I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

290 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
In intellectual circles, you could find conservatives who would write passionate articles
and give riveting speeches on the glories of free enterprise. But then the other shoe would
drop. Nixon is the answer, they said, because at least he has his priorities straight: before
restoring free enterprise at home, the U.S. needed to be a world empire to defeat the Russian
army. The Russian army was defeated, or rather fell under its own weight, and all we’re left
with is another evil empire. We’re still waiting for free enterprise.
Doherty: How did you get involved with Arlington House? When did Arlington House
begin, who financed it, what was its philosophy, and why did it die?
Rockwell: In the early 1930s, most libertarian literature was published by mainstream
houses. There wasn’t much of it, but our ideas did get a hearing. Hazlitt was published in
The Nation and the American Century, Garrett appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and
Nock was in the Atlantic, while the Southern Agrarians were at the height of the literary
profession and Mencken had the American Mercury. American Austrian economists like
Benjamin Anderson and Frank Fetter had very high profiles in academia and business. And
there was Colonel McCormick’s Chicago Tribune.
But a decade of the Depression and the New Deal killed off most mainstream outlets.
Opposing the federal government became politically incorrect, and publishers didn’t want
to take the risk of calling down the price-control police or being accused of sedition. The
generation that opposed the New Deal’s welfare-warfare state did not reproduce itself on
any serious scale, and those who remained couldn’t get a hearing.
After Roosevelt tricked the Japanese into firing the first shot, the America First
Committee, which had been a major vehicle for the resistance, shut down, and after the
war, dissident, pro-liberty publishing houses survived only in a handful of places.
Our professors had mostly retired, and our journalists were reduced to the status of
pamphleteers. The left enjoyed ridiculing libertarian political commentary because it was so
unmainstream, and they were able to point to the existence of all these cranky pamphlets to
prove it wasn’t serious material. Of course, Trotskyite pamphlets were never similarly attacked.
The only real publishers out there were Caxton, Regnery, and Devin-Adair, which did
heroic work, but their distribution channels were limited, and in the latter case, some of
the material cranky and tainted. Think about it: it was something of a miracle that Mises’s
books were able to come to print at Yale University. But we should appreciate the fact that
there was massive internal and external resistance to each one.
In the middle 50s, as a consequence of Russell Kirk’s book, The Conservative Mind,
the word “conservative” came to describe anyone who was a non-socialist skeptic of federal
policy. I was unhappy with the word, because I was a conscious disciple of the pre-war
Nock-Mencken-libertarian school. There was a fundamental difference between the Old
and New Right of Kirk’s making. Kirk’s book celebrated some good writers and statesmen.
But he distorted what it was that drove them, which was not the “politics of prudence” but
implacable moral and philosophical conviction. The main thrust of Kirk’s influence, I
believe, was to turn the right against its best pre-war instincts.
In Kirk’s hands, conservatism became a posture, a demeanor, a mannerism. In
practice, it asked nothing more of people than to acquire a classical education, sniff at