The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s,
when she was a student at the Nathaniel Brandon Institute in New York City.
As a student of objectivism, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand,
A non-aggression principle, natural rights, a free market, and a state so minimal that
it had no power to tax and had to raise its revenues by charging fees for its services
or perhaps running a national lottery.
Taylor was in her early thirties when she adopted these political views.
Before that time, she seems to have been pretty much apolitical.
She did show distinct signs of a strong interest in individualism when she was in her teens
and Business and 20s, and I'll have more to say about that in a few minutes.
But before the late 1950s, she seems never to have evidenced any interest in specifically
political issues or principles.
Joan Kennedy Taylor was born 84 years ago this month, on December 21, 1926, in Manhattan.
Her father was the prominent composer and musical journalist, Demes Taylor.
Taylor's mother, Mary Kennedy, though never as well known as her father, was also in the
public eye.
She starred in plays on Broadway, wrote plays of her own, and in later years wrote poetry
and children's books as well.
Both Taylor and Kennedy were fringe members of the famous Algonquin Roundtable group.
Both are depicted in small supporting roles, of course, in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and
and the Vicious Circle, which is well worth a viewing or two by anyone interested in Dorothy
Parker, the Algonquin Roundtable or the 1920s generally.
Taylor and Kennedy divorced in 1933 when their daughter Joan was six years old, and over
the next nine years Joan attended eight different schools in three different countries.
As she explained to an interviewer 60 years later, her mother traveled a lot.
She believed in geographical solutions to problems.
She was always looking for the perfect place.
Mary Kennedy and her daughter returned to the United States at the end of the 1930s,
having spent most of the decade abroad.
But Mary had not yet found the perfect place, so she set out on her global travels again
before long, this time leaving her daughter behind, first at St. Timothy's, an Episcopal
School Boarding School for Girls in rural Maryland, not far from Baltimore, then at
Barnard College in Manhattan.
Both these schools were exclusive and expensive.
Barnard is, of course, one of the Seven Sisters, the group of colleges established in the 19th
century to provide the equivalent of an Ivy League education for women of talent who were
denied admission to Ivy League schools because of their gender.
Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley
Each of the original seven sisters was closely associated with one of the Ivy League colleges,
Radcliffe with Harvard, for example, and Barnard with Columbia.
Mary was able to afford such high-priced schools for her daughter because her divorce settlement
guaranteed her half of her ex-husband's gross income, taxes prepaid, as well as a
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.
Joan, for her part, not only availed herself of the elite education offered to her, as
it were, on a silver platter, she also formed a habit of omnivorous reading, which lasted
for the rest of her life.
Sometime in the 1940s, she read and was greatly impressed by a passionately individualist
novel called The Fountainhead, by a then not very well-known Russian immigrant who called
herself Ayn Rand.
Also during the 40s while a student at Barnard, she met and fell in love with a psychology
major over at Columbia named Donald Cook.
Cook introduced Joan to his close friend Alan Ginsberg, and through Ginsberg she met his
friends Gregory Corso, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the nucleus of what later came
to be called the Beat Generation.
She found herself strongly drawn to the jazz that was favored by Donald's beat friends,
hearing in this predominantly African-American genre what the beat writer John Clullen Holmes
later called, the music of inner freedom, of improvisation, of the creative individual
rather than the interpretive group.
She also found herself drawn to the intensely individualistic fiction written by the beat
Writers, with its focus on the individual sensibility, the individual point of view.
She became interested during these same years in self-actualization, self-realization, the
kinds of things that would come to be known a couple of decades later as elements in the
human potential movement.
In the 40s and 50s, it seemed to Joan, and to a lot of other people, that the thinkers
Those who had the most to offer to individuals seeking to realize or actualize their previously
untapped potential were the Russian G. I. Grigiev and his chief disciple P. D. Uspensky.
A few years later, when very similar ideas were set forth by American psychologists like
Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow under the name of humanistic psychology, they would reach
The Fountainhead, Jazz, Beat Writing, The First Vague Stirrings of the Human Potential
Movement
As I said earlier, all this bespeaks a general inclination in the direction of individualism,
but it doesn't really have any specifically political implications.
It is, after all, possible to be an individualist without espousing any political views.
The Beats were mostly apolitical, as were Gurjieff and Uspensky and their students,
and so was Joan.
But all this changed in 1957, when she was 30 years old.
She had been acting, on stage, on radio, on television, since graduating from high school
a dozen years before.
Like most actors of any era, she had also held various day jobs.
She had sold jewelry, she had done this, that and the other.
At the moment, she was working as a publicity assistant at the book publishing company of
Alfred A. Knopf.
That summer, through an associate who worked in publicity over at Random House, she got
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.
As it happened, Jones was only the second letter Rand had received from a reader about Atlas Shrugged,
and, as Joan told Duncan Scott, Rand was impressed with my letter,
and she spoke to her publicity person at Random House asking if she knew me, and she did,
and so the next thing I knew I got a call from Jean Ennis, the publicity person at Random House,
saying, Ein Rand got your letter, she liked it, and she wants to have lunch with you.
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.
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.
Nathaniel Brandon, Joan recalled, was working as a psychologist, and he was planning, or
hoping, to give a lecture course on Ayn Rand's philosophy.
I remember him asking me if I would be interested in taking it, and I said yes.
The first lecture in Nathaniel's completed course, Basic Principles of Objectivism, was
first delivered, according to Barbara Brandon, in January of 1958, a few months after the
and the publication of Atlas Shrugged in a small hotel room.
Joan was there, along with around two dozen others who had read Atlas Shrugged
and seen the small ads in New York newspapers promoting a series of lectures on Rand's ideas.
And as the objectivist movement grew over the next ten years, grew by leaps and bounds, Joan was there.
She was a personal friend of Ayn Rand and a frequent guest in her home.
Her social life increasingly centered around the Nathaniel Brandon Institute and the Objectivist Movement.
When she married her second husband, David Dawson, over Thanksgiving weekend of 1958,
Ayn Rand and her husband, Frank O'Connor, were among the dozen guests in attendance.
It was six years later, during the 1964 Barry Goldwater for President campaign,
In 2009, Joan told interviewer Duncan Scott in 2004 that my husband, David Dawson and
I were two of 25 students of objectivism who went down to Republican headquarters and signed
up and registered as Republicans and petitioned to form a Young Republican Club.
We did.
We formed the Metropolitan Young Republican Club, which was an objectivist front for Goldwater.
We were all students of objectivism.
Within a few months, the Metropolitan Young Republican Club established a newsletter.
It was called Persuasion, and Joan Kennedy Taylor was named editor.
Within a few more months, the campaign was over, and there was no further need for a
newsletter whose chief reason for existing seemed to be promotion of Senator Goldwater's
effort to get elected president.
But Joan had rather enjoyed her brief stint as editor of a political periodical, and rather
wanted to continue it.
And at that point, Ayn Rand came riding to the rescue.
Rand had already let Joan know that she admired her work on Persuasion.
As Joan described their conversation to Duncan Scott many years later, she told me, you're
a good editor.
I can tell that because an editor of a small publication like Persuasion might have just
one or maybe two good writers, but all of your writers are good, and that means the
The Editor's Good
But Rand had more than just praise for Joan.
She also had a suggestion.
If Joan wanted to keep persuasion going, Rand told her, take it out of the Young Republican
Club.
Buy it from them, or something like that.
Set up a corporation so that I can endorse you in the Objectivist, because I wouldn't
want to endorse anything that was specifically of a political party.
This was an opportunity.
Joan saw it and took it.
She established an independent corporation, Persuasion Incorporated, and took over the
magazine from the Metropolitan Young Republican Club.
Rand's endorsement, the only one she ever extended to any political magazine, appeared
in the December 1965 issue of the Objectivist Newsletter under the headline, A Recommendation.
It began with a caveat.
One cannot recommend a magazine or a periodical over whose future content one has no control,
Rand wrote, except conditionally or provisionally.
She described Persuasion as a modest little periodical which I have watched for almost
a year and found to be excellent in its particular field.
Persuasion, she wrote, was not a philosophical or theoretical, but specifically a political
Publication, one that did a remarkable educational job in tying current political events to
wider principles, evaluating specific events in a rational frame of reference and maintaining
a high degree of consistency.
The magazine would be of particular interest and value, Rand thought, to all those who
are eager to fight on the level of practical politics but flounder hopelessly for lack
of proper material.
The endorsement launched the new independent persuasion in style, as Joan told Duncan Scott
forty years later, we got like a thousand subscriptions or something from Ayn's endorsement.
In that same series of conversations in which Rand advised Joan to take her magazine out
of the Metropolitan Young Republican Club and make it an independent publication, Joan
Boehm asked her mentor's advice on how she should portray persuasion publicly.
As she told a couple of interviewers in later years, the members of the editorial staff
of persuasion were all students of her philosophy, but persuasion was to deal entirely with politics.
So she put the question directly to Ayn Rand.
What do I call the view that we hold?
She asked.
It certainly isn't Republican.
On the other hand, I can't say it's objectivist, we have no position on art, epistemology,
metaphysics, whatever, only on politics.
Rand's answer was straightforward, and so was her advice.
That was when she explained to me, Joan wrote decades later, that the name for her political
philosophy considered by itself was libertarianism, and she suggested that persuasion should call
itself a libertarian publication.
And so we did.
When the Objectivist movement collapsed in the wake of the Rand-Brandons split four years
later, Joan closed persuasion.
She felt she had no choice.
If she failed to cave in to Rand's demands that she denounce Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon,
she herself would be denounced, along with persuasion, in the pages of Rand's magazine,
The Objectivist.
So she closed persuasion, not without regrets, and walked away.
She moved up to her summer home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and pursued other interests.
Joan had many other interests, and she pursued them for most of the next ten years, until
one day in early 1977 she received an extremely interesting telephone call from an extremely
A very interesting young man, one Roy A. Childs Jr., 28 years old, who was taking over the
editorship of a small publication called Libertarian Review, with the assignment of turning it
into a monthly magazine of issues, events and ideas, a sort of national review or The
Nation or The New Republic, only monthly rather than weekly or fortnightly, and from a libertarian
and Perspective.
Childs had seen Rand's endorsement of persuasion when he was still in high school, had sent
off for a sample copy, and had then subscribed.
For the new magazine he was launching, he hoped to attract an editorial staff and a
group of associate editors who would represent both the Rothbardian and the Randian elements
within the libertarian movement.
Would Joan like to write for the magazine?
Would she be interested in becoming an associate editor?
At this time, Libertarian Review was published out of offices in New York City, but it moved
to San Francisco at the beginning of 1978, and by then, Childs was aggressively working
to persuade his bosses, Charles Koch and Ed Crane, to make Joan a full-time member of
the magazine's staff.
As she herself put it 15 years later,
I was a person who had worked in the anti-draft movement and who had done some political writing,
But I had published nothing in this area for nine years.
I was living in western Massachusetts in a rural setting, living a very domestic life.
Roy didn't care for that.
Roy decided that I should be a political person, and he assigned me articles to write.
He made me an associate editor of the Libertarian Review.
We visited each other in New York, and he came to Massachusetts to visit me and my husband.
And we were together a great deal.
He educated me.
He made me read books, he lobbied to get me on the staff of the Libertarian Review and
got me a staff job there which I took.
And so it was that Joan Kennedy Taylor completed the transition from individualism to libertarianism
that she had begun in the 1960s under the tutelage of Ayn Rand.
Now in her early 50s, she was at last ready to embark on the most important and productive
period in her career, the period that would establish her as an important intellectual
figure in the libertarian movement.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.