The Heroes of Liberalism

Who are those people on the cover?

THE FIRST LIBERAL tracks the Liberal Revolution from

Jesus, to Locke, to Jefferson , to Franklin ,

to Voltaire, to Gladstone , to FDR!

Today, we all stand on the shoulders of those who had the genius to observe what others could not see, and the courage to hold their ideals through storms of censure. These remarkable individuals were the clarifiers of history, and the heroes to all who value human progress.

Jesus created Liberalism on the day he said, "Love Thy Neighbor". LTN is the most meaningful difference between Liberals and Conservatives. The First Liberal is a secular investigation of Jesus' socio-political ideas that have become the basis for all Liberal and Progressive thought. Listen to a Liberal's election rhetoric, and you'll hear about education, health care, consumer protection, equal opportunity and a cleaner environment. Listen to Conservatives, and you'll hear about taxes, making money, exploiting the planet, pushing other countries around, and war.

Copernicus (1473 -1543)

You could say that Copernicus was a high achiever. In addition to being an accomplished mathematician , doctor, diplomat and economist , he just happened to discover and map the Solar System. The ancient Greeks had observed that the earth revolved around the sun; but in 1543, the pedants in power were not willing to see the earth as anything less than the center of the universe. Copernicus defied them when he described the Solar System as we now know it. That took intellectual grit, and Liberals admire nothing more.

Galileo Galilei (1564 -1642)

Those who like Copernicus, absolutely love Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist who made the first astronomical telescope and confirmed most of Copernicus' theory of the solar system, but was censured by the thought police of the Inquisition. In 1616, a group of the Catholic Church's scientific consultants officially banned Copernicus' paper, "De revolutionibus," which stated that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. Galileo objected strenuously, but his reward was house arrest for life.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

Many historians recognize Baruch Spinoza as the first modern Liberal philosopher. He held that intellect is humankind's most valued asset, and, like Thomas Jefferson a century later, Spinoza discarded all the folklore that couldn't be confirmed. This gave him (and us) a much clearer view of history, religion and philosophy. Historians note that Jefferson had Spinoza's complete works in his library at Monticello.

John Locke (1632-1704)

One of Locke's works, "On the Reasonableness of Christianity" in 1695, in which he selected the "reasonable" comments of Jesus in terms of social harmony, was the foundation of his writing on the social contract. Many of the resounding sentiments on human rights that echo through the declarations of the American and French Revolutions are traceable to this work. Locke had a noticeable influence on Voltaire, and his ideas seem to simmer to the surface in the writings of Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson and, consequently, the Marquis de Lafayette.

Voltaire (1694-1778)

Imagine the courage it took to speak out for civil liberties, freedom of religious thought and citizens' rights to fair trials, while Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were in power. Voltaire was everything in France that Thomas Paine was in America. He wrote essays in defense of open courts, free speech, and the right of public assembly. Even more daring, he was critical of the powers that controlled Europe, from the crowned heads of royalty, to the mitered heads of the clergy.

Benjamin Franklin ( 1706 - 1790 )

Now it can be told: Franklin was a secret agent, a roving informer, a credentialed diplomat and a hail-fellow-well-met who hobnobbed in London and Paris, ostensibly to promote good will for the colonies by creating international liaisons and agreements. But there's more. Franklin was a close friend of Voltaire and other intellectuals whom he may have influenced to follow the United States in the greatest one-two punch of Liberalism in world history -- The American and French revolutions.

Thomas Jefferson ( 1743 - 1826 )

One could almost say that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Mason and James Madison took Jesus' words and translated them into a country. Their ideas for the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights were built on a rock they borrowed from the Sermon on the Mount. The foundation was Jesus' sense of justice, his love of peace, and his concern for the rights of others. These were drawn in secular fashion, without reference to the reverential matters that Jesus also discussed.

Marquis de Lafayette ( 1757 - 1834 )

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence set Lafayette on fire. He set sail for America in 1777, where Congress commissioned him, and within a month he was in combat. After the American victory, he returned to France, and was a prime contributor to the Declaration of the Rights of Man , yet another milestone on the worldwide road to Liberalism. Over a hundred years later, when American troops went to help the French in WWI, they carried a banner that said, " Lafayette, we are here."

Thomas Malthus ( 1766 - 1834 )

Malthus did the math on population growth in 1798, and saw that our species' geometric progression would inevitably lead to the consumption of all the space, air and food the planet could provide. So far, it looks like he may have been right. Even now, when you consider the degradation of our air and water quality, which are responsible for all the other ecological ills we have, the net cause is the planet's burgeoning population. (By this time next year, there'll be about 75 million more of us.)

Charles Darwin (1809-1882

Darwin's observations of natural processes clashed with the most basic principles of faith, history and nature that he had honored all his life. As he made these discoveries, he challenged them in the hope that he could prove them wrong and preserve the comfort of his religion, social place and peace of mind. He knew that the road of a dissenter was a rocky one, and he had no wish to lose his status as a privileged belonger in English life. But Darwin was a scientist, and in the contest of truth and folklore, there was no contest.

Harriet Tubman (1822-1913)

Harriet Tubman was the first woman to lead a U.S. military action. She worked as a spy for the North during the Civil War , and an operation that she planned and led, resulted in the liberation of more than 750 slaves. A memorial plaque honoring her victory stands as a permanent testimony to that battle, and it's celebrated every March 10 , the day of her death. During WW II, a US Liberty ship named the SS Harriet Tubman was launched.

Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

Debs was maligned, rebuffed, denounced and jailed for trying to promote world peace abroad, and a living wage at home. He was a labor leader who steered workers through the most violent storms in American labor-management history. Debs was convicted for his views and his union activities on more than one occasion, and withstood accusations of being an anarchist, a traitor and a violator of every anti-labor law on the books; yet, he was a candidate for U.S. President five times.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt ( 1882 - 1945 ),

FDR was the thirty-second President of the United States . Elected to four consecutive terms of office. Roosevelt is consistently ranked as one of the greatest U.S. presidents. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Roosevelt created the New Deal to provide relief for the unemployed , recovery of the economy , and reform of the economic and banking systems. Many of his programs still have instrumental roles in American life, such as the FDIC , TVA , and the SEC . One of his most important legacies is the Social Security system .

Harry S . Truman ( 1884 - 1972 )

Truman succeeded FDR, and presided over the second half of Liberalism's Finest Hour, which was begun by Roosevelt. Under Truman, the armed forces were de-segregated, the Marshall Plan rebuilt war-torn Europe, and the GI Bill made Americans the best-educated people on the world. (A title we no longer hold.) Truman's presidency also fostered the founding of the United Nations , the creation of NATO, and the Truman Doctrine to contain communism.

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)

Sanger was a nurse who had to fight against societal, governmental, superstitious and religious pressures, just to protect women from the sometimes-tragic consequences of unwanted pregnancies. Long before law or custom would permit, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League which eventually became known as Planned Parenthood . At the age of 72, she enlisted the aid of Dr. Gregory Pincus, a research biologist, whom she inspired (and helped fund) to create the world's first medication that could make a woman immune to fertilization.

Frank Capra (1897 - 1991 )

Capra lived the American dream, from Italy via Ellis Island, to Hollywood. Many of his films ended with crowd scenes like the one in It's a Wonderful Life that showed the power of ordinary people when they act together. His movies were encapsulations of the Liberal ideal -- nobody could boss you around if you worked hard and fought clean, -- and people with new ideas could get to the top, and there was no prejudice, no class warfare, and no hatred.

Charles Hamilton Houston ( 1895 - 1950 )
and Thurgood Marshall (1908 - 1993)

These are the men who set the stage for America's modern Civil Rights revolution. Marshall was the brilliant young man -- and Houston, his law-school dean and forward-planning mentor. Their eventual legal victories wiped the cruel principle of "Separate but Equal" educational facilities off the books, and extended the good intentions of the Constitution to America's minorities. Marshall scored a succession of solid victories over state-sponsored discrimination. The pinnacle was undoubtedly Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which was the tipping point in the battle for equal educational opportunity in America. The decision overturned earlier precedents reaching all the way back to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1846.

By the time Marshall was invited to become an Associate Supreme Court Justice, he had already racked up more victories before that court than any other American in history. Houston and Marshall were much more than good lawyers - they were the surgical team that removed the last legal vestiges of the most shameful episode in American history.

Jonas Salk (1914-1995)

Jonas Salk was an unexpected man. He was not expected to become a doctor, because when he was young, anti-Semitism closed the doors to most American medical schools. Later, when he worked on the polio vaccine, he was not expected to succeed because he used killed viri instead of live ones. And even after his vaccine worked, he was not expected to pass up the millions he could have made by owning its patent. Instead, Salk gave it away. He answered questions about that, unexpectedly, too. "Who owns my polio vaccine? The people! Could you patent the sun?"

Of course, Liberals also admire Socrates, Isaac Newton, Tom Paine, George Sand, Frederick Douglass, John Peter Altgeld, Emma Lazarus, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, A. Philip Randolph, Ben Hecht, Buckminster Fuller, Brock Chisholm, Clifford Odets, James Albert Pike, Betty Friedan, John Maynard Keynes, John Henry Faulk, Edward R. Murrow, Andrei Sakharov, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Moyers, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Atwood, Richard Leakey, Neil DeGrasse Tyson , and all the other thinkers who dared to show us the world as it really is, and were not cowed by organized thought-suppressors. But the one Great Clarifier whom most Liberals agree took the most heat for defending the highest principles, was Jesus.

Next: Six Surprising Findings

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