Posted on 10/27/2025 4:21:18 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Echoes of 1920s Europe in today’s United States.
Some ninety years ago, Rose Wilder Lane penned “Give Me Liberty,” extolling the remarkable freedoms Americans had, especially in contrast to their European counterparts. Written in the 1930s, Lane’s piece is both a stirring defense of American freedoms and a damning portrait of European societies still writhing under the weight of bureaucratic statism. Written just as the state interventions of Roosevelt’s New Deal began to bite, her notes stand as a useful portal into a different era—challenging and checking our current assumptions about the trajectory of transatlantic liberty. In a nutshell, Europe has leapt forward since Lane’s day, while America has wallowed, indeed probably regressed, on the frontiers of individual liberty. Revisited today, Lane’s observations prompt an uncomfortable question: what if the roles have reversed?
Lane wrote from direct experience. Having spent years in 1920s Europe, first as a writer for the Red Cross and later as a roving correspondent, she saw a remarkable cross-section of European society from France to Albania as it dug itself out of the ruins of World War I. Her essential observation was that Europe, in terms of exercising freedom, was frightfully retrograde—“for all the years of my residence in Europe,” she wrote, “a great many obstacles were enforced upon me by the police-power of the men ruling the European States.”
Her examples are vivid. She reminded her American readers that they thankfully “were not obliged,” as Europeans then were, “to carry at all times a police card, renewed and paid for at intervals, bearing our pictures properly stamped and stating our names, ages, addresses” and other personal details. They sound suspiciously like today’s driver’s licenses, which, while not technically required “at all times,” are effectively required for general day-to-day life, especially travel. As we know them now,...
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“To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it.”
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