The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Brigenbach.
It was the summer of 1962, the summer before my junior year of high school.
I was 15 years old and I was working on debate.
The national high school debate question for academic year 1962-63 in the United States
had been chosen, as usual, in May of the preceding academic year, in this case, academic year
1961-62.
Things were complicated this year by the fact that two rival wordings of the proposition
had both been selected.
High schools in states east of the Mississippi would be debating, resolved that the United
States should adopt a policy of reciprocal free trade with non-communist nations.
High schools in states west of the Mississippi, like my own in suburban Houston, Texas, would
be debating, resolved that the United States should support a common market for the Western
Hemisphere.
Either way, though, the new debate topic was free trade, and I was sifting that summer
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.
contained free samples of the wonderful things our debate squad could have in even greater quantity
if only we would purchase the somewhat expensive handbook on the coming year's debate topic.
The handbook was, of course, published by the firm that had sent the envelope.
The other people who sent envelopes full of free debate material to our coach
and non-profit organizations eager to push a particular policy position related to the topic.
In the year just past, academic year 1961-62, we had debated federal aid to education,
and we had received free debate material from the National Education Association, among others.
In my senior year, we would debate adding medical benefits to Social Security.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The magazine articles were written by people I'd never heard of, Paul Poirot, Dean Russell, Edmund Opitz.
I liked the articles, however. They seemed to me to cut through to the essence of things,
to identify the basic principles involved in any decision between free trade and protectionism.
As a result, they provided arguments that would apply equally to reciprocal free trade among
non-communist nations and to a common market for the Western Hemisphere.
After I'd isolated the most useful stuff in the envelope, I went on reading.
I liked everything I read. It wasn't necessarily going to be useful in debate this year, not
all of it, but as a contribution to my education it was extraordinary. It was little short
of a revelation. I especially liked the Essays on Economics by Bastiat, the first clear writer
on economics I'd found other than Henry Hazlitt, whose weekly column in Newsweek I had just
I noticed that all one had to do to subscribe to The Freeman was request a subscription.
I did, and began receiving it in the mail every month.
From The Freeman I learned the word libertarian, which I had never seen before.
From The Freeman I learned that I was a libertarian.
From The Freeman I learned the name Ludwig von Mises, a name which would loom large indeed
in my future, once I had found the time and the will to read his magnum opus, Human Action.
I put this off for many years because I was convinced that I would find the process of
reading it dry and laborious.
All the things that truly do make economics the dismal science, whatever Thomas Carlyle
might have had in mind when, in 1849, he applied that epithet to the economics profession and
and all of its works.
I needn't have worried, of course.
Once I overcame my prejudices and got around to it, Human Action hit me like a proverbial
ton of bricks.
It was another revelation, and not at all laborious, but rather exhilarating to read.
Now I should quickly add that the Foundation for Economic Education and the Freeman were
were not the only influences leading me in a libertarian direction in academic year 1962-63.
There was also Ayn Rand. I had read and liked The Fountainhead two years earlier in 1960.
I would read Atlas Shrugged the following year, early in 1963, and it would blow my
16-year-old mind. It would be many years before I could be said to have recovered, in fact,
If I may be said to have recovered even now, nearly fifty years later, Ayn Rand is for
many of us once encountered a nearly irresistible force.
Thee, the foundation for economic education, was, for many of us of a certain age, an immovable
object of a kind.
There it lay, smack in the middle of what we had thought was our path to education.
In order to get around it, we were forced to rethink all sorts of ideas we had long
taken for granted, forced to reorient what we had thought was a straightforward and even
obvious process of gradually, steadily increasing understanding.
Brian Doherty writes in his indispensable Radicals for Capitalism, a freewheeling history
of the modern American libertarian movement, that if you scratch anyone who came of age
Page from the late 1950s through the 1980s, who works professionally in either a libertarian
or even in many cases conservative think tank or other organization for political activism,
you will find someone who sent away at some point to Irvington, or had some relative or
mentor send away for them, either $10 or $5 or even just a sincere request, and started
and receiving monthly doses of measured, simple, direct, unironic and uncomic, homey, timeless
explanations of why things worked better if you let the eternal order of the Creator,
in whatever of His manifestations, act itself out through unbridled human creative energy.
The authors and articles would be respectful, but not slavishly so, of American tradition,
carefully debunking the cliches of socialism that Fee knew its readers encountered every
day, helping them see another world, a sane, moral, successful, sensible world that freedom
could lead to.
The sight of that imagined world was often enough to make that young man, it was usually
a man, dedicate his intellectual or political life to those ideas.
So it was, at least, for me.
In the summer of 1962, looking through the contents of that fat manila envelope from
Fee, I didn't know that the Foundation for Economic Education was only 16 years old at
that time, only a few months older than I was.
I didn't know that it had been founded in March of 1946, or that it had been sending
I didn't know that Fee was the brainchild and pet project of a former realtor, wholesale
grocer and chamber of commerce executive named Leonard Reed.
Nor did I know that Reed was, in Brian Doherty's words, the man who created the institutional
I would find all this out in time, of course. I would learn that Leonard Edward Reed had
had been born in September 1898 on a farm in central Michigan, about 40 miles north-northwest
of Lansing.
After completing his schooling, he dutifully went off to war.
This was World War I, of course.
The war to make the world safe for democracy.
The war to end all wars of the future before they had even had a chance to break out.
When Reed returned from that conflict, he opened a wholesale grocery business, specializing
in local produce, in the college town of Ann Arbor, about 40 miles west of Detroit.
At first Reed's business prospered, but within a few years the increasingly ubiquitous A&P,
the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, opened one of its supermarkets in Ann Arbor.
And after that Reed's business went into a decline from which it never really recovered.
By 1925 the now 27-year-old Reed had relocated to California, the San Francisco Bay Area
to be precise.
By 1928, after a brief time in real estate, he had decided to take an executive position
with the Burlingame Chamber of Commerce.
That job had led to a similar one with the nearby, larger Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce,
and that job had led to further Chamber of Commerce gigs in Seattle and San Francisco.
Within eleven years, by 1939, when he was 41 years old, Reed had been named General
Manager of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the largest in the United States.
One part of any Chamber of Commerce executive's job was promotion of the organization's political goals.
Up to this point, Leonard Reed had promoted those goals exactly as the highest leadership
of the organization wanted them promoted.
He seems to have taken it for granted that defending the official goals of the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce was the same as defending the free market.
According to George H. Nash in his celebrated book, The Conservative Intellectual Movement
in America since 1945, Reed spent the early thirties merely echoing the ideas of the Chamber's
national leader, Henry Harriman, a proponent of interventionist ideas which became the
basis of the NRA, the National Recovery Act, a key piece of New Deal legislation that heavily
the regulated industry and even organized cartels and monopolies, supposedly to stimulate
the economy to recovery.
Nor was this some sort of aberration.
Ten years later, in 1943, the Chamber's newly inaugurated president stated in a speech that
only the willfully blind can fail to see that the old-style capitalism of a primitive, free-shooting
period is gone forever. The capitalism which fought against justified public regulation
of the competitive system is a thing of the past. By 1943, however, Leonard Reed no longer
supported such ideas. He had moved on to a new and more sophisticated level of understanding.
The way it happened was this. When Reed reached Los Angeles, he learned that a local businessman,
A very influential local businessman, an executive of Southern California Edison named William
Mullendor, had been eloquently critical of all New Deal policies.
Reed arranged a meeting.
It was his intention, he told his staff, to straighten this man Mullendor out.
Instead, it was Mullendor who ended up straightening Leonard Reed out.
He persuaded Reid that the New Deal was rotten to the core, that there was no such thing
as justified public regulation of the competitive system.
He persuaded Reid of the truth of what today we call libertarianism.
Reid was a permanently changed man, and his days with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were
numbered.
By 1945 he had resigned his position in L.A., moved to New York, and begun raising money
to establish an organization that would proselytize for a truly free market and a truly free society,
the foundation for economic education, he had decided to call it.
It would be the first explicitly libertarian think tank.
According to Brian Doherty, Mullendor warned Reed that his plans were too ambitious, but
this time Reed paid him no heed.
As Doherty puts it, Reed possessed that strange human power on which so much history, both
exalted and regrettable, hinges, to tell you an idea or suggest a path and make you think
that it is, however strange or troublesome, a very good idea that is worth acting upon.
In effect, Reed was a born salesman.
As a result, in Doherty's words, from the mid-1940s aftermath of World War II until
the early 1980s dawn of Reaganism, Reed managed to gather over $1 million a year in donations
from some of America's biggest businessmen in the name of economic education.
He used some of his seed money to purchase what Doherty calls a sprawling mansion on
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.
Those big businessmen continued to give Reed their money despite the fact that he refused
to deviate from what he regarded as libertarian principle in order to support statist policies
his donors sometimes liked. Tariffs protecting their own industries, for example. On occasion,
of course, a disappointed donor would decide not to further support these activities. When
When that happened, Reed would write in reply that I am pleased that there still exist areas
where one is free to choose how one expends his own money.
That these areas are being rapidly narrowed is self-evident.
In view of the fact that Fee is attempting to widen the areas where one is free to choose,
we cannot consistently complain when someone chooses not to support our work.
He'd also counseled his donors not to expect quick results.
In a 1960 letter to one of them, he wrote that if we could not save our situation except
as the millions come to master the complexities of economic, social, political and moral philosophy,
I would not spend a moment of my life in this work.
It would be like expecting a majority of adult Americans to become symphony composers or
conductors.
In a 1961 lecture delivered at Fee, he added,
Were it necessary to bring a majority into a comprehension of the freedom philosophy,
the cause of liberty would be utterly hopeless.
Every significant movement in history has been led by one or just a few individuals,
with a small minority of energetic supporters.
One of Reed's closest supporters and collaborators once quipped that,
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.
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.
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.
All of us who make up the libertarian movement of today have benefited immeasurably from his efforts.
This is Jeff Rigenbund.