I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

194 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
Louis M. Spadaro, the retired dean of the Fordham University Graduate School of
Business, and former chairman of the Fordham Economics Department, where Jerry
O’Driscoll and Mario Rizzo were students.
In November, 1976 a Libertarian Scholars’ Conference was held at the Waldorf-Astoria
Hotel in New York City through the generosity of the Liberty Fund (in 1977, it was held
at Princeton University, and earlier at the Williams College Club in New York City). It was
organized by Walter Grinder, who had studied with Mises and Kirzner at NYU, with the
aid of Andrea Millen Rich. I had written an extensive review in the Libertarian Review of
Books of Robert Nisbet’s The Twilight of Authority, which I consider his best book, and at
the conference I presented an analysis and Nisbet commented. (I had corresponded with
Nisbet when he had written an important article in the Wall Street Journal on the U.S.
presidency’s becoming like Roman imperialism; the Journal published my response noting
that Nisbet’s critique paralleled that of Robert A. Taft.) In 1977 I directed a long-planned
IHS conference at Fordham Lincoln Center on The Politicization of Society (later published
by the Liberty Fund), which was a discussion by scholars of their previously published essay,
in which Robert Nisbet, John Lukacs, Giovanni Sartori, Jonathan Hughes, Murray Rothbard,
among others, participated.
In January, 1973 Howard Adelson was deposed as chairman of the CCNY history
department by the left and I was immediately not reappointed by the acting chair, who was
a labor historian who felt I did not limit myself to one field. Immediately the executive
committee of the history department reversed the decision, as they highly appreciated my
scholarship. I happened to be at the Columbia University Faculty Club for a Legal and
Political Thought seminar when the senior CCNY history faculty was hosting a dinner for
the future chairman of the CCNY history department, Herbert Gutman of the University
of Rochester. The new CCNY president was a physicist from the University of Rochester
(CCNY had the Science Ph.D. school of CUNY), and he had selected Gutman. In the club
lobby I greeted a couple of my colleagues, when Gutman asked who I was, and, when told,
he greeted me on behalf of Eugene Genovese (who had told Gutman that I was a very valuable
historian on the CCNY faculty). It made some colleagues unhappy, especially as
Gutman put me on committees alongside the more senior historians, including the committee
to revise long-standing history requirements, which was chaired by the graduate
dean, Oscar Zeichner, a historian of the Connecticut federalists.
Herbert Gutman’s important book The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom was highly
praised as showing that neither slavery nor freedom destroyed the Black family (Thomas
Sowell, in a review in Fortune magazine, noted that Gutman ended with the 1925 census,
and said the destruction of the Black family was due to the New Deal welfare system).
Gutman was chairman of the New York Council for the Humanities, and recommended
me to the Rockefeller Foundation to be director of a proposed Center for Cultural Diversity.
The development of this center was a project of Michael Novak as director of Humanities
at the Rockefeller Foundation following his working with R. Sargent Shriver’s 1972 vicepresidential
campaign and the publication of Novak’s Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. The
Center for Cultural Diversity would work with scholars on research and curriculum development
in the City University of New York on European-American Ethnic histories.