I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

190 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
studies of the medieval canonists’ writings on the permissibility of interest for risk, including
repayment in a different coinage. De Roover was a close associate of Joseph Schumpeter,
and Schumpeter’s treatment of medieval and early modern economists reflects de Roover’s
influence. Murray Rothbard, Joe Peden, and I spent occasional hours with de Roover over
beer after the Mises dinner when de Roover came to New York City from Boston, and later
when he joined Brooklyn College.
At Fordham University graduate school I built on the foundations I had been given at
Georgetown. The Fordham graduate history department had been created in the 1930s
with Hilaire Belloc as a visiting lecturer and with senior professors from NYU, Pennsylvania,
and Harvard. Then there had come the harvest of scholars who were refugees from Europe.
There is nothing today comparable to the education that I received. The history professors
were hardly-achievable models. I was examined in my final comprehensive exam in three
fields of my major of modern European history: history of international relations, French
history, and East-Central Europe, and in two minor fields: medieval history and American
diplomatic history. Fordham professors included: Ross J.S. Hoffman (English history during
the American Revolution and history of international relations); A. Paul Levack (French
history) (Hoffman and Levack were the editors of Burke’s Politics) which revived Burke
studies); Oskar Halecki (of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg Monarchy,
and the Versailles Conference; he had attended Jagiellonian University and had been a dean
at the University of Warsaw); Gerhard Ladner (medieval reform movements; he came from
Austria and won the 1959 Haskins Gold Medal for his Harvard University book The Idea
of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers); Fr. Vincent
Hopkins, S.J., (American history; he wrote the book Dred Scott’s Case on the 1857 Dred
Scott Decision). I took four year-long seminars with Halecki, as well as courses. Halecki
introduced me to conservative historian John Lukacs
At the beginning of 1958 Ayn Rand, whom Murray Rothbard had known some years
earlier, invited him to bring his friends to meet her and her friends following the publication
of Atlas Shrugged. Since my graduate studies at Fordham often involved spending all day
at the New York Public Library before going to late afternoon class, I was not suited to her
late hours. Famously, I once fell asleep at three a.m. while she was speaking. Since I was a
theist I did not continue to join the meetings. A crisis emerged in late spring. Nathan
Brandon had sought to convince Murray’s wife, Joey, on atheism, which she did not accept.
Murray was told he must divorce his theist wife, which he declined to do.
At that point Murray was expelled from the “Randian Collective” on the grounds that
his new article, “The Mantle of Science,” failed to footnote Ayn Rand as his source for the
concept of reason. Murray had cited scholarly books on rational philosophy which predated
Ayn Rand’s writings, not to mention that he was a graduate of Columbia College’s famous
Civilization course taught by some world famous philosophers. Ralph Raico and I were
called upon on July 4, 1958 to repudiate Murray, which we did not. (Murray had written
the article for a William Volker Fund conference at Sea Island, Georgia.)
In late summer of 1958 Murray and I were invited to be guests at the first general
meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in the U.S., held at Princeton University Graduate
College. Since I was the youngest guest, Jasper Crane, a vice-president of DuPont and