The Fourth Freedom

Led by the Red Cross Knight, Herbie Hoover, on his glistening white charger, Constitution, the forces of the Right were prepared for a duel to the death with the "un-American" American laborer and the New Deal on the "D-Day" report of the National Resources Planning Board. The plan, highly similar to the British Beveridge Report, has called for a greatly extended social security program, post-war maintenance of full employment guaranteed by the government, and larger government cooperation with industry as well as a share in management by labor. The plan is, admittedly, only a recommendation to Congress; details of legislation, administration and financing are accordingly absent. But its guiding principle is clear to all--the assurance to the American people of freedom from want, of the right to work and to live happily of security from another Great Depression.

Such a principle was attacked by President Henry M. Wriston of Brown University, in his address last week to the New England Council. Such State assistance and control would never have been approved by the Founding Fathers he declared; the plan negates all opportunities for the individual. And President Wriston characterized the plan as "the product of men who had lived intimately with depression. It is cast in the mode of thought of a materialistic age, a time of pessimism, years of retreat, of minds hesitant and doubtful."

Quite a few things have happened, however, since the infallible Founders brought forth the perfect Constitution. They created a document that became a marvelous instrument for a Jeffersonian agrarian democracy, but that lost its quality as a testament under the stress of an expanding society. The Industrial Revolution necessitated a flexible interpretation of our political structure, a fact that the American public began to realize after prosperity remained around the corner. Individual initiative is possible only if individual despair is forestalled. And freedom for the individual to deal as an "equal" with a billion-dollar corporation has become an assininity; individual freedom, because of the facts of life of an industrial society, can be maintained only if responsible government protects the citizen against irresponsible business, the vagaries of the business cycle, the dreadful body-hunger and soul-sickness that our nation knew during the Great Depression. Yes, the report is "the product of men who have lived intimately with depression"; but its essence is not pessimism, but a realistic optimism that has appraised our economy, perceived its needs, and determined to preserve it.