My Years with Ludwig von Mises.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

States. We are today practically a two-industry community-ships
and planes.... I think that no citizen group in America is more
keenly aware of the crisis of free enterprise than our group in Los
Angeles. . . . There is one factor to which your attention should be
definitely drawn. Very probably, you are already aware of the differences
in the thinking of business and industrial men in San Francisco
and Los Angeles. San Francisco has been a closed-up shop city
for many, many years. Business executives up there have grown accustomed
to this idea. They have (we in Los Angeles think) a defeatistattitude.
They are apparently making very little attempt to throw
off any of the shackles of the closed shop. In Los Angeles, on the
other hand, our executives have seen Los Angeles develop from a
second-rate city to a real power. They attribute, and I agree with
them, that much of this industrial growth has been due to the fact
that Los Angeles has, during this long period of years been able to
maintain open-shop conditions. I bring this difference in these two
cities to your attention to remind you of the different thinking which
is being done in Los Angeles and in our sister city to the north.
For some time Lu had been in correspondence with Leonard
Read, then general manager of the Chamber of Commerce in Los
Angeles. In his first letter, dated June 4, 1943, Read invited Lu fOJ
a "series of lectures on behalf of free, competitive enterprise," and
he sent Lu a pamphlet published by the Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce. Lu answered on June 12:
The arena in which the fate of the West will be decided is neither
the conference rooms of the diplomats, nor the offices of the bureaucrats,
not the capitol in Washington, not the election campaigns. The
only thing which really matters is the outcome of the intellectual
combat betw,een the supporters of socialism and those of capitalism.
The masses, those millions of voters who are supreme in democracy,
have to learn that they are deluded by spurious doctrines and that
only market society and free enterprise can bring them what they
want: prosperity. But in order to persuade the crowd, you have first to
convince the elite, the intellectuals and the businessmen themselves.
He agreed to give some lectures, and Read proposed the date of
October 20, 1943, having heard that Lu would be in California
around that time. He also invited Lu for dinner at his home to meet
a group of outstanding men, among them Lu's good friend Benjamin
M. Anderson.
On Monday, October 16, Lu arrived in Los Angeles, and for the
next two days he was the guest of R. C. Hoiles, publisher of the
Santa Anna'Register. During these two days he spoke twice, once
at a forum 'lecture, sponsored by the Register, about "The Causes
of War," and once at the Santa Anna Rotary Club, about "Credit
Expansion and Depression." It was on October 18, 1943, that Lu
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