Sportive Thoughts

From President Hoover's "Constitution Day Speech" in 1935:

The dynamic forces which sustain economic security and progress in human comfort lie deep below the surface. They reach to those human impulses which are watered alone by freedom. The initiative of men, their enterprise, the inspiration of thought, flower in full only in the security of these [Constitutional] rights.

And by practical experience under the American system we have tested this truth. And here I may repeat what I have said elsewhere. Down through a century and a half this American concept of human freedom has enriched the whole world. From the release of the spirit, the initiative, the cooperation, and the courage of men, which alone comes of these freedoms, has [built] this very machine age with all its additions of comfort, its reductions of sweat. Wherever in the world the system of individual liberty has been sustained, mankind has been better clothed, better fed, better housed, has had more leisure. Above all, men and women have had more self-respect. They have been more generous and of finer spirit. Those who scoff that liberty is of no consequence to the underprivileged and the unemployed are grossly ignorant of the primary fact that it is through the creative and the productive impulses of free men that the redemption of those sufferers and their economic security must come. Any system which curtails these freedoms and stimulants to men destroys the possibility of the full production from which economic security can alone come.

Hoover had been out of office for nearly four years when he gave this speech, FDR's New Deal was transforming the country and its government, and the Second World War was on the horizon. Given the context, its difficult to gauge Hoover's target. He might be warning against FDR's policies as threats to American freedom, on par with Fascism or Bolshevism. Or he may simply be warning against radical, authoritarian parties within the United States.

Whatever Hoover's immediate political target, his ideological message is clear enough. He contrasts two pairs of principles whose contrast highlights the value of the US Constitution and its Amendments. The first pair is that of "initiative" and "freedom," each somehow generative of American successes. Hoover's logic suggests that initiative is the exercise of freedom; initiative is sufficient to show a healthy social order whereas freedom is necessary for one to act from initiative. The second pair--which is inimical to the first--is servitude and the State. When the individual serves the State or when the State exists only as a manifestation of the individual. In these cases of the fasces or the soviet, individuals have no interests separate from the State. Thus individuals are unable to act with the freedom bestowed by human nature, and, in Hoover's view, are destined to suffer the fate they wish to avoid.

As Hoover closes his speech he advocates a weaker, less unified form of government than FDR's policies would have encouraged. Hoover is a mere sentence away from invoking a slippery slope argument; but he refrains with a remarkable interpretation of the branches of government:

These rights and protections of the Bill of Rights are safeguarded in the Constitution through a delicate balance and separation of powers in the framework of our government.

The weakness of government is assured by the separation of power--that is, separation of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches from one another as well as the separation of "audacious men" from power itself.

How does one fulfill the need for economic security at a time when the nation may benefit--in the medium term--from government intervention?