Economy of the Golden Rule

If I tarry one moment longer to examine my grandfather’s understanding of socialism, am I exploiting the license I gain from being without a readership? That’s a rhetorical question, as all questions are, when you write in a vacuum. At any rate, I have in my hands a Harvard Class of 1912 alumni book that gives each living graduate a short forum for explaining his (they were all men at the time) “guiding philosophy” in the year 1962. My grandfather could never pass up a chance to explain his political and economic credo, and, moreover, he genuinely believed that Harvard professors and classmates had shaped him.



So what was Montelle espousing when he used the word, collectivism? How did this word differ from socialism, Marxism, communism, or anarchism? I have to say up front that Montelle Boyd wasn’t the most precise thinker or writer. Knowing very little about his topic, I wonder whether the vagueness surrounding his use of the term collectivism was related to the economic theory or to Montelle’s understanding of that theory. Certainly, Montelle’s description of the term—and its impact on his life’s work—is filled with nonsequitors. Neverthless, Montelle’s evangelical essay (longer than most other classmates) gives a great deal of credit to a Harvard professor named Francis Greenwood Peabody (see future posts for an analysis of one of Peabody’s books, inherited from my grandfather’s library, which may or may not explain the concepts here more satisfactorily).

Apparently, Peabody gave Harvard classmates a choice between three social systems: capitalism, socialism, and collectivism. (It’s interesting to think that this choice was originally offered even before the Bolsheviks had, arguably, helped to illustrate what socialism might look like if fully implemented. ) Clearly, Peabody favored collectivism. Apparently, capitalism had proved its inadequacy even before the Great Depression. It fostered exploitation, social divisions, and economic uncertainty as a result of the pitiless market laws of supply and demand. But, according to Montelle, socialism was little better: it merely reversed the equation and created other forms of elites, including Big Labor and Big Government.

What collectivism offered was voluntary association between free individuals, cooperation based on the Christian principles of the Golden Rule, equality of dividend enjoyment, and fundamental fairness when it came to the distribution of what Marx would have called the surplus value of labor. The difference between collectivism and socialism isn’t self-evident, but Montelle thought collectivism was about local communities retaining control of their own economic destinies. He wanted a rigidly decentralized system of economic control, where Boom and Bust cycles couldn’t hurt “the little guy,” most frequently a farmer.

Montelle distrusted “middle men” in the economic system, banks in particular, and therefore championed credit unions. Even money could be controlled by local communities of people who were dedicated to common principles of fairness. He also seemed to evince the traditional agrarian suspicion of cities, perhaps with good reason. Touchingly, he wanted “metropolitan areas” to be broken down into units so small that “neighborliness” would once again become appropriate for urban dwellers. Of course, on some rare occasions local communities would need to “federate” with one another to achieve goals that transcended particular regions. Writing in 1962, Montelle was acutely aware that large parts of the world were deciding between socialism and capitalism. He believed that the local autonomy offered by collectivism would ultimately persuade developing countries as well as communist countries to change.

Collectivism and Rural Citizenship

Previously, I briefly described the Liberal inclinations of my mother, Grace Boyd. This Liberalism evolved as a result of a complex discourse and exchange of ideas with socialism. In some ways, Liberalism accepted many of the premises of socialism; in other ways, it defined itself in opposition to Marxism. Grace’s father, my grandfather, claimed to be more directly aligned with socialism. Although my grandfather, Montelle Boyd, died when I was less than a year old, I find it interesting to see how Montelle translated socialism into rural America.

Fortunately, Montelle edited a small newspaper, the Boone County Courier, for about 40 years. If my math is correct, this means that he was writing about socialism between 1931 and 1971. During this time, we know that global socialism moved from triumph to triumph. It defeated NAZI Germany, expanded throughout Eastern European, and eventually spread through China, Southeast Asia, and many other parts of the de-colonized world. Back in America, Montelle thought that socialism could be reconciled with American political, cultural, and indeed religious traditions. He also thought that American socialism—or collectivism, the term he preferred—could avoid the twin evils of capitalism and Russian-style communism, which had noble objectives but involved a “class dictatorship” rather than democracy, which he favored.

Apparently Montelle learned his socialism from articulate Harvard professors. I have a few of his books about collectivism, and intend to post about them sometime in the future. (I have his personal testimony about these influences, published in a Harvard alumni book that encouraged alumni to explain their worldview at some length). But it’s also evident from his newspaper that his collectivism was profoundly influenced by autochthonous agrarian movements. One even suspects that Montelle’s faith in collectivism resulted from the loss of a family farm early in his life. For Montelle’s editorials relentlessly critique the boom and bust cycles of American capitalism and the impact these cycles have on family farmers.

For Montelle, a devout Protestant Christian, socialism looked something like anarchism, devoid of any trace of violence. Montelle wanted local American communities to take ownership over their own political and economic destinies. He wanted workers to decide the destinies of their own industries or companies, and farmers to work together to set higher prices for their produce. One of Montelle’s pet projects was the establishment of local credit unions. According to the Boone County Courier of 30 January 1947, Credit Unions were authorized in Illinois in 1925. The one in Boone County, called The People’s Credit Union, was organized five years later on what Montelle called a “membership basis, with the COMMON welfare being kept ever as a major objective” (Montelle’s capitalization). Montelle didn’t always follow the standard journalistic practice of revealing his own involvement in the creation of one of Illinois’ first credit unions, probably because everybody in Boone County knew about it already.

Montelle’s newspapers from the 1940s repeatedly touch about his faith in collectivism, but the economic philosophy he propounded was somewhat ill-defined. It wasn’t capitalism, and it certainly wasn’t Marxist-Leninism. Looking beyond the editorials, what these papers bring to mind to me is Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, which traces the precipitous decline of participation of modern American life. According to Putnam, Americans are now less engaged in almost every type of measurable political, civic, or cultural participation. With the notable exception of a fairly narrow form of evangelical religious activity, Americans no longer demonstrate any of the qualities of free association that Tocqueville praised when he first compared us with European counterparts. We don’t even go bowling in bowling teams anymore but prefer to “bowl alone,” as Putnam’s title denotes.



In Montelle’s world, collectivism—if it be defined as active citizenship and local self-determination—was alive and well. People were of course building local credit unions and growers associations, but, more importantly, they were going to functions related to church, family, civic pride (e.g., Rockford’s annual Milk Day), politics, business, local society, school, sports, veteran affairs, farming interests, municipal planning, and more. In short, in the 1940s, the concept of citizenship was still very meaningful, whether or not one accepted Montelle’s slightly blurry version of how this form of active citizenship was fundamentally at odds with capitalism. It’s hard to picture anything less revolutionary than small town life in Boone County. However, the history of modern revolution began with a very charged contest about the significance of the French word, citoyen.

Grace Boyd, Liberal, RIP

December 7—Pearl Harbor Day--was the 25th anniversary of my mother’s death. That’s right; it’s been a quarter of a century since I last saw or hugged the woman. In many ways, this blog was created as an homage to Grace Boyd, my mother. Grace wasn’t a socialist or even a Russophile, but she inherited a moderately left-of-center political disposition from her father, who was a self-professed “Christian-Socialist” who never missed a chance to evangelize about agrarian populism and the advantages of “the cooperative” alternative to capitalism. As my mother told us, she grew up in an intellectual atmosphere of unremitting opposition to the deleterious effects of consumerism and capitalism. Her father, an editor of a tiny newspaper, wrote minor treatises on socialism and collectivism in almost every edition of his paper, ignoring the opinions of his manifestly uninspired readership.



After 25 years, my connection to my mother is necessarily tenuous, but writing about my mother’s intellectual world is one way to revive this connection. My mother’s cultural heroes were not, of course, Lenin and Trotsky. While Grace must have been interested in the Soviet Union’s putative attempt to implement social equality, feminism, internationalism, and anti-colonialism, the influence of these dead men was very remote from the microscopically small Midwestern town where she grew up, namely Capron, Illinois.



Rather, my mother celebrated the work of Liberal, Democratic, and feminist icons of the post-war era, including Margaret Meade, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez, Jean Paul Sartre, John F. Kennedy, J.R., Paul Tillich, Enrich Fromm, Joseph Campbell, Thor Heyerdahl, Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, and Luis Leakey. (Note the decidedly non-revolutionary nature of this strange cast of characters—Malcolm X and Mao Tse Tung never made the list). And, truth be told, a liberalized, post-War Jesus Christ also made her list. (I remember that for many years she had a picture of a white, smiling, hippie Jesus hanging over her bed, making the classic peace sign with his fingers.)



In the era of African independence, Grace studied African history in college and once lived for a brief time in Southern Rhodesia, Africa. The country, now called Zimbabwe, was dominated by a white, apartheid regime, which ultimately declared independence from Great Britain in order to set up a locally controlled racist regime. The enemies of that regime, led by Robert Mugabe and others, were African freedom fighters who were inspired by the twin ideologies of nationalism and socialism. To Grace, the choice seemed clear: socialism was preferable to racism, and might even be an antidote to it. (How sad to think about Robert Mugabe in the present).



I don’t know when the idea first hit me, but not long ago I decided that it was important to look at cultural heroes who were no longer in fashion. Think, for instance, of the whole system of Esparanto, an invented language that, once upon a time, seemed destined to become a neutral and therefore unifying force in diplomatic and inter-cultural relations. Remember the Equal Rights Amendment, which seemed ready to take us to another epoch in gender relations but narrowly failed to pass and then quickly vanished into obscurity for modern women?



Celebrating the importance of the unimportant, I decided that it would best to go to the source of discredited ideology: The Russian Revolution of 1917. While it’s true that both Liberals and Conservatives formed a united opposition to Soviet aggrandizement, and my mother never even participated in systematic opposition to the Vietnam War, I believe that most Liberal ideology was ultimately grounded in some form of limited engagement with Bolshevik ideals. I can’t speak for my mother, but I suspect that she and I share this grudging respect for the “workers’ paradise.” If it meant nothing else, she feared the Right (whether that meant the Nazis or the followers of Ronald Reagan) more than she feared the Left. If Fidel Castro wasn’t admired in our household, neither was he a bogeyman.



I’ll close these random ruminations about my mother by quoting from her own college notes on Marxism, taken from a class she attended on 21 February 1957. How strange to be separated from Mom by half a century: the notes still feel fresh, as if they had just been written, and some of the historical judgments haven’t been affected all that much by 50 years of scholarship. They suggest a rather critical attitude to Lenin’s interpretation of Marxism. According to the Radcliff/Harvard lecturer of Humanities 125 (named Buttrick—and easily identified via Google), the Soviet Union was an attempt to overcome “man’s” inevitable anxiety about death; the Soviet citizen might die, but the state would live on. The Soviet critique of bourgeois pride made sense, the lecturer goes on to say, but Communism reinstated this divisiveness by creating administrative rather than social ranks. Ironically, the Soviet elites even had property now, including limousines.



Mom’s notes leave off on a decidedly un-Communist note: “We are free whether or not we understand.” Rest in peace.