President Ronald
Reagan? The Gipper? A distributist? Yes — at least according to John Chamberlain in
his July 8, 1981 These Days column, “Everything Back to
the Electorate.” Chamberlain, who anticipated
today’s Chesterton revival by a few years, compared Reagan favorably to G.K.
Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Possibly
outraging many who even then equated distributism with “democratic” or other
forms of socialism, Chamberlain claimed that the problem with England and its
“Nanny State” was that they had gone over to Fabian socialism instead of to distributism.
What caused
Chamberlain’s Chestertonian chatter (sorry)?
On June 22, 1981, Governor Pete Du Pont of Delaware signed into law
House Bill 31. And what was special
about that? The bill made broadened
capital ownership and Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) official policy to
be encouraged by all state agencies. As
President Reagan (1911-2004) said in a congratulatory note he sent to Du Pont the
day of the signing,
The General Assembly of the State of Delaware has taken an
important step by the adoption of House Bill 31, which makes it the policy of
the state to encourage the broadening of the base of capital ownership among
the people of the state. I have long
believed that the widespread distribution of private property ownership is
essential to the preservation of individual liberty, to the strength of our
competitive free enterprise economy, and to our republican form of government.
This was not the
first time Reagan had declared his strong support for expanded ownership, nor
would it be the last. As governor of
California he had stated in a speech before the Young Americans for Freedom on
July 20, 1974 that the United States needs an “Industrial Homestead Act” to
continue and expand on Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 land-based initiative.
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| ESOP inventor Louis Kelso |
It was only a few
years after then-Governor Du Pont signed the bill into law that CESJ mobilized bipartisan
political support for Congressional legislation which established the Presidential
Task Force for Project Economic Justice under Reagan. The concept, first conceived in a strategy
paper authored by Norman Kurland, president of CESJ, offered a revolutionary
economic alternative to military solutions to regional conflicts in Central
America and the Caribbean.
Enacted as part
of the International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1985, this
legislation created the first presidential task force funded entirely with
private donations. It was supported by
both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO.
John William
Middendorf II, former Ambassador to the Organization of American States and the
European Community, served as Chairman. Kurland,
CESJ’s president, served as Deputy Chairman.
The Task Force’s
1986 report, High Road to Economic
Justice, was America’s first official endorsement of expanded capital
ownership as a policy for achieving economic democracy, the essential
precondition for reestablishing the natural law foundation of a stable
political order. Some of the Task Force’s
recommendations were adopted into U.S. foreign policy. They were also included as one of the World
Bank’s “market based” options for debt-equity conversions through ESOPs.
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| Alberto Martén Chavarría |
Just Third Way supporters
throughout the world praised the initiative, including Don Alberto Martén
Chavarría, founder of Solidarismo Costariccense (which also gave its
endorsement) and an expert on the thought of Father Heinrich Pesch, S.J. Others
included the controversial Jesuit Father Claudio Solano, founder of the John
XXIII Social School in San José, Costa Rica.
It was on the
occasion of CESJ’s delivery of the report at a White House ceremony that Reagan
gave the speech lauding the Task Force’s efforts and the work of the CESJ
representatives. He made special mention
of the program of La Perla coffee plantation in Guatemala, where worker owners
had taken arms against communist insurgents to protect their lives, liberty,
and property. Previously, workers had
either run away or joined the insurgents.
In addition to
making a reference to Lincoln’s Homestead Act, Reagan declared, “what will change despair into
confidence, deprivation into plenty, stagnation into upward mobility, is a
commitment to human freedom and an understanding of how that relates to the
economic progress of mankind.”
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| Audience with Pope John Paul II |
A copy of the
Task Force report was also presented to
His Holiness Pope John Paul II in a private audience at the Vatican in company
with representatives of Polish Solidarity.
It was on this occasion that the pope gave his personal encouragement of
the work of CESJ.
In 1988, CESJ
members and friends funded the Polish translation of the Task Force orientation
book, Every Worker an Owner. Forty thousand copies of the translation were
distributed throughout Solidarity channels in Poland prior to the dismantling
of the Soviet Union. Copies (in English)
were sent under cover letter in May 1988 to every USAID mission around the
world.
November 1991 saw
a CESJ delegation travel to Rome to present the English and Polish versions of Every
Worker an Owner to John Paul II in a Vatican ceremony. At CESJ’s all-day seminar presenting the Just
Third Way to Church leaders and scholars, Achille Cardinal Silvestrini
presented the first Global Awards for Value-Based Management
to the heads of three worker-owned companies on behalf of CESJ.
As a result of
the Rome conference, CESJ’s most important collection of essays, Curing World Poverty: The New Role of
Property, was compiled and published in 1994 by the Social Justice
Review, the official journal of the Central Bureau of the Catholic Central
Union of America in St. Louis, Missouri. Approximately 5,000 copies were distributed,
reaching high-level policy makers, business executives, labor officials,
scholars, and religious leaders worldwide.
As for Reagan’s
speech at the ceremony to present the report of the Task Force . . . that is
what we will look at tomorrow.
#30#
