Word: authoritarianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...threat to press freedom. The Liberal Winnipeg Free Press called it "a discriminatory tax ... on the movement of ideas." Toronto's Tory Telegram said it was a "vicious" tax that "should cause concern in every editor's office." The Liberal Victoria Times called it "a discriminatory and authoritarian measure," the Vancouver News-Herald saw it as "a stride toward censorship," and the London Free Press, taking note of a similar affair on the other side of the border (see below), pointed out that "the same government which protested to the U.S. against discriminatory action against a Canadian brewery...
...Senator McCarthy's witch hunts, the Americans for Democratic Action has recently assumed its own air of inquisitorial self-righteousness. Last week the national headquarters intervened to prevent Alger Hiss from speaking at the Swarthmore chapter of the ADA. Since the national organization gave no other grounds for its authoritarian behavior, its action obviously represents an attempt to raise a facade of political respectability...
Jersey City was just the place for Hague. Its citizens were mostly immigrants who had in common only their bewilderment at the strange ways of American democracy and their Old-World respect for the authoritarian hand of the state. Autocratic Frank Hague rose from constable to city hall custodian to membership on the Street and Water Board to city commissioner. In 1917 Hague took over as mayor, and two years later he struck for state power by successfully backing Edward I. Edwards for governor of New Jersey. By 1922, when he was elected Democratic national committeeman, Hague was recognized...
...obsessive liberalism" of the present day-"that frightened and frantic pursuit of freedom alone and at all costs." Obsessive liberalism, he said, "not only seeks an excess of freedom but denies any function to authority save that which is temporary, remedial-and for others. It has made 'authoritarian' a bad word in the semantics of our day. It has proliferated committees in defense of every freedom, but none to uphold authority. It has identified social progress only with the expansion of liberties and the severing of authority's bonds. Basically and most dangerously, it is egocentric...
Dictators and their apologists like to say that authoritarian government makes for economic efficiency, that loss of liberty is balanced by material gains. Not even that illusory apology holds up in the case of Argentina's Juan Perón, whose government last week released the first full and coherent set of statistics on how the economy has fared since Perón took over the government of Argentina...