eb white freedom essay

• No category

FREEDOM EB White

Related documents.

Study collections

Add this document to collection(s).

You can add this document to your study collection(s)

Add this document to saved

You can add this document to your saved list

Suggest us how to improve StudyLib

(For complaints, use another form )

Input it if you want to receive answer

Why is Christian Science in our name?

Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The Christian Science Church, and we’ve always been transparent about that.

The Church publishes the Monitor because it sees good journalism as vital to progress in the world. Since 1908, we’ve aimed “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind,” as our founder, Mary Baker Eddy, put it.

Here, you’ll find award-winning journalism not driven by commercial influences – a news organization that takes seriously its mission to uplift the world by seeking solutions and finding reasons for credible hope.

Your subscription makes our work possible.

We want to bridge divides to reach everyone.

Deepen your worldview with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads .

E.B. White’s essays argue eloquently against extremism

A new collection, put together by his granddaughter, demonstrates what made him such a pointed observer of representative government.

• By Danny Heitman Correspondent

Updated June 28, 2019, 9:26 a.m. ET

Elwyn Brooks White is best known as the author of children’s stories such as “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little” that remain reliable classics.

But White, who died in 1985, is also celebrated as a writer for adults. He divided his time between New York City and a farm in coastal Maine, crafting personal essays that, more than three decades after his passing, endure as exemplars of the form.

White was a master of conversational prose, excelling at sentences that seem perfectly balanced. To read his work is to feel balanced too. With their underlying tone of moderation, White’s essays resonate with a subtly political dimension even when they’re supposedly about nothing more than an afternoon on the farm or a morning in Manhattan. They constituted, in their own way, an abiding argument against the extremism of White’s times.

When “One Man’s Meat,” White’s collection of commentaries about rural New England, was published in a special edition for members of the Armed Forces in the 1940s, it became a favorite among those fighting World War II. White’s unassumingly democratic voice – sane, sensible, self-deprecating, suspicious of cant – reminded them what they were fighting for.

The only challenge with White’s essays is that not enough of them are in wide circulation. He was exacting with his prose, selecting only a relative handful of his pieces from The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly and other magazines to preserve in his books.

Martha White, his granddaughter and literary executor, has remained almost as judicious in drawing material from her grandfather’s archive for new book projects. Given the singularity of E.B. White’s literary art, the anthologies Martha White has brought out in recent years have been a cause for celebration. They include “E.B. White on Dogs,” an assortment of his prose on all things canine; and “In the Words of E.B. White,” a distillation of his pithiest observations.

Now comes "E.B. White On Democracy," in which Martha White surveys her grandfather’s thoughts on representative government. As with her previous anthologies, “On Democracy” is partly a curation of material from other White volumes, but it also includes items that haven’t been published in book form before.

White wasn’t a grand thinker about governance. “The Wild Flag,” his one attempt at a sustained political philosophy, was a forgettable argument for one-world government written near the close of World War II. White later dismissed the book as “dreamy and uninformed,” perhaps sensing that its vague theorizing worked against his natural gifts.

White was most eloquent when he grounded his ideas in the granular particularity of daily life, for he was, memorably, a reporter at heart.

The most persuasive selections in “On Democracy” riff on the headlines of White’s day, such as when he addressed the despotism of America’s opponents during World War II and the red baiting zealotry of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. This would seem, at first glance, to date “On Democracy” as a mere period piece. But in writing against fanaticism, White wrestled with challenges that seem, alas, still too much with us.

In “Freedom,” a 1940 essay included here, White dissects the tendency to gradually accommodate the erosion of democratic ideals, an ostensible exercise in pragmatism that inevitably proves corrupting. “Where I expected to find indignation,” he writes of his fellow Americans’ initial shrugging ambivalence about Adolf Hitler, “I found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is dully swallowing a distasteful pill.”

Against this sense of surrender, White offers his creed:

I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell arises. I pinch my nose.

That passage points to White’s strengths as a stylist. The crowded first sentence seems to spill out its message, an analog to White’s ecstatic embrace of liberty. Then the next two sentences become progressively shorter, as if he’s descending from his soapbox to speak more intimately with his audience. At his best, White also emulates to good effect his hero Henry David Thoreau, who could use gripping physical imagery to make the theoretical more concrete. When White pinches his nose at extremism, he’s reminding his readers that such policies have tangible, real-world consequences.

In his introduction, journalist and author Jon Meacham takes pains to draw parallels between White’s cautions about autocratic values and our present-day concerns about political cults of personality. But it’s not really necessary for Meacham, however well-meaning, to connect the dots for us.

Although he left the scene a generation ago, White can still speak for himself, and he sounds thoroughly up to date. “Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble,” he wrote in 1973. “We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.”

Help fund Monitor journalism for $11/ month

Already a subscriber? Login

Monitor journalism changes lives because we open that too-small box that most people think they live in. We believe news can and should expand a sense of identity and possibility beyond narrow conventional expectations.

Our work isn't possible without your support.

Unlimited digital access $11/month.

Digital subscription includes:

• Unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
• CSMonitor.com archive.
• The Monitor Daily email.
• No advertising.
• Cancel anytime.

Related stories

Review wendell berry takes a stand on stewardship of the earth, review 'if you ask me' is a delightful compendium of the thoughts of eleanor roosevelt, review 'winter' is karl ove knausgaard's attempt to make you see things anew, share this article.

Link copied.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

Subscription expired

Your subscription to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. You can renew your subscription or continue to use the site without a subscription.

Return to the free version of the site

If you have questions about your account, please contact customer service or call us at 1-617-450-2300 .

This message will appear once per week unless you renew or log out.

Session expired

Your session to The Christian Science Monitor has expired. We logged you out.

No subscription

You don’t have a Christian Science Monitor subscription yet.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• The Lit Hub Podcast
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

Jon Meacham on E.B. White and American Democracy

"white’s patriotism is clear-eyed; his nationalism nonexistent.".

 To hold America in one’s thoughts is like holding a love letter in one’s hand—it has so special a meaning. –E.B. White

Franklin D. Roosevelt couldn’t get enough of the piece. At the suggestion of his advisor Harry Hopkins, the New Dealer turned wartime consigliere, the president of the United States took a moment away from the pressures of global war to read a July 3, 1943, “Notes and Comment ” essay from The New Yorker . Occasioned by a letter from the Writers’ War Board, a group of au­thors devoted to shaping public opinion about the Al­lied effort in World War II—the board was led by the mystery novelist Rex Stout, the creator of Nero Wolfe, the orchid-loving New York City detective—the small item tackled the largest of subjects. Speaking in the magazine’s omniscient vernacular, the New Yorker au­thor wrote, “We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on ‘The Meaning of Democracy,”‘ continuing:

Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recur­rent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feel­ing of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in rationed coffee.

FDR thought it brilliant. “I LOVE IT!” he said, “with a sort of rising inflection on the word ‘love,”‘ according to the Hopkins biographer and playwright Robert E. Sherwood. The president read the piece to different gatherings, punctuating his recitation with a homey coda (or at least as homey as the squire of Hyde Park ever got): “Them’s my sentiments exactly.”

They were, importantly, the sentiments of the au­thor of the “Notes and Comment,” the longtime New Yorker contributor E.B. White, whose writings of free­dom and democracy captivate us still, all these years distant. Few things are as perishable as prose written for magazines (sermons come close, as do the great majority of political speeches), but White, arguably the finest occasional essayist of the 20th century, endures because he wrote plainly and honestly about the things that matter the most, from life on his farm in Maine to the lives of nations and of peoples. Known popularly more for his books for children ( Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little ) than for his corpus of essays, White is that rarest of figures, a writer whose ordinary run of work is so extraordinary that it repays our at­tention decades after his death.

White lived and wrote through several of the most contentious hours in our history, ones in which America itself felt at best in the dock and at worst on the scaffold. The Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthyite Red Scare, the Cold War, the civil rights movement—all unfolded under White’s watchful eye as he composed pieces for The New Yorker and for Harp­er’s . He was especially gifted at evoking the universal through the exploration of the particular, which is one of the cardinal tasks of the essayist. His work touched on politics but was not, in the popular sense, political, and the writings here underscore the role of the quiet observer in the great dramas of history. For White was not a charismatic speaker—he avoided the platform all his life—nor was he an activist or even a partisan in the way we think of the terms. He was, rather, a wry but profound voice in the large chorus of American life.

In the first days of World War II, in the lovely Amer­ican September of 1939, after Nazi Germany launched the invasion of Poland, plunging Europe into a war that would last nearly six years, White described a day spent on the waters in Maine. “It struck me as we worked our way homeward up the rough bay with our catch of lobsters and a fresh breeze in our teeth that this was what the fight was all about,” he wrote. “This was it. Either we would continue to have it or we wouldn’t, this right to speak our own minds, haul our own traps, mind our own business, and wallow in the wide, wide sea.”

That fight seems to be unfolding still in the first de­cades of the 21st century, a time when an opportunistic real estate and reality TV showman from White’s beloved New York has risen to the pinnacle of American politics by marshaling and, in some cases, manufacturing fears about changing demography and identity in the life of the Republic. We can’t know for certain what White would have made of Trump or of Twitter, but we can safely say that E. B. White’s Amer­ica, the one described in this collection, is a better, fairer, and more congenial place than the 45th president’s.

Reflecting on the Munich Pact of 1938, the agreement, negotiated by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, that emboldened Adolf Hitler to press on with his campaign to build a 1,000-year Reich, White wrote, “Old England, eating swastika for breakfast instead of kipper, is a sight I had as lief not lived to see. And though I’m no warrior, I would gladly fight for the things which Nazism seeks to destroy.” Reading him now, at a time when so many Americans live with sights we would have lief not lived to see, is at once reassuring and challenging, for White’s America, which should be our America, is worth a glad fight.

Born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, Elwyn Brooks White, the youngest of six children, grew up in comfort. “If an unhappy childhood is indispens­able for a writer, I am ill-equipped: I missed out on all that and was neither deprived nor unloved,” he re­called. His father was a successful businessman who created a secure enclave for his family in Westchester County, just 25 minutes from New York City. “Our big house at 101 Summit Avenue was my castle,” E. B. White, who was nicknamed “En,” wrote. “From it I emerged to do battle, and into it I retreated when I was frightened or in trouble.” There were summers in Maine, public school in Westchester, the warmth of a sprawling family. He was sensitive, too, from an early age. “The normal fears and worries of every child were in me developed to a high degree; every day was an awesome prospect. I was uneasy about practically everything: the uncertainty of the future, the dark of the attic, the panoply and discipline of school, the transitoriness of life, the mystery of the church and of God, the frailty of the body, the sadness of afternoon, the shadow of sex, the distant challenge of love and marriage, the far-off problem of a livelihood. I brooded about them all, lived with them day by day.”

White’s father, Samuel Tilly White, perhaps sensing something of his youngest child’s anxious nature, wrote the lad a cheerful birthday note in 1911. “All hail! With joy and gladness we salute you on your natal day,” the senior White wrote. “May each recurring anniversary bring you earth’s best gifts and heaven’s choicest bless­ings. Think today on your mercies. You have been born in the greatest and best land on the face of the globe under the best government known to men. Be thank­ful then that you are an American. Moreover you are the youngest child of a large family and have profited by the companionship of older brothers and sisters. . . . [W]hen you are fretted by the small things of life re­member that on this your birthday you heard a voice telling you to look up and out on the great things of life and beholding them say—surely they all are mine.”

From an early age, then, White was exhorted to think of America in the most reverential of ways. For all its faults, the nation was a place of particular merit, and a place worth defending. At 18, he debated whether to enlist in the Great War, but decided against it. (He also thought about joining the ambulance corps on the grounds that he “would rather save than destroy men.”) Instead, he headed for Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, and became a writer who did indeed look up and out (as well as inward).

The founding of The New Yorker magazine in 1925 proved a turning point for White and for American letters. Brought into being by Harold Ross, the weekly was, like Ross himself, chaotic and brilliant.

“The cast of characters in those early days,” White recalled, “was as shifty as the characters in a floating poker game.” James Thurber was among them, as was Katharine Angell, who became Mrs. White in 1929. “During the day I saw her in operation at the office,” White recalled. “At the end of the day, I watched her bring the whole mess home with her in a cheap and bulging portfolio. The light burned late, our bed was lumpy with page proofs, and our home was alive with laughter and the pervasive spirit of her dedication and her industry.”

The year he married Katharine, White approvingly cited a dissenting opinion of Supreme Court justice Oli­ver Wendell Holmes, thus inaugurating, in a sense, the canon of his work on freedom and democracy. Reading reports of a commencement speech at West Point by the secretary of war, White wrote that he hoped the young graduates would heed a recent observation of Holmes’s: “All West Point graduates should read [Holmes’s] words, brighter than sword-thrusts: ‘… if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.”‘

He was not a predictable party man. Musing about fashionable talk of a government-controlled economy in the middle of the Depression, White wrote, “Much as we hope that something can be done to adjust the State, reduce inequalities in fortune, and right wrong, we are yet skeptical about the abandonment of private enterprise . . . Cooperation and public spirit are, we do not doubt, increasingly necessary in the scheme of our economy; but we wonder how far they go in our blood, and whether great music will be written under the guidance of a central planning board whose duty it shall be to coordinate our several harmonics.” And when President Roosevelt proposed to pack the Su­preme Court after the 1936 presidential election in or­der to ensure rulings friendlier to the New Deal, White was having none of it. Americans, White wrote, should “decline to follow a leader, however high-minded, who proposes to take charge of affairs because he thinks he knows all the answers.”

In June 1940, as the Germans marched into Paris, White weighed in for The New Yorker . “To many Americans, war started (spiritually) years ago with the tor­ment of the Jews,” White wrote. “To millions of others, less sensitive to the overtones of history, war became actual only when Paris became German. We looked at the faces in the street today, and war is at last real, and the remaining step is merely the transformation of fear into resolve Democracy is now asked to mount its honor and decency on wheels, and to manufacture, with all the electric power at its command, a world which can make all people free and perhaps many peo­ple contented. We believe and shall continue to believe that even that is within the power of men.”

The common denominators in White’s thinking about democracy were a sense of fair play and a love of liberty. He was for that which defended and expanded freedom, and he was against that which did not. “If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free,” he wrote in September 1940, “then I’ll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.”

And he was quite willing to call the rest of the world onto a rhetorical carpet if circumstances warranted it. Chatting with other New Yorkers in the fall of 1940, a time when isolationism remained strong in the United States despite the harrowing fall of France and the Battle of Britain, White was disappointed that one man, “discovering signs of zeal [about the war] creeping into my blood, berated me for having lost my detachment, my pure skeptical point of view. He an­nounced that he wasn’t going to be swept away by all this nonsense, but would prefer to remain in the role of innocent bystander, which he said was the duty of any intelligent person.”

At least one intelligent person, White, chose to dis­agree. “The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he stands,” he wrote. “I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed for time I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fas­cism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell arises. I pinch my nose.”

Freedom was not optional; nor was it, in the first instance, political. Working within an ancient Western tradition that viewed liberty as an inherent right and free will as the oxygen of humanity, White traced free­dom to its intuitive origins:

[Freedom begins] with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of nature pub­lishing herself through the “I.” This elusive sensation is moving and memorable. It comes early in life; a boy, we’ll say, sitting on the front steps on a summer night, thinking of nothing in par­ticular, suddenly hearing as with a new percep­tion and as though for the first time the pulsing sound of crickets, overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification with the natural company of insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the universal perplexing question: “What is ‘I’?” Or a little girl, returning from the grave of a pet bird, leaning with her el­bows on the window sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as part of the complete story. Or to an older youth, en­countering for the first time a great teacher who by some chance or mood awakens something and the youth beginning to breathe as an individual and conscious of strength in his vitals. I think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of identity with God—an eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense of divine existence as distinct from mere animal existence. This is the beginning of the affair with freedom.

As he often did with such grace and fluidity, White turned from the intimate to the general:

The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of free­dom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listen­ing, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state . . . To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a societal sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework.

White’s writings are remarkably free of cant and of cliche, as one might expect from the coauthor of The Elements of Style . Bombast bored him, and he loved be­ing let alone. Writing in the Paris Review , Brendan Gill, a fellow New Yorker mainstay, once observed, “Andy White is small and wiry, with an unexpectedly large nose, speckled eyes, and an air of being just about to turn away, not on an errand of any importance but as a means of remaining free to cut and run without the nuisance of prolonged goodbyes.”

White’s patriotism is clear-eyed; his nationalism nonexistent. A case in point: in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, he wrote warmly of American values, noting, “America has been at a great disadvantage in relation to the Axis. In this country we are used to the queer notion that any sort of sporting contest must be gov­erned by a set of rules. We think that the football can’t be kicked off until after the whistle is blown. We be­lieve the prize fighter can’t be socked until he has come out of his corner. . . . So it was quite to be expected that America grew purple and pink with rage and fury when the Japanese struck us without warning.”

And yet White simultaneously believed, and began to argue in the first week of December 1941, that the future belonged to the supranationalists—those who saw that national rivalries were perennial and fatal and had to give way to a broader system of global governance.

“The passionate love of Americans for their America will have a lot to do with winning the war,” White wrote. “It is an odd thing though: the very patriotism on which we now rely is the thing that must eventually be in part relinquished if the world is ever to find a lasting peace and an end to these butcheries.” Musing on the snow swirling outside his window in these final weeks of the year, White went on: “Already you can see the beginnings of the big post-war poker game, for trade, for air routes and airfields, for insular possessions, and for all the rest of it,” he wrote Harold Ross in the fall of 1944. “I hate to see millions of kids getting their guts blown out because all these things are made the prizes of nationality. Science is universal, music is universal, sex is universal, chow is universal, and by God government better be, too.”

He would make the case, unsuccessfully, for years, most explicitly in a 1946 book entitled  The Wild Flag . Whatever White’s (self-acknowledged) weaknesses as an architect of a kind of technocratic New Jerusalem, he remained an astute critic of democracy’s rivals. In a piece on fascism, he defined the phenomenon as “a nation founded on bloodlines, political expansion by surprise and war, murder or detention of unbelievers, transcendence of state over individual, obedience to one leader, contempt for parliamentary forms, plus some miscellaneous gymnastics for the young and a general feeling of elation. . . . Fascism is openly against people-in-general, in favor of people-in-particular.”

After World War II, he worried about fascistic tendencies in America, the very nation that had done so much to defeat the Axis. In 1947 he spoke out against the New York Herald   Tribune ‘s editorial support for blacklisting those who did not swear loyalty to the United States. The anticommunist campaign, White wrote in a letter to the editor of the paper, meant that employees had to “be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our Constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic. . . . I hold that it would be improper for any committee or any employer to examine my conscience. They wouldn’t know how to get into it, they wouldn’t know what to do when they got in there, and I wouldn’t let them in anyway. Like other Americans, my acts and my words are open to inspection—not my thoughts or my political affiliation.”

His work touched on the central domestic struggle of the 20th century, too: the long battle against Jim Crow, the system of racial segregation that had grown out of the failures of Reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War. “The South,” he wrote in  The New Yorker in 1956, “is the land of the sustained sibilant. Everywhere, for the appreciative visitor, the letter S insinuates itself into the scene: the sound of sea and sand, in the singing shell, in the heat of sun and sky, in the sultriness of the gentle hours, in the siesta, in the stir of birds and insects.” But, White added, in contrast to the softness of its music, the South is also “hard and cruel and prickly.”

He was reporting about a visit to Jim Crow Florida, calling himself a “beachcomber from the North, which is my present status.” It had been two years since the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down school segregation, and not long before, a collection of legislators from the Old Confederacy had issued a defiant Southern Manifesto pledging to defy federal efforts to integrate the region. Writing from Florida, White described a conversation with his cook, a Finnish woman, about “the mysteries of bus travel in the American Southland.”

“When you get on the bus,” White told her, “I think you’d better sit in one of the front seats—the seats in the back are for colored people.”

The cook, who was white, saw through it all. “A look of great weariness came into her face, as it does when we use too many dishes, and she replied, ‘Oh, I know—isn’t it silly!'”

Then came a brief meditation by White that captured much about what W.E.B. Du Bois had called “the problem of the color-line”:

Her remark, coming as it did all the way from Finland and landing on this sandbar with a plunk, impressed me. The Supreme Court said nothing about silliness, but I suspect it may play more of a role than one might suppose. People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust. I note that one of the arguments in the recent manifesto of Southern congressmen in support of the doctrine of “separate but equal” was that it had been founded on “common sense.” The sense that is common to one generation is uncommon to the next. Probably the first slave ship, with Negroes lying in chains on its decks, seemed commonsensical to the owners who operated it and to the planters who patronized it. But such a vessel would not be in the realm of common sense today.

The pressures of the Cold War gave White plenty of opportunities to offer thoughts on democracy, and he took many of them. When universities were debating loyalty and “Americanism,” White wrote, “A healthy university in a healthy democracy is a free society, in miniature. The pesky nature of democratic life is that it has no comfortable rigidity; it always hangs by a thread, never quite submits to consolidation or solidification, is always being challenged, always being defended.”

The key thing—and White worried about this, volunteering his pen in the cause—is the nature and the fate of the defense in the face of those inevitable challenges. White anticipated the antidemocratic forces of our own era: political tribalism (“We doubt that there was ever a time in this country when so many people were trying to discredit so many other people,” he wrote—in 1952); media saturation (“This country is on the verge of getting news-drunk anyway; a democracy cannot survive merely by being well informed, it must also be contemplative, and wise,” he wrote—in 1954); and the need for a free and disputatious press (“There is safety in numbers: the papers expose each other’s follies and peccadillos, correct each other’s mistakes, and cancel out each other’s biases” he wrote—in 1976). He believed strongly, too, in the virtues of a diversity of ownership in the media, arguing that oligarchical and monopolistic tendencies in terms of the control of the means of information were bad for democracy, and therefore a threat to freedom.

White was always mindful about the mind itself, which he considered, with its cousins the imagination and the conscience, the wellspring of all good things. Amid the debates about the role of religious observance in the public arena in the 20th century, he brilliantly laid out an inspired test for those who would compel others to share their beliefs. “Democracy, if I understand it at all, is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. . . . I believe that our political leaders should live by faith and should, by deeds and sometimes by prayer, demonstrate faith, but I doubt that they should advocate faith, if only because such advocacy renders a few people uncomfortable. The concern of a democracy is that no honest man shall feel uncomfortable, I don’t care who he is, or how nutty he is.”

At heart, White’s vision of democracy is about generosity of spirit and a kind of self-interested covenant—the best way to guarantee freedom and fair play for ourselves is to guarantee it for others. In this way, anyone who attempts to subvert the system or abridge another’s rights is instantly shown to be a hypocrite whose will to power threatens to hijack an ethos where no one kicks the ball until the whistle is blown, and no one can tell you what to think or whom to worship or what to do. In leaving us this understanding of how we have lived, and how we ought to go on living, White is a kind of conversational Thomas Jefferson, a 20th-century Benjamin Franklin, an accessible James Madison.

A final thought. In early 1942, White was summoned to Washington for several days of meetings about a wartime project: the production of a pamphlet, authored by several of the nation’s finest writers (Max Lerner and Reinhold Niebuhr among them), to expound on President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. A year earlier, in his January 1941 State of the Union address, FDR had first articulated his vision of a united front against the march of dictatorship. “I suppose that every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world—assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace,” Roosevelt had told the Congress. After laying out a practical program for rearmement and aid to the Allied forces, the president broadened his sights. “In the future days, which we seek to make more secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” he said. He enumerated the freedom of speech and conscience and the freedom from want and from fear. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he added. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

Now, with the war upon America in the wake of Pearl Harbor, Archibald MacLeish, the poet and Librarian of Congress, wanted White to take charge of a Four Freedoms publication for wide distribution. The task was to expand on Roosevelt’s general themes, a job that White found daunting. In letters to Katharine, he was honest about his trepidation. After a series of conversations, including a lovely pasta-and-wine lunch at MacLeish’s Georgetown house, White had what he called “thousands of untranscribed notes—the kind of thing you scribble on your program in a dark theatre—and the burden of collecting these into a document which will suit the President and the Supreme Court justices and Mr. Churchill . . . and which will explain to a great man young men why they are about to get stuck in the stomach.” There was enough meandering in the debates about the project that White thought about, but did not mention, an obvious possibility. “Two or three times during the proceedings I was tempted to ask why, if the pamphlet was to be an extension and n interpretation of the President’s formula, we shouldn’t just go and ask him what he meant.” They never did, and neither can we. But we can ask E.B. White about freedom and democracy, and through his collected writings, he can answer.

__________________________________

This introduction is to On Democracy , by E.B. White, which is out on May 7, 2019 from Harper.

Jon Meacham

Previous article, next article.

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Subscribe to our newsletter

10 great articles and essays by e.b. white, articles/essays, once more to the lake, here is new york, farewell, my lovely, death of a pig, the sea and the wind that blows, the ring of time, the elements of style, 15 great essays about writing.

The Bookshelf: A Love Letter on Democracy and Freedom

In e.b. white on democracy, writings from the legendary late New Yorker contributor speak to us today about supporting freedom at home and abroad, upholding the rule of law, and resisting isolationism.

My daughter and I were touring colleges last summer when we happened into a bookstore one evening. A few works on democracy sat on a table, so I picked up a copy of a small book with the simple title: e.b. white on democracy .

 I am so glad I did. Martha White, the granddaughter of the legendary late New Yorker contributor, has compiled a book of insightful essays, letters, and poems from her very readable grandfather that speak directly to our contemporary world. Never mind that White, who joined the New Yorker in 1927 and remained there for almost six decades while authoring such children’s classics as Charlotte’s Web, wrote the majority of these pieces during the middle part of the last century. (He wrote the latest ones in the 1970s.) E.B. White’s observations on democracy and freedom during a time of world war, economic calamity, and the rise of communism address some of the underlying tensions we face today.

E.B. White’s observations on democracy and freedom during a time of world war, economic calamity, and the rise of communism address some of the underlying tensions we face today.

The book starts with a perceptive introduction by historian Jon Meacham, who notes that White was not a predictable partisan. Living a large part of his life in Maine, White, like many writers, preferred being left alone. But with so many social and political currents swirling through the middle 1900s, he understood, as Meacham writes, that “… the best way to guarantee freedom and fair play for ourselves is to guarantee it for others.”

  Standing up for freedom

 In other words, preserving freedom abroad preserves liberty at home. And White, by his own admission, had a love affair with freedom. In a September 1940 essay, when some here and abroad preferred isolationism to combatting the rising forces of tyranny, White wrote:

“I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. Because of its fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to admit of any compromise or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I’ll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.”

The recipient of a special Pulitzer Prize and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, White was a devoted American who valued our nation’s appreciation for the rule of law, right down to our sporting events. He remarked after Pearl Harbor that the unforeseen attack astonished Americans because we play games that depend upon referees to maintain the foul lines. “We think that the football can’t be kicked off until after the whistle is blown,” he observed. “So it was quite to be expected that America grew purple with rage and fury when the Japanese struck us without warning.”

As much as he prized America’s belief in individual freedom, White was not a nationalist. He strongly advocated for then-emerging international institutions to check the excesses of rampant tribalism and overheated nationalistic fervor.

For readers today, his writings suggest an idealized view of the ability of supranational institutions to contain tyranny and authoritarianism. Perhaps he sought such hope in them because his professional career was developing at the same time many freedom-loving people were coming to realize that the world needed institutions of some kind to check the dark forces that unleashed fascism, Nazism, and communism.

Of course, we possess the benefit of hindsight to see how difficult it is to make some of our international institutions preserve peace and protect human rights. (Former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power provides an illuminating look in her new book, The Education of an Idealist , at how difficult it has been to get the United Nations to call an evil like genocide by its name.) This isn’t to suggest we don’t need the postwar institutions the U.S. rightly led the way in creating. We do, and they have helped stabilize the world. It’s just that White’s extolling of their promise reads a little differently to the modern reader, especially as we see a strong sense of national sovereignty ram straight into the pillars of the European Union.

To his credit, White believed the United States cannot sit by idly while some leaders and their nations seek total control over their citizens and even other lands. Or, as he wrote of Adolf Hitler, leaders who see humans as “capable of being arranged and standardized by a superior intellect.”

White proclaimed being “in love with freedom” and that “I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose.”

Yet more is required at times than pinching one’s nose. “United States policy is to strengthen the free nations and build our defenses,” he argued in December 1950 as the Cold War intensified. “It is a correct policy and we should go at it relentlessly and fast.”

White wrote fiercely about the perils of disarmament as the Russians armed up. But he also valued what we now call “soft power.” Writing about foreign aid’s importance in countering communism’s appeal in some impoverished nations, he warned in that 1950 essay: “To keep it small and timid might be a very big mistake.”

An essayist by trade, White gleaned something even more fundamental: the moral need for Americans and their leaders to resist tyranny. Only hours after France fell to Germany on June 22, 1940, he advocated this response from the United States:

“We are of the opinion that something of a total nature is in store for this country, and we don’t mean dictatorship or vigor. We mean a total rejection of the threat with which we are faced, and a total moral resistance to it.”

An essayist writer by trade, White gleaned something even more fundamental: the moral need for Americans and their leaders to resist tyranny.

Fortunately, the world does not face the same maniacal, immediate threat that Hitler’s march across Europe posed. But nativism, populism, and isolationism are fueling unrest and division around the world, often with great force. Even once-aspiring democracies — see Poland, Hungary, and Turkey — have succumbed to these isms and cracked down on freedom of the press, an independent judiciary, and freedom of dissent.

What’s more, authoritarian rule is firmly cemented in major powers like Russia and China. They are cleverly using technological tools to attempt to undermine our own democracy. We cannot pretend this is not happening and adopt the fierce isolationism that White opposed in his day. Instead, we must use our moral voices as well as strong leadership to counter any effort to retreat from promoting the rule of law and human dignity.

Freedom at home

As he wrote of his times, which saw domestic Red Scares, oppression of civil rights, and cultural conformity, White made the case for freedom here at home, too. Freedom of speech. Academic freedom. A free press. He used his pen to explain those important principles.

His fierce belief in an independent press may seem expected for a journalist, but his writings point to a sensible reason: A free and independent press works for the good of all Americans. “We the people have access to a variety of news and opinion when we have a multitude of individuals owning the press,” White argued in a free-market way. “The press in our free country is reliable and useful not because of its good character, but because of its great diversity.” Otherwise, we only get what a few barons or the government want us to read or hear.

His belief in academic freedom and freedom of speech were in contrast to the prevailing winds blown by the literati’s flirtation with communism in the 1930s and by Joe McCarthy’s purging fire in the 1950s. Reacting to a plan for a Cooperative Commonwealth published in the magazine Common Sense , White decried the plan’s proposal for “a sufficient control of the organs of public opinion.” Responding sharply, he wrote:

“We don’t mind changing to a different economy, as to a different shirt, but we will not submit, even for a split second, to controlled opinion. If it is controlled, it isn’t opinion.”

From his support for freedom at home and abroad, to his belief in the rule of law, to his warnings against isolationism, White’s words from the last century speak directly to us in our times. They also give us hope that the human desire to be free will prevail.

From his support for freedom at home and abroad, to his belief in the rule of law, to his warnings against isolationism, White’s words from the last century speak directly to us in our times. They also give us hope that the human desire to be free will prevail.

“Here in America, where our society is based on belief in the individual, not contempt for him, the free principle of life has a chance of surviving,” he wrote. “I believe that it must and will survive.”

Freedom certainly triumphed over the forces that sought to topple it in the last century. We now have the duty to uphold that belief in the individual and remember, as White concluded, that “liberty is an animating cause.”

Democracy Paradox

Because Democracy is More than Elections

E.B. White – On Democracy

My kids know E.B. White as the author of Charlotte’s Web . Both of my kids were expected to read this classic on their own. Some books are written for children to read rather than their parents to read to them. I held off reading The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham until my kids were able to read them to me. I have long believed it is wrong to take away the achievement from a child of reading a great book on their own.

So, my kids were surprised to find I was reading an E.B. White book about Democracy. They are both used to finding books around the house with titles they do not comprehend. Sometimes they ask me why I don’t read fiction anymore and I do not always have a good answer. But E.B. White is an author they finally recognize. And yet, there is a puzzlement when I tell them it is another book about democracy. I am sure my readers will find the same sense of curiosity, because I was puzzled when I discovered this new volume in an essay from William Dobson in the Journal of Democracy . He was inspired to quote E.B. White twice in the same article. Indeed, I have found White just as quotable.

There are three ways to read this slender volume. The reader can simply read it as it is. There is plenty of wisdom to learn from Mr. White. He offers a brilliant description of democracy as “an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad.” Francis Fukuyama has spilled pages to get this simple idea across to his readers which E.B. White was able to encapsulate in a single sentence. His writings transform the current events of his day into thoughts which transcend political eras especially as “eras are growing shorter and shorter in America—some of them seem to last only a few days.”

But On Democracy can also be read as a window into the political thought of his time. It is no accident Jon Meacham wrote the introduction. Readers of presidential biographies will recognize Meacham from his works on Thomas Jefferson , George H.W. Bush, and Andrew Jackson . I am drawn to comparative politics and works from around the globe, but there are moments when I retreat into American political thought and history. E.B. White shares his thoughts on the American role in World War II and Roosevelt’s New Deal, but also the political repercussions over the thirty years that followed.

Let me jump ahead to the Eisenhower Presidency which has undergone a substantial revisionism in recent years. It is similar to the revisionism of George H.W. Bush as found in Meacham’s biography. The current era of polarization has brought about a nostalgia for the Presidents who worked to bridge the divide between the political right and left to capture the political center. There is a sense of loss in American politics for a time when elections felt less consequential. It is unimaginable to read this passage about both candidates in an American Presidential election, “In General Eisenhower and Governor Stevenson the country has a pair of candidates who have seldom been matched for distinction, for ability, and for probity, and that no matter which gets the job, we can thank our lucky stars as well as our secret booths.” And yet, these words could have been written not so long ago about Barak Obama and John McCain or even Barak Obama and Mitt Romney. It feels so long ago.

The genius of the Eisenhower Presidency was its ability to tame the more radical voices within his party. There is a false assumption among casual historians to equate the temperament of a political party with its political leadership. But its failure was in its inability to transform the party into a voice of political moderation. There was a desire among Republicans to roll back the New Deal, reduce the size of government, and cut taxes. The fact Eisenhower did not pursue a radical agenda was not a reflection of the Republican Party, but his leadership which transcended partisanship. While Eisenhower did not expand upon the New Deal, he allowed its programs to consolidate into broad acceptance. Uninformed intellectuals look upon Eisenhower simply as a general who became famous at the right political moment. But E.B. White allows us to recognize Eisenhower was respected for his ability to stand for the right principles during an era of McCarthyism. It is often forgotten how Eisenhower was well known as the President of Columbia University. It allowed him to speak freely in a manner which he was unable as a General. White explains how Eisenhower stood for academic freedom during the Red Scare. Eisenhower “has stated firmly that Columbia, while admiring one idea, will examine all ideas. He seems to us to have the best grasp of where the strength of America lies.”

I write so much about Eisenhower because political scientists use him as an example to demonstrate how the Republican Party has changed. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue political polarization emerged over time as the Southern Strategy reshaped the Republican Party and changed the political dynamics of American politics. But this account is a bit naïve. It describes a political golden age where Congress was able to address the issues of the day through bipartisanship. But it neglects to recognize how Roosevelt struggled to pass meaningful legislation after his failed effort to pack the courts. Robert A. Caro describes how the Senate was ridiculed for its inability to get business done due to its traditions which favored seniority and the filibuster. The failure to pass anti-lynching legislation is just one example where widespread popular support was unable to materialize into law.

The American South has been blamed for the inability of the United States to resolve its democratic deficiencies during this era. I am not going to refute this narrative. But E.B. White helps explain how the Republican Party was an inevitable ally of the South. Eisenhower reflects the liberalism of the Republicans during the fifties. It is often forgotten how his administration passed the first meaningful Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction and was in support of the consequential Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. But it was a “soft” liberalism. For example, he never pressed for the widespread implementation of the Brown decision. The liberalism of Eisenhower was a Conservative Liberalism.

But the Republican Party was never the party of Eisenhower. E.B. White shares another side of Republicans in his depiction of Barry Goldwater’s politics as “the classic pattern of authoritarianism and the police state: discrediting the court, intimidating the press… depicting the federal government as the enemy of the people, depicting social welfare as the contaminant in our lives, promising to use presidential power to end violence, arguing that the end justifies the means (catch the thief, never mind how), promising victory now in an age of delicate nuclear balance, slyly suggesting that those of opposite opinion are perhaps of questionable loyalty, and always insisting that freedom has gone down the drain.”

This was not the Barry Goldwater my father taught me. But it makes so much more sense because I was never able to reconcile Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights legislation. Indeed, Goldwater once relieved Strom Thurmond during a long filibuster of civil rights legislation so he was able to get a bite to eat. Goldwater is lionized by Libertarians as a friend of small government who defended personal liberties and state’s rights. But it was always the rights and privileges of his own class that caught his attention. He defended the rights of Southerners as though they were a persecuted minority while demonstrating a formal indifference to persecuted minorities like African Americans. E.B. White goes further to explain how “Senator Goldwater has occasionally used the phrase “obviously guilty,” referring to criminals. This is a very unsettling thing. Nobody is “obviously” guilty in this country—a man is innocent until the court decides otherwise. Goldwater appears to believe that it’s more important to catch a criminal than to preserve the principle of search and seizure, which is a bedrock of our jurisprudence, safeguarding our homes.” This casual indifference to injustice is reminiscent of the Republican Party of today especially in light of what Ibram Kendi describes as racist policies because they produce inequities between the races in their application.

This brings me to the third way I suggest to read On Democracy . It is perhaps best read when the historical moment is reinterpreted in light of our own times. This approach may take the words of White out of context but gives them new meaning. It allows history to serve as a lesson for the particular experiences we face today. E.B. White did not foresee a global pandemic in the twenty-first century, but he was prescient to note, “We have, lately, at least one large new group of people to whom the planet does come first. I mean scientists.” And he understood the Russian threat to democracy, “Russia’s greatest fear, apparently, is that Western democracies will act in a united and constructive way. Russia is constantly on the alert to divide us and drive the wedge that we read about every day in the papers.”

Sometimes I read the words of E.B. White and sensed he was speaking to me. But not as a human who transcends historical eras. No, he spoke to me as I am today. He understood the challenges we face right now. White understands us not simply for who we are but for who we have become. He understands how “all half-truths excite me.” He understood “democracy is itself a religious faith.” But most of all he understood what has become regarded as the populist moment. He recognized how democracy “can be destroyed by a single zealous man who holds aloft a freedom sign while quietly undermining all of freedom’s cherished institutions.”

The difference in E.B. White is there are no empty demands for freedom and liberty. Any moment when he approaches idealism, he turns back into a refreshing sense of realism. Liberty could not be imposed. For him, democratic governance is what gives freedom substance because those who “assume no personal responsibility for anything… will gain no personal rights.” Liberal democracy depends on the responsibility of its citizens and its leaders. It is vulnerable because the people can turn away at any time, but without political freedom, civil rights have no substance and become empty platitudes that are neither respected nor accepted. “Peace is expensive, and so are human rights and civil liberties; they have a price, and we the peoples have not yet offered to pay it.”

There are moments when feel a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost. Donald Trump is not the only one who wants to make America great again. There is a sense of loss among every American. There is a sense of loss throughout the world. Pessimism has dominated the political vocabulary for far too long. E.B. White reminds us to “be concerned with principles, not with results.” And it helps to recall the imperfections of bygone days and take stock of the progress which has been made. “We are perfectionist to the extent that we regard this world as an imperfect one.” It is not the past we want to bring back. It is elements of the past we can refashion into a more perfect future. “I wish the woods were more the way they used to be. I wish they were the way they could be.”

jmk, carmel, indiana, [email protected]

Follow me on Twitter @DemParadox

Share this:

• Share on Tumblr

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Recent posts.

• The Last Episode. Elizabeth Saunders on How Democracies Wage War and Make Peace
• When Democracy Breaks: Final Thoughts with Archon Fung, David Moss and Arne Westad
• When Democracy Breaks: Scott Mainwaring on Argentina
• European Elections 2024: Setting the Right Questions, Innovative Answers Might Emerge
• When Democracy Breaks: 1930s Japan with Louise Young

Discover more from Democracy Paradox

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Author E.B. White On 'The Meaning Of Democracy'

Melissa Block

In his victory speech Tuesday night, President Obama said that democracy in a nation of 300 million can be "noisy and messy and complicated." That sentence reminded Melissa Block of an anonymous editorial published in The New Yorker in 1943, written by E.B. White. Included in White's take on the subject: "Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time."

Copyright © 2012 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Ask the publishers to restore access to 500,000+ books.

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Essays of E. B. White.

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

1,163 Views

16 Favorites

Better World Books

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by lotu.t on November 4, 2011

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Eighty-Five from the Archive: E. B. White

_This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.

Today’s selection is E. B. White’s “ Comment ” from August 18, 1945.

In a 1969 Times interview , the American essayist and stylist E. B. White was asked what he cherished most in life: “I cherish the remembrance of the beauty I have seen. I cherish the grave, compulsive word.” Grave is not typically a term associated with White, who for fifty years was the whimsical, intellectual soul of The New Yorker . From 1925 to 1976 he crafted more than eighteen hundred pieces for the magazine and established, in the words of editor William Shawn, “a new literary form.” That form was the magazine’s Comment essay—a personal essay that was, in White’s hands, light in style yet often weighty in substance. As White noted in a 1969 Paris Review interview, > I do feel a responsibility to society because of going into print: a writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down. Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.

White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1899, the youngest of six children. After attending Cornell University, where he acquired the nickname Andy, he worked as a reporter for the United Press and then the Seattle Times , before returning to New York to work at an advertising agency. During this period, he sold a number of poems to Franklin P. Adams’s “The Conning Tower” column. In 1925, he submitted several pieces to The New Yorker , and the following year he took a job at the magazine editing newsbreaks. Ross soon approached White about writing Comment, and it was there that he quickly established the editorial voice of the magazine. As White’s good friend James Thurber observed , in 1938,> Harold Ross and Katharine Angell, his literary editor, were not slow to perceive that here were the perfect eye and ear, the authentic voice and accent for their struggling magazine…. His contributions to the Talk of the Town, particularly his Notes and Comment on the first page, struck the shining note that Ross had dreamed of striking.

In addition to Comment, White also contributed light verse, casuals, longer essays, and captions for cartoons (most famously, “ I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it! ”). His intimate essays, which his stepson, the New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell, once said “took down the fences of manner … and pomposity in writing,” were remarkable examples of White’s ability to relate the quotidian to the topical. In a 1985 Postscript in this magazine, John Updike observed ,> The least pugnacious of editorialists, [White] was remarkably keen and quick in the defense of personal liberty and purity of expression, whether the threat was as overt as McCarthyism or totalitarianism or as seemingly innocuous as … Alexander Woollcott’s endorsement of a brand of whiskey. American freedom was not just a notion to him; it was an instinct, a current in the blood, expressed by his very style and his untrammelled thought, his cunning informality, his courteous skepticism, his boundless and gallant capacity for wonder.

White married Katharine Angell in 1929, the same year that he and Thurber published their satire on Freudianism, “Is Sex Necessary?” In 1938, White and Angell left New York and settled in Maine, where White wrote a monthly column, “One Man’s Meat,” for Harper ’ s magazine. White began writing Comment again for The New Yorker in the spring of 1943, and he also took up writing what would later become a children’s classic, “Stuart Little” (1945), which was soon followed by another classic, “Charlotte’s Web,” published in 1952. Of his children’s writing, White once said , “Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.” White continued writing for the magazine until the late seventies, and he was awarded an honorary Pulitzer Prize in 1978. He died in Maine, on October 1, 1985, at the age of eighty-six.

Today we highlight a Comment that ran in the issue of August 18, 1945. The essay examines White’s visceral skepticism about the beginnings of the atomic age. In this excerpt , White questions just how far man is willing to go in his pursuit of victory:> We thought back over the whole long war, trying to remember the terrible distances and the terrible decisions, the setbacks, the filth and the horror, the bugs, the open wounds, the fellows on the flight decks and on the beaches and in the huts and holes, the resolution and the extra bravery—and all for what? Why, for liberty. “Liberty, the first of blessings, the aspiration of every human soul … every abridgment of it demands an excuse, and the only good excuse is the necessity of preserving it. Whatever tends to preseve this is right, all else is wrong.” And we tried to imagine what it will mean to a soldier, having gone out to fight a war to preserve the world as he knew it, now to return to a world he never dreamt about, a world of atomic designs and portents. Some say this is the beginning of a great time of peace and plenty, because atomic energy is so fearsome no nation will dare unleash it. The argument is fragile. One nation (our own) has already dared take the atom off its leash, has dared crowd its luck, and not for the purpose of conquering the world, merely to preserve liberty.

In England the other day a philosopher and a crystallographer held a debate. The question was whether a halt should be called on science. The discussion was academic, since there is no possibility of doing any such thing. Nevertheless, it was a nice debate. Professor Bernal, the crystallographer, argued that children should be allowed to play with dangerous toys in order that they may learn to use them properly. Joad, the philosopher, said no—science changes our environment faster than we have the ability to adjust ourselves to it. The words were hardly out of his mouth when a blind girl in Albuquerque, noticing a strange brightness in the room, looked up and said, “What was that?” A bomb had exploded a hundred and twenty miles away in the New Mexican desert. And people all over the world were soon to be adjusting themselves to their new environment. For the first time in our lives, we can feel the disturbing vibrations of complete human readjustment. Usually the vibrations are so faint as to go unnoticed. This time, they are so strong that even the ending of a war is overshadowed. Today it is not so much the fact of the end of a war which engages us. It is the limitless power of the victor. The quest for a substitute for God ended suddenly. The substitute turned up. And who do you suppose it was? It was man himself, stealing God’s stuff.

Any favorite New Yorker articles come to mind? Send us an e-mail .

Start typing to search all Word on Fire content.

Home › Articles › The Indispensable Role of Faith in Public Life: A Late Response to E.B. White

The Indispensable Role of Faith in Public Life: A Late Response to E.B. White

Thomas j. salerno, september 2, 2020.

Recently, I started reading a collection of essays by E.B. White . Perhaps best remembered as the author of the classic children’s book Charlotte’s Web , White is also considered by many to be the greatest American essayist of the twentieth century. It’s not hard to see why. E.B. White is a master of the English language. His prose is fluid and effervescent, jam-packed with humorous metaphors and delightful turns of phrase. His tone is friendly and conversational, drawing the reader in and holding their rapt attention no matter how mundane the subject matter. His command of the essay form seems almost effortless.

The best essays elicit strong emotional responses from the reader. One case in point is his 1956 essay “Bedfellows,” which got a surprising rise out of me six decades after it was published.

In “Bedfellows,” White deftly segues from reminisces about Fred, his late Dachshund, into a discussion of national politics. His thoughts about freedom of the press and the expansion of the security state seem unnervingly prescient, demonstrating that few things in American political life ever truly change. But it is when he pontificates on the role of religious faith in public life that White hits on a topic as relevant and as caustic (if not more so) in the 2020s as it was in the 1950s.

White finds himself unsettled by a newspaper article on President Dwight Eisenhower’s view that prayer and religious faith are important pillars of a democratic society and the American way of life. White opines that “the implications of such a pronouncement, emanating from the seat of government, is that religious faith is a condition , or even a precondition , of democratic life. This is just wrong.” White goes on to say that American presidents can and should pray privately and even by words and deeds “demonstrate faith” but that they shouldn’t publicly “advertise prayer” or “ advocate faith” because “such advocacy renders a few people uncomfortable.” Even six decades removed from the Eisenhower administration, doesn’t this all sound eerily familiar to contemporary ears?

Many people in Western society today view religion as little more than an individual private hobby; they become upset or indignant when it is promoted or preached in the public square. White asserts that “the concern of a democracy is that no honest man shall feel uncomfortable.”

But how, one asks, can democratic principles or the free exchange of ideas flourish under such a bizarre rubric? Unless one completely cuts oneself off from public discourse, it is inevitable that one will be made to feel “uncomfortable.” The beliefs, ideas, and convictions of others will not always be to our liking. And that’s fine! We should engage with ideas we disagree with, discuss them vigorously, not seek to silence or suppress them. If White had lived to see how the quixotic mission to ensure that one is ever made to feel offended or uncomfortable has led to the disturbing proliferation of “safe spaces” and “cancel culture,” an erosion of public discourse into rancorous recrimination and invective, and the desecration and vandalism of churches and the statues of saints, it’s doubtful that he would be pleased.

Religion in public life has always been a touchy subject in America. Although many of the Founders of our Republic were deeply religious men, they were also heavily influenced by the values of the Enlightenment, which, among other things, championed reason over and above faith and advocated the strict separation of church and state. White reveals himself as an inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition when he balks at the idea that religious faith could possibly be a precondition, or stabilizing pillar, of democratic society. Americans rightly find repugnant the idea of an official state-sanctioned church, but for most of the nation’s history its citizens also took for granted the notion that the United States was founded upon Judeo-Christian principles of justice and the fundamental rights of the human person. Thomas Jefferson, by no means an orthodox believer, stated unequivocally in the Declaration of Independence that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This is a remarkable statement. For the vast majority of human history, the basic equality of human beings as children of God with irrevocable rights was emphatically not recognized as self-evident. Only on the foundation of the divinely revealed Scriptures of the Judeo-Christian tradition could these ideas find purchase.

Among E.B. White’s concerns was that religious faith would be made “one of the requirements of the accredited citizen.” While I certainly agree that one need does not need to be a believer in order to participate in a democratic society, I think that all Americans should acknowledge that democratic principles and institutions ultimately find their basis in the Judeo-Christian faith tradition. When this is forgotten, when religious faith wanes, it can only be to the detriment of our society.

This principle is plain to see for anyone who takes even a passing interest in public affairs. In the sixty-plus years since E.B. White wrote “Bedfellows,” religious faith in America has been on a precipitous decline, with a corresponding erosion of moral values. Nature abhors a vacuum. If Christianity is rejected as the basis of our social life, some competing ideology is bound to take its place. To quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church number 2257: “Every society’s judgement and conduct reflect a vision of man and his destiny. Without the light the Gospel sheds on God and man, societies easily become totalitarian.”

E.B. White chided Eisenhower for insisting on the vital role of faith in a democratic society, but it is important to remember what Eisenhower had seen as the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. On April 12, 1945, Eisenhower visited the concentration camp at Ohrdruf, Germany. There he was personally exposed to the horrific crimes of the Nazi Party which sought to supplant Christianity with a racist blood and soil ideology that promoted worship of the state. As president, Eisenhower confronted the might of the Soviet Union, which imposed its atheistic communist system over half of Europe through violent oppression. The totalitarian atheist regimes of the twentieth century serve as a warning that when faith is sidelined—abandoned in favor of godless ideologies—democracy and respect for human dignity quickly evanesce. It is surprising that a brilliant man such as E.B. White failed to appreciate this reality.

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

• Do adults read children's literature?
• When did American literature begin?
• Who are some important authors of American literature?
• What are the periods of American literature?

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Maine: An Encyclopedia - Biography of E. B. White
• Poetry Foundation - Biography of E. B. White
• National Endowment for the Humanities - The White Pages
• Amercian Society of Authors and Writers - Biography of E. B. White
• Village Preservation - E.B. White and his Greenwich Village
• E.B. White - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• E.B. White - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

E.B. White (born July 11, 1899, Mount Vernon , New York , U.S.—died October 1, 1985, North Brooklin, Maine) was an American essayist, author, and literary stylist, whose eloquent , unaffected prose appealed to readers of all ages.

White graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1921 and worked as a reporter and freelance writer before joining The New Yorker magazine as a writer and contributing editor in 1927. He married Katherine Sergeant Angell, The New Yorker ’s first fiction editor, in 1929, and he remained with the weekly magazine for the rest of his career. White’s essays for The New Yorker quickly garnered critical praise. Written in a personal, direct style that showcased an affable sense of humour, his witty pieces contained musings about city life, politics, and literature , among other subjects. White also wrote poems, cartoon captions, and brief sketches for the magazine, and his writings helped establish its intellectual and cosmopolitan tone. White collaborated with James Thurber on Is Sex Necessary? (1929), a spoof of contemporary sex manuals. In a monthly column (1938–43) for Harper’s magazine, he wrote essays about rural life.

In 1941 White edited with his wife A Subtreasury of American Humor. His three books for children— Stuart Little (1945, film 1999), Charlotte’s Web (1952, film 1973 and 2006), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)—are considered classics, featuring lively animal protagonists who seamlessly interact with the human world. In 1959 he revised and published a book by the late William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style, which became a standard style manual for writing in English. Among White’s other works is Points of My Compass (1962). Letters of E.B. White, edited by D.L. Guth, appeared in 1976, his collected essays in 1977, and Poems and Sketches of E.B. White in 1981. He was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963) and a Pulitzer Prize special citation (1978). White’s biography of Harold W. Ross appeared in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica .