John.Birch.org
Less Government, Individual Responsibility, And — With God's Help — A Better World
Socializing AmericaBy William Norman Grigg
I Accuse, by William W. Martin, San Diego: Freedom's Herald Publishing Co., 1989, 363 pages, hardcover, $25.00. Available from General Birch Services, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54913. (Add $3.00 per order for shipping.)When the Founding Fathers had completed their work at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked what manner of government they had produced. His answer was, "A Republic — if you can keep it." Informed Americans are ruefully aware that we have not been doing a good job of keeping the Republic, and in his new book, William W. Martin explains how we are losing our Constitutional Republic — and what we are receiving in its place.
According to Martin, "By the 1880s the cancer of socialism had begun to spread throughout the Republic. Now, a hundred years later, this cancer has all but put an end to what remains of our country's noble legacy." Martin's response to this state of affairs is to issue a bill of particulars against those responsible for the erosion of our liberties. Martin's method is borrowed from Emile Zola's 1898 work J'Accuse ("I Accuse?), in which the corruption and anti-semitism of the French military were exposed. As was the case with the earlier French work, Martin's book is intended to enrage as well as inform.
Martin informs the reader, "you are a victim of National Socialism" — a political system "by which the national state allows its subjects or citizens to hold nominal title or property but in fact seeks directly or indirectly to control virtually every economic and social factor for the so-called benefit of 'The People' or 'The Nation.'" By this, Martin does not mean to describe America as a Hitlerian state; rather, he seeks to retrieve an authentic definition of national socialism as a taxonomy that includes — but is not limited to — Germany under Hitler. National socialism is a necessary precursor to global socialism.
Intellectual ApostasyAmerica's abandonment of republican principles has been aided by the country's intellectual elite. The apostasy began with those whom Martin designates the "pseudophilosophers." Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson, there has been a constant stream of American intellectuals who have discarded principled ethics and embraced moral relativism. Martin censures Emerson, William James (the popularizer of "pragmatism," the concept that "the end justifies the means"), and John Dewey, who was instrumental in the development of America's public education system.
The"pseudophilosophers" taught, essentially, that one can make up one's own morality as he goes along. A kindred approach was taken by the "pseudoeconomists," who offered exaggerated — and often entirely specious — indictments of American capitalism. In 1885 a cabal of these "pseudoeconomists" assembled themselves into the American Economic Association; the stated purpose of the AEA was to "liberate" America from "Manchester Economics" — that is, from lassiez-faire capitalism. The AEA could be considered the prototype for all "nonpartisan" or "bipartisan" commissions of "experts" that gather periodically to ratify Establishment policy proposals.
With the "pseudophilosophers" came two related groups, the "new sociologists" and the "new historians." The task of the "new sociologists" was to erode the idea of individual responsibility and to propagate the concept of "collective responsibility." Because the individual is not truly responsible, according to the "new sociologists," the state must be given a therapeutic mandate —the power to eliminate evil by manipulating human behavior.
According to the "new sociologists," human beings aren't capable of making enlightened choices; according to the "new historians," human choices are irrelevant, as economic and historical forces govern human history. Since the early 20th Century, revisionist historians, beginning with Charles Beard, have cultivated disdain for the Constitution as the product of the vested economic interests and "18th-Century values" of our country's Founders. From such "historians" came the idea that the Constitution is inadequate for the needs of modem Americans. Their efforts prepared the way for those Martin designates as the "popularizers," "Americanizers" and "implementers" of socialism.
Popularizers and ImplementersThe "popularizers" of socialism included religious demagogues, muckraking journalists, and utopian novelists who all preached the gospel of the impending socialist millennium and professed indignation at the plight of the working class. Martin observes that the conditions decried by the "popularizers" of socialism were created not by normal capitalism, but by the economic dyspepsia typical of a nation experiencing unprecedented immigration during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. America's immigration glut was produced by the flight of people from countries whose economic systems were broadly compatible with the utopian socialist vision.
The "Americanizers" of socialism prostituted the language of American liberty by placing it in the service of socialism. This group depicted the Founding Fathers as "revolutionaries" who fought for "democracy" —kindred spirits to socialist revolutionaries in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
The combined efforts of the groups listed by Martin gave socialism a sense of intellectual respectability —even a sense of inevitability. Accordingly, the "implementers of socialism" — political leaders, judges, and some business leaders — were free to subvert the institutions of American liberty. The success of the implementers' designs can be seen in our society's tropism toward Washington; this is a recognizable symptom of a centralized, proto-socialist society.
Conquest of ValuesIf the subversion of America's constitutional order is as comprehensive as Martin maintains — and as obvious as he makes it appear — how do we explain America's apathy toward this danger?. Martin's answer to this question involves an examination of the effects of the socialist conquest upon American education and the American family.
Martin offers a useful synopsis of the development of American public education. Beginning in the early 19th Century, American intellectuals — Josiah Holbrook with his "American Lyceum" movement, and Francis Wright and Robert Owen with their experimental socialist communities — rejected the educational concept of the Founders and began agitating for "socializing" education. The most influential of these intellectuals was John Dewey.
Martin exhumes some significant quotations from Dewey regarding the mission of public education in "socializing" America. According to Dewey, "the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true Kingdom of God." Dewey's millennial kingdom bore a striking similarity to the Soviet regime. In 1928 Dewey praised the Soviets for their "marvelous developments" in "progressive" educational practices. Dewey was delighted by the role of the Soviet schools "in building up forces ... whose natural effect is to undermine the importance and uniqueness of family life .... "Dewey perceived a similar dynamic at work in American education: "It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties." Bear in mind that this observation was not intended as a criticism.
The socialist inclination of American public education is intended to prepare our society for a seamless merger into a collectivist world order. Martin provides this insight, taken from scholar Arthur Ekirch, about the public education establishment in the 1940s and 1950s: "Groups of teachers and professors, anxious to see the schools assume an active role in preparing American children for an impending cooperative, collectivist society, urged a shift from an individual-centered to a community, social-type education."
Martin's book is dense and erudite, but it is no soporific treatise. Upon finishing the volume, the reader will know the pleasant exhaustion that follows an invigorating intellectual journey — in spite of the fact that the book deals with a manifestly unpleasant subject.
I Accuse will inform and provoke the diligent reader, and it should inspire further individual study. The reader should be advised, however, that Martin's book will do nothing to prepare him to mingle with the "mainstream" that defines itself by the planted assumptions that Martin exposes.
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