Give Me Liberty by Rose Wilder Lane

Give Me Liberty Reviews

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  Stacy Allbritton

  This was an eye-opening read about the premises of liberty and self-reliance in our country. Rose's writing, as always, is insightful and thought-provoking. She was staunchly opposed to socialism after having experienced it first-hand in post-war Europe. In this treatise, she explains the principles upon which America was founded and how self-reliance has always been the backbone and strength of our country.
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  Mehdii

  کتابی کوتاه در نکوهشِ جوامعِ جمع گرا و آسیب های آن. نویسنده جامعه خود را قبل و بعد از افتادن به ورطه جمع گرایی وصف میکند و به نقدِ آن میپردازد. از قرارِ معلوم نویسنده خود کمونیست بوده و شاهدِ انقلاب1917.
• 
  Dan Walker

  Wow. An American who didn't buy into FDR's New Deal. Rose Wilder Lane shares her personal transformation from (almost) card-carrying Commie back to American individualist as portrayed in the Little House books. Makes me wonder if my parents and teachers had any idea that they were reading me highly seditious, counter-revolutionary propaganda.
  
  What I appreciated about her story is that it isn't based on theory. Mrs. Lane actually traveled to Russia and talked to the peasants who would, I would have naively believed, benefit the most from Lenin's revolution. She also traveled much the Old World and so gained a unique perspective on the American experience - the true revolution. I am learning to have a lot more respect for people who have traveled. Their experience gives them a worldview that non-travelers just don't have.
  
  Even though she wrote the book 80 years ago, I think it's more relevant than ever. Even though bastions of big government such as Detroit have failed spectacularly, most Americans are still convinced that with the right political leaders and laws we can create a safe, cozy world all run efficiently by selfless bureaucrats. So read the book and learn that some people, almost from the very beginning, saw through the fables.
• 
  Alfredo Flores

  Un muy buen libro para leerlo de una sola pasada. Rose Wilder hace un gran resumen filosófico, histórico y económico de los problemas del socialismo, la importancia de la libertad y los errores y falta de análisis de los intelectuales de izquierda que increíblemente son los mismos que repiten hasta el día de hoy. Cuenta también como la casi anarquía capitalista generó mucha riqueza en Estados Unidos y como la envidia junto con la ignorancia hizo que ocurra una reforma socialista que se concretó con el New Deal. Lo explica a partir de su propia experiencia, desde sus inicios como comunista en Nueva York, la experiencia que tuvo cuando viajó a la Unión Soviética y otros países socialistas, y su regreso a Estados Unidos valorando la libertad.
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  D.

  My host astounded me by the force with which he said that he did not like the new government. I could hardly believe that a lifelong communist, with the proofs of successful communism thick about us, was opposed to a communist government. He repeated that he did not like it. “No! No!”
  
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  Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills.
  
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  The historical novelty of the Soviet government was its motive. Other governments have existed to keep peace among their subjects, or to amass money from them, or to use them in trade and war for the glory of the men governing them. But the Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not.
  
  And I felt that, of all the tyrannies to which men have been subject, that tyranny would be the most ruthless and the most agonizing to bear. There is some refuge for freedom under other tyrannies, since they are less thorough and not so remorselessly armed with righteousness. But from benevolence in economic power I could see no refuge whatever.
  
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  Economic compulsion is, therefore, constantly threatened by human willfulness. It must constantly overcome that willfulness, crush all impulses of egotism and independence, destroy variety of human desires and behavior. Centralized economic power endeavoring to plan and to control the economic processes of a modern nation is under a necessity, either to fail, or to tend to become absolute power in every province of human life.
  
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  Resisting step by step, I was finally compelled to admit to my Italian friends that I had seen the spirit of Italy revive under Mussolini. And it seemed to me that this revival was based on a separation of individual liberty from the industrial revolution whose cause and source is individual liberty. I said that in Italy, as in Russia, an essentially medieval, planned and controlled economic order was taking over the fruits of the industrial revolution while destroying its root, the freedom of the individual.
  
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  In 1927, my car broke down after nightfall in the edge of a small Italian village. Three men, a waiter, a charcoal burner, and the uniformed chauffeur of wealthy travelers sleeping in the inn, worked all night on the engine. When it was running smoothly in the bleak dawn, all three refused to take any payment. Americans in a similar situation would have refused from human friendliness and personal pride. The Italians said firmly, “No, signora. We did it for Italy.” This was typical. Italians were no longer centered in themselves, but in that mythical creation of their imaginations unto which they poured their lives, Italy, immortal Italy.
  
  I began at last to question the value of this personal freedom which had seemed so inherently right. I saw how rare, how new in history, is a recognition of human rights. From Brittany to Basra I considered the ruins of brilliant civilizations where peoples had never glimpsed the idea that men are born free.
  
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  Several women frantically protested, crying, pleading on their knees, so that they had almost to be carried to the wagon. One young girl fought, screaming horribly. It took two policemen to handle her; they were not rough, but when she bit at their hands on her arms, a third slapped her face. In the wagon she went on screaming insanely. I could not understand Hungarian. The Chief explained that some women objected to being given prostitute’s cards.
  
  When a domestic servant had been several days without work, the police took away the card that identified her as a working girl and permitted her to work; they gave her instead a prostitute’s card. Men who had not worked recently were sentenced to a brief imprisonment for theft. Obviously, the Chief said, if they were not working, they were prostitutes and thieves; how else were they living.
  
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  This is an important fact: Americans were the only settlers who built their houses far apart, each on his own land. America is the only country I have seen where farmers do not live today in close, safe village-groups. It is the only country I know where each person does not feel an essential, permanent solidarity with a certain class, and with a certain group within that class. The first Americans came from such groups in Europe, but they came because they were individuals rebelling against groups. Each in his own way built his own house at a distance from others in the American wilderness. This is individualism.
  
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  Such instances are multiplied by hundreds, by thousands. Everywhere you look at American history you see them. There is no plan, no intention, no fixed policy anywhere; this is anarchy, this is chaos. It is individualism. In less than a century, it created our America.
  
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  How could we be so bemused by books and by the desire of our own minds to make a pattern, as to apply to these United States the ideology of Europe?
  
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  In America a man works, but he is not Labor. A hundred million men, working, are not Labor. They are a hundred million individuals with a hundred million backgrounds, characters, tastes, ambitions and degrees of ability. Each of them, amid the uncertainties, dangers, risks, opportunities and catastrophes of a free society, has been creating his own life and his own status as best he could.
  
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  As long as our form of government stands, there can be no such control. Every business and financial undertaking must serve the unpredictable multitudes of common men and swiftly change to serve their changing demands and desires, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, or rivals will rise from those multitudes and destroy it.
  
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  I said, “How can you men know this, and do nothing? Is this possible? You know that our country is being destroyed, and you do nothing to save it? You actually understand that your own property, your liberty, your lives, are in danger, and you do nothing?”
  
  “That’s it,” they said.
  
  It was a nightmare. When I found anyone who understood the situation as I did, he had no hope, and pessimism itself is not American. Americans hold the truths that all men are born equal and endowed by the Creator with inalienable liberty. Freedom is the nature of man; every person is self-controlling and himself responsible for his thoughts, his speech, his acts. That is a fact; we know it; Americans established this Republic upon that fact. And to doubt that knowledge of any fact must dispel ignorance of that fact is to deny the plain reality of all human experience. To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.
  
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  This is a real political issue, and the major political parties have not represented a real political issue since the 1860’s. These parties have not stood for opposite political principles; they have differed only about methods. For example: one has stood for higher tariffs; the other, for lower tariffs. They have not presented to voters the real political issue between tariffs and free trade.
  
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  Europeans and Asiatics from the Volga to the Mediterranean are killing each other, not for opposing principles of liberty and tyranny, but for different methods of using the same principle of tyranny.
  
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  Blind to America and worshipping Europe, these reactionary pseudo-thinkers shifted American thought into reverse, in an effort to catch up with the Kaiser’s Germany. They called it “liberal” to suppress liberty; “progressive” to stop the free initiative that is the source of all human progress; “economic freedom,” to obstruct all freedom, and “economic equality” to make men slaves.
  
  They taught my generation that the American Revolution was only a war that ended in 1782. We never heard that these United States are a political structure unique in all history, built upon a natural fact never before used as a political principle: the fact that individual persons are naturally free, self-controlling and responsible.
  
  In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser’s Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World’s reaction against the new, the American, principle of individual liberty and human rights. American leaders of thought, whom we respected, told us that the Communist reaction was the world revolution.
  
  That was the lie that deceived us. Americans are world-revolutionists. These United States stand for a political principle that must conquer and change the whole world, because it is true. Three generations of Americans have been creating a new world, the modern world. It is our tradition, our heritage, the unconscious impulse of our lives, to destroy the old, to create the new. Our ignorance betrayed us; we believed labels. We wanted the ancient thing that was marked “New.”
  
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  The answer is: Yes, individualism has the strength to resist all attacks.
  
• 
  Aditya Patil

  "A half-century of back-sliding makes our country less than it might have been. But a world revolution cannot be won without encountering a reaction against it. *This last decade of *reactionary national socialism* hampers all Americans now. Yet in the test of war, this most-individualistic, still least-socialized people supports or defeats the whole old world. As Stalin said at Teheran, American capitalist production is winning this world war.
  
  The men unprepared and untrained for war have the economic and military energy that defeats in war the most socialized of all peoples, well trained for war by compulsory military service."
  
  A shorter version of "The discovery of freedom", just as crisp, clear and powerful.
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  John

  If you compare Rose Wilder Lane with Ayn Rand, there is very much agreement but some main differences that shines through, especially in this small booklet. The biggest is that Wilder Lane base much of her resulting ideas on perception and experience together with a look at history, they are not innate logical ideas as they were in Rand. Wilder Lane was a communist, she experienced it and fell out of it and found the values to put in it's place - the values of western liberty. It was by travel, by being there, Wilder Lane understood why communism did not work - and part of this is that story. It is a valid approach with force in the argument, great reading, but on the cost of philosophical clarity and structure in the message. Experience and examples makes solid groundwork, but can be repudiated by examples and experiences from the other side, so Wilder Lane do include theory to explain why her use of them are valid. She makes it make sense. And it is powerful.
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  Paul

  After reading Fountainhead by Ayn Rand I wanted to understand more clearly her views on what is known as individualism and how they differ from communism and socialism. This essay was helpful. It is full of anecdotal evidence and cobbled together historical events the author states on page 52" can be found in the files of old newspapers for those who do not remember so long ago". It was ok for me . It doesn't question individualism, it just presents it as is, and that would be the only problem I have with the text, it doesn't dig deep enough to answer any doubts one might have for the idea. The Indians vanished because there was no control over individualism (pg. 39) but the whole of the chapter seems to suggest paradoxically that with any other outcome we wouldn't be as great as we are, in 1938 that is. Should I be thinking that if the Indians of that paragraph were spared we wouldn't be as great a nation? The government was trying to stop the abuses but I would have liked some additional enlightenment from the sentence I referenced. Also, I wished the author would have tried to talk more about community life which existed then and now in the form of religion. Can the confines of religion be reconciled with individualism or do you need to be something approaching an atheist to be an individualist. I think this should be a must read for anyone wanting to understand this interesting subject but it is obviously a brief essay and not intended to answer doubts about its subject matter.
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  K B

  well written - clear and concise. Worth the time!