The America We Lost

Dr. Pei, who came to this country from Italy in 1908, is Professor of Romance Philology at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of several distinguished books and nu­merous magazine articles. The Foundation was given special permission by the Saturday Evening Post to reprint the above article. Copyright 1952 by The Curtis Publishing Company

When I first came to America, many years ago, I learned a new meaning of the word "Liberty"—freedom from government.

I did not learn a new meaning for "democracy." The European country from which I came, Italy, was at that time as "democratic" as America. It was a constitutional monarchy, with a parliament, free and frequent elections, lots of political parties and plenty of freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly.

But my native country was gov­ernment-ridden. A vast bureauc­racy held it in its countless ten­tacles. Regardless of the party or coalition of parties that might be in power at the moment, the government was everywhere. Wher­ever one looked, one saw signs of the ever-present government—in the uniforms of numberless royal, rural, and municipal policemen, soldiers, officers, gold-braided functionaries of all sorts. You could not take a step without gov­ernment intervention.

Many industries and businesses were government-owned and gov­ernment-run—railroads, tele­graphs, salt, and tobacco among them. No agreement, however trivial, was legal unless written on government-stamped paper. If you stepped out of the city into the country and came back with a ham, a loaf of bread, or a bottle of wine, you had to stop at the internal-revenue barriers and pay duty to the government, and so did the farmers who brought in the city’s food supply every morn­ing. No business could be started or run without the official sanction of a hundred bureaucrats.

Young people did not dream of going into business for them­selves; they dreamed of a modest but safe government job, where they would have tenure, security, and a pitiful pension at the end of their plodding careers. There was grinding taxation to support the many government functions and the innumerable public ser­vants. Everybody hated the gov­ernment—not just the party in power, but the government itself. They had even coined a phrase, "It’s raining—thief of a govern­ment!" as though even the evils of nature were the government’s fault. Yet, I repeat, the country was democratically run, with all the trappings of a many-party sys­tem and all the freedoms of which we in America boast today.

America in those days made you open your lungs wide and inhale great gulps of freedom-laden air, for here was one additional free­dom—freedom from government.

The government was conspicu­ous by its very absence. There were no men in uniform, save oc­casional cops and firemen, no vis­ible bureaucrats, no stifling re­strictions, no government monopo­lies. It was wonderful to get used to the American system: to learn that a contract was valid if writ­ten on the side of a house; that you could move not only from the city to the country but from state to state and never be asked what your business was or whether you had anything to declare; that you could open and conduct your own business, provided it was a legiti­mate one, without government in­terference; that you could go from one end of the year to the other and never have contact with the national government, save for the cheery postman who delivered your mail with a speed and effi­ciency unknown today; that there were no national taxes, save hid­den excises and import duties that you did not even know you paid.

In that horse-and-buggy Amer­ica, if you made an honest dollar, you could pocket it or spend it without having to figure what portion of it you "owed" the gov­ernment or what possible deduc­tions you could allege against that government’s claims. You did not have to keep books and records of every bit of income and expendi­ture or run the risk of being called a liar and a cheat by some­one in authority.

Above all, the national ideal was not the obscure security of a government job, but the boundless opportunity that all Americans seemed to consider their birth­right. Those same Americans loved their government then. It was there to help, protect, and defend them, not to restrict, be­fuddle, and harass them. At the same time, they did not look to the government for a livelihood or for special privileges and hand­outs. They were independent men in the full sense of the word.

Foreign-born citizens have been watching with alarm the gradual Europeanization of America over the past twenty years. They have seen the growth of the familiar European-style government octo­pus, along with the vanishing of the American spirit of freedom and opportunity and its replacement by a breathless search for "security" that is doomed to de­feat in advance in a world where nothing, not even life itself, is se­cure.

Far more than the native-born, they are in a position to make comparisons. They see that Amer­ica is fast becoming a nineteenth century-model European country. They are asked to believe that this is progress. But they know from bitter experience that it just isn’t so.

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Milk on the Doorstep

"It is remarkable," comments George Schwartz, an English writer, in an article in The New York Times Magazine, "how many people can see no sense in the existing order of Western society, the easiest criticism of which is that it is not order but disorder. With the milk on the doorstep every morning, the free economy is denounced as unplanned, uncoordinated, and chaotic."

It is a valid observation. There are countries—notably Russia—that have all the necessary material resources but still can’t get the morning milk to the doorstep. Their society’s system of production and distribution is fully ordered, carefully blueprinted by government experts. But they have the plan and no milk while we have the milk and no plan.

The fact is, of course, that our economy does not exist in disorder. In the milk business, to take the everyday example mentioned by Mr. Schwartz, there are literally thousands of individuals—farmers, truckers, processors, and salesmen, and the thousands more who are their suppliers—who make the major or minor decisions that get the milk to the doorstep, and earn a profit in the process. No group of government experts could equal the input of knowledge, industry, flexibility, and efficiency that is the combined total contribution of all of these individuals.

From Clip-Sheet, published by C. J. Harris, Toronto, Ontario