FOREWORD

It is some time since I have felt called on to write a foreword to a book of mine. But it is difficult for me to resist the temptation to provide one for this small volume. As I have watched the course of events in America these last 25 years I have noted with growing apprehension a disturbing phenomenon.

During a century and a half, despite endless differences about policy at any given time, certain principles of organized life were accepted by practically our whole population. These principles involved a collection of moral, social and political concepts. Leaders and groups differed about the means of putting these ideas to work in our society, but there was no important repudiation of the great fundamental concepts themselves.

Then, pressing on the heels of the depression, a new generation was offered a wholly new society—not just a series of reforms of the old. It is fair to say that in its general outlines, and even more in its ultimate development, this new society corresponded with the Fabian philosophy of the British socialists. A vision was conjured before the eyes of our younger citizens of a wholly new and better world—the “Good Society”—that would ensure to all the material essentials of the “good life,” along with leisure and a new kind of freedom—freedom from want.

This radiant vision was held up against the dark background of the Great Depression. The promise was benevolent, the hope was bright, and those who doubted it or called attention to its frailties were cast for the role of enemies of the Free World and champions of the wicked world of Wall Street and the Simon Legrees of the big corporations.

It was my lot to tour most of the leading cities of America discussing on the lecture platform these grave problems. Everywhere it was easy to note a growing element in audiences which sought to make me realize that I was defending a dark and ugly world dissolving before the onset of a new and bright dawn of freedom and security for all whose light was just breaking over the Potomac. This baffled me no little, because I had been one of those who had not condoned the evils of certain sections of big business, the banks and Wall Street. I had spent endless hours and acres of pages talking and writing of the disasters that were sure to follow in the wake of the sins of business and politics in those years. The consequences that followed the grave crisis of 1929 were much worse than even I had supposed they would be. I criticized these evils because I believed they were inflicting a serious wound on the free world. But I defended and still defend the system of free enterprise because I believe it to be the only system in which man can live in freedom. But it can survive only if it is managed within the framework of a social order and a government dedicated to preserving it, alert to its defects, and prepared to stimulate its beneficent energies while ensuring freedom to all.

It is difficult to escape the feeling that most of the young men and women who passed through our colleges in the years from 1933 to the present time do not have the faintest conception of the type of government which Americans for a century and a half knew as the American Republic. For this reason I have felt it of the first importance that some effort be made to bring to their attention what I believe to be the greatest disaster of the depression and the wars that followed—the assault upon the American Republic here in America. This assault has progressed so far that, unless arrested now, it will end soon in the complete renunciation of our great constitutional system.

Nothing else engaging the attention of Washington—neither the preservation of the British Empire, nor the salvation of a Europe already drenched in communism, socialism and dictatorship, nor the rescue of an Asia which our government presented on a silver platter to the criminals in the Kremlin—can be permitted to blind the people of America, and particularly our young people, to the project that must be the first and the most challenging of all—the restoration of the American Republic.

Bayside, L. I.,
April,
1955

JOHN T. FLYNN