Read Online Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 by E. B. White - Free Book Online

shattered world would require anything more than a mere extension of American culture and habits, as exemplified by past and present Republicans. In the summer night, we felt that we were a million boys, armed, bloody, and tired, standing and listening to this slick spiel, outside this gaudy and unlikely tent—listening and knowing all the while that we were about to be taken.
    LIBERALISM
    1/17/48
    â€œTHERE IS NO LIBERAL VIEW,” sighed the Herald Tribune as the old year died, “no really self-consistent and logical body of principle and policy.” It was a doleful thought, and the old year drew a few more tortured breaths and expired.
    Ever since Thanksgiving, the Herald Tribune has been rassling with the theme of liberalism, and there have been mornings when the struggle resembled an old-fashioned rassling match with the Devil. The Tribune’s feeling about the independent liberal seems to be that he comes from a good family but has taken to hanging around pool halls. His instability, his shallow charm, his unpredictable movements, his dissolute companions, all have been the subject of speculation recently in the Tribune’s pages, and the word that was finally trotted out to describe his fate was the word “bankrupt.” Even this word, however, seemed vaguely to trouble the Tribune, which does not in theory approve of any sort of American insolvency, even liberal insolvency. Clearly, a dilemma. The Tribune met it boldly by explaining that the liberal’s work was done, his victory complete, and that henceforth the “conventional party structure” would be happy to carry the whole load and take care of the situation without any help. Its editorial paid tribute to the deep moral roots of nineteenth-century liberalism and the classic insurgencies, and traced the course of liberal history from the Jefferson revolt right down to the year 1933, at which point the editorialist gulped, hawked, and spat out.
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    The Tribune’s estimate of the independent liberal sounds to us a bit on the romantic side, a bit too full of the great tradition, not quite catching the essence of liberalism. The value of the liberal in the republic is not that he is logical but that he is inquisitive. At the moment, the liberal’s desperate position and his dead life seem to us neither as desperate nor as dead as the Ç. T. has been making out. There are still a good many free men around who don’t think that the liberal’s work is done. (They would like to, but it isn’t that easy.) The independent liberal, whether walking by his wild lone or running with a pack, is an essential ingredient in the two-party system in America—as strange and as vital as the trace elements in our soil. He gives the system its fluidity, its benign inconsistency, and (in cahoots with the major political organizations) its indisputable grace. We have never believed that the independent liberal had a priority on liberal thought, or a corner on the market; he merely lives in a semi-detached house and goes out without his rubbers. The Tribune itself has turned in such a good liberal performance lately in its news columns that its editorial shudders have seemed all the more strange. After all, it was the Trib that handed over ten columns last Sunday to William Z. Foster, who has seldom needed more than twenty-five words to hang himself in and this time did it in two flat, when he described legislative debates as “ridiculous talkfests.”
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    The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man’s invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog’s way, too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he