Henry Grady – or Buck—Weaver, whose The Mainspring of Hu­man Progress, originally copy­righted in 1947, has just been re­issued by the Foundation for Eco­nomic Education, was head of the Customer Research Staff of Gen­eral Motors, and a great one for emphasizing the causal relation­ship between individual human liberty and the proliferation of goods and services that go to create the affluent society. He was one part thinker, one part busi­nessman, and one part evangelist—and he cared more for getting an idea over to his public than he did for claiming any particular pride of authorship. His Main­spring, actually, was a collabora­tive effort in that much of it con­sisted of a condensation of Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom. However, Buck Weaver added a good deal of material de­riving from his own experiences and from his own extensive read­ing. He was a great Frederic Bastiat man—and Bastiat, the French enemy of all collectivisms, perhaps guided the composition of Mainspring as much as did Mrs. Lane.

Weaver, who had been disci­plined by his life as a super salesman for General Motors, was an accomplished simplifier. He wanted to get through to the aver­age man and woman. He was, es­sentially, the popular broker of an intellectual movement that started during World War II as a series of mysterious trickles. Those were years of groping. The New Deal had come—and gone—without wiping up the big pools of unem­ployment. The war itself seemed the product of a collision of states which had, in their various ways, gone over to the doctrines of cen­tral planning and the idea that citizens (or subjects) must be di­rected by arbitrary authorities for their own good. I remember feel­ing hungry for something that would prove the futility and wrong-headedness of everything that had been in vogue since 1932.

Suddenly, there seemed to be a general touching of hands all around. Isabel Paterson, a tough-minded literary critic and novelist who had been an enemy and had become a friend, called me one day in 1944 and asked if I would like to meet a man named Leonard Read. We had a talk in a Manhat­tan hotel room about the sources of human energy. Leonard had been arguing out on the Pacific Coast that man was a natural self-starter, responsible for the dis­position of his own energy on projects of his own choice. Isabel had just published her The God of the Machine, which proved with mathematical rigor that high-energy economies are incompatible with collectivist or intervention­ist regimes. The meeting with Leonard Read led to other intro­ductions. Ayn Rand was just be­ginning her astounding career as a writer of fictional parables—that’s what Isabel Paterson called them—designed to prove the self-starter point. Leonard knew busi­nessmen who wanted to know writers who supported the free­dom philosophy, and I heard his friend, Jasper Crane, a member of the du Pont Company, talk ap­provingly of Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom.

A few years passed, and the trickles had become a river. The Viennese economists, Mises and Hayek, were welcomed in this country and found their natural allies in Henry Hazlitt, Aaron Di­rector, John Davenport, and Law­rence Fertig. Leonard Read formed the Foundation for Eco­nomic Education. And Buck Weaver, taking a bit here and a bit there, quoting from Isabel Paterson, and relying on the his­torical vistas unfolded in Rose Wilder Lane‘s book, did his great job of synthesis. It seems fitting that the Foundation for Economic Education should now be bring­ing it out again with some changes suggested by Buck Weaver just before his death.

The Nature of Man

Weaver doesn’t write as an orthodox supporter of any reli­gion. But he sees man as a mys­terious entity who, to some ex­tent, shares the faculties of his Creator. Men have wills, they dis­pose of energy. If they are not coerced or cowed they are inven­tive, they make tools, they trans­form their environments within certain physical limits. This is all part of their nature as men. But men can deny their own creativity, and have frequently done so in the course of checkered human his­tory. Mr. Weaver speaks of the pagan ages in which men believed in sacrificing the individual to the "higher" good. The pagans saw the universe ruled by the whims of a variety of gods. They were used to thinking of man as some­thing that was controlled by some Authority outside himself. And, with this submissive psychology, pagan man let those who claimed to be priests of the gods take over the direction of his energy.

The triumph of the Christian view of life released the human being from the will-of-the-swarm pagan idea. Following Rose Wilder Lane‘s schematization, Weaver tells of the three attempts to found a civilization based on the idea that man is free to do good or evil in the sight of God. The first attempt took place in ancient Israel, where Abraham insisted that man controls himself and Moses brought the Ten Command­ments—each of which is addressed "to the individual as a self-con­trolling person"—to the Israelites after their escape from bondage in Egypt.

The Saracen Contribution

The first attempt failed within the boundaries of ancient Israel, but Christ spoke to the individual, and the Christian church became the carrier of the ideas of Abra­ham and Moses through the feudal age to the present. Meanwhile, the Saracens took over the idea that man is a self-starter.

When I first read Rose Wilder Lane’s story of the rise of the Saracenic civilization, I had a hard time squaring it with the apathy of the Moslem lands as they exist today. Her accounts of the rise of the great Saracen universities, from Persia and Cairo to Spain, was an eye-opener. It seems that these universities had no organ­ization, no program, no prescribed curriculum, no departments, no ex­aminations. People enrolled to study as they willed, and went to listen to the teachers that appealed to them. Whatever the effect of such permissiveness on the whole body of students, the Saracen scientists came up with the con­cept of zero, which makes modern mathematics—and, indeed, the whole of modern civilization—possible. Without zero there would be no modern engineering, no chemistry, no measurements of substance or space.

The Rose Wilder Lane view of the Saracens is endorsed by Henry Grady Weaver. It makes one al­most wish that Charles Martel hadn’t beaten back the Moors at the Battle of Tours, which saved northern Europe from a conquest by Mohammedans. But the mili­tary defeat of the Saracens hardly mattered, for the western Chris­tianized world took over much that the Saracens had developed. As Mrs. Lane and Mr. Weaver both put it, the freedom of the Saracen world seeped into Europe via Spain and Italy even as the Sara­cens themselves were being pushed back to the African side of the Mediterranean.

An odd perspective offered by Weaver is that the chivalric be­havior of Saracens in the Holy Land was imitated by English Crusaders, and became the basis for the British code of the gentle­man. The liberties that the chival­ric English gentleman permitted were exported in time to the Brit­ish colonies in North America. In defending these liberties against the repressive government of King George III, the colonists launched the third great attempt to build a civilization on the idea that every human being is a free agent, responsible to himself for the right disposition of his energies.

It’s a great story that Mr. Weaver has to tell, but it is far from being the story that is gen­erally accepted today. However, the idea of freedom is on the march. There were only a few of us to champion the idea that man is a self-starter back in 1944, when Isabel Paterson and Rose Wilder Lane were first being read. But today the freedom movement, which is sometimes called the con­servative movement, is really per­colating. "Buck" Weaver would be surprised at the extent of his modern public.

The Rewards of Competition

The following explanation of the significance of open competition was offered at the presentation of a $2,000 scholarship at a recent Junior Achievement award dinner in Seattle:

"The fact that there is but one scholarship to be given to the best in 500 membership has in itself created a situation where each student has put forth his very best in time and effort to endeavor to win. Think a moment, of the motivation to you students, if we lived under socialism’s idealistic concept of equality for all—and the award had been announced as 500 scholarships worth $4.00 each."