William Graham Sumner: Crotchety Ass

Well, the votes are in for grouch of the century and Sumner wins hands down. I'm reading through a number of his essays for a class, and I can safely proclaim myself no fan of his.

But before I get into the meat and potatoes of this meal of criticism, perhaps a little background is in order. Graham's claim to fame is not the cracker that bears his name. Rather, Sumner was, of all things, a Yale professor (strike one):

He graduated from Yale College in 1863, where he had been a member of Skull & Bones. Later he was appointed to the newly created Chair of Political and Social Science at Yale. As a sociologist, his major accomplishments were developing the concepts of diffusion, folkways, and ethnocentrism. Sumner's work with folkways led him to conclude that attempts at government-mandated reform were useless. He was a staunch advocate of laissez-faire economics. Sumner was active in the intellectual promotion of free-trade classical liberalism, and in his heyday and after there were Sumner Clubs here and there. He heavily criticized socialism/communism. One adversary he mentioned by name was Edward Bellamy, whose national variant of socialism was set forth in Looking Backward, published in 1888, and the much more powerful sequel "Equality."

Like many classical liberals at the time, including Edward Atkinson, Moorfield Storey, and Grover Cleveland, Sumner opposed the Spanish American War and the subsequent U.S. effort to quell the insurgency in the Philippines. He was a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League which had been formed after the war to oppose the annexation of territories. In his speech "The Conquest of the United States," he lambasted imperialism as a betrayal of the small government ideals of anti-militarism, the gold standard, and free trade. According to Sumner, imperialism would enthrone a new group of "plutocrats," or businesspeople who depended on government subsidies and contracts.

Hey, wait! Sumner doesn't sound so bad: anti-communist, thinks socialism is crap, like free trade...hell, he's a 'classical liberal.' How bad could he be?

To be honest, I don't know. He does sound like a great guy, until you read him. I'm not going to use the phrase, "tedious as hell," but I'm sure some other student has. More importantly, regardless of how much he loved free markets, he had an extreme stick up a certain bodily orifice. This specific example comes to us via his essay, "The Forgotten Man."

Now you know that "the poor and the weak" are continually put forward as objects of public interest and public obligation...The paupers and the physically incapacitated are an inevitable charge on society. About them no more need be said.

Weeeeeeeeell, la dee-frickin'-da, Mr. Sumner. No more to be said about the poor and crippled, eh? What do you do when you see a bum on the side of the road? Run him over? Hey, I'm glad ol' Steve Hawking wasn't your child, Sums. I can picture you bricking him up in some corner of your drafty old house and destroying his birth certificate. Hell, who cares? He's an inevitable charge on society. There's nothing he could contribute, right?

Of course, even though "no more need be said" about these subhuman scum, Sumner continues his campaign for captain of the snotbag team.

The weak who constantly arouse the pity of humanitarians and philanthropists are the shiftless, the imprudent, the negligent, the impractical, and the inefficient, or they are the idle, the intemperate, the extravagant, and the vicious.

Hey Summie, you missed "the filth," "the dirt beneath my feet," "the sewage in the river of humanity," and "cockroaches I want to crush." Seriously, dude. I considered myself pretty unsparing when it came to welfare reform and the indigents by the side of the road. When an able-bodied man asks me for change, I tell him to get a job. Just two nights ago, I passed by a girl in a wheelchair begging, who made the mistake of getting dressed up in a Goth outfit (not sure why she thought that would really call forth the denarii). When she tried passing the cap, no doubt to fuel a couple more purchases of spikes and leather, I laughed in her face (and her non-functioning legs).

So, William, I get where you're coming from. You hate the welfare state, the nanny state, just about any state and idiotic charities that promote slavish dependency instead of rehabilitation of the fallen man. Once upon a time, we were on the same side.

But, dude, you blindsided me with this viciousness. I know, I know, all you want to do...

is point out the thing which is overlooked and the error which is made in all these charitable efforts. The notion is accepted as if it were not open to any question that if you help the inefficient and vicious you may gain something for society or you may not, but that you lose nothing. This is a complete mistake. Whatever capital you divert to the support of a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else. I would spend any conceivable amount of zeal and eloquence if I possessed it to try to make people grasp this idea.

Believe me, WG, you don't have it, so please spare yourself the trouble. All you've accomplished is given my hardcore libertarian peers reason to talk like complete jerks.

I'd go on, but this rant needs to end so that I can accomplish some schoolwork. More coming on Sumner the Bummer later, if I can stomach it.