 Leonard Ligio, our speaker tonight, if it's possible to use the term a living legend of liberty and classical liberalism, it's Leonard Ligio. You know, it would be difficult to list all of his accomplishments and achievements, but I will tell you the biggest one that's ever come in to Leonard. And that was that about a year ago, he was the first speaker at the Vienna Coffee Club. And nothing bigger has happened in his career. And he had a large audience of about, what was it, eight people, Carl? Eleven, okay. And he just fascinated us with stories of the early days about how he was in the iron-ran cult meetings and committed the heresy of falling asleep. I think he was evicted on that basis. Right in the middle of the galt speech. No, you voted with your eyes. And then he brought up the story up to the 1950s where he was participating in the Taft campaign and he told stories about Murray Rothbard. And it was just really, really a fun evening, and that's what started off the Vienna Coffee Club. It was our inaugural speech. And so, you know, by popular demand, we just kept getting all of these demands, especially from the first 11. This is bring him back, bring him back for an encore performance. And so it's nice to have him back. You know, I don't know where he's going to pick up here from part one, but I know that in the mid-70s, Leonard went to work for the Cato Institute. Or as the Washington Post says it, the Libertarian Cato Institute, right? Yeah, okay. Thank you, Ed. And so he was there at the beginning with respect to Cato. Then he went to the Institute for Humane Studies that had been started by Baldy Harper when it was still there in California. And Leonard stayed at IHS for some 17 or 18 years and most recently has moved over to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, again at George Mason. He's a distinguished scholar in the true sense of the word, a real academic. He has lectured all over the world. In fact, I think that if there was ever a person that the word teacher really embodies and epitomizes, it's Leonard Ligio because of all of the students that love and revere this man and whose life has been influenced so strongly by his example and his teachings. He teaches a course in the Department of History at George Mason as well as in the law department. He's president of the Philadelphia Society, bringing much needed Libertarian influence into that organization. Okay, no comments. We've got somebody from Heritage here, so just take it easy, Jeff. Taking notes. So I know it's a pleasure for anyone who has ever met Leonard Ligio and interacted with him to know this man without any further ado, Leonard Ligio. Well, tonight we meet with a certain amount of sadness. We've just heard the news of the death of John Chamberlain, who's had such a long involvement in the Libertarian movement, especially as a editor and author. And then in January, early January, the death of Murray Rothbard. So we've had some tragic losses. Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the death of President FDR, and I think it's important because the modern Libertarian movement began during FDR's New Deal in reaction to it that we note that event anniversary yesterday. I'm reminded of the response 50 years ago in Manhattan, Kansas to the death, which was, we never thought the SOB would ever go. So I think that gives a fitting explanation of what real Libertarians thought in the 50 years ago, and Manhattan, Kansas was a good center for such positive American thinking. Roosevelt had been re-elected in 1936 with having won 46 of the 48 states. And people believe that was the beginning of a very healthy, positive authoritarianism for America, an elected plebiscite democracy, a wonderfully acceptable president whom the Communist Party thought was the greatest thing since Lenin. And yet, a few months after the 36th election, President Roosevelt proposed a radical change in the Supreme Court. He wanted legislation so that he could appoint additional justices on the ground that they were too old. Or any justice who was 70 years old and did not retire, the president could appoint an additional justice to balance his vote and cancel that horrible situation out. From his point of view, it was horrible. There were a lot of smart legal scholars on the court who kept saying, what you're doing is totally against the Constitution. And everyone said, well, Pres said who cares about the Constitution? In the face of that, one man, Frank Gannett, head of the Gannett Newspapers centered in Rochester, tried to challenge this. And he organized the Committee for Constitutional Government, headed by Beardsley Rummel. This was the first mass opposition movement to develop against the New Deal. And in some ways, first in American history. This gathered all of the people out there who thought they were the only ones who thought what the New Deal was doing was against the Constitution. Because the press all said this was wonderful. And so these people found that there were other people who agreed. And luckily, even a number of the Democratic members of the U.S. Senate opposed this. So that the corporal God of what was left of Republicans in the Senate, which was pretty pitiful, maybe 20 seats at most, were able to gather enough Democrats to block the attempt by the president to pass this act. And he had good people working for him in the Senate. Jimmy Burns was a very smart Senate leader. And yet these senators on the Democratic side blocked the president. He was defeated. And meanwhile, horrors of horrors, all of the great New Deal Keynesian measures that had been put in, collapsed. Unemployment shot up higher than it had been when Roosevelt came into office. So people began to say, this isn't a miracle. This guy is a charlatan. Collectiveism is a charlatan proposal. And so, of course, Roosevelt tried to overcome some of this by, in the 1938 primaries, campaigning around the country to defeat Democratic senators who had opposed him. He was going to show that his 1936 popular vote was going to carry him to complete power. And he lost every one of those primaries. All of his candidates were smashed by the sitting Democratic senators. When the Senate reconvened in January 1938, one of the White House people went around to these senators and went, for instance, to Senator Walter George of Georgia. And said, oh, you know, Franklin, he's his own worst enemy. Don't hold it against him. And he said, well, you're wrong. Franklin is not his own worst enemy. I'm his worst enemy. I'm not going to forget. And none of them forgot. But this was due to the popular organization that Franklin had organized with the Committee for Constitutional Government. Later, John T. Flynn was involved with the committee. The committee led the opposition to the Len Lisa in 1941. It was a big supporter of the Bricker Amendment in 1954. I remember visiting Rommel in his offices, which were in the upper part of the Grand Central Station. There were offices up there. And visiting with him about the Bricker Amendment. Now, in the 1938 elections, the Republicans made a comeback. They didn't get control of the Senate per se. But with the anti-New Deal Democrats, they gained control. Taft was elected in 1938 and a number of other key people. In 1940, when they should have won because Woodrow Wilkie was not a great candidate and because a young congressman from Texas, very well-organized named Lyndon Baines Johnson, was appointed by the Speaker to run the House campaign. He helped with $200 here and $200 there, elected more Democrats to the Congress. It shows you how little money went in that period and how grateful all of these people were for the $200 that got them elected and signed up with Johnson and with Sam Rayburn. In 1942, the Republicans organized very, very strongly and came within five votes of great gaining control of the House representatives. So there was a continuing strength to the anti-New Deal movement, contrary to what most people tends to say. Now, in 1940, the America First Committee was organized to oppose American involvement in the Second World War. It was organized by Yale Law School students who were students of Edwin Borschard who was the premier international law person in the United States. The three leading students were R.D. Stewart Jr., whose family owned Quaker Oats and the Halsey Stewart Investment Bank in Chicago. Potter Stewart, later Supreme Court Justice and Gerald Ford. Those were the three organizers of the America First Committee. It then got many other people to join, such as Philip Jessup, who was a leading international lawyer, Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, and Robert Wood of C.S. Roebuck and hundreds of other leading people. Now, when the war occurred, as I indicated, the Republicans, nevertheless, did not lose hope and actually were able to come forward very strongly in 1942. That frightened Lyndon Johnson and frightened all the supporters of the Democrats, including the Communist Party. And so there was a big push for the 1944 campaign. That was helped by the government which tried to condemn Republican leaders for not agreeing with the president's foreign policy. There was an attempt even to bring Senator Taft to trial under the Sedition Act, so you can see what they were trying to pull. The result of that, all of this, was that the Democrats did strongly in 1944. And yet, people were becoming more concerned. There was a strong, very strong communist influence allied with the Democratic Party. And there was a great deal of discussion, thank goodness, about the future of the United States at the end of the war. And this was possible because there was much more media, in a sense, than is today of a certain kind. First of all, there were many more newspapers. There were about eight newspapers in New York at the time. Each one had a page filled with columnists writing on politics. Each newspaper represented a particularly, it was pretty segmented, very good niches existed so that you had different kinds of left wing. You could have sort of secret communist newspaper in New York and a just social Democratic newspaper, and then just a Democratic newspaper. And on the other side, you could have other kinds, so that there were at least five of the major newspapers, ones with the largest circulation, were ones that were anti-New Deal with columnists who were very anti-New Deal. One of the best was the Daily News columnist, John O'Donnell, whose column was filled with book reviews, calling attention to the important by Devon Adair, by Regnery, by Caxton. He was a very distinguished writer, but hated by Roosevelt. And I remember when I was at a student at Georgetown, the New York, there was a Chicago Tribune, was allied with the New York Daily News, and there was a Times Tribune in, James Herald in Washington. And then that was... So in order to have access to news, I subscribed daily to the Daily News from New York so I could read John O'Donnell's column and know what was going on in Washington through New York because the Washington Post was not that useful for this kind of development. Now one of the strands we might say, and there are several strands that I'll be talking about, and they run in parallel and are intersecting with each other, has to do with the development of a number of organizations. One very important impact was the William Volcker Fund. The William Volcker Fund was founded by William Volcker, a German American businessman. It was a wholesale furniture company in Kansas City, Missouri. And Mr. Volcker began by being upset by local conditions, by conditions in Tom Prentice's Kansas City. Kansas City had, in a situation of unintended consequence, benefited, quote-unquote, from one of the fallouts from the First World War. When the First World War began, the Navy was quite concerned about the sailors who might be coming through New Orleans. And so the shore patrol uprooted the section of New Orleans called Storyville, which was the kind of entertainment part of the city. And you may have seen about that in the art film, director's film Pretty Baby, in which Brook Shield debuted. And that was about Storyville before the shore patrol. Well, all of the inhabitants had to leave and they went upriver to all the St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago. And in addition brought jazz, which had developed out of ragtime music. And Kansas City was one of the beneficiaries of the shore patrol's wartime activities. And so that in Kansas City were something that Mr. Lunow didn't care for, and therefore he developed a reform association. And the person who worked with him on that was an unknown, unrecognized hero of libertarianism, Red Miller. Red Miller headed this association, which fought the Pentegeous machine. And also the purpose of which had to do with municipal reform would mean that there were lower taxes and better... This was the objective at the moment. They then realized that they helped the only problem with the federal government and state government that more had to be done. And so a little more widely than merely the local government. And one of the other parts of local government that had been a big problem had been the introduction at the end of the First World War of Prohibition. So that had made American urban life... It introduced all kinds of things people didn't like, again, because of unintended... And so all of these things made municipal government quite different than it had been when people were allowed freely to get a free lunch with a shot of whiskey at the local store, local tavern. It's important to note that prohibition was the main reason why the Democratic Party after 1932 was so successful for years. All during the 19... The Democrats campaigned against prohibition. Of course the Democrats had put it in and the Republicans came in and said, well, it may be bad, but it's the law. We have to enforce it. And this is it and we're going to enforce it no matter what, even if it's the craziest thing in the world. And the Democrats campaigned throughout the 20s against prohibition, repeated, and built up a huge constituency. And when Roosevelt came in, the first thing he did was repeal prohibition. He made a contract with America and he kept it. And that helped him throughout the four times he ran for president. Everyone wanted to get rid of prohibition. He did it immediately. No ifs, ands, or buts, no transition. Let's give it a 10-year intermediate time. He just repealed it. And people had been mobilizing for a dozen years to get rid of it. He got rid of it and they voted for him and the Democratic Party repeatedly as a result of that. Now Mr. Lunow was very active in the America First Committee and then as the end of the Second World War and he aged and then passed on, his successor, his nephew, first of all moved the company to Burlingame, California and turned the charitable trust that he had created into a more positive, more active direction, developed what was called a kind of active philanthropy. On the advice of Red Miller, he brought Herb Cornell, who had come to Miller's attention before the war started. He then went into the Navy. When he came out he went to work at Fee, which was beginning at that time in which I'll discuss, and then was quickly made the program officer for the William Volcker Fund. And he developed this idea of positive philanthropy, of active philanthropy, not to wait for people to send in proposals over the transom, but to go out and find the people who are doing the good work in a sense to get a head start, not to wait. Time is a very precious commodity. Go out and find the good people and get them working, give them the money they need, get things started, don't wait for a five-year turnaround. And so system was set up for monitoring academic production, monitoring journals, monitoring books, monitoring conference papers. There were three analysts, two senior analysts, one was Murray Rothbard, the other was Frank Meyer, and later the third non-senior analyst was myself. And we would churn out all the material we could find going to libraries every day, reading as much as we could, finding anybody who looked good, sending copies of the material into the William Volcker Fund. And then the program officers would try to contact these people. Sometimes they made visits around to universities. The program officers in the late 50s included Dick Cornell, Ken Templeton, Baldi Harper, George Resch, Ivan Beely. They would try to contact people or invite them to these faculty or PhD candidates to attend one of the three summer seminars that the Volcker Fund conducted. Seminars for eight or 10 years, three each summer lasting 10 days to two weeks. One each summer was at Chapel Hill under the direction of Clarence Philbrook. One was at Warbash College under Ben Rogan, one at Claremont Men's College under Ott Kemp. And the speakers at these were people like Ludwig von Mises, Hayek, Frank Knight, David McCord Wright, Bruno Leone, Milton Friedman, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Milton Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom were the lectures he had given at the Volcker Fund seminars. I attended one at Chapel Hill where Hayek read manuscript chapters from the Constitution of Liberty. We had another set of lectures on American economic history. And then usually there were three lectures, but instead of the third lecturer being a well-known person, they decided to invite two unknown people and give them half the time. Each one was H. Greg Lewis, who became a very, very significant economist at the University of Chicago on labor theory. It was he who first opened my eyes to how minimum wage creates unemployment for minority youth. And the other was another fellow they picked up from the University of Virginia named James Buchanan. So these were the kind of seminars that were given each summer at each of these three locations. And then the program officers there from the Volcker Fund wouldn't get to know the faculty, get to evaluate what they were working on, see if they were someone to whom a grant might be given. And they didn't wait and say, you know, someday send us a grant proposal. They would say send in a proposal now on this and we think we can get it done. And years were saved by this rather than waiting the usual courtesies of Alphonse and Gaston. Instead it was an act of philanthropy. This is a good project, send it in now. We'll try to, if it's not perfect when you send it in, we'll send it back, get it going, move. And so a great deal was accomplished by this act of philanthropy. One of the things that was done besides supporting books being written was to support translations. Many of the people like Hayek or Mises had untranslated books, et cetera. Now the books were published, if they were published by Volcker Fund auspices, by Van Nostrand and Company, which was an important publishing house at that time in Princeton, New Jersey, headed by Edward Crane, whose brother Jasper Crane was the vice president of Dupont. And Volcker Fund created a National Book Foundation. National Book Foundation agreed to buy a thousand copies of each book Van Nostrand published in a particular series. The series was called the William Volcker series in the Humane Studies. And the National Book Foundation would buy a thousand copies and they would send out each quarter a little booklet to the librarians saying these books are available if you would like one return the card. And if the librarian returned the card and said they would accession the book, it would be sent to them free. So meanwhile, the book got published through this subsidy and meanwhile Van Nostrand then sold in the bookstores books to ordinary customers. So it was a very effective way of getting things into people's hands. The consequence of that was increasing success that then led to the staff of the Volcker Fund headed by Boldie Harper's interest, motivated by his interest to set up the Institute for Humane Studies. And the Volcker Fund then worked on that so all of us who were associated with the Volcker Fund were working on that project. And finally in 1961 it was launched. Unfortunately, it was launched by a number of important academics started by Hayek. Unfortunately, the president of the foundation became much more involved in religious personal mysticism and felt he was getting direct communications from the supernatural not to set up the Institute for Humane Studies. And so he did not provide the funding. Instead the foundation wound down with the consequence of the money went by the provisions of the trust to various institutions in Kansas City. And then the other half was given to Hoover Institution. So unfortunately this program did not, which was going to move into the next stage of endowing the Institute for Humane Studies to carry on these activities in a more intensive way was short circuited and there was no endowment and made to the Institute. Now Hayek is a very important part of the development of libertarianism alongside of Ludwig von Mises. Ludwig von Mises was able to flee from Geneva where he had taken refuge after fleeing from Vienna. He was able to make his way to Spain and to Lisbon where he was able to then come to New York. Hazlett reminisced that one time in August 1940 the phone rang and the other personally said, this is Mises. And Hazlett said, what was like somebody saying, this is John Stuart Mill. And so he was quite shocked but it was, they immediately became very close friends and Mises settled in New York and began teaching at New York University and was involved in the founding of the Foundation for Economic Education. Hayek's road to serfdom had appeared in 1944. It had been turned down in the U.S. by a dozen or more publishers. Aaron Director at the University of Chicago spoke to Robert Hutchins, the president, who then authorized it being published by Chicago University Press. It then was published in an abridgment by the Reader's Digest in January 1945 which reached a huge number of people but then the Reader's Digest published this abridgment as a book. And so that reached million people or something like that. A huge number of people saw Hayek's road to serfdom. One of the immediate consequences of that was the feeling that something more could be done beyond what was being done and that took the leadership of Leonard Reid. Leonard Reid had been in the 1920s as the director of the Chamber of Commerce in Palo Alto. 1933 he was hired to be the head of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce. As part of his background, he had been in the U.S. Army in the First World War. The troopship on which he was being carried was torpedoed and he luckily survived, and he wrote a very famous book about this called Conscience on the Battlefield how as he was sinking and he felt drowning his whole life before, which was not that long, went ahead of it before him but also what he might do in the future and he felt that if he was saved he would dedicate himself to doing something more than the ordinary and also try to work that nobody in the future would suffer because of being put in danger the way being a conscript was in his case. Now, Leonard Reid went around to some of the leaders of the Chamber of Commerce to Bill Mullendore who was the president of Southern California Edison. Mullendore had been the personal secretary chief of staff of Herbert Hoover when he was secretary of commerce and Mullendore said, well, what do you think of the New Deal? And Leonard Reid said, well, maybe we'll give it a try or we don't want to prejudge it and Mullendore said, but don't you have any sense of the Constitution? Don't you have any sense of personal liberty? Don't you see what's at stake? And Leonard Reid discussed it with him and came to the conclusion that yes, a lot at stake and not to just undertake some New Deal experiments. Now, March 6, 1946, the Foundation for Economic Education was launched. The Board of Trustees was headed by David Goodrich of the BF Goodrich Company. It included Harold Luno from the Voker Company, William Patton of the University of Michigan, Charles White, the president of Republic Steel, the vice president of General Motors, Leo Wolman from Columbia University, Jasper Crane, vice president of DuPont. He might be known to you because Jasper Crane is the one who is the co-author of The Lady in the Tycoon, the letters exchanged between him and Rose Wilder Lane. B.F. Hutchinson, who was the chief of the Finance Committee of Chrysler Corporation, the publisher of the Arizona Star, Bill Mullendore from the Southern California Edison. The officers were Leonard Reid, President Henry Hazlett, Vice President Fred Field, Child Economist at Yale, Secretary Claude Robinson, Treasurer who was the head of Opinion Research Institute connected to the Gallup Organization. So this gives you an idea of the people who were involved in the establishment of fee. Leonard Reid was the president, Herb Cornell was temporarily the assistant to the president, Charlie Curtis, and later Ivan Bealy were the executive secretaries. Baldi Harper was chief economist, and then there were Paul Perot, Neil McLeod, V. Orville Roth, et cetera. Number of these people had been students of Baldi Harper's at Cornell. When Hayek's Road to Serfdom was published, Baldi Harper founded a crucial book and began giving just general non-course lectures on the book. At the same time he had been approached with the possibility of heading an institute at Cornell established by the same Frank Gannett whom I mentioned as the founder of the Committee for Constitutional Government. He wanted to provide his papers to Cornell University and he wanted to have an institute associated with it and have Baldi Harper head it. And while he was giving these lectures, one of his friends on the Board of Trustees took him aside and said, well, we're not going to have this institute and also we don't want you lecturing on the road to serfdom. We see post-war world as one in which universities are just going to get oodles of money from the government and we don't want anything to disrupt this largesse coming. So Baldi resigned his tenured professorship and joined Leonard Reed at the Foundation for Economic Education. Now the foundation published a lot of important works. Its second first book was by Fairchild dealing with wages. The second was a book called Roofs or Ceilings having to do with rent control. Now this was a book written by two very unknown young guys. One was Milton Friedman and the other was George Stiegler. And this was really their first non-purely academic publication. And it sold pretty well. There were others that sold very extensively. There was Mises Planned Chaos. There was Dixon White's book Fiat Many in France written in 1877, 52,000 copies were distributed. Henry Grady Weaver's very, very important book mainstream of human progress, a kind of economic history sold 670,000 copies. And Haslitz Will-Dollar Saved the World on Foreign Aid sold first 80,000 copies for fee and then went into all 20 Reader's Digest editions around the world. So the 13 million copies of that were read around the world. So you can see there was a certain amount of impact from these publications. One of the most widely read was Bastiat's The Law. It was translated New Translation by Dean Russell. And that book must have been sold not just by fee but by Pat Robinson and others, a million copies. Maybe its most important reader was Ronald Reagan. When Ronald Reagan was transferring his career from acting to being a spokesman for the General Electric Company, Len Bullwer, who was Vice President of General Electric and a trustee of fee, gave him the fee materials, all the publications of fee to help train him in economics. Now, first of all, I've heard some very prominent economists who were in attendance at meetings with President Reagan say that he actually did understand economics and they attributed to the fact that when he went to college he took economics and economics being taught then was real economics. And then he built on that with the materials from fee. And if you read any of speeches he ever wrote himself, those are reflected in it. Once he had speech writers, well then, anything went. But if you read anything he himself wrote, you can see the impact of these ideas. And if you heard of press conferences, there were press conferences in which the ideas of Bastiat are very clear in his presentations. Now, Bastiat actually has been an important figure in American economic thought for many years. There was an earlier publication by the Santana Register in 1945 of the Complete Works of Bastiat. So this was an important contribution, but the law being a very accessible book has been much more important. The mid-19th century translations in the late 1840s and 1850s were done by a woman in Charleston, South Carolina, Louisa Susanna Cheves-McCord. She was the daughter of a man who became the president, second president of the second bank of the United States. She was, the family was French. Huguenot, she was totally conversant in French. And she did these translations as well as writing many other important things. She's also famous for when Sherman entered Columbia, South Carolina. She refused to leave her house and the troops finally backed down rather than she backed down. And she had lost several sons in the war. But happily, after years of waiting by me, University Press of Virginia is publishing a volume of her writings and hopefully she will begin to come back into the importance which she deserves, not just for her translations of Bastille. Now, one of the things that occurred in 1947, a year after the founding of Foundation for Economic Education was the first meeting of the Montpelerin Society. Now I'm not going to give you a history either of the background of it or of its subsequent history, because Max Hartwell has written a history of the Montpelerin Society which will be published in the fall by Liberty Press of the Liberty Fund. So you can get more about it. But there were about 11 Americans among the 43 libertarian scholars who were attending. They included Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Reid, F.A. Harper, Henry Haslett, John Chamberlain, Felix Morley, Herb Cornell, Frank Knight, George Stiegler, Milton Friedman, and Aaron Director. So it was a very distinguished group, as we learned subsequently, who were involved at this early date in the MPS meetings. In 1954, Phi undertook the publication of a magazine. There was, in 1950, the probably third incarnation of the American magazine, The Freeman, which Albert J. Nock had first dotted in the 1920s. In fact, it's when he stopped publishing it that Menken then began the American Mercury to take its place. Now, it was restarted by Haslett and Chamberlain in 1950. By 1954, it wasn't enough circulation, so they were going to close it, so Leonard Reid bought it for a dollar and began issuing it as a monthly and hired Frank Choderoff to be the editor. Frank had been involved in a late 1930s attempt by Albert J. Nock to start a Freeman. He and Nock began a new magazine just before Nock died, a monthly newsletter called Analysis. In 1950, Felix Morley, who had been co-editor of the Human Events, left and Frank Hannigan then hired Choderoff to be his associate editor. The Human Events originally and in this period was very different than it is today. Each week was a pair of four-page newsletters. The newsletter would have things like heard outside the Senate Minority Leader's office. Social security will be repealed next year. So every year you had the same sort of gossip which wasn't really that good. The other thing was an essay, a four-page essay written by somebody important. Choderoff wrote one every month. Hazlett, Hayek, Mises, Morgenstern, the editor of the Chicago Tribune. All of these people wrote essays. These were incredibly good materials and could well be republished or a selection of them could well be republished. It was while Choderoff was at Human Events that I first met him. I had come to Georgetown College in 1951 and was involved in the formation of the Students for Taft and the Youth for Taft movement. When Eisenhower won the nomination in Chicago due to the treachery of Earl Warren, the result was that we felt a bit bereft. And I remember Ralph Raco, who was one of the leaders of the Students for Taft, calling me in so we met at a Horn and Hardart Automat on Columbus Circle and had iced tea. He said, well, I've gotten word from some people in Hollywood, not the entertainment part, to start a new organization. Let's the Students for Taft merge with another group which was called the National Student MacArthur Clubs, which favored General MacArthur. Happily they had funding from Henry Salvatore and so through that financial support, the Students for America was started and the group became the Eastern region. I became the director of the Eastern region of the Students for America. One of the things that I developed because soon after that Ralph Raco had discovered fee and so then when I was up from Washington we went up to fee and then through that we discovered Mises Seminar. But I discovered the fee publications which were lots of small 8-page, 12-page pamphlets and so they agreed to send them to the students free who were members of Students for America. So we began this process. Leonard Reed was extremely kind and arranged for this to be done. Now, I then met Choderoff and Choderoff had always had in mind to set up something to oppose collectivism on the campus. He thought that Walter Lippmann's intercollegiate socialist society was a spawning ground of collectivism if something like the Adam Smith clubs as he thought could be set up that would be important. So in my conversations with him I showed him the ability through the fee pamphlets to reach students even though we might not have a lot of money and so we then organized the intercollegiate society of individualists which is now the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. And Bill Buckley became the president and helped to raise some funds. And Mr. Pugh of Sun Oil Company was very generous and he provided a campus travel of Vic Milione to go around the campus. I founded the first chapter at Georgetown of the ISI and then from there lots of chapters were able to be established. But you can see there was a certain amount of synergism and cooperation. We didn't have very much but we were able to make it go a long way by cooperation. The pamphlets weren't doing fee any good sitting in their basement. So they were quite willing to let them and pay for sending them out. And so through these mechanisms we were able to begin to reach lots of people on the campuses to make some kind of a dent in what was going on for the most part and which is much worse now on the campuses. In addition to the Freeman which Todorov then began to edit at fee for about a year and then he and Leonard read those sort of culture clash and Frank retired and once and the Freeman was turned into more like a readers digestile magazine rather than more of a political analysis and so at that point William Buckley then decided to start planning what became the national review. He was in many ways a disciple of Todorov. He didn't want to do anything while Todorov was editing the Freeman once Todorov stepped down then he felt free to undertake what he wanted to do which was to start the national review magazine which began in November 1955. There was another magazine which is important to us even though it wasn't big circulation called Faith and Freedom. It was aimed at clergy with a free market perspective. It was a monthly magazine but the editors were all libertarians and I don't know what the clergy made of the articles that were in there because there was stuff by clergy but like Edmund Opitz and other people but they were not what clergy probably were looking for was what we thought they should be reading and that was headed by the Reverend James Feifield of the First Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles which I think is the church Reagan attended and there were some good people they had a Washington column called Along Pennsylvania Avenue which Todorov wrote and then when he went to Fee he was replaced by Murray Rothbard but since Murray Rothbard of course at that time never left Manhattan it was hard to say that he was writing it so he took a pseudonym Auburn Herbert as the author although even though he was in New York he knew a lot about what was going on in Washington. Now another important development at this time was again the work of Red Miller you remember I had mentioned him an important resource for Mr. Voker he had discovered Herb Cornell who became the founder of the active philanthropy concept he then moved on to Detroit to again head a municipal reform league where he met H.B. Earhart and Mr. Earhart and Red Miller came up with the idea of setting up the Earhart Foundation and the Realm Foundation which again even though the money is not that munificent, not a huge endowment yet it's had a very very crucial effect again pursuing something like this idea of active philanthropy trying to find good people and to help them in their work. There are a number of other parallel activities I'm thinking of William Regnery who owned a window shade manufacturing company which provided the window shades to Mr. Luno's furniture wholesale company from Chicago who like Mr. Luno was a leading member of the America First Committee his son Henry Regnery then set up the Regnery publishing company there had been an earlier set of publications during the war Robert Hutchins and a number of others had written and I've forgotten the name of that publishing entity but then also was set up the foundation for foreign affairs which tried to assist people doing work dealing with foreign policy or history in general I myself was a recipient of a fellowship from that foundation at an early point one of the leading members one of the leading scholars involved with them was William L. Newman Newman was a historian who in early 1945 wrote a short but very important expose on Pearl Harbor and the question of responsibility for the Pearl Harbor situation you saw more rather recently in the Washington Times about Admiral Kimmel's family wanting more treatment there's an excellent, there's this excellent book whatever his name is on Pearl Harbor who's gone through all, he's a famous author but he's gone through all of the investigations there were a number during the war and when you read that it really tells you what really went on leading up to Pearl Harbor Newman published this he was at that time in a conscientious objective camp in Oregon along with Arthur E. Kirch who was again another leading historian on American diplomatic history and a congressman when he saw it was published by the American Friends Service Committee a congressman immediately wanted him executed but J. Edgar Hoover didn't read the congressional record that day so he was spared being holed in anyway Newman became academic in publishing part of the foundation and some good things were published but it didn't eventually have the impact it should have had we also experienced a lot of feeling of sadness that the politics was not an answer this I think the defeat of Taft in the nomination the Eisenhower administration while in retrospect was heaven didn't seem that way to us it seemed a lot of compromise in retrospect it did a lot of good and Eisenhower in fact adopted at the Morningside Heights Accord when at that time Eisenhower had been the president of Columbia University and Taft came to his house on Morningside Heights and they came up with a Taftite program to run the campaign during after the nomination people said Eisenhower's campaign was running like a dry creek and what it needed was a program and Taft came in and gave him the program and in a lot of ways they tried to fulfill it but it was not a very inspiring kind of program a lot of it was ad hoc now at this time another institution came into existence that is the Freedom School in Palma Lake Colorado headed by Bob LaFave I had met Bob LaFave once maybe when he worked in New York and then he went out to become the editorial page editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph and in doing that he also set up the Freedom School I never was at the Freedom School so I can only say that people who were there founded Inspiring I did hear him once give I heard part of a weekend seminar Harry Langenberg had asked me to come to St. Louis and I caught part of it and he was inspiring he was very competent and he had Army colonels in his audience whom he was able to convince that pacifism was correct and so I must say he was an amazing person as he was very good at reaching people and never with any hostility, nothing, never confrontation but to look at the person's position and try to examine it in his own so the one time I saw him I was totally amazed and I had wished and I proposed that he be permitted to train other people with the same effect but no one thought that was a useful thing so now that he's gone we don't have that opportunity it was a period also where in the 1950s Iron Rand became important for some people her Atlas drugged was published with a great deal of controversy and as a consequence of that a number of us who had been involved with the Mises seminar had been invited by her to meet with her and her friends and talk and we did but usually these meetings started at 11 o'clock at night and I was doing my graduate research every day at the New York Public Library and so by midnight I would fall asleep which was not welcomed understandably and so I didn't continue and in part because philosophically I didn't share some of the views of the objectivists so that there was and then there was a break between many of us and them so I never other than thinking that her for instance Fountainhead is a great novel and some of the others I enjoyed the movie I always I headed the film society at Georgetown and would show it every year and that sort of thing but beyond that I mean we already have 2,500 years of western philosophy and Rand I don't think added anything to it in my opinion it was what she said was accurate but it wasn't original and it was wonderful and so far she got people interested in reading Aristotle or Aquinas or any of the other great philosophers but her own personal claims I wasn't convinced about the other important event was Hayek actually coming to America University of Chicago graduate economics department had been hired by the president of the university and then the economics department with Paul Douglas and other luminaries did not feel he was an appropriate colleague which in a sense was a correct judgment and so so now there was a problem so temporarily Hayek was warehouse teaching at the University of Arkansas till it was straightened out and then finally it was decided he would come to the committee on social thought which was headed by John Yunef John Yunef was an English economic historian really a great scholar his most famous book was called War and Human Progress and he quite readily took Hayek in as someone extremely appropriate to the committee on social thought and Hayek went there and not only was important to the university but was active speaking at other academic and like events now this treatment of Hayek by the University of Chicago was parallel by other similar things there at one point Mr. Walgren the founder of the Walgren drug stores had set up a chair at Chicago chair in American institutions but the school did not appoint somebody they would bring somebody famous in for a week would give four or five lectures and then they published them and finally Mr. Walgren and his son said well we donated the money for a chair for a professor to be here all year and influence the students all year not to circulate somebody in for five days and then you know fifty weeks of the year that there isn't anyone here and the dean of the social science school said well we'll give the money back we're not going to have this man dictating to us and the poor bedraggled graduate business school said oh maybe we'll be dictated too for a million dollars it might you know might not be the worst thing that could happen to university so Alan Wallace who was the dean of the graduate business school later the president and chancellor of the University of Rochester and later George Bush under secretary of state for economic affairs said we have to we'll come up with someone that Mr. Walgren will accept and we know that the person that Mr. Walgren will draw on for his advice his resource person is Leonard Reid so think of a university that draws on Leonard Reid for advice or at least the donor so Alan Wallace and Milton Friedman went to see Leonard Reid and said what do you think of George Stiegler and he said great person so they said what if he were offered a chair at Chicago he said that's a good idea and then when Mr. Walgren called what do you think of this George Stiegler Leonard Reid said great person and Stiegler had the chair then that he had for many many years at the University of Chicago but these were some of the small victories that gave the base for later future development all of these things are small but base building if they didn't exist we wouldn't be here so even though they were small they were acorns that grew into very large oaks and over the years the consequences of having people like Hayek or Stiegler or Friedman or Buchanan or Kos or any of the other people in the various key university positions had an impact and even without the Volcker Fund which people like Stiegler and Friedman Hayek et cetera said was crucial in the early days and would have continued to be crucial if it had existed even once it had gone there were enough other institutions like the Institute for Humane Studies able to do part of the slack and to keep the momentum going and to pursue some of this idea of active philanthropy which the Volcker Fund had established I think this is a good point to conclude and we can have questions in their contemporaries we're all going to have recovery in the fifties talking plenty a lot about the New Deal essentially they were gum feeders and since all they could do was complain there wasn't any kind of breadth in the sense of an intellectual response to that era and I guess the question I have why did it take so long for something to develop and the more I look back 40 years ago the more I don't understand why weren't the people in the fifties almost spontaneously realizing what the problem was when Friedman was talking about Social Security you mentioned that you had to be positive the problem with the people at that time was they were nothing but just negative and so they were a turn off to a lot of people and so they couldn't, as I could say section of why the government's on security was bad and number two come up with something that was better as we're able to do today now what you laid out is what the origins were of an intellectual revolution in the state of maybe 40 to 50 years my question is why did it take 50 years why didn't it happen in 5 or 10 or 15 years we're not talking about rocket science in terms of kind of analysis oh rocket science is much easier than changing public opinion no no, not changing public opinion it's a matter of being able to do the basic analysis solution the basic... I'll answer shortly and then a little longer Social Security is a very interesting point because actually at this historic meeting in the summer of 1942 at the Horn and Hartot Automat on Columbus Circle in discussing what will we do in the future now that Taft is not the nominee and Ralph Reiko said well one of the things that we have to address is that Social Security is a fraud I said what do you mean Kent that's you know given it was put in before I reached the age of reason so it must be good and I said we can't challenge that everyone's in favor and he convinced me that it was theft and it was the whole thing was a fraud and that's really was when I became a libertarian at that particular moment Fee published lots on Social Security it all said it wasn't going to work the problem was as they said it was going to take a long time for it not to work because everyone was paying in and only a few people were drawing out so it looked like the wonderful wealth machine and so everything looked like it would work now of course the people who were drawing the money out at that time were taking small amounts they thought it was really they weren't sure whether the thing was right it was something they had it was brand new and they were still living in Murray Rothbard would have called the old culture they were responsible hardworking people the whole welfare system has come in with generations growing up with it not knowing a period of self-responsibility and so attitudes changed this is part of the unintended consequences that for instance if you put in a welfare system in Sweden where everybody is Swedes it's probably not going to be too disastrous because they will behave in certain ways and watch each other etc if you put it in Louisiana it may be a very different thing you have different cultural impact so that if you have congressmen and senators year after year from Minnesota saying what are local Norwegian farmers would accept as this kind of a safety net etc and you put it in a national scale well people in Louisiana don't think like Norwegian farmers and they're going to pocket everything they can and so you by having national that's one of the problems with national welfare or any of the other things you have the Moors the leaders are all the progressives from Wisconsin and Minnesota where the population is very different than other parts of the United States and therefore when you have national legislation you have all kinds of disasters coming out of it now a longer point is that yes you could say people were gum beaters and whatever but there was no despite the fact there were a lot of columnists and there were a lot of other good people most of the national press or the local versions of the national press were very left people always referred to the Kansas City star as the red star over Kansas the Cowells publications in Minnesota and Iowa you have all kinds of key press in the opposite of what the people were and so they thought well I must be wrong and there was no way it was very difficult to have leadership and a lot of good columnists were dropped I mean there were a whole lots of things that were important and so the universities were in the hands of big business which meant that they hired only communists to teach since ideas aren't important only manufacturing is important and the same happened in France de Gaulle set up many new universities and said well who cares about universities let the communists staff the universities while I staff the ministries of production or whatever it is everywhere there is the surrender but the right does not think ideas are important they think that better manufacturing will show people that this will work and this is what undermined liberalism classical liberalism in the late 19th century all the industrial leaders said well who cares about ideas as long as we show that capitalism produces more and makes people happy and people didn't draw those conclusions from that they thought well we can this is something good we can milk and they had no arguments against milking it yes Leonard I agree about the importance of freedom in part because it came at a certain time in a certain whole generation through their presence when I was there in 1967 and I agree with you by the way about the face incredible speaker the person next to me were a child just a whole set of people at that time and it was a kind of transition you could see some of what you talked about as the vulgar traditions there but that was going on we didn't have the new a lot of people seem to benefit from it yes no I was wondering if you could comment maybe a few thoughts on what you think where you would place Murray Rothbard in his importance in development of not just modern libertarian but also in terms of comparison to people like Mises Locke thinkers like that well he was a very great scholar and very knowledgeable and very interdisciplinary and mastered a whole bunch of areas I have to admire the fact that he trained himself as a historian which is something he was a mathematician basically and went into economics and then later saw the importance of history and trained himself and wrote a great deal of history he wrote on political philosophy so in terms of his contributions they were very very important and probably his last two volumes which have just been published on the history of economic thought will be long considered crucial in study of economic history of economic thought if that subject still continues most schools are dropping it because Smith did not use any equations so why study Smith we are dominated now by an MIT sense of what economics is about despite people like Hayek and Buchanan and Knight and all these others trying to put something else forward so as a scholar he was really very very important and he helped a lot of other people develop their scholarship so I have the highest praise for him as a scholar yes the having seen the sort of history of the movement right now what do you think what kind of institution building do you think is most crucial right now that we should be looking at we have of course think tanks we have a lot of magazines and publications what kind of institution building is most crucial right now I would say in the next five to ten years and are there any particular either topic areas or sort of aspects of social economic thought philosophy whether it's history whatever do you think our movement should look more at from an academic perspective or policy perspective or whatever well I fear somewhat pessimistic and worry that we are in a crisis beyond the movement that is American education is word zero I what people will know in a few years when they come out of our school system I have no idea I'm very fearful I don't have any optimism so I don't know what to say to some degree America may have been saved by the great advances in medicine people have said that before 1920 any help from a doctor was as likely to kill you as to help you but since 1920 we've had great advances in medical research and science which means a lot of people who are educated under the old system have lived a long time so we have a lot of very old voters but America may be saved by 80 year old voters I mean the vote in 1994 may have been the vote of the 90 year old voters well that's medicine only can go so far and the result is that I don't know what's going to happen those voters vote most frequently etc but those are people educated in the old culture that doesn't mean they have degrees or anything I'm talking about people who may have only had primary education but primary education someone New York for instance has been saved by having lots of 80 year old secretaries because when they graduated with a primary school degree it was equal to a community college degree or better probably and so yeah I mean all kinds of things and those people have been continuing to be hired and as they retire or depart those businesses close in New York you could trace New York's decline as the availability of educated people from a long time back have disappeared and these people are the kind of people who didn't take Social Security when they were 65 but wanted to work till they were 85 so I mean that's a whole different world that we're talking about as Mises said there was a reserve in the economy and in society and that was a social reserve that we've had that can't be banked any longer and so what's going to happen I don't know I mean this is a I mean the schools obviously have collapsed long ago and nobody will recognize it so we have the emperor with no clothes and everyone running around saying put more ermine on and so you know it's a very it's more than just the movement it's really the whole civilization that's at stake Mises sort of in the social realm yes but whether you know I don't know enough of how that can be transmitted in new culture and all that sort of thing you know I don't know you know I we have lots of we have a McLuhanite world maybe of more on the non printed word and all these other things so I don't know what the consequences of all that that is also needs to be discovered but I don't know is classical liberalism and western civilization dependent on printing and people reading or you know is there something else coming out is you know can we have a a new Woody Allen film to show us what the brave new world is going to look like something of that sort yes Montgomery yes yes it's Montgomery who was the assistant attorney general of the US over his confirmation but people aren't familiar with it it is the first attempt to compare the outcomes of public schooling versus private school and for the one figure that sticks in my mind he said in Massachusetts which has supported government public education since 1647 like one out of every 649 native born whites was in prison in Virginia which had just a year before going into public education 1 in 7000 7000 although you can poke fun at all you know if the figures are raised questions it was actually the first empirical effort that I know about and it preceded James Coleman in public and private schools by 90 years and I held that for a very long time yes some discussion of Zach Montgomery's work in some of the essays by Joe Peden on opponents of public education but he was from California and he was being wrecked over the coals by some of the public school mandarins at the time there were other there was a lot of argumentation on public education in California out of which he had been involved in that which is why then he was being challenged at his confirmation hearings and also Joe Peden has done work on New Mexico territory and Utah territory both of which for different reasons but equally did not want government imposed educational systems but there were also opponents of public education earlier in America and George Smith has an unpublished manuscript on English opponents of public education especially the Leeds Mercury he's gone through all the editions of Leeds Mercury which was a daily newspaper in England the editor of which was one of the most important libertarians of the mid 19th century and people around the economist in its early years were in the similar point of view but the Zach Montgomery book is an excellent book and it was reprinted so at some point because I remember this when I read it it was somebody had reprinted it 20 30 years ago who it was or why but it would say do you have the original hearings because no it was reprinted it in a paperback probably Joe Peden would remember what it was I don't I can't remember offhand yes well that was about it was not overly complex it was Taft or Hoover I mean part of it came out of the first world war Hoover and Taft were part of the Wilson administration Hoover was head of food and fuel and Taft was his general counsel and then they went over to Paris to save the world and they saw that what Wilson was doing was going to create a new war so they both abandoned the peace conference came home Hoover set up the Hoover institution on war peace and revolution to show that war causes revolution that there would not have been a Bolshevik revolution if Russia hadn't caused the first world war to begin so their attitude was that first of all that by the United States going into the first world war it prolonged the war the war would have had a negotiated settlement in 1917 that would not have been a Bolshevik revolution the established institutions would have survived things would have been able to somehow get back rather than Bella Kun in Hungary or the Bavarian communist revolution or the Berlin spot assist and all that that was so disruptive that led eventually to Nazism so their point was America coming into the war with its huge industrial strength meant that what would have been natural in the international scene that is a negotiated settlement was overcome by the brute you just U.S. would wear down the other side and therefore the U.S. was a dangerous force because it was such a great industrial success that it didn't its involvement and created unnatural problems in international affairs and so and their view was America was a beacon on a hill it showed what you should do make a great success have a great constitution great successful economy and don't disrupt it internally by going to war and don't disrupt the rest of the world and Hoover said well if we go into a second world war there are a million communists rather than just a couple of hundred million and he was absolutely right that U.S. can survive a war without a lot of problems we lived relatively well given all the strains of the second world war but others people couldn't they didn't have the resources and so they constantly said that we should be a beacon on the hill show how successful a republic with limited government can be and some parts of the world will learn from it hopefully for a valid trade well there was some were free trade and some were various kinds of old style protectionist so it was a mixed group the president of New York said it was a small young young yes I guess two people from the election kind of interested first first eventually becoming a libertarian anarchist well first John Dos Pasos I remember him he had a Sunday weekly radio program and I used to listen to that and he wrote a couple of books in that period and wrote for national review and other things so that he was a cultural critic of collectivism and Garrett Garrett mainly wrote for the Saturday evening post and was a very accomplished writer was involved in all the different publications wrote for the free men etc so he and wrote very important work but in the Saturday evening post he reached a large audience in the free men smaller audience but he was an extremely effective writer he was very very important yes we talked about the objective of this I ran when did you differ with them in terms of philosophically no stylistically they were not easy to get along with but did you have a philosophical well mainly with the claim to the iron rand originated a lot of these philosophical ideas well the ideas themselves I mean the way she presented them sometimes I thought were not accurate descriptions of them so why not take the great writers themselves rather than some rehashing of them as a novelist she was extremely effective there was no great novelist my point is as much as what's happening the feeling of despair about school back in the 50s what's going to happen in the future and now the future is here but I think that was on a level for people who were not you're up there in the scholarly I have no objections to the people I have no objections to the VISTA I didn't I went to college school this was something to me we need to think of a level which freezes people who don't have that scholarly background who don't make that effort as we need to get to public schools we need to get to the textbooks what are the things I'm doing about getting into the I can't read that's why we have tapes that's why we have video tapes that's why we have video tapes for example we need to work on the reading part of that of course the public schools that would be the one thing to get to read but also give the material to read can grasp and understand on their level and the grade school books that they can teach sex in a kindergarten they can start to teach about thinking in kindergarten what are the things I'm doing about getting down into the kindergarten well first of all you can't get down to each kindergarten at this point the idea is to try and deal with the system as the whole and Mike Lieberman is here who's trying to begin a public policy institute dealing with questions of education so at least there's an addition to the work heritage is done for example and Sheldon Richmond's many contributions in this area so there's work being done but a million times more needs to be done on all levels there's no question about that, yes how about the other side of the Markman first group for Westbrook Bangler of the General America Father Coughlin was not in the America first committee Charles Lindberg Charles Lindberg was and Westbrook I don't think so he probably was favorable to it but he wasn't in there Yes Jeff Ask an alter to Washington based question because you're fascinating and I think very receptive survey of development of institutions as well as publications during this period needs to be lacking is really involvement in Washington and was there a sense especially I guess after the defeat of Taft that Washington was sort of a wasteland as far as ideas were concerned and so the ISI was set up in Philadelphia I guess Fee was up in New York and these institutions publications developed around the country but nothing was really focused in Washington was the feeling that it wasn't important the effort in doing things No and because there were there were senators and congressmen who were favorable but you know they but in a general way they didn't fully understand a lot Goldwater put his mind to learning a good deal so that that gave him the preeminence that he received the others were good hearted I was at Columbia Law School and we had Senator Molly Malone from Nevada speak who was very good hearted he wasn't one of the towering intellects of our time but he was on the right he voted right all the time to where things belong and the provost of Columbia called us in and said we don't want that to happen anymore it was an ISI chapter that we were founding and he made sure there wasn't any further ISI chapter or Molly Malone at Columbia University so when the students tossed them out in 1968 I wasn't so sorry thank you Leonard for that excellent presentation maybe part three next year okay then we started in the fifties at that point thank you very much I'm sorry we ran late we will do better next time with respect to getting the salads out earlier and I hope to see you in May and in June thank you