Frank Chodorov Quotes
Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.
Chodorov, Frank. The Income Tax: Root of All Evil. New York: Devin-Adair Co., 1954.
The University Presidents had written to the American Public arguing that the German aggression was the result of the militarists in the German society dominating the people and pushing them to war. They argued that most German people were not really responsible. Lamprecht took exception and argued that the German policy was the democratic will of the majority of the German people. He claimed that Germany at the time was more of a de facto democracy than America—as the Untied States did not have a Voting Rights Act or any way of de facto ensuring that all citizens could vote—particularly Negroes in the South. While he was accurate about the voting aspects of a democracy, Germany neither had the Constitution nor a judiciary that was independent and co-equal to the executive and legislature, but Germany did not have the institutions with democratic traditions. The greatest embarrassment to modern Germans is that Adolf Hitler was actually elected by a majority of Germans and was very popular until things in Germany started to go poorly. This quotation is very important in that it shows the importance of a Constitution to limit the powers of even a popularly elected government.
He was referring to Negroes who did not then have the fight to vote.
Even after the South was defeated in the Civil War, most Southern politicians strove to keep the newly freed Blacks from voting. The vehicle they chose to attain that purpose was the concept of States’ Rights where the states were the sole determiners of who could and could not vote. The majority of the country rejected that view and the Constitution was amended to allow Black men to vote. After reconstruction Black voting in the South was curtailed substantiality by devices such as poll taxes and literacy requirements and terror and intimidation. It was not until the latter part of the 20th century that most Blacks could vote in the Southern States.
1st Baron Macaulay. Macaulay was opposed to universal suffrage, and when John Stuart Mill and others started a movement for allowing all males to vote, this was one of the tactics to stave off allowing the lower classes to vote.
Frank Chodorov was an American member of the Old Right, a group of libertarian thinkers who were non-interventionist in foreign policy and opposed to both the American entry into World War II and the New Deal. He was called by Ralph Raico "the last of the Old Right greats."
