Some ninety years ago, Rose Wilder Lane penned "Give Me Liberty," extolling the remarkable freedoms Americans had, especially in contrast to their European counterparts. Written in the 1930s, Lane's piece is both a stirring defense of American freedoms and a damning portrait of European societies still writhing under the weight of bureaucratic statism. Written just as the state interventions of Roosevelt's New Deal began to bite, her notes stand as a useful portal into a different era—challenging and checking our current assumptions about the trajectory of transatlantic liberty. In a nutshell, Europe has leapt forward since Lane's day, while America has wallowed, indeed probably regressed, on the frontiers of individual liberty. Revisited today, Lane's observations prompt an uncomfortable question: what if the roles have reversed?

Lane wrote from direct experience. Having spent years in 1920s Europe, first as a writer for the Red Cross and later as a roving correspondent, she saw a remarkable cross-section of European society from France to Albania as it dug itself out of the ruins of World War I. Her essential observation was that Europe, in terms of exercising freedom, was frightfully retrograde—"for all the years of my residence in Europe," she wrote, "a great many obstacles were enforced upon me by the police-power of the men ruling the European States."

Her examples are vivid. She reminded her American readers that they thankfully "were not obliged," as Europeans then were, "to carry at all times a police card, renewed and paid for at intervals, bearing our pictures properly stamped and stating our names, ages, addresses" and other personal details. They sound suspiciously like today's driver's licenses, which, while not technically required "at all times," are effectively required for general day-to-day life, especially travel. As we know them now, this form of identity card did not unfold US-wide until the 1940s. Lane would no doubt be shocked.

She was horrified, after all, by police raids in Budapest where working-class neighborhoods were upended in the name of "public order" and their "workingmen's cards" checked to ensure they were employed in their proper capacity. Lane noted that the working families' "terror at the sight of uniforms was abject. All rose meekly and raised their hands. The policemen grinned with the peculiar enjoyment of human beings in possessing such power." Such raids are more or less unheard of in Europe today, yet bear an uncanny resemblance to the ICE raids sweeping America coast-to-coast now. Regardless of where one comes down on the proper enforcement of immigration, the fact that modern America so resembles Europe of the 1920s should give us pause.