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NOTE Roger MacBride and Rose Wilder Lane: A Libertarian Legacy

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Brigenbach.

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Roger McBride died 15 years ago this month. His death on March 4, 1995, took place only about 8 weeks after the death on January 7, 1995, of Murray and Rothbard.

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Yet contrast their post-mortem careers. Rothbard is, if anything, bigger today than he was in 1995.

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Roger McBride, by comparison, seems to have been virtually forgotten.

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An old-timer like me has to wonder how many libertarians under 40 really know who Roger McBride was

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and why he was significant in the history of the libertarian movement.

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If you're of the under 40 set, feel free to email me and give me your two cents worth on this.

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I'm J. Rigenbach, all one word, at Mises.com.

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So who was Roger McBride?

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I first heard of him in 1972 when the reporters in newspapers and on radio and TV

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informed me that a renegade Republican elector from Virginia in the Electoral College, one Roger McBride,

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had voted for John Hospers for President and Tony Nathan for Vice President,

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thus casting the first electoral vote ever cast for a woman and the first electoral vote ever won by the Libertarian Party.

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I had never heard of Roger McBride at this point, nor had anyone else I knew in the Libertarian movement,

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and my friends and I had been involved since the movement's earliest days, a few years before, in 1969.

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Who was this newcomer? Roger McBride.

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It turned out, of course, that Roger McBride was no newcomer.

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I, Callow youth that I was, was the newcomer.

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McBride, on the other hand, was a connection back to an earlier stage in the modern libertarian movement,

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which had gotten underway not in the late 1960s, as I had thought, but in the 1940s,

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with the publication during World War II of four important libertarian books, The Discovery

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of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane, The God of the Machine by Isabel Patterson, The Road

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to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, and a radically individualist novel, The Fountainhead, by

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Ayn Rand, and The Establishment, the year after the war's end, of the Foundation for

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for Economic Education, The First Libertarian Think Tank.

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Rose Wilder Lane, the author of the first of those four libertarian books, The Discovery

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of Freedom, was the daughter of Almanzo Wilder and Laura Ingalls, who had moved from the

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Great Lakes region into the Dakota Territory in the late 1870s, determined to get for themselves

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Some of the free land offered to new settlers who would homestead a claim and work it and

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live on it for a minimum period of time.

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Their daughter, Rose Wilder, was born in the Dakota Territory in 1886.

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She grew up there and in rural southern Missouri on a farm her parents bought in the Ozarks

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after the climate of the Dakota Territory proved too much for them.

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The young Rose Wilder was a star student in the small town schools she attended in Missouri

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and in the Cajun country of southwestern Louisiana, but there was no money for her to attend college.

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So in the summer of 1904, just after her graduation from high school, she studied telegraphy informally

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at the local railroad station, under the tutelage of the station master, who was the father

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of a school friend.

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By Fall, still not yet 18 years old, she was living on her own in Kansas City, working

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for Western Union.

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For the next five years, Rose operated telegraphs in Missouri, Indiana and California.

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Then, at the age of 22, she met and married Gillette Lane, a young man who traveled around

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the country having a good time, supporting himself as he went by his gift of gab and

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his flair for the written word.

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Sometimes he took writing or editing jobs on newspapers.

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Sometimes he sold ads for newspapers.

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Sometimes he sold real estate.

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Sometimes he wrote brochure and display ad copy for real estate developers.

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Whatever you needed done, if being glib would answer your needs, Gillette Lane was your

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man.

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Rose followed him around the country for several years, learning a lot in the process, acquiring,

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For example, some useful familiarity with newspaper offices.

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But about six years after their romance began, it was over.

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They were in San Francisco at the time.

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It was 1915, Rose was 28.

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She took a job in the newsroom at the Daily San Francisco Bulletin and quickly progressed

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from editing other people's copy to writing her own and seeing it published under her

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byline, not infrequently, with a photo.

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In those days, big city newspapers ran fiction as well as nonfiction, and Rose wrote it all.

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Novels for serialization, short stories, profiles of famous men based on extensive interviews

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with those men and with those who had known them and worked with them, feature articles,

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you name it.

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Her articles and stories were often picked up for syndication to other papers around

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the country.

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By 1918, Rose had decided that her talent was larger than the San Francisco Bulletin.

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She would freelance, write articles and books for a national audience.

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And so she would, for the next 25 years.

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Throughout the 20s and 30s, her byline would be everywhere, in the newspapers, in magazines

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as diverse as Harper's, the Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Cosmopolitan,

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and the Lady's Home Journal.

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Her books would be in all the bookstores, and sometimes on the bestseller lists.

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She would be, as Wikipedia puts it, reputed to be one of the highest paid female writers

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in America.

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But all that was in the future, the fairly near future, but still the future.

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For now, it was 1918.

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She was 31 years old, a local success with a local reputation.

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She believed she had it in her to do more, to make it bigger, but she wasn't sure.

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How could she be sure?

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She hadn't tried yet.

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Meanwhile, she had developed an interest in social and political questions, and she had

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decided that she was a communist.

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Why?

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Because she was dedicated to the freedom of the individual.

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At that time, she explained many years later, in an article for the Saturday Evening Post,

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She had viewed the history of Western civilization since the Renaissance as a story of progressive

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steps to freedom.

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The first step was the Reformation, that one freedom of conscience.

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The second was the political revolution.

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Our American Revolution against an English king was part of that.

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This second step won for all Western people varying degrees of political freedom.

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Liberals have continued to increase that freedom by giving increasing political power to the

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people.

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In the United States, for example, liberals gained equal suffrage, popular election of

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nearly all public officials, initiative, referendum, recall and the primaries.

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But now we confront economic tyranny, stated in its simplest terms, no man is free whose

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very livelihood can be denied him at another man's will.

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The worker is a wage slave. The final revolution, then, must capture economic control.

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As the Rosewilder Lane of 1919 or thereabouts saw it, since the progress of science and

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invention enables us to produce more goods than we can consume, no one should lack any

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material thing. Yet we see on the one hand great wealth in the hands of a few who, owning

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Banking and controlling all means of production own all the goods produced.

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On the other hand, we see multitudes always relatively poor lacking goods they could enjoy.

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Who owns this great wealth?

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The capitalist.

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What creates wealth?

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Labor.

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How does the capitalist get it?

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He collects a profit on all goods produced.

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Does the capitalist produce anything?

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No, labor produces everything.

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Then if all working men organized in trade unions compelled all capitalists to pay in

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wages the full value of their labor, they could buy all the goods produced?

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No, because the capitalist adds his profit to the goods before he sells them.

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From this point of view, it is clear that the profit system causes the injustice, the

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Inequality we see. We must eliminate profit. That is to say, we must eliminate the capitalist.

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We will take his current profits, distribute his accumulated wealth, and ourselves administer

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his former affairs. The workers who produce the goods will then enjoy the goods. There

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will no longer be any economic inequality, and we shall have such general prosperity

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as the world has never known. When the capitalist is gone, who will manage production? The State.

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And what is the State? The State will be the mass of the toiling workers. It was at this

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point that the first doubt pierced my Communist faith.

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Still she persevered in her Communist faith for at least a few more years. Then, in Europe

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up on assignment for the American Red Cross, which employed journalists in the aftermath

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of World War I to call public attention to its activities in war-devastated areas, thereby

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improving its chances of raising funds to cover the cost of those activities.

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She took advantage of an opportunity to visit Soviet Russia and see for herself how the

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noble experiment there was working out in practice.

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She had tea one afternoon in the home of a farm couple in Georgia.

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Their village, Rose wrote some years later during the 1930s, was communist, of course.

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It had always been communist.

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The sole source of wealth was land, and it had never occurred to these villagers that

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land could be privately owned.

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This doesn't mean that the villagers lived in poverty.

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Lane acknowledged that certainly their standard of living was primitive.

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In a hundred years it had not changed. They had no electric lights, no plumbing. They

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bathed, I supposed, only once a week in the village bathhouse, and perhaps it wasn't sanitary.

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How many germs were in their drinking water, no one knew. Their windows were not screened.

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Their dusty roads were undoubtedly fathomless mud in rainy weather. They had no automobiles

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. . . . . . . . . . .

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In the year that Lane visited, crops had been good, the cattle were fat, the granaries overflowed, and all the open-house lofts held piles of red-gold pumpkins.

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Of course there was not a poor man in the town. Everyone worked, and, weather permitting, everyone who worked was abundantly fed.

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So communist could have desired better proof of communism's practical value than the prosperous

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well-being of those villagers.

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As for their relationship to the Russian national government, Lane wrote, these people had never

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had any real contact with the Tsar's government.

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Once a year in the fall, they had been accustomed to paying a tax collector a tenth of the year's

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yield from the grain fields.

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The tax collector came riding across the plains, collected the taxes in ox-wagons and rode

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away.

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The young men occasionally went to war, an officer rode into the village, young men rode

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away with him, and when some returned, months or years later, they brought the news of where

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they had been and what they had done and seen.

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At the time of her visit, Lane wrote, the Bolsheviks had been nearly four years in power,

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And the village taxes had not been increased, nor any more young men taken for the army

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than during the Tsar's regime.

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These villages depended hardly at all upon Tiflis, the nearest city, but even Tiflis

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was at the moment reviving under NEP, Lenin's new economic policy of a temporary breathing

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spell for capitalism.

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Yet my host astounded me with the force with which he said that he did not like the new

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Development.

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I could hardly believe that a lifelong communist, with the proofs of successful communism thick

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about us, was opposed to a communist government.

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He repeated that he did not like it.

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Why not?

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It turned out, Lane wrote, that his complaint was government interference with village affairs.

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He protested against the growing bureaucracy that was taking more and more men from productive

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He predicted chaos and suffering from the centralizing of economic power in Moscow.

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This, I said to myself, is the opposition of the peasant mind to new ideas, too large

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for him to grasp.

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Here is my small opportunity to spread a little light.

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I could understand simple Russian, but I could not speak it well, and through my interpreter

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Later I explained in primer words the parallel between the village land as a source of wealth

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and all sources of wealth.

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I drew for him a picture of Great Russia to its remotest corner enjoying the equality,

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the peace and the justly divided prosperity of his village.

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He shook his head sadly.

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It is too big, he said.

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Too big.

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At the top it is too small.

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It will not work.

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In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man's head, and one

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hundred heads together do not make one great head. No, only God can know Russia.

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One might say, I suppose, that the Georgian farmer had hit upon F. A. Hayek's idea about

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the role of knowledge in society, and by enunciating it as he did, he seems to have taken the

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and the wind, at least temporarily, out of Rose Wilder Lane's communist sails.

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She continued travelling around the Soviet Union after that, talking to people wherever

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she went, and by the time she left, she had changed her mind on a few things.

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I came out of the Soviet Union no longer a communist, she wrote nearly fifteen years

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later, because I believed in personal freedom.

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Like all Americans, I took for granted the individual liberty to which I had been born.

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It seemed as necessary and as inevitable as the air I breathed.

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It seemed the natural element in which human beings lived.

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And what I saw in the Soviet Union was not an extension of human freedom, but the establishment

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of tyranny on a new, widely extended and deeper base.

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and acknowledged that, given their aim, I do not see how the Soviet leaders could have

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done otherwise.

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For she had now grasped that, as she put it, centralized economic control over multitudes

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of human beings must be continuous and it must be autocratic.

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It must be government by a swift flow of edicts, issued in haste to catch up with events receding

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The problem, Lane now realized, was that producing food from the earth and the sea, making goods from a semblance of money,

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and it will be compelled to use compulsion.

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In the effort to succeed, it must become such minute and rigorous control of details of individual life,

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as no people will accept without compulsion.

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The problem, Lane now realized, was that producing food from the earth and the sea,

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It is that producing food from the earth and the sea, making goods from assembled raw

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materials and their storing, exchanging, transporting, distributing and consuming by vast multitudes

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of human beings, are activities so intricately interrelated and interdependent that efficient

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control of any part of them demands control of the whole.

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No man can so control multitudes of men without compulsion, and that compulsion must increase.

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It must increase because human beings are naturally diverse.

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It is the nature of men to do the same thing in different ways, to waste time and energy

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in altering the shapes of things, to experiment, invent, make mistakes, depart from the past

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in an Infinite Variety of Directions.

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Plants and animals repeat routine, but men who are not restrained will go into the future

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like explorers into a new country, and exploration is always wasteful.

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Great numbers of explorers accomplish nothing, and many are lost.

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Economic compulsion is therefore constantly threatened by human willfulness.

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must constantly overcome that willfulness, crush all impulses of egotism and independence,

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destroy variety of human desires and behavior.

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Centralized economic power endeavoring to plan and to control the economic processes

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of a modern nation is under a necessity either to fail or to tend to become absolute power

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in Every Province of Human Life.

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Properly disillusioned about communism, Lane returned home and got on with her career.

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In addition to filling the pages of the major American newspapers and magazines week by

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week and month by month, in addition to publishing two novels of her own that appeared on the

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national best-seller lists during the thirties, she undertook another important project.

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Her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, had begun writing a series of children's books based

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on her own life story.

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She asked her daughter for help polishing her manuscripts and putting them into publishable

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form.

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Lane complied.

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She extensively revised, expanded and rewrote her mother's manuscripts, producing the internationally

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and a famous Little House books, originally published between 1932 and 1943.

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The series has sold around 40 million copies in the United States in the last half century

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and another 20 million or so in around 32 other languages worldwide.

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During the 30s, Rose Wilder Lane also became a leading opponent of the New Deal.

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The real political question of the 30s, Lane wrote, was the choice between American individualism

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and European National Socialism.

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Unfortunately, as Lane saw it, there was no American political party committed to individualism.

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In 1933, she wrote, a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the

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The Democratic Party used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically,

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from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America

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over.

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The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle, National

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Socialism.

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Another way of saying this was to say that, again in Rosa's words, a vote for the New

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New Deal approves National Socialism.

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Unfortunately, however, the Republican Party was a political mechanism with no political

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principle.

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It does not stand for American individualism.

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Therefore, lamentably, Americans of both parties who stand for American political principles

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have no means of peaceful political action.

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What was needed, Rose believed, was a political movement which would unite writers, activists,

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teachers, propagandists and politicians in favor of individual liberty.

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A libertarian movement, that was her phrase.

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Brian Doherty reports in his book Radicals for Capitalism, an indispensable resource,

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by the way, for anyone interested in the history of the libertarian movement, that he found

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and Rose using this phrase, libertarian movement, as early as 1947.

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He calls it, the first example I've found of the phrase in its modern sense.

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During World War II, when she was in her late 50s, Rose began working with Burt McBride,

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an editor at Reader's Digest, who was planning to condense one of her books for the magazine.

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Through Burt McBride, Rose met his 14-year-old son, Roger McBride, and Rose and Roger quickly

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became devoted friends.

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Within a couple of years, he was calling her Grandma, and coming to spend weekends

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with her, weeding her garden, running errands for her, and talking with her about history,

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economics, politics, and philosophy.

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Lane's biographer, William Holtz, writes that young McBride found himself receiving

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Another Education, an alternative to his classroom learning that was compelling by the range,

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focus and energy his other grandmother brought to the political and economic arguments she

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had spent two decades in refining.

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Rose gave a guest lecture in Roger's government class at Phillips Exeter Academy, his Tony

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New England prep school, and lent moral support to his efforts to establish libertarian student

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groups at Princeton, where he earned his undergraduate degree, and at Harvard, where he went to law

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school.

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As Roger's education progressed, he continued to make himself useful to his adoptive granny,

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first as her agent and business manager, then as her attorney.

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In the end, he and his wife moved Rose and her 6,000 books into their home and took her

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with them when they moved that home from Vermont to Virginia.

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Ultimately, when Rose died, it was in 1968, she was 81, Roger inherited everything she

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owned, including the fabulously valuable rights to the Little House books, ostensibly written

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by her mother.

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It was Roger McBride who put the Little House stories on network TV for most of the 1970s

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and the early 1980s as well.

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It was also Roger McBride who put the fledgling Libertarian Party on the political map in

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1972 and represented it as its presidential nominee in the 1976 campaign against Gerald

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Ford and Jimmy Carter.

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In later years McBride abandoned the LP and went back to the Republican Party within which

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he founded a Libertarian organization, the Republican Liberty Caucus.

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Then McBride died suddenly of a heart attack in 1995 at the age of 65.

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Perhaps McBride's abandonment of the LP for the GOP earned him some ill will.

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It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, with Bill Clinton in the White House

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and the Republicans putting a lot of emphasis on their supposed points of agreement with

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But the eight years of GOP rule from 2001 to 2009 showed just how much real interest the Republican Party has in individual liberty and limited government.

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In retrospect, McBride probably looks like something of a fool to many libertarians.

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But then again, maybe not.

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In any case, Roger McBride should be remembered and paid a debt of gratitude by all libertarians

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who want the movement to grow and attract public attention.

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For at a time when he was in a position to do a lot for the public image of the libertarian

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movement, Roger McBride came forward and did it.

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This is Jeff Rigenbaum.