The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
John T. Flynn was born fewer than ten miles from central Washington, D.C., in a small town in Prince George's County, Maryland, late in October of 1882.
Before a decade had passed, Flynn's father, an attorney, had moved his growing family
to New York, and it was there that the younger Flynn grew up, in a moderately prosperous
middle-class Irish Catholic household.
He attended parochial schools and a small, undistinguished college in New York, then
moved back to the nation's capital at the turn of the 20th century to attend law school
at Georgetown University.
Flynn was a scholarship student at Georgetown and his family, as has been noted, was modestly
well-to-do, but any student can always use a few extra bucks, and Flynn earned his own
extra bucks as a part-time reporter for the Washington Times.
After graduating from Georgetown, he spent a few months in his father's law office back
in New York, but it wasn't long before he abandoned law forever in favor of journalism.
It seems likely that he attended law school at all only as a way of displaying his filial
piety and his wholehearted willingness to follow in his father's professional footsteps.
Certainly his decision to become a journalist did not make him rich or produce anything
like quick success.
He wound up leaving the practice of law for a series of jobs, none of which lasted very
long or paid very well on a series of New York and Los Angeles newspapers.
Then he landed in 1916 at the age of 34 in New Haven, Connecticut, where he had secured
a position on the New Haven Register.
And now, at last, he began to enjoy some noticeable success in journalism.
Within a year, Flynn was city editor of the Register.
Within three years, he had moved on to the New York Evening Globe, and within another
three years, by late 1922, not long after his 40th birthday, John T. Flynn had become
A year later, when he left the Evening Globe, he found that he had little trouble moving smoothly into a new career as a freelance writer for magazines, mostly Collier's, Harper's, The Forum, and The New Republic.
By 1931, at the age of nearly 50, he saw his first book appear in print.
It was the first of nearly 20 books Flynn would write, despite the fact that he had
got off to rather a late start as an author of books.
In his magazine pieces and his books, he wrote mostly about economics and economic policy,
the subjects he had begun to specialize in during his years on the Evening Globe.
It wasn't as though Flynn knew anything much about economics.
Ralph Reiko, in his Introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Flynn's best-known
book, writes that Flynn's thinking on economics was not notably sophisticated.
He fully appreciated the productive dynamism of the private property market economy, but
in his progressive phase he held that government had a crucial role to play in reining in the
excesses of capitalism by thwarting monopolies, protecting small investors, and undertaking
and Moderate Social Reform. Yet he was never a socialist. To his mind, the hopes for a free and prosperous society lay in a truly competitive private enterprise system.
Reiko assures us that Flynn opposed the New Deal practically from the start. But one wonders. Flynn's biographer John E. Moser reports that in 1932, at the time Franklin Roosevelt was running for his first term in the White House,
House, Flynn publicly dismissed what he called the Doctrine of Laissez-Faire as the Gospel
of the Reactionary.
In 1934, Flynn called for a national minimum wage law, a vast program of public spending
mainly on construction projects to relieve unemployment, and a government-run system
of unemployment and old age insurance.
In 1936, Flynn called for three constitutional amendments, one that would give to the government
the police power over all economic matters of national importance, and two others that
would free Congress and state legislatures from the inhibitions of the due process clause.
Sounds a lot like the New Deal to me.
Flynn thought, according to Moser, that instead of opening up the economy to competitive forces,
Roosevelt seemed bent on cartelizing it, principally through the National Recovery Act, NRA, which
Flynn regarded as a copy of Mussolini's corporate state.
And what exactly was it that Flynn had expected as the outcome of constitutional amendments
to give the federal government the police power over all economic matters of national
importance?
One shakes one's head in wonderment.
What John T. Flynn was, of course, was a liberal, specifically what for most of a hundred
years now has been known as a classical liberal, that is, an advocate of a political position
that is basically anti-war, pro-market, in favor of free international trade and in favor
of freedom for every individual, virtually what you'd call a libertarian position, except
To get a sense of how utterly ridiculous this idea seems to a hardcore libertarian, imagine
and attempting to reform the Mafia in this way.
It is important to bear in mind here that these classical liberals of whom I speak are
not all a bunch of bewigged denizens of the 18th century who stopped short of anarchism
in their political thinking only because it hadn't yet been invented.
On the contrary, there were still liberals long after anarchism was invented.
If you figure, for the sake of intellectual convenience, that anarchism was invented by
by William Godwin in the 1790s, then you can say that a full hundred years after anarchism
had been invented, during the second Grover Cleveland administration, that's between
1893 and 1897, there were still plenty of liberals in the United States.
They were even sufficiently numerous to exercise arguably a considerable influence in our domestic
politics at that time.
And these liberals hadn't the excuse of ignorance, either.
They knew about the anarchist alternative.
The largest circulation anarchist periodical in the world was edited and published right
here in the United States, in New York, by Benjamin R. Tucker, who rightly referred to
anarchists of his stripe as un-terrified Jeffersonian Democrats.
For more than 200 years in this country, those who qualify for the description classical
Classical Liberal have rejected anarchism not out of ignorance of its existence, but
out of terror at what they imagine to be its practical results.
And who is it who qualifies exactly for the description Classical Liberal?
This is a more complicated question than it may at first seem.
All classical liberals have always believed it was all right to coerce the other residents
of their communities or countries for certain purposes, but they have differed widely on
What Purposes They Considered Important Enough to Justify Such Coercion?
To Adam Smith, it was just to coerce his neighbors to provide schooling for those whose parents
were too poor or too improvident to buy it for them.
To Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues among the American Founding Fathers, it was just
to coerce one's neighbors if they were of the wrong sex or the wrong color.
To Friedrich Hayek, it was just to coerce his neighbors to provide subsidies to museums
and Symphony Orchestras and Ballet Companies.
To Ludwig von Mises, it was just to coerce his neighbors to raise armies to fight against
the Axis powers in World War II.
It was just, he believed, even if it meant forcing young men at gunpoint to don the uniforms
of soldiers and sailors and drop bombs on non-violent civilian populations.
Yet liberals and liberalism have done a powerful lot of good for the goal of liberty over the
in the last few centuries.
As the anarchist Rudolf Rocker wrote in his magnum opus Nationalism and Culture, liberalism
judges the social environment according as it furthers the natural development of the
individual or is a hindrance to his personal freedom and independence.
Its conceptions of society are those of an organic process resulting from man's natural
Social Necessities and Leading to Free Associations, which exist as long as they fulfill their
purpose and dissolve again when this purpose has become meaningless.
The less this natural course of things is affected by forceful interference and mechanical
regulation from outside, the freer and more frictionless will be all social procedure,
and the more fully can man enjoy the happiness of his personal freedom and independence.
From this point of view, liberalism judged also the state and all forms of government.
Its advocates believed, however, that government in certain matters cannot be entirely dispensed
with.
Yet they saw clearly that every form of government menaces man's freedom.
Hence, they always endeavored to guard the individual from the encroachments of governmental
power, and strove to confine this to the smallest possible field of activity.
The administration of things always meant more to them than the government of men.
Hence, the state, for them, had a right to exist only as long as its functionaries strove
merely to protect the personal safety of its citizens against forcible attacks.
The state constitution of liberalism was, therefore, predominantly of a negative nature.
The focal point of all the social-political thought of its advocates was the largest possible
Thus, Rudolf Rocker, in 1937.
In a later work, Pioneers of American Freedom, Rocker wrote that American individualist anarchism
of the sort exemplified by the writings of Benjamin R. Tucker was closely interwoven
at its very root with American liberalism, and was in many respects a quite natural outgrowth
Rocker concluded that Tucker was right in calling the anarchists simply un-terrified
Jeffersonian Democrats.
Since the liberals were terrified, of course, they fell far short of advocating a completely
libertarian program, the abolition of the state, nor, as we have seen, did they really
only limit themselves to advocacy of a state that strove merely to protect the personal
safety of its citizens against forcible attacks.
Prominent liberals have wanted a state that also schooled its citizens and subsidized
their artistic creativity, conscripted them into wartime military service, and guaranteed
the property rights of the owners of human slaves.
Yet, as Ludwig von Mises points out in the opening paragraphs of his 1927 book, Liberalism,
nowhere was even this half-hearted program ever completely carried out.
Even in England, which has been called the homeland of liberalism and the model liberal
country, the proponents of liberal policies never succeeded in winning all their demands.
In the rest of the world, only parts of the liberal program were adopted, while others,
were either rejected from the very first or discarded after a short time.
Only with some exaggeration can one say that the world once lived through a liberal era.
Liberalism was never permitted to come to full fruition.
Nevertheless, brief and all too limited as the supremacy of liberal ideas was,
it sufficed to change the face of the earth.
A magnificent economic development took place.
The release of man's productive powers multiplied the means of subsistence many times over.
On the eve of the First World War, the world was incomparably more densely populated than
it had ever been, and each inhabitant could live incomparably better than had been possible
in earlier centuries.
The prosperity that liberalism had created reduced considerably infant mortality, which
which had been the pitiless scourge of earlier ages, and, as a result of the improvement
in living conditions, lengthened the average span of life.
Nor did this prosperity flow only to a select class of privileged persons.
On the eve of the World War, the worker in the industrial nations of Europe, in the United
States and in the overseas dominions of England, lived better and more graciously than the
nobleman of not too long before.
Not only could he eat and drink according to his desire, he could give his children
a better education.
He could, if he wished, take part in the intellectual and cultural life of his nation, and if he
possessed enough talent and energy, he could, without difficulty, raise his social position.
It was precisely in the countries that had gone the farthest in adopting the liberal
program that the top of the social pyramid was composed in the main, not of those who
who had, from their very birth, enjoyed a privileged position by virtue of the wealth
or high rank of their parents, but of those who, under favorable conditions, had worked
their way up from straightened circumstances by their own power.
Thus Ludwig von Mises, in 1927.
And Mises's point here is not only well taken, it's undeniably true.
Liberals have done a world of good for liberty.
So what are hardcore libertarians to do with such liberals, including Mises?
In the 1890s, men like Benjamin R. Tucker, who was arguably the founder and leader of
the first American libertarian movement, ignored liberals and formed their strategic alliances
instead with other anarchists, whatever their economic doctrines might be.
Since the early 1940s, however, when the contemporary American libertarian movement first got underway,
have adopted a different strategy.
We have made common cause with modern-day classical liberals, whom we have taken to
calling limited government libertarians.
And I'd say too many of us have written off anarchists who don't feel comfortable calling
themselves anarcho-capitalists as our adversaries, not our allies.
But setting aside that last point, at least for the nots, how are we to know a true classical
liberal when we see one?
A person who believes, as Rocker put it, that government in certain matters cannot be entirely
dispensed with, yet who sees clearly that every form of government menaces man's freedom,
and thus always endeavours to guard the individual from the encroachments of governmental power,
and strives to confine this to the smallest possible field of activity.
How are we to distinguish this classical liberal when we encounter him or her, from the
The sort of garden-variety status that hangs around National Review and the American Spectator
and the Republican Party and wants the state to leave his guns alone, but is enthusiastic
about seeing it look in your windows and through your keyholes so it can lock you up for reading
the wrong things or putting the wrong substances in your own body.
The answer is implicit, I think, in Rocker's phraseology.
The classical liberals, Rocker says, see clearly that every form of government menaces man's
freedom, and thus always endeavor to guard the individual from the encroachments of governmental
power and strive to confine this to the smallest possible field of activity.
To use terminology adapted from the world of computers, liberty is the classical liberal's
default setting.
Their tendency is to see the solution to any social problem as liberty, any proposed government
solution to that problem they view with dubiety, any deviation from a policy of strict liberty
they see as requiring an explanation, a justification, an argument.
They may make mistakes about which arguments they succumb to, which government intrusions
It is on individual liberty they come to accept, but their hearts are in the right place.
It is in this sense that John T. Flynn was a classical liberal.
He was always at his purest and best, his most liberal, on subjects like international
trade and war.
But even on issues like economic matters of national importance, issues on which he had
once recommended government interference in the market, Flynn gradually became more libertarian.
John Moser points out that the young Flynn considered philosophy empty and futile.
More important in his judgment was social science, for experts trained in the social sciences could identify the basic facts of any troublesome social situation.
After all, evils were as easy to identify as any scientific phenomenon, and once having identified them,
Experts trained in the social sciences would know precisely what reforms to recommend to solve social problems in a scientific way.
The problem with this vision of reality was pinpointed by the writer and anti-war activist Lawrence Dennis in a pair of letters written in 1952 to Harry Elmer Barnes.
Mozer quotes Dennis as saying that the same facts can prove diametrically opposite conclusions,
because facts by themselves, without a well-developed theory of interpretation, prove little or
nothing.
As Flynn grew older, he came more and more to realize that Dennis was right.
The path to utopia was by no means so simple.
Collecting the facts scientifically was not sufficient to guarantee the good judgment
of the Experts Who Collected Them.
Moreover, there was the problem that intellectuals, whom by this time, 1954, he had taken to calling
eggheads, were irresistibly drawn to power.
Over time, therefore, his thinking evolved in a steadily more liberal, steadily more
individualist, direction.
Over time, also, Flynn steadily became better and better known.
Moser acknowledges that the name of John T. Flynn might be unfamiliar today, but he notes
that Flynn's name would have been readily recognizable to any American who followed public
affairs from the late 1920s through the 1950s.
As a newspaper columnist, freelance magazine writer, best-selling author, and widely recognized
expert on economics, finance, politics, and foreign affairs, his words were read by millions.
Through the 30s and into the 40s, Flynn wrote a weekly column called Other People's Money
in the New Republic.
He also wrote, for much of his career, a daily newspaper column, one that eventually appeared
in all the papers of the Scripps-Howard chain.
On top of that, on and off during the 1930s and early 1940s, and consistently in the late
In the 1940s and 1950s, he had a weekly radio program.
And that weekly 15-minute program, behind the headlines, was a big success.
In the end, it brought Flynn's words to a much larger audience than ever before.
By the end of 1949, Moser tells us, the program was being carried on 56 stations, including
all 45 affiliates of the mutual network.
By the autumn of 1952, Flynn was being heard on 362 stations, and he gleefully reported
that it took a corps of clerks just to go through his fan mail, 100 to 500 pieces of
which arrived each day.
Flynn retired from public life in 1960 at the age of 77.
He died four years later, in 1964, at the age of 81.
At the time of his death, he was thought of by most who knew of him as a member of the
Right, what later came to be called the Old Right.
Ralph Raco characterizes him that way in his introduction to Flynn's best-known book,
The Roosevelt Myth, calling him the intellectual mainstay of the Old Right.
But in fact, Flynn was never, in any sense, on the Right.
To the end of his life, Moser writes, Flynn never referred to himself as anything but a
The fact is that Flynn came to be thought of as a member of the right for one reason
and one reason only.
His opposition to the domestic and foreign policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The thinking seemed to run pretty much as follows.
The opposition to the New Deal came from conservatives, conservative republicans, right?
So Flynn must have been a conservative, right?
Well, in a word, no.
That's another podcast.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.