“The very first concept we must recapture is this: That civilized life is not possible without adequate government, but that government itself can be the greatest of social evils…throughout history government has been the greatest enemy of liberty [emphasis in original].” John T. Flynn, The Decline of the American Republic, 1955
The title of this series of essays, The Lost World, arises from the thesis that any effort to “save our republic,” no matter how sincere and well-intentioned, is futile. Specifically, you cannot defend what no longer exists. It cannot be overemphasized that no one alive in 2023 has ever lived under the American Republic in its original form, as it existed for 144 years. While maintaining the outward form of a federal constitutional republic, the presidential election of 1932 brought about an Aristotelian “revolution in the state.” Under the exigency of an emergency, the American system of government was abandoned, dismantled, and reconstructed, not by force of arms, but by surrender.
You may say this cannot be so because the Constitution is still the law of the land, elected officials still swear an oath to “…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” the three branches of government still exist. The forms remain but a revolution occurred in the relations between government and the citizens. “The first article of our inherited tradition implicit in American thought from the beginning,” writes Garet Garrett, is this axiom: “Government is the responsibility of a self-governing people [emphasis in original].”[1] Under the New Deal regime, a new doctrine arose, asserting, “in the name of democracy, it is accepted as a political fact that people are the responsibility of government [emphasis in original].”[2]
Republican government forms subsist; the nature of the state has changed. A government supported and controlled by the people became one that supported and controlled them. Like a hagfish, the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal entered “the old form and devoured its meaning from within.”[3]
The founding generation recognized that no system of government can be restrained within the limits of form prescribed in a written constitution. “The belief that they could do so has been the great political illusion of the American people,”[4] opined former Solicitor General and sitting Congressman James Beck of Pennsylvania, June 1933, fresh from the trenches of the first session of the 73rd Congress. Describing the first 100 days of the Roosevelt Administration, Beck warned the Tennessee Bar Association:
If the American people are still harboring the illusion that they have a written form of government of limited powers, neither the Executive nor the Congress any longer entertain such belief…I know that in Congress any reference to the Constitution as a limitation upon Congressional power is now greeted with cynical indifference. As a restraining force upon congressional legislation it is non-existent…This is the great reality of the present day, and it might be well if the American people, who have generally been deluded by illusions, would now face the fact that their Constitution, insofar as it was intended to be a restraining force upon legislation, is virtually non-existent.[5]
Did you catch that? In 1933, a sitting member of Congress admitted that the Constitution was a dead letter! Yet the illusion continues - the forms subsist, the ultimate power had shifted from the citizens to Washington.
The generation that framed our constitution feared the concentration of power in the hands of “the one, the few, the well-born, or but the many,” as stated by Thomas Jefferson. When, in 1816, the Virginia legislature considered amending the State constitution, they wisely solicited Jefferson’s expertise in the fundamental principles of government. What, asked Jefferson, “has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing & concentrating all cares and powers into one body.”[6] Never one to say things by halves, the Sage of Monticello continued:
No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one; but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to…And I do believe that if the Almighty has not decreed that Man shall never be free, (and it is blasphemy to believe it) that the secret will be found to be in the making himself the depository of the powers respecting himself, so far as he is competent to them, and delegating only what is beyond his competence…The elementary republics of the wards, the county republics, the State republics, and the republic of the Union, would form a gradation of authorities, standing each on the basis of law, holding every one its delegated share of powers, and constituting truly a system of fundamental balances and checks for the government.
Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs not merely at an election, one day in a year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the state who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.[7]
Jefferson could not have been clearer: local, self-government, where every citizen is active in its administration and not just a voter once a year, is the best way to guarantee the equal right of every citizen to his life, liberty, and property, and the well-being of his neighbor. When his advice was solicited four months later regarding calling a constitutional convention, the elder statesman, sounding eerily prophetic, frankly warned of the consequences of abandoning this division and diffusion of power, of rejecting self-government:
I am not among those who fear the people. They and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And, to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers loads us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy & liberty, or profusion & servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries & our comforts, in our labors & our amusements, for our calling and our creeds…we must come to labor 16 hours in the 24, give the earnings of 15 of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses…but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers…
And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a 2nd, that 2nd for a 3rd and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering…And the forehorse of this frightful team is Public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.[8]
Like his contemporaries, Jefferson was a student of history. His grim forecast was not theoretical but grounded in the experience of “all human governments.” Perhaps no better example of concentration of power exists than the third century Roman Empire under the reign of Diocletian (284-305 A.D.). Diocletian and his successors created a vast bureaucracy, a multitude of government officials and standing army, accommodated in luxury, while quelling the teeming masses with “bread and circuses.”
The New Deal “Brain Trusters” apparently were unaware of the publication of a contemporary, James Breasted, entitled The Conquest of Civilization. Expounding on the final days of the Roman Empire, Breasted notes the consequences of unlimited, centralized power:
For the will of the emperor had now become law, and as such his decrees were dispatched throughout the length and breadth of the Roman dominions…The emperor’s innumerable officials kept an eye upon even the humblest citizen. They watched the grain dealers, butchers, and bakers, and saw to it that they properly supplied the public and never deserted their occupation…In a word, the Roman government now attempted to regulate almost every interest in life, and wherever the citizen turned he felt the control and oppression of the state.
Staggering under this crushing burden of taxes, in a state which was practically bankrupt, the citizen of every class had now become a mere cog in the vast machinery of the government. He had no other function that to toil for the state, which exacted so much of the fruit of his labor that he was fortunate if it proved barely possible for him to survive on what was left.[9]
Heedless of such warnings, the Roosevelt administration embraced a constitutional heresy: that in case of an emergency, the Constitution is held in suspension indefinitely. Americans’ birthright was traded for a mess of pottage. A tidal wave of “social” legislation coursed through a stunned Congress; out of the flood arose the Welfare State, innumerable, impersonal bureaus and agencies dispensing and enforcing cradle-to-grave dependency. Habits of dependency are easier to form than to break, and nearly a century of power over every aspect of the citizenry’s life will never be surrendered without a struggle.
The American empire (because we are a republic in name only) is on borrowed time, it will collapse under its own weight. But do not despair. This author is optimistic, that following the prescription of Jefferson, Americans will reclaim their birthright, and local, self-governing communities will arise from the ashes.
The next essay will delve into the bait-and-switch scam of the 1932 Presidential election of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
[1] Garet Garrett, "Rise of Empire (1952)," in The People's Pottage (Belmont, MA: Western Islands, 1965), 95.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Garrett, "The Revolution Was (1944)," 55.
[4] James M. Beck, "The Future of the Constitution," American Bar Association Journal 19, no. 9 (September 1933): 494.
[5] Ibid., 495.
[6] Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Carrington Cabell, February 2, 1816, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archive.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-09-02-0286.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Thomas Jefferson to “Henry Tompkinson” (Samuel Kercheval), July 12, 1816, Founders Online, National Archives., https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-10-02-0128-0002.
[9] James Henry Breasted, The Conquest of Civilization, ed. Edith Williams Ware, 1938 ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1926), 626-27.