Liberty Matters

Classical Liberals on Race (August/September 2024)

By: OLL Editor


Many classical liberals have been silent or passive when it comes to racism’s pernicious effects. Others have twisted or misunderstood classical liberalism to justify racist words and deeds.

Sections

Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher are on a mission to raise up the thinkers within classical liberalism that are anti-racist and to show how the most important parts of classical liberalism are in opposition to discrimination against minorities. Part of Ferguson and Witcher’s project, in which they are aided in this series, is to argue for the inclusion of individualist or hard to classify thinkers under a broader canopy of liberal and humane imaginings of what a freer world could look like and how we can achieve it.

Lead Essay The True Anti-Racists: The Classical Liberal Tradition of Opposing Minority Oppression

Rachel Ferguson and Marcus M. Witcher


Classical liberals aren’t famous for their anti-racism, but maybe they should be. In our research for Black Liberation Through the Marketplace, we were astounded to discover that classical liberals have a consistent legacy of pushing back against racist policies by appealing to individual rights. After deeper dives on the putrid legacy of racism, xenophobia and pseudo-scientific eugenics on both the left and the right, we were struck with another thought: while forms of ethnic prejudice are ubiquitous in American history, the classical liberal tradition seems largely bereft of virulent racists. If this is generally true, something about the paradigm of individual rights may naturally push back on group oppression, even if the one pushing back has no particular sensitivity to that group. In other words, the principled nature of classical liberal commitments forces even personally prejudiced people to make neutral policy choices and legal judgments. We’ve asked fellow scholars to discuss particular figures in their responses but we’d like to sketch out the evidence we’ve found for these claims.
Classical economists
We start with the classical economists, who stand out from their detractors as genuinely anti-racist abolitionists. Adam Smith condemned slavery throughout his works in the 18th century. He argued that property in one’s own labor is the most sacred and inviolable of all property claims, as it grounds the rest, and these very words are inscribed on his grave to this day. He argued against the economic advantages of slavery as well, since slavery removed incentives to work and create and limited the ability of the enslaved group to match their skills and talents to the needs of the market economy. In the middle of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill took up the mantle of free market economics and civil liberty. He contended that human nature operates in basically the same way no matter the race of the person. This claim of equality between the races infuriated Thomas Carlyle to the point that he slandered the entire discipline of political economy in his “Occasional Discourses on the Negro Question” by labeling it “the dismal science.”
Abolitionists
These economic insights translate directly into the anti-tariff and anti-slavery Christian non-violence movement of Richard Cobden and John Bright. In turn, they influenced an array of American  abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison, Harriett Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Eventually, Garrison’s student Frederick Douglass would tour England and Ireland with Bright, advocating for free trade, which meant cheap food for the poor. Douglass copied the Anti-Corn Law League playbook in his abolitionist efforts and explained to his socialist unionist friends that their zero-sum ideas about trade were not “villainy,” but mere “honest stupidity.”[1]
American Founders
The anti-racist sentiment of liberalism is also in America’s founding. In spite of the execrable practice of slavery in British North America, American founders such as John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were open abolitionists. Recent scholarship has unearthed Thomas Jefferson’s serious intellectual effort in trying to think of practical plans to eliminate slavery. He lamented its destructive effect on the manners and morals of the country.[2] The framers also included the 1808 elimination of the slave trade in the Constitution and explicitly hoped that natural economic forces would make slavery inoperable. At the time, it wasn’t odd that they thought this; they didn’t anticipate the invention of the cotton gin.
As such, Phyllis Wheatley, the first female published poet in US history and a slave, could write paeans to George Washington in one poem, praising his battle for liberty, and in another recall to the minds of her readers that the same logic ought to apply to those “snatch’d” from their “parents’ breast”:
Such, such my case. And can I then but prayOthers may never feel tyrannic sway?
And here, Wheatley draws the same contrast in one fell swoop:
But how presumptuous shall we hope to findDivine acceptance with the Almighty mind
While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race
Let virtue reign and then accord our prayersBe victory ours and generous freedom theirs.
America’s founding ideals and appeals to inalienable rights provided the intellectual and rhetorical foundation for many different rights movements–especially those calling for racial equality. As early as the 1770s, groups of enslaved Black Americans appealed to Massachusetts with the popular concepts of natural rights and moral equality to argue for Black freedom. The ideas of individual liberty and equality were so ingrained in the young Republic, that some anti-Federalists used the rhetoric of the Declaration to argue against a Constitution that allowed the existence of slavery: “Where is the man, …can lay his hand upon his heart and say, I am willing my sons and my daughters should be torn from me and doomed to perpetual slavery?... [yet] this is what every man ought to be able to say, who voted for this constitution…”[3] It was blatantly obvious to some anti-Federalists that slavery ran contrary to the liberal ideals that the nation was founded upon. Such language was common and well-known. During the founding generation slavery was considered, at best, a necessary evil. They hoped that economic circumstances themselves would eliminate the institution and thus remove the obvious incongruence, and therefore internal threat, to their burgeoning free society.
Many of these facts will be well-known to readers. America combines two philosophical strands within classical liberalism. First, the English common law system requires judges to decide ambiguous legal decisions based on an assumption of natural liberty. Second, the burgeoning Enlightenment emphasized anti-monarchical sentiments based on individual rights and the consent of the governed. Taken together, these served to create an uncongenial environment for group-based oppression. This may sound hypocritical, given the persistence of American slavery. But this highlights that, while good ideas can be extremely powerful, the material status quo can often overwhelm them, especially when that status quo is tied to a visible difference like color.
U.S. Civil War
Even worse, this departure from the founding principles led to the development of false and distorted ideas to justify the unjustifiable. This is what happened in the American South, where slavery defenders replaced the concept of ‘necessary evil’ with ‘positive good’ in an attempt to beat back the abolitionist onslaught in the 1830s. Southern planters defended themselves with Bible verses while excising whole books to create a “Slave Bible” that would avoid fomenting rebellion.[4] Southern slave owners commitment to limited government was belied by layers of privilege-seeking. They pawned off onto their state governments the costs of all of the legal confusions and enforcement problems that arise when a piece of ‘property’ has a will of his or her own. Slaveholders like George Fitzhugh theorized their own forms of socialism and paternalism to defy the Northern capitalists and defend the planters’ way of life.[5] They despised the free labor and free markets of the North and they said so! Ultimately, slavery distorted slave owners liberal commitments, and their religious commitments.
We take note of these things to sharpen our understanding of the past, not to excuse it. The maintenance of systems of group-based oppression didn’t benefit from the classical liberal commitment to legal neutrality between persons. On the contrary, it departed from it and tied itself in knots to try and escape from the demands of a free society. The founding generation understood that maintaining the tension between two fundamentally opposed systems was entirely unsustainable and would doom the Republic. Abraham Lincoln carried on this tradition in his 1858 House Divided speech where he warned that the US would either end slavery, or the entire American experiment would fail. We emphasize this to counter the claims that slavery fit well with the American system or that liberalism and oppression are somehow comfortable with one another. American ideas and the American experience show classical liberalism’s enmity to slavery.
Unfortunately, war proved necessary to establish free labor over slave labor. During the Civil War, prominent classical liberal, Frederick Douglass pushed Lincoln to add emancipation to the preservation of the union as a major war aim. Lincoln eventually did just that and the Civil War vanquished America’s “peculiar institution.” Although Black Americans had been freed from bondage, new systems of oppression emerged, and we see several important episodes of classical liberal pushback on group oppression.
Reconstruction
By 1876, every southern statehouse had fallen back into the hands of former Confederate Democrats who had taken power from Republicans and their Black allies. Black Americans and classical liberals struggled against these racist Redeemer governments and the legal impediments they established. These often took the form of Jim Crow laws that established separate but equal facilities (that in reality were never anywhere close to equal) but also included new systems of oppression such as convict leasing and peonage.
The classical liberal abolitionist Frederick Douglass led the charge for black equality. Douglass argued that the government simply needed to extend the rule of just law to Black Americans and grant them civil rights. When describing what should be “done” with the Black man, Douglass insisted that the best course of action was to extend to him rights and then let him rise or fall on his own: “If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot box, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going into a workshop, just let him alone,—your interference is doing him a positive injury.” Douglass concluded that “If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live.”[6] To his credit, Douglass was not merely concerned with the freedom of Black Americans. He also fought alongside suffragists, the Irish, and the Chinese.
Unfortunately, the rule of just law wasn’t extended to Black Americans as Douglass had hoped and the next generation of Black leaders had to continue what seemed like a losing fight for equal justice. Booker T. Washington took up the mantle upon Douglass’s death. Washington believed the best way to fight racism and injustice was for Black Americans to build useful vocational skills that would enable them to make a living, build wealth, and contribute to the American economy. He argued that Black economic progress would force white Americans to acknowledge Black equality and treat them with respect. To this end he built numerous institutions including the Tuskegee Institute, the Alabama State Teacher Association, the Tuskegee Negro Conference, and importantly the National Negro Business League. These efforts helped create a foundation of Black wealth and voluntary associations that would enable the successful civil rights movement some fifty years later.[7]
Anti-Imperialism
While classical liberals were fighting for Black equality, they also argued against American imperialism, which many of them viewed as a paternalistic and racist endeavor contrary to the ideals of the American Revolution. Edward Atkinson, a classical liberal economist, founded the Anti-Imperialist League in the summer of 1898 while the United States was still embroiled in war with Spain and in opposition to Washington’s decision to annex the Philippines. Prominent classical liberals such as Moorfield Storey, former president Grover Cleveland, and William Graham Sumner were all active members.
In 1899, Sumner (the Vice President of the Anti-Imperialist League) delivered a lecture at Yale University titled “The Conquest of the United States by Spain” in which he argued that the US occupation of the Philippines ran counter to the history, ideals, and principles of the United States and would ultimately undermine liberty at home and abroad.[8] After all, it made no sense that a nation born from a rebellion against colonization would establish colonies of its own—regardless of the race of the people it sought to “civilize.” The classical liberals of the Anti-Imperialist League ultimately lost the argument. The results were horrific and anti-American.[9] While the U.S. crushed the Filipino Independence movement, it cost 4,200 U.S. soldiers, 20,000 Filipino fighters, and around 250,000 Filipino citizens.
20th Century
At the dawn of the 20th century, classical liberal ideas and figures continued to push back against group-based oppression. In the tradition of Douglass’s praise for the Constitution as “a glorious liberty document,” the NAACP sought to use the power of the Constitution and courts to dismantle the injustices of Jim Crow. In response to a murderous race riot in Springfield, Illinois in 1908, Oswald Garrison Villard, a passionate classical liberal both on domestic and foreign policy, joined with civil rights activist Mary Ovington to organize an inter-racial response. They recruited dozens of white activists and prominent Black figures, including W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells, to create and sign a statement, which was published on Lincoln’s birthday in 1909 (recall that Lincoln was from Springfield). Thus was born the NAACP. Villard was the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, and son of suffragist and fellow NAACP founder Fanny Villard. Notably, he was also a founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League. After joining the New York Evening Post, Villard described himself and his colleagues with a succinct summary of classical liberal ideals. They were:
“... radical on peace and war and on the Negro question; radical in our insistence that the United States stay at home and not go to war abroad and impose its imperialistic will upon Latin-American republics, often with great slaughter. We were radical in our demand for free trade and our complete opposition to the whole protective system.”[10]
Villard was also friends with Booker T. Washington, who asked him to help advocate against Woodrow Wilson’s re-segregation of federal offices in 1913. Villard did so, both writing directly to Wilson and editorializing in The Post against the president’s failure to defend Black voting rights in the South as well as his plan for a League of Nations. As time wore on, Villard changed his mind on laissez-faire economics, adopting a national industrial plan, and even debating Ayn Rand on the New Deal. Nevertheless, Villard’s commitment to Black rights never wavered, and perhaps if he had anticipated how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) machinations would create a storm of civil rights abuses, he might have thought differently.
Moorfield Storey, another explicitly classical liberal co-founder of the NAACP, served as its founding president in 1909 and continued to serve until his death in 1929. Like others in this tradition, Storey’s concern for the rights of Black Americans coincided with the same concern for the rights of Native Americans and immigrants, a thorough-going anti-Imperialism, advocacy for the gold standard, and emphasis on property and contract rights. As an accomplished lawyer, Storey also served as the lead counsel on several of the most important NAACP cases, involving white supremacist laws that violated the 14th and 15th amendments.
The New Deal
Classical liberals were critical of FDR’s New Deal during the 1930s. We highly recommend Timothy Sandefur’s Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness. In the book he chronicles the views of Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, and Rose Wilder Lane—known as the three mothers of libertarianism. Lane despised the authoritarianism of the New Deal, concluding that “there was no reason to think government officials would be exempt from the shortsightedness, corruption, or ignorance that plagued the decisions of private citizens.”[11] The shortcoming of the New Deal’s social engineering would be felt for generations especially among Black Americans who suffered from the racist housing policies of the Federal Housing Administration. Paterson labeled eugenics as “bunk” and condemned “Jim Crow laws as inequitable and without foundation of right.” She also vocally opposed FDR’s appointment of Hugo Black to the Supreme Court because he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.[12] For her part, Rand condemned racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”[13] Not just white classical liberals, but serious Black individualists like Zora Neale Hurston also opposed the New Deal on the grounds that it insulted Black ability to be self-sustaining.[14]
Lane didn’t focus much on the hardships faced by Black Americans until she joined the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely distributed Black American newspaper in the 1940s. Lane lamented that she was late to the struggle, but lauded editor George Schuyler, the “Black H.L. Mencken” and the other editors for launching the Double V Campaign: “Victory over Fascism Abroad and Jim Crow at Home.” The campaign pointed out the terrible irony that Black American soldiers were fighting against a totalitarian, eugenicist regime abroad, only to come home to racial segregation, government discrimination in housing and education, and cultural humiliation. At the Courier, Lane described finding belonging amongst “Americans who understood the meaning of equality and freedom.” She spent three years applying libertarian ideals to the problems faced by Black Americans and endeared herself to the Courier’s readers.[15]
Japanese Internment
Japanese internment served as another glaring hypocrisy of the war, and the Courier responded in the same vein to this unconstitutional policy. Schuyler argued that Japanese citizens were not a threat to the war effort, and that “if the Government can do this to American citizens of Japanese ancestry, then it can do this to American citizens of ANY ancestry... Their fight is our fight.” Similarly, classical liberal R.C. Hoiles picked up the argument in the Santa Ana Register. He argued that the policy of internment was foreign to our Constitution, our way of life, and would turn America into the kind of government we were fighting in the war. He declared that this guilty-until-proven-innocent approach would set us on “the road to losing our democracy.” Prominent classical liberals such as Oswald Garrison Villard also signed onto an open letter that condemned FDR’s Japanese internment as approximating “the totalitarian theory of justice practiced by the Nazis in their treatment of the Jews.”[16]
Economic Exclusion
As Black oppression shifted from prima facie legal exclusion to sneakier forms of top-down economic exclusion, we see classical liberal thought coming to bear again. While the famous urban planning thinker Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was not an ideologue of any kind, her theories of neighborhood formation reflected a deeply Hayekian sensibility of social evolution. Thus, she opposed the building of highways through organic, and often Black and immigrant, areas of town with such unrelenting fervor that she was arrested. She argued vehemently against ‘urban renewal’ and slum clearance, noting that every form of “development” that the government planners showed her appeared to entirely end community life.[17]
As the moniker of ‘libertarian’ began to gain steam as a resurgence of the old classical liberal ideas, libertarians became known for their advocacy for gay rights, their alarm over the ballooning carceral state, and their opposition to the War on Drugs—all issues that disparately affect marginalized communities. While it is tempting to react to the collectivism of the neo-Marxists by leaving out discussions of group-based oppression, we suggest that classical liberals ought to lead rather than react, espousing a third way of approaching these false dichotomies. The principled commitment to the individual rights of Americans translates into a passionate condemnation of all forms of collectivist oppression, whether racial or otherwise. At the same time, as proponents of the fundamental importance of voluntary association in civil society, classical liberals can also affirm the power of cultural identities. There is simply no contradiction between individual involvement in voluntary groups and legal neutrality between citizens. To maintain this healthy tension, we have a rich history of classical liberal affirmation of traditions of virtue interwoven with a deep value for individual liberty.
Endnotes
[1] Paul D. Moreno, Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2008), 37.
[2]  https://jackmillercenter.org/cara-rogers-stevens-thomas-jefferson-and-the-fight-against-slavery/
[3]  https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/915
[4] https://www.npr.org/2018/12/09/674995075/slave-bible-from-the-1800s-omitted-key-passages-that-could-incite-rebellion
[5] https://www.aier.org/article/the-anti-capitalist-ideology-of-slavery/
[6] https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/what-the-black-man-wants-frederick-douglasss-answe
[7]  https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/the-activism-of-booker-t-washington and https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/taking-the-long-view-of-black-history
[8] https://fee.org/articles/the-conquest-of-the-united-states-by-spain/
[9] For more on the domestic consequences of American foreign interventionism see Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).
[10] Rachel S. Ferguson and Marcus M. Witcher, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America, (Nashville: Emancipation Books, 2022), 16-17.
[11] Timothy Sandefur, Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (Washington D.C.: Libertarianism.org, 2022).
[12] David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty” Independent Review. vol XII, n. 4, 2008, 558-559.
[13] Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), 126.
[14] David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty” Independent Review. vol XII, n. 4, 2008.
[15] David T. Beito and Marcus M. Witcher, Rose Lane Says: Thoughts on Liberty and Equality, 1942-1945 (Pierre, SD: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2024).
[16] David T. Beito, FDR’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance (Oakland: Independent Institute, 2023), 188-189.
[17] For more on Jane Jacobs’ thought, readers are encouraged to consult Sanford Ikeda’s new book titled A City Cannot Be a Work of Art: Learning Economics and Social Theory from Jane Jacobs.

Response Essay Phillis Wheatley: Dialogues on Equality and Freedom

Angel Adams Parham

There are few shining examples of liberty more deserving of praise than the Declaration of Independence.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”. But while they may have been self-evident, they did not translate easily into practice, as Phillis Wheatley—that poetic genius of the revolutionary war period—could well attest. This is clearly not the fault of the Declaration itself—merely an indication of the fragility of liberty as it attempts to make its way from paper to practice.
Wheatley was a great defender of freedom and the Revolution, though her contributions—and those of the Africans she represented—have received rather less credit than they deserve for their role in reinforcing the foundations of the American project and its defense of freedom.  Wheatley deserves a place in the country’s memory alongside Thomas Jefferson and George Washington—both of whom engaged her work in their writing. But while both men addressed Wheatley, they did so in ways that pointed toward quite different paths for America.   We explore these differences below in two dialogues: one between Jefferson and Wheatley and the other between the poet and Washington.
Jefferson Speaks on the Inferior Status of Africans
Although the first to speak in this dialogue is Jefferson, the views he expresses represent those of many white Americans in the founding years of the country.  Jefferson lays out his argument in support of the innateness of African inferiority in Query XIV from Notes on the State of Virginia where he cites Wheatley specifically, disparaging her poetry:
Whether [blacks] will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.—Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar œstrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately (sic); but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.
In a moment, we will allow Wheatley to defend herself via her poetry.  For now, we move on to visit the rest of Jefferson’s argument.  The most devastating part of his critique of African intellect lies in his interpretation of slavery in antiquity and the great intellects who emerged from that oppressed state.  He argues that in Greek and Roman antiquity, despite a regime of inhumane conditions and punishments, their slaves “were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master's children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phædrus, were slaves”.
What makes for the difference between these slaves of antiquity and those of Jefferson’s time in America?  It is that the former: “were of the race of whites. It is not their condition [in American] then, but nature, which has produced the distinction”.  Wheatley’s life and work speak forcefully against this view.
Wheatley’s Reply
Wheatley was brought to Boston from the west coast of Africa in 1761.  Her estimated age upon arriving in America is seven years, given her missing two front teeth.  By all accounts, she was swift in learning English and even Latin.  Drawing from deep wells of knowledge, she shows herself through poetry and letters to be well-learned in the Bible and classical literature.  The Wheatley family, to their credit, recognized her fine intellect and supported her learning.  The young poet gained acclaim within Boston and across the sea in Britain, which led to the 1773 publication of her poetry volume, Poems of Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. She begins the collection with the poem “To Maecenas”—quite a powerful choice, as it provides a forceful response to the denigration and doubt expressed by Jefferson and others like him about the equality of Africans with whites.
She, like Jefferson, traces her argument back to antiquity, but takes rather a different path.  Where Jefferson uses this past to justify African inferiority, Wheatley uses it to solidify her right to step into and work within the literary heritage that flows from the ancients right down to her own day.  Maecenas was a wealthy patron of the arts in Rome and was a supporter of both Virgil and Horace.  She begins, therefore, with a smart nod to her own patrons in eighteenth century America and Britain, while at the same time inserting herself into the larger literary tradition of the ancients.
She begins by stating her fervent desire to work within the classical tradition:
Great Maro’s strain in heav’nly numbers flows,The Nine inspire, and all the bosom glows.
O could I rival thine and Virgil’s page,
Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage;
Soon the same beauties should my mind adorn,
And the same ardors in my soul should burn:
Then should my song in bolder notes arise,And all my numbers pleasingly surprise;
The underlined words designate places where Wheatley claims the classical mantle.  The “Great Maro” and the “Mantuan Sage” both refer to Virgil, famed poet of the Aeneid and beneficiary of Maecenas’s patronage.  The “Nine” refer to the nine muses of Greek literature who inspire and speak to those who practice the arts, including poetry, theater, and dance, among others.  The italicized phrases show Wheatley seeking to claim these Greek and Roman literary traditions for herself.  The italicized phrases show Wheatley seeking to claim these Greek and Roman literary traditions for herself.  In this claimed heritage, her mind could be tutored by the beauty of the tradition.  Like her predecessors, her soul could be enlightened and enlivened.
But the next lines note with sorrow that her access has been blocked. Rather than mounting with the muses to “ride upon the wind”, she is forced to “sit, and mourn a grov’ling mind”.  While others’ bosoms become the “Muses home” she sighs with longing, lamenting that “But I less happy, cannot raise the song, The fault’ring, music dies upon my tongue”. Here she makes reference to Terence—the formerly enslaved African playwright whom Jefferson references above.  Wheatley argues that he, though enslaved, was allowed to have his “soul replenish’d, and his bosom fir’d”.  In protest, she seeks a remedy to this injustice as she demands: “But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace, To one alone of Afric’s sable race”.  That is, will it be just this one African from antiquity who will have the pleasure of the Muses?  Why not open the way to all Africans to drink at the river of inspiration for their souls’ refreshment?
Despite the challenges barring her way, Wheatley refuses to allow the obstacles to freedom to limit her song.  Thus, she determines to “snatch a laurel, from thine honour’d head, While you indulgent smile upon the deed”.  The “you” here refers to the patron Maecenas.  She concludes the poem by calling on this patron to “Hear me propitious, and defend my lays”.  Her usage of “lay” here seems to refer to the noun version of the word, which means situation or condition, as in determining the “lay of the land” so that one can form a strategy or plan for navigating a difficult circumstance.
Wheatley, Freedom, and the Revolution
Where Jefferson focused on what he considered to be the “unfortunate difference of colour” in Africans and supported plans for their colonization following emancipation, not all of the founders were as convinced of the innate inferiority of Wheatley and her fellow Africans.  Indeed, the poet found an admiring friend in George Washington for whom she composed a laudatory poem praising his leadership of the Revolution.  The two shared a letter exchange which pointed toward an alternative vision for the country and its future.
On October 26, 1775, Wheatly addressed a letter to General George Washington and enclosed an original poem of encouragement and praise.  Her letter reads:
SIR,
I Have taken the freedom to address your Excellency in the enclosed poem, and entreat your acceptance, though I am not insensible of its inaccuracies. Your being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to be Generalissimo of the armies of North America, together with the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy to suppress. Your generosity, therefore, I presume, will pardon the attempt. Wishing your Excellency all possible success in the great cause you are so generously engaged in. I am,
Your Excellency’s most obedient humble servant,
Phillis Wheatley
The poem, written in heroic couplets, esteems Washington and paints a laudatory portrait that does not fail to impress the general and future president. She begins in praise of freedom:
Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms,She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
This focus on the struggle for freedom under daunting circumstances is a common theme in Wheatley’s poetry.  A 1773 poem to the Earl of Dartmouth, British Secretary of State for the Colonies, celebrates “Fair Freedom” as early as the second line.  Then toward the end, she explains: “Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung….I young in life, by seeming cruel fate, Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat”.
Wheatley remembered being rudely snatched from her native home. The memory of a time of freedom before her enslavement moved her to be clear in both her poetry and prose that the fight for the colonies’ freedom converged with the emancipatory struggle of the Africans her verse gave voice to.
She writes with a certainty that goodness and virtue stand on the side of those fighting in the cause of liberty.  Thus, she concludes the paean to Washington:
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,With gold unfading, Washington! be thine.
Washington’s Reply
Washington is greatly moved by the poet’s praise and sends a letter roundly praising her in turn—quite in contrast to Jefferson’s ungenerous assessment of her poetic talent.  Washington writes:
I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me, in the elegant Lines you enclosed; and however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyrick, the style and manner exhibit a striking proof of your great poetical Talents.
He goes further, inviting her to visit him in Cambridge or “near Head Quarters”, should she have occasion to be in town.  His closing lines reinforce his admiration: “I shall be happy to see a person so favourd by the Muses, and to whom nature has been so liberal and beneficent in her dispensations”.
Toward a More Expansive Vision for America
Wheatley, Jefferson, and Washington each played seminal roles in the foundation of the country.  Jefferson’s silver pen spun a vision of America devoted to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  But his vision was limited.  While he was clear about the evils of slavery, he justified the degraded status of Africans and proposed a vision of America without its African population.  Washington, on the other hand, while he also owned slaves, expressed an openness of heart to Wheatley and others like her, and became the only founder to free all of his enslaved property upon his death.  Of these dueling portraits—one where all are free and equal opposed to another where unequal status continues to cast a shadow across the centuries—we must continue to choose the one that points us toward that ever more expansive vision.

Response Essay Frederick Douglass and Liberty

Timothy Sandefur

More than a century and a quarter after his death, Frederick Douglass remains America's best known antislavery spokesman. An escaped slave himself, and author of one of the nation’s great autobiographies, he was a brilliant intellectual and activist, who will forever be remembered as one of the immortal champions of those in bondage.
What’s less well known are Douglass’s broader libertarian commitments. He went beyond arguing for emancipation, to advancing a program of economic liberty, private property rights, the right to possess firearms, and other freedoms that in today’s parlance are associated with “conservatism”—while also advocating for women’s suffrage, interracial marriage, and the rights of immigrants, all of which are typically labeled “liberal.” In short, like any good libertarian, Douglass would have rejected today’s alleged dichotomy between “personal” and “economic” liberty. He saw these as merely different facets of the individualism that animated all his concerns.
While he supported efforts at social reform, he saw that reform by compulsion was a fool’s errand. Thus he rejected socialism—which was becoming increasingly popular among intellectuals in his lifetime—calling it “arrant nonsense” to contend that “holding property in the soil” was “on the same footing as holding property in man.”[1] With remarkable prescience, he told a friend that because a socialist state would obliterate the profit motive, it could only produce wealth through compulsory labor, which meant (in the friend’s words) that socialism would “necessarily resemble slavery in its cruelties as well as in its privations.”[2]
What’s more, economic liberty was central to Douglass’s thinking. When Union general Nathaniel Banks, occupying New Orleans in 1865, forbade freedmen from taking jobs without his permission—supposedly to protect them from being exploited by their bosses—Douglass denounced the idea. “What is freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment…. When any individual or combination of individuals undertakes to decide for any man when he shall work, where he shall work, at what he shall work, and for what he shall work, he or they practically reduce him to slavery.”[3] When asked what the government should do to help the freed slaves, his answer was: “Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us…! If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!”[4]
Douglass’s advocacy of economic freedom, private property rights, and the right to possess firearms were of a piece, because the bedrock of his political orientation was that the individual owns him- or herself. This has been the foundation of classical liberal political philosophy since at least the days of John Locke, who had argued in the seventeenth century that because each person is a self-possessor, each has a right to his own labor, and consequently to the fruits of his labors—and that this self-ownership principle also necessarily implied representative government, because if each person owns his own faculties, government may never justly assert power to rule without asking permission first.
The Declaration of Independence—which practically served as scripture to the abolitionists—phrased this idea in almost syllogistic terms: All people are equally born free; this means we have the right to guide our own lives, and that the only legitimate government is one based on consent—and also that there are certain lines government may never justly cross. The same moral principles that bar murder or theft by individuals also constrain the state, because we cannot ask government to murder or steal on our behalf.
This explains why the American founding fathers, laboring in Locke’s shadow, understood and admitted that their principles were incompatible with slavery. And by 1807, when outgoing president Thomas Jefferson signed a federal law banning the international slave trade, they had reason to hope slavery was already fading away. All Northern states abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804, and they thought economic pressures would do the rest, given that slavery was enormously wasteful.
What they did not foresee was the rise of technology that made slavery far more profitable and the advent of an explicitly anti-liberal political philosophy—indeed, the first anti-capitalist political ideology in American history, now known as the “positive good school.” Led by such figures as John C. Calhoun, Henry Hughes, George Fitzhugh, and James Hammond, this school argued that liberalism and capitalism are soulless, artificial, and spiritually bankrupt, because they are premised on calculating reason and vulgar selfishness, instead of the supposedly more “human” considerations of companionship and belonging that animated slavery.
In his Letters on Southern Slavery (1845), Hammond contrasted slavery with capitalism by arguing that the former was a “sacred and natural system in which the laborer is under the personal control of a fellow being endowed with the sentiments and sympathies of humanity,” whereas capitalism, or the “modern artificial money-power system,” was “cold, stern, [and] arithmetical.”[5] Fitzhugh was more explicit in his Sociology for the South (1854). The “whole philosophy, moral and economical, of The Wealth of Nations,” he wrote, is “‘Every man for himself, and Devil take the hindmost’”[6]—whereas slavery was about “protective care-taking and supporting”—indeed, it was “the very best form of socialism,” because it was grounded in the compassionate hierarchy of paternalism.[7]
It was against this anti-capitalist, anti-liberal doctrine that Abraham Lincoln spoke in 1859 when he said that economic freedom is “the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”[8] The freedom to pursue happiness by employing one’s skills to provide for oneself is the very opposite of “cold” and “stern”—it is both essential to individual liberty and the key to social advancement. And it stood in humane contrast to the paternalistic and static collectivism advocated by the positive good school.
Douglass could affirm Lincoln’s arguments with his own experience. After escaping slavery in 1838, he had traveled to Massachusetts—only to find that he was free, as he put it, “from slavery, but free from food and shelter as well.”[9] He soon found an opportunity, however:
The fifth day after my arrival I … went upon the wharves in search of work. On my way down Union Street I saw a large pile of coal in front of [a] house…. I went to the kitchen-door and asked the privilege of bringing in and putting away this coal. “What will you charge?” said the lady. “I will leave that to you, madam.” “You may put it away,” she said. I was not long in accomplishing the job, when the dear lady put into my hand two silver half-dollars. To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me—that it was mine—that my hands were my own, and could earn more of the precious coin—one must have been in some sense himself a slave…. I was not only a freeman but a free-working man, and no master … stood ready at the end of the week to seize my hard earnings.[10]
This helps explain why economic freedom was as critical for Douglass as freedom of speech or religion.
Despite his clear words, Douglass’s legacy was later appropriated by the political left, which sought to downplay elements of his political philosophy, such as his support for the U.S. Constitution (in opposition to abolitionists who argued that the constitution was a pro-slavery document), and his skepticism toward labor unions (which excluded black Americans from membership, and thus deprived them of employment opportunities[11]). Some scholars, such as Waldo Martin Jr., openly denounce Douglass’s pro-free market views,[12] but others take a subtler approach, arguing that Douglass was either unaware of the “fact” that government intervention is necessary for racial equality, or that he was really not a proponent of laissez-faire at all.
The dispute over Douglass’s legacy is most notable with respect to his famous “leave us alone” speech. Scholar Nicholas Buccola has argued that Douglass came to regret these words, and to endorse interventionist government policies to aid black Americans in attaining equality.[13] He cites an 1880 speech in which Douglass said that if the country had followed the advice of such leaders as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner—who wanted to confiscate land from Southern whites after the Civil War and redistribute it to blacks—“the terrible evils from which we now suffer would have been averted.”[14] This, Buccola argues, shows that Douglass’s views about private property had “evolved.”
Actually, as I’ve shown elsewhere,[15] this is not an accurate reading of Douglass’s 1880 speech. For one thing, he explained that his “do nothing with us” speech had been misunderstood. “I meant all that I said [in that speech],” he later said. But it was not “doing nothing” for states to exclude black Americans from public schools or voting or economic opportunity. “Should the American people put a school house in every valley of the South and a church on every hill side and supply the one with teachers and the other with preachers, for a hundred years to come, they would not then have given fair play to the negro . . . . The nearest approach to justice to the negro for the past is to do him justice in the present. Throw open to him the doors of the schools, the factories, the workshops, and of all mechanical industries. For his own welfare, give him a chance to do whatever he can do well. If he fails then, let him fail! I can, however, assure you that he will not fail.”[16]
These words hardly show that Douglass came to reject his earlier commitment to classical liberalism. Rather, he understood that the problems with racism were far more complicated than the type of problems that can be solved by the adoption and enforcement of legislation—and that the latter path held serious dangers for a persecuted minority. As public choice scholars have demonstrated, government intervention merely transfers the operative decision-making power from the hands of private buyers and sellers into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, who typically base their decisions on political factors rather than on merit or economic efficiency. Thus wealth redistribution tends to reward the politically well-connected at the expense of the already disfavored. This explains why minorities tend to stagnate economically under redistributive government—and why the early twentieth century Progressive movement simultaneously expanded government power and implemented segregation.
Douglass died before that happened and before economists devised the tools to explain the deleterious consequences of government intervention. But he did detect that danger—which explains why Douglass advanced what looks today like an unusual argument for the right to vote. He was a vigilant champion of voting rights, but unlike those today who see voting as a way to mold society toward a desired end, Douglass viewed the ballot as a tool of self-defense. “While the black man can be denied a vote, while the Legislatures of the South can take from him the right to keep and bear arms … the work of the Abolitionists is not finished,” he declared a month after the Civil War ended. “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.”[17] Nearly 30 years later, his message remained the same: “Those who are already educated and are vested with political power have thereby an advantage which they are not likely to divide with the Negro, especially when they have a fixed purpose to make this entirely a white man’s government.”[18] The right to vote was critical to prevent state governments from effectively re-instituting slavery—or, as Douglass put it, from “establish[ing] an ownership of the blacks by the community among whom they live”[19]—which, in fact, Southern state governments effectively accomplished not long after his death.
Some scholars of the Reconstruction Era have claimed that “free labor ideology” (which views the right to economic liberty as a crucial element of freedom) was an advent of the post-Civil War era. But Douglass’s career reveals that the age-old principles of classical liberalism that animated the American founding were always the essential core of anti-slavery and then of laissez-faire thinking in the nineteenth century—and that they remain essential to any program of “true anti-racism” today.
Endnotes
[1]  Frederick Douglass, “Property in Soil and Property in Man,” Nov. 18, 1848, in Philip Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York: International Publishers,1975), vol. 5, p. 105.
[2] Frederic May Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (Toronto: Funk & Wagnalls, 1891), 92.
[3] Douglass, “What the Black Man Wants,” Apr. 1865, in Foner, ed., Life and Writings, vol. 4, p. 158
[4] Ibid., 164.
[5] Gov. Hammond’s Letters on Southern Slavery (Charleston: Walker & Burke, 1845), 27-28.
[6] George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of a Free Society (Richmond: A. Morris, 1854), 10.
[7] Ibid., 28
[8] Speech at the Wisconsin Agricultural Fair, Sep. 30, 1858, Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed., Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings (New York: Library of America, 1989), vol. 2, p. 98.
[9] Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (London: Christian Age, 1882), 172.
[10] Ibid., 177.
[11] https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/18429
[12] Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
[13] Nicholas Buccola, “You Can’t Put Frederick Douglass in Chains, N.Y. Times, Mar. 12, 2018,
[14] Frederick Douglass, “Suffrage for the Negro,” Frederick Douglass on Slvery and the Civil War: Selections from his Writings, 58
[15] Timothy Sandefur, “Did Frederick Douglass Change His Mind? And If So, So What?” In Defense of Liberty, Apr. 20, 2018, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/did-frederick-douglass-change-his-mind-and-if-so-so-what/.

Response Essay Zora Neale Hurston: A Minority of One, the Individual

Lucas E. Morel

Any exposition of Zora Neale Hurston’s political opinions must begin with the caution that she was not a systematic thinker on politics and certainly not a joiner, per se, of any institution or philosophical school of thought. As she put it, “I do not have much of a herd instinct. . . . [L]et me be the shepherd my ownself.” (“Seeing the World As It Is,” Dust Tracks on a Road, 794) With this caveat in mind, what follows presents some gleanings of her regarding matters of race and politics drawn from the non-fiction prose of a literary artist.
In her most famous essay, “How It Feels to be Colored Me” (1928), Hurston observed, “Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong, regardless of a little pigmentation more or less” (827). What is typically described as a “realist” account of life, one devoid of high ideals and moral expectations, Hurston presents as an invitation to assert oneself regardless of the obstacles that one happens to face. Applied to the crucible of America’s racial divide, Hurston rejects “the sobbing school of Negro-hood” in favor of seeing the world as her proverbial oyster: “No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” Were the possibilities of her self-improvement and prosperity constrained by racial bigotry? To be sure, but she chose to seek those areas of the world and life in general where she could enjoy herself and the company of those who recognized her worth. “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company!” (829)
Hurston explains that her race was just one of those elements of her identity that at times actually heightened her enjoyment of life, like when she felt “so colored” at a jazz club in contrast with a white friend, “sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly,”  who could only hear what she felt: “I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way” (828). But at other times, “I have no race, I am me. . . . The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (829). To be fixated on the limitations of race, which she did not deny existed in America (see “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience,” 1944), would inhibit what she could explore and enjoy as a black woman both by virtue of her race and transcending far beyond it—a sentiment best expressed in her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
In the concluding chapter of Dust Tracks on a Road (“Looking Things Over”), a 1942 autobiography she wrote at age 51, Hurston championed self-reliance as the key to living. She learned early in life that there was no use in complaining if things did not go her way. The world owed her nothing, but she’d make it yield something before she was through with it. If Hurston was going to get or enjoy anything, it was up to her to make it happen. As she put it, “I am in the struggle with the sword in my hands” (765). She saw “bitterness” as a choice, not a natural feeling of disappointment over the world doing you wrong. This was the product of “wishful weakness” and “the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.” In a word, Hurston accepted life—all of it, the lows (“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots”) and the highs (“I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands”) and what she called “the challenge of responsibility,” going so far as to call prayer “a cry of weakness” (“Religion,” 764). To the extent that religion represented resignation in the face of an inscrutable universe, she held no truck with it. (Hurston did not understand the way that it reinforced the morality and self-control necessary for a free society to flourish.)
Her account of human history was that might had gotten the better of right for the better portion of it. Although she called herself “an idealist” (“Looking Things Over,” 766), the failure of practice to live up to profession made her a thoroughgoing realist when it came to expecting politics to enable selfish human beings to transcend “human self-bias” to secure the common good. “We all want the breaks,” she confesses, “and what seems just to us is something that favors our wishes” (765). Hurston admits that everyone claims to want justice, “but the application brings on the fight” (766). Hurston agrees with the classic adage of Lord Acton, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” when she says to those “who walk in humble places,” i.e., those without political power, “There has been no proof in the world so far that you would be less arrogant if you held the lever of power in your hands” (769). Politics, for Hurston is simply James Madison’s “faction” writ large: “Real slavery is couched in the desire and the efforts of any man or community to live and advance their interests at the expense of the lives and interests of others” (767). This made her a natural libertarian, favoring that form of government that governed least precisely because no form of government could act more justly than the people who composed it.
Perhaps her expressed cynicism towards the capacity of politics to achieve justice was simply a counsel of moderation in those seeking “for some disinterested party to pass on things!” (“Looking Things Over,” 766) Hurston decided that in the face of hypocrisy, humility and humor were more conducive of work and activity than “the uselessness of gloominess.” The human frailty she found in others only reminded her of her own tendency to prefer her interest to absolute justice among her peers: “My inner fineness is continually outraged at finding that the world is a whole family of Hurstons.” Given her impressions of history, she thought it was futile to preach justice and fair play. She contented herself with making the struggle a personal project—“trying to make the day at hand a positive thing”—rather than pursuing a collective, organized effort exemplified by the modern Civil Rights Movement. More important than leveling the playing field was applying one’s own talents to the game at hand—even a crooked one (see “Seeing the World As It Is,” 794).
Oddly enough, the flip side of Hurston’s pessimism toward improvement of the human condition as the precursor to improvement of political institutions was her optimism about the capacity of individuals to make something of themselves. Like Frederick Douglass, Hurston saw the chief obstacle to improving oneself was internal, not external: “No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual. If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it. If you have got it, you can’t hide it!” (“My People! My People!” 733)
But for self-reliance to be effectual on the widest scale, especially for those outnumbered in a self-governing society, Douglass pleaded for government to provide equal protection of the laws and security for the fruit of one’s labors, what free market proponents tout as the protection of private property. Hurston’s emphasis on self-reliance seems to give short shrift to the protection that a government can and ought to offer. That said, while she does not explicitly call for these protections, they are implicit in her confidence that her efforts to make her way in the world depend chiefly on her initiative rather than external aid from the political community.
Hurston expressed her most explicit political opinion in a letter to the editor (“Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix,” Orlando Sentinel [August 11, 1955]) criticizing the Supreme Court rulings in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954 and 1955). These unanimous opinions by the Supreme Court desegregated K-12 public schools by rejecting the longstanding doctrine of “separate but equal” of Plessy v. Ferguson. Speaking of black children educated in segregated schools, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas 347 U.S. 483, 494) While many lauded the decision as a step towards the eventual integration of schools, Hurston took offense at its suggestion that black students could not learn without the help of white students, as if black people were incapable of improving themselves without the presence of white people. She rejected this white supremacist notion, and declared, “I take the Indian position” (956), which scorned any need to adopt the ways of white America. Hurston deplored the “woe is me” school of black improvement and identified with the defiant self-confidence of the American Indian.
She went on to warn that the Court’s decision might be a “trial-balloon” for “Govt by administrative decree” (958, 957), which she believed was not consistent with individual liberty under the Constitution. In sum, “Govt by fiat can replace the Constitution.” At minimum, Hurston thought self-government under the Constitution entailed government by consent of the governed, which in the United States meant “the two-party system” (957). Without a voting process informed by a competitive two-party system, the citizenry would find themselves under a government with “[n]o questions allowed and no information given out from the administrative dept.” In the case of desegregation of schools, Hurston saw the Brown decision as a Trojan horse for “more rulings on the same subject and more far-reaching any day.” This proved to be prescient, for the following decades saw the Court acting as an unelected legislature in its efforts to produce racial outcomes by decree rather than by a fair application of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause (see, e.g., Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education [1971]).
Her contempt for any public policy or political movement that condescended to black Americans was made most clear in her 1951 essay, “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism.” Hurston lambasted the collectivism of Russian socialism, with its propaganda “about there being no more frontiers, no more chances at all for free enterprise, not a prayer for a lone individual to rise by his own efforts.” (American Legion Magazine [June 1951], 56) She attributed the failure of communist infiltration of black America “because the Negro, the intended mud-sill, refused to hold still so that he could be built upon.” Simply put, black Americans, along with the rest of America, thought to themselves, “Why kill the boss? He might be the big boss himself next year.” Most rejected the Marxist notion of a global conflict of oppressors and oppressed. Hurston believed blacks would continue to take their chances with “the American tradition,” a political and economic system that afforded greater opportunity for advancement than what the press had reported about Joseph Stalin’s Russia.
In the end, Hurston rejects any view of humanity that would prescribe arbitrary limits on the aspirations of any individual person. With Douglass, she trusted blacks in America to rise or fall on their own merits, and found “Race Pride and Race Consciousness . . . a thing to be abhorred” (“Seeing the World As It Is,” 784). In proclaiming, “I do not wish to close the frontiers of life upon my own self,” Hurston emphasized that taking comfort in “race pride and race solidarity” in the face of oppressive circumstances would achieve little (786, 787). One infers that the greater crime was not a society that imposed its will on any person or group of persons, but the decision of any person not to venture out until all was made right in the world. With little faith in political reform, Hurston focused on prodding her readers to have faith in themselves, come what may.

Response Essay Jacobs, Internment, and Action

Sanford Ikeda

INTRODUCTION
In my response to the essay by Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher I will draw on what I have learned and thought about as a classical liberal working in economics and urbanism, the latter particularly through the lens of the urbanist Jane Jacobs.  Indeed, I was asked to contribute to this conversation in part because of my familiarity with Jacobs’s writings.  I will also, if I may, draw on some experiences close to home.
JANE JACOBS ON RACISM
Jane Jacobs has influenced classical liberals and progressives alike, and she can’t be easily classified ideologically.  Indeed, she refused throughout her life to explicitly identify with any ideology and claimed not to have one.  However, John Blundell lists her among the “ladies for liberty” (2011) and in my opinion that’s fair.  In my recent book, I also try to point out the strong classical-liberal elements in her writings (Ikeda 2024: 379-380).
While most of her writings don’t directly treat the problem of racism, in her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Death and Life), she devotes a fair amount on the impact of urban planning on the neighborhoods of (in the nomenclature of the day) “Negroes” and “Colored People.”  To some critics today that has not been enough, but one should consider that she wrote most of Death and Life in the late 1950s, a period when books about the socio-economics of cities were just beginning to deal explicitly with racial issues.
In the first part of Death and Life Jacobs discusses “red lining,” the practice by financial institutions of excluding certain neighborhoods from lending.  Her discussion here is largely race neutral, and in fact focuses on predominantly low-income white neighborhoods such as Boston’s North End that were so designated and the way their residents coped by using local resources and their resourcefulness.  Given the tendency of even fans of Jacobs to focus mainly on the first chapters of Death and Life, it’s possible that those accusing her of downplaying racial problems may have overlooked chapter 15 on “unslumming” (the North End may be seen as an example of this process), which brims with instances of heavy handed urban planning and “slum clearance,” with the aid of federal funding, damaging or destroying predominantly poor Black communities.
The discrimination which operates most drastically today is, of course, discrimination against Negroes.  But it is an injustice with which all our major slum populations have had to contend to some degree (Jacobs 1961: 283).
But even earlier in the book than that, in chapter 6 on city neighborhoods, Jacobs explains why post-War housing projects in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere not only destroyed vital-but-poor Black neighborhoods but also how the projects that replaced them created the conditions – remote high-rise buildings with drab unkempt interiors and isolated public spaces – that discouraged the kinds of informal social contact that naturally fosters the basic safety and security that is the foundation of any successful community.
But when slum clearance enters an area…it does not merely rip out slatternly houses.  It uproots the people.  It tears out the churches.  It destroys the local business man.  It sends the neighborhood lawyer to new offices downtown and it mangles the tight skein of community friendships and group relationships beyond repair (Jacobs 1961: 137).
Today, “market urbanists,” who seek to find market-based solutions to urban problems such as homelessness and affordable housing, have taken up Jacobs’s work and point out the racist consequences, if not intent, of building codes and various forms of land-use zoning in the United States that has its roots in racial exclusion (Ikeda and Hamilton 2015).
As Ferguson and Witcher note, Ayn Rand rightly characterizes racism as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”  But another dangerous form of collectivism is “nationalism” – the belief that one should always place the interests of the country in which one is born above all else.  And nothing fans the flames of nationalism more than war.  In the 1940s, here and abroad nationalism merged frighteningly with racism.
WORLD WAR TWO AND JAPANESE-AMERICAN INTERNMENT
Then and now, war makes otherwise decent people apologists for the atrocities their governments commit.  In the case of America during the Second World War, these included, to name but two, the imprisoning of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry merely because of their race, and the burning, crushing, and irradiating of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of their nationality.
The impact on my family during that time was far less severe but still deeply disruptive.  My mother and father were second-generation Japanese Americans (JA).  To escape Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s prison camps, my mother and her family fled California to the relative safety of Arizona.  However, my father, a successful farmer in Arizona, was legally forbidden from entering the state capital to sell his produce, and as a leader in the JA community, he was hounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigations to “name names” when there were none.  There is no better example of the perversion of the word liberal than to describe the president who ordered this to happen (via EO 9066) as “liberal.”
TRANSLATING RESPECT FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS INTO CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION
As a “person of color” who was born and raised in the Southwest of mid-century America, when I attend events in the United States hosted by organizations for libertarians young and old I tend to note how many other People of Color (POC) are there among the regular participants.  Over the 40-odd years I’ve been going to these gatherings I’m usually disappointed by the few I see.  Has libertarian “colorblindness” indeed made us blind to people of color?
Ferguson and Witcher identify libertarian thinkers and doers throughout American history who have championed the cause of racial equality.  In the twentieth century these include some who have supported civil rights for African Americans in the 1960s (e.g. removing “Jim Crow” laws and legal racial segregation) and in the 1980s redress for Japanese-American internment (though not monetary reparations).  But their names (e.g. Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, as well as Karl Hess and Robert Lefevre) are not recognized as national leaders in these fights, and rightly so.  If Ferguson and Witcher are right about the strong heritage of racial equality among earlier American libertarians, what has happened to that fervor in more recent times?  And why is it that even today the day signifying the emancipation of Black slaves – Juneteenth – is mostly ignored by libertarians?  Shouldn’t we be celebrating this holiday no less enthusiastically than the other American Independence Day?
Like Rose Wilder Lane (as the authors note), we also seem to be “late to the struggle,” the few exceptions notwithstanding, and at best follow rather than lead, often reluctantly.  So, their claim that “the principled commitment to the individual rights of Americans translates into a passionate condemnation of all forms of collectivist oppression, whether racial or otherwise” sounds more like a wish than a statement of fact.  How much has that commitment actually translated into taking action against all forms of racism and, like Adam Smith speaking up for the most vulnerable in our communities?
Ferguson and Witcher make an important and much-needed point, but will efforts such as theirs move the libertarian needle?  I hope so.  It did in a sense for me because, well, thanks to a few libertarians like them, for the past two years I’ve been celebrating Juneteenth.  (Yes, I too am very late to the party.)  That’s a very small step, of course, but one among many more that all libertarians need to take.  As for the bigger picture, I am in wholehearted agreement with the title of their book (which I have not yet read):  Black Liberation through the Marketplace.  The advancement of minorities and the marginalized in society is demonstrably most effectively accomplished through free markets, free association, and radical tolerance (and criticism).  These have worked miracles for human well-being across the board for at least the past 250 years, and, if given the chance, will do so for at least the next 250.
WORKS CITED
Blundell, John (2011).  Ladies For Liberty:  Women Who Made a Difference in American History.  New York:  Algora Publishing.
Ferguson, Rachel S. and Marcus M. Witcher (2022).  Black Liberation Through the Marketplace:  Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America.  Brentwood, TN:  Emancipation Books.
Ikeda, Sanford (2024).  A City Cannot Be a Work of Art:  Learning Economics and Social Theory from Jane Jacobs.  Singapore:  Palgrave Macmillan.
Ikeda, Sanford and Emily Hamilton (2015).  “How land-use regulation undermines affordable housing,” Mercatus Center, George Mason University (November).  https://www.mercatus.org/students/research/research-papers/how-land-use-regulation-undermines-affordable-housing  Accessed 21 July 2024.
Jacobs, Jane (1961).  The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  New York:  Vintage.

Conversation Comments Classical Liberals and Libertarians Have Been Consistent Champions for Minority Rights

Rachel Ferguson and Marcus M. Witcher

First, we would like to thank Ikeda, Morel, Parham, and Sandefur for their responses and their engagement. Each of them focused on a particular classical liberal thinker and discussed the ways in which they promoted individual liberty. Our hope is to extend this work to more and more under-appreciated figures. We truly believe there is a classical liberal anti-racist tradition in this country and that an emphasis on individual rights leads classical liberals and libertarians to promote liberty for minority groups.
Ikeda challenges us to ask why classical liberals and libertarians have lost their “fervor” for promoting “racial equality” and asserts that our view that the commitment to individual liberty translates to condemning all forms of collectivist oppression is more “a wish than a statement of fact.” Ikeda also mentions his own experience as a Japanese classical liberal, whose parents suffered through internment and who is often the only person of color in room after room of libertarian and classical liberal scholars. In response, we argue that libertarians boast an outstanding record on behalf of minorities in recent times. However, this legacy has been obscured by the movement’s small size, and the more prominent use of neutral language when solving the underlying policy issues themselves. This means that for attracting minorities who have experienced state oppression, we have a marketing problem.
Nevertheless, some parts of our movement, such as the Acton Institute for the study of religion and liberty, have developed highly diverse audiences, both by reaching out to the international freedom movement, and by forging connections with American minorities via shared concerns such as effective poverty alleviation. As Jonathan Haidt might remind us from his insights in The Righteous Mind, liberty is a foundational moral value, but we are motivated by other foundations as well, including care and sacredness. These successful outreach efforts can serve as a template moving forward.
Furthermore, we can also share Ikeda’s concerns insofar as a certain subset of the liberty movement seems to have created a pipeline to the alt-right. As far as we can tell, the distasteful vitriol of this group is almost entirely traceable to the work of Hans Hermann Hoppe, a man deeply out of step with the rest of the liberty tradition. But perhaps a more trenchant concern ought to be the 20th century tendency towards a kind of philosophical anorexia. The liberty movement will best safeguard its inheritance if it remains deeply connected to its substantive philosophical roots.
Recent Pro-Minority Advocacy
We have already noted the many classical liberals involved in the long Civil Rights Movement. Post-New Deal and post-WWII, classical liberalism had become fairly obscure among the public. However, just as Moorfield Storey not only co-founded the NAACP but served as its president until his death, the few classical liberals involved in the Civil Rights Movement itself also happened to be absolutely pivotal to its launch. For instance, TRM Howard was an ardent classical liberal who, in the 1950s, was one of the most prominent activists for Black civil rights. He supported and protected Emmett Till’s mother during the trial of her son’s murderers and when Till did not receive justice, Howard traveled the country arguing that Black Americans needed to March on Washington to secure equal rights and justice. He was invited by the relatively unknown Martin Luther King Jr. to speak to his congregation in Montgomery, Alabama. There, Howard’s passionate remarks inspired Rosa Parks to take a stand. In short, classical liberals were present throughout the struggle for Black civil rights even if many of them are no longer household names.
Later, libertarians joined with many in the Civil Rights Movement to oppose the Vietnam War and the draft, which disproportionately affected Black men due to their underrepresentation in groups excepted from the draft, such as university students. In fact, libertarians carved out a distinct identity from conservatives in the debates over the Vietnam War. Libertarians “believed that the war in Vietnam was so heinous, and the draft so threatening to national liberty, that they could no longer stand as a part of the largest pro-laissez-faire capitalist youth organization in the nation.” As such, they walked out of  the 1969 Young Americans for Freedom Convention. Free marketer Milton Friedman was central to ending military conscription in the United States, and also referred specifically to disparate effects on Black Americans in his discussions of the perverse effects of the minimum wage. Furthermore, in Friedman’s school choice efforts, he explicitly noted the importance of integration and argued that educational freedom would ultimately promote it.
Classical liberals and libertarians were also influential in the struggle for women’s rights going all the way back to the 18th century, such as the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké’s famously Lockean and individualist arguments for the equal rights and responsibilities of women. 20th century libertarianism may be one of the only major political movements in history to base its entire founding on female thinkers: Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and Isabel Patterson, the three “mothers of libertarianism.” It was the ideas of individual liberty, equality before the law, and the right of each individual to pursue their own ends that inspired second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. With the general obscurity of classical liberalism in this period, most women’s rights activists didn’t identify as libertarians, but many of the ideals they promoted were derived from the classical liberal intellectual tradition.
In the case of gay Americans, those who placed individual liberty as their highest idea led the way. The Libertarian Party embraced gay marriage in its first (1972) Presidential platform and throughout the 1970s libertarians called for an end to anti-gay laws across the United States. Other libertarians argued for decoupling the state from marriage altogether, an approach that also promotes the legal equality of heterosexuals and homosexuals.  According to David Boaz, this should come as no surprise. After all, as F.A. Hayek argued in 1960, “private practice among adults, however abhorrent it may be to the majority, is not a proper subject for coercive action for a state whose object is to minimize coercion.” For comparison, both the Republican and Democratic Parties still opposed gay marriage as recently as 2008.
Libertarians were far ahead of the curve in forcefully advocating for an end to the War on Drugs and the carceral state. In fact, they did so long before these became topics championed by the left. We know that drug laws disproportionately affect Black Americans—specifically Black men. While Democrats and Republicans were passing bipartisan legislation to establish mandatory minimums, classical liberals and libertarians were calling for drug liberalization.
Safeguarding the Liberty Movement for All
While it’s absolutely true that the glory of classical liberalism is its neutrality between citizens, it’s also true that those who have suffered historical exclusion from liberal institutions -- whether ethnic groups, women, or sexual minorities -- need to know that classical liberals will fight for their equality before the law. Therefore, we understand Ikeda’s push-back in light of some disturbing developments in the last few decades. We do not have space here to litigate it, but please see the work of Phil Magness on the influence of Hans Hermann Hoppe. We will just briefly say that Hoppe created a novel (but, we would argue, unsuccessful) argument for property rights from Habermasian discourse ethics; holds extreme anti-immigration views that are incompatible with a free society; has defended the Germans in WWII; and has used disturbingly ethnocentric language on many occasions. His popularity through his association with the Mises Institute has recently led to an almost complete breakdown of the Libertarian Party, led by the so-called “Mises Caucus,” in spite of the fact that these activists disagree deeply with Ludwig von Mises’s own, quite cosmopolitan, perspective.
But underneath that troubling subset of the movement, we see a deeper weakness. 20th century libertarianism simplified the anthropologically rich, Scottish Enlightenment ideas of liberty down to something much thinner: a formulaic appeal to the non-aggression principle. This departure from the wisdom of the classical liberal heritage around the role of human sociality and virtue has perhaps set up the movement for the way it’s been co-opted in recent years. Hopefully, this aberration in the liberty movement will undermine itself, returning us to a wiser and deeper tradition of liberty that has the substance to withstand empty philosophical fads.

Conversation Comments The Freedom of Dwelling Outside of Categorical Thinking

Angel Adams Parham

There is much that resonates with me in the lead essay by Ferguson and Witcher.  Their work in that piece is to gather together thinkers who we might not normally associate with classical liberalism in order to demonstrate the ways that the tradition defends liberty for the racially oppressed, going back at least to the eighteenth century.  The fact that these thinkers come from diverse backgrounds that span the gamut from an enslaved teenage girl—Phillis Wheatley—to a still-influential European intellectual—Adam Smith—is a testament to the centuries old capaciousness and strength of the liberal tradition. My co-respondents have also provided great insight into the lives and liberty-oriented work of writers as diverse as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jane Jacobs.
While my overall response to this work is positive, I do have a critical response to the move of describing some of these thinkers as “libertarian”.  In his essay, Lucas Morel writes of Zora Neale Hurston that she was “a natural libertarian, favoring that form of government that governed least precisely because no form of government could”.  And Sandefur begins his essay by promising to show us “Douglass’s broader libertarian commitments”.  While both Hurston and Douglass certainly held views that resonate with some libertarian commitments, I have hesitations about drafting them posthumously into libertarianism.  Why is this?
We—and here I mean scholars as well as everyday people outside of the academy—like to know how to place or categorize people and their political views.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this, as we are the kinds of creatures who need to make meaning.  But in our current time of hyper-polarization and fragmentation, the tendency to categorize that which is not readily labeled, seems to me to work against rather than for real freedom.  While I understand what Ferguson, Witcher, and my co-respondents are trying to do—and agree that there is some real utility in doing it—I want to argue for the importance of striking a careful balance between highlighting intellectual resonances with the classical liberal tradition versus nudging thinkers into intellectual pigeon holes.  I realize that the latter is not the intent of the other respondents, but that could become the result when their essays are read by others seeking to quickly judge who to place in the libertarian basket.
As an African-American woman writer and intellectual, the work and thought of writers such as Wheatley, Douglass, Hurston, and many others, has already been liberating to me because they are not easily placed within today’s political categories.  Re-defining them as “libertarian” doesn’t feel helpful, especially as I think about how to present those writers to others—whether Black, white, Asian, and so on—as examples of diversity of thought within the Black intellectual tradition.  I think, for instance, of a hypothetical conversation I might have with an African-American student who is working through her own political thinking.  She has been raised in a twenty-first century America that provides more openness and opportunity than ever, but where the Democratic party and its liberal policy agenda still attract the majority of Black Americans.  And while Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, and Ian Rowe are increasingly visible, there is still a palpable hesitation in the Black community to identifying as “conservative”.
So it is within this larger societal context that I sit down to talk with this young woman.  She is, perhaps, a student of mine, and I’m eager to show her models of Black thinkers, many whom she has heard of, who defied the political silos we place ourselves in today.  I want her to understand that the school textbooks and even the college courses tend to highlight limited dimensions of quite complex Black thinkers so that those thinkers appear to be consistently left, liberal, even radical in their politics.  Likewise, it is important to me that she understand that an author like Phillis Wheatley has been unjustly branded as an assimilationist who embraced her own subjection.  I will do this first by presenting, in brief, the complexity of their thought, and next by recommending some of their best writings.  The last thing I am inclined to do is to say: “You know many of these writers were really more libertarian than anything else.  We could easily place them within the libertarian tradition.”  I do not think that this would be a compelling approach, nor do I think it would best represent Wheatley, Douglass, Hurston, or others. Perhaps, paradoxically, these writers’ strength for libertarians is more in celebrating their brave individuality than in trying to argue for their adopted membership into libertarianism. That is, if one really desires more people to think for themselves, placing these great figures before them—in all of their complexity and irreducibility— is more important than claiming them for the libertarian cause.
In this sense, I resonate most with Ikeda’s approach, where he sets out to “point out the strong classical-liberal elements in [Jane Jacobs’] writings”.  Here there is no attempt to describe her as an unacknowledged libertarian. Instead, the focus is on aspects of her writing that support classical liberal thinking.  Here I will also say that while “libertarian” and “classical liberal” certainly overlap, they are not the same thing and do not have the same connotation among intellectuals or in the general public.  Thus it matters whether one seeks to highlight the aspects of Hurston’s writing that resonate with a “classical liberal” approach to thinking about the individual and the state versus signing her up as a “libertarian”. The former is more capacious than the latter.
At the end of the day, however, though my comments have focused on critique, I support the spirit of what is at work in the lead essay and in my co-respondents’ writings.  There is far too much group-think, and the standard assumptions about Black Americans’ politics are intellectually stifling.  We do need to see that a fairly diverse group of writers have provided models for how to live as critically thinking individuals in the midst of great pressures to succumb to the facile categories of thought all around us from social media to presidential politics.
We need more forums where Hurston’s fearless originality of thought are made known; where the classical education and classical influence on writers like Anna Julia Cooper and Martin Luther King, Jr. are made clear.   Cooper, for instance, continues to be under-read and under-appreciated. But those scholars who are writing about her today tend to anachronistically describe her as an “intersectional” scholar, while completely ignoring the fact that she was a quite conservative and very faithful Christian.  The strength of this forum on the classical liberal tradition’s efforts to fight racism is that it makes us take another look at writers who are too often presented in a uni-dimensional way that reinforces today’s truncated ideological and political categories.  But let’s do this in a way that preserves their beautiful individuality rather than harnessing them within yet another political corral.

Conversation Comments Where Do We Go From Here?

Timothy Sandefur

Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher have done more than argue that economic freedom, property rights, and other classical liberal values are and always have been indispensable to any effort by black Americans—or, indeed, any racial minority—to escape the burdens of discrimination. They’ve also offered a challenge to the American libertarian community: it’s truly anomalous, given the fascinating and moving history of the black American freedom struggle, and the fact that it so perfectly demonstrates much of the libertarian argument, that libertarians have themselves rarely given it a central role in their case for liberty.
Despite prominent and honorable exceptions such as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams—and, of course, the figures our essays have highlighted, such as Frederick Douglass and Zora Neale Hurston—few well-known champions of libertarianism have been black, and such leaders as Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard rarely devoted much attention to the specific challenges faced by black Americans during their lifetime. Worse—far worse—is the fact that in today’s world, libertarianism is often associated with outright racists, thanks largely to the political tomfoolery of the Libertarian Party’s so-called Mises Caucus.  Given circumstances like these, it’s no wonder many black Americans are turned off by the very word “libertarian.” 
As disappointing as the estrangement between blacks and classical liberalism is, it can only be remedied by first understanding its origin.  And here the story largely begins with the famous clash between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois—perhaps the most interesting political debate of the twentieth century, and one which is fundamental to any grasp of the distinctive political challenges black Americans confront today.
Washington, the famous leader of the Tuskegee Institute, was born into slavery in Virginia in 1856.  Only after the Civil War did he get a chance to attend school.  He fell in love with learning, and labored in coal mines to put himself through school, where he impressed his teachers enough that they chose him to lead Tuskegee—a position he held for three decades.  After Frederick Douglass’s 1895 death, Washington—who, incidentally, published one of the first biographies of Douglass—was considered the grand old man’s successor as “leader of his race.”
But that same year, Washington’s philosophy regarding black resistance to oppression became controversial—and it remains so today, for reasons that are crucial to understand by anyone wishing to appreciate, let alone resolve, black America’s alienation from the libertarian world.
Washington thought black Americans should concentrate on “self-reliance”— learning trades, developing businesses, and climbing by their own efforts into a position of economic autonomy.  That did not mean cutting themselves off from white America, but it did mean they should strive for economic stability, instead of devoting themselves to political and social agitation on the segregation issue.  For one thing, Washington thought such activism was futile at that point—white Americans were simply too wealthy and powerful; only after a significantly large black middle class grew up, could blacks hope to end Jim Crow.  But Washington also thought that if black Americans developed a culture of self-reliance, they would not have to depend on white America so much to begin with.  If blacks built their own farms and factories, owned banks and insurance companies, became medical and legal professionals, whites would soon find themselves impelled to some kind of détente.
What’s more, it was simply good for a person’s character not to care what other people think of him.  Washington liked to relate a story that Frederick Douglass told him of a time when Douglass was on a train, and was ordered to move to the Jim Crow car.  When another passenger expressed regret that Douglass had been “degraded in this manner,” Douglass replied, “They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass.”  Washington hoped all black Americans could someday earn sufficient financial independence to shrug off racism the same way.
In September 1895—only seven months after Douglass’s death—Washington spoke in Atlanta to a largely white audience, and summarized his views:
As we have proved our loyalty to you [whites] in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you…interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one.  In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.  There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all….  The agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly….  Progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.  No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.  It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.  The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house. [Bolding mine]
The man who would become Washington’s nemesis, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was born to a well-heeled, educated family in Massachusetts in 1868.  He became the first black man to earn a Harvard PhD, and his historical and sociological scholarship remain influential today.  He started out as a Washington admirer, but became his sharpest critic a few years after the Atlanta speech, when he decided that the “self-reliance” philosophy was in many respects a form of victim-blaming.  “[Washington’s] doctrine,” wrote Du Bois in 1903, “has tended to make the whites, North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders and stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators.”  The “self-reliance” philosophy gave “the distinct impression” that “the prime cause of the Negro’s failure to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past,” and that “his future rise depends primarily on his own efforts”—when the brutal reality was that segregationists were responsible for obstructing every effort by blacks to attain educational, economic, or social success.
It's easy to caricature, but important to seriously weigh, the positions of both Washington and Du Bois.  In reality, each argument had merit.  To accept being segregated (like the fingers of a hand) as Washington suggested was surely like ashes in the mouths of those who had been wronged time and again by white supremacy.  Yet on the other hand, the “agitation” Du Bois was advocating was unlikely to succeed—and certainly could not, without the financial support of the bourgeois class Washington was trying to build.  Washington was right that “no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized”—but Du Bois was right that a time must come when black Americans laid down their tools and took up their picket signs, and that the time may as well be now.
Simply put, the Washington / Du Bois debate was a tragedy wrapped in a sort of yin-yang dilemma.  And it left a legacy today by setting the stage for the political tensions among contemporary America’s black population.  At the risk of the aforementioned caricature, one can loosely lump the “conservative” strain of black political thought—represented by figures such as Clarence Thomas or Glenn Loury—with Washington’s legacy, and the “liberal” strain—represented by Barack Obama or Kamala Harris—with Du Bois’s.
The problem for classical liberalism was that it became almost entirely associated with the Washingtonian wing—thanks largely to the work of Du Bois and his admirers, who after Washington’s death increasingly embraced the political left.  In fact, Du Bois joined the Communist Party, renounced his American citizenship, celebrated Hitler during the Nazi-Soviet alliance, and published a revoltingly admiring obituary for Joseph Stalin in 1953.  As Lucas Morel has noted, Zora Neale Hurston—an outspoken devotee of Washington’s, who knew and despised Du Bois—denounced the rise of communism among her Harlem Renaissance peers, and even came to view the Du Bois side of the black political spectrum as motivated by envy: she thought they were embarrassed at their own blackness.  But she was the rare exception.  From Langston Hughes to Richard Wright to Bayard Rustin, twentieth century black intellectuals were attracted to the Communist Party’s claim that racism is just a device used by elites to oppress the working class, and that overthrowing capitalism will also end racism.
That claim is absurdly false—and it turned out that Soviets were actually manipulating black intellectuals for their own advantage—but in the 1960s, it seemed to many that the Du Bois side of the debate was vindicated by the triumphs of the Civil Rights Era.  (It appears more than merely symbolic that the old thinker died at the age of 95, only a day before Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.)
What’s more, Du Bois and his admirers persuaded many that the “self-reliance” argument amounted to a “do-nothing” attitude, just as leftist political thinkers have typically seen capitalism not as a spontaneous order but as an unplanned chaos.  In their eyes, counseling the oppressed to patiently wait for markets to correct themselves—to focus on self-improvement in hopes of liberation “someday”—was both senseless and insensitive; their response was summarized in the title of the book King published on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: Why We Can’t Wait.
By the time of King’s death, the Washingtonian philosophy of self-reliance was viewed by the most prominent black leaders not just as obsolete, but unrealistic—and that lack of realism appeared to be perfectly symbolized in the fight over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which the nascent libertarian community viewed as a violation of private property rights.
A half century later, the relationship between black Americans and the libertarian world remains more or less at an impasse for precisely that reason.  The question—to borrow the title of another of King’s books—is Where Do We Go From Here?
There’s no simple answer, but the first step is to keep in mind the lessons learned in the sixty years since King’s day.  Those decades have witnessed the development of powerful intellectual tools—most notably public choice theory—that help explain why government intervention in markets might sometimes seem like a panacea, but over the long term actually entrench established power-players and can prove counterproductive when bureaucracies become “captured” by the very entities they’re supposed to regulate. The consequences of such capture are typically most severe on those who wield the least political influence—typically, members of minority groups.
Relatedly, classical liberals should always make clear that they aren’t champions of business, but of free markets—and these are not only different, but sometimes contradictory things.  The libertarian economic ideal is one of dynamic and disruptive entrepreneurialism: a world in which businesses are kept on their toes by the constant threat of competition.  The pro-business mindset, by contrast, is typically conformist and timid—and it was that Babbitt mentality, through a mix of cowardice and traditionalism, that enabled Jim Crow to fester for so long.  The libertarian attitude isn’t “don’t rock the boat”—it’s “freedom now.”  Unfortunately, their healthy skepticism toward central planning often misleads classical liberals into the pitfalls of the former attitude—what I call “The Romance of Gradualism.” That’s something libertarians should avoid.
Another important development is the spectacular vindication of the classical liberal critique of socialism.  The Soviet Union’s collapse, and the examples of China and North Korea, have made it impossible to believe, as Du Bois did, that government planning “in the production of wealth and work” can build  “a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part.”  In fact, history has revealed that collectivist nations are at least as racist as freer countries are—and typically moreso.
In other words, in making the case for why black Americans should consider their arguments, non-white libertarians should focus on the future: on the question of how free markets, private property rights, freedom of speech, individualism and economic and social dynamism, all offer a better future going forward than do the antiquated arguments left over from the days of the Great Society.
Still, however, libertarians will have a hard time making the case for the future if they do not know and fairly confront the past.  The history of race in this country is a complicated, often dismal one—but it’s also a story that features great heroism and beauty.  The path by which black Americans have risen from the status of literal property to the ranks of fellow citizens, and even to the top leadership roles in our society, within the span of a century and a half, is an epic all Americans can celebrate and cherish.  Libertarians most of all.

Conversation Comments Both Wheatley and Jefferson Tried to Liberate America

Lucas E. Morel

Angel Parham makes an important point regarding Phillis Wheatley’s role in “reinforcing the foundations of the American project and its defense of freedom.” Wheatley’s poetry was a literary adjunct to the petitions and speeches of other black Americans, free and enslaved, who took seriously the liberating politics (and religion) of the new nation.[1] Her most famous poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773), pricks the conscience of her white readers with a concise challenge to both their religious and political convictions:
’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die,”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.
Written when Wheatley was only fourteen, the poem invites white American readers to think through the implications of any claim that forcibly transplanting Africans to American soil was an unmitigated improvement in their condition.[2] It gets those readers to agree almost too quickly with its premises in order to move them to conclusions they have yet to act fully upon. To agree with the poem is to leave them to reconcile American principles—religious and political—with American practice toward the now American African.
For example, in what way could surviving the harrowing Middle Passage be an act of “mercy”? Why is Christian America better than “Pagan” Africa? If salvation applies to Wheatley’s “benighted soul,” how ought American “Christians” treat their African sister in Christ? Her final ironic challenge, juxtaposing the black “colour” of “Negros” to the black soul of Cain, puts an exclamation point on the underlying message of equality that Wheatley understands even better than most white American Christians. In short, do Americans really believe in America, not to mention the gospel?
Now, Thomas Jefferson may have given short shrift to Wheatley’s poetry, but he deserves everlasting credit for (1) what he does not say about racial inequality and (2) what he does say about human equality. In the first place, although he freed only ten of the more than six hundred slaves he legally owned over his lifetime (most through inheritance or natural increase),[3] he never “justified the degraded status of Africans” as Parham claims in any public or private document. Despite the insulting depiction of blacks in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson qualifies his observations: “The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence.” He continues, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Without question, his examination of black people as if they were subjects in an experiment belies the claim in the Declaration of Independence that human equality is a “self-evident” truth.[4] However, his observations are intended to explore the political implications of a race of people whom white Virginians have chiefly associated with slavery. Jefferson is candid about the impediments to an emancipation he consistently acknowledged they deserved but was unlikely given the opposing sentiments of black and white Virginians.
For example, he points out that the “unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.” Regardless of the accuracy of his observations about their mental aptitude, Jefferson suggests that the widespread association of enslavement with the African race makes white Americans hesitant about immediate, mass emancipation. He reinforces this point by posing a question: “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state?” His answer: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” During the crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state, Jefferson declared in an April 22, 1820 letter to John Holmes that “we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”[5] He put the matter starkly in a January 22, 1821 letter to John Adams, discussing whether Congress possessed the power to regulate slavery in the states: “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” Fear of a race war, Jefferson observed, was a significant reason that white Virginians hesitated to free their slaves and incorporate them into their political community.
Perhaps most importantly, in February 1809, Jefferson shared with Henri Grégoire, a French abolitionist bishop, that his “doubts were the result of personal observation on the limited sphere of my own State, where the opportunities for the development of their genius were not favorable, and those of exercising it still less so. I expressed them therefore with great hesitation.”[6] He then added, “but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others” (emphasis mine). Even in the worst case scenario—namely, that Jefferson’s “doubts” about “the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature” proved true—he insisted that black people possessed rights regardless of their mental or physical endowments vis-à-vis white people. He opined that “on this subject they are gaining daily in the Opinions of nations, & hopeful advances are making towards their reestablishment on an equal footing with the other colours of the human family.” As the evidence of their natural capacity on par with whites became more widespread, he concluded hopefully that it “cannot fail to have effect in hastening the day of their relief.” Jefferson believed that the political consequence of white prejudice against black people, whether ill-founded or not, could not be ignored.
At bottom, Jefferson always maintained that slavery was unjust. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he condemned King George III for waging “cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s [sic] most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”[7] Describing the transatlantic slave trade as “execrable commerce” and the product of “piratical warfare,” Jefferson was repeating a criticism of the king he had made in 1774 in his “Summary View of the Rights of British America.” He noted that colonial efforts to ban the importation of slaves as the first step towards “the infranchisement [i.e., emancipation] of the slaves we have” were repeatedly “defeated by his majesty’s negative.”[8] By “preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice,” King George III had abused his veto power to the detriment of both blacks and whites in America.
By affirming that black people possessed “sacred rights” and “the rights of human nature,” Jefferson makes it difficult—though not impossible—to deny that he, along with the founding generation, understood persons of every race to share a common humanity. Unfortunately, as Abraham Lincoln once lamented, “The plainest print cannot be read through a gold eagle.”[9] One cannot forget that Jefferson’s public concern to avoid a race war joined a personal concern to continue a life of ease. His failure to emancipate most of his slaves, a failure shared by most slaveowners of his generation, occluded the clear promise of an America devoted to securing individual rights. Still, we can be thankful that the gap between America profession and practice has narrowed over time precisely because Americans of all races have found no clearer guide to progress in closing that gap than the words of founders like Jefferson, echoed by those of Wheatley, Frederick  Douglass, Lincoln, and other patriotic Americans through our present day.
Endnotes
[1] Two recent publications demonstrate the various ways blacks in the early American republic spoke and wrote about the full implications of the principles of the American founding. See David Hackett Fisher, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2022), and James G. Basker with Nicole Seary, ed., Black Writers of the Founding Era: A Library of America Anthology (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2023).
[2] For an account of Wheatley’s struggle to make poetry her livelihood amidst an American people unbelieving in more ways than one, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York, NY: Basic Civitas Books, 2003).
[3] “Slavery FAQs—Property,” Monticello, https://www.monticello.org/slavery/slavery-faqs/property/ (accessed July 26, 2024).
[4] Jefferson originally wrote, “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independant” [sic]. “Jefferson’s ‘original Rough draught’ of the Declaration of Independence,” “Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents,” Library of Congress, from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760-1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), 243, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html (accessed July 26, 2024).
[5] To John Holmes (April 22, 1820), The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1977), 568.
[6] To Henri Grégoire (February 25, 1809), Portable Thomas Jefferson, 517. Grégoire had sent Jefferson a copy of his book, On the Cultural Achievements of Negroes (1808), in response to his disparaging comments about black people in Notes on the State of Virginia. For a recent book that examines Jefferson’s composition of Notes on the State of Virginia and argues that it was part of broader project of Jefferson’s to convince younger slaveowners to adopt emancipation, see Cara Rogers Stevens, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight against Slavery (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2024).
[7] Ibid 4
[8] Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (July 1774), Portable Thomas Jefferson, 14, 15.
[9] Abraham Lincoln, “The Dred Scott Decision: Speech at Springfield, Illinois” (June 26, 1857), ed. Roy P. Basler, Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1990; orig. publ.: Cleveland, OH: World Pub. Co. 1946), 365.

Conversation Comments Hurston, Jacobs, and Libertarian Blindness

Sanford Ikeda

Clearly, my submission to the first round of this conversation was vastly different from the excellent and informative essays of the others in that I tried to address more directly the content of Ferguson and Witcher’s initial essay, interpret its purpose, and express the thoughts it evoked when I read it.  My fellow contributors, however, demonstrate a knowledge far greater than my own of the important figures in the history of classical liberalism in America as they relate to slavery and civil rights.  Here is what I take away from their offerings.
While Frederick Douglass is a name one hopes is known to every American school child, Timothy Sandefur highlights aspects of his classical liberalism that are less well-known, including his rejection of socialism.  Of particular interest to me is Sandefur’s claim that Douglass would have rejected the false dichotomy between personal and economic liberty, which is a central element in libertarian thought.  (One my favorite expositions of this theme is Chapter Seven of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom on “Economic Control and Totalitarianism.”)[1]
Angel Parham’s essay not only informed me of the poet Phyllis Wheatley but also made me aware of the vastly different responses to her poetry and her talent of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the latter suffering by far in the comparison.
But it was Lucas E. Morel’s essay on Zora Neale Hurston that resonated the most with me for two reasons.  The first is Hurston’s likeness in some ways to Jane Jacobs, and the second is her attitude toward the Civil Rights Movement and modern libertarianism.
The similarity I see between Hurston and Jacobs, based solely on Morel’s presentation, is the former’s reluctance to associate with any school of thought, much as Jacobs refused to be pigeonholed ideologically.  Like Jacobs, Hurston was not a “joiner” and at least to some extent also a non-conformist.  Hurston’s emphasis on the individual and on self-reliance reminds me of Jacobs’s confidence in the resourcefulness of ordinary people, and she can also be seen as another precursor to modern Black libertarians such as Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell.  Which brings me to Hurston and Jacobs on the Civil Rights Movement.
In my essay I pointed out what I perceive as the relative silence of libertarians on the national level on the injustice against Blacks during the Jim Crow era of forced segregation and legal discrimination. (I realize that much of this may have been due to the extent to which classical liberalism, with its emphasis of free markets and individual rights, were seen, perhaps even more than today, as being out of step with the post-WW2 enthusiasm for socialism and interventionism, and the consequent paucity of classical liberal thinkers during that time.)  To the extent then that Civil Rights legislation went beyond eliminating legal barriers to Blacks and other minorities, to providing what many libertarians would consider unjustified privileges (e.g. Affirmative Action and racial quotas in hiring), both Hurston, with her emphasis on Black liberation as a personal rather than a collective struggle, and libertarians, with their focus on individual rights, likely felt alienated from that movement and the growing demand for government interventions by the elites leading it.
Jacobs, too, may have felt that way, although I have no direct evidence of this.  Jacobs always emphasizes the importance of the power of the individual, in her case individuals relying on their knowledge and resourcefulness to identify and address (sometimes with the help of government) problems within their own communities, whatever their ethnicity.  I mentioned in my essay that she does treat racial discrimination in Death and Life, but I’m not aware that in her later writings she really takes up the issues of race and civil rights directly.
In her last published book Dark Age Ahead Jacobs seeks to identify what she sees as the “five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm” and to “discuss what seem to me ominous signs of their decay” (Jacobs 2004: 24).[2]  She then goes on to say:
It may seem surprising that I do not single out such failings as racism, profligate environmental destruction, crime, voters’ distrust of politicians and thus low turnouts for elections, and the enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class (Jacobs 2004: 24-25).
That’s because Jacobs sees racism et al. as symptoms of the decay of the five more-fundamental pillars she does identify (i.e. community and family, higher education, the effective practice of science and technology, taxes and government powers, and self-policing by the learned professions).
Jacobs’s focus on what she considers problems deeper than racism and Hurston’s reservations about the collective focus of the Civil Rights Movement may also be factors, insofar as Jacobs and Hurston are indeed libertarian, in what I referred to as possible “libertarian color blindness.”   But I’m not convinced, by Jacobs in particular, about racism being more a symptom than a fundamental problem.  Unfortunately, racism like other forms of collectivism may itself be a fundamental tendency of our human character.  If so, Ferguson and Witcher’s emphasis on free markets and civil society, while no panacea, has shown itself to be an effective way to minimize its more pernicious consequences.

Copyright and Fair Use Statement

“Liberty Matters” is the copyright of Liberty Fund, Inc. This material is put on line to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. These essays and responses may be quoted and otherwise used under “fair use” provisions for educational and academic purposes. To reprint these essays in course booklets requires the prior permission of Liberty Fund, Inc. Please contact oll@libertyfund.org if you have any questions.

Current Posts

Contrasting Views of Liberty in Hume and Rousseau (November 2024) (Nov 12, 2024) Oakeshott and Liberal Education (October 2024) (Oct 08, 2024) Classical Liberals on Race (August/September 2024) (Aug 20, 2024) The Rebirth of the Austrian School and the South Royalton Conference: Marking the Fifty-Year Anniversary (June 2024) (Jun 04, 2024) Archived Posts…

Contributors

Sections