John Basil Barnhill

American writer & anti-socialist debater · early 20th century

John Basil Barnhill was an American writer and public debater active in the early 1900s. He is remembered chiefly for the 1912 Barnhill–Tichenor Debate on Socialism, published in 1914, in which he argued against socialism opposite Henry M. Tichenor. In his “Indictment of Socialism (#3)” he wrote the liberty-and-tyranny couplet that would later be rephrased and, decades on, misattributed to Thomas Jefferson.

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“When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny”

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