I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Anne Wortham 381
have understood Miss Rand’s books, I am sure you will understand the contradiction.”
I did understand, and attempted to resign from the Peace Corps, but was told that if I
left before the end of my tour, I would have to finance my return to the U.S. I had no
choice but to stay.
Despite the manager’s castigation, I ordered pamphlets by Rand, hardbacks of her 4
novels, For the New Intellectual, The Virtue of Selfishness, NBI’s Objectivist Newsletter, Ludwig
von Mises’s Anti-Capitalist Mentality, John Herman Randall’s Aristotle, Brand Blanshard’s
Reason and Analysis, and others. With these works, I began an adventure of intellectual
expansion that continues to this day. I remember reading Anthem and being brought to
tears by a mixture of joyous confirmation and indignation and sadness for the state of the
world. The empirical evidence of John Galt’s speech in Atlas and Mises’s Anti-Capitalistic
Mentality was all around me; I had but to look out my window and see the consequences
of collectivism in the lives of Tanzanian peasants.
A very important ingredient, in the form of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative,
was also thrown into my intellectual cauldron. The book was in our Peace Corps-issued
library, and I became interested in it when I read Rand’s endorsement of Goldwater’s presidential
candidacy in the Objectivist Newsletter. His criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill,
and Rand’s essays, “Collectivized Rights” and “Man’s Rights” spoke as clearly to me as the
first paragraphs of The Fountainhead had. Rand’s natural law defense of individual rights
confirmed my misgivings about the civil rights movement and gave me the language of
freedom and justice with which to integrate my questions about civil rights policy into a
coherent perspective.
It is difficult to explain what it meant to be able to conceptualize at last what I had
been staring at both internally and externally since my college days! I felt the glorious and
ennobling torment of self-liberation that Frederick Douglass said he knew upon teaching
himself to read. He said he sometimes felt knowledge to be a curse rather than a blessing,
and almost envied his fellow-slaves for their stupidity. Now that he was free from ignorance,
his soul was ever wakeful and he could not cease thinking of his condition. Douglass
eventually fled his enslavement, but fortunately, I had only to extract my mind from the
perplexities of contradictions and false premises.
Let me pause to note that the roots of my quandary over civil rights issues and my
affinity for the analyses of Rand and Mises were located in the circumstances of my family
background and the teachings of my father. Born in 1941, I was the first of five children
born to Bernice and Johnny Wortham, a high-school educated housewife who had studied
Latin in school and wrote religious poetry, and a self-taught laborer who later became a
self-employed traveling salesman and self-ordained minister. Our family was not poor
because, despite rationing during the war, my father always had a job, and the postwar
economy was fairly good, so an industrious family could manage quite well. My Mom died
in 1952 at age 32 when I was almost 11 years old. Fearing that my 35-year-old father would
saddle us with a stepmother, I insisted that I could help him take care of my sister and three
brothers, the youngest of whom was 3 years old. My confidence came from the fact that
my mother had taught me homemaking skills that women of that time were expected to
teach their daughters. My Dad’s great gift to me was that he believed me, so I became the