Ambrose Bierce on Socialismby Daniel Hager

Ambrose Bierce packed a pistol whenhe walked the streets of San Fran-cisco. As a long-time editor andwriter there, he made many enemies

through the pungency of his pen. So hewisely carried a revolver in case of retalia-tion. He backed up that prudence with a rep-utation carried from the War Between theStates that he was a crack shot.

Bierce’s range of verbal targets ran beyondthe local to the universal. His habit was todissect the illusions and vanities of humanbeliefs and behaviors and expose them toridicule. He wrote essays, poems, and shortstories so prolifically that his collected workstotal 12 volumes, including The Devil’s Dic-tionary, a compilation of hundreds of acer-bic definitions.

During his 40-year literary career, Bierceamply observed the tenets and antics ofsocialists as they attempted to make inroadsin America. They withered under his analy-sis. Witness his 1910 treatise, “The Social-ist—What He Is, and Why.”1

Today few persons admit to being social-ists, but the basic beliefs are as epidemic asever. The ideal is an egalitarian cooperativecommonwealth that erases class lines andprovides abundance for all but not too muchfor any. This result can be achieved onlythrough a centralized planned economy,with bureaucrats pulling whatever levers are

necessary so that everything will turn out“fair.” Redistributionism is key to realiza-tion of its vision. The leveling processrequires confiscation of property from thosewho have “too much” and apportionment ofit to those who deserve “more.”

Since redistributionism is a vital conceptin today’s political discourse, Bierce’s essay,despite the lapse of a century, hits the bulls-eye as dead-center as if it were written lastweek.

Bierce faulted socialists on two grounds,the intellectual and the moral. The systemfounders when subjected to rational analy-sis, and it fosters ignoble qualities in itsadherents.

“His unreason is what he is a socialistwith,” Bierce wrote in prefacing his discus-sion of the socialist’s deficient grasp of simple economics (p. 38). He identified a primary misapprehension: “The socialistnotion appears to be that the world’s wealthis a fixed quantity, and A can acquire onlyby depriving B. He is fond of figuring therich as living upon the poor—riding on theirbacks, as Tolstoi (staggering under theweight of his wife, to whom he had given hisvast estate) was pleased to signify the situa-tion” (p. 42).

Contrary to the socialists, the sum ofwealth will increase if wealth producers areallowed to exercise their talents and createnew products and services. Bierce wrote, “Inthe youth of a nation there is virtual equalityof fortunes—all are poor. Sixty years ago

Daniel Hager (fris@michcom.net) is a writer andconsultant in Lansing, Michigan.

21

Ideas On Liberty

DECEMBER 2004

there were probably not a half dozen mil-lionaires in America; the number now is notdefinitely known, but it runs into thousands;that of persons of less but considerablewealth—enough to take attention—into the hundreds of thousands” (p. 41). Wealthbuilds additional wealth as new demandsdevelop: “All the industries of the world areso interrelated and interdependent that noneis unaffected in some infinitesimal degree bythe new stimulation [of demand]” (p. 43).

Thus the redistributionist should workbetter to advance himself economicallyrather than lobby to appropriate others’wealth: “The plain truth of the matter is thatthe poor live mostly on the rich. . . . A manmay remain in poverty all his life and be notonly of no advantage to his fellow poor men,but by his competition in the labor market aharm to them; for in the abundance of laborlies the cause of low wages, as even a social-ist knows. As a consumer the man counts forlittle, for he consumes only the bare neces-saries of life. But, if he pass from poverty towealth he not only ceases to be a competinglaborer; he becomes a consumer of every-thing that he used to want—all the luxuriesby production of which nine-tenths of thelabor class live he now buys. He has addedhis voice to the chorus of demand” (pp.42–43).

America the OpenThis chorus is amazingly open to member-

ship in America, according to Bierce: “Wehave so good a country here that more thana million a year of Europe’s poor come overto share its advantages. In the patent factthat it is a land of opportunity and prosper-ity we feel a justifiable pride; yet the crown-ing proof and natural result of this—thegreat number that do prosper—‘the multi-tude of millionaires’—has come to beresented as an intolerable wrong, and hewho is most clamorous for opportunity(which he has never for a moment beenwithout) most austerely condemns thosewho have made the best use of it” (pp.44–45).

Character shortcomings fuel the redistrib-

utionist movement, Bierce believed. Thesocialist “would substitute something ‘morenearly to the heart’s desire’—an order ofthings in which all would share the rewardsof efficiency. Always it is the incapable whomost loudly preaches the gospel of Equalityand Fraternity—which, being interpreted,means stand and deliver and look pleasantabout it” (p. 38).

He identified the driving force: “Richesand luxurious living provoke envy in thevast multitude to whom they are inaccessiblethrough lack of efficiency; and from envy torevenge and revolution the transition is nat-ural and easy” (pp. 40–41). He observedthat “the [socialist] ‘movement’ as a socialand political force is, in this country, born ofenvy, the true purpose of its activities,revenge. In the shadow of our national pros-perity it whets its knife for the throats of theprosperous. It unleashes the hounds of hateupon the track of success—the only kind ofsuccess that it covets and derides” (p. 46).

Bierce anticipated the New Deal and itsconfiscatory taxation policies that raised thetop marginal rate on incomes to 91 percent.The momentum of hostility against the moreefficient opened up an uninviting prospect:“It looks as if we may eventually have to pre-vent the multiplication of millionaires by set-ting a legal limit to private fortunes. By somesuch cowardly and statesmanlike concessionwe may perhaps anticipate and forestall themore drastic action of our political Apaches,incited by Envy, wrecker of empires andassassin of civilization” (pp. 46–47).

Among the envious who helped form theclimate of hostility were “poets, muckrakers,demagogues and other audibles” addingtheir “howls of sensibility” (p. 43). In dis-cussing this group, Bierce was also prescientregarding the Hollywood ideology of today.Since the movie industry’s nascence aboutthe time he wrote his essay, it has remainedthe economic sector with the least regulatoryinterference and the closest current approxi-mation of laissez-faire capitalism, andaccordingly has yielded incredible levels ofwealth to many of its participants. Yet theentertainment industry’s dominant creed ismalice against capitalism and demand for

The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty • December 2004

22

expanded economic control by the state (itsown industry excepted).

Bierce provided an explanation. He wrotethat “the poet, the artist or the musician isalmost invariably an audible socialist”because “he is not a thinker but a feeler.”Bierce added that “some of these ‘intellectu-als’ . . . might better be called emotionals”(p. 42).

Some even in his day were already “fairlythrifty and prosperous” but could appar-ently not grasp that “in the redistribution ofwealth which many of them impudently pro-pose [they] would be first to experience themischance of ‘restitution’” (p. 42).

Or perhaps they were like many of today’suniversity professors who advocate harness-ing the producer classes into a socialisticeconomic ideal under which relatively fewuniversities would exist to employ profes-sors. Bierce wrote of these “emotionals” that“doubtless they do not expect their blessed‘new order of things’ to come in their day.Meanwhile there are profit and a certain pic-turesqueness in ‘hailing the dawn’ of a better

one, just as if it had already struck ‘the Sul-tan’s tower with a shaft of light’” (p. 42).

A century ago the dogma of socialist redis-tributionism was intellectually tawdry.Bierce with his flair tore it to bits. But itsappeal survives on an emotional level—as hedescribed it, through “the prevalence andpower of some of the primal brute passionsof the human mind” (p. 40).

Bierce did not include “socialism” or“socialist” in The Devil’s Dictionary butadded a dig under “Troglodyte,” citing a“famous community” that lived with Davidin the Cave of Adullam. Quoting from I Samuel 22:2, Bierce wrote that “the colonyconsisted of ‘every one that was in distress,and every one that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented’—in brief, all theSocialists of Judah.”2 �

1. Ambrose Bierce, The Socialist—What He Is, and Why, inThe Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. IX, TangentialViews (New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Com-pany, 1911).

2. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, in CollectedWorks, Vol. VII, p. 352.

Ambrose Bierce on Socialism

23

Who Was Ambrose Bierce?Born in southeastern Ohio in 1842, Bierce started writing seri-ously in 1865, following service as a Union Army officer duringthe Civil War. He went west and worked at various jobs beforebecoming editor of the San Francisco News-Letter. Bierce’s“Devil’s Dictionary” definitions first appeared in his noted col-umn, “The Prattler,” which he wrote for almost 30 years. Hiredas a writer for the San Francisco Examiner in1887 by WilliamRandolph Hearst, Bierce began publishing his Civil War storiessoon thereafter. He wrote for various Hearst publications,

including the New York Telegraph and Cosmopolitan, until 1908.Bierce is especially known for tales of the supernatural, including “An Occur-

rence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and for The Devil’s Dictionary, which was originallypublished as The Cynic’s Word Book.

His colorful career and personal life were marred by his sometimes imprudentbehavior (a physical attack on a fellow author, drinking bouts with Mark Twainand Jack London, controversy about four lines that seem to have presaged Pres-ident William McKinley’s assassination) and family problems (a divorce from hiswife and the bizarre deaths of his two sons).

In November of 1913 he left Texas for revolution-wracked Mexico and senthis last communication the day after Christmas. His fate remains a mystery.There were stories that he was killed by one of Pancho Villa’s firing squads, butthe truth may well have been more prosaic.