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Ward, David Westrate, Brian J. Wilton THE BETRAYAL OF THE AMERICAN RIGHT MURRAY N. ROTHBARD EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS E. WOODS, JR. Ludwig von Mises Institute AUBURN, ALABAMA Copyright © 2007 Ludwig von Mises Institute All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any man- ner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information write the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, Alabama 36832 U.S.A.; mises.org. ISBN: 978-1-933550-13-8 To the memory of Howard Homan Buffett, Frank Chodorov, and the Old Right CONTENTS Introduction by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. ix Preface to the 1991 Revision by Murray N. Rothbard . xxi 1. Two Rights, Old and New . 1 2. Origins of the Old Right I: Early Individualism . 3 3. Origins of the Old Right II: The Tory Anarchism of Mencken and Nock . 9 4. The New Deal and the Emergence of the Old Right . 23 5. Isolationism and the Foreign New Deal . 33 6. World War II: The Nadir . 53 7. The Postwar Renaissance I: Libertarianism . 65 8. The Postwar Renaissance II: Politics and Foreign Policy . 85 9. The Postwar Renaissance III: Libertarians and Foreign Policy . 103 10. The Postwar Renaissance IV: Swansong of the Old Right . 117 11. Decline of the Old Right . 127 12. National Review and the Triumph of the New Right . 147 13. The Early 1960s: From Right to Left . 173 14. The Later 1960s: The New Left . 191 Bibliography . 207 Index . 217 vii INTRODUCTION t is a cliché of publishing to observe, when a book appears before the public years after it was first written, that it is more I relevant now than ever. But it is difficult to think of how else The Betrayal of the American Right can be described. Murray N. Rothbard chronicles the emergence of an American right wing that gave lip service to free-market principles and “limited govern- ment,” but whose first priority, for which it was willing to sacrifice anything else, was military interventionism around the world. That sounds familiar, to be sure, but as Rothbard shows, it is nei- ther recent nor anomalous. It goes back to the very beginnings of the organized conservative movement in the 1950s. Since this book is likely to reach beyond Rothbard’s traditional audience, an initial word about the author is in order. Murray N. Rothbard was a scholar and polymath of such extraordinary pro- ductivity as almost to defy belief. His Man, Economy, and State, a 1,000-page treatise on economic principles, was one of the great contributions to the so-called Austrian School of economics. For a New Liberty became the standard libertarian manifesto. In The Ethics of Liberty Rothbard set out the philosophical implications of the idea of self-ownership. He told the story of colonial America in his four-volume Conceived in Liberty. His America’s Great Depres- sion, now in a fifth edition, used the explanatory power of the Aus- trian theory of the business cycle to show that monetary interven- tionism, rather than “capitalism,” was to blame for that catastro- phe. He also wrote a great many groundbreaking articles. To name just two: “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Eco- nomics” laid out a distinctly Austrian approach to the contentious area of welfare economics, and “Law, Property Rights, and Air ix x The Betrayal of the American Right Pollution” may be the best brief Austrian contribution to the study of law and economics. In addition to his 25 books and three thou- sand articles, which spanned several disciplines, Rothbard also taught economics, edited two academic journals and several popu- lar periodicals, wrote movie reviews, and carried on a mountain of correspondence with a diverse array of American intellectuals. Even this overview of Rothbard’s work cannot do justice to his legendary productivity. But we learn a great deal about Murray N. Rothbard from a simple fact: more Rothbard books have appeared since his death than most college professors publish in a lifetime. Two volumes of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, which Rothbard had been working on at the time of his death, were released in 1995. The Logic of Action (1997) consisted of a thousand pages of Rothbard’s scholarly articles, now conve- niently available for the general public. A History of Money and Banking in the United States (2002) brought together much of Rothbard’s important work in monetary history, much of which had previously been available only in scholarly journals or as chap- ters in books long out of print. It may as well have been a brand new Rothbard book. It wasn’t only Rothbard’s scholarly work that was assembled into handsome volumes and made available for general consump- tion; his popular writing began to appear in new collections as well. Making Economic Sense (1995) collected a hundred of Roth- bard’s shorter economic articles in a book that can instruct and entertain beginner and specialist alike. A 20,000-word article Rothbard had written for a small-circulation investment newslet- ter became the 1995 Center for Libertarian Studies monograph Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy. The Irrepressible Rothbard (2000) assembled some of Rothbard’s contributions to the Rothbard-Rockwell Report of the 1990s, where we encounter the master at his funniest and, at times, his most scathing. The present book, however, consists of material being made available to the public for the very first time. The manuscript was written in the 1970s, as Rothbard points out in the Preface, and went through periodic edits and additions over the years as publication opportunities arose. Each time, though, unforeseen circumstances Introduction xi interfered with the book’s release, and so it is finally appearing only now, under the Mises Institute’s imprint. To be sure, Rothbard had written published articles on the Old Right: in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Continuum, and the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, among other venues. But here he tells the full story, from the point of view of someone who was not only a witness to these events but also an important participant. What was this Old Right, anyway? Rothbard describes it as a diverse band of opponents of the New Deal at home and interven- tionism abroad. More a loose coalition than a self-conscious “movement,” the Old Right drew inspiration from the likes of H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock, and featured such writers, thinkers, and journalists as Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Felix Morley, and the Chicago Tri- bune’s Colonel Robert McCormick. They did not describe or think of themselves as conservatives: they wanted to repeal and over- throw, not conserve. A 1992 Rothbard retrospective on the Old Right drew out its principles: If we know what the Old Right was against, what were they for? In general terms, they were for a restoration of the lib- erty of the Old Republic, of a government strictly limited to the defense of the rights of private property. In the concrete, as in the case of any broad coalition, there were differences of opinion within this overall framework. But we can boil down those differences to this question: how much of existing gov- ernment would you repeal? How far would you roll govern- ment back? The minimum demand which almost all Old Rightists agreed on, which virtually defined the Old Right, was total abolition of the New Deal, the whole kit and kaboodle of the welfare state, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, going off gold in 1933, and all the rest.