WEBVTT NOTE Leonard Read and the Love of Liberty 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.640 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.640 --> 00:00:12.840 Jeff Brigenbach. 3 00:00:12.840 --> 00:00:18.800 It was the summer of 1962, the summer before my junior year of high school. 4 00:00:18.800 --> 00:00:23.040 I was 15 years old and I was working on debate. 5 00:00:23.040 --> 00:00:29.920 The national high school debate question for academic year 1962-63 in the United States 6 00:00:29.920 --> 00:00:36.840 had been chosen, as usual, in May of the preceding academic year, in this case, academic year 7 00:00:36.840 --> 00:00:40.120 1961-62. 8 00:00:40.120 --> 00:00:45.280 Things were complicated this year by the fact that two rival wordings of the proposition 9 00:00:45.280 --> 00:00:47.640 had both been selected. 10 00:00:47.640 --> 00:00:52.680 High schools in states east of the Mississippi would be debating, resolved that the United 11 00:00:52.680 --> 00:00:58.800 States should adopt a policy of reciprocal free trade with non-communist nations. 12 00:00:58.800 --> 00:01:04.800 High schools in states west of the Mississippi, like my own in suburban Houston, Texas, would 13 00:01:04.800 --> 00:01:10.400 be debating, resolved that the United States should support a common market for the Western 14 00:01:10.400 --> 00:01:11.760 Hemisphere. 15 00:01:11.760 --> 00:01:17.240 Either way, though, the new debate topic was free trade, and I was sifting that summer 16 00:01:17.240 --> 00:01:47.240 This summer afternoon, through the contents of the free debate material that had been sent to our debate coach since the announcement of the new topic, every year you see our debate coach received a dozen fat envelopes full of free debate materials, paperback books, off prints of newspaper and magazine articles, and leaflets and pamphlets of various sizes, some of the people sending these envelopes were in business for profit. 17 00:01:47.240 --> 00:01:54.240 contained free samples of the wonderful things our debate squad could have in even greater quantity 18 00:01:54.240 --> 00:02:00.240 if only we would purchase the somewhat expensive handbook on the coming year's debate topic. 19 00:02:00.240 --> 00:02:05.240 The handbook was, of course, published by the firm that had sent the envelope. 20 00:02:05.240 --> 00:02:10.240 The other people who sent envelopes full of free debate material to our coach 21 00:02:10.240 --> 00:02:17.240 and non-profit organizations eager to push a particular policy position related to the topic. 22 00:02:17.240 --> 00:02:25.240 In the year just past, academic year 1961-62, we had debated federal aid to education, 23 00:02:25.240 --> 00:02:32.240 and we had received free debate material from the National Education Association, among others. 24 00:02:32.240 --> 00:02:37.240 In my senior year, we would debate adding medical benefits to Social Security. 25 00:02:37.240 --> 00:02:49.240 Medicare did not yet exist during my senior year in high school, and we had free debate material that year from the American Association of Retired Persons, among others. 26 00:02:49.240 --> 00:03:06.240 Every year somebody had to go through all this stuff, and separate the wheat from the chaff, throw away the junk we wouldn't be able to use, and mark and file the good usable material that was always a part of even the least useful envelope. 27 00:03:06.240 --> 00:03:20.740 This year the job was mine, and I had already looked through the contents of the envelope from the AFL-CIO full of articles proving that free trade would cause horrible unemployment among American workers. 28 00:03:20.740 --> 00:03:32.240 I turned my attention next to a big fat envelope from an outfit called the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington on Hudson, New York. 29 00:03:32.240 --> 00:03:47.240 It turned out to contain a number of articles in favor of free trade, along with a couple of copies of a magazine called The Freeman and some general works on economics by someone named Frederic Bastiat. 30 00:03:47.240 --> 00:03:55.240 The magazine articles were written by people I'd never heard of, Paul Poirot, Dean Russell, Edmund Opitz. 31 00:03:55.240 --> 00:04:00.760 I liked the articles, however. They seemed to me to cut through to the essence of things, 32 00:04:00.760 --> 00:04:07.800 to identify the basic principles involved in any decision between free trade and protectionism. 33 00:04:07.800 --> 00:04:14.040 As a result, they provided arguments that would apply equally to reciprocal free trade among 34 00:04:14.040 --> 00:04:18.760 non-communist nations and to a common market for the Western Hemisphere. 35 00:04:19.640 --> 00:04:24.520 After I'd isolated the most useful stuff in the envelope, I went on reading. 36 00:04:24.520 --> 00:04:30.720 I liked everything I read. It wasn't necessarily going to be useful in debate this year, not 37 00:04:30.720 --> 00:04:36.920 all of it, but as a contribution to my education it was extraordinary. It was little short 38 00:04:36.920 --> 00:04:44.200 of a revelation. I especially liked the Essays on Economics by Bastiat, the first clear writer 39 00:04:44.200 --> 00:04:50.360 on economics I'd found other than Henry Hazlitt, whose weekly column in Newsweek I had just 40 00:04:50.360 --> 00:04:59.800 I noticed that all one had to do to subscribe to The Freeman was request a subscription. 41 00:04:59.800 --> 00:05:04.080 I did, and began receiving it in the mail every month. 42 00:05:04.080 --> 00:05:09.960 From The Freeman I learned the word libertarian, which I had never seen before. 43 00:05:09.960 --> 00:05:13.940 From The Freeman I learned that I was a libertarian. 44 00:05:13.940 --> 00:05:19.620 From The Freeman I learned the name Ludwig von Mises, a name which would loom large indeed 45 00:05:19.620 --> 00:05:26.580 in my future, once I had found the time and the will to read his magnum opus, Human Action. 46 00:05:26.580 --> 00:05:31.600 I put this off for many years because I was convinced that I would find the process of 47 00:05:31.600 --> 00:05:34.660 reading it dry and laborious. 48 00:05:34.660 --> 00:05:40.820 All the things that truly do make economics the dismal science, whatever Thomas Carlyle 49 00:05:40.820 --> 00:05:48.020 might have had in mind when, in 1849, he applied that epithet to the economics profession and 50 00:05:48.020 --> 00:05:49.660 and all of its works. 51 00:05:49.660 --> 00:05:52.140 I needn't have worried, of course. 52 00:05:52.140 --> 00:05:57.900 Once I overcame my prejudices and got around to it, Human Action hit me like a proverbial 53 00:05:57.900 --> 00:05:59.500 ton of bricks. 54 00:05:59.500 --> 00:06:06.400 It was another revelation, and not at all laborious, but rather exhilarating to read. 55 00:06:06.400 --> 00:06:11.460 Now I should quickly add that the Foundation for Economic Education and the Freeman were 56 00:06:11.460 --> 00:06:19.620 were not the only influences leading me in a libertarian direction in academic year 1962-63. 57 00:06:19.620 --> 00:06:26.620 There was also Ayn Rand. I had read and liked The Fountainhead two years earlier in 1960. 58 00:06:26.620 --> 00:06:33.400 I would read Atlas Shrugged the following year, early in 1963, and it would blow my 59 00:06:33.400 --> 00:06:40.880 16-year-old mind. It would be many years before I could be said to have recovered, in fact, 60 00:06:40.880 --> 00:06:47.080 If I may be said to have recovered even now, nearly fifty years later, Ayn Rand is for 61 00:06:47.080 --> 00:06:51.600 many of us once encountered a nearly irresistible force. 62 00:06:51.600 --> 00:06:58.880 Thee, the foundation for economic education, was, for many of us of a certain age, an immovable 63 00:06:58.880 --> 00:07:00.840 object of a kind. 64 00:07:00.840 --> 00:07:06.360 There it lay, smack in the middle of what we had thought was our path to education. 65 00:07:06.360 --> 00:07:11.460 In order to get around it, we were forced to rethink all sorts of ideas we had long 66 00:07:11.460 --> 00:07:17.860 taken for granted, forced to reorient what we had thought was a straightforward and even 67 00:07:17.860 --> 00:07:23.740 obvious process of gradually, steadily increasing understanding. 68 00:07:23.740 --> 00:07:29.860 Brian Doherty writes in his indispensable Radicals for Capitalism, a freewheeling history 69 00:07:29.860 --> 00:07:35.720 of the modern American libertarian movement, that if you scratch anyone who came of age 70 00:07:35.720 --> 00:07:42.680 Page from the late 1950s through the 1980s, who works professionally in either a libertarian 71 00:07:42.680 --> 00:07:49.960 or even in many cases conservative think tank or other organization for political activism, 72 00:07:49.960 --> 00:07:55.920 you will find someone who sent away at some point to Irvington, or had some relative or 73 00:07:55.920 --> 00:08:04.040 mentor send away for them, either $10 or $5 or even just a sincere request, and started 74 00:08:04.040 --> 00:08:12.480 and receiving monthly doses of measured, simple, direct, unironic and uncomic, homey, timeless 75 00:08:12.480 --> 00:08:19.320 explanations of why things worked better if you let the eternal order of the Creator, 76 00:08:19.320 --> 00:08:26.860 in whatever of His manifestations, act itself out through unbridled human creative energy. 77 00:08:26.860 --> 00:08:33.240 The authors and articles would be respectful, but not slavishly so, of American tradition, 78 00:08:33.240 --> 00:08:39.240 carefully debunking the cliches of socialism that Fee knew its readers encountered every 79 00:08:39.240 --> 00:08:47.200 day, helping them see another world, a sane, moral, successful, sensible world that freedom 80 00:08:47.200 --> 00:08:48.800 could lead to. 81 00:08:48.800 --> 00:08:54.480 The sight of that imagined world was often enough to make that young man, it was usually 82 00:08:54.480 --> 00:09:01.560 a man, dedicate his intellectual or political life to those ideas. 83 00:09:01.560 --> 00:09:05.280 So it was, at least, for me. 84 00:09:05.280 --> 00:09:11.000 In the summer of 1962, looking through the contents of that fat manila envelope from 85 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:17.320 Fee, I didn't know that the Foundation for Economic Education was only 16 years old at 86 00:09:17.320 --> 00:09:21.020 that time, only a few months older than I was. 87 00:09:21.020 --> 00:09:26.940 I didn't know that it had been founded in March of 1946, or that it had been sending 88 00:09:26.940 --> 00:09:43.740 I didn't know that Fee was the brainchild and pet project of a former realtor, wholesale 89 00:09:43.740 --> 00:09:48.820 grocer and chamber of commerce executive named Leonard Reed. 90 00:09:48.820 --> 00:09:55.140 Nor did I know that Reed was, in Brian Doherty's words, the man who created the institutional 91 00:09:55.140 --> 00:10:19.720 I would find all this out in time, of course. I would learn that Leonard Edward Reed had 92 00:10:19.720 --> 00:10:27.300 had been born in September 1898 on a farm in central Michigan, about 40 miles north-northwest 93 00:10:27.300 --> 00:10:28.800 of Lansing. 94 00:10:28.800 --> 00:10:33.080 After completing his schooling, he dutifully went off to war. 95 00:10:33.080 --> 00:10:35.240 This was World War I, of course. 96 00:10:35.240 --> 00:10:38.520 The war to make the world safe for democracy. 97 00:10:38.520 --> 00:10:44.340 The war to end all wars of the future before they had even had a chance to break out. 98 00:10:44.340 --> 00:10:49.980 When Reed returned from that conflict, he opened a wholesale grocery business, specializing 99 00:10:49.980 --> 00:10:56.900 in local produce, in the college town of Ann Arbor, about 40 miles west of Detroit. 100 00:10:56.900 --> 00:11:03.780 At first Reed's business prospered, but within a few years the increasingly ubiquitous A&P, 101 00:11:03.780 --> 00:11:09.860 the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, opened one of its supermarkets in Ann Arbor. 102 00:11:09.860 --> 00:11:15.780 And after that Reed's business went into a decline from which it never really recovered. 103 00:11:15.780 --> 00:11:23.460 By 1925 the now 27-year-old Reed had relocated to California, the San Francisco Bay Area 104 00:11:23.460 --> 00:11:25.060 to be precise. 105 00:11:25.060 --> 00:11:31.460 By 1928, after a brief time in real estate, he had decided to take an executive position 106 00:11:31.460 --> 00:11:34.700 with the Burlingame Chamber of Commerce. 107 00:11:34.700 --> 00:11:41.060 That job had led to a similar one with the nearby, larger Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce, 108 00:11:41.060 --> 00:11:47.460 and that job had led to further Chamber of Commerce gigs in Seattle and San Francisco. 109 00:11:47.460 --> 00:11:54.300 Within eleven years, by 1939, when he was 41 years old, Reed had been named General 110 00:11:54.300 --> 00:12:00.820 Manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the largest in the United States. 111 00:12:00.820 --> 00:12:08.220 One part of any Chamber of Commerce executive's job was promotion of the organization's political goals. 112 00:12:08.220 --> 00:12:13.680 Up to this point, Leonard Reed had promoted those goals exactly as the highest leadership 113 00:12:13.680 --> 00:12:16.660 of the organization wanted them promoted. 114 00:12:16.660 --> 00:12:21.580 He seems to have taken it for granted that defending the official goals of the U.S. Chamber 115 00:12:21.580 --> 00:12:26.200 of Commerce was the same as defending the free market. 116 00:12:26.200 --> 00:12:31.600 According to George H. Nash in his celebrated book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement 117 00:12:31.600 --> 00:12:39.280 in America since 1945, Reed spent the early thirties merely echoing the ideas of the Chamber's 118 00:12:39.280 --> 00:12:45.360 national leader, Henry Harriman, a proponent of interventionist ideas which became the 119 00:12:45.360 --> 00:12:53.200 basis of the NRA, the National Recovery Act, a key piece of New Deal legislation that heavily 120 00:12:53.200 --> 00:13:00.240 the regulated industry and even organized cartels and monopolies, supposedly to stimulate 121 00:13:00.240 --> 00:13:03.280 the economy to recovery. 122 00:13:03.280 --> 00:13:06.000 Nor was this some sort of aberration. 123 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:13.120 Ten years later, in 1943, the Chamber's newly inaugurated president stated in a speech that 124 00:13:13.120 --> 00:13:20.880 only the willfully blind can fail to see that the old-style capitalism of a primitive, free-shooting 125 00:13:20.880 --> 00:13:27.720 period is gone forever. The capitalism which fought against justified public regulation 126 00:13:27.720 --> 00:13:34.920 of the competitive system is a thing of the past. By 1943, however, Leonard Reed no longer 127 00:13:34.920 --> 00:13:42.640 supported such ideas. He had moved on to a new and more sophisticated level of understanding. 128 00:13:42.640 --> 00:13:48.760 The way it happened was this. When Reed reached Los Angeles, he learned that a local businessman, 129 00:13:48.760 --> 00:13:55.080 A very influential local businessman, an executive of Southern California Edison named William 130 00:13:55.080 --> 00:14:01.360 Mullendor, had been eloquently critical of all New Deal policies. 131 00:14:01.360 --> 00:14:03.000 Reed arranged a meeting. 132 00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:08.360 It was his intention, he told his staff, to straighten this man Mullendor out. 133 00:14:08.360 --> 00:14:13.680 Instead, it was Mullendor who ended up straightening Leonard Reed out. 134 00:14:13.680 --> 00:14:19.440 He persuaded Reid that the New Deal was rotten to the core, that there was no such thing 135 00:14:19.440 --> 00:14:23.920 as justified public regulation of the competitive system. 136 00:14:23.920 --> 00:14:30.480 He persuaded Reid of the truth of what today we call libertarianism. 137 00:14:30.480 --> 00:14:36.040 Reid was a permanently changed man, and his days with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were 138 00:14:36.040 --> 00:14:37.040 numbered. 139 00:14:37.040 --> 00:14:43.640 By 1945 he had resigned his position in L.A., moved to New York, and begun raising money 140 00:14:43.640 --> 00:14:52.440 to establish an organization that would proselytize for a truly free market and a truly free society, 141 00:14:52.440 --> 00:14:57.240 the foundation for economic education, he had decided to call it. 142 00:14:57.240 --> 00:15:01.920 It would be the first explicitly libertarian think tank. 143 00:15:01.920 --> 00:15:07.520 According to Brian Doherty, Mullendor warned Reed that his plans were too ambitious, but 144 00:15:07.520 --> 00:15:10.960 this time Reed paid him no heed. 145 00:15:10.960 --> 00:15:17.580 As Doherty puts it, Reed possessed that strange human power on which so much history, both 146 00:15:17.580 --> 00:15:24.880 exalted and regrettable, hinges, to tell you an idea or suggest a path and make you think 147 00:15:24.880 --> 00:15:32.500 that it is, however strange or troublesome, a very good idea that is worth acting upon. 148 00:15:32.500 --> 00:15:35.580 In effect, Reed was a born salesman. 149 00:15:35.580 --> 00:15:42.060 As a result, in Doherty's words, from the mid-1940s aftermath of World War II until 150 00:15:42.060 --> 00:15:50.020 the early 1980s dawn of Reaganism, Reed managed to gather over $1 million a year in donations 151 00:15:50.020 --> 00:15:56.700 from some of America's biggest businessmen in the name of economic education. 152 00:15:56.700 --> 00:16:02.100 He used some of his seed money to purchase what Doherty calls a sprawling mansion on 153 00:16:02.100 --> 00:16:31.100 A horse stable on the grounds was turned into a store room for a growing collection of books, pamphlets, magazines and clippings, and a house was built, owned by Fee, for Reed and his wife Gladys to live in out back. Fee presidents still live in it. 154 00:16:32.100 --> 00:16:37.780 Those big businessmen continued to give Reed their money despite the fact that he refused 155 00:16:37.780 --> 00:16:44.700 to deviate from what he regarded as libertarian principle in order to support statist policies 156 00:16:44.700 --> 00:16:52.700 his donors sometimes liked. Tariffs protecting their own industries, for example. On occasion, 157 00:16:52.700 --> 00:16:58.700 of course, a disappointed donor would decide not to further support these activities. When 158 00:16:58.700 --> 00:17:04.780 When that happened, Reed would write in reply that I am pleased that there still exist areas 159 00:17:04.780 --> 00:17:09.700 where one is free to choose how one expends his own money. 160 00:17:09.700 --> 00:17:13.900 That these areas are being rapidly narrowed is self-evident. 161 00:17:13.900 --> 00:17:20.120 In view of the fact that Fee is attempting to widen the areas where one is free to choose, 162 00:17:20.120 --> 00:17:26.980 we cannot consistently complain when someone chooses not to support our work. 163 00:17:26.980 --> 00:17:31.460 He'd also counseled his donors not to expect quick results. 164 00:17:31.460 --> 00:17:37.920 In a 1960 letter to one of them, he wrote that if we could not save our situation except 165 00:17:37.920 --> 00:17:45.500 as the millions come to master the complexities of economic, social, political and moral philosophy, 166 00:17:45.500 --> 00:17:48.980 I would not spend a moment of my life in this work. 167 00:17:48.980 --> 00:17:54.540 It would be like expecting a majority of adult Americans to become symphony composers or 168 00:17:54.540 --> 00:17:55.540 conductors. 169 00:17:55.540 --> 00:17:59.780 In a 1961 lecture delivered at Fee, he added, 170 00:17:59.780 --> 00:18:05.620 Were it necessary to bring a majority into a comprehension of the freedom philosophy, 171 00:18:05.620 --> 00:18:08.660 the cause of liberty would be utterly hopeless. 172 00:18:08.660 --> 00:18:15.140 Every significant movement in history has been led by one or just a few individuals, 173 00:18:15.140 --> 00:18:19.060 with a small minority of energetic supporters. 174 00:18:19.060 --> 00:18:23.940 One of Reed's closest supporters and collaborators once quipped that, 175 00:18:23.940 --> 00:18:42.940 Not only does Reid not promise us a win in the near future, not only does he not guarantee us a win in the distant future, he has the unmitigated gall to tell us that we still don't even fully understand the game or how to recognize a win when we see one. 176 00:18:42.940 --> 00:18:57.940 This was not pessimism on Reed's part. It was realism. Like Ayn Rand, he recognized that it is earlier than you think, that the triumph of liberty would require a long process of education. 177 00:18:57.940 --> 00:19:21.940 Between 1946 and 1983, 37 years later, when he died in his sleep at the age of 84, 27 years ago this month, in his bedroom in the house built for him and his wife behind the Fee Mansion in Irvington, Leonard Reed put all he had into that long-term educational project. 178 00:19:21.940 --> 00:19:29.460 All of us who make up the libertarian movement of today have benefited immeasurably from his efforts. 179 00:19:29.460 --> 00:19:31.460 This is Jeff Rigenbund.