University of Virginia Library

Colloquium

Restoration Of Individual Liberties

By CHRISTIAN WHITE

(The following was submitted
in response to this newspaper's
quasi-endorsement of Richard
Nixon, Mr. White is a
third-year law student and
chairman of Students for
Schmitz.–Ed.)

Now for the American Party:
it is a very different institution
from the one that George
Wallace created in 1968; Mr.
Wallace's people are gone from
the top positions, having been
replaced by such men as T.
Coleman Andrews as national
chairman (a post that didn't
even exist when Wallace was
connected to the party, save
perhaps in a shadow-sense).
The philosophical emphasis has
also changed. Indeed, the focus
of the party has changed so
much that:

—Nicholas von Hoffman,
The Washington Post's house
New Leftist, said in his column
of August 7, 1972, that the
party was neither racist nor
anti-Semitic;

—At the insistence of the
national chairman, Mr.
Andrews, the flags of the
Protestant, Catholic and Jewish
faiths were ranked behind the
national flag at the convention
in Louisville, Ky., at which
Congressman John G. Schmitz
of California became the
party's candidate (the
American Party explicitly
professes a belief in God, and
considers any faith sharing
such a belief worthy of esteem
and party recognition); further,
Mr. Andrews has made any
action by a party member
which tends to impute religious
bigotry to the Party ground for
discipline, up to and including
purgation from the party;

—Clay Smothers, a black
man from Texas, delivered a
major address at the
convention in Louisville, and
very nearly took the
Vice-presidential nomination.

It is true that Wallace created
the party. He did so, however,
as a "one-time-only" vehicle for
his own political action. After
the election of 1968 he
proceeded to largely ignore the
party, and evidently expected
it to die without him. He had a
sound basis for that
expectation; he had staffed the
most vital positions in it with
his own people, and he pulled
them out with him when he
lost the 1968 election.

The party, however, surprised
him; It survived without his
personnel, his money, and his
presence, and developed to the
point which he could no longer
dictate to it. That was part of
the reason that he ran as a
Democrat this year; if he built
another structure from the
ground up, he could control it
utterly, and the American
Party was no longer "steerable"
to that degree. It had
developed its own interests and
intents, including:

—Restoration of the
individual's liberties, by
limiting the powers and
authority of government at all
levels to that which the
nation's founding fathers
intended. (Wherefore Vietnam
is "unconstitutional"; the
Constitution requires that wars
be declared by Congress, not
by executive fiat.)

—Restoration of government
of, by, and for the citizens, not
the special interests such as big
business, industry-wide labor,
or cultural voting blocs. Where
these groups clash with one
another, the American Party
stands neutral; where they seek
things which would harm the
country as a whole, the party
opposes them.

—Restoration of a
non-interventionist foreign
policy, one which avoids the
"entangling alliances" George
Washington warned us against.

—Restoration of a
governmental size and
structure that does not daily
oppress the citizenry or parts
thereof, as the current one now
does. The American Party
recalls, as the Democrats and
Republicans evidently do not,
that Washington equated
"government" with "force",
terming it "a dangerous servant
and a fearful master," and that
Jefferson said "...bind it down
with the chains of the
Constitution," and is ready to
act on those precepts.

None of these things has to do
with the power and prestige of
G. C. Wallace, so Wallace isn't
interested; indeed, he hasn't
even endorsed Schmitz though
he can't run himself. Wallace
wants to keep his monopoly on
third-party power"; the
American Party threatens that,
so Wallace won't touch....

And in spite of its
now-outgrown origins, isn't the
A. P., and its candidate, better
than the alternatives? The
Democrats present us with a
"gentleman" who, faced with an
unfortunate choice of a
running-mate publicly gave his
solemn word of honor to keep
the man on the ticket and then
broke it a week later, and the
Republicans present us with a
man who built a group
amounting, in reality, to a
non-official government
agency; that group, thereafter,
proceeded to conduct itself
more like Hitler's Gestapo or
Stalin's NKVD than like a
legitimate campaign
organization. Look at it
clearly: government people are
spying on their opponents in
order to stay in power. Doesn't
that smack of dictatorialism?

With that pair of
organizations for its
competition in the field of
morality, how can the
American Party lose? Even if it
were racist, which it isn't, the
other two would be no better
than on its level.