I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

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CHARLES W. BAIRD
MY JOURNEY TOWARD LIBERTARIANISM
I didn’t know it at the time, but my first step toward libertarianism was taken during
a violent labor union strike, circa 1950, against the factory that employed my father. I
grew up in a classic company town, Whitinsville, Massachusetts. Dad’s employer, Whitin
Machine Works, employed something like 80 percent of the workers in the town, and
we lived in a company-owned tenement. The union that, by force of law, represented
both willing and unwilling factory workers, decided to call a strike. My father and his
older brother were members of the union only because they had to be as a condition of
employment by the factory. They and several other workers were opposed to the strike
and decided to attempt to cross the picket line. The town police were there ostensibly to
keep the peace, but they did not. My father and my uncle, and other workers, were beaten.
Union thugs threatened all the “scabs” with violence against their families if they continued
not to support the strike. Through violence and threats of violence by the unionists
no one made it across the picket line, and the police did nothing. Worse, they blamed
the would-be line crossers for inciting the unionists to violence. This puzzled me because
my government school teachers taught me that the police were supposed to prevent, or
at least punish, the private use of force and violence. I asked my father why the police
sided with the strikers against employees who wanted to work. He said it was because of
a federal law, the Wagner Act, which gave special privileges to people who ran labor
unions. This was the first time, in my memory, that I realized that government laws
could be stupid, even unjust. I discovered my civics teacher was wrong: laws are not
always passed in the interest of the general public. A year later in school my class was
discussing the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. When it came to the bit about “a more
perfect union” I raised my hand and asked the teacher why the founders supported bad
organizations like unions. The son of the local union president was a classmate. He
glowered at me and later denied the legitimacy of my birth. But I was bigger than he, so
it went no further.
That experience is the source of my life-long opposition to compulsory unionism. But
throughout high school I was innocent of all the other ways that the law can be, in the
words of Dickens, “a ass [sic].” My government school teachers did what they were paid to
do: they convinced me that most of what government does is in the public interest, and
those who enter “public service” are noble. Some things never change.
I graduated high school in 1956 and spent one successful, and apolitical, year as a
freshman at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In a vain (and what now seems