The Newest Freeman

For a magazine of political opinion, The Freeman has changed considerably during the past nineteen months. In its first issues this fortnightly right-wing organ had acted like a drunken paper-hanger, slapping "bloody red" labels on everyone in sight. The original Freeman saw modern art as a Communist plot to accelerate capitalist collapse, said there was non-Communist Left, described America's European allies as "unrecognizably neurotic" and disloyal. But this week Editor John Chamberlin sent a "Newest Freeman" to fifty university cities. It sports a glossy cover and four full page ads--but what is more important, The Freeman has sobered up. Its former hysteria has dissolved into gloom.

One reason for the change might have been the switch in staff; China lobbyist Alfred Kohlberg had dropped out as Treasurer. In any case, its current editorials calmly discuss recent primary results--in terms of a voter rebellion against the Democratic New Deal and Casaristic elements in the groundswell for Eisenhower. Other editorials criticize President Truman for allowing his loyalty to General Marshall to overide professions of sympathy with Chiang Kai-shek, and complain that the current Wage Stabilization program has union leanings.

In its signed articles The Freeman repeats familiar right-wing opinions "Our Leftist Economic Teaching" by Ludwig Von Mises berates ex-Harvard economist Dr. Paul Sweezey for being too naive a socialist, then criticizes a critic of Sweezey's for being too unmilitant an enemy of socialism. Then Von Mises discusses a sinister, but unnamed, group of people called "progressive intellectuals" (who are also by definition Marxists, Veblenians, and Central Planners). Apparently these people held short-term jobs in Washington and came back to their universities with the "mentality of authoritarianism" and a view of the state as "God-sent guardian of the wretched underlings". In a similar article, another writer takes short excerpts from three popular economics texts and points to their supposedly socialist leanings. In looking up these excerpts, one finds that significant qualifying remarks by the authors are often omitted in the Freeman's article.

In the political sphere, an article on "One World Illusion" is representative of the Newest Freeman's attitude. Here one Fred De Armond acidly debunks all the hopes for a better world, that were held in this country during the war. De Armond scoffs at Wendell Wilkie's One World ("the headiest conception since Galileo's), the "strange freedoms" of the Atlantic Charter, and even UN plans for international standards of diet.

This last article closes with: "The optimists had their rosy decade...Now the reaction has come, and it is sad and bitter." In a way this characterizes The Freeman's outlook--sad and bitter. If this is the American Right, it is not a creative political force.