I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

310 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
positions as representatives of a State whose legitimacy was suddenly being seriously questioned
by tens of thousands of ordinary Americans. Some of the younger officers even seemed as if
they would have liked to shed their uniforms and join us. At the rally itself the greatest response
from the crowd occurred when the clownish but charismatic Abbie Hoffman pointed to the
John Hancock building looming over the Commons and roared, “John Hancock wasn’t an
insurance salesman, he was a f-----g revolutionary.”
The ability of charismatic leaders to imbue ordinary middle-class Americans with a
radical anti-state mentality by demonstrating how specific government policies exploited
and victimized them and disrupted their families and communities was actually brought
home to me a year earlier when I attended a rally for George Wallace at the same Boston
Commons in the waning days of the Presidential campaign of 1968. Campaigning on an
anti-establishment third party ticket Wallace roused the crowd by hammering on the
absurdity of the despotic and unconstitutional judicial mandate that prevented white and
black students in Boston from attending schools near their homes and coercively bused
them to schools in strange and distant, and sometimes dangerous, neighborhoods. At the
end of his talk the feisty Wallace waded into the dispersing crowd to shake hands and
engage a gaggle of leftist student hecklers in good-natured repartee. I was standing a few
feet away from Wallace when he jovially suggested to one of the students, “Why don’t you
bring your sandal over here, hippie, and I’ll autograph it for ya.” After the laughter abated
Wallace surprised and disarmed his erstwhile hecklers by standing among them and amiably
responding to their questions and criticisms.
I was deeply impressed by these two episodes, although at the time I could not have
articulated the reasons why, let alone recognized their general implications for a coherent
libertarian strategy of political change. It was only many years later that I was enlightened on
this matter by Murray Rothbard’s analysis of the Joe McCarthy phenomenon of the early
1950s. Rothbard delighted in standing the established view of McCarthy on its head. The
entire political and academic establishment, from New Deal/Truman Democrats to Eisenhower
Republicans, from moderate liberals to moderate conservatives, concurred in the necessity of
waging a Cold War to contain the alleged Soviet conspiracy to take over the so-called “Free
World” and therefore were in explicit agreement with McCarthy’s ultimate goals. What they
detested, they said, was McCarthy’s means. Rothbard, in sharp contrast, never believed that
the Soviet Union, albeit a bloody and repressive dictatorship, had the ability or intention of
taking over the West. Rather he argued that the Cold War was a ruse devised by the American
ruling elite to justify the continuation and expansion of the massive, tax-consuming, welfarewarfare
state built up during World War II at home and to rationalize postwar U.S. imperialist
ambitions for assorted military interventions abroad. While dismissing McCarthy’s ridiculous
and contrived Cold War ideology—which, to repeat, he shared with most of his respectable
establishment detractors—Rothbard had a profound appreciation for the means McCarthy
employed. According to Rothbard (The Irrepressible Rothbard, 2000, p. 13):
The unique and glorious thing about McCarthy was not his goals or his
ideology, but precisely his radical, populist means. For McCarthy was
able, for a few years, to short-circuit the intense opposition of all the