American Individualism and the Challenge to Liberty
by Herbert Hoover
Category: Business & Economics

From the Preface: Hoover's message in American Individualism was not so gray as his prose. Like most one-time Progressives, he looked forward to perpetual advance, spurred on by technology, inhibited only by irrational politicians, greedy interest groups, and what he called "individualism run riot." His was an incremental idealism, wherein personal success was tempered and purified by service to others. "Character is made in the community as well as in the individual by assuming responsibilities," wrote the man who had abandoned his engineering career to feed war-ravaged Europe, "not by escape from them." In his 1922 work, the future president envisioned a delicate balancing act between capitalists, workers and a public represented by the national government. Should one group gain authority over the others, the result would be fascism, socialism, or tyranny by bureaucracy. And individualism-the mainspring of American greatness-would be crippled for good. Twelve years would pass before Hoover's next attempt at codifying values. The Challenge to Liberty was necessarily a very different work, less a summons to cooperation than a warning against incipient fascism. "I am no more fond of the Wall Street model of liberty than I am of the Pennsylvania Avenue model," asserted the former president, for whom the Bill of Rights took precedence over property rights. Now, as in 1922, Hoover wrote in the shadow of revolution, nationalistic frenzy and economic confusion. But he did not fear Depression-era mobs in the streets of American cities. The threat to liberty was more subtile than that. What Hoover termed "the tragedy of Liberty" followed a similar pattern on both sides of the Atlantic: "idealism without realism, slogans, phrases and statements destructive to confidence in existing institutions, demands for violent action against slowly curable ills; unfair representation that sporadic wickedness in the system itself." Next came the man on horseback, demanding delegation of authority from elected representatives, denouncing all opposition and exploiting propagandists in the pay of the state.