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J. Gresham Machen
Presbyterian Theologian (1881-1937)

On Threats to Human Freedom

Contra the creation of a Federal Department of Education in 1926

Some persons … think that an objection to socialism is that it would not work. But so far as [I am] concerned … [my] objection [is] rather than it might possibly work. So it is with this federal control of education. The better it works, the worse it suits me…. I am not inclined to do what a great many people do today; I am not inclined to write freedom in quotation marks as though it were a sort of joke. I believe, on the contrary, that it is something that is very real. An ounce of freedom is worth a pound of efficiency…. And we do not want, in any form whatever, the slavery that a federal Department of Education would bring.

J. Gresham Machen, "Shall We Have a Federal Department of Education?"
The Woman Patriot 15 February 1926, 27.