Evangelists for Freedom: Libertarian Populism and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Conservatism, 1930-1950

Alexander McPhee-Browne

ORCID: 0000-0001-8258-7447

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Masters of Arts (Thesis only)

April, 2018

School of Historical and Philosophical Studies The University of Melbourne

Supervisors: A/Professor Barbara Keys and Professor David Goodman

i Abstract

This thesis examines the history of rightwing anti-statist thought in twentieth- century America from 1930-1950, focusing on the works of an array of intellectuals,

politicians and activists who forged a distinct synthesis of classical American

individualism with a populist critique of the nascent liberal political order, a revivalist Christian apologetics and virulent anti-communism. Central to their vision was an image of the liberty of the individual and the modern administrative state as

antithetical, and a conception of the social world as the sole product of the creative power of the liberated individual. Radicalized by the triumph of New Deal liberalism,

these authors and activists collaborated closely with conservative industrialists to

establish new individualist organizations and publications, and propagate their

philosophy throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Offering a quasi-utopian vision of

national spiritual and material renewal, I argue that the work of these authors

embodied a distinct strand of “libertarian populism,” a novel body of thought that

would, in time, form the intellectual bedrock of the “new” post-World War II

American conservatism.

ii

Declaration

This is to certify that:

(i) This thesis comprises only my original work towards the Masters of Arts degree. (ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used. (iii) This thesis is 49,800 words in length, exclusive of the bibliography, abstract and table of contents, as approved by the RHD committee.

Signed,

Alex McPhee-Browne

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my two supervisors first of all. Professor Barbara Keys, for her boundless enthusiasm, endless support and advice, and invaluable editing. And Professor David Goodman, for his keen analysis of my argument, sage advice and generous proofreading.

I would also like to thank my friends and family for their encouragement and much needed support. Especially, my father and mother, and my best friend Annie, who nursed me through a long illness and made the completion of this thesis, so long in the work, a possibility at all.

iv CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter One 23

Garet Garrett and the Old Individualists

Chapter Two 55

American Counter-Utopia: The Birth of Libertarian Populism

in the Shadow of Roosevelt

Chapter Three 82

American Fundamentalist: Rose Wilder Lane and the

Rise of Libertarian Populism

Chapter Four 123

Rose Wilder Lane and the Intellectual Origins of

Modern Conservatism

Conclusion 144

List of Abbreviations 148

Bibliography 149

v

Each one saves himself or he is not saved.

–Garet Garrett

vi Introduction

In late November, 1935, in a long, sour letter to the writer Virginia Brastow, the journalist and novelist Rose Wilder Lane contemplated, not for the first time, the fall of the American republic. The slow march of a bleak, tumultuous decade—riven by crises, personal and civilizational—was gradually undermining Lane’s faith in the promise of American politics. “What America did in one little short hundred years, only one century,” she wrote of the years from 1812, “was done by utterly lawless individuals. The century was a release of the power of millions of individuals; like a tremendous explosion of energy.” As Lane turned her gaze to contemporary society, though, she saw only a “tired” nation, its citizens clamoring for release from the weight of the old virtues. “Human beings are so helpless, really, Virginia,” she wrote.

“The individual is tired of the burden of power, that is, of responsibility.”1

The American Revolution, Lane believed, had “destroyed” the “principle of authority,” the power of the state to control and enslave the individual, for the first time in history. Now, though, this experiment in the spiritual and material potential of individual liberty appeared to be drawing to a close. “The explosion is over; the western world returns to order, discipline, authority and obedience,” she wrote.

“[T]he principle of authority has survived and is reviving with vigor. Everywhere.

Everywhere, including America. And when a democratic people goes back to the principle of authority, where can it go but to communism?”2

The nightmare that gripped Lane in those months would only intensify over the following years. But her resignation, which in 1935 seemed almost total, would

1 Rose Wilder Lane [hereafter: “RWL”] to Virginia Brastow [hereafter: “VB”], June 16, 1935, in Subject Files [SF], box 1, folder 16, William Holtz papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa [hereafter: “Holtz papers”]. 2 Ibid.; RWL to VB, November 21, 1935, in ibid.

1 steadily transform, over the coming months, into angry defiance. By the end of the following year, Lane had decided to dedicate the remainder of her life to resisting

America’s descent into collectivism, embarking on a decades-long project to revive and reconstitute the old philosophy of American individualism.

In these efforts, she was not alone. Economic calamity, pervasive fear, the specter of European totalitarianism—all of these developments violently undermined the old political order, while radically widening the space of political possibility on both the left and the right throughout the 1930s. In this climate, a new group of polemicists and political operatives, committed to a vision of classical American individualism—individual liberty, property rights, and limited government—began to fuse their philosophy with a populist critique of the nascent liberal political order, a revivalist Christian apologetics and, in time, virulent anti-communism.3 Lane, first among them, conceived of this project as a return to the high revolutionary tradition of the Founding Fathers. “The Revolution is the effort to make a new human world in which persons, endowed with liberty, control themselves according to God's laws of human relationships,” she wrote in 1948. “Such a world must—and someday will— include all persons living on earth, in all their variety.” Their philosophy, which I call

“libertarian populism,” radicalized the faith of their immediate individualist precursors, forging an extreme anti-statism that denied the government any positive

3 For the purposes of this thesis, I treat the individualists’ conception of American’s founding philosophy as based principally on a restrictive, Lockean natural rights liberalism as a given. While this was the historical orthodoxy of the 1930s (see chp. 1, n33), there is a vast body of scholarship regarding the relative contributions of liberal individualism and republicanism to America’s founding philosophy. A classic account challenging the traditional, classical liberal view is Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America In Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). For an overview of the debate, see Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), and Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept,” The Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (June 1992): 11. For a useful prehistory of the emergence of Lockean market individualism as the dominant framework for understanding twentieth-century conceptions of “freedom” or “liberty,” see Eric MacGilvray, The Invention of Market Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

2 role in society and celebrated the sovereign spiritual and economic power of the free individual. For the ensuing decade and a half this new worldview remained in flux, intermingling at times with Social Darwinism, apocalyptic fundamentalism, and the outer fringe of anti-communist activism. By 1950, though, it had congealed into a distinct ideology—a populist, laissez-faire, Christian individualism—which would form the intellectual bedrock of modern American conservatism. The story of how the libertarian populists emerged in the wake of the Roosevelt revolution to challenge America’s drift towards collectivism and to reclaim the philosophical heritage of their forebears is the subject of this thesis.4

The evolution of libertarian populism and the individualist response to Roosevelt’s

New Deal is an essential element of the broader history of the emergence of modern conservatism in the decades after the Great Depression. Scholarship on the twentieth-century American right, long relegated to the margins of the profession, has exploded in the last two decades, with a profusion of new work covering the birth of the modern conservative movement in the years after World War II up until the electoral triumph of the New Right in 1980. While the intellectual history of these movements remains underdeveloped, scholars have recently begun to examine conservative ideas with increasing depth and sophistication.5 Scholarship on an array

4 RWL, National Economic Council Review of Books [NECRB] 5, no. 1 (January, 1948), 1. On fear, see Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), esp. introduction & chp. 1; on totalitarianism, see, among others, David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), esp. chps. 1 & 2. Although scholars differ on the extent that Roosevelt’s program broke with American political economy of the preceding decades, I employ the phrase “Roosevelt revolution” because the libertarian populists and their old individualist compatriots viewed, without exception, the New Deal as revolutionary. 5 Julian E. Zelizer, “Reflections: Rethinking the History of American Conservatism,” Reviews in American History 38, no. 2 (2010): 367. See, for instance, Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Bruce Caldwell, Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

3 of thinkers, especially those often consigned to the fringe of the conservative intellectual movement—such as the fundamentalist preacher Carl McIntire—has provided new, and valuable insights into the way radical ideas about the nature of capitalism and society generated wide popular appeal on the right throughout the century.6

The study of libertarianism or individualism—understood as a discrete and internally coherent element of the American right—is, however, far less developed.

Brian Doherty’s sprawling 2007 history, Radicals for Capitalism, is the only work to offer a comprehensive overview of libertarianism in the twentieth century. Doherty’s account, an impressively detailed, if one-eyed treatment, of the movement, chronicles the fortunes of many of libertarianism’s principal figures, while advancing a novel argument about his subject’s place in history. For Doherty, libertarianism

“sells the promise of a world mankind hasn't yet fully known,” one that is “freer, richer, and even cleaner.”7 Doherty’s account is intriguing yet flawed; it presents less an impartial appraisal of the subject than the self-conception of a movement partisan. For all its vigor, too, Radicals for Capitalism is distinctly uneven, marred by an absence of deep archival research, Doherty’s lack of interest in the connections between libertarianism and conservatism and his incessant praise for libertarianism’s “uniquely American radicalism.”8

6 The best two recent overviews of scholarship on the twentieth-century right are Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” The Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (2011): 729 & Leo P. Ribuffo, “The Discovery and Rediscovery of American Conservatism Broadly Conceived,” OAH Magazine of History 17, no. 2 (2003): 5; Markku Ruotsila, Fighting Fundamentalist: Carl McIntire and the Politicization of American Fundamentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Michael J. McVicar, Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 7 Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 4. 8 Ibid., 18 & 15.

4 The work of Jennifer Burns constitutes the only other sustained scholarly engagement with the evolution of twentieth century libertarian and individualist thought. Her 2009 study, Goddess of the Market, presented the first full-length, scholarly biography of the influential right-wing philosopher and social critic Ayn

Rand—a seminal figure in the development of twentieth-century anti-statist thought, who engaged with many of the individuals discussed in this thesis.9 In a 2015 essay analyzing the careers of Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand, Burns offered the only sustained, scholarly attempt to examine the significance of these figures within the broader history of mid-century conservatism. The article provides a useful overview of the three, focusing on their shared biography and philosophical commitments, briefly analyzing some of their most important theoretical contributions, and charting their influence in propagating their ideas through a loose coalition of sympathetic businessmen after the war. Lane, Rand and Paterson, in her telling, reconfigured a “deeply personal and gendered sense of individualism” into a radical account of capitalism and the state, premised on the dynamic “energy” of the individual. The essay underlines the importance of these figures, but does not discuss the immediate intellectual context of Lane and Paterson’s work in any detail, offering an analysis of their work and influence that, while a notable corrective to much of the scholarship on the early history of modern conservatism, broadly reproduces the standard scholarly picture of their significance—as brilliant, idiosyncratic outliers, whose influence did not “survive the institutionalization of conservatism” in the mid-

1950s.10

9 Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 10 Jennifer Burns, “The Three ‘Furies’ of Libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand,” Journal of American History 102, no. 3 (December, 2015): 749. Burns earlier work strongly emphasizes Rand’s isolated status as a champion of unregulated capitalism. See Jennifer Burns, “Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement,” Modern Intellectual History 1, vol. 3 (2004): 367.

5 The backdrop to this work, and the dominant interpretation of twentieth- century conservative and anti-statist thought, remains George Nash’s 1976 study,

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. Nash’s account, which has set the terms of the scholarship for four decades, offers a deft and sophisticated overview of the burgeoning movement, charting the emergence of a distinctly modern conservative philosophy. While Nash presented a compelling picture of post-war conservative thought, the idiosyncrasies of his account—his dismissal of the pre-World War II right, including Lane, Paterson and Rand, and his overwhelming focus on William F. Buckley’s National Review and the role of

“traditionalist” intellectuals—have served to distort, just as much as clarify, understanding of the evolution of conservative and individualist ideas during this period.

Scholars have followed Nash in strongly emphasizing the marginal position of the right during the second half of the 1930s. In Nash’s words, the right on the eve of the Second World War comprised “scattered voices of protest, profoundly pessimistic about the future of their country.” It is certainly true that in the wake of the New Deal and Roosevelt’s triumph in the 1932 election the individualist right lost its dominance over the nation’s political and intellectual life. The pre-World War II individualists cannot, however, convincingly be labelled a “remnant,” as scholars, following Nash, have understood them. The dense networks of correspondence and collaboration that characterize the individualist movement during this period indicate that they were not “scattered voice of protest” but a self-conscious and, in many respects, strikingly unitary movement.11 These men and women held positions

11 The collections in the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, and the University of Oregon Special Collections, in Eugene, Oregon, in particular, demonstrate the exceedingly close links between individualist and conservative organizations from the mid-1930s onwards, a phenomenon absent from the existing scholarship. Figures such as Lane, Merwin K. Hart, George Sokolsky, Frank Gannett, Verne P. Kaub, Leonard Read, J. Howard Pew, Robert E. Wood, James W. Fifield, Jr.,

6 of enormous influence, owned, edited or were published in the most prestigious and popular magazines and newspapers, and had the support of a substantial slice—both conservative Republicans and “Jeffersonian” Democrats—of the political establishment. The philosophy they articulated, a pro-business, anti-statist individualism, had largely dominated American political life since the end of the Civil

War; it did not simply disappear overnight.12

This thesis argues that scholars, following Nash, have failed to accurately grasp the character of the pre-World War II conservative and individualist response to the New Deal. Donald Critchlow, summarising the existing literature, argues that the pre-World War II right as a whole held little faith in the “dynamic quality of capitalism, or the character of the American people”—they were “reactionaries… pristine in their condescension towards the masses, and confirmed in their elitism.”13

Howard E. Kershner, William F. Buckley, and Herbert Hoover functioned for over two decades as central nodes in a network of individualist intellectuals and activists that stretched from New York to southern California, encompassing a broad swath of the mid-West and the "Jeffersonian" Democratic sunbelt. Such was the volume of individualist activity, that the conservative Senator Albert Hawkes (R-NJ) complained in 1945 that “[t]here is no question that there are too many organizations,” whose functions often overlapped. Albert W. Hawkes to Norman Vincent Peale, March 5, 1945, in Series I, Subseries B, box 20, Norman Vincent Peale papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York [hereafter: “Peale papers”]. Given the limits of a thesis of this size, only a small section of this movement has been analyzed. 12 On Nash’s dominant influence, which is “difficult to overstate,” see Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism,” 729-30. George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 12 & 26. Nash’s fixation on the concept of a “remnant,” a necessarily “obscure” and “unorganized” group of principled intellectuals, parallels the problems with his broader definition of conservatism. As Jennifer Burns notes: “Essentially, Nash’s definition—and historians’ acceptance of it—represented the final victory of conservative efforts at self-definition.” Jennifer Burns, “In Retrospect: George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945,” Reviews in American History 32, no. 3 (2004): 453. On the pre-World War II right as “scattered voices of protest” or an inchoate “remnant,” see n22 below, and Gregory Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 3; Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement: Revised Edition (New York: Twayne, 1993), 5. On post-bellum conservative and laissez-faire individualist thought, see chapter 1, n33. One might even go so far as to say that, after 1938, the individualist worldview—moderated, but intact—was held by a majority of the members of Congress for more than a decade. On the conservative or individualist character of Congress, and the alliance between conservative Northern Republicans and Southern “Jeffersonian” Democrats, led by Senator Robert A. Taft, see James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933-1939 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967); David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), chp. 1. Cf. Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. 3-4. 13 Donald Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13.

7 This familiar argument, though, is squarely contradicted by the evidence. The old individualists and the libertarian populists believed, perhaps above all else, that only the “dynamic forces” of unrestricted economic freedom could guarantee national prosperity.14 They attacked the New Deal precisely because it favoured, in journalist

Garet Garrett’s words, “stability” over the productive, “progressive and dangerous change” of the market.15 The “fatal error” of Roosevelt’s advisors, the individualist polemicist and politician Ogden Mills wrote in 1935, was that of “considering industry stable and static and, therefore, susceptible to control, rather than dynamic and in constant process of evolution, readjustment and change.”16 As for their elitism: the works of these writers more often took the form of a populist call to arms than the kind of sneering denunciation of the masses favoured by Irving Babbit and

Albert Jay Nock. Ogden Mills’ The Seventeen Million (1937), a plea to those who had voted against Roosevelt in 1936, captures this well—but a faith in the good sense of the people and an emphasis on the essentially populist character of American capitalism run through all of their works.17

In assessing the individualist and conservative response to the New Deal, scholars have focused almost exclusively on the Liberty League, a business lobby group established in 1934 by the Du Pont brothers and other wealthy industrialists in an effort to influence the 1936 Presidential election.18 The League, which was styled by its president, the conservative Democratic politician Jouett Shouse, as an

“absolutely non-partisan” group of concerned citizens, dedicated to upholding the

14 Herbert Hoover, The Challenge to Liberty (New York: Scribner’s, 1934), 200. One of The Challenge to Liberty’s chapters is titled “The Dynamic Force of Liberty.” 15 Garet Garrett [hereafter: “GG”], “‘America Can’t Come Back,’” The Saturday Evening Post [SEP], January 23, 1932, 4. 16 Ogden Mills, What of Tomorrow (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 126. 17 Ogden Mills, The Seventeen Million (New York: Macmillan, 1937). 18 On the League, see George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934-1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 10-29.

8 Constitution, was a spectacular failure.19 The group’s ham-fisted defense of the privileges of its wealthy backers—at a time of singular popular suspicion of America’s business elite—swiftly doomed it to the status of political punching bag.20

Nevertheless, while many high-profile individualists were associated with the group, the individualist and libertarian populist response to the New Deal can hardly be reduced to the activities of a single organisation.21 The enduring dominance of individualist and laissez-faire ideas amongst a substantial section of the political and intellectual class ensured that criticism of the New Deal as a reactionary betrayal of traditional American principles was widespread. That the efforts of these women and men to combat the New Deal were unsuccessful in the short term should not lead us to dismiss their prevalence or influence.

In a crucial sense, then, the two figures most often linked to the flowering of twentieth-century free-market individualism, the Austrian economists Friedrich

Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, must be seen, on closer inspection, as less important.22 For Nash, it was the high Wirtschaftswissenschaft of these two émigrés that brought “intellectual sustenance” and an “articulate voice” to a beleaguered

American right.23 This view, that the pre-World War II right lacked the intellectual

19 Jouett Shouse, “American Liberty League,” August 23, 1934, Jouett Shouse Collection (American Liberty League Pamphlets), University of Kentucky Archives, Lexington, Kentucky, http://kdl.kyvl.org/catalog/xt7wwp9t2q46_1_1, 2 [hereafter: “Shouse Collection”]. 20 William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1963), 20-22. 21 Eliot A. Rosen, The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt: Sources of Anti-Government Conservatism in the United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 53; Wolfskill, Revolt of the Conservatives, 60. Many individualist intellectuals and politicians were skeptical of the League’s brand of corporate libertarianism. Herbert Hoover, for instance, was asked to join the League but declined, writing at the time that “I have no more confidence in the Wall Street model of human liberty, which this group so well represents, than I have in the Pennsylvania Avenue model upon which the country now rides.” Herbert Hoover to a “friend,” September 3, 1934, cited in Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 455. 22 By implication, Jennifer Burns makes a similar argument in Burns, “Three Furies,” 749. 23 In reality, the individualist right was broadly—if privately—contemptuous of Hayek, who they regarded as a “semi-socialist” liability. RWL to Frank Meyer, September 18, 1956, in Name and Subject Files [NSF], box 9, folder 5, Rose Wilder Lane papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa [hereafter: “LP”]. “As an example of our most pernicious enemy, I would name

9 “sustenance” to mount a coherent critique of the New Deal, nevertheless flies in the face of the available evidence. The individualist critique of the New Deal, an

“articulate” and systematic creed widely shared on the right, precisely condemned

Roosevelt’s program—in a manner identical to post-war conservatives—for its deviation from the traditional maxims of American political economy. In the eyes of these men and women, it was the President’s embrace of European ideas, of a crude

“Old World” philosophy of paternalist government and state economic planning, which best explained the “totalitarian” impulses of the New Deal. Europe, indeed, was the last place they would have looked for support for their ideas.24

The ingredients for a renascence of American right-wing anti-statist thought, then, were fully present by the end of the 1930s, well before the arrival of the two famous Austrian economists.25 It was during this decade that the libertarian populists, drawing on the writings of their individualist precursors, and the heritage

Hayek. That one is real poison.” Ayn Rand to Rose Wilder Lane, in Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner (New York: Penguin, 1995), 308. 24 George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 14-17, 25 & 68. A couple of recent studies can illustrate the general drift of the literature. Donald Critchlow writes, “At the end of the Second World War… a small, unorganized band of intellectuals… launched a counteroffensive against the liberal New Deal economic and political order… The American Right’s impetus for revival came from these European intellectuals who fled to America…” Critchlow, again following Nash, characterizes the pre-World War II right as a “disparate group of writers;” “cranks” lacking in “serious intellectual thought.” Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, 7-8. Kim Phillips-Fein writes, “Rather, in his [Jasper Crane’s] search for a new ‘bible’ of free enterprise, he encountered a pair of economic thinkers, refugees from the European catastrophes, who provided a broad intellectual justification for keeping up a bitter opposition to the new economic order.” The key figure of Phillips-Fein’s early narrative is Jasper Crane, but she omits Crane’s extraordinarily lengthy correspondence with Lane, covered in chapter 4 of this thesis. Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 33-34. 25 Gregory Schneider gets closest to this argument when he writes: “Historians have been too quick to dismiss the early twentieth-century ‘conservatives’… as an aberration, as a collection of eccentrics without much to tell us about contemporary conservative concerns.” Schneider briefly discusses Garrett, as well as the Liberty League and the activities of the pre-World War II congressional individualist right, but he fails to adequately detail the link between the pre-World War II right and the post-war anti-statist conservative or libertarian movements. He also cites George Nash frequently and follows him in arguing that the pre-World War II right was not “effective in addressing the central tendencies of liberalism,” even though, as this thesis argues, their critique exactly anticipates that of their post-World War II successors. Unfortunately, moreover, Schneider’s account is marred by a large number of errors. In the first chapter alone, Franz Oppenheimer is rendered as “Fritz Oppenheimer;” Ludwig von Mises as “Ludwig Van Mises;” and Henry Wriston’s The Challenge to Freedom as “The Challenge to Liberty.” Schneider, Conservative Century, 3, 9 & 26.

10 of revolutionary-era political thought, developed and refined their critique of the liberal state, as chapters two, three and four will detail. If anything, the early 1940s witnessed a crucial setback in the efforts of individualist activists to begin the rollback of the New Deal state. The entry of America into World War II transformed the domestic political situation, creating the conditions for durable economic recovery and consigning the anti-Roosevelt right, temporarily, to the margins of national debate.26 The period of the war, as Robert Crunden notes, marked the

“nadir” of individualist thought in the United States; it would be almost a decade before the libertarian populists found their feet again.27 For all the chaotic effects of national mobilisation, though, the philosophy of the pre-war individualists was not simply forgotten.

While the works of the libertarian populists differed widely in breadth and philosophical complexity, a clear set of themes dominate their output from the mid-

1930s on. At the center of their vision was an image of the state and the liberty of the individual as antithetical, a radical anti-statism that shaded, at times, into fully fledged anarchism. Lane and her allies believed not only that “all moral and spiritual values of human life are in the individual,” but that society itself was, at best, merely a useful description of transient human associations and, at worst, a collectivist fiction invoked to justify the capricious violence of the state. “To think of human society as an organism, developing, progressing or retrograding, is to think like a bee—if a bee thinks,” Lane wrote in 1943. “It is to imagine a fantasy. In the human world there is no entity but the individual person.”28 The libertarian populist critic

26 Patrick Allitt, The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 155-59. 27 Robert Crunden, The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 179. 28 RWL, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority (New York: John Day, 1943), 5.

11 Isabel Paterson, like Lane, derided the contemporary “[f]aith in the benevolent omnipotence of government” as “pure superstition, an aggregate residue of all the

‘magical’ practices of primitive man.” Such a faith, she argued, had been transferred to the state, an abstract agency above the individual. But this was “a complete retrogression, in one gigantic stride, toward darkness and extinction.”29

Accordingly, the libertarian populists traversed party politics, subordinating practical concerns to a vision of philosophical struggle between collectivism and individualism that Lane and her allies regarded as the animating force of world history. In answer to the collectivist vision of the State and the People, the libertarian populists counterposed an image of the freewheeling individual, the supreme creative locus of human life. And in place of government, inherently a collective enterprise, they appealed to an alternate model of social relations: market capitalism.

The unfettered market, they argued, had secured for America an unprecedented prosperity and a position of singular power in world affairs. But the logic of capitalist exchange was not purely economic in character; for the libertarian populists, it structured the social world tout court. “The motive which creates and maintains society (i.e., relationships between persons) is the profit motive,” Lane wrote to the economist Willford I. King in 1947. “The same principles operate in society… that operate in a free market economy: since no one voluntarily, or intentionally, exchanges a greater (to him) value for a (to him) lesser value, every exchange produces a profit for each party to the exchange. If either does not believe he will profit, there is no exchange.”30

29 Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (New York: Putnam, 1943), 291. 30 RWL to Willford I. King, April 29, 1947, in box 2, folder 9, Vervon Orval Watts papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Paolo Alto, California [hereafter: “Watts papers”].

12 At the centre of the libertarian populist’s defence of capitalism was this conception of the political and social world as the pure product of individual action, freely undertaken. This radical individualism mirrored, in part, the methodological individualism of neoclassical economics, while imbuing it with a quasi-spiritual potency.31 Where the economists based their science on a vision of the perfect rationality of the individual market actor, the libertarian populists offered a kindred conception of political and social life as the product of the rational and autonomous actions of free agents. Individuals, in this vision, possessed both total control— untrammelled “free will”—and absolute understanding of their own actions, making them wholly responsible for the results. These two concepts, liberty and responsibility, formed the core of the libertarian populist creed; indeed, for Lane and her allies, these supreme “laws”—the “spiritual equality,” in Clark’s phrase, that governed the Christian social order—invested the economic relationships of society with an unassailable ethical legitimacy.32

The antipathy that the libertarian populists held towards the state and to the very idea of the social, was thus, in its essence, an antipathy towards redistribution.

The integrity of the natural, God-given order—the liberty that the individual had from the claims of society—stood precisely prior to the deliberations of democratic government. “The upward struggle of the human race is milestoned with tragedy and suffering. That seems to be God’s plan,” Clark wrote in 1940. “But the progress of the human race has been marked by the emergence of superior intellects and stouter hearts. To these go the larger rewards and on these depends the welfare of the masses. And, that too, seems to be God’s plan.” Capitalism, in this vision, was the

31 On methodological individualism in neoclassical economics, see, for instance, Lars Udehn, Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2001), ch. 4. 32 FGC, Magnificent Delusion, vii & 117; RWL, Discovery, 158; RWL, National Economic Council Review of Books [NECRB] 3, no. 8 (October, 1946), 3.

13 engine not simply of economic, but of moral truths. Rendered as an ethical abstraction, the competitive market functioned as a just and impartial arbiter: the individual, freed to a productive liberty, made of themselves what they would. The programs of the socialists and the collectivists, in contrast, stole from those who had exercised their liberty responsibly, in order to support the weak, the dissolute and the profligate. “We muddle the thing, in the first place, by being humanitarian,” Lane wrote to Virginia Brastow in 1936. “Full of loving-kindness, we exert enormous energies to keep alive hundreds of thousands of humans who, at the unimpeded hands of our dear Mother Nature, would quite uncomfortably die.”33

It followed that even the arch-individualism of a figure like Ludwig von Mises fell short of the extreme vision of political and social life preached by Lane and her allies. “It is uncontested that in the sphere of human action social entities have real existence,” Mises wrote in 1949. “Nobody ventures to deny that nations, states, municipalities, parties, religious communities, are real factors determining the course of human events.” Yet Mises’ confidence was misplaced—“somebody” precisely did contest the ontological and epistemological reality of the social world.

“The student or reader of economics, politics, sociology enters a realm inhabited by mythological figures: The Nation, The Race, The People, The Government, Labor,

Management, Society,” Lane wrote in 1946. “In the human world there is no entity but the individual person… In actual human life the only real Society is every living person's contact with everyone he meets.” Or as Isabel Paterson put it, more bluntly, in a letter to Ayn Rand: “The point is, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE

COLLECTIVE. Please say that over to me, there is no such thing as the collective.

33 FGC, Magnificent Delusion, 121; RWL to VB, November 21, 1935, in SF, box 1, folder 16, Holtz papers.

14 There is one man, there are two men, three men, and so on, but no Collective entity.”34

Ultimately, then, the libertarian populists largely abandoned an interest in the question of virtue and the proper domain of the individual’s “self-rule,” the traditional concerns of conservative political theory.35 Instead, they would increasingly conflate economic liberty, the freedom to compete without coercion, with virtue, and the liberated market order with natural justice. In contrast to the late-nineteenth century theory of laissez-faire, though, which conceived of society as a harsh and unremitting struggle for spoils destined to be carved up by the gifted few, in their public writings Lane and her fellow libertarian populists offered a resolutely optimistic and essentially populist vision of market society.36 Essential to the libertarian populist critique of the New Deal was an emphasis on the capacity of the everyman to flourish within a market order liberated from the hand of government.

Only capitalism, they argued, had historically offered an opportunity for the great majority of Americans to thrive. Roosevelt’s expanded state, in this vision, directly compromised the right of every American to make their own way in the world, unencumbered by the meddling hands of bureaucrats and politicians. The radical expansion of government, the libertarian populist journalist Samuel Crowther agued, had destroyed the liberty of the “common man.” “Our job, if we want freedom, is to hew our way out of the jungle of laws and bureaus.” The “politicians and bureaucrats

34 Ludwig von Mises, Human Action [1949] (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998), 42; RWL, NECRB 2, no. 12 (January, 1946), 2; RWL, Discovery, 5; Isabel Paterson to Ayn Rand, December 15, 1943 in Name and Subject Files, box 4, folder 3, Isabel Paterson papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa [hereafter: “Paterson papers”], italics in the original. 35 On conservative self-rule, see Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (London: Heinemann, 1955), esp. 25. 36 Robert McCloskey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise: 1865-1910 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), 26-28.

15 did not create this country’s enormous productive energy,” Lane declared in 1943.

Only by untying the “red tape,” stopping the “restrictions on individual liberty” and taking the “political handicaps off the owners and managers and workers,” she argued, could America regain its rightful freedom and prosperity.37

This vision, a kind of Horatio Alger populism, was invariably coupled with a lacerating critique of the political and bureaucratic class. “The enormous producing class is being ground to powder between the millstones of a parasitic bureaucracy,”

Lane wrote in 1943. The result was a coming economic calamity and the destruction of the individual’s sacred liberty. “I would not resort to collectivism, to a reduction of all individuals to a common denominator,” wrote the libertarian populist journalist

Howard Kershner in 1936, “based on poverty and goose stepping for all.” In such a way, the libertarian populists offered what Michael Kazin has called the basic populist image of “conflict between the powerful and the powerless,” a picture of a greedy and iniquitous liberal elite preying upon the great mass of honest Americans.

A philosophy of the perennial political outsider, the libertarian populists claimed, from the beginning, to speak “for the people,” over and against the domestic enemies of liberty: the intellectuals, the politicians and the bureaucrats.38

While the libertarian populists naturally invoked the economic dividends of individual liberty, they just as often premised their arguments on the spiritually productive power of economic and political freedom. And by the mid-1940s, Lane and her allies had begun to explicitly fuse their philosophy of laissez-faire

37 Samuel Crowther, Time to Inquire: How Can We Restore the Freedom, Opportunity, and Dignity of the Average Man? (New York: John Day, 1942), 322; RWL, What Kind of America Are We Fighting For? (Cleveland: American Economic Foundation, 1943), 7. 38 RWL, NECRB 3, no. 8 (October, 1946), 3; Vervon Orval Watts, Why Are We So Prosperous? (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Company, 1938), 58; Howard Eldred Kershner, The Menace of Roosevelt and His Policies (New York: Greenberg Publishers, 1936), xii; Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 1.

16 individualism with the language and teachings of scripture. The centrality of

Christian doctrine to libertarian populism is perhaps surprising. Neither Lane nor

Paterson—nor many of their allies—were committed church-going Christians. Yet the soft deism of Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom (1943) and Paterson’s The God of the

Machine (1943) was ultimately supplanted among the libertarian populists by a militant strand of free-market Christianity.

Lane herself was, in part, the agent of this shift. Beginning in the mid-1940s, as chapter 3 will detail, she embraced the work of Christian libertarians like the Rev.

James W. Fifield and the fundamentalist minister Carl McIntire. The radical individualism of the American Revolution, Lane argued in 1946, was inconceivable without the “pure faith of Abraham,” embodied in Mosaic Law and the “practical realism” of Christ’s teachings. The founders had “made a wholly new kind of State,” she wrote, “the first government ‘not of men, but of Law,’ and Law is based on the

Ten Commandments.” This conception, of America’s founding philosophy as the unique political instantiation of the wisdom of Moses and Christ, was central to the works of the libertarian populists. “The most important thing that has happened to the world since the birth of Christ is the birth of America,” Fred Clark wrote in 1951.

“There is a direct connection between these two events: the second could never have happened without the first. The colossus of the world that we call America has been the product of a colossal idea: the idea of the sovereignty of the individual that

Christ brought to the world.” Or, as Isabel Paterson put it, with characteristic concision, “[T]he axiom of liberty cannot be postulated except on the basis affirmed by Christian philosophy.”39

39 RWL, NECRB 3, no. 10 (December, 1946), 2; FGC, “Not By Bread Alone: The ‘Code of the People’ is Replacing the “Code of God,’” speech before Society of Colonial Wars, New York, N.Y., December 19, 1951, italics in original; Paterson, God, 55.

17 Absent the guiding hand of Christian revelation, the libertarian populists argued, individualism was impotent, easy prey for the utopian materialism of the

Communists or the Fascists. The tragedy of Europe, Lane wrote, was the product of a continent-wide effort to fuse individualism with the doctrines of socialism.

“European thinkers,” she argued in 1947, “have destroyed their own institutions finally, by their long effort to synthesize freedom and slavery, Judeo-Christian individualism and pagan communism.” The root of this calamity was a pervasive philosophical relativism that “denied morality, jeered at justice, refused to accept or permit individual responsibility.” These beliefs, the logical extension of which was communism, were thrusting “the world back into jungle savagery—massacre, torture, slavery, famine.” Without religion, the absolute rights of the individual could be freely sacrificed to a mythic abstraction—whether “The Party,” the “Will of the

Majority,” or the “Social Good.” The signal act of collectivist thought, on these terms, was the substitution of the State for God, the schemes of the intellectual for the divine order of America’s Christian republic. As Isabel Paterson remarked in 1943:

“The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.”40

The moral imperative that drove this conception was partly a product of the ideological tenor of post-war capitalism. While the Allies had ultimately triumphed over the Axis foe, it had not been liberal capitalism’s victory alone. The Soviet state, a shadowy behemoth commanding a sixth of the world’s surface, embodied in ongoing and nightmarish form the grandest of all critiques of the capitalist order. From the mid-1930s on, opposition to communism—an alien, “pagan” and “materialist” philosophy antithetical to America’s ideals—swiftly assumed a central place in the

40 Fascism, of course, was broadly antithetical to “materialism”—but the libertarian populists insisted upon the shared ontology of Communism, Fascism and Nazism. Cf. Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), esp. chp. 2; RWL, NECRB 4, no. 10 (October, 1947), 3; RWL, NECRB 4, no. 11 (November, 1947), 2; RWL, Discovery, 114; Paterson, God, 241.

18 libertarian populist worldview. For Lane and her allies, Soviet communism was the purest instantiation of the political instinct, a dystopian state in which the essential and fertile differences between individuals had been erased. The “very core of collectivism,” Lane wrote in 1948, is ‘‘the denial and destruction of humanity itself, of the human functions of life, of individual liberty of choice, action, speech and thought, of human brotherhood.”41 Writing in 1942, surveying a world in which collectivism appeared triumphant, Samuel Crowther mourned the sacrifice of

Christian individualist principle. Those “social concepts which ignore the spiritual and exalt the material,” he argued, are “inherently destructive.”42 “The dignity of man,” Crowther wrote, “that dignity for which Christ died on the cross, and which was our ideal—has been cast away as though it were nothing and in its place we have only vague, chattering promises.”43

Anti-communism, stoked by a consuming fear of subversion at home, dominated much of the work of the libertarian populists in the 1940s, peaking at decades end amidst the early years of the Second Red Scare. Lane, who had dwelled privately on the communist infiltration of the government throughout the thirties, spent the latter-half of the 1940s issuing dire warnings of the threat posed by communist agents at home. “If anyone told you that you know personally, meet frequently, and ask to dinner, men and women who are plotting, working, living only for the time when they will strip you of everything you own, even to your watch and shoes, separate you from your family, enslave your children, and deliberately overwork and starve you to death, you wouldn’t believe it, would you?” But there could be no doubt that the communists aspired to “destroy the civilized world,” Lane

41 RWL, NECRB, vol. 5, no. 4 (April, 1948), 1. 42 Crowther, Time, 19. 43 Ibid.

19 argued, for the simple reason that for “a hundred years come 1948 they have said so, frankly, eloquently, vigorously, in all languages, all the time.” Such visions of teeming subversives at home were generally coupled by the libertarian populists with the charge that devious New Dealers had sold the country—not to mention, Europe—out to Stalin at the close of the war. “We cannot side-step our moral responsibility for the state of the world today,” wrote Fred G. Clark in 1951, “the Communist power that threatens to extinguish freedom everywhere was created by America at Yalta, Cairo,

Tehran, and Potsdam.”44

The sheer volume and scope of libertarian populist and right-wing individualist intellectual work during the 1930s and ‘40s precludes a comprehensive survey of the literature in a thesis of this size. Representative examples, then—those figures who articulated most clearly and forcefully the libertarian populist position, and whose influence extended beyond the Second World War—form the core of my analysis.

Opening with an overview of the work of a group of politicians, writers and activists grouped around the conservative wing of the Republican party—whom I dub the “old individualists”—chapter one examines their attacks on Roosevelt’s programs for subverting America’s founding ideals of individual liberty, property rights and limited government.45 These men, radicalized by the flood of legislation in the weeks following the new President’s inauguration, advocated strict adherence to the

44 RWL, NECRB 4, no. 1 (January, 1947), 1-2; FGC, “Not By Bread Alone,” 1, emphasis in original removed. The scholarly literature on the Second Red Scare and the era of McCarthyism is enormous. Two studies in particular have guided my work in this thesis: Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 45 I suggest by the term “old individualists” the belief among these men that they were the inheritors of a social philosophy that stretched unbroken back to the American Revolution. Most scholars would reject the notion that the nation’s founding philosophy can be reduced to such a schema—see n3 of this chapter.

20 liberties enumerated in the Constitution, harbored a deep antipathy to European welfare statism, and preached a militant faith in the productive powers of free enterprise. The chapter opens with a brief overview of the philosophy of Rexford

Tugwell, most radical of Roosevelt’s advisors and great nemesis of the individualists, before turning to an examination of a range of old individualist works, principally before the election of 1936. The most sophisticated and influential exponent of the old individualist creed, I argue, was the journalist and political operative Garet

Garrett, whose work offered a biting critique of the New Deal coupled with a lucid defense of the old individualist order. In the final section of chapter one, I turn to

Garrett’s relationship with Rose Wilder Lane, highlighting Garrett’s influence on

Lane, the broad continuity of their ideas, and Lane’s growing conviction that only a new, self-consciously populist movement of individualist intellectuals and activists offered the prospect of countering the ascendant liberal state.

The libertarian populists responded to the “Second New Deal” and Roosevelt’s seismic victory over Alf Landon in the 1936 election by further retreating from the field of practical politics, cultivating a virulent and increasingly radical critique of the

New Deal’s collectivist philosophy, shorn of the moderating impulses of the old individualists.46 Chapter two examines the works of libertarian populist journalists and polemicists such as Samuel Crowther and Fred G. Clark, as well as Lane and

Isabel Paterson, highlight the growing truculence and philosophical sophistication of their efforts. Libertarian populism, I argue, came to be defined by two strands, or modes of thought, often present—their surface tension notwithstanding—in the works of the same author. The first, guided by the legacy of nineteenth-century Social

46 A staple term of the scholarship, the Second New Deal encompassed a range of progressive legislation passed in 1935, most notably social security and the National Labor Relations Act. See, David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 247-248 and chp. 9; Leuchtenburg, New Deal, 162-163.

21 Darwinist laissez faire, emphasized state intervention into the economy as the corruption of the natural, moral, and God-given hierarchy of the market order. The second mode, forged amidst the crushing triumph of New Deal liberalism, offered a resolutely romantic vision of market society, one in which individuals, freed at last from the shackles of an overweening state, could remake themselves, and in time, the world.

The career of Rose Wilder Lane—the story of libertarian populism in microcosm—is the subject of chapters 3 and 4. Analyzing her early life, major works and surviving correspondence, I chart the evolution of Lane’s populist critique of the prevailing political order, her move from isolationism to muscular anticommunism, and her steady embrace of biblical teachings. Lane, I argue, fused the ideology of the old individualists, the revolutionary philosophy of Thomas Paine, and the unyielding laissez-faire of the nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat, into a new, and politically explosive blend. Supplanting the dry formulations of the traditional defenders of capitalism, Lane offered a novel, utopian vision of the market, as the sole guardian of America’s spiritual and material wealth, a dynamic, fluctuating expression of the collective sublime. By the late 1940s, Lane’s philosophical position combined radical anti-statism, fervent anti-communism, and conservative biblical morality. Shared by a key group of Lane’s allies on the right, this worldview, I argue, anticipated and would come to fix, to a remarkable degree, the ideological coordinates of modern conservatism.

22 Chapter 1

Garet Garrett and the Old Individualists

On a cold December evening in Washington, D.C. 1931, Rexford Tugwell, a young economist at Columbia University in New York, strode into the Hotel Washington on

Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver an obituary for American business. Tugwell, seven months shy of his fortieth birthday, handsome and precocious, had long been a critic of the prevailing economic order, yet the paper he presented that night went a step further. Written against the backdrop of the ravages of the Great Depression, “The

Principle of Planning and the Institution of Laissez Faire” rebuked two and a half centuries of economic thought, castigating those who clung grimly to the old verities.1 “Most economists, even today,” Tugwell told the assembled audience,

“believe that Adam Smith laid his finger on a profound truth when he said that not benevolent feelings but rather self-interest actuated the butchers and bakers of this world.” But this belief in the beneficent alchemy of the capitalist order persisted among the nation’s leaders only by the most “violent rationalization.”2 Under the presidency of Herbert Hoover, Tugwell argued, a faith in the pristine virtues of the market had hamstrung the national response to the crisis.3 At last, however, with

Roosevelt’s landslide victory in November, the tide appeared to be turning.

An avowed progressive, Tugwell believed that only a massive expansion of government control of the economy could guarantee a return to prosperity. “The

1 R.G. Tugwell, “The Principle of Planning and the Institution of Laissez Faire,” The American Economic Review 22, no. 1, Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (1932): 76. Cf. R.G. Tugwell, Mr. Hoover’s Economic Policy (New York: John Day, 1932), 8-9; Marc Eisner, Regulatory Politics in Transition (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 80-82. The details of Tugwell’s life in this chapter are taken from Michael Namorato, Rexford G. Tugwell: A Biography (New York: Praeger, 1988). 2 Tugwell, “Principle of Planning,” 78-79. 3 Tugwell, Mr. Hoover’s Economic Policy, 8-9.

23 disasters of recent years have caused us to ask again how the ancient paradox of business—conflict to produce order—can be resolved,” he told the assembled audience. “[T]he interest of the liberals among us in the institutions of the new

Russia of the Soviets… has created wide popular interest in ‘planning’ as a possible refuge from persistent insecurity.” Only a new era of government management, overseen by a benevolent technocratic elite, Tugwell argued, could supersede the primitive anarchy of the market.4 “Planning is by definition the opposite of conflict,” he declared. “[I]ts meaning is aligned to co-ordination, to rationality, to publicly defined and expertly approached aims; but not to private money-making ventures; and not to the guidance of a hidden hand.”5

Under the watchful eye of the bureaucrat, competition, the life-blood of the capitalist economy, would wither. But in its place, the economist proposed a new principle: “cooperation,” on a grand scale.6 “From what I know of human nature,”

Tugwell told his audience, “I believe that the world awaits a great outpouring of energy so soon as we shall have removed the dead hand of competitive enterprise.”

Forced to work in tandem for the social good, the giant corporations and banks, agents of the country’s malaise, would be tamed once and for all, their productive energies harnessed for society’s benefit. In place of the profit motive, long an incentive to the most “antisocial” and “speculative” gains, the new economy would hew to the cool hand of the government planner.7 This would amount, Tugwell argued, not only to the “abandonment, finally, of laissez faire,” but to nothing less than the “abolition of ‘business’” itself.8

4 Tugwell, “Principle of Planning,” 83. 5 Ibid., 89. 6 Ibid., 87. 7 Ibid., 81. 8 Ibid., 76.

24 Tugwell, a future member of Roosevelt’s academic “brains trust,” spoke at an auspicious moment for American liberalism.9 For those who had railed against the injustices of unregulated capital, the crash of October 1929 and the subsequent crisis was a moment of striking vindication. The country, wracked by stratospheric unemployment levels, seemed poised to embrace far-reaching change, and Tugwell, like many of his compatriots, was not shy about his vision for the nation. Yet for those politicians and thinkers on the right, who had dominated for a decade the nation’s political and intellectual life, the crisis and the rise of Roosevelt occasioned little less than existential terror.

This chapter examines the domestic opposition to Roosevelt and the New

Deal, exemplified in the works of a group of politicians and intellectuals who stuck fast throughout the 1930s to their vision of old American individualism. These “old individualists,” who included conservative Republican Party luminaries and prominent journalists, believed that Roosevelt’s programs violated America’s founding ideals of individual liberty and limited government, presaging the nation’s descent into a nightmarish collectivism on the model of Stalin’s Russia. It was the rise of Roosevelt and the new ideology of “planning,” I argue, that occasioned what

Karl Mannheim has called a “conservative counter-utopia,” an effort on the part of the 1930s individualist right to formulate anew the historical and theoretical basis of their guiding philosophy.10 At the center of their efforts was an absolute faith in the

9 My description of the New Deal and the Great Depression in this chapter relies principally on Kennedy, Freedom; Anthony Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), and Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal, 1933-1935 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). 10 “Only the counter-attack of opposing classes and their tendency to break through the limits of the existing order causes the conservative mentality to question the basis of its own dominance, and necessarily brings about among conservatives historical-philosophical reflections concerning themselves. Thus, there arises a counter-utopia which serves as a means of self-orientation and defence.” Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth [1936] (New York: Routledge, 2000), 207.

25 principles embodied in the Constitution, a commitment, bordering on obsession, to what they regarded as the central premises of Revolutionary-era political thought— individual liberty, property rights, and limited government—a doctrine which they labelled “Americanism.”11

In contrast to the bulk of the existing scholarship, which argues that the post-

World War 2 anti-statist right owed its primary impetus to the influx of European

émigré economists after the war, I argue in this chapter and the next that it was the persistence, throughout the 1930s and early ‘40s, of a vigorous, indigenous strain of anti-statist individualist thought that best explains the language and priorities of the post-World War II right.12 The central features of the philosophy of the pre-war old individualists, their preoccupation with the exceptional character of America’s founding philosophy, the virtues of free enterprise and unrestricted property rights, and the mortal danger posed by the rise of the liberal welfare state, is mirrored throughout the work of the post-war libertarian populists. But while Rose Wilder

Lane and her allies—whose close relationship with Garrett is examined below—drew liberally on the old individualist worldview, they came in time, to radicalize its central premises, underlining the revolutionary character and world-historical significance of America’s founding political philosophy and placing renewed emphasis on the potent populist dichotomy between the liberty of the individual and the illegitimate and authoritarian character of the post-New Deal state.

11 The concept of Americanism predates the old individualists, but their use of it, as this chapter argues, is specific and grounded in a particular vision of the nation’s founding ideals. On Americanism’s protean quality, see Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, introduction to Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, eds. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 12 An exception is Jennifer Burns, who has noted that “this salon [Isabel Paterson, Ayn Rand and Rose Wilder Lane] passed libertarian ideas from the Old Right to the New Right.” Criticizing the existing scholarship, which argues that the “conservative movement emerged from a postwar struggle with liberalism,” Burns notes that “Lane, Paterson, and Rand remind us that these ideas… had deep roots in the continental United States.” Burns, “Three Furies,” 749.

26

Tugwell’s vision of a new, humane and rational order, an economy shorn of the primitive contest of the market, did not survive his tenure as Undersecretary of

Agriculture under Roosevelt. The New Deal, while monumental, eschewed the kind of radical reforms proposed by the young economist. Business was not abolished; if anything, the industrial elite resumed its place at the center of the nation’s life with an alacrity that probably amazed many critics. Yet eighty years on, it remains a striking sign of the radical tenor of the time that views like Tugwell’s were given a wide and often sympathetic hearing throughout the 1930s.13

In the eyes of most observers, the catastrophic toll of the Depression had categorically refuted the economic doctrines of the preceding century.14 Laissez-faire, competitive individualism, and a faith in the natural equilibrium of the free economy were widely judged the principal causes of national calamity. On these terms, only a wholesale repudiation of the old order could pave the way for a revival of the nation’s fortunes. Historian Charles Beard, writing in 1931, expressed a widespread sentiment when he attacked the “myth of rugged individualism” as “principally responsible for the distress in which Western civilization presently finds itself.”15 “Whatever merits the creed may have had in days of primitive agriculture and industry, it is not applicable in an age of technology, science, and rationalized economy,” he argued.16

A belief that was “once useful,” Beard warned, has now “become a danger to society.”17

13 Richard Pell, Radical Visions, American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), esp. chp. 2; Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), esp. chp. 7. 14 Kennedy, Freedom, chp. 1; Schlesinger, Crisis, esp. chp. 22; Allitt, Conservatives, chp. 6. 15 Charles A. Beard, “The Myth of Rugged American Individualism,” Harpers Monthly Magazine, December 1931, 22. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.

27 The ferment that occasioned Tugwell’s speech inspired a dizzying range of reactions. “The American revolution,” wrote Communist party leader William Foster in 1932, “will develop even more swiftly in all its phases than has the Russian revolution.” The crisis of the Depression, he argued, presented a nation “ripe” for

Communist takeover.18 In New York, Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. assailed

Hoover’s “philosophy of laissez faire” as a “disaster,” warning that “here, too, there may come dictatorship, either of the people or of the moneyed Fascist interests.”19 As communist agitators seized on the mounting chaos of industry, the more jittery among the nation’s leaders began to believe that violent revolution was imminent.

“Unless something is done,” Edward O’Neal, the head of American Farm Bureau

Federation, told Congress in early 1933, “we will have a revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months.”20

These men, conservative leaders of American industry, feared, above all, a

Russian-style revolt from below. For them, the rise of Roosevelt, a scion of the New

York aristocracy, held out the hope of an orderly end to the chaos. “There’ll be a revolution, sure,” a member of the banking establishment told the journalist H.F.

Pringle in February 1933. “The Reds will run the country—or maybe the Fascists.

Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something.”21 Yet a smaller group on the right, alert to the sea change in attitude among their countrymen, greeted the New Deal and the decline of old ideals with alarm. Like Tugwell, these men and women were radicalized by the crisis of the Depression and the rise of Roosevelt. But far from welcoming the new President as national saviour, they could discern in the ornate sweep of his inaugural address only the thinly veiled outlines of a new tyranny.

18 William Z. Foster, Towards Soviet America (New York: Coward-McCann, 1932), 269. 19 “La Follette Doubts Third-Party Action,” New York Times [NYT], April 27, 1931, 6. 20 Cited in Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), 92. 21 Cited in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, 22.

28

Garet Garrett and the Old Individualism

In the famous opening lines of his essay on the early years of the New Deal, “The

Revolution Was,” the journalist Garet Garrett deftly evoked the position of the

American right at the end of the 1930s:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution

that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction.

The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing

songs to freedom.22

Born on an Illinois farm in February 1878, Garrett became a correspondent, novelist and partisan of the old individualist order, an influential commentator whose worldview was shaped by a penniless upbringing and the euphoric affluence of the

New Era.23 For Garrett, the old American ideals of individual liberty, property rights and limited government were a uniquely fertile bequest, the key to understanding the nation’s rise from agrarian backwater to industrial superpower in less than a hundred and fifty years.24 This nation, in which “political freedom and economic

22 GG, People’s Pottage, 15. 23 The two biographies of Garrett are Carl Ryant, Profit’s Prophet: Garet Garrett (1878-1954) (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1989) and Bruce Ramsey, Unsanctioned Voice: Garet Garrett, Journalist of the Old Right (Idaho: Caxton, 2008). Ryant’s is short, sober and scholarly, providing a brief account of Garrett’s life and a useful overview of his writings. Unfortunately, it is marred by a large number of errors—many quotations are listed with incorrect page numbers, and in certain cases it is difficult to establish whether Garrett actually wrote what is being quoted at all. Ramsey’s biography is loose and impressionistic, but it provides a good analysis of Garrett’s fiction and a broad outline of his relationship to post-World War II libertarianism. Neither biography analyses Garrett in the context of the old individualist right, or offers a compelling overview of the themes that organize his thought. 24 Gregory Schneider offers a brief analysis of Garrett, emphasizing his critique of the New Deal, Gregory Schneider, The Conservative Century, esp. 1-3; Justin Raimondo offers a detailed overview of Garrett’s work from the 1920s and 30s, emphasizing Garrett’s critique of Roosevelt’s programs, the

29 freedom were the two aspects of one thing,” he wrote in 1935, had “opened an era the wonder of which is still upon us.”25 In the decades before the crash, Garrett worked for the New York Times and a string of other high profile newspapers, but it was from his perch as lead economics writer at the popular weekly magazine The

Saturday Evening Post that he sharpened, in dozens of long lead articles, a distinctive vision of American industrial supremacy.

Garrett is usually cast as a member of what historians call the “Old Right,” a loose collection of journalists, intellectuals and businessmen who vigorously opposed the New Deal throughout the 1930s, and later condemned the interventionist foreign policy of Roosevelt and Harry Truman.26 These men argued variously that mass democracy was corrupting American society, that high culture was the last refuge of a virtuous elite, that the government response to the Depression had prolonged the crisis, and that the dramatic expansion of the state under Roosevelt threatened the republic’s vital liberties. Among its members were John T. Flynn, the left populist journalist;27 Irving Babbitt, the new humanist literary critic who regarded democracy and the elevation of the “urban masses” as the root of all modern evils; and Albert

“nationalist” character of Garrett’s thought and his later isolationism. Unfortunately, Raimondo does not draw on archival sources, so many parts of his account are incomplete or misleading. Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [1993] (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), chps. 3 & 8; David Beito offers a brief overview of certain aspects of Garrett’s thought, David T. Beito, Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression [1989] (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 155-57; William Holtz discusses Garrett’s relationship with RWL, but focuses primarily on their personal relationship rather than the broader context or development of their ideas, William Holtz, The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of RWL (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), esp. 260-69. 25 GG, “Economic Fascinations,” SEP, March 9, 1935, 7. 26 On Garrett as a member of the Old Right, see Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right, chp. 3; Schneider, Conservative Century, 1-3. On Garrett’s isolationism, see Justus D. Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941 (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), esp. 4. 27 On Flynn, see John E. Moser, Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 124. As late as 1940, Flynn maintained that he was “well left of center.” John T. Flynn, Country Squire in the White House (New York: Doubleday, 1940), v.

30 Jay Nock, the aristocratic individualist essayist, among many others.28 In the standard account, these men were united less by a shared creed than an intense antipathy towards Roosevelt, whom they regarded as a tyrant bent on subverting traditional virtues and establishing a leviathan welfare-warfare state.29

The sheer variety of political and philosophical views connoted by the label

Old Right, however, renders the term almost meaningless. Its very imprecision conceals not only the enormous divergence between the views of the pre-World War

II right, but the presence of concrete historical movements, including a prominent group of intellectuals and politicians, clustered around the Republican Party, who remained committed throughout the 1930s to an “old liberal” or old American individualist credo.30 These men conceived of the traditional Republican ideals of individual liberty, strict property rights and limited government as the apogee of

Western political thought.31 Mindful, perhaps, of the history of the welfare state—

28 Irving Babbitt, “Democracy and Standards,” in On Literature, Culture, and Religion, ed. George A. Panichas (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005), 135, 139. 29 Joseph Scotchie, The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right (New Jersey: Transaction, 1999), xiii-xiv; Schneider, Conservative Century, 2-3; Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, 12- 13; Laura Kalman, Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 21. Cf. Crunden, The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock, 164. 30 The phrase “old liberal” is taken from Paula Baker, “Liberty and Property: Defending Classical Liberalism in the 1930s,” unpublished paper in author’s possession. Baker’s paper offers a brief and fragmentary but rich discussion of the persistence of individualist ideas throughout the 1930s. Baker does not include Garrett in her analysis, but his views clearly overlap with the other figures she examines. In this thesis I use the phrase “old individualism” or “Americanism” to refer to the individualists of the 1930s. While these figures certainly conceived of themselves as “liberal” in the tradition of John Locke, their philosophy celebrated a specifically American intellectual heritage and was on the whole less doctrinaire and less internationalist than either 19th laissez-faire or “classical liberal” thought. On classical liberalism, see George H. Smith, The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. chp. 1; Jason Brennan and John Tomasi, “Classical Liberalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, ed. David Estlund (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 115. 31 The scholarship on the individualist or conservative response to the New Deal is surprisingly limited. Schneider, Conservative Century, 1-9, provides a brief overview of the Old Right opposition to Roosevelt; Scotchie, The Paleoconservatives, collects a handful of essays written by members of the old individualist right, with a brief introductory essay; Allitt, Conservatives, chp. 6, discusses the cultural conservatives of the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as H.L. Mencken and Nock; Gregory T. Eow, “Fighting a New Deal: Intellectual Origins of the Reagan Revolution, 1932-1952,” (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2007), is the best survey of the conservative response to the New Deal, but he does not cover Garrett or the old individualists and the chapter on Lane and Isabel Paterson ignores many primary sources and is unconvincingly argued. An older work, George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All But The People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-39 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), surveys the full range of opposition to Roosevelt during the 1930s, but the analysis is highly partisan,

31 imposed on the Continent by autocratic rulers such as Bismarck—they regarded

Roosevelt’s efforts as the harbinger of dictatorship.32 They were influenced, in part, by the 19th century laissez-faire philosophy of Herbert Spencer and William Graham

Sumner, as well as the doctrines of classical economics, but their intellectual range of reference was restricted principally to the writings and pronouncements of the

Founding Fathers.33

The works of Ogden L. Mills, a Republican Party grandee and Treasury

Secretary under Hoover, exemplify this almost monomaniacal devotion to the teachings of the Revolutionary generation.34 “Americanism,” the gospel of “free government, free men and free enterprise,” Mills wrote in his 1936 anti-Roosevelt tract Liberalism Fights On, is more than a “framework of government.” “It is a scheme of life. Tested over a period of a century and a half, it has proved to be the most successful scheme of life ever devised.”35 In What of Tomorrow, published a

with Wolfskill and Hudson openly mocking their sources. On conservatives and old individualists in Congress, the standard work remains Patterson, Congressional Conservatism. 32 The libertarian populists would later evince an obsession with the corrupting effects of the supposed importation of Bismarck’s social policies. See, for instance, RWL, NECRB 5, no. 9-10 (October, 1948), 2; Jasper E. Crane [JC], “The Welfare State,” speech delivered before the Church-Industry Conference, Wilmington, Delaware, January 1949, in box 7, Jasper E. Crane papers, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware [hereafter: “Crane papers”]. 33 The classic studies of revolutionary-era American political thought are Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), and Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991). On 19th century individualist laissez-faire, see McCloskey, American Conservatism; Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chps. 4 & 5. The dominant historical interpretation of the Constitution during this period remained that of the Progressive school, whose leader Charles Beard argued in his seminal An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) that the Constitution was formulated primarily to protect the private property of the framers and the nation’s wealthy elite. Beard regarded this as perverse, but the old individualists, while they would have rejected many of Beard’s contentions, viewed the Constitution similarly as oriented around the protection of property. On the dominance Beard’s interpretation still exerted during the 1930s, see Robert Eldon Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis [1956] (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015), esp. 8-10. 34 On Mills, see most recently, Robert Mason, The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 45-46; Rosen, The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt, 32-35. Mills, Herbert Hoover, would later write, was “was obviously the ablest man in the Republican Party, both in intelligence, information, character and courage.” Herbert Hoover, The Crusade Years, 1933–1955: Herbert Hoover’s Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath, ed. George Nash (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2013), 100. Cf. Schlesinger, Crisis, 251-253. 35 Ogden L. Mills, Liberalism Fights On (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 20.

32 year earlier, Mills sketched a loose historical taxonomy of centrally planned economies, beginning with the Roman empire under Diocletian and progressing through the Middles Ages. In each case, Mills argued, the efforts of government to control the productive energies of the people had swiftly devolved into economic

“stagnation.” At the beginning of the 19th century, though, something had changed. A new spirit of radical change convulsed the West, inaugurating an era of unimagined prosperity. “Why, after eighteen centuries of comparative inactivity, should man’s creative and inventive genius suddenly come to life and with such vigor?” Mills asked. “I can give the answer in one word—freedom—political and economic freedom.”36 It was the American people’s absolute faith in freedom, and this faith alone, Mills argued, that had made the nation the “wonder of mankind.”37

For all the President’s talk of liberating the people from want, then,

Roosevelt’s program was simply a “reversion to prototypes tried throughout history, and with a uniform record of failure,” Mills argued.38 By renouncing a faith in economic liberty and the “adjustments of a free economy” powered by the

“unfettered energies and ambitions of countless individuals,” Roosevelt had abandoned the spiritual basis of the modern world.39 Unsurprisingly, Mills, like

Garrett, conceived of the New Deal as “revolutionary,” an attempt to substitute

America’s strictly limited government with an authoritarian state.40 The nation,

“unmindful of its ancient virtues,” had forsaken the “soul and spirit of American institutions” for “new and alien gods.”41 The guiding principles of the Roosevelt revolution, moreover, Mills argued, were not American but European. The

36 Ogden L. Mills, What of Tomorrow (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 122-128. 37 Ibid., 10. 38 Ibid., 2. 39 Ibid., 11. 40 Ibid., 2. 41 Ibid., 29-30.

33 “governmental philosophy” of the New Deal, he wrote, “finds its supreme expression in the Fascist Government of Italy and the Nazi Government of Germany.”42

Raoul Desvernine, chairman of the Liberty League’s legal committee, echoed these concerns in his 1936 anti-Roosevelt screed, Democratic Despotism.43

Desvernine, like Garrett and Mills, argued that the New Deal had “violently distorted” America’s “traditional democratic ideas,” and sensed in Roosevelt’s program “a clear and definite tendency toward the Totalitarian state.”44 “It is impossible,” he wrote, “to conceive of two systems more contradictory” than

European statism and American self-government.45 “They will not, and cannot, be mixed. The slightest compromise with the primal principles of Americanism… sets it

[the state] adrift on the tide that sweeps toward the totalitarian idea.”46 In a 1935 speech, Desvernine was similarly explicit: the New Deal, he argued, is “alien and foreign to our constitutional philosophy. It destroys our American system and substitutes the European system.”47 Historically, Desvernine claimed, the nation’s chief bulwark against collectivist impulses had been its unrestricted regime of

42 Ibid., 2. 43 There is only a smattering of scholarship on Raoul Desvernine. For a capsule biography, see David Brion Davis, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present [1971] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 270-72. Haruo Iguchi offers a useful brief overview of Desvernine’s career, his connection to individualist luminaries such as Hoover and Wall Street Journal founding editor Thomas Woodlock, and his role as a mediator between Japanese banking and political interests and U.S. officials before World War II. Haruo Iguchi, Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1937-1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 157-160. Robert Fredrick Burk focuses on Desvernine’s relationship with the Du Pont family, Robert Fredrick Burk, The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. chp. 10. George Wolfskill focuses on Desvernine’s prominent role in the Liberty League, Wolfskill, Revolt of the Conservatives, esp. 60-71. 44 Raoul E. Desvernine, Democratic Despotism (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1936), 158 & ix. On Desvernine’s later close relationship with Hoover, see for instance Raoul Desvernine to Herbert Hoover, August 10, 1942, in Post Presidential Individual Correspondence [PPIC], box 46, folder 2539, Herbert Hoover Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa [hereafter: “HP”]. 45 Desvernine, Despotism, 90. 46 Ibid., 91. 47 Raoul Desvernine, “The Principles of Constitutional Democracy and the New Deal,” speech [no location given], July 11, 1935, in Shouse Collection, http://kdl.kyvl.org/catalog/xt7wwp9t2q46_49_2/details.

34 property rights. The Founding Fathers understood that “man not only gained his political freedom but also his economic freedom by the use of property.” Those who attacked property as the root of all evil wilfully, and dangerously, ignored this. “[T]he fact is,” Desvernine wrote, “property rights are human rights.”48 To impinge on the right to property was to violate the individual’s freedom in toto; only unqualified negative liberty, an absolute freedom from coercion, could ensure the maintenance of man’s natural liberty. “Freedom is a reality, or it is nothing,” Desvernine declared.

“Man is either independent of the State or he is mere dependent of the State.”49

In “Americanism At the Crossroads,” a speech from the same year before the

Hamilton Republican Club in Chicago, Desvernine offered a concise overview of the old individualist credo.50 Two axioms, each enunciated in the Declaration of

Independence, stood at the core of this creed, Desvernine argued: individual liberty, a belief in the individual as possessor of a set of divinely endowed and inalienable

“natural rights”; and a theory of “self-government,” the principle that the people “are the ultimately repository and source of sovereign power,” and that government therefore can have only those powers “expressly granted” by the people.51 This philosophy was best understood as a blend of “Christianity and American democracy,” a system of governance “postulated on the Christian way of life,”

Desvernine later wrote.52 “Our founders repudiated an atheistic or materialistic interpretation of man and of man’s rights… They anchored man and society to God.”

48 Desvernine, Despotism, 21. 49 Ibid., 20-21. The classic formulation of the distinction between positive and negative liberty is Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118. 50 Raoul E. Desvernine, “Americanism At the Crossroads,” speech before the Republican Round Table Luncheon at the Hamilton Republican Club, Chicago, Illinois, January 15, 1936, in Shouse Collection, http://kdl.kyvl.org/catalog/xt7wwp9t2q46_85_12/details. 51 Ibid., 5. On natural rights, see Stephen M. Griffin, American Constitutionalism: From Theory to Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), chp. 5. Phillip Hamburger notes that the concept of natural rights often resembles the “elusive shapes of a Rorschach test.” Phillip Hamburger, “Natural Rights, Natural Law, and American Constitutions,” Yale Law Journal 102, no. 4 (1993): 907. 52 Raoul E. Desvernine, “The Creed of Americanism,” Notre Dame Law Review 17, no. 3 (1941): 217.

35 It was this unique covenant that guaranteed the nation’s prosperity and preeminence, Desvernine argued.53 Indeed, Americanism, for the old individualists, was not simply a set of abstract and interchangeable philosophical dicta, but a veritable Weltanschauung, a way of being in and perceiving the world. Central to this worldview was an image, captured by Desvernine, of the autonomous, “supernatural” individual as existing prior to and constituting the social totality—a totality reducible, in theory, to the contingent moral actions of individual agents.54

After Garrett, however, the most lucid and influential statement of the principles of the old individualism came from Herbert Hoover himself.55 In the years after his loss to Roosevelt in 1932, Hoover engaged in a self-styled “crusade against collectivism,” an effort to forestall the nation’s descent into totalitarian government.

“[T]hroughout the world,” Hoover declared in The Challenge to Liberty (1934), “the whole philosophy of individual liberty is under attack.”56 Americanism, for Hoover, like the other old individualists, was “not a catalogue of political ‘rights,’” but “a thing of the spirit.” It rested on a belief that the sole purpose of government is to “nurture and assure” the freedoms of the individual, and that these liberties were secure only when the individual was “free to choose his own calling, to develop his talents,” and

“to earn, to spend, to save, [and] to accumulate property.” As Hoover wrote, the

“intellectual and spiritual freedoms… cannot thrive except where there are also these economic freedoms.”57

53 Desvernine, “Creed of Americanism,” 219. 54 Ibid., 219. Desvernine’s use of the term “supernatural” in this context probably literally means “above nature”—i.e. in the image of God. 55 For a good summary of Hoover’s individualist views during the 1930s, see Rosen, The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt, chp. 1; George H. Nash, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Hoover, Crusade Years, xi-xxxvii. 56 Hoover, Challenge, 1. According to Hoover, 135,000 copies of The Challenge to Liberty were printed. Hoover, Crusade Years, 55. 57 Hoover, Challenge, 2-4.

36 Against this belief in strictly limited government and a regime of unrestricted property rights, Hoover counterposed the specter of a new collectivist tyranny, fuelled by Roosevelt’s despotic “greed for power” and the New Dealers’ “propaganda of hate.”58 “In its larger dimensions this irrepressible conflict is between the

American system of liberty and New Deal collectivism,” Hoover declared. Unless the

“insidious expansion of government over the lives of the people” is “arrested,” he warned in late 1935, it will result in the final “strangling of the liberties that were born with this nation.”59 Thus Hoover, like his old individualist allies, conceived of the New Deal as essentially reactionary, a great “corruptor of American Freedom and the American spirit,” and a wholesale reversion to “European” collectivist dogma.60

A belief in the exceptional character of America’s founding ideals, coupled with a conception of the New Deal as a reactionary product of the Old World, was, as this chapter and the next argue, central to both the old individualist critique of

Roosevelt and the new libertarian populism of Lane and her allies. A close confidante of Herbert Hoover, Garet Garrett mirrored the ex-President’s contempt for the collectivist impulses of the Old World and his conception of America’s individualist

“social philosophy” as a uniquely liberating force within history.61 And while Garrett shared many of the concerns of the broader Old Right, he is best understood, as the remainder of this chapter will argue, as the most distinctive and influential defender of this old conservative ethic of Americanism, a belief in the primacy of individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.

58 Herbert Hoover, American Ideals Versus the New Deal (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), 5. 59 Ibid., 35-36. 60 Hoover, Crusade Years, 53. 61 Herbert Hoover, American Individualism (New York: Doubleday, 1922), 3. Cf. Mason, Republican Party, 70-71.

37 Garrett’s work of the 1920s, saturated with the easy confidence of the Jazz Age, earned him a measure of fame and recognition, but it was the crisis of the Depression and the rise of Roosevelt that occasioned his most memorable writing. Here, in reams of baroque, aphoristic prose, Garrett excoriated his enemies on the left and mourned the steady loss of America’s philosophical heritage. “Like the hagfish, the

New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within,” he wrote in

1938. “A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them.”62 In a profusion of articles and essays for The Saturday Evening Post throughout the

1930s, Garrett celebrated American capitalism and the old Protestant virtues of thrift and staunch self-reliance, while mounting a scathing critique of the burgeoning New

Deal order.

Under the editorship of Garrett’s employer and close friend George Horace

Lorimer, the Post had long strode the world of American magazines like a colossus, vastly outselling its rivals and publishing the crème of the nation’s literary and reportorial talent. From 1899-1936, Lorimer and the Post were instrumental, to a remarkable degree, in shaping the popular self-conception of mainstream America.63

The roots of this conception lay in Lorimer’s own worldview, which prized the frontier values of the nineteenth century and ceaselessly preached the virtues of

62 GG, People’s Pottage, 73. 63 When Robert and Helen Lynd surveyed the media habits of the people of Muncie, Indiana in 1924 in their famous “Middletown studies,” they found that the aggregate circulation of the Post and its sister magazine, Ladies Home Journal, was “sixty times that of older magazines like Harper’s.” Christopher P. Wilson, “The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass-Market Magazines and the Demise of the Gentle Reader, 1880-1920,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American history, 1880-1980, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 44. As David Welky has noted, the vast bulk of magazines and newspapers during the 1930s “worked to convince readers that American society had no faults while downplaying the threat of radical reform. The mainstream media lauded the continuing relevance of the rags-to-riches, hard-work ethos.” Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression (Urbana- Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008), esp. 4-5; Jan Cohn, Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 5-13.

38 American capitalism. In the decades prior to the Depression, the Post propagated what Jan Cohn has dubbed an “American ideology”—a culture, emanating from the business world, of unwavering optimism and affluence, the easy complement to a new era of American supremacy.64 Garet Garrett and a handful of other leading Post contributors were nothing less than the “Edward R. Murrows and Walter Cronkites of the day,” the voices upon which a host of Americans relied for authoritative news and opinion.65

Under Lorimer, the Post long shied away from overt political advocacy, offering its readers instead a suggestive melange of fiction, celebrity profiles, and social commentary.66 Garrett was appointed chief economics correspondent in 1922, and The American Omen, a collection of his Saturday Evening Post articles published in 1928, clearly reflects the priorities of Lorimer’s magazine. The book is for the most part flexible and undogmatic, a potpourri of historical anecdote and folk philosophy that eulogises American capitalism as a uniquely benevolent force, one in which an unprecedented harmony of interest between capital and labor prevails. “We had capitalism here in its dangerous forms,” Garrett wrote. “But now, as we know labor without laborism, so we know capital without capitalism.”67

In less than a century and a half America had produced a new civilization, incomparably rich and dynamic, yet Garrett believed that his nation’s success had been misunderstood. “Why has the sign of world supremacy passed to this hemisphere?” he asked. The secret was simple: “In this country occurred a revolution

65 Ibid., 8. Garrett’s prominence can be partly judged by the contents of his personal papers. Only around a hundred seemingly random letters have survived, the majority from the early 1940s, but they include correspondence with two Presidents (Roosevelt and Hoover), a Supreme Court justice (Brandeis), the chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations (Key Pittman), and a slew of prominent publishers and industrialists. 66 Cohn, Creating America, 165-68. 67 GG, The American Omen (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1928), 17.

39 of thought. The American doctrine is that capital, profits and wages are limited only by production…Therefore, so far as we know, prosperity is unlimited by any inherent fact.” This horizon of unlimited plenty had created the conditions for the redemption of business, a new ethos of “service” that industry embraced “with a kind of ecstasy.”68 “All the truth of it,” Garrett argued, was “new and fundamentally strange to Old World traditions and mind habits.”69 “Guided only by our faith in the idea of human progress,” he wrote, “we have stumbled beyond doctrine and logic into a region of common sense.”70 America in its “innocence” stood alone, ascendant.71

In early 1928, in a letter to Lorimer, Garrett confided that he had written to Herbert

Hoover offering his help and advice for the campaign. Hoover, Garrett, believed was the “only man in sight” who could successfully manage the country in the following years. “[O]ur economic affair is so taught [sic], especially in the financial woof, that it seems to me a man of clear economic insight is a vital necessity in the next few years.”72 Hoover replied, affirming that he would probably call on Garrett. “What he needs more than anything else is someone who can supply him with political understanding,” Garrett wrote.73 Later, in another letter to Lorimer, Garrett confessed that “the signs in Wall Street portend hell to pay.”74 Hoover called on

Garrett regularly for advice over the next few years, dining with him at the White

68 Ibid., 175 & 179. 69 Ibid., 10. 70 Ibid., 206. 71 Ibid., 21. 72 GG, letter to George Horace Lorimer, dated Monday, 1928 (probably early in the year), in George Horace Lorimer series [GHLS], box 15, folder 8, George Horace Lorimer family papers, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia [hereafter: “Lorimer family papers”]. 73 Ibid. 74 GG, letter to George Horace Lorimer, dated Tuesday (probably late 1929), in GHLS, box 15, folder 8, Lorimer family papers.

40 House on a number of occasions.75 Nevertheless, Garrett apparently did not dwell on his misgivings about the financial sector—he appears to have been blindsided, like so many others, by the signal event of Hoover’s presidency.76 On October, 29 the following year, the ceiling fell in on the American economy.

Garrett’s 1932 book, A Bubble That Broke the World, diagnosed the crash of

1929 as the product of a massive, unprecedented expansion of American credit and

European debt, fed by pernicious fantasy. “Mass delusions are not rare. They salt the human story,” he wrote. “But a delusion affecting the mentality of the entire world at one time was hitherto unknown… This is a delusion about credit.”77 The European powers after the war had sought to finance new government programs through a massive expansion of public debt, heedless of the risk. “When they have been living on credit beyond their means the debt overtakes them,” Garrett wrote. “In this dilemma the ideal solution, so recommended even to the creditor, is more credit, more debt.”78 At root was a relatively novel fallacy, a social doctrine holding “that people are entitled to certain betterments of life.”79 Garrett regarded this doctrine with contempt. “Here, if a man says the state owes him liberty, protection, equality of opportunity, that is already acknowledged,” he wrote in 1928. “But if he says the state owes him a living he is ridiculed; if he insists we know there is something wrong with him.”80 Economic inequalities, arising from disparities of ability and industry, are

75 Hoover’s presidential calendar of late November, 1929 has him dining with Garrett four times in three days, although it seems to have been a relatively rare occasion otherwise. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Herbert Hoover, 1930 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1976), 695. There is fragmentary evidence that Garrett played a significant role in Hoover’s 1928 campaign, and it is clear that their friendship was at least a decade old at that point. See, Herbert Hoover to GG, July 14, 1928, and Herbert Hoover to GG, November 7, 1928 in Series I, items 28 & 30, Garet Garrett papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts [hereafter: “Garrett papers”] 76 Cf. Schlesinger, Crisis, 178-80. 77 GG, A Bubble That Broke the World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), 3. 78 Ibid., 5. 79 Ibid., 3 & 4. 80 Ibid., 23.

41 “facts of Nature,” he added. “They cannot be abolished.”81 The market, a zone of virtue, character and daring, was the true proving ground of the individual; those who demanded its fruits without risk were precisely to be “ridiculed.”

In a series of articles for the Post written in the months before Roosevelt’s inauguration, Garrett outlined his views on the proper scope of government intervention into the economy. “[T]hrough all this depression runs a delusion,” he wrote in February 1933. “It may be described as a faith in the miraculous power of government, to cure and make whole again.”82 Only “old-fashioned thrift” and a return to the rigors of individual responsibility could end the crisis, he argued.83

There had arisen a burning passion for economic planning. But what “society can now afford more than it could ever afford before is owing to machine industry, to unplanned industry as it is and has been.” Only capitalism, and its “anarchy of production,” Garret argued, had “delivered people from a Malthusian doom.”84 His, indeed, was not a god that had failed; if anything, the crisis of the Depression only strengthened Garrett’s faith in the virtues of free enterprise. “Capitalism is no more on trial than human nature,” he wrote in 1931. Those who indicted the system had simply forgotten the “inevitable alternation of good and bad times.”85 The

Depression was natural, Garrett argued, even salutary—an “investment in experience” and a lesson in the fundamental dynamics of boom and bust.86

Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, and his first months witnessed a frenzy of legislative activity, as the new President sought to stem the tide of the Depression

81 Ibid., 76. 82 GG, “Unemployment—In the Light of Happening,” SEP, February 18, 1933, 71. 83 GG, “Unemployment—What We Do About It,” SEP, March 11, 1933, 91. 84 GG, “Unemployment—What Is It?,” SEP, January 21, 1933, 56. 85 GG, “Looking In the Ditch,” SEP, March 14, 1931, 3 & 95. 86 Ibid., 96.

42 while boldly remaking the country along new, more liberal lines.87 The so-called

“hundred days” transformed the character and scope of the American state, rapidly modernising and expanding the bureaucracy of federal power and erecting the first elements of the modern welfare and regulatory state. To sympathetic contemporaries like the journalist Walter Lippmann, Roosevelt’s “indomitable faith” and seemingly boundless energy revived a nation held hostage by fear. “At the end of February,”

Lippmann told a conference in October 1933, “we were a congeries of disorderly panic-stricken mobs and factions. In the hundred days from March to June we became again an organized nation confident of our power to provide for our own security and to control our own destiny.”88

Roosevelt himself had earlier written to Garrett, possibly at the suggestion of

Garrett’s close friend, the Democratic financier and strategist Bernard Baruch, requesting his “advice and counsel from time to time.” “I need the assistance of all my friends,” he noted drily.89 What the future President received instead was an implacable foe. As the hundred days progressed, Garrett registered with alarm

Roosevelt’s efforts to restructure the economy. In a lead article for the Post, published in August, he chronicled in exacting detail the avalanche of legislation that had accompanied the President’s first months in office. His tone was biting. “Social revolutions,” Garrett wrote, “are, by nature, sudden and more or less incredible in the time of taking place… [A] redistribution of advantage and wealth—that is what the power is for.” “By this definition,” he added, “the country is in a state of

87 Kennedy, Freedom, 131-45. 88 Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1933, A4. 89 Franklin Delano Roosevelt to GG, September 10, 1932, in Series 1, item 57, Garrett. The letter is a curious document, and Garrett’s reaction to it, as well as his prior relationship to FDR, is a mystery. There are no letters to or from Garrett in Roosevelt’s papers, and no mention of Garrett, even as a public antagonist, in any of the major biographies of Roosevelt. On Garrett and Baruch’s friendship, see Bernard M. Baruch, Baruch: The Public Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 2; GG to Bernard Baruch, December 8, 1943, in which Garrett notes: “that I love you as ever.” In series I, item 6, Garrett papers.

43 revolution.”90 The new President, gifted a pliant Congress, had exploited the crisis with aplomb. In just three months, Roosevelt had erected “a complete temporary dictatorship.” The motive of Roosevelt’s efforts, Garrett argued, was a massive redistribution of wealth, its method an “elective despotism” under the guise of national emergency.91

Garrett feared, above all, the machinations of Roosevelt’s “brain trust”—the academics, among them Rexford Tugwell, who advised the President and urged upon him the boldest experiments. Theirs was “a complex intention”; its purpose was not to restore the old prosperity but instead to concoct a “new order, scientifically planned and managed… human happiness ascendant on a plotted curve.”92 For

Garrett, of course, like his allies on the right, the grand schemes of the high priests of planning represented not the promise of universal prosperity but the sinister augury of a new despotism. “Every choice it made,” Garrett later wrote of the New Deal, “was a choice unerringly true to the essential design of totalitarian government.”93 The levelling and regimentation of the people essential to such a scheme had already begun with the relief programs passed during the hundred days. The Social Security

Act, which Garrett decried as a brazen “instrument of Government power,” cemented the new bondage of the American people.94

Garrett’s most famous work, the 1938 essay “The Revolution Was,” embodies the position of the old individualist right at the end of the 1930s: trenchant opposition to Roosevelt coupled with an increasingly fatalistic acceptance of the new

90 GG, “The Hundred Days,” SEP, August 12, 1933, 5. 91 Ibid., 6. The phrase “elective despotism” is Jefferson’s—see Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 120. 92 Ibid., 7. 93 GG, People’s Pottage, 25. 94 GG, “Security,” SEP, September 19, 1936, 104.

44 order.95 Garrett regarded America’s turn away from its revolutionary ideals as a craven and futile attempt to evade the hazards of “individual responsibility,” the grand product of a “disaffected intellectual cult.”96 This nameless cadre of scholars, writers and critics, infused with a “bitter intellectual radicalism,” had a single goal: the destruction of capitalism.97 The New Deal’s enmity towards capitalism was

“fundamental,” Garrett wrote in 1938. For “private capitalism by its very nature limits government.”98 “The first of all objections to the New Deal,” Garrett argued, nevertheless, was neither economic nor political but “moral.”99 Roosevelt and his acolytes, emboldened by emergency, had made no distinction between “means that are legal and means that are illegal.” Instead, a nation laid prostrate had been administered “imported narcotics” by a Machiavellian clique of New Deal physicians.100 Their crimes were many. But greatest of all was a prodigious raft of new taxes and “class subsidies,” ostensibly an attempt to redistribute the nation’s wealth in the name of “social justice,” but in fact calculated “to reduce millions of citizens to subservience” and to cultivate an insidious “supreme government.”101

At the center of it all was one figure: the charming, debonair, silver-tongued

Roosevelt, a man who had promised the American people limited government, a balanced budget and sound money, but had instead delivered them into bondage.102

“There never had been a President remotely like him,” Garrett would later write.103

His voice had a “hypnotic quality,” and he presented the image of a “benign father,”

95 For quotes from “The Revolution Was,” I use Garrett’s collection of essays, The People’s Pottage. On the circumstances surrounding the publication of The People’s Pottage, see Ramsey, Unsanctioned Voice, chp. 29. 96 GG, People’s Pottage, 5 & 6. 97 Ibid., 22. 98 Ibid., 43. 99 Ibid., 73. 100 Ibid., 73 & 7. 101 Ibid., 7 & 8. 102 Ibid., 92. 103 GG, The American Story (Chicago: Regnery, 1955), 257.

45 yet in Roosevelt, power “flourished” and “multiplied itself, until he had more than any other President ever possessed or wanted.”104 With fearsome speed, the new

President had consummated a “revolution… within the form,” an audacious power grab that had permanently fractured the republic, severing the state from the moorings of constitutional government.105

In time, like his old individualist allies, Garrett came to regard the New Deal as essentially aberrant, a hostile imposition inspired by foreign ideas. “It took off from a revolutionary base,” he wrote in “The Revolution Was.” “The design was

European.”106 Those who attacked the New Deal from the vantage of “all that was implicit in the American scheme” had simply fallen for Roosevelt’s ruse.107 The New

Deal was not American at all: the notion of “exalting” the executive function of government could not have sprung from the “American tradition,” Garrett wrote in

1935. At root was a conflict “between two ideas of government so deep and so antagonistic that never since man became a political being have they ever for a moment been quite reconciled.” On the one hand was European statism, “the idea of a powerful, unlimited central government… acting directly upon people in a providential manner.” This was the essence, lately revealed, of the Roosevelt revolution. “The other,” Garrett continued, “is the idea of representative, constitutional government, possessing only such powers as have been deliberately and jealously surrendered to it by a free people.” This was the “limited government” that had secured the liberties central to old fashioned individualism.108 These two types of government, Garrett stressed, were wholly incompatible; one sought

“stability,” the stasis of the “managed” economy, and the other perpetual “change.”

104 Ibid., 256 & 257. 105 GG, The People’s Pottage, 73. 106 Ibid., 15. 107 Ibid., 15. 108 GG, “The House We Live In,” SEP, August 3, 1935, 8.

46 Only in America had this idea of “progressive and dangerous change,” the key to the material power of the West, fully taken hold. “[A]nd that,” Garrett wrote in 1932, “is why we now possess the sign of paramount power in the whole world.”109

The tragedy of the New Deal, Garrett would come to believe, was that it affirmed this malignant European creed. “[W]e obscure from ourselves the fact that a great moral disaster has overtaken the world,” Garrett wrote in 1934. The crisis stemmed from an “instability of moral values,” a loss of faith in the integrity of words and contract. In this sickly moral climate, he argued, “expediency becomes the great design,” and by any desperate “means we escape from a sense of responsibility.”110

There is an “immune sedition” among the people, “acting to produce a pernicious anaemia in the blood cells of American democracy,” he argued in 1936. It served to

“slur Americanism” and to propagate the political and social doctrines of the Old

World.111 Garrett had warned in 1931 of the risks that government subsidies would create an enormous “dependent caste.”112 Now Roosevelt, promising recovery, had fulfilled this scheme, thereby securing, Garrett feared, a permanent elective despotism.113 “It was thus,” he wrote in 1938, “that the hand of paternal government, having first seized economic power, traced the indelible outlines of the American

Welfare State.”114

Garrett regarded Tugwell, after Roosevelt, as the preeminent symbol of the administration’s duplicity and radicalism. The “celebrated case of Rexford Guy

109 GG, “‘America Can’t Come Back,’”4. Garrett’s thinking here, as we have seen, was not original. This distinction, between European paternalism and American “self-government,” had long been a central element of individualist thought. See, for instance, Hoover, “New York City,” in The New Day: Campaign Speeches of Herbert Hoover, 1928 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1928), 154. Cf. Schlesinger, Crisis, 433-35. 110 GG, “The Great Moral Disaster,” SEP, August 18, 1934, 7. 111 GG, “We Overtake Europe,” SEP, October 24, 1936, 23. 112 GG, “Insatiable Government,” SEP, June 25, 1932, 34. 113 GG, “Hundred Days,” 6. 114 GG, People’s Pottage, 58.

47 Tugwell,” Garrett wrote in 1934, embodied the perspective of the New Dealers,

“where, apparently, a thing may be both true and untrue at the same time or neither true nor untrue.”115 Confronted with his 1931 speech in a Senate committee, Tugwell had denied that it advocated planning. “He was applauded for his skill at the game of words,” Garrett wrote. Such indifference “to the fate of the word’s integrity,” though, was precisely a symptom of the “great moral crisis” that had seized America.116

Central to Garrett’s and the old individualists’ worldview was an abiding faith in the virtues of “Americanism,” a legacy of luminous political principle forged in struggle with the asphyxiating dogmas of the Old World.117 America’s success,

Garrett argued, rested on the people’s rejection of politics, of the coercive redistribution of the European state. “Certainly, no other people so distrust the political approach to an economic problem,” he wrote in 1928, echoing Albert Jay

Nock and German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer’s distinction between the economic and political means of satisfying human wants.118 For Garrett, the republic was the product of a singular manifestation of the sovereign will of the people, embodied in the articles of the Constitution. The drafting of that document represented nothing less than the “highest and most reasonable political act so far performed by people,” for it enshrined a unique principle: that of sovereign self- restraint. Henceforth the law of the Constitution bound government, protecting the people from the “sudden passion” of a majority. In this “magnificent act of self-

115 GG, “Great Moral Disaster,” 57. 116 Ibid., 58. 117 GG, “We Overtake Europe,” 23. Cf. Raimondo, Reclaiming, 52. 118 GG, American Omen, 22; Our Enemy, the State [1935] (Idaho: Caxton, 1950), esp. 59. Garrett was likely familiar with Nock’s ideas but does not mention him by name. Nock, though, was certainly aware of Garrett, writing in 1944 of “The Revolution Was”: “If this book got its just due (which it will not) it would change the whole course of American thought.” Albert Jay Nock, NECRB 2, no. 4 (December 1944): 1.

48 restraint,” Garrett wrote, sovereign power “forbids itself to alter the fundamental law except in a mood of conscious deliberation.”119

America, crucially, was not a pure democracy, for “never was the rule of demos safe for the rights of minorities or the rights of individuals.”120 Like Nock, then, the old individualists regarded the aggrandising democratic state of the New

Deal as unconstitutional and wholly parasitic. “Government tends to devour liberty,”

Garrett wrote in 1935.121 “It cannot provide for itself but by taking toll of what the people produce,” and in these matters it is invariably “insatiable.”122 In their founding act, Garrett argued, Americans had strictly limited the possible scope of any future government, choosing liberty and responsibility over the false comforts of state dependence. “They would sooner be free to starve than not to be free,” he wrote.

“And that was Americanism.”123

The old individualist’s image of the proper role of government, shared later by the libertarian populists, was accordingly narrow and essentially static. The founders had fashioned a system without peer, a guarantee of the people’s liberties unique to history; it was only through strict fidelity to this founding covenant, Garrett argued, that America had secured a “standard of common living the highest so far as we know in the history of the race.”124 The nucleus of this scheme was the autonomous individual, whose “natural rights”—to life, liberty and property—were inviolable and transcendent, properly immune from political sanction.125

Essential to the maintenance of this freedom, Garrett argued, was the right to property, for only the vigorous play of individual competitive enterprise could

119 GG, “House We Live In,” 76 & 77. 120 GG, “House We Live In,” 76. 121 Ibid., 8. 122 GG, “Security,” 33; GG, “Insatiable Government,” 3. 123 GG, “We Overtake Europe,” 23. 124 GG, American Omen, xi. 125 GG, “House We Live In,” 77.

49 protect the liberties of the individual. In America before the New Deal, “the economic system was freer and competition more reckless and daring than anywhere else,” he wrote in 1935.126 America’s willingness to tolerate the apparent chaos of the market had made the nation’s extraordinary ascent possible. “Never was it imposed upon life as a system,” Garrett wrote. “It grew out of life, not all at once but gradually, and is therefore, as was said at first, one of the great natural designs.”127 Capitalism, indeed, was not a “system” at all but simply a label for the productive anarchy of free individuals. “Capitalism is neither innocent nor guilty,” he wrote. “The worst image that can be made of it is an image of people themselves.”128

Garrett abhorred, as we have seen, the figure of the planner, a purely political creature who usurped the individual’s rightful liberty in the name of noxious abstractions. “As once the incurable passion of the human mind to mysticize itself by logic and dialectic was spent upon theological doctrine,” he wrote with amused contempt in 1934, “so now it spends itself on social doctrine.”129 Throughout history,

“nothing was ever solved by reason,” Garrett declared in a letter to Rose Wilder

Lane.130 The expert wished to plan from rational precepts the prosperity of the nation; but prosperity was the product of individual freedom, it could not be planned. “Capitalism was not scientifically and consciously conceived,” Garrett wrote in 1934. Its laws were not the product of rational design, but natural expressions of

“the axioms of experience.”131 An “idea of progress,” a faith in the powers of the free individual, these—not the calculations of the central planner—had made America great.132 “The spectacle of the human mind exerting itself blindly, erringly,

126 GG, “Economic Fascinations,” 101. 127 Ibid., 7. 128 Ibid., 7. 129 GG, “Socialism in the Red,” SEP, June 16, 1934, 7. 130 GG to RWL, n.d. (probably October, 1936), in NSF, box 5, folder 15, LP. 131 GG, “Balance Sheet,” 7. 132 GG, “Economic Fascinations,” 7.

50 victoriously, to bring about a condition it cannot foresee is utterly mysterious to reason,” Garrett wrote in 1928.133 The genius of the American system was the faith it put in this suprarational facility of the people, their capacity to arrive at goals, to make and remake the world, without an overarching plan.134 “It seems to matter very little what men think,” Garrett wrote in his 1924 novel The Cinder Buggy. “They very often do the right thing for the wrong reasons… All that the great law of becoming requires is that men shall work.”135

In 1936, Garrett was recruited to advise Republican presidential candidate Alf

Landon’s struggling campaign.136 His advice to Landon, preserved in a six-page memo, offers a concise overview of the themes that dominate his writing from the period. “Instead of promising to balance the budget, declare: The government will borrow no more money for any reason,” Garrett wrote. “What is the result of borrowing no more?... The extension [of the] Federal government is stopped.”

Roosevelt’s war on capitalism should be confronted head on, Garrett argued. “Defend nothing,” he advised. “Challenge the idea that there has been a recovery,” and declare that the “the profit motive shall be released” and the “spirit of adventure shall be called up again.”137 Garrett was happy to advise Landon, but in a later letter to Lane he confessed to being “sick with disappointment” after meeting the candidate.

“Roosevelt will get the entire moron vote,” he wrote. “Most intelligent Republicans

133 GG, American Omen, 251. 134 Garrett’s critique of planning and conception of capitalism borrows from classical economics, while at times closely anticipating Friedrich Hayek’s famous formulation of the “spontaneous order.” On Hayek, see Louis Hunt, “The Origin and Scope of Hayek’s Idea of Spontaneous Order,” in Liberalism, Conservatism, and Hayek’s Idea of Spontaneous Order, eds. Louis Hunt and Peter McNamara (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 43-64. 135 GG, The Cinder Buggy: A Fable in Iron and Steel (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1923), 246. 136 On Landon, see Donald R. McCoy, Landon of Kansas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966); Mason, Republican Party, chp. 2. 137 Unsigned memo to Alf Landon (with Garrett’s return address), August 12, 1936, in Post Series (H- M), box 2, George Horace Lorimer papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

51 will have to vote the Republican ticket in spite of Landon.”138 A month later, Landon was crushed; Roosevelt was returned to office in the greatest landslide in over a century. “What vanity to suppose that what one thinks or says is of any importance, or can make any difference,” Garrett wrote to Lane after the result came in.139

“Everything I believed about my own people was wrong. Everything I have written in the last four years was absurd.”140

The Birth of Libertarian Populism

In his early writings, Garrett’s attitude towards capitalism was one of awe and easy reverence. His novels, particularly The Driver and The Cinder Buggy, celebrate the heroic energies of the entrepreneur, the individual triumphant in the face of unremitting nature and the incomprehension of their fellow men. “They were free egoists, seeking profit, power, personal success, everyone attending to his own greatness,” he wrote in The Cinder Buggy. “Never before in the world had the practice of individualism been so reckless, so purely dynamic, so heedless of the

Devil's harvest.”141 The distinguishing mode of Garrett’s writing, nevertheless, is not eulogy but dirge. The deep pessimism—a positively gothic gloom—that marks his most memorable work is of a piece with a politics of nostalgic fatalism. “The fundamentalists, now called the Old Dealers, have made their contributions, too,”

Garrett wrote of his old individualist compatriots in 1935. “But their fundamentalism turns out to consist in a certain precision of ominous statement.”142 He might well have been thinking of himself.

138 GG to RWL, n.d. (probably October, 1936), in NSF, box 5, folder 15, LP. 139 GG to RWL, n.d. (probably mid-November, 1936), in ibid. 140 GG to RWL, n.d. (probably early-to-mid November, 1936), in ibid. 141 GG, Cinder Buggy, 245. 142 GG, “When Wishes Think,” SEP, February 23, 1935, 8.

52 By the late 1930s, Garrett believed that the forces of reaction represented by

Roosevelt had triumphed, perhaps permanently. Like many of his contemporaries on the right, he held little faith in the power of political activism. The people, Garrett wrote to Lane, had voted for the New Deal in a “positive, overwhelming manner.”

“Where is the new base?” he wondered. “I don’t see it. Where is the fighting position?

I haven’t any.” The people “wanted manna and water out the rock [sic]. I wanted people to stay hard and fit and self responsible,” he wrote. But “I realize now that it is not arguable and never was. You are or you ain’t, and that’s how you were born.”143

Garrett’s fatalism, the mirror of many on the right, is crucial to understanding the relationship between the partisans of the old order and the libertarian populists.

While Lane and her allies drew liberally from the worldview of Garrett and the old individualists, they did not accept Roosevelt’s new order lying down.

“A society must believe in something,” Garrett wrote to Lane, his mood sour, in December of 1936. “As I look upon the world it seems to me that this is the only great nation without an image. It has no image of itself, no image of an errand, no image of destiny, no image of its own power.”144 Lane agreed. “If there be any immediate hope at all,” she wrote to Garrett later in the decade, “it is that somehow, from somewhere in this multitude, young men will come, knowing what America, the

American revolution, is in principle, attached to it, believing in it, wanting to fight for it.” The emergence of such a multitude, however, Lane argued, would be dependent on a new movement of individualist activists and intellectuals. “We need thousands upon thousands of writers and speakers and cartoonists to hammer constantly on the fact that this is counter-revolution,” she wrote. At the end of the 1930s, such a movement seemed far away indeed. “The whole opposition like imbecile lambs

143 GG to RWL, n.d. (probably late November, 1936), in NSF, box 5, folder 15, LP. 144 GG to RWL, n.d. (probably December, 1936), in ibid.

53 accepted the New Deal self-labelling,” Lane wrote, “and said, ‘We want to go back to the old Americanism.’ Americans do not want to go back… they know nothing about the past and do not want to know anything about it.”145

The old individualist’s critique of the New Deal order freely combined two types of reasoning, the deontological and the consequentialist, in a manner later reproduced by the libertarian populists.146 For these men, the New Deal was dangerous both because it impinged on individual liberty, the inalienable freedom of every person, and because it threatened the efficient workings of the market, the engine of the nation’s prosperity. If these two ideas were often blurred in a way that might have seemed sloppy to later theorists, it did not detract from the argument’s essential polemical power. Yet the old individualist critique, couched as often as not in the grim poetry of defeat, lacked something, of which Garrett was, at least in part, aware. If America was to be returned once more to its founding ideals, it would need a new and vital “image” of itself, a positive conception of the nation as the embodiment of a unique and vital political calling. What was needed, in other words, was not a philosophy per se, but a spiritual idea of American individualism, a vision of man’s historical self-emancipation that could supplant the egalitarian promises of the left. This task would fall not to Garrett and his old individualist allies, who in less than a decade had fallen into obscurity, but to a new generation of writers and activists, repelled by the expansion of the liberal state. Garrett’s close confidante

Lane, who had composed an exultant credo of individualism for the Post in 1936, was the first to turn attention to building the ideological foundations of a new movement.

Already by the summer of 1935, her work had begun in earnest.147

145 RWL to GG, n.d. (probably 1939), in ibid. 146 My analysis of libertarian anti-statism is informed by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, A Brief History of Libertarianism, unpublished manuscript in author’s possession. 147 RWL, “Credo,” SEP, March 7, 1936, 5.

54

Chapter 2

American Counter-Utopia: The Birth of Libertarian Populism in the

Shadow of Roosevelt

Rose Wilder Lane was not a woman often given to anger. But in 1933, repulsed by events in the capital, she longed for the death of a president. “I hoped that Roosevelt would be killed in 1933,” she wrote to her literary agent George Bye later in the decade. “If there were any genuine adherence to American political principles in this country, any man in public life with the simple decency to forget his own personal picayune interests and stand for them, I would make a try at killing FDR now.”1 Like many on the right, Lane had initially been attracted to Roosevelt. His campaign, echoing Al Smith’s of 1928, had promised a balanced budget and an end to

1 RWL to George Bye, November 8, 1938, in Author File, box 223, “Lane, Rose Wilder,” James Oliver Brown Associates Records, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York City, New York [hereafter: “Brown Records”]. On Lane, William Holtz’s biography offers an excellent overview of her life, examining in particular her literary collaboration with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Holtz’s focus is on Lane’s major role in the composition of the Little House books. Holtz does discuss Lane’s political and philosophical views in passing, but he does not discuss in any depth the context of Lane’s ideas or her role in fomenting opposition to the New Deal, and he ascribes her politics to a “pathology” driven by Lane’s fractious relationship with her mother. See William Holtz, Ghost, 328. Doherty, Radicals, chp. 3, provides a useful overview of Lane’s career. Doherty argues that Lane was an early and important influence on the libertarian movement, but his account does not analyze Lane’s ideological formation in any depth, eschews archival sources and mostly recapitulates the standard narrative of the emergence of the anti-New Deal right critiqued in the introduction of this thesis. Gregory Eow devotes a chapter to Lane and Paterson, emphasizing their “particular conception of history” that led them to defend liberal modernity. Eow, “Fighting a New Deal,” chp. 6 & 253. Eow provides a useful overview of the pair, but he fails to explore their debt to or relationship with the old individualists, and his argument that their chief influence lay in their defense of modernity is unconvincing. Christine Woodside, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016), discusses the shared politics of Lane and her mother, but the book is largely a popularization of Holtz, and does not include a comprehensive or convincing analysis of Lane’s ideas. Caroline Fraser’s recent biography of Lane’s mother, the celebrated children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder, offers an engaging and carefully researched account of the pair’s evolving collaboration on the Little House series. Unfortunately, Fraser’s lengthy description of Lane’s political views is highly misleading and contains many errors. Fraser argues that Lane was beginning to “embrace fascism” in the mid-1930s, becoming an “apologist for dictators,” but the first claim is based on a quotation from a passage in which Lane explicitly criticises fascism, and the second is not substantiated at all, betraying a basic misunderstanding of Lane’s political project. The book contains many such errors. Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (New York: Metropolitan, 2017), 387 & 446.

55 Prohibition. But following the events of the hundred days from her home in

Mansfield, Missouri, Lane spiralled into despair. She was appalled by the President’s inaugural address, convinced he was intent on assuming “dictatorial powers.” And

Roosevelt’s famous first fireside chat smacked to her of little more than “Soviet-

Russian” propaganda.2 By the middle of March, her mind was made up. She wrote in her journal: “March 1933: We have a dictator Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a smart politician.”3

Lane was hardly alone in her visceral hatred of Roosevelt. In the following years, a dizzying array of figures from across the political spectrum would mobolize themselves against the President’s reforms. Central to these efforts, as chapter one showed, were the old individualists, a group of writers and politicians associated with

Herbert Hoover and the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Motivated as much by their fall from grace as the individualist philosophy of the New Era, these writers and party operatives aimed, above all, to defeat Roosevelt at the ballot box.

But as the decade wore on, a new group of figures, less bound by the strictures of party politics, opened a fresh front against the hated Roosevelt. These women and men were consumed by a burning belief that the New Deal represented a fundamental transformation of the American system of government. They sought nothing less than its total rollback, a task that, for many, would consume the rest of their lives.

As Lane would later write, invoking the galvanising effect of Roosevelt’s program: “I believe that in time the New Deal will prove to be—to have been—most useful to the [American] Revolution, in that it roused Americans to political thinking,

2 RWL, journal entry, March 13, 1933 in Diaries and Notes [DN], box 21, item 52, LP. 3 RWL, journal entry, March 1933 in Notes on American Politics, box 19, item 6, LP.

56 for the first time since the early 19th-century.”4 These writers enlarged, refined and sharpened the old individualist’s critique of the New Deal, while elaborating a radical and positive vision of national spiritual renewal. In answer to the burgeoning hegemony of the technocratic liberal state, they counterposed an existentially charged conception of politics, positing the fight against the liberal leviathan as a grand philosophical choice or conundrum. Their “philosophy of freedom,” as the libertarian author and operative Leonard Read would later term it, offered a vision of the market as the material and spiritual locus of American life, the sublime product of innumerable individuals in spontaneous harmony. Fusing the doctrines of the old individualists with the language of self-help literature and Christian apologetics, the libertarian populists crafted a novel populist rhetoric, one that sanctified the personal emancipation of the market order and preached resistance to the tyrannical incursions of the New Deal state. “Give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit,” Lane wrote in 1935. “Also I will tell you why the relative freedom of human spirit is better—and more productive, even in material ways—than the communist, Fascist, or any other rigidity organized for material ends.”5

Together with the émigré Russian novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, and the novelist and critic Isabel Paterson, Lane has long been regarded as one of the “three furies of libertarianism,” the founding mothers of the twentieth-century libertarian movement.6 Paterson, a literary critic whose formidable intellect and infamous temper earned her considerable fame, spent the 1930s formulating a novel, hardline

4 RWL to Frank Meyer, July 6, 1955, in NSF, box 9, folder 4, LP. 5 RWL, “Who’s Who—and Why,” SEP, July 6, 1935, 30. 6 William F. Buckley Jr., “John Chamberlain, RIP,” National Review, May 1, 1995, 25. On Jenifer Burns’ analysis of the trio, see the introduction to this thesis. Doherty, Radicals, chp. 3, provides a useful overview of each woman’s career and some essential broader context.

57 individualism in her column for the New York Herald Tribune, and in her magnum opus of 1943, The God of the Machine, an audacious attempt to construct from the axioms of American experience a novel political philosophy. Paterson’s brand of politics—wholly uncompromising, nostalgic in spirit but radical in its totalizing vision—offered a pure, abstract individualism that contrasted with Lane’s essentially romantic conception. Rand, born and raised in Saint Petersburg, a city transformed by the Bolshevik revolution, immigrated to California as a young woman in 1926, repelled by the ideology of the new Communist state. Frustrated by early efforts as a

Hollywood screenwriter and converted to politics by Wendell Willkie’s 1940

Republican campaign, Rand would find an enormous audience for her pro-capitalist novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) after the war.7 In time, she would emerge as the century’s most famous popular advocate of right-wing individualism. “There wasn’t an economist among them,” the conservative journalist

John Chamberlain later wrote of the three, yet “with scornful side glances at the male business community… [they] had decided to rekindle a faith in an older American philosophy.”8

Scholars have generally regarded the influence of Paterson and Lane as restricted primarily to the nascent libertarian movement, through their work with

Leonard Read and the Foundation for Economic Education after the war.9 Yet the modern libertarian movement, fuelled as much by the volatile campus politics of the

1960s as the theories of von Mises and Hayek, bears little resemblance to the movement politics that Lane, in particular, advanced. Forged in the crucible of the

Roosevelt revolution, their brand of libertarian populism instead strikingly

7 Burns, Goddess, chp. 1 & 2. 8 John Chamberlain, A Life With the Printed Word (Regnery: Chicago, 1982), 136. 9 Doherty, Radicals, chp. 3 & 4 is the main, recent overview.

58 anticipated the post-war conservatism of Barry Goldwater and the Reagan right.

Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), generally taken as the definitive statement of post-war conservative politics, mirrors in almost every particular the philosophy advanced by the libertarian populists. As Albert Jay Nock noted in 1943, “Rose and old Isabel have shown the male world of this period how to think fundamentally. They make all of us male writers look like Confederate money.”10 It was this attempt, to refashion the fading doctrines of the old individualists in the service of a new and radical vision, that would, in time, powerfully etch the philosophy of the libertarian populists into the fabric of

American politics.

This chapter opens with an overview of libertarian populist thought, analyzing the work of a handful of thinkers and emphasizing their break with the philosophy of

Hoover and Garrett. Where the old individualists and a new wave of free-market

European émigrés sought, in part, to adjust their precepts to the particularities of capitalism’s crisis, Lane and her allies turned inward, fashioning a radical, populist defense of twentieth-century capitalism, grounded in a novel natural rights individualism, a narrow, reverential reading of the Constitution, and a nascent

Christian free market evangelism. Two strands or styles of thought marked the evolution of libertarian populism throughout this period. The first, heir to Spencer and Sumner’s Darwinism, emphasized the essentially moral character of the market regime, its capacity to reward the virtuous and discipline the indolent. Capitalism, in this vision, was the exalted conduit of a higher, God-given hierarchy; inequalities of ability and outcome were to be embraced as inevitable and just, essential to the

10 Albert Jay Nock to Mrs. Edmund C. Evans, August 7, 1943, in Letters from Albert Jay Nock, 1924- 1945, ed. Frank W. Garrison (Caxton: Idaho, 1949), 183.

59 spiritual and material health of society. The second strand, honed in the shadow of liberalism’s triumph, advanced a novel, romantic vision of market society, largely shorn of the harsh tones of the Darwinists. In this vision, individuals, liberated at last from the dead hand of the state, made of themselves what they would, and in so doing transformed the world. The market, on these terms, was the great destroyer of hierarchy.

Apparently incompatible, these visions were in fact little more than two sides of the same coin: the one severe, unremitting, almost Calvinist in its comprehension of the individual; the other freewheeling, romantic, and decidedly Evangelical. And the result too, in concrete terms, was generally the same. Both modes placed absolute primacy on the material and spiritually productive powers of the market, while rejecting wholesale the forms and functions of the New Deal state. And while the vision of the market as moral enforcer stressed the unbending hierarchy of human society, a conception of capitalism as meritocratic emancipator presupposed, in the end, such a hierarchy as well. Crucially, then, although the libertarian populists did not abandon the language of moral order, their rhetoric in time largely jettisoned the traditional laissez-faire emphasis on the virtues of the elite capitalist class. In its place, Lane and her allies premised their defense of capitalism on a scathing critique of a Washington establishment of politicians and bureaucrats, emphasizing above all the benefits that a truly free system of enterprise would bestow on the everyman striver.

While rebellion against Roosevelt’s reforms stood at the heart of the efforts of both the old individualists and the libertarian populists, their responses differed in scope and tone. Where the old individualists tended to defend capitalism on the basis of its unrivalled productive power, the libertarian populists extolled the moral and

60 spiritual sanctity of the market regime, emphasizing the radical, creative freedom granted by an unfettered competitive order. And while the old individualists happily conceded a small role for the state in the economy, the libertarian populists came to regard government intervention of any kind as morally and practically indefensible.

The distinction between the philosophy of the old individualists and the libertarian populists that grounds this thesis is, nevertheless, a porous one. Ogden Mill’s The

Seventeen Million (1937) contains within it much that made libertarian populism distinctive, just as Paterson’s The God of the Machine (1943) could easily be seen, in a slightly altered light, as the crowning statement of old individualist philosophy. Yet

Mills’ text, for all its impassioned calls to a new liberty-loving populism, remains bound by a particular worldview: that of the patrician Republican elite, an elite that feared a permanent Democratic majority as much, if not more, than the decay of their ideals.11

On the one hand, the distinction is simply one of chronology. By war’s end the old individualists had, for most part, faded from public life, their influence erased by

Roosevelt’s triumph, their works only rarely cited by the post-war right.12 The libertarian populists, on the other hand, assumed in many cases positions at the vanguard of the post-war movement to combat liberalism. But while chronology grounds the distinction, it does not exhaust it. For although the libertarian populists absorbed the foundations of Garrett and Hoover’s worldview, they steadily radicalized its central premises, elevating the old individualist’s “folklore of capitalism” to a higher philosophical and existential plane.13 Where Ogden Mills

11 Ogden L. Mills, The Seventeen Million (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 8. 12 This last point likely explains, in part, the virtual absence of the old individualists from the scholarly literature on American conservatism and the twentieth-century right. 13 The phrase is Thurman W. Arnold’s, from The Folklore of Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937).

61 might write that America had always and would always be “a classless society,”14

Lane and her allies attempted to construct an individualist ontology that would render the very term “class” meaningless. And where the old individualists offered only muted criticisms of the political class per se, the libertarian populists freely pilloried a Washington elite they viewed as inept, cynical and incurably corrupt.

Although at first they focused their fire on Democrats alone, by the end of the war

Lane and her allies had begun to openly attack both parties, whatever the virtues— and they were often considerable—of individual figures in the GOP. “[T]he

Republican Party,” Lane wrote in 1947, “began the New Deal and since 1933 has supported it vigorously, betraying our country to ruin.”15 American politics at the end of the 1940s was “tragic and disgusting,” she wrote. “[W]e are living under a one- party system… There is no choice between Democrat New Deal and Republican New

Deal.”16 Lane called, in strikingly modern terms, for “[a]n honorable man who speaks the truth in public, a candidate who does not hire hacks to write his campaign speeches from Gallup polls, an elected President who takes an oath to uphold the

American Constitution and then upholds it.”17 David Lawrence, a libertarian populist journalist and editor of the United States News, concurred. Only “a new party willing to stake everything on a defense of the Constitution,” he wrote in Stumbling Into

Socialism (1935), could hope to counter Roosevelt’s “political autocracy.”18

This attack on the perfidy of a newly-ascendant class of bureaucrats and New

Deal politicians was the essential other half of the populism of Lane and her allies.

For while the libertarian populists frequently invoked the bottomless virtue and good

14 Mills, Seventeen Million, 124. 15 RWL, NECRB 4, no. 3 (March, 1947), 4. 16 RWL, NECRB 5, no. 7 (July, 1948), 4. 17 Ibid., 4. 18 David Lawrence, Stumbling Into Socialism: And the Future of Our Political Parties (New York: D. Appleton, 1935), 50. Lane was an enthusiastic fan of Lawrence’s work as a late letter makes clear. RWL to JC, October 3, 1954, in NSF, box 3, folder 37, LP.

62 sense of the American people, they just as often marshalled a populist picture of a corrupt and unscrupulous political class preying on a virtuous citizenry. These bureaucratic “careerists in human misery,” wrote the libertarian populist journalist

Samuel Crowther, are not motivated by true “social reform” but simply “absolute political power of a kind far beyond the imagination of the run-of-the-mine [sic] politicians.”19 This elite class of bureaucrats and liberal ideologues cloaked their true intentions, the libertarian populists argued, enriching themselves under the guise of a preening “humanitarianism.”20 “We seem determined to uplift the down-trodden even if we go down with them,” wrote the libertarian populist publicist Fred G. Clark.

The planned, “humanitarian” economy of the social reformers, Clark warned, was simply a recipe for the “inevitable collapse of our economy.”21 The “professional thinker,” Lane argued, was a “parasite,” a man who “dreams of a happy world of parasites.”22 The libertarian populist critique of the political and intellectual class, indeed, often adopted the savage tones of the aristocratic individualists Francis

Neilson and Albert Jay Nock. The “legislators” and “bureaucrats,” Neilson wrote in

1934, are “non-producers all, mere parasites, living on the labor foolish enough to feed them.”23 This dichotomy, between the productive and non-productive—strongly echoing the work of the Social Darwinists—would become, in the following decades, a central motif of libertarian populist thought.

Such a belief in the essentially self-serving character of progressive reformers, in their basic duplicity and “lust for power,” was invariably coupled with a conviction that man and society were, in their essence, unchanging and unreformable.24 As the

19 Crowther, Time, 132. 20 Francis Neilson, Control from the Top (New York: Putnam’s, 1933), 45. 21 FGC, Magnificent Delusion, 16 & ix. 22 RWL, NECRB 4, no. 7 (July, 1947), 2. 23 Francis Neilson, Sociocratic Escapades (New York: Putnam’s, 1934), 87. 24 Crowther, Time, 132.

63 Social Darwinist John Rustgard, who influenced many of the libertarian populists, wrote: “Ever and anon has the humanitarian undertaken to equalize the conditions and fortunes of men by taking from one and giving to the other, only to destroy both.”25 This critique of planning and of an elite professional “humanitarian” class dominated the work of the libertarian populists from the mid-1930s onwards, and formed a crux of the broader libertarian populist defense of capitalism. For Fred

Clark, the great “crisis” facing the nation was the temptation of humanitarianism, of

America, in his striking phrase, “crucifying its commerce on the cross of its social conscience.”26 For the eminent historian James Truslow Adams—father of the

“American Dream”— the schemes of the planners were contrary to the basic nature of man. “We are interfering with both economic laws and those of nature,” Adams wrote in 1936, and “humanitarianism has wrecked our adherence to both.”27 “Many of the great political movements of the day which are carried out in the name of

‘national regeneration,’ ‘economic security,’ and so on,” he argued, “should be known rather as movements for the political, moral and intellectual slavery of the individual.”28 Isabel Paterson, in the most famous chapter of The God of the

Machine, concurred. The humanitarian, Paterson wrote, “cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves.” But

“what the humanitarian actually proposes,” she argued, “is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.”29

Just as important as the evolution of ideas that separated the libertarian populists

25 John Rustgard, The Problem of Poverty (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), ix. 26 FGC, Magnificent Delusion, 124. 27 James Truslow Adams, “The Question of the Hour,” The American Mercury, August, 1936, 492. 28 James Truslow Adams, The Living Jefferson (New York: Scribner’s, 1936), 13. 29 Paterson, God, 241.

64 from the old individualism of Garrett and Hoover was another shift: that of tone. For many on the right, Roosevelt’s landslide victory in ‘36 appeared to settle, for the time being at least, the question of the proper limits of federal power. “So we will have to grin and bear it,” counselled the American Mercury. “The grinning is easy enough— except when we come to pay the bill. And bear it we must—until that day, not so far distant, when the incense smoke clears away from Dr. Roosevelt’s thaumaturgies and we find ourselves face to face with a reality which is going to be as unpleasant as it is stark.”30

Garet Garrett’s later work is emblematic in this regard. Ornate and peppered with archaisms, fixated on the decay of a once virtuous republic, it was ultimately all but subsumed by its author’s brooding fatalism. Garret's attitude influenced the libertarian populists, yet their work channelled his nostalgia in the service of a positive vision. For Lane, America represented an “unprecedented use of Judeo-

Christian individualist philosophy as a political idea, embodied in an unprecedented political structure and expressed in social and economic action.”31 As early as 1932, she had already begun to conceive of American history in grand, world-historical terms. The history of America was a “story of gigantic achievement, physically, spiritually, morally,” she wrote.32 Such a narrative had the potential to “lead the world back from the defeatist thinking of the socialistic, militaristic, caste formula in which European thought is so hopelessly involved…”33 Paterson, like her fellow libertarian populists, advocated a kind of redemptive radicalism: a revolutionary refounding of the nation along the lines first formulated by the Founding Fathers.

The story of American freedom, she declared, was a “great romance… springing from

30 “Back at the Old Stand,” The American Mercury, December, 1936, 480. 31 RWL, NECRB 5, no. 5 (May, 1948), 2. 32 RWL, journal entry, December 23, 1932 in DN, box 21, item 52, LP. 33 Ibid.

65 a fresh apprehension of the relation of man to the universe.”34 To forsake its truths in the face of peril was to misunderstand their very nature. “The most extreme fallacy is to believe that nothing can be done, that we must drift to disaster and accommodate ourselves to it,” Paterson wrote in The God of the Machine. 35 The principles of American political philosophy are “universals,” she insisted. “They do not change with ‘history.’ Whenever and wherever they are understood and applied they will work, always in the same way.”36

The obverse of this vision was the other mode of libertarian populist rhetoric: the jeremiad. Apocalyptic warnings, couched as often as not in the language of eschatology, were a mainstay of libertarian populist literature from the 1930s onwards. In the beginning, the focus was the singular threat of Roosevelt. Like the old individualists, Lane and her allies regarded the New Deal as a brazen attempt to subvert traditional limits on federal power, and as a prelude to dictatorship. “With prices controlled… the incentive to work is stifled and the State must compel men to work as it directs,” Samuel Crowther wrote of Roosevelt’s economy. “Thus the State turns itself into an absolute dictatorship, for, the elementary right to work and to keep the product of one’s work having been withdrawn, there is left no area in which the people might govern.”37

In time, though, the threat of New Deal liberalism took on a different, more insidious, aspect. The Bolshevik state had inspired, from its inception, tremendous fear and loathing on the American right. The libertarian populists were among the first, however, to link liberalism with communism and to conceive of the struggle against the New Deal state as a local instantiation of the worldwide crusade against

34 Isabel Paterson, Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson, ed. Stephen Cox (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2015), xxi. 35 Paterson, God, 291. 36 Ibid., 292. 37 Crowther, Time, 311.

66 communism. “It has taken a century to carry Marxism to its ultimate conclusion in

Europe,” Lane wrote in 1945, “and to bring its destructive force into play against the

American political structure and the American economy, under the alias of liberalism.”38 The New Deal “ignores the moral and spiritual values of individualism, the love of liberty,” wrote the libertarian populist author and business magnate

Edgar M. Queeny. “They [the New Dealers] desire to create a classless, homogenous society collectively controlled in the interests of all the people. This is socialism. The idea is as old as history.”39 Liberalism, on these terms, was simply a façade, the opening gambit of a far bolder ploy, one that had been definitively advanced by

Roosevelt’s New Deal: the socialist takeover of America. “In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party,” Lane wrote in 1936.

“The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism.”40 Only recognition of the gravity of the crisis, Lane argued, and wholesale resistance on the part of the American people, could hope to avert the nation’s descent into totalitarian government. “Every American is living today in the first political crisis he has ever known, and upon his decision and his action depend his right to own property, his exercise of his natural freedom, and the safety of his own life,” Lane declared. Liberty or tyranny: “This is the choice that every American must make.”41

While Lane and Paterson offered the most novel and compelling libertarian populist defenses of the capitalist order, they were hardly alone. A raft of journalists, industrialists and academics responded to the New Deal assault on the remnants of

38 RWL, NECRB 2, no. 9 (October 1945), 1. 39 Edgar M. Queeny, The Spirit of Enterprise (New York: Scribner’s, 1943), 44. 40 RWL, Give Me Liberty [1936] (Idaho: Caxton, 1954), 50. 41 Ibid.

67 the old laissez-faire order with a flood of ink. Much like Lane and Paterson these works sought to reclaim the basic elements of nineteenth-century pro-capitalist thought in the form of a novel populist individualism. By the end of the war, these figures would be linked by a network of correspondence and a suite of individualist organizations and publications—stretching from New York to California—united in the shared project of liberating America from the clutches of collectivism.

Fred G. Clark, a businessman and popular radio journalist, who founded the

American Economic Foundation (AEF)—the earliest free market think-tank—in

1939, was one of the first to attempt a synthesis of Social Darwinist and old individualist free market thought with a new, everyman populism.42 Clark’s work, from his early anti-prohibition advocacy, to his best-selling popular “basic American” economics primers—the second, How We Live, sold some three million copies—was more folksy and less dogmatic than that of Lane or Paterson, yet it was animated at its core by the same hardline laissez-faire zeal.43

Throughout the 1930s Clark headed the Crusaders, an anti-prohibition advocacy group funded by the du Pont brothers and other wealthy industrialists.44

Styled as a voluntary “non-racial, non-partisan, de-centralized nation-wide organization of men and women of all walks of life,” the Crusaders was transformed

42 FGC to J. Howard Pew, March 27, 1939, and J. Howard Pew to FGC, March 29, 1939, in box 210, J. Howard Pew papers, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware [hereafter: “Pew papers”]. 43 FGC, How We Live: A Simple Dissection of the Economic Body (New York D. Van Nostrand, 1944); “Action Taken By the Trustees of the Crusaders As Of January 16th 1940,” in The Crusaders, box 4, folder 2, Fred G. Clark papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa [hereafter “Clark papers”]. The scholarship on Clark is extremely minimal. Daniel Stedman Jones devotes half a paragraph to the AEF in Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 160; Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Erik Barnouw each devote a paragraph to Clark’s efforts in radio, in Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2006), 28, and Erik Barnouw, The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States: Vol. 2—1933 to 1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 14; Robert F. Burk discusses Clarks’s relationship with the du Ponts and other wealthy industrialists, in Corporate State, esp. 57-58 & 202-203; Wolfskill discusses the Crusaders relationship with the American Liberty League, in Wolfskill, Revolt, esp. 53. 44 Irénée du Pont to FGC, July 16, 1936, in box 4, folder 1, Clark papers; FGC to JC, February 2, 1940, box 1, Crane papers.

68 after 1933 into a broad-purpose advocacy group, tasked with defending the

Constitution and the free enterprise system from the radical statism of Roosevelt’s

New Deal.45 The group’s ideology was pure libertarian populism, a mix of pro-market bromides, paeans to individual liberty, and zealous attacks on the New Deal, coupled with populist appeals to the innate wisdom and virtue of the American people. The

Crusader’s boasted 1,500,000 members nationwide, and organized town halls and large rallies advocating drastic limits on the power of the federal government.46 But the main vehicle for the group’s message was a series of radio broadcasts, titled

“Wake up America,” initially run for five-months on the Columbia Broadcasting

System, beginning in March, 1934, reaching seventy-odd stations across the country, and extended over the next four years to include regular broadcasts covering a hundred plus stations, featuring distinguished guests like the celebrated Dean of

Harvard Law School Roscoe Pound.47 The programs were designed to stimulate opposition to Roosevelt’s policies, to “awaken the American people,” in Clark’s phrase, “to a realization of the forces which are working to destroy free government.”

Taken as a whole, they offered the attentive listener a comprehensive education in the principles of pro-capitalist individualism. The language, generally delivered by

Clark himself, was direct and unpretentious, the perspective that of a concerned citizen—yet the zeal of Clark and his backers was readily apparent. “This spoils

45 “Incorporation documents,” n.d. (probably early 1934), in box 4, folder 2, Clark papers. For a detailed overview of the evolution of the Crusaders after 1933, see James F. Bell, “Diary, 1928-1936,” 27-36, in box 9, James Ford Bell and family papers, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, Minnesota. 46 “Action Taken By the Trustees of the Crusaders As Of January 16th 1940,” in box 4, folder 2, Clark papers; “Fears Inflation Passage: Crusaders Head Urges Protests to Hold Back Congress,” NYT, December 22, 1933, 2; “Crusaders to Fight Pleas for Inflation: 1,500,000 Foes of Dry Law Back Drive,” NYT, November 13, 1933, 4; “Speakers at Carnegie Hall Rally Plead for ‘Sound Policies,’” NYT, November 28, 1933, 16. 47 FGC, The Crusaders Present: “Wake Up America,” A Series of Radio Broadcasts (New York: The Crusaders, n.d.), 4; “Action Taken By the Trustees of the Crusaders As Of January 19th 1937,” in box 4, folder 2, Clark papers. Frederic R. Harris to Roscoe Pound, May 25, 1934, in Series II, box 11, folder 5, Roscoe Pound papers, Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

69 system has corrupted American politics from the villages to the very gates of

Washington,” Clark declared in the 32nd episode, on the perils of government control of industry.48 “And now it is proposed to extend this political patronage influence to private enterprise! On top of the legions of political parasites in public works the political racketeer now intends to pile another load of political parasites on private enterprise.”49

The great fear animating the broadcasts was of a nation on the brink of abandoning the economic, political and spiritual arrangements that had secured it a singular place in world history. The conflict, between cynical collectivists and the great bulk of “liberty loving individuals… may be the most titanic struggle in

American history,” Clark proclaimed in the first episode.50 Only by awakening the spirit of “Real America,” and ending the “senseless campaign of hate and envy against private enterprise” could the nation be saved from the “maelstrom of

Fascism, Hitlerism or Leninism.” “We have reached a time in our history when it again becomes necessary for every true American to engage in determined battle,”

Clark wrote, in a printed pamphlet of the broadcasts issued that year, “to defend and maintain the system and the principles upon which our nation was founded.”51

Central to the broadcasts was the belief that only private enterprise, safe from the despotic whims of centralized government, could secure a free and prosperous future. “The Profit System has proved to be the greatest benefactor of an industrial nation,” Clark wrote. “Man’s right to what he earns, so long as it is earned honestly, is the one driving force that has created national vitality.”52 In the face of the

48 FGC, Wake Up America, 40. 49 Ibid., 39. 50 FGC, “Introduction—Crusaders’ Economic Broadcasts (Tuesday, March 15, 1936),” in Wake Up America, 7-11 & 7. 51 FGC, Wake Up America, 7 & 10. 52 Ibid., 10, italics in original.

70 extraordinary beneficence of capitalism, the “covetous attitude toward other people’s property” that now dominated American political life was evidence of a grave spiritual and intellectual crisis.53 The “brain truster, the communist, the political- operation-of-private-enterprise theorist, the political racketeer and the demagogue,” had hoodwinked the people and their politicians with flagrant lies and utopian schemes, Clark argued. 54 These “public enemies” could only be thwarted by a determined campaign to revive American morals and return politics to the enduring truths of the Founders. “The future of this country depends on courageous action today,” Clark declared. “It is to deflate the demagogues and scandal-spreaders, and inflate common sense and co-operation that the Crusaders appeal to the red-blooded men of America to break the chains of lethargy and join the constructive forces mobilizing to Wake Up America!”55

The radio broadcasts would continue after the war under the aegis of Clark’s

AEF, morphing into a debate show in which luminaries of the anti-statist right were pitted against a more mainstream, or left-wing guest, on a rotating topic.56 The later series, less overtly agitprop—although the deck was subtly tilted towards Clark’s favored guest—earned plaudits and a large listening audience.57 Yet while the

Crusaders, amidst the Depression, had granted the occasional utility of limited and

“intelligent regulation,” by the end of the decade Clark’s views had hardened.

Magnificent Delusion (1940), the fullest statement of his political philosophy, offered a crisp assault on the “magnificent delusion” of government welfare for all, its

53 Ibid., 57. 54 Ibid., 52. 55 Ibid., 26. 56 Lane was a guest on the program in 1943—see RWL, What Kind of America—and a big fan of Clark and his partner, R. S. Rimanoczy. See RWL to Clark, in NSF, box 26, folder 17, LP, and RWL to JC, October 3, 1954, in NSF, box 3, folder 37, LP. 57 JC to FGC, December 20, 1939, in box 1, Crane papers; JC to H. S. Wherrett, August 6, 1942, in ibid.; J. Howard Pew to JC, April 11, 1940, in ibid.

71 radical pro-capitalist assumptions mirroring the emergent libertarian populist critique of the new liberal order. “The majority of our people must come to understand that business—the manufacturing and selling of goods—is the very essence of civilization,” Clark wrote. “Dislike them as much as you will as people, but remember that the desire to get rich developed the world and the men with the brains to get rich are the people who did it.”58 Only the heroic actions of society’s

“leaders” had liberated the “masses” from brute toil, Clark argued. “[I]f the top one- tenth of 1 per cent of the population were in some way liquidated or incapacitated, civilization would collapse like an empty sack. It is nature's inexorable law that the weak must depend on the strong; that without their protection they die.”59

Unsurprisingly, Clark ridiculed the notion of equality, the watchword of the left, as a guiding political ideal. “Liberty is based on the privilege of inequality,” he wrote,

“the privilege and opportunity to rise in the world as a result of our individual efforts and superiority.”60 Like the influential libertarian advocate Leonard Read in the years after World War II, Clark believed that only a broad-based effort to “educate” the American people in the benefits of liberty and free enterprise could prevent the total “socialization of business and inevitable collapse of our economy.”61 “The danger to Americanism and the hope of collectivism lies in the ignorance of the people,” he declared.62

Vervon Orval Watts, a libertarian populist economist and polemicist, spent the 1930s and ‘40s propagating a fusion of classical economics and a populist critique of the nascent New Deal order. A disciple of Thomas Nixon Carver, the last giant of Social Darwinist political-economy, and close confidante of Rose Wilder

58 FGC, Magnificent Delusion, 143. 59 Ibid., 142-43. 60 Ibid., 63. 61 Ibid., 159 & ix. 62 Ibid., 93.

72 Lane, Watts was a crucial figure in the transmission of the free market thought of the

New Era to a new generation of anti-statist activists.63 In Why Are We So

Prosperous? (1938), Watts offered a folksy popularization—replete with cartoon infographics—of the theories he had imbibed at Harvard under Carver, lauding the indispensable role of the market and attacking the dangers of “Robin Hood economics” and the creeping bureaucratization of American life.64

“[E]xperience has shown,” Watts wrote, “that voluntary enterprise is necessary for mass prosperity and democracy.” But the people, he argued, had been hoodwinked into believing that capitalism needed to be regulated. The preachers of

Robin Hood economics—the politicians, the unions and the intellectuals—attacked, above all, the “profit motive.” In their vision, the relentless pursuit of profit had created an economy riven by inequality. “One excuse for restricting enterprise is that we can thus reduce inequality,” Watts noted. But inequality, he argued, is the essence of “every thriving social group.” “[A]ny group of persons can cooperate efficiently only when organized into a pyramid of authority and influence.” Any attempt to reduce inequality, then, would swiftly quash prosperity. And proposals that would substitute profit for the hand of the government planner would lead, inevitably,

Watts argued, to totalitarian government and the nightmare of the firing squad.

“Hope of reward is in the long run the only efficient motive force for civilized life,” he

63 Orval Watts to RWL, January 4, 1944, box 2, folder 10, Watts papers. On the continuities between 1920s and 1930s conservative individualism, see George S. May, “Ultra-Conservative Thought in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1954). 64 Vervon Orval Watts, Why Are We So Prosperous? (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Company, 1938), 1. Carver supervised Watts doctoral dissertation at Harvard, and recruited him for a junior position when Carver joined the Republican National Committee’s Research Division in 1936. Orval Watts to Thomas Nixon Carver, March 28, 1936, in box 1, folder 6, Thomas Nixon Carver papers, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California [hereafter: “Carver papers”].

73 wrote. “A democratic free society can't use firing squads. It must therefore use profits.”65

Watts’ vision of the proper size and scope of government married the unyielding laissez-faire of Carver with a populist critique of the corrupt and profligate political class. “In short, government—local, state, and federal—is to a large extent a gigantic racket. Force and intimidation are used, as in any hold-up, to collect tribute (taxes).” Politicians, gifted control of the public purse, invariably showered their “loyal supporters” with lucrative jobs. Next to the politicians, though, the greatest threat to America’s freedom and prosperity were those willing to sacrifice liberty in pursuit of the false “security” of government hand-outs. Such security, Watts argued, was that “sought by the aged and infirm, the cowards and weaklings.” It would lead, in time, to a great sacrifice of “social welfare and progress.”

A return to prosperity could only arise when the American people rejected the false idol of government security and reasserted the vigorous independence of their forefathers. “[W]e must stop asking the central government to do so many things for us,” Watts wrote. “Do present-day Americans have sufficient moral courage and patriotism to pay this price for democracy?”66

In 1939, Watts became the first professional economist hired by a US

Chamber of Commerce when he joined the Los Angeles Chamber under General

Manager Leonard Read. Read, who would soon emerge as the central architect of the

65 The scholarship on Watts is very limited. The most substantial, covering Watts’ role in the “textbook controversy”—discussed in the next chapter—is David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart and Margaret Albert, “Economic Liberals as Quasi-Public Intellectuals: The Democratic Dimension,” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 30, no. 2 (2012), esp. 2-14. On Watts and Lane, a letter Watts wrote to Lane in 1955 conveys the nature of their relationship: “You are still my chief teacher. Hope you see the bits of progress, which together have worked a revolution in my thinking during the past decade.” Orval Watts to RWL, June 19, 1955, in NSF, box 27, folder 10, LP. Watts conception is more fully articulated in Vervon Orval Watts, “Social Inequality,” American Management Review 25, no. 5 (1936): 147-48. Watts, Why Are We So Prosperous?, i, iii, 7, 34 & 7. 66 Ibid., 85, 97 & 86.

74 post-war libertarian movement, was another avid protégé of Carver, and the pair soon became, in the words of Read’s biographer, “close confederates in the cause of freedom.” Do We Want Free Enterprise? (1944), a collection of Watts’ lectures from a regular course he gave to businessmen, offered a familiar synthesis of rigid classical economics and populist bromides, shot through with notes of Carver’s Social

Darwinism. “The living thread of human evolution is carried by those who learn to find their greatest satisfaction in striving and achieving,” Watts wrote. “War is merely an incident in the ceaseless struggle for survival among individuals and groups.” America, he argued, had risen from rural backwater to industrial superpower on the back of the morals and character of its people, uniquely adapted to the unceasing struggle of social life. Generations of Americans innately possessed the “habits of self reliance” and “individual initiative” that conditioned them to resist the siren song of positive government. 67 “Our great industrial system,” Watts wrote,

“was not built by a few supermen. It was built, instead, by millions of men and women, each trying to do a job better, each learning from others and each building on the work of others..68

But America, Watts believed, had been hijacked by those who spurned its ancestral virtues. The expansion of government “security” under Roosevelt was already corrupting the essential self-reliance and initiative of the people. At root, was the notion of “social equality,” that so exercised the minds of the New Dealers. This

“myth,” Watts argued, directly endangered the future of the republic. “[E]qualitarian policies already in operation will destroy the power of private enterprise to create new jobs,” he wrote. In time, these policies would “bring to a close the era of rapid

67 Leonard Read, “To friends and admirers of Thomas Nixon Carver,” October 21, 1939, in box 1, “Leonard Read,” Carver papers; Mary Sennholz, Leonard E. Read: Philosopher of Freedom (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1993), 59-60. Vervon Orval Watts, Do We Want Free Enterprise? (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 1944), 5 & 9. 68 Ibid., 9.

75 progress which made America the hope and envy of all the world.” For Watts, it was the market, a pure conduit of the innumerable, infinitely various decisions of individuals, that embodied true democracy and a future of prosperity. “[C]ompetitive business organizations and other voluntary groups are usually more democratic than government.” And only “free competitive markets” could guarantee American affluence. “Prosperity is a fragile thing,” Watts wrote. “It can be built only by hard work and sacrifice. It can be maintained only by ceaseless struggle.”69

The career of Samuel Crowther, a journalist at The Saturday Evening Post and long-time collaborator of Henry Ford, illustrates the evolving priorities of the anti-statist right throughout the 1930s. A columnist and stenographer to a slew of wealthy industrialists, Crowther spent much of the ‘20s and early ‘30s developing an idiosyncratic, isolationist economics. By the middle of the 1930s, though, Crowther, repelled by Roosevelt’s program, had alighted on a distinctive blend of populism and free market economics.70 In “Planned Economy,” an essay published by the Post in

1934, Crowther attacked the ideology of planning that had guided Roosevelt’s early efforts, deriding the ascendant class of liberal intellectuals, those “bands of sincere emotionalists” who zealously advocated planning as social panacea.71 “The plans of the Administration at Washington have largely failed, not because they have been

69 Ibid., 97, 140-41, 20, 32 & 159. 70 The literature on Crowther’s collaboration with Ford and other industrialists is large, although it contains no in-depth analysis of Crowther’s own views. Crowther is absent from the broader literature on twentieth-century conservatism. David Farber highlight’s Crowther’s success at gaining the trust of high-profile industrialists, noting that Crowther “was a Big Business true believer.” David Farber, Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189. On Crowther and Ford in particular, see, among others, Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (New York: Vintage, 2006), 274. On Crowther’s early nationalist, isolationist economics, which mirrored in part Garrett’s early views, see Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 110-119 & 163. Crowther never entirely abandoned his scepticism of free trade, or his belief that America should seek in part to make its economy “self-contained.” Crowther, Time, 250. 71 Samuel Crowther, “Planned Economy,” SEP, July 7, 1934, 74. Crowther boasted that he had received a “very great mass of letters” in response, of which “ninety per cent” were favorable. Samuel Crowther to Dr. E. E. Lincoln, July 18, 1934 in PPIC, box 41, folder 2478, HP.

76 opposed by Bourbons, stuffed shirts, dead cats, or any other of the animals out of the menageries of the orators,” Crowther wrote, but because they ignored the “actual ills” of the country, in favor of “Socialistic” delusions.72 “In this country, following our own methods, we have erected the highest standard of living the world has ever known,” he wrote. But the administration, blinded by the slogans of the central planners, had sought instead a “revolutionary” reordering of American life.73

Crowther’s work for the Post under Lorimer mirrored another luminary of that magazine: Garet Garrett. Both men, shaped by the rapturous business credo of the New Era, assailed the New Deal as antithetical to the American ethos.74 Yet

Garrett’s deep fatalism, his belief that the New Deal represented a permanent, inviolable break with the past, was not shared by Crowther. In a 1936 article for the

Post, “The American System,” Crowther denounced the New Deal but offered in its place a positive vision of national renewal premised on a return to the high individualism of the Founders. “The drift from the American system started a long time ago,” he wrote.75 “For some years and through several administrations, both

Republican and Democratic, the country has been veering away from the American system.”76 In early 1934, Crowther was convinced that November’s congressional elections presented Republicans with a uniquely ripe opportunity to affirm the principles of American individualism. As he wrote to Herbert Hoover: “I am firmly of the opinion that, if the Republicans will ride one good horse, kick out these worthless progressives and stand straight and firmly for America and liberty, they will carry the

House and get most of the contested seats in the Senate.”77

72 Ibid., 74. 73 Ibid., 74. 74 Crowther’s unstintingly positive view of the boom 1920s is made clear in Samuel Crowther, Prohibition and Prosperity (New York: John Day, 1930), 3. 75 Samuel Crowther, “The American System,” SEP, February 15, 1936, 33. 76 Ibid., 33. 77 Samuel Crowther to Herbert Hoover, May 16, 1934, in PPIC, box 41, folder 2478, HP.

77 By 1936, though, Crowther had given up hope of achieving positive change through the GOP. Only a new opposition movement, he argued, one prepared to break with both major parties and zealously advance the Republic’s ancestral principles, could hope to avert the nation’s descent into totalitarianism. “If, therefore, the American system is not to be scrapped without ever being clearly put before the nation for a vote,” Crowther wrote, “it is up to the opposition to force the issue before the great forces of administration publicity wipe out the issue… [T]he opposition must have a set of clear-cut policies, become a fighting organization and purge itself of all those who do not believe in the American system.”78 The program of this opposition, Crowther argued, should focus on the extraordinary productive power of the American economy over the past century and a half. This epochal expansion was the pure product of “free and unrestricted competition… whose rewards,” Crowther cautioned, would “not and should not be equal.”79 Roosevelt’s

“un-American” collectivism, by contrast, had failed to fulfil even the basic promises of its creator. In place of the President’s schemes, Crowther proposed a simple tripartite plan to revitalize the economy, one that would become familiar in the following decades. The Federal government’s mission, he argued, should be

“lowering taxes as fast as possible, scrapping the useless bureaucracy, and freeing the way for private initiative to act.”80

In an address to the New Jersey Taxpayer’s Association in 1939, Crowther foreshadowed a critique that would come to dominate libertarian populist thought after the war. “One by one, we see those liberties which we have taken for granted as a part of our very being slowly abridged,” Crowther argued, “until today, if you call

78 Crowther, “American System,” 33. 79 Ibid., 35. 80 Ibid., 94.

78 things by their right names, it is pretty hard to say what form of government we are living under.” Chief among the tools of state power abused by Roosevelt’s government was the expansive authority of the Sixteenth Amendment. “The power to tax is of course the power to destroy, but also it is the power, stopping short of destruction, to enslave,” he declared. This “vast machinery for redistributing wealth and income” had sapped the nation’s productive powers, Crowther argued, while quietly eroding the very foundation of American prosperity: property rights.

“[W]ithout private ownership we can have neither self-government nor liberty,” he wrote. Crowther, by now a zealous anti-taxer, began his remarks by referencing an event that would later galvanize anti-statist activists. “The tax that might have been paid upon the tea that was dumped in Boston Harbor was of no great concern to anyone, but the principle behind that tax was of great concern to everyone,” he declared. “You are fighting for exactly the same principles. You are fighting to be something more than tax fodder.”81

Crowther’s 1942 libertarian populist tract Time to Inquire, further developed these themes, offering a sprawling assault on the New Deal ideology of state power and a populist plan to reclaim the liberty of the people. The reforms of the preceding decade had constituted nothing less than a “social revolution,” Crowther declared, one that had “traded liberty for the promise of security” by instituting “government controls... in almost every sphere of life.”82 The result was a veritable state

“dictatorship,” in which the liberties of the individual had withered and a once proudly free enterprise was hobbled by government diktat. “[W]e are in the grip of a welfare workerism,” Crowther wrote, “conceived on noble principles and

81 Samuel Crowther, “Fighting For a Great Tradition: The Right To Live, To Work, and To Die As Free Men and Women,” speech before New Jersey Taxpayers Association, Newark, N. J., December 9, 1939. 82 Crowther, Time, 303.

79 implemented by vast delusions of grandeur.”83 The bureaucrats and their allies had attacked business under the “pretense that politically appointed controllers will be better and wiser than the men chosen by business.”84 But such a pretense was risible.

Their plans had led instead to economic stagnation and the creeping totalitarianism of the communist state. Only new leadership, one bent on a massive reduction in the power and scope of the federal government, could hope to arrest America’s decline.

The “true liberalism” of the Founders, Crowther wrote, had envisioned a “structure of government which would assure against political or economic despotism.”85 In abandoning this structure, America had relinquished the wellspring of its economic and spiritual power. “The dignity of man,” he wrote, “has been cast away as though it were nothing.”86 Only by rejecting the “crude egalitarianism” of the New Dealers, and guaranteeing the “elementary right to work and to keep the product of one’s work,” could the nation safeguard the welfare of the common man.87 “Our job, if we want freedom,” Crowther wrote, “is to hew our way out of the jungle of laws and bureaus” and to “go forward into the realization of our full manhood by giving every man the opportunity to exert whatever may be in him—be it little or be it much.”88

Thus, although the libertarian populists welcomed the flowering of European free- market thought in the years after World War II, their vision hewed in its essentials, as Paterson noted, to an uncompromising “classical Americanism.”89 This vision, as chapter one emphasized, conceived of the American political tradition as uniquely fertile, and exalted the Revolution of 1775 as a world-historical event of singular

83 Ibid., 23. 84 Ibid., 98. 85 Ibid., 29. 86 Ibid., 19. 87 Ibid., 311 & 176. 88 Ibid., 322 & 321. 89 Isabel Paterson, “Turns With a Bookworm,” New York Herald Tribune Books, May 28, 1933, 35.

80 importance. The “American implementation of individualism, in the political mechanism of these States,” Lane later told the conservative theorist Frank Meyer, is

“world-revolutionary… There is no phenomenon resembling [it] in all known history.” By contrast, the work of other pro-capitalist thinkers during and after the war tended to make peace with the demands of the social planners. Friedrich Hayek’s

The Road to Serfdom—the most prominent work of free-market thought published in the 1940s—accepted, for the most part, the premises and conceptual framework of the nascent post-war welfare state. Lane, who derided Hayek as “semi-socialist,” offered instead an unstinting defense of American capitalism, and an unyielding philosophical individualism. It is to Lane’s career, which embodies the libertarian populist’s attempts to revive and radicalize the doctrines of the old individualists, that the final chapters of this thesis turn.90

90 RWL to Frank Meyer, September 18, 1956, in NSF, box 9, folder 5, LP. On Hayek’s accommodationist tendencies, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), esp. chp. 3.

81 Chapter 3

American Fundamentalist: Rose Wilder Lane and the Rise of Libertarian

Populism

“I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most

important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and

collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”

– William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale

On February 2, 1928, in the fading light of the Gulf of Patras, Rose Wilder Lane boarded the ocean liner Saturnia to begin the long winter’s voyage from Greece back to the United States.1 The circumstances of her return were something of a mystery, even to Lane herself. “There seem to be numbers of quite inconsequential reasons,” she wrote to the newspaperman Fremont Older, “but now that I think of them, even the sum total doesn’t seem to explain.”2 But Lane’s return, regardless of its impetus, would prove a decisive moment in her life. Whatever longings she still held for a life of foreign adventure swiftly faded. By May, she increasingly found “a sort of quivering in the foundations of my former opinions.”3 And over the next four years, her old self—inveterate traveller, Europhile, political progressive—would vanish. In its place, a new identity, shaped by historical circumstance and voracious reading,

1 RWL, diary, January 30-February 3, 1928 in DN, box 20, item 25, LP. 2 RWL to Fremont Older, April 26, 1928, in NSF, box 10, folder 137, LP. 3 RWL to Fremont Older, May 19, 1928, in ibid.

82 took form. Fiercely individualistic, contemptuous of the Old World, and consumed by the promise of America, Lane’s burgeoning political and personal faith would propel her to a decades-long career as a partisan operative and polemicist.

This chapter examines Lane’s life and career, focusing on her conversion to libertarian populism in the early 1930s, and analyzing her most important essays, her magnum opus The Discovery of Freedom (1943), and her post-war political commentary.4 For Lane, individualism was a fighting faith, a philosophy of freedom forged in combat with reactionary collectivism. In her vision, the individual was not the brute plaything of desire but an autonomous embodiment of pure potential, a transcendent subject existing outside of and freely constituting the social order.

“Individual energy, constantly generated and constantly acting, creates the physical necessities of human existence, and creates societies, civilizations, nations, kingdoms, principalities and powers, all human relationships, all forms of human association,” she wrote. “Each living person is a source of this energy. There is no other source.”5 Lane’s folk metaphysics valorized the absolute “creative” power of the individual, and individual liberty, the freedom to act as one chooses, as the sole good of politics. The shift, as Lane conceived of it, was not simply one of politics but of the very ontological basis of the social order itself. “The United States are the first crude attempt to make a State according to the real nature of man—the human nature with which the Creator endows every person,” she wrote.6 If social theory since the nineteenth century had been characterized by the successive triumph of “structure” over “agency,” the work of Lane and her allies offered a potent populist inversion, stressing individual liberty and the capacity for self-actualization, within a market

4 Unless otherwise indicated, the details of Lane’s life in this chapter are taken from Holtz, Ghost. On Holtz, see chp. 2, n1. 5 RWL, Discovery, x. 6 RWL, NECRB 5, no. 1 (January, 1948): 1.

83 order governed by conservative biblical morality, as the highest organizing principles of social and economic life.7

Two influences dominated Lane’s political work. Thomas Paine, Founding

Father and philosopher of revolution, provided the fundamentals of her new worldview and the language with which to express it.8 Lane’s political work is so saturated with the ideas and imagery of Paine that it sometimes assumes the form of a contemporary gloss. In a certain sense, this seems to have been precisely her intention: to reconstitute and refashion the revolutionary-era thought of Paine, as well as Jefferson and Madison, in a demotic form responsive to the challenges of the present. Lane’s essay “The American Revolution, 1939,” written in the shadow of

Paine’s Common Sense (1776), was her most sophisticated effort, although elements of it are present in two earlier essays. The Discovery of Freedom, her magnum opus of ‘43, would offer a fuller, but flawed, attempt.

The work of the French classical liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat, distinguished by its cutting wit and militant defense of the laissez-faire order, rounded out Lane’s political education, offering her contact with an earlier and authentically radical individualist tradition. In his most famous essay, The Law

(1850), Bastiat attacked the “legal plunder” of protectionism and socialism, and spun from the axiom that God provides man with life, liberty and property, and a right to defend them, the structure of a perfect classical liberal society. Along with his mordant attacks on competing economic doctrines, the Economic Sophisms (1845),

7 Cf. Burns, “Three ‘Furies,’” 760. 8 On Bastiat and Paine as the most important influences on Lane, see RWL, NECRB 3, no. 11 (November, 1950), 1; RWL, Discovery, 173-76; RWL to George Bye, September 30, 1940, in Author File, box 223, “Lane, Rose Wilder,” Brown Records. Lane’s embrace of Paine was somewhat limited; she never engaged fully, for instance, with Paine’s major late work Agrarian Justice, which advocated an estate tax to fund a universal old-age social security system, as well as an early form of a universal basic income.

84 Bastiat provided for Lane a model of the engaged, uncompromising intellectual.9 It was probably during research for her Saturday Evening Post essay “The American

Revolution, 1939,” which shows a new appreciation for America’s classical liberal heritage, that Lane stumbled across Bastiat’s writings.10 The encounter infused her philosophy with a new confidence and a new radicalism.

Preoccupied, by the end of World War II, with the ideological and practical power of communism, Lane came to conceive of her political project as a kind of counter-Marxism, a revived revolutionary ideology that could mobilize individuals in the world-historical struggle between collectivism and individualism. Abandoning her earlier isolationism and embracing the early work of the Christian libertarians, by the end of the 1940s Lane’s libertarian populism fused militant pro-capitalist individualism, muscular anti-communism and conservative moral traditionalism, in a new and politically potent blend. Although she would have rejected the label, this chapter argues that by this time Lane had alighted on a distinctive fusion of ideas, one that would come to powerfully reshape post-war American politics: modern conservatism.

Born in 1886, on a farm in De Smet, Dakota Territory, Lane’s early life was characterized by restless movement, driven first by the struggles of her pioneer parents, and later by her desire to carve out a new life, free from the cloistered confines of the rural Midwest. By the time Lane was eight, in the face of widespread crop failure and financial panic, her parents abandoned their life as pioneer farmers, settling 650 miles away in Mansfield, Missouri. In Mansfield, Lane received her first

9 On Bastiat and Paine as models, see RWL to Leonard Read, October 19, 1944, in NSF, box 10, folder 12, LP. 10 Lane was fluent in French and appears to have encountered Bastiat’s work as early as the late 1930s. For the review, see RWL, NECRB 2, no. 9 (October, 1945), 1.

85 schooling, at which she excelled, and developed an early and insatiable appetite for books. These years were not, however, happy ones. Isolated at school, Lane struggled under the presence of her domineering mother in a household that often lived from hand to mouth. She would later describe it as a “hard, narrow, relentless life,” recalling: “I hated everything and everybody in my childhood with such bitterness and resentment that I didn’t want to remember anything about it.”11

In 1904, Lane escaped Mansfield, taking the train West to Kansas City, where she began work as a telegraph operator. Over the next decade, she would move from job to job, first east and then west, before settling in San Francisco, where in 1915, aided by a friend, she accepted a position as an editorial assistant for the San

Francisco Bulletin. Lane thrived at the paper. Its crusading editor Fremont Older became a mentor and close friend, and Lane’s politics in those years seems to have hewed to Older’s liberalism, touched with the idealism of youth. For the Bulletin and a handful of periodicals she wrote reams of fiction and short biographies of famous lives, or sometimes—in the case of a biography of Jack London, for instance—a kind of mixture of the two (London’s estate was not pleased).12

Marked by the pressure of deadlines and a curiously unromantic conception of her craft, Lane’s work from those years is largely unremarkable.13 Biographies of

Henry Ford and Herbert Hoover are glib and adulatory, stuffed with anecdotes illustrating their hero’s distinctive genius and manifold virtues. But although Lane’s political conversion would not occur for over a decade, they illustrate her instinctive grasp of the romance of American capitalism. “‘Any young man who has a good idea

11 RWL, Old Home Town (New York: Longmans, Green, 1935), 23; RWL to Fremont Older, August 7, 1931, cited in Holtz, Ghost, 17. 12 On the London “biography,” see esp. Holtz, Ghost, 68-71. 13 RWL, to Dorothy Thompson, August 3, 1932, in Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane, Forty Years of Friendship: Letters 1921-1960, ed. William Holtz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 136.

86 and works hard enough will succeed; money will come to him,’” Lane wrote, quoting

Ford. But, as she continued, “[t]his country has produced hundreds of men whose lives prove this statement, men who have built railroads, telephones, telegraph systems, great merchandising organizations. These men have subordinated every personal pleasure to their work. They have exhausted their minds and bodies, driven themselves mercilessly, used every ounce of energy and ability, and won.”14 Hoover, too, emerges from Lane’s account an almost mythological figure. “In Herbert

Hoover’s own experience,” Lane wrote in The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920), “he has lived through all the phases of development that have created America itself. The forces that made the country made the man and behind the growth of his soul there is shown the growth of the nation… this story proves that, in the most subtle sense,

Herbert Hoover represents America.”15

Lane spent the bulk of the following decade abroad, travelling as far east as

Baghdad and settling for a time in Paris and her adoptive home, Albania. There, in a tiny inland kingdom battered by war, she bought a house, was feted by the aristocracy, and in time took on a protégé, a young Muslim boy whom she would support through university. Absent from America, immersed in a rich and alien culture, Lane seems at that time to have regarded the country of her birth with thinly disguised contempt. “I don’t like the American spirit,” she wrote to her lover, Guy

Moyston, from Albania in 1927. “I don’t like its energy, its deification of work, its insularity, its standardization, its terrific stress on possessions and comfort, its complacency, its ignorance, its idealism, and (mental sum-total of these) its unconscious hypocrisy.”16 The story of the next ten years, sparked by her return to

14 RWL, Henry Ford’s Own Story: How a Farmer Boy Rose to the Power that Goes with Many Millions, Yet Never Lost Touch with Humanity (E.O. Jones: New York, 1917), 142. 15 RWL, The Making of Herbert Hoover (New York: The Century Co., 1920), v. 16 RWL to Guy Moyston, February 16, 1927, in NSF, box 9, folder 9, LP.

87 the States in 1928, would be Lane’s repudiation of those views, first gradually and then with intensifying fervor.

For the bulk of her career, Lane’s national reputation rested on her short fiction and a succession of well-received novels. The most celebrated of these, Let the

Hurricane Roar (1932) and Free Land (1938), are pioneer tales, deftly capturing the extremes of frontier life and the quiet courage of the homesteaders. It is not difficult to see in the novels many of the themes that would come to dominate Lane’s political work: the triumph of free individuals in the face of unremitting nature, and the vital place of the old Protestant virtues in the story of American success. Free Land, especially, written after Lane’s political conversion early in the decade, is powerfully stamped by her individualist philosophy. The hero David Beaton, a plucky young homesteader, is the model of a pioneering individualist, battling extraordinary challenges—blizzards, drought, the local Indians—to preserve and make prosperous the land. But it is Beaton’s father who early in the novel imparts the wisdom that, for

Lane, sustained pioneer life: “He did not believe in giving, or getting, something for nothing. He believed in every man’s paying his own way. The Beatons had always done it.”17 As David later remarks, in one of the novel’s few lapses into agitprop, “[a] man knew instinctively that Government was his natural enemy.” 18

Free Land was widely praised, and correspondence between Lane and her agents throughout most of this period show a writer in demand.19 By 1930, Lane had also begun to edit for publication her mother’s juveniles, short books for young adults chronicling the travails of pioneer life, drawn from the Wilder family’s own

17 RWL, Free Land [1938] (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 7. 18 Ibid., 29. 19 Lane’s prominence can be partly judged by the amount she was paid. The serialization of Free Land in the Post fetched $25,000—about $430,000 in 2017—an enormous sum. Holtz, Ghost, 278. The Saturday Review noted the legendary volume of correspondence that Lane received from enthusiastic readers of Let the Hurricane Roar. “The Phoenix Nest,” The Saturday Review, February 18, 1933, 444.

88 experiences.20 The work tired her and strained an already fractious relationship with her mother, but the Little House series would prove a literary sensation, and Lane would subsist on royalties from the books in her later years. By the middle of the

1930s, though, plagued by bouts of depression, and increasingly preoccupied with politics, Lane’s interest in fiction began to wane. Free Land, for all its success, would be her last novel. She would dedicate the remainder of her life to political struggle.21

It is difficult to date precisely when Lane’s political views shifted. A youthful flirtation with communism memorably repurposed for her essay “Credo,” discussed below, seems to have been exceedingly brief, but by all accounts Lane clung to the liberalism of her Bulletin years well into the 1920s. Returning to the States in 1928, though, personally and professionally adrift, Lane quickly began to question the instinctive anti-Americanism and soft liberal pieties of her friends in San Francisco.

Her long sojourn abroad for much of the ‘20s had left Lane convinced that European civilization, for all its splendor, was a spent force.22 It was America, vital, ascendant, an “inevitably conquering” power, that now possessed her imagination.23 “Listen to this country,” she wrote to the journalist Dorothy Thompson, in August, 1928. “There was never anything like it. It’s a complete break with everything that’s gone before.”24

In a letter to Fremont Older later that year, she adumbrated the outlines of a new vision of America, one that she would later preach with great zeal:

20 The character and extent of Lane’s collaboration with her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, has been the subject of wide scholarly debate. Pamela Smith Hill, Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life (Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2007), is a good recent overview of the issues. 21 RWL to Ruth Levine, September 15, 1939, box 133, folder 8, Isaac Don Levine papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia [hereafter: “Levine papers”]. 22 RWL to Dorothy Thompson, July 11, 1928, in Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane, 83. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid.

89 This is the largest, most powerful… most prosperous Empire in history. It also

happens to have an economic system that distributes its wealth more equally

than any other. It has no spiritual qualities (no country has ever had); but it

does have moral ones (which no other country has). For the first time in

history, we have a vast people which has somehow perceived the practical use

for moral qualities, and therefore has ‘em.25

Yet, it was impossible to convey the true essence of this America, Lane found, because it was the one nation without a fixed essence. “Is it possible for a civilization to be wholly dynamic?,” she wondered to Thompson. “A civilization always becoming, never being, never never having the stability, the form, which is the beginning of death?”26 Such a possibility thrilled and—in 1928—frightened Lane.

“That, it seems to me, is the first thing to try to understand about this country; that there aren’t any walls anymore.”27 And while Lane in 1928 could still write that she didn’t like America because of “its lack of form,” the seed had been planted.28 A new vision of America, as a place of pure dynamic energy, a vast country free from the old—from any—constraints, had begun to take shape in Lane’s mind. In time it would become, as the remainder of this chapter will show, the central motif of her political thought. But before that, a crisis beckoned.

The October crash and subsequent bank runs left Lane, who had used the healthy profits from her fiction to invest in the stock market—almost $30,000 by her reckoning, all gone—in a precarious position. Her financial independence shattered,

Lane returned to the family farm and entered a period of brooding self-reflection.

25 RWL to Fremont Older, November 16, 1928, in NSF, box 10, folder 137, LP. 26 RWL to Dorothy Thompson, August 14, 1928, in Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane, 94. 27 Ibid., 95. 28 Ibid., 94-95.

90 Her diaries and journals from the period are marked by frustrated desire, endless money worries and depressive episodes of grim intensity. “So horribly blue that dying seems a relief,” she wrote in March, 1930.29 “So far, I am almost superlatively a failure. There has been no success in personal relationships, in adjustment to the world, in work, or in money.”30

Politically, too, the early 1930s found Lane dejected and adrift. In the same letter to Older in November 1928, she had confessed to having eagerly voted for

Hoover in November’s election. “If Christ had run on the Democratic ticket, I should still have been for Mr. Hoover,” Lane wrote. “I prefer the idealism of the Ford factory to that of the revolutionary; it has more effect on the world.”31 But the crisis of 1929, and the President’s faltering response, seems to have turned Lane, like much of the country, against the Republican Party. Her early enthusiasm for Hoover gone, she wrote in her journal in early June, 1932:

Hoover’s appeal to the Senate is bad. It is alarming without being arousing…

This country desperately needs one of the good old slogan-makers—a [T.R.]

Roosevelt or a Bryan. Hoover’s intelligence is his weakness: it keeps him

seeing problems all around, instead of dramatically.32

Lane clearly felt the desire, shared by a great many of her contemporaries, for a strong leader, a “slogan-maker” who would combat the depression with vigorous purpose. In 1932, she seems to have viewed the younger Roosevelt as an antidote to

Hoover’s equivocation. Roosevelt’s victory that November did not surprise her;

29 RWL, diary, March 30, 1930, in DN, box 20, item 25, LP. 30 RWL, journal, n.d. (probably January 1933), 4, in DN, box 21, item 47, LP. 31 RWL to Fremont Older, November 16, 1928, in NSF, box 10, folder 137, LP. 32 RWL, journal, June 2, 1932, in DN, box 21, item 45, LP.

91 Hoover had long seemed to her a “wreck” of a man, doomed to a single term.33 But the hundred days, and the new President’s rapid and profound break with the old order, much of it at odds with his campaign promises, horrified Lane. By the end of

March, 1933, Lane burned with hatred for, and feared as an aspiring dictator, a man she had eyed with cautious optimism barely four months earlier. In late May, 1932,

Lane had confided in her journal: “I am not leading my own life, because any life must coalesce around a central purpose, and I have none.”34 At last though, in the teeth of crisis, she had found one.

Ensconced at the family farm, the years from 1933 to 1935 were dreary and frantic ones for Lane, as she feverishly wrote day and night to keep bread on the table.35

Beneath this bustle of activity, though, a sea change was occurring in her political thought. In a remarkable series of letters to the journalist Virginia Brastow, strikingly candid and combative, Lane unspooled the evolving elements of her political ideology. In late 1933, she contemplated, almost breezily, the prospect of fascism in

America: “I’d never say that Germany hasn’t hit on something; whatever else it is, certainly it’s a resurrection of the German people… Probably it’ll have to come to an equivalent, here. So far I don’t see it, though.”36 But by 1934, Lane was decrying the

“fetish” of “Society” and the frenzied efforts to “control” and “regulate” human affairs.37 America, she now declared, was “rushing straight, like the Gadarene swine… into regimentation. Communist or Fascist, it comes to the same thing.” By 1935, the blueprint of her subsequent political thought had fully emerged:

33 RWL to Laura Ingalls Wilder, November 12, 1930, in Laura Ingalls Wilder Files, box 13, folder 188, LP. 34 RWL, journal, May 29, 1932, in DN, box 21, item 45, LP. 35 RWL to VB, July 5, 1933, in SF, box 1, folder 16, Holtz papers. 36 RWL to VB, December 16, 1933, in ibid. 37 RWL to VB, July 19, 1934, in ibid.

92

It followed that American society was based on the Industrial revolution

totally unimpeded by any remnants of medievalism. There was a terrific

release of energy; human energy in terms of individuals, material energy of

raw materials, social energy coalescing from both these sources. America, in

contrast to Europe, has from the first been intensely alive… I think it is a

crime, a sin against the vital energy of this people, to attempt to stratify,

codify, restrict and restrain and order and control the anarchy of our growth…

We have not begun to exhaust the possibilities of capitalism, of individualism,

laissez-faire, in this country.38

In the same letter, Lane offered a searing, point-by-point critique of

Roosevelt’s record. The President’s “revolutionary” decision to abandon the gold standard, she argued, had destroyed the age-old, “almost-instinctive confidence of

Americans in their government.” The National Recovery Administration was an

“unconstitutional” abomination; its main effect was to strangle industry and delay recovery. And the agriculture efforts, the grim augury of a Soviet-America, perfectly encapsulated the authoritarian, morally repellent character of the New Deal. “What is happening, Virginia,” she wrote, “is a death-struggle between the Industrial

Revolution and Medievalism. Roosevelt is for Medievalism. He has to smash America to get it. I am against his purpose.” Lane viewed with utter contempt the mainstream political debate, which turned on whether Roosevelt was “sincere” in his actions.

“[I]t’s babbling nonsense (moronic bosh, absolutely astounding when it comes from you of all persons) to say that he’s sincere and doing the best he can,” Lane wrote to

38 RWL to VB, June 16, 1935, in ibid.

93 Brastow.39 “Hells bells, Mussolini is sincere. Lenin was sincere. Cromwell was sincere.” Roosevelt, she added, with a touch of acid, was “quite sincere” in his attempt to convert America to communism. “I’m sincere, too; and sincerely with all my being I would like to kill him.”40

In the summer of 1935, Lane embarked on a trip through the Midwest with Garet

Garrett, who was doing research for a series of articles on Roosevelt’s agricultural policies. For Lane, who had had little direct exposure to the New Deal, the excursion was revelatory. The political instincts that she had nurtured since her return to the

States were further sharpened on contact with the farmers, who bitterly requested that Lane and Garrett prove that they were not from the government before talking to them.41 Roosevelt’s goal, Garrett argued, was to “implant in the mind of the farmer the idea that he is exploited and oppressed,” to cultivate, “with acid,” their political loyalties.42 Lane was struck that the farmers, lured with the prospect of federal largesse, instead rebelled against direct control over their affairs. “The people were frantic and furious,” she later recalled. “None of them wanted to be rehabilitated.” 43

The reforms seemed to Lane a kind of microcosm of the New Deal, farcical and not a little cruel, barely removed from Stalin’s program of forced collectivization—

“Communist Terror in Illinois,” as she would later call it.44 The trip opened her eyes and stiffened her resolve. There would be no more “‘[a]ll is lost’” pessimism,” of the kind her travelling companion trafficked in.45 Instead, then and there, “in Garet

39 RWL to VB, July 5, 1935, in ibid. 40 RWL to VB, June 16, 1935, in ibid. 41 RWL to JC, January 30, 1957, in NSF, box 3, folder 40, LP. 42 GG, “Saving Agriculture,” SEP, July 6, 1935, 5. 43 RWL to JC, January 30, 1957, in NSF, box 3, folder 40, LP. 44 Ibid.; RWL to VB, March 8, 1936, in SF, box 1, folder 16, Holtz papers. 45 RWL to JC, September 1, in NSF, box 3, folder 44, LP. As she wrote to Frank Meyer, in 1955: “That was the flaw in Garet Garrett’s thought— or mood—and work; his ‘all is lost, all is hopeless, we are doomed’ pessimism.” RWL to Frank Meyer, July 6, 1955 in NSF, box 9, folder 4, LP.

94 Garrett’s car in Kansas,” Lane vowed that she would do whatever she could to

“resist.”46

Later that summer, the Post asked Lane for an article on a personal topic, probably as a result of her striking pronouncement—“I am now a fundamentalist American”— in a July profile.47 Egged on by Garrett, who would have read and undoubtedly influenced the final draft, Lane set to work on a piece that would synthesize the various elements of her new political identity.48 But the essay she produced was returned by the magazine, with a note, Lane later recalled, “saying I could do much better if I tried.”49 Six months later she sent the work, unchanged, to her agent

George T. Bye, as part of a friendly political disagreement they were having (Bye was a liberal, and agent to Eleanor Roosevelt). Bye obviously grasped the force of the essay, as he promptly sent it back to the Post, with a suggested title, “Credo.”50 It was published immediately, and would go on to become Lane’s most famous piece of political writing. Read now, it is not hard to see why. Part memoir, part history and part philosophy, written with an ease and grace that often eluded her, “Credo” deftly fuses the story of Lane’s own political evolution with her theoretical musings on the nature of the state and the individual. Taken as a whole, it is the quintessential statement of libertarian populism, a luminous portrait of America and American capitalism as the product of individual liberty and the vast and vital energies of the common man.

46 RWL to JC, September 1, 1961, in NSF, box 3, folder 44, LP. As she told a journalist in 1944: “The thing to do, if you really believe the New Deal practices are wrong, is to resist them. The American people did it with prohibition. The colonists did it when King George III tried to overtax them.” “Author Tires of New Deal; Stops Writing,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 4, 1944, 1. 47 RWL, “Who’s Who—and Why,” 30. 48 RWL to Elsie Meyer, May 16, 1954, in NSF, box 9, folder 4, LP. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid.

95 “Credo” begins with a confession: “Sixteen years ago I was a communist. My

Bolshevik friends of those days are scattered; some are bourgeois, some are dead… I was never a member of the party. But it was an accident that I was not.” For a younger Lane, communism offered a seductive vision of a world of true liberty, free from injustice. Amongst “the hungry, lighted faces” of her comrades that vision struck her as the true embodiment of the “American dream.”51 Travelling through

Russia in the early 1920s, Lane came upon a village that seemed a glowing example of communism in practice. The harvest that year had been good, the people were well fed and happy, and “[o]f course, there was not a poor man in the town.” But Lane’s peasant host expressed only contempt for the new leaders in Moscow and their bloated bureaucracies and ceaseless edicts. “‘It is too big,’ he said. ‘Too big. And at the top, too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not

God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great head. Only God can know Russia.’”52 The conversation was transformative.

“What, then, I asked myself dizzily, is the State? The Communist State—does it exist?

Can it exist?” The answer, Lane believed, was simple: “[I]n practical fact, the State, the Government, cannot exist. They are abstract concepts, useful, perhaps, in their place… What does, in fact, exist is a man, or a few men, in power over many men.”53

The genius of the Founding Fathers, she argued, lay in their recognition of this fact. They understood that the state must be strictly confined to the political, to those broad principles that “may stand unchanged indefinitely”—no taxation without representation, say, or the strict division of powers—that America might remain, in

John Adams’ phrase, “a government of laws and not of men.”54 Such a system was

51 RWL, “Credo,” 5. 52 Ibid., 6. 53 Ibid., 6. 54 Ibid., 7.

96 not possible in Russia, Lane argued, because the goals of its rulers were not political, but economic. And in seeking to control the economic fortunes of its citizens, the

Soviets had created, by necessity, a vast and ever-growing state apparatus.

“Centralized economic control over multitudes of human beings must, therefore, be continuous and, perhaps, superhumanly flexible, and it must be autocratic,” Lane argued. To succeed, it must dispense such “minute and rigorous supervision of details of individual life as no people will accept without compulsion.”55 Such powers, by dint of their scope, would be naturally resistant to democratic whim. And they would crush, in time, the natural vitality and variety of individual life. “It is the nature of men to do the same thing in different ways, to waste time and energy in altering the shapes of things, to experiment, invent, improvise.” But this human wilfulness, these impulses of self-interest and independence, precisely threatened a bureaucracy designed to administer the totality of economic life. “Centralized economic power,” Lane wrote, “is under a necessity, either to fail or to tend to become absolute power in every province of human life.”56

The second half of “Credo” pivoted from Russia to America, from human bondage to that “sweet land of liberty.” Americans, Lane argued, had a greater— indeed, far greater—measure of personal freedom than any people in history. But this freedom came at a price. “[A]nyone whose freedom has been, as mine has always been and today most urgently is, freedom to earn a living,” Lane wrote, “knows that independence is another name for slavery without security. This is a slavery in which one is one’s own master, bearing a double burden of toil and of responsibility.”57 This motif of responsibility, of the real price of individual liberty, would recur insistently

55 Ibid., 7. 56 Ibid., 7 & 30. 57 Ibid., 30.

97 throughout Lane’s later writing. In “Credo” it is given its most ominous cast— freedom as slavery, as the perils of individual responsibility in a fundamentally hostile world. “The American pioneers phrased this clearly and bluntly. They said,

‘Root, hog, or die.’” The question, of course, was whether this was a price worth paying. Was freedom worth the “terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and the risks of individual self-reliance”? To answer that, Lane argued, one had to look at freedom’s results. “The test of the worth of personal freedom,” she argued, “can only be in a country whose institutions and ways of life and of thought have grown from individualism. The only such country is the United States of America.”58

For Lane, the history of America was a history of the chance occurrence, of a multitude of small, unplanned actions of ordinary citizens that operated, by a kind of osmosis, upon the whole. “Other nations adopt policies and pursue them; their history is formed by the clash of these policies with other planned policies elsewhere,” Lane wrote. “But America moves by a kind of indirection.”59 The early

Republic, Lane argued, was chiefly an experiment in the limitation and fragmentation of government power. Near anarchy, a resistance to authority in all its forms, characterized the new social world, and this singular climate permitted an explosion of creative and commercial energies. For Lane, the anarchic spirit of the new nation found its most pure expression in the ethos of the pioneers, the same ethos that had guided her parents on the Dakota prairie. The settlement of the West,

Lane argued, was the product of the headstrong freedom of the most “reckless and lawless of peoples,” animated by the relentless pressures of frontier life. “There was no plan that America should cover half this continent,” she wrote, yet “the released

58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 31.

98 energies of individuals… poured westward at a speed never imagined.”60 Lane, bred from this stock, had few illusions about its character. The pioneers were “by no means the best of Europe,” she wrote. They brought “no great amount of intelligence or culture.” Yet their tenacious, vital independence was the key to the triumph of the

American experiment. There was no “plan, no intention, no fixed policy anywhere,” only the “anarchy” of individualism, Lane wrote, echoing Garrett. But in less than a century this “American chaos of released human energies” had created nothing less than the modern world.61

Freedom’s price, then, for Lane—as if there could ever have been any doubt— was one worth paying. And in its final passage, “Credo” offered a paean to those forgotten “millions,” who continued to bear the burden of individual responsibility through the darkness of the Depression. “Not half the reported unemployed have ever appeared on the reported relief rolls,” Lane wrote. “[S]omewhere those millions who have not been helped are still fighting through this depression on their own.” It was precisely these men and women who were keeping the “spirit of individualism” alive. “By such personal courage and endurance, the American principle has been successfully defended for more than a century.”62 That century had seen the West embrace liberal democracy. In 1936, though, democracy in Europe had crumbled or stood encircled. The true test of American political principles came now, Lane argued, “when half of Europe has turned back from democracy to the old stability in which the multitudes, having no authority, have no responsibility, but leave both the power and the burden to a few men in control.”63

60 Ibid., 30. 61 Ibid., 31. 62 Ibid., 35. 63 Ibid.

99 The essay marked a watershed for Lane personally, professionally and philosophically. The deeply romantic vision of the raw vitality and infinite variability of free individual action that animates “Credo” would become the distinguishing feature of Lane’s individualism. The essay’s central motif, order through chaos—or, the triumph of American capitalism through the anarchy of free individual action— strongly presaged the post-war right’s emphasis on the dynamic, spontaneous order of the market.64 It was in “Credo,” as well, that Lane first sketched the outlines of her folk individualist ontology: “In America a man works, but he is not Labor. A hundred million men, working, are not Labor. They are a hundred million individuals…” As for labor, so too for capital:

The Capitalist cannot be found; he does not exist. Men of many different

minds and for many purposes, or by accident and luck, create huge business

and financial organizations, and fight to draw profits from them. But here

everything is fluid, changing and uncertain; nothing is static and secure. Here

is no solidly established class, holding lower classes steady like cows to be

milked.65

In her later writing Lane would deepen and sharpen these intuitions. But in “Credo,” absent the dogmatic insistence of that later work, they offered a novel, rhetorically potent rejoinder to the New Deal.

64 The emphasis in “Credo” on the dynamic self-ordering of the market also obviously anticipates in part Hayek’s concept of the “spontaneous order,” although Lane here was probably influenced by Garrett. These ideas did, however, have fairly wide circulation at the time. See, for example, C. Reinold Noyes, America’s Destiny (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935), esp. 90-92. On Hayek and Garrett’s conception of order through market chaos, see chp. 1, esp. n161. 65 RWL, “Credo,” 31.

100 The reaction to “Credo” was ecstatic. Both Lane and the Post were inundated with letters, and George Horace Lorimer, doyen of American magazine editors, told

Lane, as she later recalled, “that in his whole editorial experience, no other article had ever aroused anything approaching such a response.”66 Within a week of its appearance in the Post, Lane signed a contract with Longmans, Green to have the essay reprinted as a pamphlet, with a new title: Give Me Liberty.67 Herbert Hoover, in a letter to Lane in April, lauded the essay: “As a certificate of character and my undiluted admiration for you, may I cite the fact that I have recently advised that an effort be made to circulate some millions of copies of your recent article in the

Saturday Evening Post.”68 And in 1945, the seminal libertarian organizer Leonard

Read established his publishing imprint Pamphleteers, Inc., in order to issue an expanded edition of the essay.69

Lane spent the months after the publication of “Credo” laboring on a follow up. In

“The Horse-and-Buggy Days,” published in the Post just after Roosevelt’s landslide reelection, she sketched the prehistory of the American experiment eulogised in

“Credo,” beginning with the Greeks, brilliant but “inward-turning… focused on abstractions,” and the Romans, who created a dynamic “material civilization” but soon submerged its energies under a “vast bureaucracy” fed on taxes and regulation.70 In Rome, Lane saw the twin drivers of human history, the dynamic and

66 As Lane noted in a letter to Elsie Meyer (wife of Frank) eighteen years later: “for ten days more than 3/5ths of SEP mail was about it [“Credo”]; 3,000-plus letters came to me personally.” RWL to Elsie Meyer, May 16, 1954, in NSF, box 9, folder 4, LP. 67 RWL, Give Me Liberty (Longmans, Green: New York, 1936). 68 Herbert Hoover to RWL, April 16, 1936, in NSF, box 119, folder 3, LP. 69 RWL to Ruth Levine, January 27, 1945 in box 133, folder 8, Levine papers; RWL to Leonard Read, January 18, 1945, in in Series I, Subseries C, box 10, folder 10, James C. Ingebretsen papers, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene, Oregon [hereafter: “Ingebretsen papers”]; RWL, Give Me Liberty (Los Angeles: Pamphleteers, Inc., 1945). 70 The title of the essay was a play on Roosevelt’s famous criticism of the Supreme Court as determined to interpret the interstate commerce clause as though America was still stuck in the “horse-and-buggy age.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Press Conference,” May 31, 1935,

101 individualistic and the orderly and collectivist, compete with familiar results: Rome

“devoured itself.”71 The ten centuries of Feudalism that followed were the fruit of this same longing for “social order and personal security,” she argued. “Greed, anxiety, envy, the burden of responsibility and the torments of ambition,” Lane wrote, were in feudalism “eliminated, so far as a social-economic system can possibly eliminate them.” But change, the ceaseless, violent change of a dynamic mercantile society, indeed the “very possibility of progress,” was “forgotten.” The discovery of the New

World—a “terrific mental shock”—first breached this epoch of stagnant calm. The looting of that continent “released almost uncontrollable economic forces,” Lane wrote, forces that, over the next three centuries, would greatly undermine the feudal system. By the late eighteenth century a new experiment, one that would definitively end the old systems of control, had begun. The Thirteen Colonies of that new continent, fired by the vista of true liberty, rebelled against royal “economic control,” and for the right to pursue their own livelihoods without interference. “No civilized government had ever dropped upon the individual the dangerous and doubtful task of pursuing his own happiness,” Lane argued. “This was a new principle. It was untried theory. No one knew what it might do in practical affairs, not even the few

Americans who were willing to die for it.”72

The revolution, Lane believed, was of singular world historical significance, far outweighing the upheavals that had gripped Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. This “new principle of individual economic freedom,” carved into history by a generation of revolutionary struggle, unleashed titanic productive forces, buried for millennia. “A horde of individuals released from economic control proved to be the

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15065; RWL, “The Horse-and-Buggy Days,” SEP, November 21, 1936, 27 & 101-102. 71 Ibid., 101-102. 72 Ibid., 102-104.

102 most terrific economic force in history,” Lane wrote. “Wherever this individualism broke down government’s ancient power, it destroyed and re-created the whole outer world. Modern progress occurred in ratio to individual economic liberty.” Of course, individualism’s triumph was far from total. In the decade to 1936, the Western world had moved decisively away from the principles of the Founding Fathers. “What destroyed feudalism?,” Lane asked. “It was not destroyed.” Instead, the other world powers—Japan, Russia, Italy, Germany—had stolen the “achievements of free individuals,” while renouncing the principles of revolutionary individualism.

“Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Nazi-ism, New Deal… are not revolutionary,”

Lane wrote. “They are modern forms of the ancient principle of unified social- economic-political power,”—feudalism, in other words. “They are the counter- revolution coming nearer in its attack on the American revolution.”73

Lane, fresh from the extraordinary success of “Credo,” had surprising difficulty placing “The Horse-and-Buggy Days.” Her editors at the Post complained that the original draft was “more of an essay than a human document… [it] deals too much with Europe and the past, and not enough with America and the present.”74

Lane seems to have revised the work, as it was eventually published by the Post in late November; but the finished product, an awkward melange of historical anecdote and political polemic, lacks the clarity or force of Lane’s best essays. It did, however, clarify something that “Credo” had not. For Lane, like the other libertarian populists, economic liberty was not simply one freedom among many—it was the sine qua non of a free society, the absolutely indispensable element in the story of America’s success. Beside this, the civil and political liberties guaranteed by the Constitution paled in importance. So paramount was the freedom of goods, labour and capital,

73 Ibid., 27 & 102. 74 Adelaide Neall to George Bye, April 3, 1936, in NSF, box 1, folder 16, LP, 1.

103 Lane could write, without irony, that before the revolution, “[n]o civilization had ever allowed freedom to any man, noble or serf.”75

The broader reaction to “The Horse-and-Buggy Days,” was muted. The individualist right, devastated by Roosevelt’s electoral triumph, had begun a period of chastened self-reflection, as the previous chapters have shown. Lane, unsurprisingly, was disgusted by the result, and by the sudden rush of politicians and businessmen eager to kiss the ring. “Oh, there is just nothing, nothing in the whole political scene,” she later wrote to Garrett. “Hearst, and Smith, and Rockefeller all for the New Deal, was there ever a more disgusting spectacle? more creative of complete cynicism?”76 For Lane, like Garrett, the New Deal had brought about a revolution in morals, one that was wholly pernicious. “All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction, and must increasingly be, until he is liquidated.”

The story of humanity’s emergence from feudalism sketched in “The Horse- and-Buggy Days,” would later form the backbone of Lane’s most extended discussion of her philosophy, The Discovery of Freedom. But before that, Lane would produce one last political essay for the Post. “The American Revolution, 1939,” written in a world on the brink of catastrophic war, is Lane’s single most sophisticated piece of political writing. Although less polemically potent than “Credo,” the essay, published by the Post in January, 1939, offered a dense, vigorous and newly-cogent account of

Lane’s evolving ideology. “The American Revolution” also showed, unmistakably, the

75 RWL, “Horse-and-Buggy Days,” 104. 76 RWL to GG, n.d., in NSF, box 5, folder 15, LP.

104 influence of a figure that would come to dominate Lane’s mature thought: Bastiat.77

A quote that Lane would later cite shows her debt to his thinking:

All government action beyond this limit [police and military power] is an

encroachment upon the individual’s conscience, intelligence, and industry—in

a word, upon human liberty. Accordingly, we must set ourselves unceasingly

and relentlessly to the task of freeing the whole domain of private activity

from the encroachments of government. Only on this condition shall we

succeed in winning our liberty or assuring the free play of the harmonious

laws that God has decreed for the development and progress of the human

race.78

Bastiat’s vision exerted a powerful influence on Lane, steadily sharpening the romantic individualism of “Credo” and “The Horse-and-Buggy Days.” This influence was sometimes felt, though, in unexpected ways. Central to “The American

Revolution” is Lane’s new emphasis on Judaeo-Christian theology as the fundamental bedrock of her philosophy. Where the earlier essays made no mention of religion, Lane would henceforth stress the indispensability of a conception of God to any systematic philosophical individualism. For Lane, as “The American

Revolution” makes clear, it was the emergence of the Christian idea of the self, the notion that individuals are, in the first instance, “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” that made political individualism and American capitalism possible. A devout Catholic, theology, and a conception of the market

77 On Bastiat, the only recent scholarly monograph is Robert Leroux, Political Economy and Liberalism in France: The Contributions of Frédéric Bastiat (New York: Routledge, 2011). 78 Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Harmonies, trans. W. Hayden Boyers, ed. George B. Huszar [1850] (Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996), xxxv. For Lane’s citation, RWL, NECRB 2, no. 9 (October, 1945), 2.

105 order as the earthly instantiation of God’s will, were likewise central to Bastiat’s work. As he wrote in The Law: “individuality, liberty, property—this is man… these three gifts from God precede all human legislation.”79 For Bastiat, the self-interest of the individual—“this primordial phenomenon that is at the bottom of all human actions”—was a gift from God. Capitalism, he argued, was the providential play of the individual’s self-interest, which “legitimately” governed—“with freedom,” that is, from the greedy arm of the state—invariably arrived at a perfect social “harmony.”80

Lane’s new appreciation for the place of religion in her philosophical schema is a clear, and crucial, sign of Bastiat’s influence. But the economist’s radical vision also lay behind Lane’s increasingly militant anti-statism. In “The American

Revolution,” Lane fused Bastiat’s conception of the state as wholly negative—simply an agglomeration of blunt “force”—with Garrett’s apocalyptic rhetoric, to potent effect. “Government,” she declared, “is the enemy of freedom and the devourer of a free society.”81

While “Credo” and the “The Horse-and-Buggy-Days” had provided the outlines of her worldview, “The American Revolution” was Lane’s first attempt to offer a programmatic statement of her philosophy. But the initial impetus for the essay was probably more prosaic. Like her compatriots on the right, Lane deeply resented Roosevelt’s co-option of the label “liberal,” which had come in a decade, in the words of Hoover, to connote a philosophy that was the “very negation of [true]

American Liberalism.”82 It was the perfect symbol of the President’s strikingly

79 Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, trans. Dean Russell [1850] (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006), 5-6. 80 Frédéric Bastiat, The Bastiat Collection (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 1000, 1005 & 447; Gilbert Faccarello and Philippe Steiner, “Religion and Political Economy in Early-Nineteenth- Century France,” History of Political Economy 40, no. 5 (December 2008): 57. 81 RWL, “The American Revolution, 1939,” SEP, January 7, 1939, 52 & 50. On Bastiat, see Bastiat, The Law, esp. 22-23; Leroux, Political Economy, chp. 7. On Garrett’s rhetoric, see GG, “Insatiable Government,” 3. 82 Hoover, Challenge, 8. Cf. Donald R. Rotunda, The Politics of Language: Liberalism as Word and Symbol (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986), chp. 4.

106 successful efforts to remake the American political order. “The American Revolution” was Lane’s late—and doomed—attempt to reclaim the label. “In this situation the counter-revolutionist proposes to destroy the creative energy of liberty,” she wrote.

“[A]nd this reactionary has the ignorance or the insolence to call himself a liberal.”83

The essay opened, in familiar style, with a historical preamble. Throughout human history, Lane argued, a succession of political orders had arisen in which one man or a few men—“priests,” “kings,” “oligarchies and aristocracies”—ruled with absolute power over the lives of the majority.84 Revolutions, such as they were, simply traded this power to a new group of men. “Always the governing power is whole power, an economic-social-political-religious-military power, unified, absolute,” Lane wrote. “A few govern, the masses of men are absolutely governed, and every upheaval changes only the names of the governors.”85 But with the birth of

Christ, a new principle, “that all men are equal in the sight of God and that a human being is a human soul, with not only certain duties but certain rights,” entered the world.86 This conception of the individual, Lane argued, profoundly threatened the ancient systems of control. And in time, it would find its political expression in a perhaps unlikely source—the rebellion of the thirteen colonies against the tyrant

King George:

The war that ensued was unlike all former revolutions… Mingled with the

demand for independence from England was the strange new cry of American

liberals for personal liberty and the rights of man. After six thousand years of

fighting for governing power, for the first time that power itself was attacked.

83 RWL, “American Revolution,” 50. 84 Ibid., 23. 85 Ibid., 23. 86 Ibid., 50.

107 Liberals saw that a man is free precisely to the extent in which he is not

governed—simply not governed.87

The American Revolution, in this vision, was the consummation of deep stirrings toward freedom that had haunted humanity for millennia. It was also, in a crucial sense, a Judeo-Christian revolution, one that sort to establish a new state on the basis of biblical principle. “These [revolutionary] ideas are inseparable from the long revolt against government that began when Abram left Ur, and that found its first effective method in our American revolution.”88 Unlike in “The Horse-and-Buggy

Days,” which conceived of the revolution in narrower, economic terms, Lane now stressed its moral and spiritually productive power. “This revolution was not expected to produce the world’s widest distribution of wealth and highest living standard. Such widespread well-being never existed before, and today exists nowhere else, but it is the unexpected by-product of a revolution expected to create moral, not material, values.”89 The leaders of the revolution believed above all that “free men would become better men,” that the liberation of the spirits and energies of the individual would lead to a great flowering of moral values. Such a society, free from the malign hand of government, Lane argued, was destined in time to constitute on earth nothing less than the biblical “brotherhood of man.”90

That moment, of course, had never arrived. For the “counter-revolution,” the drive to expand government, to crush liberty, never satiated, was in Lane’s view,

“active from the first.” Above all, it was the “politicians” lusting for power, and the

“intellectuals and educators” poisoning the land with a “counter-revolutionary

87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 52. 89 Ibid., 50. 90 Ibid., 50.

108 climate of thought,” who betrayed the revolution. But they were hardly alone. “Rich men immediately began to induce government to extend its powers, for their profit.”

Communists, “[m]isguided altruists,” a whole host of ideologists of different hues, sought to undermine the revolution’s strict limits on government power. And “[i]n the riotous abundance that came from freedom, busy men forgot that we inherit a revolutionary struggle to resist government and to create a better world for human beings.”91

For Lane, then, the revolution did not end with the establishment of the

American republic, any more than communism’s own revolutionary imperative had ceased with the creation of the soviets. The American Revolution persisted, and in

1939 faced its greatest test. “At this moment the counter-revolution is so strong that government hardly permits society to function.”92 To resist this tidal wave, the patriotic citizen’s only defense, Lane argued, was “[o]ur revolutionary method:” the division, and destruction of government power. “Rather than permit government to invade society, the free society must invade government,” Lane declared. “This invasion is a revolutionary necessity, which liberals will someday perceive and act upon.”93

“The American Revolution” built on “The Horse-and-Buggy Days,” offering

Lane’s fullest picture of politics as a global, trans-historical struggle between collectivism and individualism. In part, this was achieved through the language of the essay, which inverts the rhetoric of Communism and New Deal liberalism to disorienting effect. But “The American Revolution” also sought to address the contemporary collectivist critic in more specific matters. In a section reminiscent of

91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 52.

109 Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms, Lane set out to answer the demands of the contemporary “reactionary:”

The reactionary then says, “But society is no longer so simple. Everything is so

complex that government must take control.” The complexity of modern

society is the most obvious reason why government must not be permitted to

control it. This marvellous complexity gives us all the wealth of goods and

services which Americans alone enjoy. What created this complexity? Did

government? Certainly not. This complexity comes from free enterprise…

Where is the basis for this astonishing statement that, because these

mechanisms are complex, they must be seized by force and operated by

politicians?94

For Lane, the muddled logic of the reactionary ultimately flowed from their reliance on foreign ideas. “Many intellectuals and educators keep a European standard of values which does not apply to America’s purpose or America’s achievements.” Her solution was simple: “look at America,” comprehend the country in its unique vitality and variety. “America is producing an infinity of experiments. Everywhere, new social mechanisms created in this country meet the candid eye.” Look, but resist the temptation, essentially European, to tame this anarchic system. “The complexity of this society is the hope of the world, and the imperative reason why it must not be reduced by government to a disciplined and simple order.”95

94 Ibid., 50-52. 95 Ibid.

110 The reception of “The American Revolution” gave Lane a much-needed fillip. A week and a half after publication, letters praising the essay were still “pouring in” to her apartment in New York, and the Post received thousands of requests for reprints.

Herbert Hoover, then engaged in his own crusade against collectivism, wrote to

Lane, praising “the very wonderful and valuable article you have in the Saturday

Evening Post of January 7th.”96

The coming of the war later that year coincided with a recurrence of Lane’s financial troubles, and in time, a return of the depression that had plagued her earlier in the decade. Unable to place an anti-New Deal short story—rejected by the

Post as thinly-veiled “propaganda”—Lane turned to new avenues for her political work.97 A vocal opponent of US entry into the war, fearing it would lead to a permanent expansion of government power, Lane wrote a series of articles for

Liberty and Woman’s Day advocating the Ludlow amendment, which would have required a national referendum on any declaration of war, except in cases where

America was attacked first. In May 1939, Lane even appeared before the Senate

Judiciary Committee, to speak in favour of the amendment.98 To Hoover, however, she confessed that she had “no expectation” that Ludlow would pass. “It seems to me to offer only an opportunity to dramatize the fundamental issues, and to stimulate a little the expression of the popular desire to stay out of the next European war.”99

Pearl Harbor, of course, ended that calculus. And by the close of the war, Lane’s instinctive aversion to foreign entanglements had all but vanished. In its place

96 Later that year, Lane would compress and further popularize the themes from “The American Revolution” in an article for Cosmopolitan. RWL, “Long May Our Land Be Bright,” Cosmopolitan, August, 1939, 25. RWL to Hoover, January 11, 1939, in PPIC, box 119, folder 3, HP; Hoover to RWL, January 5, 1939, in ibid. 97 RWL to Ruth Levine, September 15, 1939, box 133, folder 8, Levine papers. 98 RWL, “Why I Am for the People’s Vote on War,” Liberty, April 1, 1939, 11-12; “Neutrality Snags Plague Congress,” NYT, May 11, 1939, 12. 99 RWL to Hoover, April 13, 1939, in PPIC, box 119, folder 3, HP.

111 bloomed a militant, occasionally paranoid, anti-Communism, and a strident hawkishness that would have seemed unthinkable a decade earlier:

I think that the obvious world situation imperatively requires these United

States to continue to be the world’s strongest military power, not for a decade

but for an indefinite time to come. I believe that Americans must fight more

than one future war against the world’s reactionary States; and I know that if

this country loses a war or destroys American constitutional law [via

conscription], humane civilization ceases to exist.100

Before that, Lane would complete her most substantial piece of political philosophy, a book that synthesised the various strands of her ideology within a new historical narrative, epic in scope. The success of the Post essays had earned Lane a reputation as a philosophical polemicist. They appear to have caught the attention of an editor at the John Day company, a small New York publishing house, who approached Lane in 1941 about writing a full-length work of political theory. Delighted, Lane began work throughout the winter and summer of ‘42. She had in mind the massive reading public that had greeted “Credo” with such enthusiasm in 1936. The book, she hoped, would serve as a political primer for the disaffected voter, and a rallying cry for old- fashioned American individualism.101

Published in early 1943, The Discovery of Freedom offered a sweeping, idiosyncratic account of the origins of human freedom, fused with the philosophical critique of collectivism that Lane had begun to sketch in her earlier essays.102

100 RWL, NECRB 5, no. 3 (March, 1948), 2. 101 RWL to Frank Meyer, September 5, 1953 in NSF, box 9, folder 4, LP; RWL to Herbert Hoover, August 5, 1942, in PPIC, box 119, folder 3, HP. 102 RWL, journal, January 8, 1943, in DN, box 23, item 68, LP.

112 Couched in a compact, unpretentious style, the book was animated by a simple question: “In less than one century, human energy—only in these States and on the western rim of Europe—has made such a terrific attack on the enemies of human life that it has created the whole modern world.” “Why,” Lane wondered, “was such an attack never made before?” The answer, she believed, lay in the unique philosophical heritage of America, a history that stretched from Abraham and Christ, through

Mohammed, to the grand revolutionary moment of 1765. Uneven in tone, repetitious, and marred by a weakness for historical anecdote, The Discovery of Freedom featured Lane at her most strident and idiosyncratic. Yet the book’s starkly utopian vision of American capitalism, and its Manichean picture of a coming global struggle, anticipated at times, with uncanny precision, the language and priorities of the post- war conservatism.103

Discovery opens with a striking image, cosmological in flavour:

Here is a planet, whirling in sunlit space. This planet is energy. Every

apparent substance composing it is energy... On this earth are living creatures.

Life is energy. Every living creature has consciousness and desires. The

imperative desire is to continue to live, and living is not easy. Life struggles to

exist, among not-living energies that destroy it.104

From this origin story and its homespun metaphysics, Lane sought to derive the essential facts of human and social life: “A human being is a dynamo, generating energy… This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it.

Each person is self-controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts. Every human

103 RWL, Discovery, viii. 104 Ibid., vii.

113 being, by his nature, is free.” Human energy, in Lane’s account, was directed at securing the necessities of life. But survival, for the solitary individual, was all but impossible; only by working with others could an individual hope to sustain themselves. “To save his bare existence, he [the individual] must have allies of his own kind. The brotherhood of man is not a pretty phrase nor a beautiful ideal; it is a fact.” It was from such an imperative that individuals created “all forms of human association.” Yet with the emergence of these social worlds a basic problem, the perennial “human dilemma,” emerged—how to control the energies of individuals in combination.105

For millennia, Lane argued, humans had confronted this problem with a simple answer: they denied the existence of individual freedom, believing that the actions and energy of individuals were controlled by the Gods. “The pagan view of man is that all individuals are, and by their nature should and must be, controlled by some Authority outside themselves.” Throughout history, this “authority,” had taken on a multitude of forms—“God,” “The State,” “The Party,” the “Master Race.” But the practical results were invariably the same: a stunted social form, one in which the great bulk of individuals barely rose above the level of uneasy subsistence.106 Human history, Lane believed, was a story of this pagan philosophy in all its variety, with three crucial exceptions.107 The first, she argued, was the emergence of the Judaeo-

Christian idea of the self:

105 Ibid., x-xii. 106 The dichotomy of liberty versus authority that animates the first section of Discovery is clearly indebted to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty: “The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, eds. David Bromwich and George Kateb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 73. Mill’s work, however, does not—unlike Lane’s—discuss the nature of authority at any length. On Lane’s appreciation of Mill, see RWL to Orval Watts, January 10, 1944, box 2, folder 10, Watts papers. 107 Ibid., 3, xiv.

114 Abraham said that none of these gods exist. He said that God is One Creator-

and-Judge. God is The Right, he said; Rightness creates the universe and

judges men’s acts… But God does not control any man, Abraham said; a man

controls himself, he is free to do good or evil in the sight of God.108

Abraham, Lane argued, had expressed the essential truth of individual freedom. But his wisdom, she argued, was limited. In essence, Abraham’s revelation was reducible to a single statement: man is free. The “problem of method,” of how to organize free individuals without impinging on their liberty, remained to be solved.

It was with the coming of Christ that the old Abrahamic insight was fused with a new and revolutionary principle, one that partly resolved humanity’s ancient dilemma. “Christ came not to bring peace, but a sword that would destroy kingdoms,” Lane wrote. “He spoke of the brotherhood of man. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Do unto others as ye would be done by.”

Lane’s conception of the “brotherhood of man,” a phrase she had used but not described earlier, was the new and essential element of the philosophy she presented in Discovery. It enabled Lane to reconcile an extreme individualism that denied the ontological or epistemological reality of the social world with a picture of human society as a vast, protean web of free individuals in spontaneous harmony. “In actual human life the only real Society is every living person’s contact with everyone he meets,” she declared. But “[i]f all men were not brothers, and if most men did not recognize the brotherhood of human kind, there would not be a human being alive.”109

108 Ibid., 74. 109 Ibid., 74, 77, 80, 5, 60, italics in original.

115 The remainder of Discovery illustrated the dynamic force of these ideas throughout history. Where Christian revelation had generated a revolution in thought, the application of its basic insights to the study of the natural world made possible the “first great creative effort of human energy.” During the Dark Ages, Lane argued, the “world was actually bright with an energetic, brilliant civilization… To them the world owes modern science—mathematics, astronomy, navigation, modern medicine and surgery, scientific agriculture.110

Lane had first come into contact with Muslim history and culture in her travels. In the second section of Discovery she turned her attention to the great

Islamic caliphates that had stretched from India to Spain throughout the Middle

Ages. Freed from paganism, the people of this vast civilization attacked the material world with unprecedented vigor. “[U]sing free energy flexibly, in mutual action,” they created great seats of learning, and a material culture singularly rich and varied. In this civilization, Lane saw the direct precursor to the American republic. Yet in their riotous freedom, a barely modified “anarchy,” the Saracens made no room for law.

This absence, of the legal rights of contract and ownership, of an “impersonal witness” to the dynamic results of economic liberty, made their civilization perilously brittle.111

Lane’s view of the ultimate, and highest, instantiation of Christ and

Abraham’s wisdom would not have come as a surprise to those familiar with her earlier essays. “The American Revolution had no leader,” Lane argued, at the beginning of the long, final chapter of Discovery. “Hundreds of thousands of men and women who lived and died unknown to anyone but their neighbours… began the third attempt to create conditions in which human beings can use their natural

110 Ibid., 86. 111 Ibid., 111-112.

116 freedom. This is the great fact in history.” The roots of the Revolution, Lane believed, lay in the singular character of the American colonists. It was these women and men who cast aside the old prism of beliefs that had enslaved individuals for millennia. In its place the colonists recognized instinctually and immutably the reality of their freedom, and accepted without pause their “responsibility” as “creator[s] of the human world.” “[N]othing in history, or on earth, is more valuable than an individual who knows that men are free,” she declared. “These first Americans did not need a

Fuehrer… [They] had learned what reality is, from experience.”112

Like the pioneer farmers in “Credo,” the colonists were the “rag-tag and hobtail of Europe,” a motley group of peasants, vagrants, religious zealots, and the

“black sheep” of the European gentry. But in this New World, these outcasts and refugees were confronted, Lane argued, with the “actual human situation on this earth.” Without food, without clothing, without shelter, they attacked the “bare earth with their hands,” carving from it the human necessities. Swiftly, within five generations, the colonists erected a civilization whose average standard of living eclipsed that of Europe. In their leisure time, these men and women turned, first of all, to the Bible. When they read the words of Abraham and Christ, Lane argued, who preached that individuals are “self-controlling and responsible,” this wisdom corresponded with the “facts” they had drawn from experience, confirming to the colonists the reality of their freedom.113

The revolutionary war that followed, Lane believed, was the product of the instinctive liberty of the colonists, who would have sooner died than yield to the directives of a greedy and capricious monarch. For Lane, the conflict was intrinsically populist, its first shot the “first sound of a common man’s voice that the Old World

112 Ibid., 174, 158 & 175. 113 Ibid., 158-60.

117 ever heard.”114 In the final section of Discovery, Lane sought to clarify the philosophical and political essence of the revolution. The transformative power of

American political economy, in her view, rested principally on the war’s enshrinement of property rights. The revolutionaries were the first to grasp the

“simple fact” that the free exercise of the individual’s natural freedom depended on their “right to stand upon this earth.” “No one can act freely,” Lane wrote, “if by merely living he is a trespasser upon property that Government—the King, the

Squire, or the Commune—owns.” The right to own property, Lane declared, was nothing less than “the essence of the Revolution.” The contemporary counter- revolutionist—the Lenins, the Roosevelts and the Hitlers of the world—invariably attacked property rights, because this was the Revolution’s “newest” and “weakest” point. From these reactionary demagogues had arisen the “preposterous suggestion” that property rights were the enemy of human rights. But in truth, it was the inviolable rights of property that had transformed America into the world’s great industrial power, banishing poverty and ennobling the individual like no nation on earth.115

Essential to the maintenance of property rights and the individual natural’s freedom was the other half of revolutionary political practice, embodied in the

Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The founders, Lane believed,

“were not enthusiasts.” They had “no plan for a better world,” neither “illusions” nor

“dreams of any Utopia.” They understood that government constituted a monopoly of force, and that throughout history this power had been used to supress and violate the rights of the individual. They sought not to reform but to restrict government, to limit, dilute and fragment the power of the state in such a way that its abuses would

114 Ibid., 170. 115 Ibid., 183-84.

118 cease. For Lane, the formulation of the separation of powers in the Constitution was a signal moment in human history, the “first attack ever made upon Government’s use of force, itself.” Such an assault was elegant expression of the principle that

“hampering the use of force in human affairs, is the only way to permit individuals to use their natural freedom.” The state thus established was “unique,” for it instituted for the first time not government by pagan “Authority,” but government by law.116

The fledging states of the new union, secure at last in their freedom, witnessed a “terrific outburst of human energy.” In one century the ceaseless activities of the

American people transformed the material world, erecting a new, “dynamic” civilization “constantly changing under the drive of terrific, incalculable energy.” It was the free exercise of the individual’s “human rights,” Lane argued, that made possible the emergence of this new world.117 As she declared, in the triumphalist final passage of Discovery:

The pigmy Republic has become a colossus. And too late and too little, the Old

World tyrants attack this Revolution with its own tools. Win this war? Of

course Americans will win this war… Five generations of Americans have led

the Revolution, and the time is coming when Americans will set this whole

world free.

As a work of systematic political philosophy, Discovery was a failure. Although at its core lay a populist creed of striking simplicity, Lane buried her insights under layer upon layer of historical anecdote. The result was a bloated narrative littered with errors of fact and understanding, punctuated by digressions on a dizzying array of

116 Ibid., 199 & 195, italics in original. 117 Ibid., 229 & 227.

119 topics—from the evils of compulsory, State-run education and the intrinsic inefficiency of bureaucracy, to the European attitude to warfare.

Nevertheless, Lane’s only full-length work of political theory helped to refine and expand her vision in a number of important ways.118 Where most individualists continued to emphasize the unsparing laws of the competitive order, Lane’s work offered a fundamentally romantic picture of the market as the ultimate place of individual self-actualisation, a dynamic, endlessly transfigured proving ground in which the individual’s free energies and ingenuity could find their full and virtuous satisfaction. This vision, a kind of capitalist romantic populism, conceived of individual life as the pure product of ceaseless, fluctuating market operations. The social world, in turn, was reduced to a mere artefact of this inexorable process. “In the human world there is no entity but the individual person… In actual human life the only real Society is every living person's contact with everyone he meets,” she argued. In Lane’s account, the power of the autonomous individual, the “creator of the human world,” took the place of the highest good. It was the free actions of virtuous individuals that had secured for America an unprecedented prosperity. It followed, she argued, that everything of value, “all moral and spiritual values,” were ultimately the product of individual liberty. And in such a vision, the aggrandising state, a destructive aggregate of negative “force,” was transfigured into the enemy of the people.119

Discovery was in some sense the culmination of the philosophical project that

Lane had begun seven years earlier with “Credo.” Most of text’s central ideas had

118 Even favourable reviews of Lane’s work noted its sloppiness: “She [Lane] makes a great many statements which, to say the least, are questionable.” Albert Jay Nock, NECRB 1, no. 5 (October, 1943), 1. 119 RWL, Discovery, xii, 5. Lane would later make this explicit: “Society, therefore, is relationships between living persons in Space and Time, originating in the will of each person to obtain profit for himself and maintained in Time by the individual's continuing use of his life-energy in action, for the purpose of obtaining profit.” RWL, NECRB 4, no. 10 (October, 1947), 2.

120 been percolating in her mind since at least 1935, and the book was, in part, simply an amplification of the historical thesis sketched in “The American Revolution.” But

Discovery was also a tissue of new influences and ideas, some easier to parse than others. The energy metaphor that grounds the text, for instance, had wide, and slightly perplexing, currency with the individualist right during this period. The economist Thomas Nixon Carver, who mentored several individualist intellectuals— including Leonard Read and Orval Watts, both close confidantes of Lane—wrote an entire book, The Economy of Human Energy (1924), in which he sought to conceptualize human life in terms of the transformation of energy.120 Isabel

Paterson, Lane’s close friend and sparring partner, published her magnum opus The

God of the Machine scarcely five months after Lane, and Paterson’s text is full of references to energy, although the conceptualization differs. Whatever its origins, the metaphor seems to have caught on. As Merwin K. Hart, the conservative political operative and confidant of Lane, declared in a speech in Utica a year later: “As the world has long noted… the liberty our Fathers won released in America the greatest aggregate amount of human energy that history has ever known.”121

120 The most plausible source for the image of the “dynamo” is Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Ira B. Nadel [1907] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chp. 25. See Stephen Cox’s discussion of the relationship of Adams’ conception to Paterson’s work, Cox, Woman and the Dynamo, 259-260. Cf. William James, “The Energies of Man,” Science 25, no. 635 (March 1907): 321- 332. For a magisterial, contemporary appraisal of the use of the term “energy” and others based on the physical sciences to explain social phenomena, see Pitirim Sorokin, Contemporary Sociological Theories (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), esp. ch. 1 121 RWL to VB, November 21, 1935, in SF, box 1, folder 16, Holtz papers. Carey McWilliams, “Battle for the Clergy,” Nation, February 7, 1948, 151. There is significant overlap between Discovery and The God of the Machine on a number of points. Both Lane and Paterson refer to the individual as a “dynamo;” they also both use the example of St. Paul’s arrest by the Romans to elucidate their views on the role of law. One quote can illustrate the broader similarities of their thought: “The United States is the Age of the Dynamo. By carrying over the axiom of free will from religious to political doctrine, a Niagara of kinetic energy was released.” Paterson, God, 157. The correspondence between Lane and Paterson, who had been friends since at least the mid 1920s, has not survived except for two letters, although Paterson’s later, unflattering view of Lane is present in Paterson’s correspondence with Ayn Rand. Scholars have generally assumed that Paterson was a one-way influence on Lane, but the evidence is ambiguous. See Burns, “The Three ‘Furies,’” 762; Cox, Woman and the Dynamo, 217- 18; e.g. Bastiat, Bastiat Collection, 470; Merwin K. Hart, “Another Truth That is Self-Evident: Liberty, the Essential Foundation of American Life,” speech before the Exchange Club, Utica, New York, July 6, 1944.

121 As for energy, so too for the other terminological change from the earlier essays: Lane’s use of the word “pagan.” As a byword for collectivist ideology, the term was not unheard of on the individualist right. The founding document of Spiritual

Mobilization called in 1935 on “ministers of all denominations in America to check the trends towards pagan stateism,” while Clarence Manion, who would later become a critical figure in the post-war conservative movement, attacked the old “pagan principle of the all-powerful state” in his 1939 book, Lessons In Liberty. Bastiat, too, occasionally conflated paganism with socialism. But it seems likely that Lane drew the idea from a contemporary source, and in so doing linked her book with the

Christian anti-statist fringe that she would embrace later in the decade.122

Discovery was a flop and an enduring disappointment for Lane. The book sold barely more than a thousand copies, a figure she would later attribute to a cabal of liberal literary critics, whose silence had “damned” her work. In the National

Economic Council Review of Books, which Lane would soon edit, Albert Jay Nock lauded Discovery: “in its exposition of individualism’s philosophy it is one of the two great books of our period.” “When it comes to anything fundamental,” he wrote,

“Mrs. Lane never makes a mistake. She is always right.” Nock, the éminence grise of the individualist right and a political fatalist in the mode of Garrett, seems to have found Lane’s brio infectious. But in late 1943, as the Allies appeared to seal the fate of the Nazi regime, Nock’s lone enthusiasm was a spark swiftly snuffed out.123

122 Ralph Lord Roy, Apostles of Discord: A Study of Organized Bigotry and Disruption on the Fringes of Protestantism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), 286; Clarence Manion, Lessons in Liberty: A Study of God in Government (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1939), 17. Lane was a keen admirer of Manion; it is unclear, however, when she first came into contact with his work. RWL to JC, October 8, 1957, in NSF, box 3, folder 40, LP. On Spiritual Mobilization, see Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), chp. 1. On Manion, see Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Critclow, Conservative Ascendancy, esp. 44-47. 123 RWL to JC, May 5, 1951, in NSF, box 3, folder 34, LP; Albert Jay Nock, NECRB 1, no. 5 (October, 1943), 1. The other book Nock alludes to was Paterson’s The God of the Machine.

122 Chapter 4

Rose Wilder Lane and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Conservatism

Snubbed by critics and ignored by the reading public, Lane’s magnum opus had a curious afterlife. Stung by the book’s failure, Lane returned her advance to the publishers. Over the next four years, interest in Discovery grew, but Lane refused to allow the book to be republished. The original run had been little more than a thousand copies and Lane was planning a revised version, which she would work on intermittently for the rest of her life. In 1947, Henry Grady Weaver, a GM executive, motivated by the increasing demand for Discovery, published a digest of Lane’s work with the title The Mainspring of Human Progress.1 Lane was delighted by Weaver’s efforts. “Doubtless other readers are dissatisfied with my book, The Discovery of

Freedom; it never satisfied me,” she wrote. “But who but Mr. Weaver, dissatisfied, would have run that ramshackle book into his shop, taken it down to the last comma, reassembled and rebuilt it with new engine and transmission, added a superb paint job, and produced a new 1948 model with fluid drive?2

A year after publication, Mainspring had sold 160,000 copies. Leonard Read’s

Foundation for Economic Education republished the work from 1949 onwards, advertising it as the “first book one should read in the study of freedom.”

Mainspring, Read remarked, was probably the best-selling book “of its nature.” By the middle of the following decade everyone included on the Foundation’s mailing

1 A letter to the industrialist J. Howard Pew strongly suggests that Lane, in fact, was responsible for writing Mainspring, but for the remainder of her life Lane publicly concealed her role. RWL to J. Howard Pew, September 2, 1946, in box 21, Pew papers. 2 RWL, NECRB 4, no. 12 (December, 1947), 2.

123 list was given a free copy of the book, its status as the essential gateway to the

“freedom philosophy” assured.34

With Discovery behind her, Lane turned to the task of finding new outlets for her political commentary. In the early 1940s, she began corresponding with J.A. Rogers, a noted columnist for The Pittsburgh Courier, the largest and most influential black newspaper of the period. Lane, who apparently had first heard about the Courier from her domestic help, wrote to Rodgers: “Here in this country, the source of world revolution for human rights, actually the only Americans who are consciously carrying on this revolution are Americans whose human rights never have been fully recognized for the fantastic reason that their skins are dark.”5 Lane was offered a column, and in November, 1942 she began a weekly tutorial in the principles of

American individualism. Lane’s unyielding, hortative style and penchant for grand philosophical pronouncements were an odd mix for a mass-market newspaper. Week after week, she obsessively reiterated the themes of Discovery, emphasizing the necessity and burden of individual responsibility. “Do not imagine that slave-minded men and women are only in enemy countries,” she wrote in her second column.

“Everyone, more or less, would like to get out from under the responsibility that is freedom.” Those who sought to evade the rigors of individual liberty, who demanded that government provide them with material security, cherished an “illusion” that one can “have freedom without risk or responsibility, and slave’s security with being

3 Leonard Read to Howard E. Kershner, September 2, 1958, in Howard E. Kershner papers, box 15, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene, Oregon [hereafter: “Kershner papers”]. 4 Leonard Read to C. H. Scantland, July 24, 1950, in folder 1699, Foundation for Economic Education Archives, Atlanta, Georgia [hereafter: “FEEA”]; “Order Form—Ideas on Liberty,” undated (circa 1962), in Notes January 1962-November 1964, folder 1570, FEEA. 5 Lane’s letter is quoted in J.A. Rodgers, “Unthinking White Americans Do Not Know the Negros—We Must Educate Them,” PC, October 31, 1942, 7.

124 a slave.”6 Lane, perhaps unsurprisingly, was at pains to underline the populist character of her philosophy:

But in our country it is an almost voiceless spirit, the spirit of the so-called

“little” men—the men who merely create the homes, the factories, the cities,

this whole modern world, and keep it existing in spite of death and taxes and

weather and war and all the silly babblings of the Big Brains. In the millions

who actually make America, there is the true spirit of freedom.7

Lane’s column ran until September 1945. She would later claim that the Courier’s editor, a supporter of Roosevelt, had forced her out.8 Whatever the reasons for her departure, within a month Lane had taken up the editorship of the National

Economic Council Review of Books, vacated on the death of Albert Jay Nock in late

August. The National Economic Council, Inc. (NEC), a conservative advocacy group headed by New York lawyer Merwin K. Hart, was a crucial clearing house for individualist and conservative intellectuals during the period, publishing an array of right-wing literature. Funded by a slew of prominent businessmen, the NEC styled itself as a bulwark against the “tide toward collectivism,” dedicated to defending free enterprise, property rights and “American independence.” Hart, a virulent Christian nationalist, fascist sympathizer, laissez-faire advocate and anti-Semite, played an important, and almost wholly overlooked, role in the evolution of conservative and individualist politics in the aftermath of the war. For Hart, opposition to the New

6 RWL, “Rose Lane Says [RLS],” PC, November 28, 1942, 15; RWL, “RLS,” PC, March 20, 1943, 6. On this aspect of Lane’s career, see David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “Selling Laissez-faire Antiracism to the Black Masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the Pittsburgh Courier,” The Independent Review 15, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 282-3. 7 RWL, “RLS,” PC, May 15, 1943, 6. 8 RWL to JC, July 31, 1963, in NSF, box 4, folder 46, LP.

125 Deal was explicitly racialized: the liberal ideology of Roosevelt, he would later argue, was delivering America into the hands of perfidious Jewry.9 Lane was no anti-

Semite, but as an avid movement-watcher and connoisseur of individualist and anti- communist literature, she must have relished the opportunity a monthly newsletter presented. Her perch at the Review allowed Lane to survey the state of individualist and conservative thought, while helping to shape the tastes and opinions of a dedicated audience of wealthy businessmen and sympathetic activists and intellectuals.10

Something of the power, modest but not insignificant, of Lane’s new role is illustrated by the most significant controversy of her tenure. In 1947, Lane reviewed

Stanford economist Lorie Tarshis’s The Elements of Economics, an introductory textbook designed for undergraduates and the first of its kind to incorporate

Keynesian ideas. In a review twice the ordinary length, Lane methodically skewered

9 Hart’s anti-Semitism chiefly manifested publicly as “anti-Zionism,” and only became fully evident by the mid-1950s. Lane did, however, remain on very friendly terms with Hart for the remainder of her life. Merwin K. Hart, Economic Council Letter, no. 181 (December 1947). Correspondence illustrates the growth of Hart’s increasingly conspiratorial anti-Semitism. See Merwin K. Hart to Gerald L. K. Smith, December 29, 1960, in Correspondence Series, box 52, folder 3, Gerald L. K. Smith papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan and Merwin K. Hart to George W. Armstrong, February 18, 1952, in box 172, folder 5, George W. Armstrong papers, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Arlington, Texas, in which Hart urges the strident white supremacist Armstrong to distribute John O. Beaty’s The Iron Curtain Over America (1951)—condemned by the Anti-Defamation League as “one of the most anti-Semitic books ever published.” ADL quote is from Don E. Carleton, Red Scare: Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 118. 10 Part 4 of Hearings before the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1950), 80 & 69-71; Walter Linn, Dangers to Our American Way of Life (New York: National Economic Council, Inc., 1947), in uncatalogued, Ludwig von Mises papers, Buhl Library, Grove City College, Pennsylvania, 11; National Economic Council, Inc.: Statement of Purpose (New York: National Economic Council, Inc., undated), in Ibid., 1. The NEC received numerous contributions from the William Volker Fund—which distributed copies of Lane’s Discovery—a critical financier of a large array of “mainstream” conservative groups after the war, but its operations seem to have been principally underwritten by the three—Lammot, Irénée and Pierre S.—Du Pont brothers. See esp. Merwin K. Hart to Lammot du Pont, December 9, 1946 and Lammot du Pont to Merwin K. Hart, February 27, 1951, in box 2, folder 40, Merwin K. Hart papers, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene, Oregon [hereafter: “Hart papers”]. RWL to Isaac Don Levine, n.d. (probably early 1946), in box 133, folder 8, Levine papers. On Lane’s contempt for naked anti- Semitism, see RWL, “American Jews,” The American Mercury, December, 1938, 501. On Hart’s support for Franco’s Spain, see Merwin K. Hart, America: Look at Spain (New York: P.J. Kennedy & Sons, 1939).

126 Tarshis’ assumptions, savaging the book as a “pagan-religious and political tract” designed to indoctrinate students in collectivist ideology. Keynesian ideas, she believed, were a particularly insidious form of the Old World lie that the state could guarantee the prosperity of the people. “Every American who does not act to stop the teaching of these fallacies in the schools and universities that he supports,” Lane wrote, “would be wiser to cut his own throat and thus quietly avoid the consequences that his idleness is bringing upon himself and his children.”11

The review sparked an aggressive national campaign, spearheaded by the

NEC, to bar the textbook from colleges. In early March, 1948, Lane wrote to Hoover to update him on the campaign, gleefully reporting that a number of prominent universities had abandoned the work. “The vigor, activity and persistence of the response aroused by my one little review of this book seem to me to indicate a general change in this country.” The ultimate result of the controversy, though, was ambiguous. The campaign successfully destroyed the market for Tarshis’ textbook, but the long-term effect was simply to elevate Paul Samuelson’s competing, but basically similar, work.12

Lane’s original review of Tarshis’s book later formed the foundation of a chapter on college economics in God and Man at Yale (1951), William F. Buckley,

11 RWL, NECRB 4, no. 8 (August 1947), 1-4. On Lane’s review, and the “textbook controversy,” see Levy, Peart and Albert, “Economic Liberals,” esp. 1-10. 12 “Author of first U.S. college textbook on Keynesian economics dies,” Stanford University News Service, October 11, 1993, http://news.stanford.edu/pr/93/931011Arc3112.html; RWL to Herbert Hoover, March 5, 1948, in PPIC, box 119, folder 4, HP. A letter Lane wrote to Leonard Read’s mentor William Mullendore offers substantial detail on the campaign. RWL to William C. Mullendore, March 10, 1948, in box 2, folder 13, William C. Mullendore papers, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene, Oregon [hereafter: “Mullendore papers”]. Lane’s preoccupation with the insidious effects of Keynesian textbooks was mirrored by a large array of individualists during this period. Lucille Cardin Crain, for instance, whose Educational Reviewer was entirely devoted to rooting out “communistic” textbooks, was a close correspondent of Lane’s during the period. The Reviewer was funded and managed by William F. Buckley, Sr., with the help of his precocious son, “Billy”, Jr., along with Crain and the lawyer George S. Montgomery, Jr. See, esp., RWL to Lucille Cardin Crain, Lucille Cardin Crain papers, University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene, Oregon; William F. Buckler, Sr., memorandum to William F. Buckley, Jr. and Mrs. Kenneth Crain, March 20, 1952, in box 27, folder 3, ibid.

127 Jr.’s. first, sensational book. Buckley, probably the single most important post-war conservative intellectual, was a protégé of Hart during these years, and apparently engaged in a lengthy correspondence with Lane, which has not survived. God and

Man at Yale echoed the language of Lane’s political work, invoking the global struggle between “collectivism” and “individualism” and the corrupting effect of the abandonment of Christian religion. The collectivists, Buckley wrote, “disparage the individual, glorify the government, enshrine security, and discourage self-reliance.”

They “look upon the American people as an indivisible entity, instead of as one hundred and fifty million individuals.”13

Buckley’s evident appreciation of Lane was mutual. In a letter to Jasper Crane about whom to invite to the American meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society—the influential free market advocacy organisation, headed by Hayek—she listed Buckley, along with a handful of other figures, as possible replacements for the academics usually present. “All the men I have mentioned are a species unknown in Europe, their existence is news and their points of view are bombshells to Europeans,” she wrote. “They could represent the real USA to Europe much more accurately and effectively I think, than any equal number of American professional thinkers in universities.”14

Buckley, though, was hardly the only figure among the nascent conservative movement indebted to Lane. William Rusher, one of the founders of modern

13 William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” [1951] (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway Editions, 1986), lxvi, 64, 42 & 64; Merwin K. Hart to William F. Buckley, Jr., October 11, 1951, in box 2, folder 34, Hart papers; Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, “F. A. Hayek and the ‘Individualists,’” in F. A. Hayek and the Modern Economy, eds. Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 31-32. On Buckley’s role in the development of modern conservatism, see, for instance, Carl T. Bogus, Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), and Farber, Rise and Fall, 39–76. 14 On the Society, see Burgin, Great Persuasion and Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); RWL to JC, October 8, 1957, in NSF, box 3, folder 40, LP.

128 conservatism and the original publisher of Buckley’s National Review, credited a series of letters he exchanged as a teenager with Lane as the catalyst for his own ideological awakening. “Her defiant contempt for the Leviathan state,” Rusher wrote in his memoir, “was something wholly new in my experience and made a powerful impression on me.”15

Lane’s work for the Review, and well as private correspondence, made it clear that both anti-communism and cultural conservatism, had, by 1945, assumed a central place in her worldview. Lane’s editorship corresponded with a boom period for anti-communist literature amidst the nascent stages of the Second Red Scare, with a massive proliferation of books and pamphlets emerging on the right denouncing the encroaching Soviet menace.16 In her pieces for the Review, Lane surveyed dozens of anti-communist works, but she reserved her most lavish praise for one in particular: William Henry Chamberlain’s Blueprint for World Conquest

(1946), a collection of documents and statements drawn from official Communist

Party literature, with an introduction by the author. Chamberlain, a well-known journalist and Moscow correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor during the

1930s, began an eager supporter of the Bolshevik revolution. First-hand experience of the depredations of forced collectivization, though, in time led him to repudiate communism. In 1940, Chamberlain had come so far as to declare the Soviet state “a power of darkness and of evil with few parallels in history.” Confessions of an

15 William Rusher, The Rise of the Right (New York: National Review, 1993), 11. In his memoir, Rusher states that although Lane made a “powerful impression” on him, “it was not destined to lead anywhere.” But Lane, to judge by a contemporary letter to Crane, had obviously been informed otherwise: “I heard a high-school “debate” among all pro-New Dealers on the radio, and wrote to each of them. One replied… Now he turns up as publisher of National Review, telling people that I—i.e., my letters—changed his whole life.” RWL to JC, October 30, 1958, in NSF, box 3, folder 41, LP. 16 See, for instance, RWL to Orval Watts, February 5, 1945, box 2, folder 10, Watts papers. On the broader contours of anti-communism in this period, see Fried, Nightmare, chp. 1; Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998), chp. 8.

129 Individualist, his memoir of the period, cemented Chamberlain’s shift to the right. “I believe that individual man’s instinct is to create, while collective man’s instinct is to destroy,” he wrote.17

Chamberlain was an early and influential example of a figure that would play a central role in the evolution of the post-war right: the ex-communist. Communism, a

“fifth column agency of Soviet Russian infiltration,” was a vast and sinister

“international conspiracy” without historical parallel, he argued. So inherently belligerent was the communist philosophy that war with America was all but

“inevitable,” and it “would be sheer imbecility not to make every conceivable political, economic, military and psychological preparation to win.”18 Lane, who was convinced that communists had infiltrated the federal government by the mid-1930s, concurred. “The truth is that you are not safe,” she wrote in a review of

Chamberlain’s work. “The organized conspiracy to win your confidence, to get into your office, your business, your committees, every branch of your government, your children’s school, your son’s regiment, and to destroy them all and kill you, is as actual as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” The threat, in other words, was existential and imminent. She expressed scorn and dismay at the liberal apologists who dismissed it as the product of right-wing hysteria.19

Next to Chamberlain in Lane’s affections stood another, darker, figure, partially obscured to history, but representative of the outer fringes of anti- communist activism that she enthusiastically embraced during this period. Joseph P.

Kamp, a political propagandist, conspiracy theorist and head of the Du Pont-funded

17 William Henry Chamberlain, Confessions of an Individualist (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 159 & 300. 18 William Henry Chamberlain, Blueprint for World Conquest: As Outlined by the Communist International (Washington: Human Events, 1946), 2. 19 RWL to VB, March 8, 1936, in SF, box 1, folder 16, Holtz papers; RWL, NECRB 4, no. 1 (January 1947), 2-3.

130 Constitutional Education League (CEL), was responsible for the creation and distribution of an enormous quantity of anti-communist literature from the mid-

1930s to the mid-1950s. In pamphlets such as The Fifth Column in Washington

(1940) and Hitler Was a Liberal (1949), Kamp sketched the outline of a vast conspiracy to establish a “Communazi dictatorship” in America, operating under the

“false colors” of humanitarianism and liberalism. Kamp was fond of vilifying prominent political figures as Moscow agents. In the early 1950s he was the first to attack Eisenhower as a closet communist, a charge later gleefully taken up by the immensely popular right-wing anti-communist organization the John Birch Society, whose founder, Robert Welch, based one of his books on a pamphlet written by

Kamp. Although widely derided as a fascist, Kamp’s works periodically took aim at

Nazism and fascism, which he regarded, like Lane, as simply a different species of socialism. Evidence of Kamp’s anti-Semitism, and his connection to notorious racists like Gerald L.K. Smith, is unambiguous though.20

Lane seems to have first come into contact with Kamp’s work in 1947, probably at the suggestion of Merwin Hart, who was a fan. By 1950, she had become an avid supporter, praising Kamp’s relentless and “soberly factual” exposés. Later that year, Kamp was jailed for contempt of Congress, after refusing to divulge

20 Roosevelt’s Justice Department dubbed the CEL “an instrument of the Axis powers,” but the FBI was more circumspect, noting Kamp’s serial exaggerations and falsehoods but finding no connection to organized fascist politics. Robert Justin Goldstein, Little ‘Red Scares’: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921-1946 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 239; D. A. Flinn to Percy E. Foxworth, “Re: Constitutional Education League, Incorporated, Joseph P. Kamp, President; Internal Security—G,” memorandum, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, August 27, 1941, in “Freedom of Information Act Document: FOIA: Kamp, Joseph P.-HQ-5,” 31-32, https://archive.org/stream/foia_Kamp_Joseph_P.-HQ-5/Kamp_Joseph_P.-HQ-5. On Kamp’s anti-Semitism, see his letters to Gerald L. K. Smith, esp. those in Correspondence Series, box 37, folder 3, Smith papers; RWL to Connie and Merwin Hart, October 16, 1962, in NSF, box 5, folder 19, LP; Orval Watts to RWL, August 24, 1961, in NSF, box 11, folder 18, LP. Jospeh P. Kamp, The Fifth Column in Washington (New Haven: Constitutional Education League, Inc., 1940), 8-9; Benjamin R. Epstein and Arnold Forster, Report on the John Birch Society: 1966 (New York, Vintage, 1966), 30- 34; Don E. Carleton, Red Scare: Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 229.

131 contributors to the CEL during a committee investigation into lobbying. “Mr. Joseph

P. Kamp is in jail. So I have lived to see injustice breed injustice destroying the last security of men on earth,” Lane declared at the beginning of a four-page spread defending Kamp, detailing the history of his “difficult and meticulously exact research” into communist organizations. “Not one of his published statements has ever been challenged as untruthful or inaccurate… not one of the hundreds of persons whom he has named has ever suggested a suit for libel.” In the following years, Lane would become close friends with Kamp, often hosting him at her home in

Danbury. Lane was clearly incensed by the broader attacks on Kamp in the press, and among her more level-headed allies on the right. A late letter from Orval Watts indicates that the pair were still intent on trying “to remove some of the mud from his [Kamp’s] reputation” among the “influential persons on our side in this area.”21

Privately, unlike many of her colleagues, Lane argued that all-out war with the

Soviets was unlikely.22 But publicly, she repeatedly invoked the necessity of a strong military deterrent. And like the great bulk of individualist and conservative activists on the right, Lane was perfectly prepared to forego her anti-statist principles when it came to combatting the enemy. In a favorable review of the arch-interventionist

James Burnham’s The Struggle for the World, Lane declared that the “U.S.S.R. is fighting a ‘shooting war’ now. The struggle for the world is continuing, and it is a struggle for existence. There is no interval between ‘Second’ and ‘Third’ world wars; it is suicidal folly to imagine that there is one.”23

21 RWL, NECRB 4, no. 6 (June, 1947), 4; “Kamp Convicted in Contempt Trial,” NYT, 29 June, 1951, 8; RWL, NECRB 7, no. 5 (May, 1950), 4; RWL, NECRB 7, no. 10 (October, 1950), 2-3. 22 Lane went so far as to privately argue, presciently, that the USSR would “inevitably” collapse “internally,” with or without American military engagement. RWL to William C. Mullendore, August 17, 1948, in box 2, folder 13, Mullendore papers. 23 RWL to JC, September 6, 1953, in NSF, box 3, folder 36, LP; RWL, NECRB 5, no. 3 (March, 1948), 2; RWL, NECRB 4, no. 7 (July, 1947), 4.

132 Lane’s belief in the necessity of American military power to combat the Soviet threat abroad seems only to have hardened in her later years. In a 1965 interview, she endorsed the infamous “domino theory” of communism, warning of the perils should the South yield to the Viet Cong. At the end of that year, when US combat forces were first deployed in earnest, Lane championed the move. And in August the same year, at the age of seventy-two, she left America for the last time, travelling to

Vietnam on assignment for Woman’s Day. Her article, published in December, was less political polemic than classic reportage, lyrically documenting the quiet stoicism of the Vietnamese people in the face of the treachery and brutality of their communist opponents.24

The final element of the modern conservative synthesis, cultural conservatism, had been present in some form in Lane’s work from the mid-1930s. As early as 1936, she had begun to question the progressive mores of her youth and to lament, in part, her drive to carve out a new life as an independent woman, free from social constraint. In

“Woman’s Place is in the Home,” an article for Ladies Home Journal, she began by invoking the nascent worldview that had driven her to escape from Mansfield in

1904: “we had no intention of losing our precious individualities… It was our creed that a woman is a complete human being.” But to the Lane of 1936, such sentiments were hollow. They ignored, she argued, the true role of women in society. The “union of masculine and feminine” in marriage, is the “root of life values,” she wrote. “It is the source of all profound harmony, goodness and richness in human life.” To the young women who wrote to Lane for advice, she issued this blunt counsel:

24 “Rose Wilder Lane Tells about Vietnam,” Danbury News-Times, September 21, 1965, cited in Holtz, Ghost, 359. RWL, “August in Viet Nam,” Woman’s Day, December, 1965, 3.

133 Your business is to be a woman. Your career is to make a good marriage, to

spend the days and the years of your life and all the resources of your mind

and spirit in deepening and enriching and making fruitful in life values the

union of feminine and masculine that is marriage… If you are to have a whole

life, you will have it only in complete union with a husband in a home. You

will make the home. It is your feminine business to be creative in the art of

living.25

Lane’s article might be written off as faux traditionalism, the product of editorial pressure rather than firm conviction, if not for a single line. “[M]y life,” Lane wrote,

“has been arid and sterile at the core, because I have been a human being instead of a woman, a wife.”26 In her late twenties Lane had briefly married before divorcing a young salesman, and the personal cost she felt of a life lived alone would occasionally surface in her later writing. But where Lane’s early fiction had often celebrated a particularly female vision of personal autonomy—the educated, independent New

Woman of turn of the century America—the picture of individual, freewheeling liberty at the heart of her later political work took on a decidedly gender-neutral, even masculine cast.27

By the late 1940s, in her writings for the NEC Review and elsewhere, Lane’s cultural conservatism had solidified, driven, in part, by her intensifying embrace of

Christian thought. Where The Discovery of Freedom had offered a striking vision of

25 RWL, “Woman’s Place is In the Home,” Ladies Home Journal 53 (October, 1946): 96. Lane occasionally resented writing for women’s magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Woman’s Day, complaining to a friend: “I have done a Christmas article for Woman's Day, which they will turn down too, because it is not frivolous and personal enough.” RWL to Ruth Levine, September 15, 1939, box 133, folder 8, Levine papers. 26 RWL, “Woman’s Place,” 96. 27 Ibid., 94-96. On the function of gender in Lane’s work, see Burns, “Three Furies,” esp. 756-58.

134 religious pluralism—of the legacy that both Islamic and Judeo-Christian thought had played in the development of human freedom—Lane’s work swiftly took on a more parochial cast. “Nothing in American life, in American manners, customs, culture, civilization, is comprehensible without a knowledge of the Bible,” she wrote in 1947.

“Americans who do not know the Bible have lost touch with themselves and wander lost in the fallacies of paganism.”28

Far from grappling, as a host of earlier thinkers had, with the tensions between capitalism and scripture, Lane celebrated Christian teachings as the indispensable foundation of the market order. In this respect, she was not alone. The mid-1940s witnessed the emergence of an array of thinkers, many of them clergymen, committed to fusing hardline, laissez-faire economics with the teachings of scripture. The works of Rev. Carl McIntire, a fundamentalist minister and

Christian libertarian theorist, attracted Lane’s particular interest. In The Rise of the

Tyrant (1947), McIntire argued that “private enterprise is established in the moral law; that is to say, in the Ten Commandments.” Moses’ tablets, he wrote, “form the most individualistic document the world has ever seen. They are the eternal bill of rights of the individual.” McIntire’s biblical literalism led him, Lane wrote, to a “view of political principles, current events, and necessary action, which precisely coincides with my own.” And on the subject of the Ten Commandments, Lane would henceforth parrot McIntire’s Christian individualist reading. “As the Magna Carta is the charter of English liberties, the Bible is the charter of American liberty and law,” she wrote in 1947. “Americans based their claim to human rights upon the original

28 RWL, NECRB 3, no. 10 (December, 1946), 1.

135 and greatest document of individualism: the Ten Commandments.”29

In a growing sign of her social conservatism, Lane took to arguing in the pages of the Review that the problems that plagued contemporary society stemmed from

America’s abandonment of traditional morality. Of a child reared without the teachings of the Bible, she wrote: “He is a victim of the current cruelty to children which stunts their minds, corrupts their morals and robs them of their American heritage. Their parents are denying to them, and to themselves, the richest treasure of knowledge and wisdom [the Bible] on this earth.” Elsewhere, Lane would claim that the abandonment of the “Christian moral basis,” wholly “essential to civilization,” was “destroying this modern world.” Anticipating the conservatism of

Richard M. Weaver and Russel Kirk, Lane argued that it was liberal relativism, an aversion to the very notion of truth, that had corroded the traditional moral fabric of

America. In a series of pieces for the Review, she excoriated liberal intellectuals who breezily asserted that “[t]here are no principles.” “The necessity to think rationally, or perish, is upon us,” Lane declared, and “principles are thinkable only on the basis that The Truth, God, exists.” In Lane’s case, as well as that of Kirk and Weaver, the defense of moral or philosophical absolutism—the belief that a “transcendent order” of timeless truths governed human action—was invariably linked to a vision of pervasive social decay at the hands of godless liberalism, of nothing less, in Weaver’s resonant phrase, than the “dissolution of the West.”30

29 Carl McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant: Controlled Economy vs Private Enterprise (Collingswood: Christian Beacon Press, 1945), 13 & 15; RWL, NECRB 3, no. 10 (December, 1947), 1. On McIntire, see Ruotsila, Fighting Fundamentalist. 30 RWL, NECRB 3, no. 10 (December, 1946): 1-2; RWL, NECRB 3, no. 1 (February, 1946): 3; Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences [1948] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 1.

136 Little by little, then, over the course of a turbulent decade, Lane had arrived at a philosophical position indistinguishable from modern conservatism. And while she would remain, until the end of her life, intensely averse to the label, Lane watched the movement grow over the following two decades with clear sympathy. In 1953, she began a long, wide-ranging and densely theoretical correspondence with Frank

Meyer, the seminal political theorist who would later formulate the “fusionist” account of conservatism, blending libertarianism and traditionalism. In 1955, Lane wrote to Meyer, offering an overview of the American “political position,” as she saw it. The letter, four pages of closely set reasoning, offered a sophisticated reprisal of the philosophy she had advanced in The Discovery of Freedom. “Your statement of the American political position actually leaves nothing for me to say but ‘Amen,’”

Meyer replied. “[A] number of your formulations,” he noted with surprise, were

“directly parallel” to those from an article Meyer was preparing attacking the traditionalist, quasi-feudal conservatism of Russel Kirk. Lane, similarly, loathed

Kirk, whose philosophy she regarded—in the same terms she had attacked

Roosevelt—as rank “medievalism.”31

For Lane, though, the grassroots conservative movement represented by Barry

Goldwater was an entirely different matter. Conditioned by three decades of profound alienation from the political establishment, Lane initially viewed the

Senator from Arizona with suspicion. “I say Mr. Goldwater is a clever party

31 Meyer, William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote, “has done more than anyone in America to search out the metaphysics of freedom.” Frank Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996), back cover. RWL to Frank Meyer, June 6, 1955, in NSF, box 9, folder 4, LP; Frank Meyer to RWL, June 7, 1955, in ibid.; RWL to JC, September 6, 1953 & March 28, 1958, in NSF, box 3, folders 36 & 41, LP. The most substantial disagreement between Lane and Meyer was on the question of the European contribution to American political philosophy. Lane conceived of America’s founding ideals a reaction against European thought, in toto; Meyer believed, like all modern scholars, that the Founders drew liberally from European and classical political philosophy. Later, Lane would take issue with Meyer’s defense of “tradition,” among other things, but the basic congruence of their political program is obvious. RWL to Frank Meyer, September 18, 1956, in NSF, box 9, folder 5, LP.

137 politician,” Lane wrote to Crane in late 1960, “but not clever enough, and not intelligent at all.” Goldwater, she argued, highlighting her deep affinity with the conservative grassroots, would be a good President “provided that the misnamed

‘conservative’ movement was a tremendous force behind him. But then, any man would be, in that situation; even Ike or Nixon.”

By 1963, though, Lane’s earlier misgivings had evaporated. Goldwater’s candidacy, she argued, was the first sign of a coming American “renaissance.”

Echoing the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Lane argued that Goldwater vs.

Johnson presented Americans with a true political choice for the first time in almost three decades. “Through the 40s and 50s there was only one party here: socialist, under three or four names,” she wrote. Lane was a “spend-till-it-hurts contributor” to

Goldwater’s 1964 campaign and even “carried self-sacrifice so far as to watch on television every campaign program I heard of.” Johnson’s landslide win shook her confidence, but Lane took ready comfort in a story universal among disappointed partisans: “I am not yet persuaded that anything like a majority of Americans want what they voted for this year,” she wrote to Crane in late November. Goldwater’s handlers, she argued, had run a singularly “inept” campaign, and a principled man, as ever, had simply been betrayed by the political establishment. “Goldwater was defeated by Republicans, of course; as Senator Knowland was, and how many others since 1936?”32

Lane’s correspondence with Crane, a retired Du Pont industrialist, would ultimately run to more than four thousand pages, constituting the most consequential

32 RWL to JC, September 10, 1960, in NSF, box 3, folder 43, LP; RWL to JC, October 25, 1963, NSF, box 3, folder 47, LP; Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, Ill.: Pere Marquette Press, 1964); RWL to JC, November 20, 1964, in NSF, box 3, folder 48, LP.

138 relationship of her political career.33 The letters between them illustrate the central role Lane played in helping shape the burgeoning individualist and conservative movements in the two decades after the war.34 Crane, probably the single most important financier of post-war conservatism, had been involved, from the mid-

1930s on, in establishing a variety of groups to resist New Deal liberalism.35 The pair were introduced in 1945 by Leonard Read, whom Lane appears to have been working for in an unofficial capacity, condensing classic works of individualism and composing an “embryonic” book called Handbook for Revolutionists.36 Read, Crane noted to Lane, shared the “opinion that I have had for a long time, that you are doing the most effective writing on the fundamentals of liberty.”37

A bond between them—spurred by Crane’s appreciation for Lane’s long, philosophical letters—swiftly flowered. Barely a year into their correspondence,

Crane confessed to Lane that “I frequently think of your fundamental teaching.”

Enthralled by the unwavering intensity of Lane’s thought, Crane in time embraced

33 With the exception of William Holtz’s biography, all existing scholarship on Lane has relied on an edited selection of Lane and Jasper Crane’s correspondence, published as The Lady and the Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane, ed. Roger Lea MacBride (Caldwell: Caxton Printers, 1973). Unfortunately, the collection is clumsily and inconsistently edited. Portions of letters are persistently omitted without a note, consistently distorting the meaning of the material. Scholars must refer to the original letters, which offer a far fuller and more accurate picture of their relationship. 34 The most complete study of Crane’s career and actions as a conservative philanthropist is Phillips- Fein, Invisible Hands, chp. 3, but Phillips-Fein, relying heavily on George Nash, omits any reference to Lane, who was the decisive influence on Crane’s thought and philanthropic activities after 1946. In arguing her case that Crane was influenced primarily by Hayek, Phillips-Fein refers to a series of letters from Crane’s close associate Loren B. Miller, who was instrumental in shaping the Volker Fund and the Earhart Foundation, another critical financier of post-war conservative intellectual thought. But Miller himself was an avid fan of Lane’s, writing to Crane in early 1946: “I wonder if you have read it [Discovery]? If you have not, I urge that you do so in all haste. We have at various times discussed the ‘bible’ for the cause of freedom. If this is not it, it is, in my opinion, by all odds the closest approach to it… I think Mrs. Lane shows us the way. I think she offers the basis around which people who similarly believe in freedom could rally.” Loren B. Miller to JC, January 2, 1946, in box 57, Crane papers. The best account of Miller’s influence is David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, “The Role of the Earhart Foundation in Liberal Free Market Support,” (April 2018), unpublished paper in author’s possession. 35 Crane played a pivotal role, for instance, in helping to establish Fred G. Clark’s American Economic Foundation. FGC to JC, June 14, 1940, in “American Economic Foundation,” box 1, Crane papers. 36 Leonard Read to J. Howard Pew, June 12, 1946, in box 9, Pew papers; RWL to Raoul E. Desvernine, January 24, 1944, in Correspondence 1916-1962, box 41, folder 16, George E. Sokolsky papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Paolo Alto, California. The work was never published. 37 JC to RWL, September 6, 1945, in box 3, folder 31, LP.

139 her as a kind of guru figure. In letter after letter, he praised Lane’s intelligence and acumen, sought her advice on philanthropic matters, and forwarded new individualist and conservative texts for her approval.38 In 1962, he wrote, of Lane’s magnum opus:

Whatever the reason, it seems to have taken almost eighteen hundred years

from the teachings of Jesus to establish a government fashioned after the

nature of man. Then it wasn’t appreciated. The meaning of liberty was

unknown and our heritage was almost wasted away. Then a book appeared

called The Discovery of Freedom. A new literature developed and has now

reached great and influential volume.39

In 1946, Crane and J. Howard Pew, a close friend of Crane’s and the other major conservative fundraiser of the period, asked Lane if she would write a new

“treatise on liberty,” with their backing. Lane, no doubt still conscious of the problems with Discovery, declined the offer, but told the pair that she would be happy to help the project in other ways.40 In her final piece of published philosophical work, Lane ghost wrote a speech for Crane, that was later reprinted in

Faith and Freedom, the magazine of Spiritual Mobilization. “Christianity vs.

Totalitarianism” (1950) crisply articulated the libertarian populist fusion of laissez faire economics, militant Christianity, and anti-communism that Lane had been refining since the mid-1930s, underlining the spiritual essence of the American

38 JC to RWL, January 22, 1946, in NSF, box 3, folder 31, LP; JC to RWL, September 8, 1947, in Ibid., 14; JC to Harry Earhart, September 5, 1947, cited in Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands, 28. 39 JC to RWL, September 20, 1962, in NSF, box 3, folder 44, LP. 40 Lane also maintained a lengthy and lively correspondence with Pew, who regarded Discovery, like Crane, as the “best book on freedom that has so far been written.” J. Howard Pew to George Wharton Pepper, August 13, 1948, in box 17, Pew papers.

140 experiment and preaching the world-revolutionary potential of the nation’s divinely- sanctioned political economy. The fusion of Lane and Crane’s beliefs was by this point almost total. Lane, Crane wrote, was the “principal contributor” to the essay, and Crane’s influence seems to have been confined to the text’s heightened emphasis on religious themes.

The essay was animated at heart by the same conflict between individualism and collectivism that had governed Lane’s earlier work, but for those terms had been substituted “Christianity” and the godless “totalitarianism” of the Soviet Union and the welfare state. The American form of government, Lane declared, was “preceded by Christian preaching and developed in conformity with religious truth.” It was the light of this truth that had struck down the great “pagan” lie that the individual was not free. In the New World, “man [was] seen to be,” Lane wrote, “not a particle of the mass, but an individual endowed with Divine life energy, self-controlling, knowing good and evil, choosing, thinking, planning managing, growing, loving, aspiring.”41

As a capstone to Lane’s career, “Christianity vs. Totalitarianism” was a fitting distillation of her mature vision, clarifying the distance she had travelled since the publication of “Credo” fourteen years earlier. That text, with its passionate invocation of the beauty and vitality of American history, had determined the contours of Lane’s career more than any other. But it was a younger person’s essay, possessed of a vibrant spirit and ardent love for country that struck the older Lane as facile.

“Christianity vs. Totalitarianism,” by contrast, was every bit the hardened product of a mind that had, in many ways, made peace with itself, that knew what it knew and felt little desire anymore to venture beyond its own borders. But the essay also

41 JC to RWL, July 15, 1946, in NSF, box 3, folder 31, LP; RWL to JC, June 9, 1946, in ibid.; JC to RWL, March 18, 1964, in NSF, box 3, folder 48, LP; JC, “Christianity vs. Totalitarianism,” Faith and Freedom 1 (May, 1950): 7-9. Crane’s author bio notes that “[h]e does not take full credit for its authorship.” Ibid., 6-8.

141 offered a closing vision of the world that would come, in the following years, to dominate on the right: America as beacon of Christian capitalism locked in final conflict with the forces of godless totalitarianism. “The conflict,” Lane wrote, sounding her favourite themes for the last time, “is world-wide. The struggle to establish and maintain institutions to safeguard human dignity and individual liberty is revolutionary. Entrenched power must be overturned, superstition cast out, the truth proclaimed. It is a missionary enterprise to the minds and hearts of all mankind.”42

42 For Lane’s later views on “Credo,” see RWL to Elsie Meyer, May 16, 1954, in NSF, box 9, folder 4, LP.

142 Conclusion

On a warm Los Angeles night, in late October, 1964, the actor and television star

Ronald Reagan appeared before a live studio audience to record a speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s floundering presidential campaign. Reagan had spent the previous decade travelling the country delivering motivational speeches—folksy sermons grounded in the philosophy of American individualism—to workers at

General Electric plants across the country. Sober and commanding before the lectern, supremely confident in speech and material, Reagan delivered the most explosive conservative call to arms of the twentieth-century. “We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind,” he declared, looking out across the audience:1

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on

Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no

other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most

unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of

this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or

whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little

intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we

can plan them ourselves.2

1 Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); “‘A Time for Choosing’ by Ronald Reagan,” filmed October 27, 1964, published online April 2, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBswFfh6AY. 2 Ibid.

144 Pausing for a moment, his soft eyes shining, Reagan continued. “You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down—up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.” Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, grandchild of the New Deal, represented the antithesis of the Founding Father’s vision of government, he argued. “They [the Founders] knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.” The speech concluded with perhaps the most famous line of

Reagan’s career, channelling the full force of the fear that had haunted the individualist right since 1933. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan declared, his voice rising gently. “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”3

On October 27, the night of the broadcast, almost three-thousand miles away in Danbury, Connecticut, Rose Wilder Lane watched, entranced, as the philosophy she had dedicated her life to unspooled from the television in forceful, elegant phrases. Electrified by Reagan’s combative tone and “old-fashioned patriotic rhetoric,” the seventy-eight year old Lane wrote to Crane: “Reagan attacked. He scored Communist influences in Washington… [H]e made it perfectly clear that the

‘welfare state’ IS chains and slavery.” Six “ardently pro-Johnson” neighbours who

3 Ibid.

145 saw the speech had been converted to the Goldwater cause on the spot, she reported jubilantly.4

Little wonder that Lane was dazzled by Reagan’s performance. For the speech—in its rhetoric, in its terminology, in its volatile mix of strident principle and populist fire—sounded uncannily like the work of Lane herself. This time, though, it was coming not from her own pen, but from the mouth of a poised and supremely gifted politician: libertarian populism made flesh.

In November, 1966, when Reagan was elected governor of California, Lane could barely contain her “wild enthusiasm,” writing to Crane that “what the voters of

California really wanted was just one honest candidate telling the truth. The landslide for Reagan would have been a national landslide for Goldwater if that admirable man had had the courage of his convictions.”5 The philosophy of libertarian populism, forged in the cauldron of the Roosevelt revolution and honed over three decades of painful political isolation, had found its champion at last.

Scholars who have looked for the intellectual origins of the conservatism of

Goldwater and Reagan, of Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, have focused almost exclusively on the work of Buckley and National Review, on the grassroots anti- communism of the John Birch Society, and, of course, on the influence of the two

European émigré economists. While these factors no doubt played a major role in the birth and evolution of conservative thought, this thesis has argued that it was

America’s potent, indigenous strain of anti-statist, individualist populism, radicalized by the triumph of New Deal, that embodied the primary intellectual matter out of which modern conservative ideology was formed.

4 RWL to JC, November 20, 1964, in NSF, box 3, folder 48, LP. 5 RWL to JC, November 18, 1966, in NSF, box 3, folder 50, LP.

146 While this thesis has begun the task of reclaiming the lost history of anti- statist individualism before and after the war, a great deal of work remains to be done. A large array of figures and organizations, some mentioned in this thesis, the majority not, helped shepherd individualism through the decades of its grinding exile from the political mainstream. Recent work has begun to rectify, in part, the existing holes in the scholarship, tracing the roots of individuals who straddled the tenuous line between the “old” and “new” right, but there exists, still, enormous gaps in our understanding.6 This thesis has endeavored—in a necessarily partial fashion—to go beyond the existing scholarly framework, highlighting the origins of the ideology of post-World War II conservatism in the political tumult of the 1930s, and in the work of the activists and theoreticians of a revived, populist individualism that would come to command, in time, the sympathies of a majority of their countrymen.

6 See, for instance, Hemmer, Messengers of the Right; Joseph W. Postell and Johnathan O'Neill, eds., Toward an American Conservatism: Constitutional Conservatism during the Progressive Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

147 List of Abbreviations

Individuals

FGC: Fred G. Clark GG: Garet Garrett JC: Jasper Crane RWL: Rose Wilder Lane VB: Virginia Brastow

Manuscript Collections

LP: Rose Wilder Lane papers HP: Herbert Hoover papers

Magazines and Newspapers

NYT: New York Times NECRB: National Economic Council Review of Books PC: Pittsburgh Courier SEP: Saturday Evening Post

148 Bibliography

Manuscript Collections

Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa:

Fred G. Clark papers Herbert Hoover papers Isabel Paterson papers Rose Wilder Lane papers William Holtz papers

University of Oregon Special Collections, Eugene, Oregon:

Howard E. Kershner papers James C. Ingebretsen papers Lucille Cardin Crain papers Merwin K. Hart papers William C. Mullendore papers

Foundation for Economic Education Archives, Atlanta, Georgia.

Garet Garrett papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

George E. Sokolsky papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Paolo Alto, California.

George Horace Lorimer family papers, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia.

George Horace Lorimer papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

George W. Armstrong papers, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, Arlington, Texas.

Gerald L. K. Smith papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Isaac Don Levine papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

J. Howard Pew papers, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.

James Oliver Brown Associates Records, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York City, New York.

149 James Ford Bell and family papers, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Jasper E. Crane papers, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.

Jouett Shouse Collection (American Liberty League Pamphlets). University of Kentucky Archives, Lexington, Kentucky. http://kdl.kyvl.org/catalog?f[source_s][]=Jouett%20Shouse%20Collection% 20(American%20Liberty%20League%20Pamphlets).

Ludwig von Mises papers, Buhl Library, Grove City College, Pennsylvania.

Norman Vincent Peale papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.

Roscoe Pound papers, Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Thomas Nixon Carver papers, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California.

Vervon Orval Watts papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Paolo Alto, California.

Government Documents

Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Herbert Hoover, 1930. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1976.

Part 4 of Hearings before the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities. Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1950.

Books, Articles and Related Sources

“‘A Time for Choosing’ by Ronald Reagan.” Filmed October 27, 1964. Published online April 2, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBswFfh6AY.

Adams, James Truslow. “The Question of the Hour.” The American Mercury, August, 1936.

_____. The Living Jefferson. New York: Scribner’s, 1936.

Adler, Les K., and Thomas G. Paterson. “Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930's-1950's.” The American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (April 1970): 1046-1064.

Allitt, Patrick. The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities Throughout American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

150 Alpers, Benjamin L. Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s-1950s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Arnold, Thurman W. The Folklore of Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937.

Babbitt, Irving. On Literature, Culture, and Religion. Edited by George A. Panichas. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2005.

Badger, Anthony. FDR: The First Hundred Days. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Baker, Paula. “Liberty and Property: Defending Classical Liberalism in the 1930s.” Unpublished paper in author’s possession.

Barnouw, Erik. The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States: Vol. 2—1933 to 1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Baruch, Bernard M. Baruch: The Public Years. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960.

Bastiat, Frédéric. Economic Harmonies. Translated by W. Hayden Boyers and edited by George B. Huszar. [1850] Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996.

_____. Social Fallacies. Translated by Patrick James Stirling. Santa Ana: Register Publishing Co., 1944.

_____. The Bastiat Collection. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007.

_____. The Law. Translated by Dean Russell. [1850]. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006.

Beard, Charles A. “The Myth of Rugged American Individualism.” Harpers Monthly Magazine, December, 1931.

Beito, David T. and Linda Royster Beito. “Selling Laissez-Faire Antiracism to the Black Masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the Pittsburgh Courier.” The Independent Review 15, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 279-294.

Beito, David T. Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009.

Berlet, Chip and Matthew N. Lyons. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.

151

Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Bogus, Carl T. Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Brennan, Jason and John Tomasi. “Classical Liberalism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy, edited by David Estlund, 115-32. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Brown, Robert Eldon. Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Buckley Jr., William F. “John Chamberlain, RIP.” National Review, May 1, 1995.

_____. God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” [1951] Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway Editions, 1986.

Burgin, Angus. The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Burk, Robert Fredrick. The Corporate State and the Broker State: The Du Ponts and American National Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Burns, Jennifer. “Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement.” Modern Intellectual History 1, vol. 3 (2004): 359-385.

_____. “In Retrospect: George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.” Reviews in American History 32, no. 3 (2004): 447- 462.

_____. “O Libertarian, Where Is Thy Sting?” Journal of Policy History 19, no. 4 (2007): 452-471.

_____. “The Three ‘Furies’ of Libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand.” Journal of American History 102, no. 3 (December, 2015): 746-774.

Caldwell, Bruce. Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Carleton, Don E. Red Scare: Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.

Chamberlain, John. A Life With the Printed Word. Regnery: Chicago, 1982.

Chamberlain, William Henry. Blueprint for World Conquest: As Outlined by the Communist International. Washington: Human Events, 1946.

_____. Confessions of an Individualist. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

152

Ciepley, David. Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Clark, Fred G. “Not By Bread Alone: The ‘Code of the People’ is Replacing the “Code of God.’” Speech before Society of Colonial Wars, New York, N.Y., December 19, 1951.

_____. How We Live: A Simple Dissection of the Economic Body. New York D. Van Nostrand, 1944.

_____. Magnificent Delusion. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940.

_____. The Crusaders Present: “Wake Up America,” A Series of Radio Broadcasts. New York: The Crusaders, n.d.

Cohn, Jan. Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

Cox, Stephen D. The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2004.

Crane, Jasper. “Christianity vs. Totalitarianism.” Faith and Freedom 1 (May, 1950): 7-9.

Critchlow, Donald. The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Crowther, Samuel. “Fighting For a Great Tradition: The Right To Live, To Work, and To Die As Free Men and Women.” Speech before New Jersey Taxpayers Association, Newark, N. J., December 9, 1939.

_____. “Planned Economy.” The Saturday Evening Post, July 7, 1934.

_____. “The American System.” The Saturday Evening Post, February 15, 1936.

_____. Prohibition and Prosperity. New York: John Day, 1930.

_____. Time to Inquire: How Can We Restore the Freedom, Opportunity, and Dignity of the Average Man? New York: John Day, 1942.

Crunden, Robert. The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock. Chicago: Regnery, 1964.

Davis, David Brion. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Desvernine, Raoul E. “The Creed of Americanism.” Notre Dame Law Review 17, no. 3 (1941): 216-226.

_____. Democratic Despotism. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1936.

153 Doenecke, Justus D. Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

Doherty, Brian. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007.

Eisner, Marc. Regulatory Politics in Transition. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Eow, Gregory T. “Fighting a New Deal: Intellectual Origins of the Reagan Revolution, 1932-1952.” Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2007.

Epstein, Benjamin R. and Arnold Forster. Report on the John Birch Society: 1966. New York, Vintage, 1966.

Evans, Thomas W. The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Faccarello, Gilbert and Philippe Steiner. “Religion and Political Economy in Early- Nineteenth-Century France.” History of Political Economy 40, no. 5 (December 2008): 26-51.

Farber, David. Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

_____. The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Flynn, John T. Country Squire in the White House. New York: Doubleday, 1940.

Fones-Wolf, Elizabeth. Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2006.

For American Independence and Freedom. New York: National Economic Council Inc., 1945.

Foster, William Z. Towards Soviet America. New York: Coward-McCann, 1932.

Fraser, Caroline. Priairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. New York: Metropolitan, 2017.

Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Garrett, Garet. “‘America Can’t Come Back.’” The Saturday Evening Post, January 23, 1932.

_____. “Economic Fascinations.” The Saturday Evening Post, March 9, 1935.

_____. “Insatiable Government,” The Saturday Evening Post, June 25, 1932.

154

_____. “Looking In the Ditch.” The Saturday Evening Post, March 14, 1931.

_____. “Saving Agriculture.” The Saturday Evening Post, July 6, 1935.

_____. “Security.” The Saturday Evening Post, September 19, 1936.

_____. “Socialism in the Red,” The Saturday Evening Post, June 16, 1934.

_____. “The Great Moral Disaster.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 18, 1934.

_____. “The House We Live In.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 3, 1935.

_____. “The Hundred Days.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 12, 1933.

_____. “Unemployment—In the Light of Happening.” The Saturday Evening Post, February 18, 1933.

_____. “Unemployment—What Is It?” The Saturday Evening Post, January 21, 1933.

_____. “Unemployment—What We Do About It.” The Saturday Evening Post, March 11, 1933.

_____. “We Overtake Europe.” The Saturday Evening Post, October 24, 1936.

_____. “When Wishes Think.” The Saturday Evening Post, February 23, 1935.

_____. A Bubble That Broke the World. Boston: Little, Brown, 1932.

_____. The American Omen. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1928.

_____. The American Story. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1955.

_____. The Cinder Buggy: A Fable in Iron and Steel. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1923.

_____. The People’s Pottage. Idaho: Caxton, 1953.

Goldstein, Robert Justin. Little ‘Red Scares’: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921-1946. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Gottfried, Paul. The Conservative Movement: Revised Edition. New York: Twayne, 1993.

Griffin, Stephen M. American Constitutionalism: From Theory to Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Hamburger, Phillip. “Natural Rights, Natural Law, and American Constitutions.” Yale Law Journal 102, no. 4 (1993): 907-960.

155 Hart, Merwin K. “Another Truth That is Self-Evident: Liberty, the Essential Foundation of American Life.” Speech before the Exchange Club, Utica, New York, July 6, 1944.

_____. America: Look at Spain. New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1939.

Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Hemmer, Nicole. Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Hill, Pamela Smith. Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2007.

Holtz, William. The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of RWL. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Hoover, Herbert. American Ideals Versus the New Deal. New York: Scribner’s, 1936.

_____. American Individualism. New York: Doubleday, 1922.

_____. The Challenge to Liberty. New York: Scribner’s, 1934.

_____. The Crusade Years, 1933–1955: Herbert Hoover’s Lost Memoir of the New Deal Era and Its Aftermath. Edited by George Nash. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2013.

_____. The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941. New York: Macmillan, 1952.

_____. The New Day: Campaign Speeches of Herbert Hoover, 1928. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1928.

Hunt, Louis. “The Origin and Scope of Hayek’s Idea of Spontaneous Order.” In Liberalism, Conservatism, and Hayek’s Idea of Spontaneous Order. Edited by Louis Hunt and Peter McNamara. New York: Palgrave, 2007, 43-64.

Iguchi, Haruo. Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1937-1953. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954.

Jones, Daniel Stedman. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.

Kalman, Laura. Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

156

Kamp, Jospeh P. The Fifth Column in Washington. New Haven: Constitutional Education League, Inc., 1940.

Katznelson, Ira. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: Liveright, 2013.

Kazin, Michael and Joseph A. McCartin, eds. Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Kennedy, David M. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Kershner, Howard Eldred. The Menace of Roosevelt and His Policies. New York: Greenberg Publishers, 1936.

Kimmage, Michael. The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Kruse, Kevin M. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Lane, Rose Wilder and Jasper Crane. The Lady and the Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane. Edited by Roger Lea MacBride. Caldwell: Caxton Printers, 1973.

Lane, Rose Wilder and Dorothy Thompson. Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane, Forty Years of Friendship: Letters 1921-1960. Edited by William Holtz. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

_____. “American Jews.” The American Mercury, December, 1938.

_____. “August in Viet Nam.” Woman’s Day, December, 1965.

_____. “Credo.” The Saturday Evening Post, March 7, 1936.

_____. “Long May Our Land Be Bright.” Cosmopolitan, August, 1939.

_____. “The American Revolution, 1939.” The Saturday Evening Post, January 7, 1939.

_____. “The Horse-and-Buggy Days.” The Saturday Evening Post, November 21, 1936.

_____. “Who’s Who—and Why.” The Saturday Evening Post, July 6, 1935.

_____. “Why I Am for the People’s Vote on War.” Liberty, April 1, 1939.

157

_____. “Woman’s Place is In the Home.” Ladies Home Journal 53 (October, 1946): 18-96.

_____. Free Land. [1938] 1984. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

_____. Give Me Liberty. Longmans, Green: New York, 1936.

_____. Henry Ford’s Own Story: How a Farmer Boy Rose to the Power that Goes with Many Millions, Yet Never Lost Touch with Humanity. E.O. Jones: New York, 1917.

_____. National Economic Council Review of Books 2-7, (October 1945-November 1950).

_____. Old Home Town. New York: Longmans, Green, 1935.

_____. The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority. New York: John Day, 1943.

_____. The Making of Herbert Hoover. New York: The Century Co., 1920.

_____. What Kind of America Are We Fighting For? Cleveland: American Economic Foundation, 1943.

Lawrence, David. Stumbling Into Socialism: And the Future of Our Political Parties. New York: D. Appleton, 1935.

Leroux, Robert. Political Economy and Liberalism in France: The Contributions of Frédéric Bastiat. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Leuchtenburg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940. New York: Harper & Rowe, 1963.

Levy, David M., Sandra J. Peart and Margaret Albert. “Economic Liberals as Quasi- Public Intellectuals: The Democratic Dimension.” Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 30, no. 2 (2012): 1–116.

Levy, David M., and Sandra J. Peart. “The Role of the Earhart Foundation in Liberal Free Market Support.” (April 2018). Unpublished paper in author’s possession.

Lippmann, Walter. “Today and Tomorrow.” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1933.

MacGilvray, Eric. The Invention of Market Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Manion, Clarence. Lessons in Liberty: A Study of God in Government. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1939.

158 Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. London: Routledge, 1936. Translated with preface and notes by Louis Wirth. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Mason, Robert. The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

May, George S. “Ultra-Conservative Thought in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1954.

McCloskey, Robert. American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise: 1865-1910. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951.

McCoy, Donald R. Landon of Kansas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966.

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009.

McIntire, Carl. The Rise of the Tyrant: Controlled Economy vs Private Enterprise. Collingswood: Christian Beacon Press, 1945.

McVicar, Michael J. Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

McWilliams, Carey. “Battle for the Clergy.” Nation, February 7, 1948.

Meyer, Frank. In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996.

Miles, Michael W. The Odyssey of the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by David Bromwich and George Kateb. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Mills, Ogden L. The Seventeen Million. New York: Macmillan, 1937.

_____. The Seventeen Million. New York: Macmillan, 1937.

_____. What of Tomorrow .New York: Macmillan, 1935.

Mirowski, Philip and Dieter Plehwe, eds. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Mises, Ludwig von. Human Action. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998.

Moser, John E. Right Turn: John T. Flynn and the Transformation of American Liberalism. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Namorato, Michael. Rexford G. Tugwell: A Biography. New York: Praeger, 1988.

159

Nash, George. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. New York: Basic Books, 1976.

Neilson, Francis. Control from the Top. New York: Putnam’s, 1933.

_____. Sociocratic Escapades. New York: Putnam’s, 1934.

Nock, Albert Jay. Free Speech and Plain Language. New York: William Morrow, 1937.

_____. Letters from Albert Jay Nock, 1924-1945. Edited by Frank W. Garrison. Caxton: Idaho, 1949

_____. National Economic Council Review of Books 1-2, (May 1943-April 1945).

_____. Our Enemy, the State. [1935] 1950. Reprint, Idaho: Caxton.

Noyes, C. Reinold. America’s Destiny. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935.

Paterson, Isabel. “Turns With a Bookworm.” New York Herald Tribune Books, May 28, 1933.

_____. Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson. Edited by Stephen Cox. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2015.

_____. The God of the Machine. New York: Putnam, 1943.

Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933-1939. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967.

Peart, Sandra J. and David M. Levy. “F. A. Hayek and the ‘Individualists.’” In F. A. Hayek and the Modern Economy, eds. Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, 29-56. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Pell, Richard. Radical Visions, American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Phillips-Fein, Kim. “Conservatism: A State of the Field.” The Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (2011): 723–743.

_____. Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

Postell, Joseph W. and O'Neill, Johnathan eds. Toward an American Conservatism: Constitutional Conservatism during the Progressive Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Powers, Richard Gid. Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998.

160

Queeny, Edgar M. The Spirit of Enterprise. New York: Scribner’s, 1943.

Raimondo, Justin. Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008.

Ramsey, Bruce. Unsanctioned Voice: Garet Garrett, Journalist of the Old Right. Idaho: Caxton, 2008.

Rand, Ayn. Letters of Ayn Rand. Edited by Michael S. Berliner. New York: Penguin, 1995.

Reagan, Patrick D. Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890-1943. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Ribuffo, Leo P. “The Discovery and Rediscovery of American Conservatism Broadly Conceived.” OAH Magazine of History 17, no. 2 (2003): 5-10.

Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Press Conference.” May 31, 1935, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15065.

Rodgers, Daniel T. “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept.” The Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (June 1992): 11-32.

Rosen, Eliot A. The Republican Party in the Age of Roosevelt: Sources of Anti- Government Conservatism in the United States. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.

Rothbard, Murray. The Betrayal of the American Right. [circa-1970] Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007.

Rotunda, Donald R. The Politics of Language: Liberalism as Word and Symbol. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986.

Roy, Ralph Lord. Apostles of Discord: A Study of Organized Bigotry and Disruption on the Fringes of Protestantism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953.

Ruotsila, Markku. Fighting Fundamentalist: Carl McIntire and the Politicization of American Fundamentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Rusher, William. The Rise of the Right. New York: National Review, 1993.

Rustgard, John. The Problem of Poverty. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936.

Ryant, Carl. Profit’s Prophet: Garet Garrett (1878-1954). Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1989.

Schlafly, Phyllis. A Choice Not an Echo. Alton, Ill.: Pere Marquette Press, 1964.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal, 1933- 1935. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

161

_____. The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956.

Schneider, Gregory. The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009.

Scotchie, Joseph. The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right. New Jersey: Transaction, 1999.

Sennholz, Mary. Leonard E. Read: Philosopher of Freedom. Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1993.

Smith, George H. The System of Liberty: Themes in the History of Classical Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Smith, Steven B. Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Sorokin, Pitirim. Contemporary Sociological Theories. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928.

Tugwell, R.G. “The Principle of Planning and the Institution of Laissez Faire.” The American Economic Review 22, no. 1, Supplement, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (1932): 75-92.

_____. Mr. Hoover’s Economic Policy. New York: John Day, 1932.

Udehn, Lars. Methodological Individualism: Background, History and Meaning. London: Routledge, 2001.

Watts, Steven. The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century. New York: Vintage, 2006.

Watts, Vervon Orval. “Social Inequality.” American Management Review 25, no. 5 (1936): 147-48.

_____. Do We Want Free Enterprise? Los Angeles: Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 1944.

_____. Why Are We So Prosperous? Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Company, 1938.

_____. Why Are We So Prosperous? Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Company, 1938.

Weaver, Richard M. Ideas Have Consequences. [1948] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

162 Wilson, Christopher P. “The Rhetoric of Consumption: Mass-Market Magazines and the Demise of the Gentle Reader, 1880-1920.” In The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American history, 1880-1980. Edited by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983, 39-64.

Wolfskill, George and Hudson, John A. All But The People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-39. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

Wolfskill, George. The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934-1940. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Woodside, Christine. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, and the Making of the Little House. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2016.

Zelizer, Julian E. “Reflections: Rethinking the History of American Conservatism.” Reviews in American History 38, no. 2 (2010): 367-392.

Zwolinski, Matt and Tomasi, John. A Brief History of Libertarianism. Unpublished manuscript in author’s possession.

163

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: McPhee-Browne, Alex

Title: Evangelists for freedom: libertarian populism and the intellectual origins of modern conservatism, 1930-1950

Date: 2018

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/213890

File Description: Evangelists for Freedom: Libertarian Populism and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Conservatism, 1930-1950

Terms and Conditions: Terms and Conditions: Copyright in works deposited in Minerva Access is retained by the copyright owner. The work may not be altered without permission from the copyright owner. Readers may only download, print and save electronic copies of whole works for their own personal non-commercial use. Any use that exceeds these limits requires permission from the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from these works.