WEBVTT NOTE Joan Kennedy Taylor (1926—2005) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:19.000 Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s, 3 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:24.000 when she was a student at the Nathaniel Brandon Institute in New York City. 4 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:29.000 As a student of objectivism, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand, 5 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:34.800 A non-aggression principle, natural rights, a free market, and a state so minimal that 6 00:00:34.800 --> 00:00:41.040 it had no power to tax and had to raise its revenues by charging fees for its services 7 00:00:41.040 --> 00:00:44.360 or perhaps running a national lottery. 8 00:00:44.360 --> 00:00:49.240 Taylor was in her early thirties when she adopted these political views. 9 00:00:49.240 --> 00:00:53.280 Before that time, she seems to have been pretty much apolitical. 10 00:00:53.280 --> 00:00:58.720 She did show distinct signs of a strong interest in individualism when she was in her teens 11 00:00:58.720 --> 00:01:03.000 and Business and 20s, and I'll have more to say about that in a few minutes. 12 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:08.480 But before the late 1950s, she seems never to have evidenced any interest in specifically 13 00:01:08.480 --> 00:01:12.000 political issues or principles. 14 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:20.320 Joan Kennedy Taylor was born 84 years ago this month, on December 21, 1926, in Manhattan. 15 00:01:20.320 --> 00:01:25.360 Her father was the prominent composer and musical journalist, Demes Taylor. 16 00:01:25.360 --> 00:01:30.200 Taylor's mother, Mary Kennedy, though never as well known as her father, was also in the 17 00:01:30.200 --> 00:01:31.480 public eye. 18 00:01:31.480 --> 00:01:37.560 She starred in plays on Broadway, wrote plays of her own, and in later years wrote poetry 19 00:01:37.560 --> 00:01:40.080 and children's books as well. 20 00:01:40.080 --> 00:01:45.940 Both Taylor and Kennedy were fringe members of the famous Algonquin Roundtable group. 21 00:01:45.940 --> 00:01:52.560 Both are depicted in small supporting roles, of course, in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and 22 00:01:52.560 --> 00:01:57.840 and the Vicious Circle, which is well worth a viewing or two by anyone interested in Dorothy 23 00:01:57.840 --> 00:02:03.640 Parker, the Algonquin Roundtable or the 1920s generally. 24 00:02:03.640 --> 00:02:09.900 Taylor and Kennedy divorced in 1933 when their daughter Joan was six years old, and over 25 00:02:09.900 --> 00:02:15.700 the next nine years Joan attended eight different schools in three different countries. 26 00:02:15.700 --> 00:02:20.940 As she explained to an interviewer 60 years later, her mother traveled a lot. 27 00:02:20.940 --> 00:02:24.540 She believed in geographical solutions to problems. 28 00:02:24.540 --> 00:02:27.740 She was always looking for the perfect place. 29 00:02:27.740 --> 00:02:32.820 Mary Kennedy and her daughter returned to the United States at the end of the 1930s, 30 00:02:32.820 --> 00:02:35.480 having spent most of the decade abroad. 31 00:02:35.480 --> 00:02:41.100 But Mary had not yet found the perfect place, so she set out on her global travels again 32 00:02:41.100 --> 00:02:47.120 before long, this time leaving her daughter behind, first at St. Timothy's, an Episcopal 33 00:02:47.120 --> 00:02:52.360 School Boarding School for Girls in rural Maryland, not far from Baltimore, then at 34 00:02:52.360 --> 00:02:55.040 Barnard College in Manhattan. 35 00:02:55.040 --> 00:02:58.920 Both these schools were exclusive and expensive. 36 00:02:58.920 --> 00:03:04.400 Barnard is, of course, one of the Seven Sisters, the group of colleges established in the 19th 37 00:03:04.400 --> 00:03:09.960 century to provide the equivalent of an Ivy League education for women of talent who were 38 00:03:09.960 --> 00:03:14.120 denied admission to Ivy League schools because of their gender. 39 00:03:14.120 --> 00:03:20.880 Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley 40 00:03:20.880 --> 00:03:27.120 Each of the original seven sisters was closely associated with one of the Ivy League colleges, 41 00:03:27.120 --> 00:03:31.920 Radcliffe with Harvard, for example, and Barnard with Columbia. 42 00:03:31.920 --> 00:03:37.480 Mary was able to afford such high-priced schools for her daughter because her divorce settlement 43 00:03:37.480 --> 00:03:44.040 guaranteed her half of her ex-husband's gross income, taxes prepaid, as well as a 44 00:03:44.040 --> 00:04:03.040 and since Jones' father prospered during the depression and the war years as a network radio personality, he was, according to his biographer, among the most listened to and recognizable voices of his time, his ex-wife and his daughter prospered too. 45 00:04:03.040 --> 00:04:08.480 Joan, for her part, not only availed herself of the elite education offered to her, as 46 00:04:08.480 --> 00:04:14.340 it were, on a silver platter, she also formed a habit of omnivorous reading, which lasted 47 00:04:14.340 --> 00:04:17.120 for the rest of her life. 48 00:04:17.120 --> 00:04:23.360 Sometime in the 1940s, she read and was greatly impressed by a passionately individualist 49 00:04:23.360 --> 00:04:29.600 novel called The Fountainhead, by a then not very well-known Russian immigrant who called 50 00:04:29.600 --> 00:04:31.960 herself Ayn Rand. 51 00:04:31.960 --> 00:04:37.320 Also during the 40s while a student at Barnard, she met and fell in love with a psychology 52 00:04:37.320 --> 00:04:41.060 major over at Columbia named Donald Cook. 53 00:04:41.060 --> 00:04:46.640 Cook introduced Joan to his close friend Alan Ginsberg, and through Ginsberg she met his 54 00:04:46.640 --> 00:04:52.940 friends Gregory Corso, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the nucleus of what later came 55 00:04:52.940 --> 00:04:56.060 to be called the Beat Generation. 56 00:04:56.060 --> 00:05:02.180 She found herself strongly drawn to the jazz that was favored by Donald's beat friends, 57 00:05:02.180 --> 00:05:08.140 hearing in this predominantly African-American genre what the beat writer John Clullen Holmes 58 00:05:08.140 --> 00:05:14.540 later called, the music of inner freedom, of improvisation, of the creative individual 59 00:05:14.540 --> 00:05:17.280 rather than the interpretive group. 60 00:05:17.280 --> 00:05:22.580 She also found herself drawn to the intensely individualistic fiction written by the beat 61 00:05:22.580 --> 00:05:29.140 Writers, with its focus on the individual sensibility, the individual point of view. 62 00:05:29.140 --> 00:05:35.020 She became interested during these same years in self-actualization, self-realization, the 63 00:05:35.020 --> 00:05:39.660 kinds of things that would come to be known a couple of decades later as elements in the 64 00:05:39.660 --> 00:05:42.000 human potential movement. 65 00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:47.020 In the 40s and 50s, it seemed to Joan, and to a lot of other people, that the thinkers 66 00:05:47.020 --> 00:05:53.520 Those who had the most to offer to individuals seeking to realize or actualize their previously 67 00:05:53.520 --> 00:06:01.320 untapped potential were the Russian G. I. Grigiev and his chief disciple P. D. Uspensky. 68 00:06:01.320 --> 00:06:07.020 A few years later, when very similar ideas were set forth by American psychologists like 69 00:06:07.020 --> 00:06:13.260 Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow under the name of humanistic psychology, they would reach 70 00:06:13.260 --> 00:06:35.660 The Fountainhead, Jazz, Beat Writing, The First Vague Stirrings of the Human Potential 71 00:06:35.660 --> 00:06:36.660 Movement 72 00:06:36.660 --> 00:06:42.780 As I said earlier, all this bespeaks a general inclination in the direction of individualism, 73 00:06:42.780 --> 00:06:47.280 but it doesn't really have any specifically political implications. 74 00:06:47.280 --> 00:06:52.980 It is, after all, possible to be an individualist without espousing any political views. 75 00:06:52.980 --> 00:06:58.860 The Beats were mostly apolitical, as were Gurjieff and Uspensky and their students, 76 00:06:58.860 --> 00:07:00.420 and so was Joan. 77 00:07:00.420 --> 00:07:05.460 But all this changed in 1957, when she was 30 years old. 78 00:07:05.460 --> 00:07:11.260 She had been acting, on stage, on radio, on television, since graduating from high school 79 00:07:11.260 --> 00:07:13.380 a dozen years before. 80 00:07:13.380 --> 00:07:17.940 Like most actors of any era, she had also held various day jobs. 81 00:07:17.940 --> 00:07:21.940 She had sold jewelry, she had done this, that and the other. 82 00:07:21.940 --> 00:07:26.340 At the moment, she was working as a publicity assistant at the book publishing company of 83 00:07:26.340 --> 00:07:28.480 Alfred A. Knopf. 84 00:07:28.480 --> 00:07:33.240 That summer, through an associate who worked in publicity over at Random House, she got 85 00:07:33.240 --> 00:07:59.240 I read it over Labor Day Weekend 1957, Joan told interviewer Duncan Scott in 2004, and I was blown away, absolutely. I had read The Fountainhead before, but I was really impressed by this, so much so that I wrote her a fan letter. 86 00:07:59.240 --> 00:08:06.240 As it happened, Jones was only the second letter Rand had received from a reader about Atlas Shrugged, 87 00:08:06.240 --> 00:08:11.240 and, as Joan told Duncan Scott, Rand was impressed with my letter, 88 00:08:11.240 --> 00:08:16.240 and she spoke to her publicity person at Random House asking if she knew me, and she did, 89 00:08:16.240 --> 00:08:22.240 and so the next thing I knew I got a call from Jean Ennis, the publicity person at Random House, 90 00:08:22.240 --> 00:08:28.240 saying, Ein Rand got your letter, she liked it, and she wants to have lunch with you. 91 00:08:28.240 --> 00:08:43.240 They had lunch. They talked for hours. Then, as Joan told the tale, Rand said that she wanted me to meet her children, Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon, and we set up a date when I would come to her house and meet them. 92 00:08:43.240 --> 00:08:55.240 Barbara Brandon in this period was putting in 40 hours a week as an editorial coordinator at St. Martin's Press and teaching philosophy at Long Island University in her spare time. 93 00:08:55.240 --> 00:09:01.000 Nathaniel Brandon, Joan recalled, was working as a psychologist, and he was planning, or 94 00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:05.020 hoping, to give a lecture course on Ayn Rand's philosophy. 95 00:09:05.020 --> 00:09:10.980 I remember him asking me if I would be interested in taking it, and I said yes. 96 00:09:10.980 --> 00:09:16.400 The first lecture in Nathaniel's completed course, Basic Principles of Objectivism, was 97 00:09:16.400 --> 00:09:22.560 first delivered, according to Barbara Brandon, in January of 1958, a few months after the 98 00:09:22.560 --> 00:09:26.560 and the publication of Atlas Shrugged in a small hotel room. 99 00:09:26.560 --> 00:09:31.560 Joan was there, along with around two dozen others who had read Atlas Shrugged 100 00:09:31.560 --> 00:09:38.560 and seen the small ads in New York newspapers promoting a series of lectures on Rand's ideas. 101 00:09:38.560 --> 00:09:46.560 And as the objectivist movement grew over the next ten years, grew by leaps and bounds, Joan was there. 102 00:09:46.560 --> 00:09:50.560 She was a personal friend of Ayn Rand and a frequent guest in her home. 103 00:09:50.560 --> 00:09:56.760 Her social life increasingly centered around the Nathaniel Brandon Institute and the Objectivist Movement. 104 00:09:56.760 --> 00:10:02.760 When she married her second husband, David Dawson, over Thanksgiving weekend of 1958, 105 00:10:02.760 --> 00:10:08.560 Ayn Rand and her husband, Frank O'Connor, were among the dozen guests in attendance. 106 00:10:09.560 --> 00:10:15.560 It was six years later, during the 1964 Barry Goldwater for President campaign, 107 00:10:15.560 --> 00:10:22.020 In 2009, Joan told interviewer Duncan Scott in 2004 that my husband, David Dawson and 108 00:10:22.020 --> 00:10:29.020 I were two of 25 students of objectivism who went down to Republican headquarters and signed 109 00:10:29.020 --> 00:10:35.340 up and registered as Republicans and petitioned to form a Young Republican Club. 110 00:10:35.340 --> 00:10:36.340 We did. 111 00:10:36.340 --> 00:10:42.500 We formed the Metropolitan Young Republican Club, which was an objectivist front for Goldwater. 112 00:10:42.500 --> 00:10:45.540 We were all students of objectivism. 113 00:10:45.540 --> 00:10:50.640 Within a few months, the Metropolitan Young Republican Club established a newsletter. 114 00:10:50.640 --> 00:10:55.860 It was called Persuasion, and Joan Kennedy Taylor was named editor. 115 00:10:55.860 --> 00:11:00.500 Within a few more months, the campaign was over, and there was no further need for a 116 00:11:00.500 --> 00:11:06.020 newsletter whose chief reason for existing seemed to be promotion of Senator Goldwater's 117 00:11:06.020 --> 00:11:08.480 effort to get elected president. 118 00:11:08.480 --> 00:11:14.240 But Joan had rather enjoyed her brief stint as editor of a political periodical, and rather 119 00:11:14.240 --> 00:11:16.240 wanted to continue it. 120 00:11:16.240 --> 00:11:20.560 And at that point, Ayn Rand came riding to the rescue. 121 00:11:20.560 --> 00:11:25.520 Rand had already let Joan know that she admired her work on Persuasion. 122 00:11:25.520 --> 00:11:30.760 As Joan described their conversation to Duncan Scott many years later, she told me, you're 123 00:11:30.760 --> 00:11:31.960 a good editor. 124 00:11:31.960 --> 00:11:37.240 I can tell that because an editor of a small publication like Persuasion might have just 125 00:11:37.240 --> 00:11:43.200 one or maybe two good writers, but all of your writers are good, and that means the 126 00:11:43.200 --> 00:11:44.200 The Editor's Good 127 00:11:44.200 --> 00:11:48.620 But Rand had more than just praise for Joan. 128 00:11:48.620 --> 00:11:50.760 She also had a suggestion. 129 00:11:50.760 --> 00:11:56.360 If Joan wanted to keep persuasion going, Rand told her, take it out of the Young Republican 130 00:11:56.360 --> 00:11:57.360 Club. 131 00:11:57.360 --> 00:11:59.560 Buy it from them, or something like that. 132 00:11:59.560 --> 00:12:04.080 Set up a corporation so that I can endorse you in the Objectivist, because I wouldn't 133 00:12:04.080 --> 00:12:09.160 want to endorse anything that was specifically of a political party. 134 00:12:09.160 --> 00:12:11.200 This was an opportunity. 135 00:12:11.200 --> 00:12:13.000 Joan saw it and took it. 136 00:12:13.000 --> 00:12:18.400 She established an independent corporation, Persuasion Incorporated, and took over the 137 00:12:18.400 --> 00:12:23.080 magazine from the Metropolitan Young Republican Club. 138 00:12:23.080 --> 00:12:28.720 Rand's endorsement, the only one she ever extended to any political magazine, appeared 139 00:12:28.720 --> 00:12:35.960 in the December 1965 issue of the Objectivist Newsletter under the headline, A Recommendation. 140 00:12:35.960 --> 00:12:38.180 It began with a caveat. 141 00:12:38.180 --> 00:12:45.220 One cannot recommend a magazine or a periodical over whose future content one has no control, 142 00:12:45.220 --> 00:12:49.340 Rand wrote, except conditionally or provisionally. 143 00:12:49.340 --> 00:12:54.540 She described Persuasion as a modest little periodical which I have watched for almost 144 00:12:54.540 --> 00:12:58.740 a year and found to be excellent in its particular field. 145 00:12:58.740 --> 00:13:04.900 Persuasion, she wrote, was not a philosophical or theoretical, but specifically a political 146 00:13:04.900 --> 00:13:12.020 Publication, one that did a remarkable educational job in tying current political events to 147 00:13:12.020 --> 00:13:18.360 wider principles, evaluating specific events in a rational frame of reference and maintaining 148 00:13:18.360 --> 00:13:21.040 a high degree of consistency. 149 00:13:21.040 --> 00:13:26.540 The magazine would be of particular interest and value, Rand thought, to all those who 150 00:13:26.540 --> 00:13:32.160 are eager to fight on the level of practical politics but flounder hopelessly for lack 151 00:13:32.160 --> 00:13:34.300 of proper material. 152 00:13:34.300 --> 00:13:40.580 The endorsement launched the new independent persuasion in style, as Joan told Duncan Scott 153 00:13:40.580 --> 00:13:47.640 forty years later, we got like a thousand subscriptions or something from Ayn's endorsement. 154 00:13:47.640 --> 00:13:53.260 In that same series of conversations in which Rand advised Joan to take her magazine out 155 00:13:53.260 --> 00:13:58.900 of the Metropolitan Young Republican Club and make it an independent publication, Joan 156 00:13:58.900 --> 00:14:04.700 Boehm asked her mentor's advice on how she should portray persuasion publicly. 157 00:14:04.700 --> 00:14:09.580 As she told a couple of interviewers in later years, the members of the editorial staff 158 00:14:09.580 --> 00:14:17.080 of persuasion were all students of her philosophy, but persuasion was to deal entirely with politics. 159 00:14:17.080 --> 00:14:19.980 So she put the question directly to Ayn Rand. 160 00:14:19.980 --> 00:14:23.060 What do I call the view that we hold? 161 00:14:23.060 --> 00:14:24.060 She asked. 162 00:14:24.060 --> 00:14:26.260 It certainly isn't Republican. 163 00:14:26.260 --> 00:14:32.220 On the other hand, I can't say it's objectivist, we have no position on art, epistemology, 164 00:14:32.220 --> 00:14:36.940 metaphysics, whatever, only on politics. 165 00:14:36.940 --> 00:14:40.960 Rand's answer was straightforward, and so was her advice. 166 00:14:40.960 --> 00:14:46.240 That was when she explained to me, Joan wrote decades later, that the name for her political 167 00:14:46.240 --> 00:14:52.900 philosophy considered by itself was libertarianism, and she suggested that persuasion should call 168 00:14:52.900 --> 00:14:55.760 itself a libertarian publication. 169 00:14:55.760 --> 00:14:57.920 And so we did. 170 00:14:57.920 --> 00:15:03.200 When the Objectivist movement collapsed in the wake of the Rand-Brandons split four years 171 00:15:03.200 --> 00:15:05.880 later, Joan closed persuasion. 172 00:15:05.880 --> 00:15:08.080 She felt she had no choice. 173 00:15:08.080 --> 00:15:13.960 If she failed to cave in to Rand's demands that she denounce Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon, 174 00:15:13.960 --> 00:15:19.520 she herself would be denounced, along with persuasion, in the pages of Rand's magazine, 175 00:15:19.520 --> 00:15:21.000 The Objectivist. 176 00:15:21.000 --> 00:15:26.120 So she closed persuasion, not without regrets, and walked away. 177 00:15:26.120 --> 00:15:31.880 She moved up to her summer home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and pursued other interests. 178 00:15:31.880 --> 00:15:37.340 Joan had many other interests, and she pursued them for most of the next ten years, until 179 00:15:37.340 --> 00:15:44.240 one day in early 1977 she received an extremely interesting telephone call from an extremely 180 00:15:44.240 --> 00:15:51.280 A very interesting young man, one Roy A. Childs Jr., 28 years old, who was taking over the 181 00:15:51.280 --> 00:15:57.120 editorship of a small publication called Libertarian Review, with the assignment of turning it 182 00:15:57.120 --> 00:16:03.840 into a monthly magazine of issues, events and ideas, a sort of national review or The 183 00:16:03.840 --> 00:16:10.320 Nation or The New Republic, only monthly rather than weekly or fortnightly, and from a libertarian 184 00:16:10.320 --> 00:16:11.600 and Perspective. 185 00:16:11.600 --> 00:16:17.000 Childs had seen Rand's endorsement of persuasion when he was still in high school, had sent 186 00:16:17.000 --> 00:16:20.520 off for a sample copy, and had then subscribed. 187 00:16:20.520 --> 00:16:25.240 For the new magazine he was launching, he hoped to attract an editorial staff and a 188 00:16:25.240 --> 00:16:30.960 group of associate editors who would represent both the Rothbardian and the Randian elements 189 00:16:30.960 --> 00:16:33.280 within the libertarian movement. 190 00:16:33.280 --> 00:16:35.760 Would Joan like to write for the magazine? 191 00:16:35.760 --> 00:16:39.760 Would she be interested in becoming an associate editor? 192 00:16:39.760 --> 00:16:45.060 At this time, Libertarian Review was published out of offices in New York City, but it moved 193 00:16:45.060 --> 00:16:51.460 to San Francisco at the beginning of 1978, and by then, Childs was aggressively working 194 00:16:51.460 --> 00:16:57.580 to persuade his bosses, Charles Koch and Ed Crane, to make Joan a full-time member of 195 00:16:57.580 --> 00:16:59.580 the magazine's staff. 196 00:16:59.580 --> 00:17:02.320 As she herself put it 15 years later, 197 00:17:02.320 --> 00:17:08.260 I was a person who had worked in the anti-draft movement and who had done some political writing, 198 00:17:08.260 --> 00:17:11.860 But I had published nothing in this area for nine years. 199 00:17:11.860 --> 00:17:17.620 I was living in western Massachusetts in a rural setting, living a very domestic life. 200 00:17:17.620 --> 00:17:19.340 Roy didn't care for that. 201 00:17:19.340 --> 00:17:24.260 Roy decided that I should be a political person, and he assigned me articles to write. 202 00:17:24.260 --> 00:17:27.740 He made me an associate editor of the Libertarian Review. 203 00:17:27.740 --> 00:17:33.340 We visited each other in New York, and he came to Massachusetts to visit me and my husband. 204 00:17:33.340 --> 00:17:35.540 And we were together a great deal. 205 00:17:35.540 --> 00:17:36.860 He educated me. 206 00:17:36.860 --> 00:17:41.960 He made me read books, he lobbied to get me on the staff of the Libertarian Review and 207 00:17:41.960 --> 00:17:45.500 got me a staff job there which I took. 208 00:17:45.500 --> 00:17:52.340 And so it was that Joan Kennedy Taylor completed the transition from individualism to libertarianism 209 00:17:52.340 --> 00:17:57.340 that she had begun in the 1960s under the tutelage of Ayn Rand. 210 00:17:57.340 --> 00:18:03.440 Now in her early 50s, she was at last ready to embark on the most important and productive 211 00:18:03.440 --> 00:18:08.480 period in her career, the period that would establish her as an important intellectual 212 00:18:08.480 --> 00:18:11.440 figure in the libertarian movement. 213 00:18:11.440 --> 00:18:26.440 This is Jeff Rigenbach.