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Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov [1980] The Online Library of Liberty A Project Of Liberty Fund, Inc. Frank Chodorov, Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov [1980] The Online Library Of Liberty This E-Book (PDF format) is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a private, non-profit, educational foundation established in 1960 to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. 2010 was the 50th anniversary year of the founding of Liberty Fund. It is part of the Online Library of Liberty web site http://oll.libertyfund.org, which was established in 2004 in order to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. To find out more about the author or title, to use the site's powerful search engine, to see other titles in other formats (HTML, facsimile PDF), or to make use of the hundreds of essays, educational aids, and study guides, please visit the OLL web site. This title is also part of the Portable Library of Liberty DVD which contains over 1,000 books and quotes about liberty and power, and is available free of charge upon request. The cuneiform inscription that appears in the logo and serves as a design element in all Liberty Fund books and web sites is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, in present day Iraq. To find out more about Liberty Fund, Inc., or the Online Library of Liberty Project, please contact the Director at [email protected]. LIBERTY FUND, INC. 8335 Allison Pointe Trail, Suite 300 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250-1684 Online Library of Liberty: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov Edition Used: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov, Compiled, Edited, and with an Introduction by Charles H. Hamilton (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1980). Author: Frank Chodorov Introduction: Charles H. Hamilton About This Title: A collection of Chodorov’s essays selected from The Freeman and Human Events and other publications. PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 2 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1730 Online Library of Liberty: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov About Liberty Fund: Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. Copyright Information: The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc. Fair Use Statement: This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit. PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 3 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1730 Online Library of Liberty: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov Table Of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction By Charles H. Hamilton Fugitive Essays Foreword Part I: The Political Mentality The Dogma of Our Times Washington: a Psychosis Washington, the American Mecca Remember Robespierre Part II: Natural Rights and Unnatural Wrongs Source of Rights Economics Versus Politics From God Or the Sword? Government Contra State Civilization Or Caveman Economy? Free Will and the Marketplace One Worldism Part III: Why We Have Socialism About Socialism and Socialists The “crime” of the Capitalists A Fifty-year Project Part IV: Communism and America Let's Teach Communism Commies Don't Count How to Curb the Commies How Communism Came to America Part V: Why Don't You Propose Something Constructive? On Saving the Country If We Quit Voting What Individualism Is Not Thought and the World of Action Why Teach Freedom? Part VI: Education and Freedom My Friend's Education Why Free Schools Are Not Free Private Schools: the Solution to America's Educational Problem Part VII: Taxation Is Robbery The Revolution of 1913 Socialism Via Taxation Part VIII: An Individualist's Heritage Thomas Jefferson, Rebel! George Mason of Virginia Henry David Thoreau The Articulate Individualist PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 4 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1730 Online Library of Liberty: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov Part IX: The International Scene Reds Are Natives Isolationism A Byzantine Empire of the West? Free Trade For Preparedness Part X: When War Comes A Jeremiad Warfare Versus Welfare A War to Communize America Part XI: It's Fun to Fight On Doing Something About It Freedom Is Better Let's Try Capitalism About Revolutions A Legacy of Value Selected Bibliography of Chodorov 's Works Books Pamphlets Periodicals Biography Frank Chodorov PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 5 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1730 Online Library of Liberty: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov [Back to Table of Contents] ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For their help and encouragement as I did the research for this volume, I would especially like to thank Oscar Johannsen, Robert Schalkenbach Foundation; Robert Kephart, Kephart Communications; Edmund Opitz, Foundation for Economic Education; and Joseph Peden, Institute for Humane Studies. Paul Avrich, Bettina Bien, Leonard Liggio, Murray Rothbard, and Jack Schwartzman all helped me when I had questions. Grace Klein, Frank Chodorov's daughter, helped me to get a better sense of Frank Chodorov as a person. Susan Trowbridge listened and made sure every word was in the right place. Charles H. Hamilton PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 6 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1730 Online Library of Liberty: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov [Back to Table of Contents] Introduction By Charles H. Hamilton Frank Chodorov was by temperament and experience skeptical of the intentions of politicians and intellectuals. They wanted to change the world. And Chodorov never tired of pointing out the dangers of such obsessions: “When proponents say ‘let's do something about it,’ they mean ‘let's get hold of the political machinery so that we can do something to somebody else.’ And that somebody else is invariably you.”1 Chodorov knew that change depended on individuals taking responsibility for their own actions, not on choreographing the actions of others. For almost thirty years he sought to find and counsel those people devoted to individual freedom and a humane life. He took on “Isaiah's job.” This biblical parable is retold by Albert Jay Nock in one of his best essays.2 The prophet Isaiah is sent by the Lord to tell the people of a decaying civilization “what is wrong, and why, and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up.” He didn't expect to rouse the masses to action or to convert the political powers that be; rather, in what was ultimately more important, Isaiah desired to serve the Remnant. The members of this Remnant, as the Lord explains, are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society, and meanwhile your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant. When Nock wrote this essay in 1936, he saw the job going begging. A few years later, Chodorov took that job and uniquely served to maintain the tradition of what Murray N. Rothbard has called the “old American Right”: that passionate belief in individual liberty which strongly opposed both the rising statist interventionism at home, and war and imperialism abroad.3 For over twenty years, he wrote hundreds of articles, edited three magazines, and helped to edit a handful of others. With his brand of political journalism, “he deeply influenced the postwar conservative movement,” as William F. Buckley once acknowledged.4 And his important contributions still survive on the Right and in the now burgeoning libertarian movement. A MAN MUST HAVE A CAUSE On February 15, 1887, two poor, Russian immigrants had their eleventh child, the only one to be born in the United States. His name was Fishel Chodorowsky, although he was always known as Frank Chodorov. He grew up on the Lower West Side of New York City, where he helped his family with their small restaurant. He graduated from Columbia University in 1907, and until 1937 he “wandered through the years.” He taught high school for a few years. He married, and he and his PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011) 7 http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1730 Online Library of Liberty: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov wife, Celia, had two children. He ran a clothing factory in Massachusetts for a time. In 1925 he started his own small mail-order clothing firm, but it was wiped out by the Great Depression. He then held a number of sales and promotion jobs. It was in between these jobs that Chodorov developed a passionate commitment to individualism and to the free market. Years later he was fond of saying that “a young man must have a cause.”5 He found his by accident. While working in Chicago (1912–17), he picked up a friend's copy of Henry George's Progress and Poverty. Assuming only that George was a fine nineteenth-century essayist, Chodorov remembers he “read the book several times, and each time I felt myself slipping into a cause.”6 That book was to give him a Weltanschauung that influenced all his writing. Henry George is usually remembered for his concern over land value and the ownership of land. Land, George contended, should not be privately owned, and rent was really a social value that should not be subject to individual profiteering.
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