I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

242 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
front, the National Book Foundation, the Volker Fund gave away libertarian books, such
as Böhm-Bawerk’s, to college libraries. Writing book reviews for the Fund were Murray
Rothbard and Rose Wilder Lane, although I did not know this at the time.
Harper was a master recruiter. He was a trained economist, a former professor at Cornell
University, along with W.M. “Charlie” Curtiss. Both of them had joined FEE in its first
year, 1946. One of their students was Paul Poirot, who was became editor of The Freeman.
It can be said that academic libertarianism was born at Cornell, though not nurtured there.
Harper wrote a few books, most notably, Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery, but his main
contribution to libertarianism was his systematic recruiting of young scholars. In 1961, he
was publishing the William Volker Fund series of books, most notably Man, Economy, and
State, which he sent me in the fall of 1962. Also in the series was Israel Kirzner’s Ph.D.
dissertation, The Economic Point of View (1960), which was a rarity: a Ph.D. dissertation
worth reading.
In the spring of 1962, I attended a one-week evening seminar given by Mises. It was
sponsored by Andrew Joseph Galambos, one of the oddest characters in the shadows of
libertarian history. He believed that all original articulated ideas possess automatic copyright,
which is permanent, and no one has the right to quote someone else’s ideas without paying
a royalty to the originator or his heirs. Galambos was influential in shaping Harry Browne’s
thinking, as Browne has discussed in a 1997 essay. The seminar was held during the period
when Human Action was out of print. Yale University Press was in the process of typesetting
the monstrosity that appeared in 1963, the New Revised Edition. (Henry Hazlitt, “The
Mangling of a Masterpiece,” National Review, May 5, 1964.)
In the summer of 1962, I attended a two-week seminar sponsored by the Intercollegiate
Society of Individualists—now called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—at St. Mary’s
College in California. I had been on the I.S.I. mailing list for about two years. I read The
Intercollegiate Review. During that seminar, I listened to Hans Sennholz on economics, and
I slept through Francis Graham Wilson’s Socratic monologues on political theory. I heard
Leo Paul de Alvarez on political theory. I remember nothing about his lectures, but I’m
sure they were suitably arcane. He was a Straussian. Rousas John Rushdoony lectured for
two weeks on what became This Independent Republic (1964). I was so impressed that I
married his daughter—a decade later.
What I did not recognize at the time was that there had been a change of administration
at the Volker Fund. The director, Harold Luhnow, who was Volker’s nephew, had fired
Harper and had brought in Ivan Bierly, another ex-FEE senior staffer, and also a Cornell
Ph.D. Bierly then hired Rushdoony. He also hired the strange and erratic David Hoggan
(HOEgun), a Harvard Ph.D. and a defender of Hitler’s foreign policy (The Enforced War).
When in his cups, he was a defender of Hitler’s domestic policies, too. He had already
written the manuscript for his anonymously published book, The Myth of the Six Million,
published years later. There have been many strange figures in the conservative movement,
but when it comes to academic types, Hoggan was the gold medalist in weird. He could
provide footnotes, not all of them faked, in eight languages. There was nothing libertarian
about him. The other major figure on the staff was W.T. Couch, a former Collier’s Encyclopedia
editor, and a man who rarely bathed. There was nothing libertarian about him, either. The