Mr. Hoover Raises a Ghost

With his habitual air of grumpy wisdom, Herbert Hoover last week summoned up a ghost: the ghost of Fisher Ames (1758-1808). The only living ex-President was making a speech to warn the U.S. against entry into the war. To show how wrought-up earlier interventionists had been, he quoted some of Ames's sentences on Napoleon which sounded exactly like Walter Lippmann's sentences on Hitler. Said Ames: "If Bonaparte prevails [in Europe], we will be his vassals. . . . Britain fights our battles. . . . One single hope of security is the British Navy. ... If Russia is disarmed, how long will it be before England will be done for?"

Fisher Ames was the Herbert Hoover of his day--except in foreign policy. A great New England Federalist, in a time when the Federalists were down & out, "a man of singularly pure and unselfish character," Fisher Ames was one of those stiff U.S. statesmen, like Hoover, who are respected without being popular, who are admired--by people who vote for somebody else; and who are considered wise--by people who wish they had time to discuss his ideas.

An infant prodigy (Latin at six, Harvard at twelve), the greatest orator between Patrick Henry and Henry Clay (Congress adjourned after one of his speeches, to let the spell of his eloquence expire), Fisher Ames looked like one of the most promising statesmen in U.S. history. But when Jefferson became President, launched his plans to reform the courts, bought Louisiana without bothering with Congress, Fisher Ames became a prophet of doom.

He thought Jefferson was leading the U.S. down the path to anarchy and despotism followed by the French Revolution. Just as Herbert Hoover fears the influence of collectivist ideas in the New Deal, so did Fisher Ames fear the influence of French revolutionary thinkers in the men around Jefferson. He saw revolutionists everywhere, undermining, raising popular passions, obstructing, subverting and--he feared--eventually revolutionizing the Government. He was as opposed as Herbert Hoover to embargoes and quarantines. We cannot "quarrel our way into their good will," said he. "I hope we shall show . . . that we deem it better policy to feed nations than to starve them." He was double-damned as the spokesman of property--although, like Herbert Hoover, his main aim was to resist ideas which he believed would eventually turn the republic into a tyranny.

Ames's fear of Napoleon was wrong, said Mr. Hoover last week, and so were modern interventionists. Hitler will be defeated, as was Napoleon, not by the Russian winter but by the hate he has kindled: "The hate of Hitler will be more terrible than the blizzard was to Napoleon." The U.S. should consequently aid Britain, build its own defenses, spread its ideas by its example and not try "to impose the four freedoms upon Europe and Asia."

To much that Herbert Hoover said, the ghost of Fisher Ames could have nodded approval. He would certainly have approved Herbert Hoover's Fifth Freedom, Economic Freedom, to be placed beside Franklin Roosevelt's Four: "Freedom for men to choose their own callings, to accumulate property in protection of their children and old age, freedom of private enterprise that does not injure others." He would have approved Hoover's blasts at Stalin and Hitler, as savage as his own thunders against Napoleon and Robespierre.

But no student of Fisher Ames could believe that if he returned in 1941 he would consider his early warnings wrong. Looking at the state of the world that did not follow his advice, seeing the need for U.S. aid to Britain to check tyranny again, the chances were that the crusty old Federalist would say: "This is what I was afraid would happen."

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