Obituary - Willima Henry Chamberlin

698 William Henry Chamberlin 1897-1969 READERS of these pages during the past three decades have become familiar with the name of William Henry Chamberlin. Few of them, however, came to know the man. Though he wrote nearly a score of books, he remained essentially a newspaperman. In a career that spanned half a century, he traveled extensively, meeting people, asking questions, shaping and reshaping his own views. In 1922, at the age of 25, he went to Moscow for the Chris tian Science Monitor. While he was at first strongly sympa thetic toward the Soviet regime, he was soon disillusioned by Stalinism's harsh reality. After a dozen years the Monitor moved Mr . Chamberlin to the Far East, where he saw the rise of Japan's militarism. In 1939 he shifted to France, leaving only after Germany's Nazi armies occupied the country. Few men saw so much of the dark forces that were driving the world toward war.

Through it all Mr. Chamberlin remained ebullient, ever confident that man, given time and proper leadership, could find his way through the wilderness. Well past the age when most men retire, he was still plying his newspaper trade. On a working trip to Europe he stopped for a few days in Switzerland where, while walking a mountain trail, he suf fered the stroke that brought his death. Saddening though it is, there is solace in an exit that is so perfectly in character. Editorial from The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 1969 The following excerpts are from Mr. Chamberlin's article in the May 1959 Freeman: The Supreme Issue: The Individual versus the State WHEN the State goes beyond its proper functions of maintaining law and order at home and provid ing protection against foreign ag gression, and starts to assume the role of a universal provider and regulator, it never knows when to stop. One arrogation of pow·er leads to another, and the planned economy quickly develops into the totalitarian State ....

Gone are the days when sturdy Grover Cleveland - rejecting a proposal to provide government compensation for farmers whose crops had been damaged by hail remarked, in substance, that while the people should support the gov ernment, the government should not support the people. Now, it is no exaggeration to say that governments in many fields do under take to support the people, or certain groups of the people. This task is very expensive, requiring taxation on a scale that formerly would have been considered fan tastically impossible. It also neces sitates far-reaching controls. One is reminded of Alexis de Tocque ville's "immense and tutelary power," which would rob the human race of all initiative and self-reliance, which would labor for their happiness, but choose to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness, which would "spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living" ....

The Soviet Union, where the combination of political dictator699 700 THE FREEMAN November ship and economic collectivism has prevailed consistently despite minor shifts in tactics and policy, has been a false beacon light to leftwingers in America and West ern Europe ever since it was established in November 1917.... From the cradle to the grave the Soviet citizen is conditioned by propaganda and, through a rigidly authoritarian school system, is as signed or directed or channeled into the work the State thinks he should take up. The horrors of forced labor under Stalin, the worst kind of slavery, have abated. This is not because his successors are more humane than the de ceased dictator. But they realize that the former system of over working and half-starving millions of people in Arctic slave labor camps is too wasteful in manpower for a country that is feeling the effects of tremendous war losses in its present low birth rate. How ever, large numbers of people, if not actually kept behind barbed wire, are forcibly detained in re mote places where they are forced to work at the tasks assigned to them.

It is a great pity and irony that just when the strength of the United States lies in being as dif ferent from the Soviet Union as possible, in adhering firmly to the principles of the free market, con sumer free choice, maximum op portunity for the individual, there are voices in this country that use a mistaken fear of Soviet economic competition as an argument for driving us further along the path toward economic statism. Apart from the threat of mili tary attack, which is a question in itself, the only thing we need fear from the Soviet economic pattern is that we should imitate or adopt it, even in part. Only if and as we maintain in our own lives the his toric American principles of in dividualist opportunity in econom ics and other fields shall we worthily fill our historic destiny as champions of the principle that the State should be the servant of its citizens, not the master of its sub jects. ~ A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN THE WAR ON THE POOR IF the American Republic is to go down the drain, it will be be cause 200,000,000 people, give or take a few hundred thousand, are taken in by the "post hoc, ergo propter hoc," or "after this, there fore because of this," way of look ing at everything that has been happening since the days of the New Deal. Our country is obvi ously prosperous: it sends men to the moon, it throws money away all over the globe; it enables 400, 000 kids to idle away their time sitting around a Catskill pasture and soaking up rock music and marijuana fumes; it keeps a big population in college so that they may take their exercise in demon strating and in throwing the deans downstairs. So, since the New Deal response to the 1929 depression came first in time, this response and the many extensions of the "government aid" principle that have followed - must, so the argument goes, he the cause of all sub sequent good things.