Vol. 6.5, May 1974

A Monthly Newsletter

THE

Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME VI, NO. 5	MAY, 1974	US-ISSN0047-4517

IMPEACH THE . . . (EXPLETIVE DELETED)

The net is closing in inexorably on the Tricky one, and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy. The now famous transcripts released by Tricky Dick with an astonishing flourish of triumph, is the final straw that will do him in. Bowdlerized, deleted, meretricious as they are, they present a face of the President and his top aides calculated to send the most fawning Nixonite loyalist running desperately for cover. For one thing, they desanctify the Oval Office and the State itself far better and with greater punch than a thousand libertarian, broadsides. Here is the Face of the State, and of its most illustrious representative, the President, revealed to the world in all its ugly nakedness.

It is almost amusing to read the horror and disgust on the part of the readers of these transcripts. Where, for heaven’s sake, they ask, is any concern whatever, among all these conversations of the top rulers of the land, for moral principle, for right and wrong, for the “public interest” or the “general welfare”? Where are all the pious platitudes habitually emitted by politicians about their deep concern for the public weal? Take, for example, the eloquent editorial of William Randolph Hearst, Jr., who, until the day of the transcripts, was a down-the-line Nixon loyalist. In his evidently sincere anguish, Hearst writes that “I have never heard anything as ruthless, deplorable and ethically indefensible as the talk on those White House tapes.” Hearst calls the transcripts “incredible and sickening.” Even Senator Hugh Scott (R., Pa.) who all his life has been the leading toady for the national Republican machine (first for Dewey, and then for Nixon), lashed out at the “deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral performances” by all the participants in the taped conversations. And when Scott goes, who will soon be left, except General Haig?

One very common social science myth has been totally exploded by the tapes: the myth cherished by economists and political scientists that, while ordinary citizens are wrapped up in their petty, short-run concerns, our wise, far-seeing government officials, and particularly the President and his aides, are able to take the long, far-sighted, view of events. While the rest of us grub from day-to-day the State rulers are free to plan for the next several generations, and even centuries. Bah! Humbug! Nixon and his cronies are clearly concerned, not just with the short-run, but with hour-by-hour gains, with the very next 6 o’clock news broadcast. The momentary concerns of the Tricky One and his crew make the rest of us seem like people devoted only to the 21st century. Speak of “high time-preference”, Nixon’s and his pals is almost infinite, which perhaps accounts for his monumental blunder in thinking only about his 24-hour propaganda coup from the fact of releasing the transcripts. “But, Mr. President, what happens when people start reading these transcripts”, we can see someone asking; “Bah, who cares about that? That’s far-off speculation about the future”—except that Tricky hardly seems able to formulate such a coherent sentence.

And then there is Bill Buckley, still in his off-beat way a defender of the President. Buckley, for example, deplores the invasion of Nixon’s privacy involved in the tapes and transcripts. Somehow Buckley seems to have forgotten the major point: that these tapes were played at the behest of Tricky Dick, and that no one else—except—Haldeman—knew of their existence. It seems to us that it is not Tricky’s privacy that has been invaded by the tapes, but that of the other poor suckers who thought that what they were saving was said in confidence.

Even the august New York Times has been moved, among other observers, to call Richard Nixon a “Godfather” on the evidence of the transcripts. That’s getting close, especially when we consider Nixon’s wistful wish at one point that he had the skills of the Mafia. But the smilie really smears the Mafia, because no Godfather worth his salt could be as ruthlessly disloyal to his own aides, to the loyalists who, in the immortal words of Chuck Colson, would “walk over their grandmother for Richard Nixon”. Whatever else they are, Godfathers are always loyal to their Families. Milhous wouldn’t have lasted a year among the Mafiosi.

In the final analysis, William Randolph Hearst, in his agonized editorial, said it all: “The voices on the tapes, even the censored parental guidance version, comes through like a gang of racketeers talking over strategy as they realize that the cops are closing in on them.” Precisely. A “gang of racketeers.” Let us cling to this powerful and illuminating glimpse that we have all had into the nature of the State apparatus and of our leading rulers. For once, we have seen the face of the State plain, stripped of all hogwash, phony rhetoric, and grandiloquent propaganda. We have for once been permitted to view the Emperor without his clothes. Let us ever hold to this knowledge in our hearts.

BFL Expands

With its April, 1974 issue, the monthly periodical Books for Libertarians has taken a giant leap forward on the way to becoming the outstanding libertarian magazine in the country. Its new expansion from eight to twelve pages per issue reflects a burgeoning prosperity and a great growth in its circulation. Twelve pages means that it can and does have longer book reviews, letters of comment to the editor, and longer “essay reviews” by scholars of interest to libertarians.

Among many other goodies, for example, the April issue of BFL has two contrasting reviews of two “anti-women’s lib” books by George Gilder and Steven Goldberg: one by yours truly and the other by Mrs. Riqui Leon. It also has its first essay-review of Brand Blanshard’s great anti-positivist work Reason and Analysis by the leading Aristotelian philosopher Henry Veatch, chairman of the philosophy department at Georgetown University. The excellent Veatch article is alone worth the price of admission.

Again among other fine reviews, the May issue of BFL has an excellent review of F. A. Hayek’s great work, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle by Walter Block, and an essay-review of James J. Martin’s monumental anti-interventionist two-volume work, American Liberalism and World Politics by the libertarian historian Arthur Ekirch.

Books for Libertarians is must reading for libertarians or for anyone else interested in the libertarian scene. Furthermore, it is available for the measly price of $6 a year from 422 First St., S.E., Washington D.C. 20003.

Uncle Miltie Rides Again

Economists used to have an instructive term for the man who comes up habitually with a single technocratic gimmick to solve deep and complex economic problems. Such a man used to be called a “crank.” If Professor Milton Friedman were not the august holder of a chair at the University of Chicago, the undisputed head of the powerful and influential Chicago School of Economics, the unofficial adviser to Presidents, and the commander of a comparatively astronomical income, that is precisely what he would have been called long before now. Yes, under cover of the free enterprise rhetoric, Uncle Miltie is a crank. Invariably, when the State has really been fouling things up, when its own created messes have brought insuperable problems that have threatened to bring much of the State system tumbling down, Milton Friedman has ridden to the State’s rescue with some crank scheme that has managed to befuddle the issue and to save the State’s bacon, at least for a good while. With friends and champions like that, the free market economy hardly needs any enemies.

Consider: when the State needed a huge increase in income tax to pay for World War II, but clearly could not collect the required lump sum on the Ides of March, it was Milton that came up with the withholding tax scheme—a “wartime emergency” measure that is now the linchpin of the entire monstrous income tax structure. More recently, when the clamor rose from Left, Right, and Center against the accelerating breakdown of the public school system, it was Milton that deflected discussion from dismantling that system into the crank “voucher scheme” for formidable government control of private schooling, a scheme that both Left and Right were able to latch onto and call their own. And then, when the welfare system threatened to break down and was attacked by Left and Right alike, and it looked as if we might be able to dismantle the entire welfare mess, it was Milton Friedman who came up with the disastrous prank scheme for the “negative income tax”, which might well wreck the economy in not too many years from now. Again, both Left and Right have rushed to embrace the negative income tax or its numerous variants as a way to save the essence of the welfare system.

And now, just when the State’s continuing and accelerating monetary expansion has brought us to the threshold of runaway inflation, and it looked as if public pressure might truly build up to force the government to stop its inflating, Milton has once again come to the rescue with an egregious gimmick that might well have the effect of taking the steam out of any public effort to stop the inflation. Milton has always been at his weakest in the area of money—and has typically spent most of his time and energy in this particular field. In the first place, he has always been soft on inflation, taking the position that: who cares about inflation so long as there are no price or wage controls to distort the allocation of resources? He has long sneered at gold as money, and has advocated the total control of the money supply by the central government, in the form of fiat paper. Then, after having ceded total control of money to the central government, he implores it to keep hands off exchange rates and to inflate the money supply by a fixed percentage (varying, depending on which Friedman article you read, from 3 to 5 percent per year,) thereby supposedly keeping a stable price level. A believer in the spurious positivist methodology that “science is prediction”, and that it doesn’t matter how false the assumptions of one’s theory so long as one can predict accurately, his predictions have been often grossly off the mark, e.g., his forecast that if gold were ever to be cut loose from the dollar, its price would fall to its “proper”, non-monetary level of something like $10 an ounce. The fact that, since gold was cut loose from the dollar in the spring of 1968 its free price has always been above the official rate (then $35 an ounce, now $42 an ounce), and has now risen to something like $170 an ounce, has not dented Milton’s air of infallibility in the slightest. He still denounces gold as an “overpriced”, speculative commodity.

And now the new Friedman gimmick to make inflation endurable and even harmless: everyone will have his monetary assets and income continually revaluated by some index of general prices; everyone will benefit by a floating “escalator clause”, and so inflation will have no terrors: we can all relax and enjoy it. If the price index doubles, then the worker making $10,000 a year will find his wages doubled; the creditor will find his return doubled, and so on.

While the Friedmanites have long held that the sting could be taken out of inflation—even runaway inflation—by a universal escalator clause, Friedman did not begin pushing his scheme until he visited Brazil for a few weeks earlier this year. Milton returned from Brazil starry-eyed about the “economic miracle” enjoyed under that dictatorial regime; perhaps the Brazilian bureaucrats fed him too much tequila. Adopting universal “escalator clause” or “monetary correction”, Friedman opines, Brazil has been able to bring down the annual rate of general price inflation from 30% to 15% since 1967. Hedging his bets a tiny bit, Friedman concedes that “The monetary correction is an accounting nuisance and it cannot be truly universal. A world of zero inflation would obviously be better.” But—and here comes the technocratic crank—“given the inevitable, if temporary, costs of reducing inflation rapidly without such a measure, the Brazilians have been extremely wise to adopt it. I believe that their miracle would have been impossible without the monetary correction”, and he even adds that “they may be able to succeed in gradually bringing inflation down to near zero . . . It is past time that the U.S. applied the lesson.” (Newsweek, Jan. 21.)

Unfortunately for Milton’s acumen, at the very time that someone in Brazil was handing him a snow job, the Brazilian “miracle” was in the process of turning sour. By early April, the London Economist was noting that price inflation for the first three months of this year in Brazil was running at an annual rate of 28% (the bad old pre-“miracle” rate!) (Economist, April 6). Furthermore, in contrast to Friedman’s assertion that Brazil had abolished price and wage controls, the economy was suffering from tight price controls, with all the attendant shortages and dislocations. Thus, as the New York Times reported (April 7): “As they face endless lines for milk and vegetable oils, shortages of rice and sugar and inaccessible prices for meat, many Brazilians have begun to ask, ‘what became of their miracle.’”

One of the numerous and insuperable problems with Friedman’s Index Scheme is: what “index”, and who produces it? If he knew anything about “Austrian” economic theory, for example, Friedman would know that there is no such thing as a single, scientific index of the movement of general prices. All such indexes are strictly arbitrary, and there are a huge number of possible indexes, all of which create insuperable economic distortions. The official U.S. government statistics, for example, denote at least three such indexes: the wholesale price index, the consumer cost of living index, and the broad-based “GNP deflator”, each of which differs widely from the others. Which one should be used? There is no non-arbitrary answer. Even if we confine ourselves to the cost-of-living index, the obstacles are insurmountable; whose cost-of-living, for example, do we measure: that of the classic Dayton, Ohio blue-collar housewife with two kids, or that of a bachelor professor in California? Every individual and group in the country experiences different cost-of-living “indexes” (the price of books, for example, will loom much larger in the cost of living of the professor), and any one overall index will fit none of the actual, living individuals concerned. And then there is the question of the timing of the adjustments: will they be annual? In that case, the person will suffer for eleven months, before he earns his “correction”. Daily? But then the practical difficulties of arriving at the index are again insurmountable. No, the entire scheme is an absurd chimera.

Neither have the index problems been conspicuously solved in Friedman’s beloved Brazil. Barron’s (April 15) reports that the index which, as everywhere, is under total control of government statisticians, is in Brazil based only on prices prevailing in the state of Guanabara (Rio de Janeiro), which notoriously lag behind the inflation in the rest of the country. Furthermore, the index, includes fictitious government-controlled prices in many instances. Also, the government has juggled the Index to make it look good; thus, “when the cost of milk and meat continued to surge, both products were abruptly stricken from the index.”

Furthermore, the escalator system has not worked with universal and harmonious smoothness in Brazil. On the contrary, the average worker has consistently lagged behind his “monetary correction”, so that the real wages (in terms of purchasing-power over goods and services) have in recent years been cut by over 30 per cent. Brazil has been able to get away with this expropriation of the working class because, under its dictatorial regime, labor unions are government-controlled and the press is strictly censored. In short, the escalator system has been used to mask an inflation that has redistributed wealth from the poorer to the wealthier classes; as Senor Bezerra de Mello, president of the Othon Hotels Corp. of Brazil, has conceded: “the Brazilian model has been good for businessmen, but labor has been punished.” (New York Times, April 14). Hence the wisdom of the warning of Chairman of U.S. Council of Economic Advisers Herbert Steiri—not usually the most astute of observers—that “Unless you have the economy perfectly indexed, somebody is bound to get stuck.” (Washington Post, April 11.)

Precisely—and if this monstrous scheme were to be instituted in the United States, we know darn well who is going to “get stuck”, whose escalator will fall behind in the mad scramble for the “monetary correction.” I can assure Milton, for example, that professors at the Polytechnic Institute of New York aren’t going to get any escalator clauses, nor will the local cleaning lady; but, on the other hand, we can rest assured that the Teamsters Union and Nelson Rockefeller’s multifarious enterprises and activities will be very early at the escalator trough.

One might ask Milton how in blazes his Universal Escalator is going to get instituted in the United States. If it is supposed to be voluntary, with all contracts, existing pensions, savings, etc. voluntarily adopting the “correction”, then the lags and the injustices will be simply enormous: pace, for example, the Polytechnic Institute of New York. Any idea that all assets and contracts will be simultaneously and universally corrected by voluntary action is to contemplate the fantasies of a Never-Never Land. How, then, make it universal and simultaneous? Obviously, the only way would be by totalitarian dictation of the entire economy by the government, with the government compulsorily dictating every minute area of correction. Such a system would make a total mockery of Friedmanite pretensions to advocacy of a “free market” economy. And, of course, even such a monstrous totalitarianism would not work, since the various indexes and corrections would be eternally subject to political pressures upon the bureaucracy.

Furthermore, Friedman’s notion that the universal escalator would make governmental tight money easier because politically less painful is clearly bizarre; instead, the scheme would help to lull people into accepting the evils of inflation by sowing the illusion that it can be made painless. The anti-inflationary ardor of the American public, just getting under way in earnest, would be gravely weakened. Inflation would be virtually institutionalized.

The left-liberal New York Post writes (April 15) that Friedman “is usually labelled a ‘conservative’, but in fact he is an unorthodox thinker (read “crank”) with a record of winning acceptance for his ideas.” It then quotes Friedman’s friend, former Treasury Secretary George Pratt Shultz that “Milton Friedman is always worth listening to”. Even Barron’s, in its otherwise trenchant critique of Friedman’s latest concoction, repeats the “always worth listening to” line. I submit that there is no surer way of generating an economic breakdown than listening to Milton a bit more often. A few more “positive proposals” from Friedman’s fertile imagination and we will all have to head for the caves.

Purity And The Libertarian Party

The vexed and troubled question of purity has again raised its head in the Libertarian Party. Such questions are inherent in the nature of a Party, precisely because a Party has to be something more than simply a philosophy club. If it were only such a club, with a purely educational function for ourselves and for the greater public, then keeping the message pure would be relatively simple. Even then, of course, neo-Randians and anarcho-capitalists, Christians and atheists, natural lawyers and Stirnerites, could well be at each other’s throats. But then there would always be a simple remedy—not really available to a political party—of splitting off, and having separate organizations for each of the doctrinal factions.

But for the Libertarian Party we want something else, something more than just a philosophical and educational instrument; we want to exert influence in the political arena, to take the lead in the vital and necessary process of rolling back and dismantling State power. To do so, we must begin by unity among the various factions, at least to the extent of remaining and working within the same overall Libertarian Party umbrella. Hence the strategic futility, among other problems, with the earlier LP tendency (happily, now presumably defunct) of beginning its platforms with every sectarian Objectivist clause from “A is A” down. We want all libertarian factions—from neo-Randian to Christian to feminist—in the Party, and therefore we must stress what unites us rather than alienate and divide our ranks with sectarian pronunciamentos. (This holds for official Party pronouncements; this does not mean that the various factions should not continue to polemicize other factions within our common ranks, and try to win them over. That is surely fair game.) Hence, statements of principles, resolutions, and platforms must be unexceptionably libertarian, and here, in the urgent quest for both purity and commonality, a lot of what outsiders might consider “nit-picking” is fully justified.

So far so good; but here we come to a much thornier and more difficult problem: how broad should our “libertarian” umbrella become? Even though I am a dedicated anarchist, I submit that this umbrella should include our cousins the laissez-faire liberals: the Mises-Read types who believe in a minimal government strictly limited to police and judicial protection of the rights of person and property. I submit that we are, in the first place, the heirs of these “classical liberals”; we are, to paraphrase the great Benjamin Tucker, “unterrified laissez-faire liberals” who believe in pushing laissez-faire, the free market, to its logical and moral conclusion in the service of protection and defense. But not only are we their heirs; we are the natural allies of the laissez-faire liberals. We would not be totally happy if Ludwig von Mises or Leonard Read were able to “push the button” and achieve their ideal world tomorrow; but surely we would be 95% happy. In this world of gallopping statism, of economic and social crisis at every hand, is now the time to get the knives out and repudiate the Iaissez-fairists forevermore? Sure, within the Libertarian Party umbrella, we should polemicize, show them the error of their ways, etc., but we still must regard them as allies as against the rest of the world. My contention is that we must, to use the Marxist terminology, form a “united front” with the laissez-faire liberals. Otherwise, we may as well call it the “Anarchist Party” outright and resign ourselves permanently to sectarian impotence in the real world. The very term “libertarian” has grown up as a concept that includes anarcho-capitalists, neo-Randians, and Mises-Read laissez-faire liberals; are we really ready to repudiate this very sensible concept?

The problem of purity has now arisen on two different fronts within the Libertarian Party; on the FLP’s nomination of Percy L. Greaves, Jr. for U.S. Senate from New York State; and on the battle between Edward H. Crane III and Eric Scott Royce for national chairman of the Libertarian Party, the issue to be resolved at the national conference in Dallas this June.

The nomination of Percy Greaves has occasioned a great deal of grumbling in LP ranks throughout the country, the most extreme being the resignation in high dudgeon from the Ohio LP of its Maximum Leader, Kay Harroff. The charge is basically twofold: that Percy believes in taxation, and that he favors the draft. On the tax question, yes of course he believes in taxation, since he is a laissez-faire liberal, and classical liberals have of course always believed in taxation. We come square against the question of whether we wish to include laissez-fairists in our ranks. I have already answered this question in general. But to be more specific: Percy Greaves is the living embodiment, in his politico-economic philosophy, of the late Ludwig von Mises. Does any LP member have the temerity to say that Mises, if he had wished it, should have been denied the nomination for U.S. Senate? Even to ask such a question is to see its grotesquerie. But then to gripe about Percy’s nomination is equally grotesque. Percy Greaves is a distinguished Misesian economist who will hit hard at the economic statism and crises of our time. It is true, yes, that he favors taxation; but the level of taxes that he would impose in a “Greavesian world” in which government is strictly limited to police and judicial protection, and to an isolationist foreign policy, would be so very much lower than what we have now that we would all heave a sigh of relief before we gird our loins to press on for full tax abolition. Is tax abolition such an immediately pressing issue that we cannot afford to endorse someone who merely calls for a drastic reduction of taxation?

In addition to his economic libertarianism, Percy Greaves, consistent with his laissez-faire stand, is in favor of civil liberties and against coerced morality and “victimless crime” laws. The fact that he refused the proferred Courage Party nomination for U.S. Senate because the party had an outlaw-abortion plank in its platform should be evidence enough of Percy’s principled libertarianism across-the-board. As for the draft, Percy only favors the draft specifically for defense against foreign invasion. Since foreign invasion of the U.S. is about as likely as immediate abolition of taxation, the draft problem with him is only a moot one for libertarians.

So much for our defense of the “impure” Percy Greaves, who, as a laissez-faire liberal, is pure on everything except anarchism. Having said this, we come now to the Crane-Royce fight, where we must come down on the side of the “pure” position. Is this inconsistent? Let us see.

Edward Crane, a bright young California lawyer, is running for national chairman. In the current issue of Reason, Crane has a letter in which he soberly but trenchantly criticizes Congressman Steve Symms (Rep., Idaho) for his substantial deviations from libertarian purity, both in his voting record and in his previous interview in Reason. 22-year-old Royce has decided to campaign for national chairman as a critic of the Crane letter, attacking Crane for sectarian purity and for injuring libertarian effectiveness with a Congressman as sympathetic to the cause as Symms. Why do we strongly side with Crane in this dispute?

For one thing, as far as I can determine, Ed Crane is not an anarchist, his “purity” therefore taking on the broader laissez-faire connotations which I have been calling for. His critique of Symms (as well as my own forays in the Lib. Forum) is not based on Steve’s deviations from anarchism, but from laissez-faire. Crane’s and my own criticisms of Symms are not necessarily related to anarchism; they would have been the same had I, for example, been a laissez-faire liberal. In my view, and presumably in Crane’s, it would be disastrous to apply the term “libertarian” or the Libertarian Party label to someone who is simply a conservative (or for that matter a New Left) sympathizer with much of the libertarian position. I would be happy to “work with” Symms in the sense of trying to influence him further in the direction of the libertarian position; but to call him a “libertarian Congressman”, or to refrain from criticizing his deviations from purity, is a very different story. For that is the point at which we begin to betray our libertarian principles which is the whole raison d’etre, the very purpose of the existence of a Libertarian Party. It is perhaps a fine line to draw, but it is a vital one nevertheless.

To his credit, Rep. Symms has never pretended to be a libertarian purist: a great fellow personally, he has instead been eager to learn and to apply the libertarian position as much as he can. The attack on Symms has not been so much directed at him as against elements in the Libertarian Party who are willing to abandon principle in order to cozy up to someone in political power. In the ticket of Ed Crane for national chairman and Andrea Millen of New York for vice-chairman, we have a slate of party officers dedicated to an uncompromising adherence to basic libertarian principle. The lines are clearly drawn. A Royce victory would be a long step toward the dissolution of the most promising vehicle for libertarian organizing and influence in the history of our fledgling movement.

There is another vital point to be made here; in applying standards of purity, it is far more important to be strict and unyielding toward, Libertarians in political office than it is toward candidates for such office. For a candidate in office has not yet sipped of the poisonous potion of public office. But a Libertarian in office has already become—from an anarchist viewpoint steeped in “sin”, while from a laissez-faire viewpoint he is at least surrounded by “occasions for sin.” To achieve ultimate libertarian victory, it will undoubtedly become necessary for Libertarians to attain political office, but they and we should be always and ever aware of the ever-present peril to their—if not lives and fortunes—at least to their sacred honor. In the old motto, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”, and so unsparing criticism of any “deviations” by Libertarians in public office will not only be vitally necessary for the libertarian cause, but for their own souls as well.

The Growth Of Revisionism From The Centre: A Review Essay

By Chris R. Tame

In an earlier essay in Libertarian Forum (November 1972), I dealt with the phenomenon of what I termed “revisionism from the centre”—that is, the increasingly common appearance of works by historians who, while still remaining within the bounds of the “liberal” (i.e., statist) paradigm, were arriving at insights and analyses which confirm the historical interpretations of New Left and Libertarian scholars. The importance of this liberal or “centrist” revisionism, I argued, was a twofold one, arising not only from its inherent value and validity but also from its utility as an “unbiased” verification of an interpretation previously characterised by its obviously political motivations and implications.

In my original essay I reviewed the works of three particular expositors of revisionism from the centre, those of Stuart Morris, Robert Weibe, and Samuel P. Hays (1). However, there have been a number of other equally important contributions which I did not touch upon but which also deserve to be brought to the attention of those Libertarians who realize the importance of historical revisionism in the formation of a relevant and fully radical Libertarian ideology.

Perhaps one of the most notable works to appear in the wake, so to speak, of Gabriel Kolko’s seminal studies in economic and political history is K. Austin Kerr’s American Railroad Politics, 1914-1920: Rates Wages, Efficiency (Pittsburgh University Press, 1968). Especially interesting in the context of this essay is the fact that Kerr’s study was conducted with an awareness of the work of both New Left and liberal revisionists. His research was first begun in a seminar conducted by Samuel P. Hays at Iowa University in 1959, and continued at Pittsburgh University as a doctoral dissertation under Hays’ direction, while at the same time Kerr also received assistance from Kolko himself. While praising the latter’s work, however, Kerr does make the qualification that “because he (i.e., Kolko) analyzes railroad affairs primarily from the point of view of only one group, the railroads themselves, Kolko misses many of the complexities of railroad politics” (p. 236). This is indeed a valid point. Although Kolko was undoubtedly aware of the role of the clash of divergent business interests in the movement for regulation (2), his focus in Railroads and Regulation was certainly upon the views and actions of the railroads themselves. A broader approach can surely supply us with a lot more equally valuable material, and in this respect American Railroad Politics constitutes a valuable adjunct to Kolko’s volume. This should not be taken as any detraction from the latter’s achievement, however. Kolko was not only dealing with a more extensive period of time (the years 1877 to 1916, as compared with Kerr’s analysis of the years 1914 to 1920), but could hardly be expected to pursue in one volume every aspect of his basic subject. Kerr’s work, then, builds on that of Kolko but extends it to draw a more detailed portrait of the complexity of affairs in the business community. It consequently provides a useful corrective against seeing ‘business’ in terms of a monolithic entity and conspiracy, with Kerr’s view of the Progressive Era” (interpreting its) system of decision-making as one which satisfied the business community’s general desire for regulation but failed to grant consistently the ends sought by any one group” (p. 4). Kolko’s interpretation of the period as one of the rise of “political capitalism” finds ample confirmation by Kerr, however. As he puts it himself:

“Railroad regulation developed historically as a system of resolving differences among competing economic groups that had a common concern with transportation. At issue were freight rates, wages, profits, and operating efficiency . . . past studies have failed to analyze systematically the origins within American industrial society of arguments over railroad issues. There has been no explicit awareness of the contrasting, competing interests among the economic groups involved with transportation, and no cognizance of the changing bargaining relationships among them” (pp. 2, 3).

Kerr also launches into a heartwarming attack on liberal historiography, rejecting the orthodox liberal vision of the Progressive Era as a period of conflict between the “public” and the “interests” and of the post-World War I period as one of conservative reaction and “return to normalcy”. The purveyors of this mythology, as Kerr so incisively puts it,

“have for the most part overlooked the essentially pro-business nature of federal regulation in the Progressive Era. The rhetoric of railroad regulation during the pre-war period, to be sure, advocated public control of private interests. However, this rhetoric, if taken alone, seems only to obscure the significant practice. We must understand it in relation to the ends sought in the argumentation of issues. Primarily, these ends involved the desire of business groups to use governmental, public means to control—if not to solve—private economic problems. Although important transitory changes occurred during the war, both the rhetorical assumptions and the general goals of the business groups concerned with railroad policy remained strikingly similar throughout the period leading up to the Transportation Act of 1920. The war experience reinforced the prevailing prewar commitment to federal regulation as the most desirable way of resolving economic differences. This reinforcement of the basic assumptions underlying federal regulation stands out in retrospect as a bold continuity in American political history” (pp. 4-5).

And thus Kerr concludes,

“If we view the ideological rhetoric of these years as an expression of particular perceptions instead of adopting it as interpretive verity, we can observe a continuous political force functioning within American industrial society, wherein business was able to exploit governmental power in order to make capitalism a more viable system. This political force was a complex phenomenon involving a high degree of competitive rivalry between groupings within the business community” (p. 229)

Not surprisingly, the area in which the revisionism of Kolko and Weinstein has perhaps been hardest to disregard is that of economic and business history. The pages of the Business History Review, for example, have thus attested to the growing impact and influence of the revisionist perspective. Robert Asher’s “Business and Workers’ Welfare in the Progressive Era: Workmen’s Compensation Reform in Massachusetts, 1880-1911.” (Business History Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, Winter 1969) is a case in point. Citing the work of both New Leftists like Kolko and Weinstein and liberals like Weibe and Hays, Asher focuses on the less extensively analysed subject of the attitudes and role of business in reform at the state level. In the case of workmen’s compensation reform in Massachusetts in the period examined Asher confirms the basic revisionist account: reform, he states, “was supported by economic groups usually, and justifiably, considered conservative” (p. 453). Similarly, his description of the motivation of these businessmen also provides further detailed evidence of that vein of thought so aptly termed by the New Left as “corporate liberalism”.

“Workmen’s compensation legislation promised to rationalize the wasteful and pernicious defects employers observed in the existing liability-litigation system. Many employers thought: workmen’s compensation reform would conserve the stability of established social institutions by removing a major source of friction and antagonism between workers and employers. Workmen’s compensation reform also would help conserve the welfare of an important national resource: human labor. Thus . . . (it) appealed to enlightened, class-conscious employers . . . and to conservative, efficiency and cost-minded employers” (pp. 453-454).

However, Asher does make some critical comments on Weinstein’s seminal essay, “Big Business and the Origins of Workmen’s Compensation”, stating that his own research “in New York, Minnesota, and Massachusetts has shown that the model workmen’s compensation bill circulated by the National Civic Federation did not exert any impact on the course and final result of workmen’s compensation legislation” (p. 474). Moreover, he argues that not only does Weinstein overrate the role of the NCF in the movement for this particular reform, but that he “does not sufficiently emphasize the negative effects that the cost-conscious conservative employers had on compensation legislation. Unlike the work of the liberal employers of the Boston Chamber of Commerce’s Committee on Industrial Relations, the activities of conservative employers within the (NCF), in Massachusetts and elsewhere, delayed, the implementation of pioneering workmen’s compensation systems and reduced the quantity and quality of assistance extended to injured workers” (p. 474) In reply to these criticisms, it should be stressed that Weinstein never portrayed business as a monolithic entity and was fully cognizant of the complexities of motivation, the clashes of interest and ideas among businessmen. Whether he sufficiently emphasized the point Asher raises seems to me a rather nebulous matter, related more to the specific and subjective interest of the historian than to any question of substance. While Asher’s study does, then, provide material of interest regarding what occurred in one state, it does not, in my view even here constitute the final view. He does not really draw an adequate picture of the roots and development of corporate liberal ideology among the business elite nor perceive its central importance for our understanding of the period.

However, a rather more valuable contribution to the body of revisionist analysis is Mansel Griffiths Blackford’s essay “Businessmen and the Regulation of Railroads and Public Utilities in California during the Progressive Era” (Business History Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 3, Autumn 1970). Similarly citing the work of both Kolko and Weibe regarding the reform movement at the national level, Blackford focuses on the specific situation in California and provides a useful confirmation of the revisionist case. Regarding railroad and utilities regulation there he demonstrates that “(g)roups of businessmen were in the vanguard of both reforms” (p. 307). Like Kerr—and in contrast to Kolko—Blackford deals mainly not with the railroads themselves but with the other business interests which sought state regulation. These interests were primarily concerned with reducing competition between themselves and “stabilizing” business conditions—as in the case of the competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco for the trade of the San Joaquin Valley. While not emphasizing the views and activities of the railroads themselves, however, Blackford does observe that by 1911 the railroads offered no opposition at the public hearings over (Governor) Hiram Johnson’s regulatory bill. The cost of rebating to the railroads was indeed considerable, he notes, and undoubtedly disliked by them. In the case of the movement that resulted in the Public Utilities Act of 1912, however, it was the utilities themselves that sought regulation.

“The public utility companies, especially the larger ones, were in the vanguard of those clamoring for its (i.e., the 1912 Act) passage. They hoped that by the enactment of a law giving a state commission power over rates they could escape constant hassling with the often corrupt municipal and county authorities. Some also expected to use the commission to end competition among themselves. In addition, regulation was also favored as a means of enhancing the character and improving the market for public utility stock and bond issues” (p. 313). And the expectations of the utilities were in fact fulfilled. The railroad commission, in which was also vested the task of utility regulation, acted in both its areas of concern to prevent rate wars and restrict competition, arguing on the specious grounds that both railroads and utilities were “natural monopolies”, that “duplication of facilities” was a “wasteful inefficiency”, and that unregulated competition was self-destructive and led ultimately to monopoly and higher rates.

Like New Left revisionism, the focus of revisionism from the centre has generally been upon economic and political history. The examination of ideas and ideology in their own right, the perspective of the historian of ideas, has tended to take a back seat. Nevertheless, a number of works have appeared which add substantially to our understanding of the nature of American progressive, ‘liberal’, and reform thought—and whose observations fit nicely into the revisionist framework. Putting aside such questions as to what extent “purely” intellectual factors—beliefs and moral values—are a major causative factor independent of direct economic interest and motive, what we are concerned with here are those works which, in demonstrating the fundamentally conservative, authoritarian, and elitist character of most of the Left and “liberal” mainstream, render clear how the nefarious aims of the corporate power elite were able to find sanctification by the intellectuals—what the liberals really had in mind behind their grandiloquent rhetoric. Orthodox liberal historiography has, of course, always recognized the elements of conservatism and “moderation” within the tradition of liberal and progressive thought, but it has generally passed over their true significance and nature in a rather glib manner and preferred not to probe too deeply. Fortunately, however, a few have gone further. For example, William E. Leuchtenburg’s “Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916” (Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XXXIX) stressed the commitment of the major Progressive politicians, publicists, and intellectuals to imperialism and nationalism, and argued that “this explains much about the basic character of the Progressive movement” (p. 507). Despite its frequently evangelical tone, Leuchtenburg characterized Progressivism as reformist rather than revolutionary, accepting traditional American values and ideals—including racist and authoritarian ones—and ultimately suffering from an inner tension “between humanistic values and nationalist aspirations” (p. 503). Similarly, John P. Diggins in his essay “Flirtation With Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy” (American Historical Review, Vol. LXXI, No. 2, Jan. 1966) and his longer study Mussolini and Fascism: The View From America (Princeton University Press, 1972) demonstrated how a large and important segment of liberals were attracted to European fascism and the corporate state. For such thinkers fascist corporatism seemed to embody the core of their ideals, those of “social engineering” and the creation of a scientifically and consciously ordered social system in which all class and group interests were represented and harmonized in the service of the higher national interest. Ironically, however, one of the most interesting re-examinations of liberal thought, Sidney Kaplan’s “Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals” (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XVII, No. 3, June 1956) received little attention at the time of its publication, Kaplan dealt primarily with the work of such major liberal thinkers as Dewey, Croly and Lippmann showing their commitment to a scientistic vision of the Good Society, one in which “organized social intelligence” was embodied in a “vanguard” elite of administrators. Class conflict was thus to be eradicated in a system characterized by efficiency, science and a competent, paternalistically humanitarian elite of scientists, “the new kind of businessman”, experts, and social administrators. World War I, while leading to disillusionment in some cases—most notably that of Randolph Bourne—had no such effect on others or even led to an enhancement of their conservative, antidemocratic temper (as in the case of Lippmann) or to the adoption of an equally conservative element of mystic religiosity (as in the case of Croly).

The process of critical re-examination of the liberal heritage by a contemporary liberal scholar has been taken furthest, however, by Charles Forcey in his The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 (Oxford University Press, N.Y., 1961) Forcey’s study indeed starts on an auspicious and critical note. In his Preface he expresses some doubts about liberalism, recounting that, as an undergraduate, liberalism “was, of course, a good thing. But that only made it more difficult to explain the fearsome tragedies that had overtaken America and the world when liberals were in power” (p. iii). The less than totally satisfactory record of liberalism led Forcey, therefore, to ask “(w)ere there fatal flaws in liberalism itself?” (p. iii). It is to answer this question, then, that Forcey selected The New Republic and its founders as his subject, as a “convenient medium for exploring some of the dilemmas of liberalism” (p. iv).

The Crossroads of Liberalism in fact constitutes an excellent account of the ideas of Croly, Weyl and Lippmann, certainly three of the most influential exponents of statist liberalism. Forcey traces the development of their ideas (including some often most interesting doubts and dilemmas in their later years) against the background of political events, and those ideas emerge quite clearly in the garb of elitism, authoritarianism and nationalism. Unfortunately, however, while undoubtedly a useful intellectual portrait, Forcey’s book is grievously deficient in its evaluation. Although perceptively stressing “how dangerously ambiguous a focus nationalism was for the new liberalism” (p. 260) Forcey reveals again and again how irrevocably wedded he is to the dogmas of orthodox “liberalism”. His conception of “creative social change” is still nothing but “social democracy” and the extension of state power. While not totally blind to the dangers of executive power he still parrots such old saws as “(n)o one can deny the need for strong executives in a country where reformers are often hamstrung by constitutional restrictions and political anachronisms” (p. 311)! (Those who do maintain the presumptuous desire not to be ‘socially engineered’ by such enlightened and humanitarian liberals are well and truly consigned to a state of non-existence!) Moreover, apparently still adhering to the Hofstadter/status revolution interpretation of the Progressive movement, Forcey totally fails to realize that the business elite was immersed in the movement for reform, both politically and intellectually, and that the formulas of state regulation were quite to their taste. Taken in by the facile rhetoric of “social democracy”, he fails to see how the statist panaceas common to “scientific socialism” and “liberalism” have objectively served the interests of the corporate power elite. In all, he fails to grasp the significance of his own description of the liberalism of Croly and co., how their elitist and authoritarian ethos reflects so well the reality of “social democracy” in practice—how it constitutes in every sense of the term a corporate liberalism!

Yet if none of these re-examinations of the liberal heritage which we have described have gone far enough in their analysis, there are some signs that a truly radical revisionism is beginning to gain some academic ground. The most notable example of this is E. K. Hunt’s essay “A Neglected Aspect of the Economic Ideology of the Early New Deal” (Review of Social Economy, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Sept. 1971). Rejecting the orthodox liberal historiography in which a “progressive” government intervened in the economy to curb the power of big business, Hunt cites the revisionist analysis of both New Left and Libertarian scholars: “a smaller group of economists and historians”, he states, “with points of view as far apart as Gabriel Kolko and Murray Rothbard have shown that the twentieth century evolution of the interventionist state was accomplished only because it had the support of big business. In fact big businessmen have been the driving force in this evolution” (p. 180). Hunt, however, concentrates in this essay on the intellectual background of the rise of the corporate state and indeed provides a most useful (although by no means definitive) analysis of that background. Specifically, he makes the perceptive point that “(t)he active intervention of the government to create cartels and to promote industrial cooperation rather than competition seems to have paralleled closely the German experience of the late nineteenth century” (p. 180) and thus takes as his major theme the demonstration that “the apparent similarity between the philosophy underlying the New Deal and the philosophy underlying German cartellization in the late nineteenth century was not entirely accidental” (p. 180).

Hunt in fact selects as a key figure Simon N. Patten, whom he correctly describes as “one of the most influential teachers of economics in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (p. 182). What was significant was that Patten in fact studied for a period in Germany, in the intellectual atmosphere of the “Socialists of the Chair” of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik. Indeed, Patten studied directly under many of the members of the Verein and became the portege of one of its founders. Professor Johannes Conrad. And thus Patten became thoroughly—nay, religiously, as he himself said—inbued with a world view which, while “anti-socialist”, was equally and militantly anti-laissez faire, urging a programme of vigorous interventionism, coercive cartellization, and welfare-statism. It was this creed that Patten embodied in his subsequent and voluminous works: an all-out attack on the “waste”, “inefficiency”, and “immorality” of the free-market. In the place of the market he advocated a new order of “corporate collectivism”, in which competition was eradicated and the “socialized capitalist”—united with a consevative labour unionism—administered an economy of abundance in the ‘public interest’.

It should be immediately pointed out that Hunt sees the rise of the corporate state by no means simply as the consequence of the nefarious influence of intellectuals like Patten. The enthusiasm of big business itself for corporate collectivism, especially after their experience of the War Industries Board, had not a little to do with the matter, as Hunt readily indicates! Nevertheless, the contribution of Patten and his disciples to the ideology and the creation of the present system is certainly significant. Indeed, it is especially worth noting that such New Dealers and architects of the NIRA as Frances Perkins and Rexford Tugwell were proteges and disciples of Patten. The case of Tugwell is also illuminating since, as Hunt points out, he “has been considered by many historians to represent the radical or left-wing element of Roosevelt’s brain trust” and since “the common assumption that New Deal reforms had a leftist orientation is often based on the belief that Tugwell was a spokesman for the left” (p. 186).

Hunt, then, vigorously indicts liberal historiography for its “myopic historical misinterpretation of the economic, social and political significance of the New Deal and post World War H American Corporate Liberalism” (p. 187) and for its failure to grasp the thoroughly conservative nature of “liberalism” and welfare-statism.

“While the dominant economic ideas and policies of ‘welfare-statism’ of late nineteenth century Germany are almost unanimously regarded as profoundly conservative, highly similar ideas and policies in the United States which were directly influenced by those from Germany are often treated as progressive or even radical” (p. 187). Hunt’s conclusion is both ringing and radical in its revisionism—and especially refreshing in its recognition of the singular inappropriateness of the appellation “conservative” when applied to libertarian and individualist critics of the status quo.

“The post World War II American ‘Corporate State’ appears to this writer to be based upon a profoundly conservative coalition of government, big business, conservative labor leaders and ‘liberal’ intellectuals. Kaiser Wilhelm I and Bismark would certainly smile approvingly on contemporary American capitalism. And yet most American economists insist on reserving the label ‘conservative’ for advocates of individualist liberalism many of whom are among the most thoroughgoing critics of contemporary American capitalism” (pp. 190-191).

The growth of revisionism from the centre is clearly a development to be welcomed by the Libertarian. Yet one major qualification must be especially stressed, and that is that there is nothing inherently radical in its revelations. As I showed in my earlier essay in Libertarian Forum, such liberal revisionists as Robert Weibe, for example, portrayed the role of business in the attainment of “reform” in no critical light but rather as a praiseworthy achievement! Similarly, Samuel P. Hays offered an interpretation of American history, a “social analysis”, which portrayed the growth of political and economic centralization as an inevitable consequence of industrialization, technology, and the “evolution from smaller to larger and larger systems”. In other words, while certainly describing the rise of our present corporate state in a more realistic manner, such liberal revisionist works also act simultaneously as its intellectual consecration, as a historiographical justification of the status quo. This apologetic role is also played by many of the works we have reviewed in this essay. Robert Asher, for example, in his essay on workmen’s conpensation, describes the various corporatist and interventionist policies as “great positive contributions to the rationalization and elimination of iniquitious social and economic practices and institutions” (Op. cit., p. 452) And Mansel Griffiths Blackford also completely embraces the specious anti-market arguments of the architects of corporate collectivism:

“(I)t is probably wrong to see too sharp a dichotomy between the best interests of business groups and the general public . . . all profited from the (railroad and utilities) commission’s policy on competition. By protecting public service corporations within their fields of operation, the commission both strengthened the financial positions of the utilities and prevented rate wars and the duplication of facilities, the costs of which, as the commissioners frequently pointed out, were ultimately borne by the public” (Op. cit., p. 319)

In fact, another recent essay in the Business History Review underlines our point regarding the ideological ambiguity of revisionism from the centre very well. In “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History” (Vol. XLIV, No. 3, Autumn, 1970), Professor Louis Galambos offers an interpretation of recent historiography in which the works of both New Left and liberal scholars are subsumed in a tendency which he terms the “organizational school of history” (p. 280). In essence, the common denominator of the works in this “organizational” category, as Galambos sees it, is their focus on the “important changes which have taken place in modern America (and which) have centered about a shift from small-scale, informal, locally or regionally oriented groups to large-scale, national, formal organizations. The new organizations are characterized by a bureaucratic structure of authority” (p. 280). Interestingly, Galambos himself perceives the ambiguous ideological implications of liberal organizational approaches. On the one hand, “(o)rganizational analysis could blend With New Left ideology to produce a synthesis which would appeal to those scholars who demand that history be ‘relevant’ in some precise and immediate way”, while on the other “some historians may find it impossible not to surrender their own judgment to the pragmatic and self-serving viewpoints expressed by their organizational subjects” (p. 289). Precisely! And we might justifiably add that Galambos’ own interpretation of the “emerging organizational synthesis” is actually insidiously conservative, due to its implicitly and explicitly economic and ‘organizational’ determinism. Such deterministic interpretations are indeed extremely convenient for the beneficiaries of the existing corporate collectivist system.

Whatever our satisfaction at the development of revisionism from the centre, and for that matter, New Left revisionism, our reading of both, however, surely underlines the importance of radical libertarians participating actively in such historical endeavours. For only such direct involvement can prevent the value of the revisionist perspective from being vitiated by either the conservative apologetics of the liberals or the barren and disastrous socialist dogmas of the New Left.

Notes

(1) The works I dealt with were, specifically: Stuart Morris, “The Wisconsin Idea and Business Progressivism”, Journal of American Studies, July 1970; Robert Weibe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (1962; Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1968); Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1929 (Harvard University Press, 1959); “The Mythology of Conservation”, in H. Jarrett, ed., Perspectives on Conservation (Johns Hopkins Press, 1958); “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era”, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, October 1964; “The Social Analysis of American Political History, 1880-1920”, Political Science Quarterly, Sept. 1965.

(2) See his comments regarding the conflict between the independent oil producers of the Petroleum Producers Union and Standard Oil, or the rivalry between the New York merchants and those of Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916 (1965; W. W. Norton, N.Y., 1970) pp. 22-26.

Rhodesia—Unjust Land Seizure

By Bill Evers

“Reprinted from the Stanford Daily, April 11, 1974.”

The history of European conquest of and rule over African Rhodesians is a history of continual theft by Europeans of land belonging to Africans.

In addition to this massive land seizure, during the last 40 years there has been a fully developed system of racial segregation in land ownership, in which sections of the country are designated as for whites or for blacks.

In recent years, this policy of land assignment led to a dramatic confrontation between the Rhodesian government and African peasants who refused to leave the land they and their forefathers had occupied and cultivated.

Forcible Uprooting

In the late 1960s, the Rhodesian government had to use troops and police to expropriate the land of the Tangwena people in the Inyanga area. The Rhodesian government uprooted forcibly approximately 300 families (approximately 3000 people) in this removal operation.

The roots of this problem lie in the activities of some of the early European colonists in Rhodesia. Dr. Jim Jameson was an administrator for the British South Africa Company, a mercantilist entity created by Cecil Rhodes. Under Jameson’s rule in Rhodesia, large tracts and vast estates were granted to aristocratic young blades in England. These tracts became the holdings of absentee-landowning companies.

Jameson not only parcelled out these tracts in the manner of a feudal chieftain, he also paid no attention to whether such land was occupied by Africans, and happily shared in the looting of Ndebele cattle.

Injustices Recognized

By the turn of the century, some sentiment had developed in England that recognized that grave injustices were being done to the Africans in Rhodesia. But the attitude was one of paternalistically regarding the Africans as wards, rather than one of defending the African’s full rights and liberties. Some areas were provisionally set aside to cushion the effects of change on tribal life.

Dr. Robin Palmer notes that “by 1914 the Colonial Office (in London) was resigned to the fact that it could do little to prevent the eviction of Africans from European farms.” From this time on, one finds the informal policy of racial segregation of land areas. What had originally been an area temporarily designated as a tribal backwater, now became an area which was viewed as the only place Africans were to be given any privileges at all.

Although constitutionally an African in Rhodesia at this time was supposed to be able to “acquire, hold, encumber, and dispose of land on the same conditions” as a European, in fact the British South Africa Company refused to allow Africans to buy land.

European Rhodesian Fear

By the late 1920s, the self-governing European Rhodesians became afraid that middle-class African farmers interested in cash-crop agriculture would press to exercise their constitutional right to own land outside of the segregated tribal areas.

In response to these white attitudes, a Land Apportionment Act was passed in 1930 formally segregating land ownership in the country.

The Tangwena people and their chief Rekayi were among the last victims of this Land Apportionment Act.

In 1969, the Rhodesian government revised and revamped the system of possessory segregation. The parliament of Ian Smith’s government scrapped the old law and passed a Land Tenure Act and the Tribal Trust Land Development Act.

Intensive Development

Under the latter act a Tribal Trust Lands Development Corporation is authorized by the government to undertake intensive development of the Tribal Trust Land.

An August, 1973, publication of the African nationalist, Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union points out that “at no stage of the corporation’s future is it envisaged that freehold title will pass” to individual African peasants or to a group of African peasants.

An information booklet put out by the Rhodesian government emphasizes correctly the intensity of feeling about land: “Both here and abroad there is a tendency . . . to believe that Africans have had a raw deal over land. There is no doubt that this is one of their most deeply emotional grievances and agitators have used it to stir up opposition against the government.”

The trouble is not the agitators, but that the Rhodesian government has absolutely no intention of rectifying what the Africans rightly perceive as injustices.