WEBVTT NOTE R.C. Hoiles (1878–1970) 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 --> 00:00:24.000 R.C. Hoyles was born Raymond Cyrus Hoyles, 132 years ago this month, on November 24, 1878, in Alliance, Ohio, 3 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:31.240 A small town of a little more than 4,000 people, about 20 miles northeast of Canton and about 4 00:00:31.240 --> 00:00:34.080 30 miles southeast of Akron. 5 00:00:34.080 --> 00:00:40.080 He grew up on a prosperous farm a short distance outside town and first went to school in what 6 00:00:40.080 --> 00:00:44.360 he himself later characterized as a little red schoolhouse. 7 00:00:44.360 --> 00:00:50.360 There, he said many years later, the most important thing he was taught was that the 8 00:00:50.360 --> 00:00:57.280 or a majority of citizens, had the right to use taxation to support the public school system. 9 00:00:57.280 --> 00:01:03.360 Hoyles found, he said, that while his school texts exposed the political error of the divine 10 00:01:03.360 --> 00:01:08.920 right of kings, they never explained the error in the divine right of the majority. 11 00:01:08.920 --> 00:01:14.340 They simply substituted the divine right of the majority for the divine right of kings. 12 00:01:14.340 --> 00:01:19.200 And they taught that the government or the local school district, if the majority so 13 00:01:19.200 --> 00:01:48.200 Of course, as I've stressed, Hoyles didn't think all these things while he was still a student in the Little Red Schoolhouse. 14 00:01:48.200 --> 00:01:53.080 at least not in so many words such thoughts would occur to him only later 15 00:01:53.080 --> 00:01:58.240 when he was looking back at the events of his early life meanwhile he graduated 16 00:01:58.240 --> 00:02:02.600 from the Little Red Schoolhouse attended the local high school graduated from 17 00:02:02.600 --> 00:02:07.960 there as well and enrolled in yet another local school an institution owned 18 00:02:07.960 --> 00:02:14.080 and operated by the Methodist Church under the name Mount Union College it is 19 00:02:14.080 --> 00:02:18.760 It's appropriate, I think, to pause for a moment at this point in the story to reflect 20 00:02:18.760 --> 00:02:25.720 on what the fact of R.C. Hoyles being a college student at all in the late 1890s tells us 21 00:02:25.720 --> 00:02:29.900 about the socioeconomic class in which he was brought up. 22 00:02:29.900 --> 00:02:35.860 It is worth remembering that, as one unsigned but very accurate online account of the relevant 23 00:02:35.860 --> 00:02:41.300 history puts it, in the first decade of the 20th century most American children attended 24 00:02:41.300 --> 00:02:46.820 schools for no more than a few years, and from their limited education, they and their 25 00:02:46.820 --> 00:02:53.260 parents were often content if they acquired only the most rudimentary literacy and numeracy 26 00:02:53.260 --> 00:02:54.260 skills. 27 00:02:54.260 --> 00:03:00.020 It is worth remembering that, in the words of yet another unsigned online account, higher 28 00:03:00.020 --> 00:03:06.100 education at the end of the 19th century remained primarily a preserve of the elite. 29 00:03:06.100 --> 00:03:11.980 For most Americans, that didn't change until World War II, with the passage of the Serviceman's 30 00:03:11.980 --> 00:03:18.140 Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill. 31 00:03:18.140 --> 00:03:25.140 In 1900, about 2% of the college-age population enrolled in higher education. 32 00:03:25.140 --> 00:03:33.400 As late as 1947, three years after the passage of the GI Bill, only about 5% of Americans, 33 00:03:33.400 --> 00:03:39.760 One American in 20 held a four-year college degree. What we're used to today is very 34 00:03:39.760 --> 00:03:46.200 different. Today, two-thirds of the college-age population in this country is in college, 35 00:03:46.200 --> 00:03:52.000 at least part-time. And a little more than a quarter of the adult population, one American 36 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:58.520 in four, holds a four-year degree. Though his family was prosperous, Hoyles felt 37 00:03:58.520 --> 00:04:02.560 he should work to help put himself through Mount Union College. 38 00:04:02.560 --> 00:04:08.260 So he took a weekend job selling subscriptions to his older brother's newspaper, The Alliance 39 00:04:08.260 --> 00:04:12.680 Review, while he studied electrical engineering during the week. 40 00:04:12.680 --> 00:04:17.560 When graduation day dawned, however, Hoyles awoke to discover that he'd begun to find 41 00:04:17.560 --> 00:04:20.960 the newspaper business more interesting than engineering. 42 00:04:20.960 --> 00:04:25.400 So he never wound up working even a single day as an engineer. 43 00:04:25.400 --> 00:04:36.400 Instead, he stayed on in his older brother's employ, working not only as a subscription salesman, but also as a printer, as a bookkeeper, and eventually as business manager. 44 00:04:36.400 --> 00:04:46.400 By 1905, when he was still only 26 years old, he had become his older brother's partner, having acquired a one-third interest in the paper. 45 00:04:46.400 --> 00:04:51.400 For the next 14 years, the Hoyles brothers worked on growing their little paper. 46 00:04:51.400 --> 00:05:05.020 Then, in 1919, they began acquiring other nearby small-town publications, first the Lorraine Times Herald, then, two years later, in 1921, the Mansfield News. 47 00:05:05.020 --> 00:05:16.160 R.C. Hoyles knew all the ins and outs of the business well enough by then to serve as publisher, first of the Lorraine newspaper, and then of the Mansfield newspaper. 48 00:05:16.160 --> 00:05:27.360 By now, R.C. Hoyles was in his forties, and had begun, perhaps somewhat belatedly, to think in a broad theoretical way about politics and society, 49 00:05:27.360 --> 00:05:36.360 and about the role a newspaper could play in a community if it were committed to some sort of principled vision of the ideal society. 50 00:05:36.360 --> 00:05:43.260 He had come to believe that, as he put it many years later, what this country needs as much as anything else 51 00:05:43.260 --> 00:05:48.940 are newspapers that believe in moral principles and have enough courage to express these 52 00:05:48.940 --> 00:05:54.580 principles and point out practices and beliefs that violate moral principles. 53 00:05:54.580 --> 00:06:00.500 A newspaper that only tries to run editorials and columnists and news items that are popular 54 00:06:00.500 --> 00:06:03.580 is of mighty little value to its readers. 55 00:06:03.580 --> 00:06:09.140 Moreover, Hoyles argued, a newspaper that is afraid of losing subscribers because of 56 00:06:09.140 --> 00:06:13.460 of Principles is of little value to itself or anyone else. 57 00:06:13.460 --> 00:06:19.860 It might make dollars, but its publisher loses his own self-respect, his own soul. 58 00:06:19.860 --> 00:06:25.260 Hoyles believed that there were more crusading newspapers in years gone by than there are 59 00:06:25.260 --> 00:06:26.260 today. 60 00:06:26.260 --> 00:06:31.580 Today, too many newspapers are afraid of offending somebody and losing a dollar by taking an 61 00:06:31.580 --> 00:06:33.460 unpopular position. 62 00:06:33.460 --> 00:06:38.420 The result is that they cease to be of much use in their community as far as getting people 63 00:06:38.420 --> 00:06:44.900 to better understand human relations that will promote goodwill, peace and prosperity. 64 00:06:44.900 --> 00:06:50.520 And not only that, but a newspaper that is afraid to discuss things that are sacred cows 65 00:06:50.520 --> 00:06:56.100 to the majority will be afraid to handle news stories that might cost it advertising or 66 00:06:56.100 --> 00:06:57.860 subscriptions. 67 00:06:57.860 --> 00:07:03.780 Increasingly though, Hoyle saw the editorial page as the true heart of a newspaper. 68 00:07:03.780 --> 00:07:10.740 A newspaper's editorial page was, he said, a daily schoolroom made available to its subscribers, 69 00:07:10.740 --> 00:07:16.460 irrespective of whether they were rich or poor, young or old, and without the duress 70 00:07:16.460 --> 00:07:21.300 of taxes nor the compulsion of forced attendance. 71 00:07:21.300 --> 00:07:24.620 His older brother Frank did not see things this way. 72 00:07:24.620 --> 00:07:29.580 He was one of those newspaper publishers who was afraid of offending somebody and losing 73 00:07:29.580 --> 00:07:32.960 a dollar by taking an unpopular position. 74 00:07:32.960 --> 00:07:39.080 So after nearly 20 years in business together, the brothers agreed to go their separate ways. 75 00:07:39.080 --> 00:07:44.960 Frank kept their original paper, the Alliance Review, R.C. took the Lorraine Times Herald 76 00:07:44.960 --> 00:07:47.060 and the Mansfield News. 77 00:07:47.060 --> 00:07:52.200 But it wasn't long before R.C. learned that running a newspaper his way could be risky 78 00:07:52.200 --> 00:07:57.560 way beyond the mere risk of offending somebody or losing a dollar. 79 00:07:57.560 --> 00:08:02.600 As Wendy McElroy tells the story in a recent article on Hoyles for the Future of Freedom 80 00:08:02.600 --> 00:08:08.480 from Foundations Freedom Daily, The Herald, the Hoyle's paper in Lorraine, had exposed 81 00:08:08.480 --> 00:08:14.160 the fraudulent awarding of a paving contract to a Cleveland company despite the presence 82 00:08:14.160 --> 00:08:15.960 of a lower bid. 83 00:08:15.960 --> 00:08:19.880 Public pressure resulted in the lower bids being accepted. 84 00:08:19.880 --> 00:08:25.120 The enraged owner of the Cleveland company purchased rival papers in both Lorraine and 85 00:08:25.120 --> 00:08:28.980 Mansfield in order to run R.C. out of business. 86 00:08:28.980 --> 00:08:33.500 The attempt failed, and the conflict blazed on. 87 00:08:33.500 --> 00:08:36.660 Now let Carl Wattner take up the story. 88 00:08:36.660 --> 00:08:43.540 He reports in a 1986 article on R.C. that mysteriously, not long afterward, the front 89 00:08:43.540 --> 00:08:49.620 porch of the Hoyle's home was destroyed by an explosion, Hoyle's car was subsequently 90 00:08:49.620 --> 00:08:56.220 found to be wired with dynamite, which fortunately failed to detonate, and another dud bomb was 91 00:08:56.220 --> 00:08:59.220 was discovered in the office of the Mansfield News. 92 00:08:59.220 --> 00:09:06.220 Mysteriously, the perpetrators of these bombings were never identified, much less apprehended or prosecuted. 93 00:09:06.220 --> 00:09:09.220 But R.C. got the message loud and clear. 94 00:09:09.220 --> 00:09:15.220 He sold the papers in Mansfield and Lorraine and moved his family to Southern California. 95 00:09:15.220 --> 00:09:19.220 After a decent interval, during which time he researched the market, 96 00:09:19.220 --> 00:09:25.220 what was available, what he could ascertain about his probable chances of success, and so forth, 97 00:09:25.220 --> 00:09:29.120 With, he bought a daily called the Santa Ana Register. 98 00:09:29.120 --> 00:09:36.120 This was in 1935, when R.C. Hoyles was 56 years old and Santa Ana, California was a 99 00:09:36.120 --> 00:09:44.240 sleepy farm town of around 30,000 people about 35 miles southeast of Los Angeles. 100 00:09:44.240 --> 00:09:49.780 By now, R.C. had pretty well worked out his social and political philosophy. 101 00:09:49.780 --> 00:09:54.300 That is, he had pretty well worked out the moral principles he wanted his newspapers 102 00:09:54.300 --> 00:10:05.360 The most harmful error most honest people make, he wrote in an editorial in the Santa 103 00:10:05.360 --> 00:10:11.420 Ana Register, is the belief that a group or a government can do things that would be harmful 104 00:10:11.420 --> 00:10:19.340 and wicked if done by an individual, and produce results that are not harmful, unjust and wicked. 105 00:10:19.340 --> 00:10:24.540 It is the belief that a number of people doing a thing that is wrong for an individual to 106 00:10:24.540 --> 00:10:28.180 do can make it right and just. 107 00:10:28.180 --> 00:10:33.980 Hoyles believed that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the individual, 108 00:10:33.980 --> 00:10:39.260 and that the government had no right to do anything that each and every individual did 109 00:10:39.260 --> 00:10:41.420 not have the right to do. 110 00:10:41.420 --> 00:10:47.340 It would, for example, be wrong for an individual to spell out rules according to which other 111 00:10:47.340 --> 00:10:52.680 Other individuals were to run their businesses, and then seize any business people who didn't 112 00:10:52.680 --> 00:10:55.940 follow those rules and lock them in cages. 113 00:10:55.940 --> 00:11:01.540 No individual has a right to do that, which, to Hoyles, meant that no government had a 114 00:11:01.540 --> 00:11:03.620 right to do that either. 115 00:11:03.620 --> 00:11:08.300 It would be wrong for an individual to insist that anyone seeking to follow a particular 116 00:11:08.300 --> 00:11:13.580 trade or profession must first pay him for a license to do so. 117 00:11:13.580 --> 00:11:19.220 Therefore, according to Hoyles, it would be wrong for any government to do the same thing. 118 00:11:19.220 --> 00:11:24.300 It would be wrong for an individual to lock other people in cages for reading or publishing 119 00:11:24.300 --> 00:11:29.340 books or for selling or using drugs, of which he didn't approve. 120 00:11:29.340 --> 00:11:34.920 Therefore, according to Hoyles, it would be wrong for any government to do the same. 121 00:11:34.920 --> 00:11:40.140 It would be wrong for an individual to force his neighbors to pay for schools or anything 122 00:11:40.140 --> 00:11:44.200 Nothing else they didn't want and preferred not to pay for. 123 00:11:44.200 --> 00:11:49.560 Therefore, according to Hoyles, it would be wrong for any government to do the same. 124 00:11:49.560 --> 00:11:55.840 As Hoyles himself put it, any time a man has to pay for something he does not want because 125 00:11:55.840 --> 00:12:02.700 of the initiating of force by the government, he is, to that degree, a slave. 126 00:12:02.700 --> 00:12:08.180 Unsurprisingly, R.C. also described himself as against all taxes. 127 00:12:08.180 --> 00:12:14.100 After all, it would be wrong for an individual to, as he put it, arbitrarily confiscate a 128 00:12:14.100 --> 00:12:16.940 man's property and call it a tax. 129 00:12:16.940 --> 00:12:21.100 It was, then, equally wrong for a government to do the same. 130 00:12:21.100 --> 00:12:28.580 I do not believe, he said, that multiplying a wrong by any number makes it right. 131 00:12:28.580 --> 00:12:33.580 This was the philosophy that informed the editorial pages of all newspapers owned by 132 00:12:33.580 --> 00:12:40.180 by R. C. Hoyles from the mid-1930s to the time of his death, just short of his 92nd 133 00:12:40.180 --> 00:12:42.780 birthday in 1970. 134 00:12:42.780 --> 00:12:47.140 It might be argued that there has been some backsliding since then. 135 00:12:47.140 --> 00:12:52.460 I can testify that by the time I joined the staff of the Santa Ana Register as an editorial 136 00:12:52.460 --> 00:12:59.580 writer and columnist in the mid-1980s, a little more than 15 years after R. C.'s passing, 137 00:12:59.580 --> 00:13:03.500 the libertarian influence seemed to be weakening somewhat. 138 00:13:03.500 --> 00:13:08.700 Our publisher, the husband of one of R.C.'s granddaughters, felt comfortable having as 139 00:13:08.700 --> 00:13:14.700 his daily editorial cartoonist an outspoken conservative who thought libertarians were 140 00:13:14.700 --> 00:13:15.820 crazy. 141 00:13:15.820 --> 00:13:21.100 That same publisher was comfortable having as his editorial and opinion pages editor 142 00:13:21.100 --> 00:13:26.540 a man who freelanced for the National Review and had earlier left the register for a few 143 00:13:26.540 --> 00:13:32.200 years to work for the Washington Times before coming back to take control of the editorial 144 00:13:32.200 --> 00:13:40.660 on the whole, I felt at the time, our publisher wanted the register to be libertarian only 145 00:13:40.660 --> 00:13:46.720 as long as that didn't entail shocking or offending his friends, local businessmen and 146 00:13:46.720 --> 00:13:49.720 their wives, at the local country club. 147 00:13:49.720 --> 00:13:56.000 It's true, he did approve adding me, a known firebrand, to the editorial board of the paper, 148 00:13:56.000 --> 00:14:01.640 despite knowing, he must have known, that he wasn't going to be able to rely on me to 149 00:14:01.640 --> 00:14:05.640 to kowtow to the delicate sensibilities of conservatives. 150 00:14:05.640 --> 00:14:09.160 But I didn't last long at the Register, less than a year. 151 00:14:09.160 --> 00:14:15.440 There are doubtless those who know and understand far more about all this than I do. 152 00:14:15.440 --> 00:14:20.520 During my time at the Register, the news columns of the paper were purely conventional, like 153 00:14:20.520 --> 00:14:26.280 those of any other major metropolitan daily that served a mainly suburban readership. 154 00:14:26.280 --> 00:14:29.280 Like those of Newsday, let us say. 155 00:14:29.280 --> 00:14:34.560 Reporters weren't expected to be libertarian in their thinking, or even to know what libertarianism 156 00:14:34.560 --> 00:14:35.560 was. 157 00:14:35.560 --> 00:14:41.560 But in R.C.'s day, his libertarianism definitely influenced the paper's coverage of the news 158 00:14:41.560 --> 00:14:45.400 as well as its editorial stance. 159 00:14:45.400 --> 00:14:51.140 R.C. wouldn't tolerate news stories that referred to the public schools, for example. 160 00:14:51.140 --> 00:14:55.800 His reporters were required to refer to them as government schools. 161 00:14:55.800 --> 00:15:01.640 R.C. himself preferred the phrase gun-run schools and used it liberally on the editorial 162 00:15:01.640 --> 00:15:02.920 page. 163 00:15:02.920 --> 00:15:08.100 Such policies won him a certain amount of ridicule from mainstream journalists. 164 00:15:08.100 --> 00:15:13.400 Time magazine described him on one occasion as the weird Uncle Harold of the newspaper 165 00:15:13.400 --> 00:15:14.400 business. 166 00:15:14.400 --> 00:15:19.200 But R.C. went on doing things his way, and his company prospered. 167 00:15:19.200 --> 00:15:25.820 By 1970, the year of his death, it had grown to 16 dailies scattered over seven states. 168 00:15:25.820 --> 00:15:31.800 By 1986, when I joined the staff at the Santa Ana Register, it had been renamed the Orange 169 00:15:31.800 --> 00:15:38.840 County Register and was the 25th largest newspaper in the United States with a paid daily circulation 170 00:15:38.840 --> 00:15:41.380 of more than 300,000. 171 00:15:41.380 --> 00:15:47.440 Freedom Newspapers, as R.C. had decided to call his firm, owned around 30 papers by the 172 00:15:47.440 --> 00:15:52.040 in the mid-1980s, with a combined circulation of about a million. 173 00:15:52.040 --> 00:15:58.720 In the 1990s, when the company began acquiring magazines and TV stations as well as newspapers, 174 00:15:58.720 --> 00:16:02.600 it changed its name to Freedom Communications. 175 00:16:02.600 --> 00:16:08.360 R.C. Hoyles was a multimillionaire by the time he died, but he lived modestly and gave 176 00:16:08.360 --> 00:16:10.400 much of his money away. 177 00:16:10.400 --> 00:16:15.920 He was among those who provided seed money so Leonard Reed could start FEE, the Foundation 178 00:16:15.920 --> 00:16:23.440 for Economic Education in 1946. He provided ongoing financial support not only to Fee, 179 00:16:23.440 --> 00:16:28.880 but also to the Institute for Humane Studies and to Robert Lefebvre's Freedom School. 180 00:16:28.880 --> 00:16:35.540 He bought 100 copies of Isabel Patterson's 1943 book, The God of the Machine, to distribute 181 00:16:35.540 --> 00:16:41.060 to his friends and business associates. He paid all expenses to bring Ludwig von Mises 182 00:16:41.060 --> 00:17:10.420 During his lifetime, R.C. Hoyles fought for many unpopular causes—for abolition of taxation, 183 00:17:10.420 --> 00:17:16.000 for abolition of the public schools, for shutting down the concentration camps in which Japanese 184 00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:22.780 Americans were imprisoned during World War II, and for repeal of any and all laws that 185 00:17:22.780 --> 00:17:27.760 emerged from the assumption that it could be right for government to do something it 186 00:17:27.760 --> 00:17:31.040 would be wrong for any individual to do. 187 00:17:31.040 --> 00:17:36.320 He even fought for replacement of tax-funded police departments with what Carl Wattner 188 00:17:36.320 --> 00:17:42.720 Kirzner calls a free enterprise association or a defensive voluntary association that 189 00:17:42.720 --> 00:17:48.200 would sell protection of life and property much like an insurance company. 190 00:17:48.200 --> 00:17:53.680 And thanks to his generosity and his long-term commitment to freedom, he is among those we 191 00:17:53.680 --> 00:17:59.880 all have to thank for the fact that, as we were growing up, there was a libertarian movement 192 00:17:59.880 --> 00:18:05.440 already in place to receive us in the event that we should come to see things as R.C. 193 00:18:05.440 --> 00:18:07.440 This is Jeff Rigenbach.