemenceau acted at Versailles." He said it didn't make any difference really about this war. It was just another war. Having relieved himself of this majestic bit of reasoning, he subsided.

Another individual, discovering signs of zeal creeping into my blood, berated me for having lost my detachment, my pure skeptical point of view. He announced that he wasn't going to be swept away by all this nonsense, but would prefer to remain in the role of innocent bystander, which he said was the duty of any intelligent person. (I noticed, that he phoned later to qualify his remark, as though he had lost some of his innocence in the cab on the way home.)

Those are just a few samples of the sort of talk that seemed to be going round—talk that was full of defeatism and disillusion and sometimes of a too studied innocence. Men are not merely annihilating themselves at a great rate these days, but they are telling one another enormous lies, grandiose fibs. Such remarks as I heard are fearfully disturbing in their cumulative effect. They are more destructive than dive bombers and mine fields, for they challenge not merely one's immediate position but one's main defenses. They seemed to me to issue either from persons who could never have really come to grips with freedom so as to understand her, or from renegades. Where I expected to find indignation, I found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill. I was advised of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment by a man who seemed to be watching the phenomenon of intolerance not through tears of shame but with a clear intellectual gaze, as through a well-ground lens.

The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he stands. I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed for time. Actually I do not believe I am pressed for time, and I apologize to the reader for a false impression that may be created. I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.

For as long as I can remember I have had a sense of living somewhat freely in a natural world. I don't mean I enjoyed freedom of action, but my existence seemed to have the quality of freeness. I traveled with secret papers pertaining to a divine conspiracy. Intuitively I've always been aware of the vitally important pact which a man has with himself, to be all things to himself, and to be identified with all things, to stand self-reliant, taking advantage of his haphazard connection with a planet, riding his luck, and following his bent with the tenacity of a hound. My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all.

It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature publishing herself through the "I." This elusive sensation is moving and memorable. It comes early in life; a boy, we'll say, sitting on the front steps on a summer night, thinking of nothing in particular, suddenly hearing as with a new perception and as though for the first time the pulsing sound of crickets, overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification with the natural company of insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the universal perplexing question: "What is 'I'?" Or a little girl, returning from the grave of a pet bird leaning with her elbows on the window sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as part of the complete story. Or to an older youth, encountering for the first time a great teacher who by some chance word or mood awakens something and the youth beginning to breathe as an individual and conscious of strength in his vitals. I think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of identity with God—an eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense of divine existence as distinct from mere animal existence. This is the beginning of the affair with freedom.

But a man's free condition is of two parts: the instinctive freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is, of the two, more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently challenged and discussed. It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a fact and should give every person pause.

To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework. In Adolph Hitler, although he is a freely flowering individual, we do not detect either type of sensibility. From reading his book I gather that his feeling for earth is not a sense of communion but a driving urge to prevail. His feeling for men is not that they co-exist, but that they are capable of being arranged and standardized by a superior intellect—that their existence suggests not a fulfillment of their personalities but a submersion of their personalities in the common racial destiny. His very great absorption in the destiny of the German people somehow loses some of its effect when you discover, from his writings, in what vast contempt he holds all people. "I learned," he wrote, "...to gain an insight into the unbelievably primitive opinions and arguments of the people." To him the ordinary man is a primitive, capable only of being used and led. He speaks continually of people as sheep, halfwits, and impudent fools—the same people to whom he promises the ultimate in prizes.

Here in America, where our society is based on belief in the individual, not contempt for him, the free principle of life has a chance of surviving. I believe that it must and will survive. To understand freedom is an accomplishment which all men may acquire who set their minds in that direction; and to love freedom is a tendency which many Americans are born with. To live in the same room with freedom, or in the same hemisphere, is still a profoundly shaking experience for me.

One of the earliest truths (and to him most valuable) that the author of Mein Kampf discovered was that it is not the written word, but the spoken word, which in heated moments moves great masses of people to noble or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual standards, not by what the man standing next to him thinks. "I know," wrote Hitler, "that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the written word...." Later he adds contemptuously: "For let it be said to all knights of the pen and to all the political dandies, especially of today: the greatest changes in this world have never been brought about by a goose quill! No, the pen has always been reserved to motivate these changes theoretically."

Luckily I am not out to change the world—that's being done for me, and at a great clip. But I know that the free spirit of man is persistent in nature; it recurs, and has never successfully been wiped out, by fire or flood. I set down the above remarks merely (in the words of Mr. Hitler) to motivate that spirit, theoretically. Being myself a knight of the goose quill, I am under no misapprehension about "winning people"; but I am inordinately proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself, historically, to be the hypodermic which inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in circulation, so that there are individuals in every time in every land who are the carriers, the Typhoid Marys, capable of infecting others by mere contact and example. These persons are feared by every tyrant who shows his fear by burning the books and destroying the individuals. A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction that comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped off—even before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumbrance.

—E.B. White, 1940