I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Leonard P. Liggio 193
I was appointed to the history faculty of the City College of New York (CCNY) in
1968 by two European refugee historians (Thomas Goldstein, from Austria, and Herbert
Strauss, from Bavaria) to teach American history (they knew I had worked on Conceived
in Liberty) because they trusted my European history credentials. Soon I was teaching
Modern European history. In using Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians as a textbook I
told the students that Hayek was a radical opposing feudalism and mercantilism. There
were other European scholars in the CCNY history faculty, of which the department chairmen
were Howard Adelson (Byzantine gold coinage and medieval Christian imagery) and
Herbert Gutman (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976), favorably
reviewed by T. Sowell in Fortune).
There were a few occasions at which I met with Mises in his last years. Murray and
Joey Rothbard would have the Miseses to dinner on occasion. The last time was a few days
after Christmas in December, 1972. Mises was in good form and talked about German
history, Bismarck, etc. Mises died at the end of September, 1973 and I drove the Rothbards
to the cemetery in Hawthorne, New York where Mises was buried.
I presented a paper at a National Endowment for the Humanities conference on Racism
at Tuskegee Institute on “The English Origins of Early American Racism.” It was published
in the Radical History Review. It had gained interest from Forrest McDonald and Eugene
Genovese, with whom I was in correspondence. I had been directing the IHS programs in
History and in Social Theory (these were alongside the IHS programs in Law, in Economics,
and in Private Education). In 1973 I organized a seminar for the IHS on U.S. economic
history at Cornell University with Forrest McDonald and Murray Rothbard as the lecturers
to young faculty and grad students. On the return, I drove Ken Templeton and R.J. Smith
to Woodstock, New York to call on Mrs. Frank Meyer following his death.
In the summer of 1974 I was a Liberty Fund fellow at the IHS in Menlo Park, California
to prepare a research agenda on economic history for them. John Blundell had come to the
IHS for the summer from England after attending the first Austrian economics conference
at South Royalton, Vermont. In November, 1974 I organized a weekend series of lectures
at Fordham Lincoln Center by Max Hartwell (visiting at the University of Virginia) on the
Industrial Revolution, with the cooperation of the graduate business dean, Louis M. Spadaro
(who had done his Ph.D. at NYU with Mises).
In April, 1975 I was assigned by the Liberty Fund to meet Professor and Mrs. Hayek
at JFK Airport (Professor Ludwig Lachmann, who was then a visiting professor at NYU,
accompanied me in order to speak in German with Mrs. Hayek). Hayek, who had won
the 1974 Nobel Prize, spoke at NYU and in Washington he appeared on Meet The Press.
He went to California as a Liberty Fund scholar at the IHS. His term as Liberty Fund
scholar overlapped with the Liberty Fund summer seminar in economic history, which
I directed. After Hayek’s departure, Professor Gunter Smolders of the University of
Cologne was the visiting scholar. In addition to the young historians, the economists
included: Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Genie and Gary Short, Richard Ebeling, and Sudha
Shenoy. Again, in the summer of 1976 I was director of the Liberty Fund summer seminar
in diplomatic history. In 1977 I was moving to San Francisco to join the Cato Institute,
and the Liberty Fund summer seminar was directed by the new president of the IHS,