The Freeman 1972 - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

754 THE FREEMAN DecemberRockefellers for their alleged hiringof "criminals and thugs toshoot the strikers" in the coalfields of Colorado. Rememberingthe recent executions of Sacco andVanzetti, whom we considered victimsof the propertied classes ofMassachusetts, we could only concludethat Paul Elmer More wasa cold-blooded enemy of humanitywho deserved all that he got in ournow-forgotten Critique of Humanism.New Wars to Wage in J929The quarrel over the New H u­manism was at the height whenthe stock market crashed in 1929.But as the depression snowballed,with the bread lines lengthening,literary New York soon turned tomore immediate concerns. Babbittand More were forgotten; thenewer quarrels were over HowardScott's Technocracy, Rexford Tugwell'sBrain Trusters and theStalin-Trotsky split in the SovietUnion. The intellectuals of theThirties went off in several sociologicaldirections, some of themto work for writers' projects onthe WPA, and the big tempestover the New Humanism blew nomore. Since then the works ofPaul Elmer More have gone out ofprint, and only an occasional RussellKirk has seen fit to talk aboutMore as though he were a livingauthor.The republication of a selectionfrom More's writings in The EssentialPaul Elmer More, editedwith an introduction and notes byByron C. Lambert (ArlingtonHouse, $12.95), is an eye openerafter all these years. Rereadingthat once-hated essay by More indefense of property, I am struckby its subtlety. What seemed, in1929, to be a crass defense of richmen was actually nothing of thekind. More was championing therights of property not particularlybecause he cared for the Rockefellers,but because he believed thatthe right to life could not be secureif property were not itselfsecure. More had written his essaybefore Lenin had taken over inRussia and rendered life precariousfor generations to come. Withtremendous foresight More questionedthat "community of ownership"would "eliminate the greedand injustice of civilized life." Hehad nothing to go on here beyondhis observation that socialistswere "notoriously quarrelsome"among themselves, yet he turnedout to be eminently correct. Lookingback over the long past,. Morefound "a convincing uniformity inthe way in which wealth and civilizationhave always gone together,and in the fact that that wealthhas accumulated only when privateproperty was secure."