 I know of no way of judging the future but by the past. Our topic this afternoon, assuming that I do not croak in the middle of it, is a history of the modern libertarian movement. And it's a bit lighter than some of the things we've been covering. Instructions about what to and not to do to these microphones. Well, we've all had a long day. That's not making any worse than it has to be. I will go over, I'll warn you that in advance, probably by about 15 minutes. And I've got about three minutes before my mouth dries up completely, so pray for Christina. In his talk on classical liberalism, his rise and decline, Rao Freco really concluded with the death of several key figures. He mentioned William Graham Sumner, Gustave Nimo, and Ari Herbert Spencer. We can mention several others, including Lord Acton. People who had been active throughout the 19th century who died roughly around the time of World War I. Lord Morley, John Morley, whose lacked official act in politics was to resign from the Esquith Cabinet over World War I. Said that he wanted to be remembered of him, that he never sat for one moment on a war cabinet. He resigned and eventually retired from British life to write his recollections, and he dies about the end of World War I. However, in getting to the modern libertarian movement, there are three individuals I like to treat in about over the next five or six minutes, who I think are quite the key in understanding the growth of the modern libertarian movement. And that's H. L. Menken, Ludwig von Mises, and Albert J. Nock. These people are all very interesting, if only because they were active, and perhaps the only intellectuals that active throughout the 1920s and 30s, on a broad range of subject material which was going to lead. That is water. You took it out of the fountain. Is that enough? For the first five minutes, huh? Where do I get my hands on the rest of that book of yours? They were active throughout the 1920s and 30s in a way that no one else really was. These are exciting times. They're lonely times for these individuals, but exciting. And that led to a number of things happening. A certain element of this talk this evening is going to be pure chronology, combined with sort of some of the fleshing in of some of the writings and work that was being done, some of the personalities here, some of them you know, quite well, some of them you don't. The easiest to start with is H. L. Menken. Menken was born September 12th, 1880, which is to say it places him a year older than von Mises. He was born in 1881. He became a newspaper man early on, and with only a very good high school education behind him, became one of the deans of American letters. He really became one of the most prominent and preeminent intellectuals of his age. His first book was published in 1905. It was on George Bernard Shaw. A couple of years later, he published the first American book on Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout the 1910s, he was co-editor with George G. Nathan of the SmartSet magazine, sort of a literary magazine where Menken started to make his mark. Menken began really to reach the peak of his influence. When in 1924, he and Albert Knopf, Knopf Publishing, began publishing the American Mercury magazine. For the first year, it was edited by Menken and George Dean Nathan. In 1925, Nathan stepped down to the role of contributing editor, and H. L. Menken remained as a sole editor from then, 1925 until 1933. Menken then wrote for the New Yorker, the Baltimore Evening Sun, full-time, and had a stroke in 1948 which put him out of commission, and he was dead eight years later at the age of 75 in 1956. I bring up H. L. Menken because he had vast influence during his lifetime. He really began a career as a journalist in 1899 at the age of 18, and quickly began to see himself as a critic of ideas. The American Mercury was a particularly important magazine during this period. Not only did it publish people like Albert J. Knopf and certain other quasi-libertarian or classical liberals, it was also a forum for World War I revisionism, for criticism of the foibles of government policy of all sorts. Basically, a satirical, scathing magazine. It nevertheless had a very, very great influence during its time. In a book on Menken, George H. Douglas wrote, the book is called H. L. Menken published in 1978, that quote, No magazine of such consistently high standards had been produced before in America. No American magazine had dared to develop a character so completely its own. No magazine produced before in America had been so completely American in its style and outlook. That just gives you a sense of the prestige of the American Mercury. It was really the preeminent monthly magazine of ideas and current issues in American intellectual life, particularly throughout the 1920s. But even sarcasm really seemed to be the Menken Fort. He really ripped into all sorts of pretentious ideas, movements, people. He held no one up as an idol, although according to Douglas, Menken was heavily influenced during his youth and 20s. By the writer William Graham Sumner, the dean of American classical liberals and the disciple of Herbert Spencer. I'll give you a sense of what Menken used to write here as a quote about government, a typical sort of target, a typical sort of style. Menken wrote, quote, The government at Washington is no more impersonal than the cloak and suit business is impersonal. It is operated by precisely the same sort of men and to almost the same ends. When we say that it has decided to do this or that, that it proposes or aspires to do this or that, usually to the great cost and inconvenience of nine-tenths of us, we simply say that a definite man or group of men has decided to do it or proposes to do it. And when we examine this group of men realistically, we almost always invariably find that it is composed of individuals who not only not superior to the general range of men, but are plainly and depressingly inferior, both in common sense and in common decency. That the acts of government we are called upon to ratify and submit to is, in its essence, no more than an act of self-interest by men who, if there was no mystical authority standing behind them, would have had a hard time of it surviving in the struggle for existence. Menken's whole style to his writing was a kind of sarcasm and withering ridicule. He was a master of the English language, a master of hyperbole, and probably the greatest American essayist in the 19th or 20th centuries. His role in American intellectual life during this period of time was rather commanding. Nevertheless, Menken really drifted from the scene as soon as the Great Depression hit, and probably because the sort of sarcasm and withering ridicule that you could dump on all manner of people, their aspirations and pretensions during the 1920s, an area of prosperity, is really significantly different from what you can get away with in a period of the Great Depression. When he tried to tear down Roosevelt with the same kind of rhetorical style that he did other people in the 1930s, his influence really began to wane. It's because intellectuals did not seem Menken really as an original thinker proposing any particular ideology or really any particular set of principles. He was more the critic than he was the builder. He was not really an ancestor of any movement, but more an ancestor of a certain style of approaching political issues. Nevertheless, he did publish a great many important individuals in the American Mercury, not the least of whom was Albert J. Nock, and really opened up the pages of the American Mercury to a wide-ranging criticism of American ideas. He was a very call for personality. When the city of Boston censored the American Mercury for carrying a short essay on prostitution, they banned it in Boston, and Menken took a copy of the banned issue, several copies in fact, to sell on a prominent street quarter outside of City Hall. And there, the mayor and chief of police came to buy the American Mercury. He took the silver coins from them, and in an inimitable Menken gesture, he bit the coins, which was a way of telling whether or not they were genuine or counterfeit. This sort of gives you the sense of what Menken was all about. He was quite a rabble rouser, quite a brilliant intellectual, a brilliant critic, whose influence ultimately was short-lived, if only because he had no program. Two other thinkers now dominant here is a very contextual term. You see, classical liberalism has died. There's almost no one left. The few people who are left are holding up sort of a candle, a remnant of ideas and trying to build toward a future during which time these ideas may take fruit. The two other people I'm going to discuss just in passing are Albert J. Nock and Ludwig von Mises. von Mises, of course, was born in 1881 in Austria. Nock was born in 1870. The difference between them is that Nock died in 1945 because of World War II, while von Mises lived a long and fruitful life dying in the early 1970s. Albert J. Nock had been an Episcopalian minister and a writer who in the 1910s, which is to say in his 40s, steeped himself in the classical liberal and Native American radical tradition literature. He studied people like Jefferson Thoreau, Henry George, Cobb, Brighton, Herbert Spencer. He became a journalist during this period and during World War I he was working as an editor for Oscar Garrison Vallard's Magazine The Nation. For that magazine he wrote a blisteringly radical attack on Wilson's decision to send Samuel Gompers, the conservative anti-radical labor boss, to an international conference of labor and socialist leaders in order to enlist support for Wilson's war plans. Nock became very well known because the post office confiscated this issue of The Nation the first time this has ever happened in the history of the magazine. It demanded suspension of publication. After the war Nock worked with Francis Nielsen, Harry Emerald Barnes, Sidney Fay, Walter Millis, Charles Calantanso and others on World War I revisionism and he published in the early 1920s his book of World War I revisionism, The Myth of a Guilty Nation. Now Nock was something of a loner and was said that in order to reach Nock when he was not around one hand to leave a note for him under a certain rock in Central Park, no one knew anything about his personal life, no one even knew if he had any. It was only at a time of his death that people learned that he had some sons and they had been married for a time. So he was an extremely private man who did a great deal of important writing. His most important book is probably published in 1935. It was called Our Enemy of the State. And to give you a sense of Nock's thought, Nock wrote about history as being a race between state power and social power. Nock built on the thesis of Franz Oppenheimer, who in turn was building on earlier German and French writers, the thesis that there were two and only two means of gaining wealth in human society, the economic means and the political means. The economic means were seen as being the production exchange of wealth, the political means, the expropriation of the wealth of others. The state Nock, like Oppenheimer before him, saw as really the organization of the political means. He saw the goal of American collectivists as being, quote, the complete extinction of social power through its absorption by the state. Nock became more and more important throughout the 1920s, widely published in things like the Atlantic Monthly and the American Mercury, the equivalent, you know, things like commentary and harpers and Atlantic Monthly today. And he had a great deal more to say than Menken in the sense that he was closer to being a systematizer, closer to being a serious intellectual rather than a fun-loving, gregarious, extroverted personality of the stripe that Menken was, really. And he really played quite a foundation for much of libertarian thought later on. He wrote in Artemy of the State, and it should be noted that this book was originally given as a series of advanced history lectures at Columbia University in the early 1930s. He wrote, quote, it is interesting to observe that in the year 1935, the average individual's incurious attitude toward the phenomena of the state is precisely what his attitude was toward the phenomenon of the church in the years, say, of 1500. The state was a very weak institution. The church was very strong. The individual was born into the church as his ancestors had been for generations, and precisely the formal documented fashion in which he is now born into the state. He was taxed for the church's support as he now is for the state's support. He was supposed to accept the official theory and doctrine of the church to conform to its discipline and in general, in a general way to do as it told him. Again, precisely the sanctions the state now lays upon him. If he were reluctant or recalcitrant, the church made a satisfactory amount of trouble for him, as the state now does. Notwithstanding all this, it does not appear to have occurred to the church citizen of that day any more than it occurs to the state citizen of the present to ask what sort of institution it was that claimed his allegiance. Nock was a libertarian who was influenced by Henry George, the position of basically a sound radical libertarianism combined with an unfortunate view of the impropriety of individuals owning property and land. He was a single taxer in short and he later influenced Frank Chodorov, a prominent post-World War II libertarian who in turn influenced people like Murray Rothbard, Leonard Ligio, Ralph Freco and others. To give you a sense of what it was like during the 1930s in America for an intellectual knock-stripe, to give you a sense of the barrenness that he faced, I'll read you one more quote from page 23 of Our Enemy of the State. Quote, it seems the most discreditable thing that this century has not seen produced in America an intellectually respectable presentation of the complete case against the state's progressive confiscations of social power, a presentation that is, which bears the mark of having sound history and a sound philosophy behind it. Mere interested touting of rugged individualism and agonized Faustian about the constitution are so specious, so frankly unscrupulous that they have become contemptible. Consequently, collectivism has easily had the best of it intellectually and the results are now apparent. That's important for me to quote because it gives you a sense of the frustration that an intellectual of Nock's caliber had in the intellectual desert of the 1920s and the 1930s. Mises I will treat here in passing because he is working mostly in Austria, therefore he's not influencing the American libertarian movement at this point in his career. But this just gives you a sense of chronology of where these things fit in is that Mises had served in the Austrian army in World War I and later began his famous private seminar, the private seminar in Austria in Vienna, which was sort of unofficial, unaccredited, but attended by everyone from Fritz Machlub, Oscar Morgenstern, to F. A. Hayek. This seminar took place throughout the 1920s and it was only the first of two major seminars, the other beginning in the late 1940s in the United States. But all in German, Mises began to publish a whole slew of very important works. Socialism appeared in the early 1920s, his book Liberalism, Criticium Interventionism and Nation, State and Economy. I'm giving all the American titles of books published first in German in the 1920s. Something else happens, that's just to give you just sort of an overview very quickly of what intellectual life was like in the 20s and the very early 1930s, which is to say there are no prominent intellectuals, at least not in America, and only slightly so in Europe, who are really holding up the banner of the old-fashioned classical liberal ideals. Mises becomes, in effect, the first of their return. Nock is another who was the first of their return, far less ambitious than Mises, far less scholarly, a better writer perhaps, but nowhere near Mises' rank as a thinker. Although I would say that our enemy of the state is well worth reading. Now starting with our chronology to give sort of a running leap, look at the history of the modern movement, we can go through the 20s very quickly. What of significance happened during the 1920s? There was the Mises Seminar in Austria, Mises publication of books in German in the German language. The beginning of work by Friedrich Hayek, who was working as Mises' assistant doing business cycle research. His first book is published in German in 1928, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle. Something else happens in the 1920s, which is going to bear fruit a few years later. That's that I ran a Russian-Jewish girl, grew up in the Soviet heartland of middle-class Jewish parents, lived through the Russian Revolution, decided when she was a young girl to escape and did so in the mid-1920s. By 1929 she's married Franco Conner in Mexico and returns to this country as an American citizen being the wife of an American citizen. In the 1930s we have all sorts of exciting things beginning to take place. I'm just going to give you a sense of the bubbling up of this because the real modern movement begins in the 1940s and 50s. There's a whole slew of intellectuals, institutions, books, ideas that come together in a way which is sort of fascinating. Very quick, very quick. So in the 1920s Rand escapes from Russia. In the 1930s we began to see some very technical works and some very obscure works which only later, much later, get recognition. We get some more work by Frieder Kayak such as his book, Prices and Production, based on his lectures at the London School of Economics in the early 1930s. A later book by him consisting of essays written throughout the 30s to elaborate on various themes, profits, interest and investment. My Rand publishes her first novel to virtually no acclaim, We the Living. A novel set in Soviet Russia which she has republished many, many years later in 1958 and an edited and significantly changed version. In 1935 Albert J. Knox, our enemy of the state. In 1936 Rose Wilder Lane publishes in the Saturday Night Post an essay Give Me Liberty which is later reprinted as a pamphlet. Something interesting begins to happen in the 1930s which is that a whole slew of people began coming together out of opposition to New Deal policies, both in foreign and domestic. Around 1934, 1935 and 1936 a whole group of people, William Melando and industrials, Leonard Reed who had worked for the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and was just sort of an ordinary person in terms of his ideology. He worked closely with the NRA and other New Deal groups. Albert J. Knox, Menken, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson, John T. Flynn, V.W. Orville Watts comes into play here. The work of Mises is gradually translated into English. Some of the work of Friedrich Hayek becomes available and starts spreading. The elder R.C. Hoyles, publisher of the Freedom Loose Paper Chain, R.C. Hoyles as he's known, particularly his flagship, The Santa Anna Register, begins publishing more or less libertarian editorials in opposition to the New Deal. A great many other people around the country began to sort of find their ideas coalescing. They find themselves increasingly frustrated with the New Deal welfare warfare state. And they began to come together and exchange ideas and interact. You see Leonard Reed getting together with Mollendor who converted him to libertarianism, what we would now call libertarianism. He's meeting Rose Wilder Lane. A couple years later he meets Ein Rand. He meets Henry Hazlett. It's Henry Hazlett's wife Frances Hazlett who introduced Rand to the people who got her job at Paramount, writing movie scripts for half a year while she worked on another novel part of the rest of the year. So bubbling up of ideas. The late 1930s began to see the publication of several different small presses. The Register Press, Pamphleteers Incorporated, which was Leonard Reed's organization. They printed some things by Frederick Bastiat such as The Law. They published a version of Rose Wilder Lane's Give Me Liberty in booklet form. They published an early Hazlett booklet. They published a version of Andrew Dixon's White's Fiat Money Inflation in France. These are all the late 30s, early 40s. There's also the American First Committee and a great amount of intellectual energy and effort on a great many people's part, really from Minkin and Nock to John T. Flynn fighting American intervention or entry into World War II. Up until the attack on Pearl Harbor, they were fairly successful and as the husband mentioned, about 80% of the American people opposed entry into the Second World War until that provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor. So these things are starting to come together. Now you might expect, interestingly, there to be a remarkable lack of work, of output, of intellectual energy during these years sort of in exile. But these opponents of American Empire, opponents of American foreign policy have lost after all. We're engaged in the most destructive war of the 20th century or indeed any other century has ever seen. But what you find, interestingly enough, is the 1930s, the 1940s rather, become a remarkably productive period in American intellectual history. There's the coming together of a vast amount of work both by people who are natively American and by people who are emigres from Russia or Nazi Germany. This includes Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. To give you a sense, let me give you a chronology that goes, let's say, from 1941 to 1949. There's an eight-year period, crucially important and very, very interesting. In 1941, you have a huge book published, National Economy, the German language edition by Ludwig von Mises that later was revised into human action, which was published in 1949. So you can bracket the years with the first German edition and the English edition of human action, National Economy in 1941, Human Action in 49. In 1943 and 44, there's an incredible outburst by these people. They've met, they've been talking, they've been talking about organizing, about getting things published and printed. There's a whole slew of things published. Let me give you a quick list. Between 1943 and 44, we have Albert J. Knox send off Memoirs of a Superbulous Man, a beautifully written work which reflects on, really, the autobiography of the ideas which he has held throughout his lifetime. He's nearing death. He dies in 1945. Not before he has helped kick off what he himself called the remnant, a group of individuals in constant contact with each other who are going to hide alive, to keep alive the flame of the ideas of individual liberty. You have The God of the Machine published by Isabel Patterson, sometime novelist and book critic for the New York Herald American. A very powerful book by, and interestingly, three of these books published in this period are by women. I ran Isabel Patterson in Rose Wilder Lane. Very powerful intellectual women, but quite an influence. It's a very, very interesting development, if you look at it from the standpoint of several things. One, feminism, that three women were very prominent. It was three women who John Chamberlain gives credit to in his memoirs, A Life with a Printed Word. These three women for converting him away from his old socialist faith to a belief in individualism and libertarianism. Three women. If there's another pattern, it's that the majority of them are Jewish. Jewish intellectuals were expatriates from Austria, Germany and Russia. It's almost as though the libertarian movement in its most intellectual phase were kicked off by a group of Jewish intellectuals who had been frustrated and seen through the myths of both fascism and communism. They didn't hold truck with either Stalinism or Trotskyism of the sort that American Jewish intellectuals were busily quabbling over. They didn't go for either one of those. So we have other books being published such as The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane, written as she puts it in a white heat, a glowing testimony, which begins with the sentence that I read to you at the opening of My Ethics of Liberty. Here we are on a planet twirling in sunlit space and ends with the words, Win this revolution? Of course we will. We are Americans. We shall spread these ideas throughout the whole world. We have the fountainhead being published, the novel by Ein Rand. Omnipotent Government by Ludwig von Mises. Two-year period now. I'm just giving you a list for a two-year period. Omnipotent Government by Ludwig von Mises, subtitled The Rise of the Total State and Total War. As we go marching by John T. Flynn, return to that in a moment, it's published by Doubleday, a big publisher in 1944. Flynn had been born in 1882. He went to Georgetown University Law School and then took up journalism. He was a columnist and contributor with the New Republic throughout the 1930s, and he was the chairman of the American First Committee in New York, a well-known radio commentator. During the last half of 1940, the New Republic editor Bruce Belivellon dismissed Flynn as a columnist, and he began to become in contact with the rest of these people. He's kept off the air from his weekly radio speeches that he made attacking the rows of a policy leading us toward war. He went ahead and penned a book as we go marching, which is really about the rise of National Socialism. It's Italian variant, it's German variant, and it's American variant, which is how he saw the New Deal. As an American version of National Socialism, transplanted into the American culture as we go marching, we have The Road to Surfdom by Friedrich Hayek, 1944, published in a condensed version of Reader's Digest. This book by an Emma Gray Austrian intellectual living in England is published by University of Chicago Press, and its first printing sells out within a matter of days after Reader's Digest's article hits the streets. It goes back into press again and again and again, finally hundreds of thousands are sold over a 25-year period. We have, in the same period, the Register Publishing Company, publishing Bastiat's economic sophisms and economic harmonies, the translation which was done at the end of the 19th century. It had a forward by Rose Wilder Lane, fascinating stuff. So those are just some of the books published during a two-year period, some of my favorites. In 1945 we have the republication of some more Bastiat's writings, including the law. We have in 1946 two very key developments. We have a key book, Henry Hazlitz's Economics in One Lesson, and we have Leonard Reed achieving his dream, which he's held now for about 10 years of starting an institute devoted solely to the teaching of the doctrines of liberty. He calls it the foundation for economic education, fee for short, and it's located in a state north of New York City in Irvington, Hudson, New York. Very, very interesting period here. In 1947, Caxton Printers publishes an updated version with an introduction by someone whose name I haven't written down, of William Graham Sunmers, what social classes owe to each other. We have Menken in 1948, just shortly before his stroke, completing the editing of his own collection of his favorite workings, called the Menken Christomethype. It's a Menken bed book. It's the thing you want to take to read snippets out before you're going to go to sleep. It's riotlessly funny. You have the Mises Seminar, and it's second incarnation beginning at New York University. It's here that thinkers like Murray Rothbard, Leonard Legio, Percy Graves, Bettina Bienn, just a whole slew of people, Israel Kursner, learning at the feet of a master at Mises and his prime. Mises left Austria about the time the Germans came in. He worked in Switzerland for a few years and then came to the United States in the mid-1940s. Settling down with the help of Henry Haslett, he got a post teaching at the Business School of New York University. Remember that Mises, at this point, is an old man. He's only about 70 years old, starting a whole second career. Interestingly enough, he was never paid anything by NYU. He was paid money from private business contributions. Throughout all those years, about the next 20 years that he continued to teach at NYU, this great man who had quite a reputation in Europe in the 20s and 30s as being the dean of liberal economists and liberal social thinkers, was not offered a university position in the United States of America. Compare that with other refugees like Herbert Marcuse. You can see how they were treated in the United States. So this is a key period in here, and a lot of exciting things have begun to happen. The foundation for economic education began to publish pamphlets. It published an attack on rent control by two young economists. They happened to be named Milton Friedman and George Stigler. In 1946, this in turn came to the attention of Murray Rothbard and a group of other people in New York who were alerted to the existence of Mises who they had only heard about through history of economic thought classes about the calculation debate. They thought he was dead. They had no idea that he was a man in his 70s about to start another seminar. You have Phi beginning to teach the equivalent of high school versions of the Cato seminar, Courses in Liberty by people like Hans Sinholtz later, Bettina B. N. Percy Graves, Edmund Opitz, Baldy Harper was one of the early associates, Herbert and Dick Cornell were early associates of the foundation, Paul Perot, who took over the magazine The Freeman after it floundered. They attempted to begin The Freeman again. You have during this period the beginnings of not just an attempt to revise the old Freeman, which Albert Daynock had edited in the 1920s. That failed and became converted into the digest size Freeman that you all know about from the Foundation for Economic Education in the early 50s. You have the starting of Frank Chodrov's attempted newspaper analysis survived for a few years with Chodrov doing most of the writing for it, most of the writing himself from his New York apartment and office. You have the beginning of human events right after World War II, which in its initial incarnation is founded by Felix Morley. Morley was involved, Frank Chodrov and Frank Hannigan was one of the co-authors of the book published in the mid 1930s called Merchants of Death. It's interesting to see that this is what the right wing is at this point in time. This is where the right wing comes from. It comes from sort of anti-war, anti-centralized government sentiments. In the early 1950s you have things published like Vivian Callum's Toil Taxes in Trouble, the ancestor of the current tax revolt. You have Garrett Garrett bringing together three essays published in 1944, 1951 and 1952 called The Revolution Was, X America, and The Rise of Empire. He publishes this as a book called The People's Potage. In 1953, Harry Elmo Barnes edits a collection drawn from all of the anti-World War II books that were published during this period, a book called Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, a phrase he has taken out of Orwell. Other things that just could be mentioned in passing. You have New English Editions of Mises Socialism. Mises publishes Theory and History. You have a number of works of Frank Chodorov published. He had published a number of pamphlets such as Taxation is a Robbery during and after World War II. He published The Case for Isolationism, a lot of little pamphlets that are collected into books during the early 50s. We have some Hayek books begin to bubble from the press like Individualism and Economic Order, A Counter-Revolution of Science and Pure Theory of Capital. Pure Theory of Capital comes out in the early 40s. We have the first American translation of Manger's Principles of Economics. In 1959, we have Bumbauerk's Capital and Interest, the three volumes that translated for the first time. So what I'm trying to get across to you is that in the late 40s and early 1950s, we have come together several different strands of thought, Native American isolationism and radicalism, American individualism. We have sort of the Mankin-esque debunking of political leaders and would-be intellectuals. We have Rand beginning to write novels. We have Isabel Patterson and Rose Wilder Lane who are already very well known as novelists beginning to write nonfiction works, which helped build a libertarian worldview. We have a lot of these people working with each other and with others to revive the works of people like William Graham Sumner, Herbert Spencer's Man vs. the State as republished by Caxton during this period of time, with an introduction by Albert J. Nock. A whole slew of things beginning to come together. And there's one organization really that begins to really capture the whole flavor of the thing in the early 50s. And that's the Foundation for Economic Education. Fee is really the cradle of liberty here. It's London Reed's creation. This is where everyone came together to teach and to learn from the great masters, from people like Henry Haslett and Ludwig von Mises and London Reed himself. Reed was never much of an intellectual in the sense that we mean the term today. He was not a scholar certainly, but he was a businessman who took a very important lead in organizing and setting into motion the regular publication of things concerned with the burning ideals of individual liberty. It's a very exciting time during this whole period. We have, as I say, the freemen and human events being started up and several things happen which show you where things are going to go wrong because things decline a little bit throughout the 1950s and then rise again in the 1960s. What happened was a struggle for power in the American right. A good many of the people that I've been talking to you about for the first half hour or so in this talk were considered initially to be part of the old right, the old conservative movement in America that really came into existence to oppose the New Deal programs of the 30s and 40s. They were both anti-welfare state and anti-warfare state. They were against the suppression of civil liberties. They were against all of the rows of policies up and down the line. And to give you the flavor of a couple of things they said, their major political leader during this time was Robert Taft, who was a bit too pink for most of them, but it was he that they looked up to. And here is a quote from Congressman Buffett, who was to be Taft's Midwestern campaign manager in 1952. Here he's talking about American foreign policy. I just want to give you the flavor here to show that not only were these people laissez-faire radicals, but they were continuing the classical liberal heritage of being anti-war, being anti-militarism, anti-government spending on military projects and armaments. Buffett in 1952 declared, even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Our persuasion and example are the methods taught by the carpenter of Nazareth. And if we believe in Christianity, we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice politics. Here is Chotorov writing during the McCarthy era. I'm reading these to give you a sense of why things are going to split in the mid-1950s, why everything is going to go two very radical and very interesting separate ways. During the height of the McCarthy hysteria, Chotorov writes, And now we come to the spy hunt, which is in reality a heresy trial. What is it that perturbs the inquisitors? They do not ask the suspects, do you believe in power? Do you adhere to the idea that the individual exists for the glory of the state? Are you against taxes or would you raise them until they absorb the entire output of this country? Are you opposed to the principle of conscription? Do you favor more social gains under the aegis of an enlarged bureaucracy? Such questions, he wrote, might prove embarrassing to the investigators. The answers might bring out a similarity between their ideas and purposes, and those of the suspected. They too worship power. Under the circumstances, they limit themselves to the one question, are you a member of the Communist Party? And this turns out to mean, have you aligned yourselves with the Moscow branch of the church? Here's a quote from Lewis Bromfield. I quoted something else from him earlier today. Are war mongers in the military apparently believe that all other nations are unimportant and can be trampled underfoot the moment either Russia or the U.S. sees fit to precipitate a war? To this faction, the war mongers in the military, it seems of small concern that the nations lying between us and Russia would be the most terrible sufferers. The growing neutralism of the European nations is merely a reasonable, sensible and civilized reaction, legitimate in every respect, when all the factors from Russia's inherent weaknesses to our own meddling and aggressiveness are taken into consideration. The Korean situation will not be settled until we withdraw entirely from an area in which we have no right to be and leave the peoples of that area to work out their own problems. Now, quotations like that give the sense of an era which is really very far removed from anything that we know from the right wing in this country. Well, what happened in the middle 1950s? A young Turk comes up with some inherited money, some ideas. He had written a book from his situation as an undergraduate at Yale University called God and Man at Yale. He's recruited into the CIA by Wilmore Kendall, works for the CIA for a year or two. He then comes together with a group of conservative Catholics, anti-communist Catholics and ex-communists, people like James Burnham Wilmore Kendall, people like Whitaker Chambers, and began a magazine called The National Review. The money in the family, the Buckley family of course, William F. Buckley Jr. is the gentleman whom I speak, comes from oil. It's a well-established, well-connected New England family based in Connecticut. And Buckley began really the modern conservative movements charge away from the anti-war views of the old right to the pro-cold war momentum of the new right. Today when we hear of the new right, you know, the right of Richard Vigory and all those people, it's as though the Buckley right had been there from time immemorial. But indeed it had not. It only came on the scenes in the middle to late 1940s. In fact, an interesting thing is that sort of symbolic of this going of the separate ways of the new Buckley right from the old conservative right and the dying off of the old conservative right, the anti-war right, if you would, is really the issue of militarism. It's really the issue of militarism because Buckley became convinced as did Burnham and others. James Burnham had been probably the most prominent Trotskyist intellectual in the United States. He forced his defection to the ranks of conservatism. He wrote books like The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, which was a positive, not a negative book incidentally on The Machiavellians. Well, John T. Flynn was in the middle of this and he's sort of symbolic because in one of his writings as a result of World War II, he said that America had, quote, managed to acquire bases all over the world. There was no part of the world where trouble can break out, where we do not have bases of some sort in which we cannot claim our interests are menaced. Thus menaced there must remain when the war is over a continuing argument in the hands of the imperialists for a vast naval establishment and a huge army to attack anywhere or anyone or to resist an attack from all the enemies we shall be obliged to have. We must have enemies. They will become an economic necessity for us. This is John T. Flynn. I bring him up at this point because Flynn's continual free market anti-war writings lead to a collision between this grand old man of American isolationism and national review. On October 22nd, 1956, William Buckley rejected an article by John T. Flynn submitted to the National Review on American militarism. Flynn, he said, did not understand the nature of the Soviet threat. Fifteen years earlier, of course, the new republic had said the same thing of Flynn invoking the Nazi threat. We have a mirror image here of Flynn and Buckley versus Flynn and the new republic. Flynn died a few years later, of course, but in the interim several important things happened. The Freeman had been shrunk down to a digest-sized magazine which no longer addressed current affairs, was now published by a tax-exempt organization that lost its former militant tone, its anti-New Deal tone, its anti-welfare warfare state tone. It became sort of the freedom-loving pussycat that it is today. I don't mean to put the Freeman down. It has got a lot of good material in it, but it doesn't engage current issues the way that it did in the early 50s and the late 40s. We find human events undergoing a transfer of ownership and becoming itself converted into the Cold War camp. We have a shorter of having a stroke in the late 50s and being silenced. We have Murray Rothbard's break with National Review in 1958 over the proper attitude to take toward the Khrushchev visit to the United States to meet with Eisenhower in the first of many summits. We have really a parting of the ways here between two great camps, the individualist libertarian anti-war right which becomes the libertarian movement of today and the conservative movement led by William F. Buckley Jr., which became the conservative movement we know today. Now I've skimmed over some of the events in 1957 in order to be able to return to them into some of the chronology because the 1950s and 60s were a very interesting time. Aside from the works of Mises and Hayek really, you'd have to say that the intellectual defenses of capitalism that exist in the United States throughout this period were not an altogether high intellectual plane. These people were intellectuals but they held that the proper strategy was more or less to address oneself to the common man. And so a great many of their works, particularly Chotorov's I would say, are written down with a potential mass audience in mind but of sort of low brow readers. They did nothing to really build an intellectual movement. Mises and Hayek are of course quietly teaching and publishing. Hayek at this point is at the University of Chicago beginning to have a handful of students after he left London School of Economics. Mises has a small seminar at NYU where Legio and Ray Co and Rothbard and Kersner and others are busy attending and listening. Outside of that there really is no great weight behind the movement for free market ideals up until this point. But in 1957 that changed and something interesting came on the scenes. I've described it elsewhere as though the heavens were torn open and Zeus thrown down a bolt of lightning was of course the 1957 publication in September 30 of Ein Rand's book Atlas Shrugged. There's a sense in which nothing more needs to be said after that about Ein Rand but there's another sense in which a great deal needs to be said because this book really was a remarkable challenge to the status quo. It was published during the age of what Daniel Bell had later named the end of ideology. During Eisenhower administration. One of the most conservative, cautious, unspectacular administrations that we've ever seen in terms of its policies. There was nothing radical about it, revolutionary. It didn't repeal very much and it didn't go forward very much. It just sort of sat there dead in the water. And then Ein Rand launched this novel on what she had been working for so many years and nothing was really ever the same. The first printing from Random House in 1957 was more than 100,000 copies. They went back to the press again and again and again. Today there are about 7 million copies in print. She published several other books of course. In 1958, Nathaniel Brandon Lectures was born with her so-called then intellectual heir. Nathaniel Brandon and his cohorts and associates including his wife Barbara Brandon giving a 20 lecture course on the basic principles of Objectivism in many cities. This begins to build gradually so that in the early 1960s they have lectures in about 30 or 40 cities among the 2,500 students. A little bit later they'll have lectures in 83 cities at their peak and will reach many, many more thousands. NBI built up a mailing list of more than 60,000. And this is important to note because NBI did more than just teach rants philosophy. They published a book catalogue which I think is just as responsible as anything else for the bringing to prominence of Mises and Hayek and people like them. It was their book list which included a good many of the people that I've been talking about particularly Bastian Mises and Haslett to this mass audience compared to what they had been able to achieve beforehand. Mises human action starts to go through many different printings after this is published. The NBI, I've talked to the people who ran it, sell simply thousands of copies of this this very dense economic treatise in the 1960s. I won't get too much into the influence of Rand. I think there'll probably be some talk about this in the discussion group tonight. Obviously a very fascinating and mesmerizing woman. Just a fascinating figure on the American scene with her clipped Russian accent, her short stocky build, her big round dark eyes, her pupils and iris almost merging in this sort of black hole at the center of each eye. Her looking as though she were borrowing into you when she looked at you. In 1962 she started a newsletter with Nathaniel Brandon, the Objectivist newsletter later converted into a magazine called The Objectivist. At its peak it reached a circulation of 22,500 which is quite a number of people considering what other people have been able to achieve with other magazines. We have the William Volcker Foundation, active in the 1960s, publishing books. We have the University of Chicago coming out with some of its graduate students such as Ronald Hamway, Sam Peltzman and editor-in-chief Ralph Rayco publishing The New Individuals to Review. In 1962 we have Murray Rothbard's main economy and state being published in Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. In the 1960s we have a whole host of books coming from the Objectivists. We have For the New Intellectual, Who is I in Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal and other things. We have The Small General Left and Right started by Ligio, H. George Rache and Murray Rothbard in 1964. We have all sorts of different organizations begun and falling. We have The Rise and Fall of the Freedom School started in 1957 by Robert LeFave, the founder of what he called autarchy or self-rule. He was an individualist libertarian who had been an editorial writer for one of the R. C. Hoyle's newspapers, the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. And LeFave began to teach courses secluded away in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a square mile of territory, speckled with log cabins where people would come for two-week periods to learn and to teach. LeFave, in many ways, is as responsible as anyone except Rand and Reid for the growing movement because there's a period of a couple of years there when they held a secluded retreat called the Frontistery. And they had their teachers such as Mises Hayek, Friedman, Rosewater Lane, Frank Chodorov, just a whole slew of people teaching there for a year or two. And graduate students were people like R. J. Smith and Hamaway and a lot of others who went on to become fairly prominent libertarian intellectuals of their generation. A very prominent thing. So throughout the 1960s probably the two main forces in terms of giving intellectual weight to liberty, maybe three if I widen it a little bit, would be Ein Rand, Frieder Kayak and Milton Friedman. Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom is just a very nicely done forceful book about the case for capitalism and its interrelation between capitalism and freedom. In 1960 we have the Constitution of Liberty published by Frieder Kayak his attempt to restate the principles of classical liberalism for a new generation. And of course we have Ein Rand simply everywhere. Those books sold like hotcakes and she was off on one campus after another. She refused to fly and so piled into cars and into trains, she and her entourage, her group of followers who were so close that often they were interrelated and intermarried. Followed everywhere, she lectured on just dozens of college campuses and things like the objectives of ethics, faith in force, the destroyers of the modern world, the fascist new frontier where she compared the Kennedy program with that of the Nazi party platform from the 20s. The new fascism ruled by consensus, her withering critique of Lyndon Johnson, the wreckage of the consensus. The list goes on and on and every year she began to give these on Fort Hall forum series and their broadcast on public radio along with a question and answer period that lasts for two hours with thousands upon thousands of followers listening to her across the country. To give you a sense of the dimensions of the influence of this woman that she could pack a house on any college campus in a moment's notice she was like Vladimir Horowitz is today in the world of music. People would stand in line for days to get tickets if necessary. And she blasted liberalism and conservatism alike. She saw herself interestingly enough as talking to the open-minded liberal. As for conservatism, what she had to say was contained in her essay Conservatism and Obituary, which she wrote in the early 1960s. She was withering and she just did not pull her punches for anyone. She was saying things to the effect that she challenged the cultural traditions of two and a half thousand years. She wanted to take philosophy back to Aristotle and fiction back to Victor Hugo and music back to the great age of Heléhar and Strauss and Kalman and Rachmaninoff. Light operatives of Vienna that she heard in the movie theaters of Soviet Russia and the music of Rachmaninoff which remained among her favorites until the day she died in 1982. To say that her influence was profound is to understate the case. One magazine after another devoted multi-page stories about her life, time, magazine Newsweek, magazines like Common Wheel devoted to attacks on her, attempted refutations of her by one person after another. But her influence just began to spread to give you a sense of how great this is and how much other figures like Rothbard and Mises and Hayek really came in with her behind her cloak, her cape so to speak. She was fond of wearing a cape and sort of a Napoleonic triangular hat. She smoked cigarettes with a long cigarette holder and a solid gold brooch shaped in the sign of a dollar. The dollar sign which at the end of that was shrugged. She says it's a symbol of free mind and free markets and therefore a free mind, a free man, something like that. She just had enormous influence. As of today, her books continue to sell incidentally. Atlus shrugged continues to sell and paperback at the rate of 125,000 copies a year. The fountain had still sells about 90,000 copies a year. There are about 18 million copies of her books available in the English language. She's been translated into at least a dozen others that I've been able to trace. As great as the influence of Mises and Hayek and Friedman then, it's I ran more than anyone else that reaches a huge mass audience with intellectual books, intellectual books. When the virtue of selfishness is first published in paperback, she sells several hundred thousand copies in the first few months, so much so that the publisher does something unprecedented. It had started by publishing in paperback but the demand was so great and went into hard cover. The hard cover then became a best seller even though the paperback was still available. Just to give you a sense of the impact of this powerful, powerful woman who I consider to be really the first Russian Jewish dissident. She really is. She left Russia in the mid to late 1920s and one of the reasons she never had any influence were the American intellectuals. They were so heavily influenced by their own Jewish forebearers who were first generation immigrants or the offspring of first generation immigrants from Eastern Europe, which is to say during this period of time, we're talking about authoritarian sort of right wing Eastern European regimes. They are all youngish Jews who look up to the world with socialist illusions, socialist ideals. Ayn Rand would never have any of this and dismissed it from the outset. She dismissed it from the outset and she said that Stalin did not corrupt any noble ideals, that it's socialism itself which was morally evil and corrupt. She said this again and again throughout her lifetime. She said it in We the Living, she said it in Atlas Shrug and she said it in every non-fiction piece that she wrote after that. In 1968, several things start to happen at once and we get the beginning of the modern, modern libertarian movement. That is not the objectivist movement, not the old right, you know, the anti-war, America First right, not the anti-war, pre-buckly conservative right, not young people from Mises seminars, but the first libertarian movement. This begins really in 1968 with the Rand-Brandon split. For reasons I cannot divulge before a camera and microphones, there was a bitter breakup between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Brandon in 1968. Rand denounced Brandon in a withering essay called, Whom it may concern in her magazine, The Objectivist. Nathaniel Brandon's name was not only ripped off the magazine, it was ripped off the dedication page of future editions of Atlas Shrugged and where she wrote about the author at the end, where she had written about the two most important men in her life, Frank O'Connor, her husband and Nathaniel Brandon and later editions of Nathaniel Brandon's name again was excised. When the reprints came out of capitalism, the unknown ideal and the virtue of selfishness that began to appear, little PS, Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon are no longer associated with me, with my philosophy or with objectivism. NBI is dissolved, Nathaniel Brandon Institute, giving tape lectures to everyone across the country. Thousands of people is simply dissolved. There's an attempt to pick up the pieces, but nothing comes of it. This in effect leads to several other things. In 1968, Jarrett Wolstein and John Knight Everson, I believe his name was, began an organization called Society for Rational Individualism. It was sort of a libertarian or politicized Randianism. They began a magazine called The Rational Individualist, which was attempting to pick up the audience. Wolstein managed to trick Brandon who would move to Los Angeles and started something called Academic Associates, to sell books and records through the mail. He tricked Brandon inadvertently into letting him rent the mailing list of Academic Associates, which was really the 60,000 mailing list of the old NBI. And Wolstein hit it with a mailing and did very, very well, something like three or four percent. And hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of former, the vote followers of Ein Rand became exposed to other ways of thinking, to the ideas of people like Rothbard, Wolstein, myself, Morrison and the Tannehill, a whole group of other people. Reason Magazine has begun during the same year. It's a little throwaway produced off the MIT or Harvard campuses, a little Mimeograph publication. In 1969, you have a split between libertarians and young Americans for freedom and the conservatives. It's a bitter split. The libertarians leave. They join with the Society for Rational Individualism and found really the first organization. They join with the Society for Rational Individualism and found really the first organization of the modern libertarian movement. And that's the Society for Individual Liberty. It changes the name of the rational individualist and becomes the individualist. Many other things happen the same year. The Libertarian Forum began to be published. Murray Rothbard's newsletter, which for the first five or six years of its existence, at least the first four anyway, it was probably the best publication of its time and of its kind for giving a libertarian perspective on current issues. Later, unfortunately, I would have to say that the libertarian forum degenerated into intra-movement infighting and lost that sort of perspective on the world that Rothbard brought to it in his late 40s and early 50s. Another important thing happened in 1969. In the March issue of Playboy, Carl Hess, former Goldwater speechwriter, officer of those words, in the defense of liberty, is no vice. Moderation and pursuit of virtue, moderation and pursuit of justice, I believe, is no virtue. The several glowing words in the 1964 Goldwater acceptance speech published in an article called The Death of Politics, a very important significant thing. They had an imporing of mail like they had never had before. The Hess article in many ways remains the most eloquent, simple statement of libertarianism. Thereon, we have the modern libertarian movement taking shape. We have one institution after another began to be piled on the shoulders of these intellectual giants of the Mises and the Hayaks and the Freedmen, of the Rosewater Lanes and the Isabel Patterson and the Ein Rands. Rand, of course, would never have anything to do with libertarian movement. She would barely have anything to do with her family. She would barely have anything to do with her family. She was the sort of person for whom getting along with other people was not a high value to put it mildly. So she continually, of course, denounced throughout this whole period any libertarian institution, the libertarian movement per se because of its mixture of people who come from diverse intellectual backgrounds because some people are mystics, that is to say Christians, other people are hippies of the right, which is to say, it was launched in 1972 at its first national convention or some of the leading figures and libertarian movement over the next several years were to come together and begin to try to build a political party and movement. Several other things happened during the 1970s. Books and institutions began to spring up like little flowers all over the place. Hayak, having decided that he's tried all age and didn't like it, decides to come back. He publishes a slew of books, a few studies in politics, economics, history, collections of essays, his trilogy, law, legislation, and liberty begins in the early 70s. In the early 70s Von Mises is unfortunately dead. He beat the age of 90, but he died in less. Austrian centers began at New York University and later at Rutgers and then George Mason University. For New Liberty, Murray Rothbard's Libertarian Manifesto was largely ignored, except by a few thousand libertarians and people who had been associated with Rand who snapped it up and took it seriously. In 1974, of course, one of the great books of the modern libertarian movement is published, one of the great intellectual works that we found so valuable in making ourselves credible before universities, indeed, before the whole world. That's Annamie State in Utopia by Robert Nozick of Harvard then in Rand Letter was started. Friedrich Hayek and later Milton Friedman win Nobel Prizes and then George Stigler. Bob Kephart, publisher of human events, reverses the cycle that had begun about 10 years earlier when human events went from an isolationist anti-war old right critic of warfare, welfare, state liberalism. Kephart had been one of the new conservatives in the 1960s who built human events. He gets in touch with people like Carl Hess, had an exchange of ideas with several younger libertarians and defected from the conservative movement. It's he who conceived of a magazine called Libertarian Review. He found the early mailings for it were disappointing and so he started instead books for libertarians which sold books to thousands of people on a mailing list that he kept updated. Sold 10 or 12 new books and short reviews over a period of about four years and a lot of libertarians began to pick up quite a bit of knowledge of the literature and of their own history during this period. Lots of other things happened. The end of 1976 Kephart decides to sell what has become a tabloid, the Libertarian Review to certain individuals who named me as editor. I edited the magazine for five years until it's demise. We saw the growth of reason magazine from a tiny magazine in the early 1970s to a slick circulation magazine circulation in the early 30,000s. We see the beginning of the Cato Institute of Inquiry Magazine the beginnings of a young students organization Students for Libertarian Society which was to prove somewhat premature and abortive for reasons that we can talk about later it's just an inherent collision between mature advisors and immature, necessarily immature and hept up and eager students. So this takes us pretty much into today to where we are at. A number of important things have happened in the Libertarian Movement in the last five years and what it really is is a coalescing of these things set in motion really beginning in the 20s and 30s and 40s by our forefathers, so to speak and foremothers, by men and women who held aloft a certain vision of individual liberty and who pursued it and pushed it with great diligence, patience and above all, sheer raw talent and hard work. When in the early 1970s organizations began to spring up we saw the birth of things like the Reason Foundation which attempted to take strides in the area of public policy we saw the attempt of Libertarian Party to break through in various levels of elections make waves in California and Alaska and a few other states we saw the Cato Institute begin under the leadership of Ed Crane in 1977 and begin to publish Inquiry magazine which later split off on its own under the aegis of the Libertarian Review Foundation. In 1981 Cato moved to Washington DC where it really began to get on a very firm policy track which is to say it has begun to take up current issues like social security the water crisis, the gold standard and several other things and began really to take these before the influential policy making community of Washington overall as a whole. Other organizations have been started such as the National Taxpayers' Legal Fund in the late 1970s and early 1980s we have things like the creation of the Council for Competitive Economy under the leadership of David Bowes National Taxpayers' Legal Fund the National Taxpayers' Union a whole group of Libertarian founded or spearheaded organizations designed to take on either single issues or single constituencies Inquiry a magazine trying to address the intelligent lay public the intellectual community concerned with public policy issues Libertarian Review attempted to do something similar within the Libertarian Movement until it was folded in 1981 and elements of it adopted in the magazine and Cato itself began to run very important conferences on things like in search of stable money and social security protectionism, free trade, industrial policy things that we have coming up I mentioned these things to you because Libertarian Movement as it's developed has become a very complicated and very interesting engine for possible political, intellectual and social change there's a great diversity of vitality and energy some of it unfortunately not yet unleashed in fashion destined to make an impact but where we are at right now in the Libertarian Movement is that we are at a new stage of maturity we're at a stage of much greater proficiency than any movement similar to what we are in spirit and in intention for really the last 130 or 40 years the scale of the corn laws in England has any movement had anything like the potential for impact that Libertarianism does today and the Libertarian Movement does today as for where we are going and what we can achieve I will leave that for my topic of my talk tomorrow night at the banquet but what I've attempted to do here is give you a very brief overview some of the exciting things which have happened over the last 30 years the last half century from the death of classical liberalism to the rebirth of a Libertarian Movement we are on a higher intellectual level than classical liberalism was we have scholars who are more numerous we have young people coming up in abundance we have more raw talent we have more institutions which seem to be functioning along the path that they should than any other time really since the middle 19th century right now and closing this up that what we have gone through in the last 30 and 40 and 50 years has been traumatic in this country what we have gone through in the death of the classical liberal movement and its rebirth and the Libertarian Movement of today is nothing more or less than a transformation which does have the potential in the decades and years to come to change the face of not only the history of America but of much of the world as well so we have questions now if you would like or we can take them over there which is more appropriate why don't we get back okay