APRIL 21, 1934

Fifteen hundred doughty burghers of Lexington, Mass., celebrated that shot heard 'round the world with a great remonstrance to the capital. They were tired of government interference, they said, of over-expenditures, of presidential advisers not chosen by the people. They wanted an immediate end of much that the New Deal is or promises to be. "When a free people feel that their rights are being trespassed upon", they declared, ". . . it is a duty as well as a right of the people to express determined disapproval". This they proceeded to do after a form and with a vehemence that recalled their ancestors.

At first glance, that is. For closer scrutiny is likely to show these Lexingtonians pulled their punches just a little bit. Consider, for instance, such a passage as this: "We are resolved that the individual's rights of private enterprise and its rewards must continue free from unreasonable interference by the Federal government". Now the italics are ours, but the Lexingtonians might well have made them theirs. For if you give that simple adjective "unreasonable" the force which it requires, you have gone a long way to muffle the impact of your blow. As the protest reads Rexford Guy Tugwell himself might approve it.

For what, exactly, is an "unreasonable" interference by the federal government in the rights of private enterprise? Lexington is in Massachusetts and Massachusetts was the home of Webster, Sumner, Hoar, Lodge. But was the nationalist tariff these gentlemen fought for an "unreasonable" interference with private enterprise? The exporters whose markets it choked off might very often think so; indeed those of them who dealt in cotton were vociferous in saying so. But history records no protest to this effect from this or other Lexington generations.

No one wants the rights of free people curbed, to be sure, but neither does anyone want repetition of the period from 1929 to now if it can be helped. Let us remember, too, it was a Republican administration which launched the RFC, prototype of all the recovery bureaus. Nor is federal curb on business a Brain Trust invention. The Interstate Commerce Commission goes back to 1884 and an earlier Roosevelt was thought to have helped precipitate the crisis of 1907 by his frowns on certain corporate practices. The New Deal justifies many doubts, in sum, but we must try hard to see it in perspective.