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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 9. Economic Inequality - 2. Our Main Hypothesis: The Vicious Circle - 3. The Value Premises
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Chapter 9. Economic Inequality 209
The vicious circle operates, of course, also in the case of whites. Few
people have enough imagination to visualize clearly what a poor white
tenant or common laborer in the South would look like if he had had more
opportunities at the start. Upper class people in all countries are accus-
tomed to look down upon people of the laboring class as inherently inferior.
But in the case of Negroes the deprecation is fortified by the elaborate
system of racial beliefs, and the discriminations are organized in the social
institution of rigid caste and not only of flexible social class.
3. The Value Premises
The system of social ideals which we have called the American Creed,
and which serves as the source of the instrumental value premises in this
study, is less specified and articulate in the economic field than, for
instance, in regard to civic rights. There is, in regard to economic issues,
considerable confusion and contradiction even within this higher plane of
sanctified national ideals and not only—^as elsewhere— between those ideals
and the more opportunistic valuations on lower planes. In public discussion
opposing economic precepts are often inferred from the American Creed.
A major part of the ideological battle and of political divisions in the
American nation, particularly in the decade of the Great Depression, has
concerned this very conflict of ideals in the economic sphere. “Equality of
opportunity” has been battling “liberty to run one’s business as one
pleases.”
Meanwhile the battle-front itself has been moving—on the whole
definitely in favor of equality of opportunity. American economic liberal-
ism was formerly characterized by “rugged individualism” j
it is now
gradually assimilating ideals of a more social type. There was always the
vague popular ideal of “an American standard of living,” but now a more
definite and realistic conception is growing out of it. A new kind of “inalien-
able rights”—economic and social—is gradually taking shape within the
great political canon of America and is acquiring the respectability of
common adherence even if not of immediate realization. As an exemplifica-
tion of the new way of thinking, without assuming that it has advanced to
the level of a national ideal, we may quote the following statement by the
National Resources Planning Board, which is an elaboration of President
Roosevelt’s pronouncement of “freedom from want” as one of the human
liberties:
We look forward to securing, through planning and cooperative action, a greater
freedom for the American people. ... In spite of all . . . changes, that great
manifesto, the Bill of Rights, has stood unshaken 150 years and now to the old
freedoms we must add new freedoms and restate our objectives in modern terms. . . .
Any new declaration of personal rights, any translation of freedom into modern
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