On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company sold its first car. Less than 30 years later, Aldous Huxley satirized Ford’s assembly line procedures in his novel Brave New World. Arguably, both the assembly line and the satire advanced freedom.
“New thinking. Unleashing growth that creates opportunity. Promoting development that lifts all people out of poverty.Supporting democracy that gives citizens their say. Advancing the security and justice that delivers peace. Respecting the human rights of all people. These are the keys to progress — not just in Africa, but around the world.”
Remarks by President Obama to the People of Africa at Mandela Hall, African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (July 28, 2015).
I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in The World Tomorrow (May 1928).
On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate voted down Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court packing scheme.
“Yes, in our world, old thinking can be a stubborn thing. That’s one of the reasons why we need term limits — old people think old ways.”
Remarks by President Obama to the People of Africa at Mandela Hall, African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (July 28, 2015).
On July 21, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a public school classroom, and fined $100. 
The ambiguous legacy of the trial would continue — for decades, even to the present — to reveal the tensions inherent within a school system run by government and funded by taxpayers.
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success.
Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity
(1877).
Born on July 20, 1754, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy, French philosopher and economist. Perhaps best remembered for coining the term “ideology,” he didn’t mean by that term what scornful Napoleon and communist Karl Marx later turned it into — for Destutt de Tracy ideology meant “the science of ideas,” a unified approach to all knowledge, from epistemology to social theory.
Though his family had been enobled twice, he renounced the title and entered the 1789 Estates General conference as a member of the Third Estate. During the Reign of Terror, he was imprisoned, and would have been executed had not Robespierre got to the scaffold ahead of him.
Two of his books became popular in early 19th century America, his commentaries on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and his Traité de la volonté, which Thomas Jefferson, the editor of the American edition, retitled A Treatise on Political Economy. Tracy’s economics was of a deductivist stripe, familiar to readers of later economists such as Nassau Senior and Ludwig von Mises.
Destutt de Tracy’s politics was republican, and his preferred economic policy was laissez-faire.
Interference of any kind . . . in the spontaneous direction of industry, and the free employment by their owners of the great agents in production, labour, land, and capital, has the certain effect of benumbing their power and lessening the sum of production, and consequently the shares, of the producing parties; as well as of needlessly, and therefore unjustly, curtailing their freedom of action.
G. Poulett Scrope, M.P., Principles of Political Economy, Deduced from the Natural Laws of Social Welfare, and Applied to the Present State of Britain (1833), p. 231.
“Bloomers” were introduced at a Women’s Rights Convention that opened on July 19, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. Named after one of this article of clothing’s chief promoters, Amelia Bloomer, a women’s rights activist, the basic idea was to tastefully allow women a stylish and modest freedom of movement (the dresses of the day were notoriously constricting). The style did not exactly catch on, and it would be a long time before women would be allowed, by cultural convention, to wear pants.
Cartoon image is from 1851, entitled “Woman’s Emancipation.”