WEBVTT NOTE Suzanne La Follette (1893 –1983) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.440 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.440 --> 00:00:12.720 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:12.720 --> 00:00:21.560 Suzanne LaFollette came into this world 118 years ago this month on June 24, 1893, the 4 00:00:21.560 --> 00:00:27.920 fourth of seven children, four boys, three girls, born to a family that owned large wheat 5 00:00:27.920 --> 00:00:33.320 and Fruit Farms Along the Snake River in Southeastern Washington State. 6 00:00:33.320 --> 00:00:38.500 As she told an interviewer who tracked her down many years later, she and her siblings 7 00:00:38.500 --> 00:00:44.100 grew up on horseback at a time when the automobile had not yet come in. 8 00:00:44.100 --> 00:00:49.220 It had begun coming in though a few years later when Suzanne was on the verge of entering 9 00:00:49.220 --> 00:00:55.180 her teens and her father decided to lease out his rural property and build a new family 10 00:00:55.180 --> 00:01:00.180 Home in the college town of Pullman near the Idaho border. 11 00:01:00.180 --> 00:01:06.060 We're now in the middle years of the first decade of a new century, the 20th century, 12 00:01:06.060 --> 00:01:11.140 and Pullman, Washington is home to around 15 or 1,600 people. 13 00:01:11.140 --> 00:01:16.760 Today and for most of the past half century, it's been home to more like 25,000. 14 00:01:16.760 --> 00:01:23.660 But then, as now, the majority of those people are connected in some way, students, faculty, 15 00:01:23.660 --> 00:01:29.280 Administration with Washington State University, which opened its doors there in Pullman in 16 00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:35.500 1890, so that it had been in business more than 15 years by the time the Lafollette family 17 00:01:35.500 --> 00:01:37.300 showed up in town. 18 00:01:37.300 --> 00:01:43.980 Eight miles east of Pullman, then as now, another college town, Moscow, Idaho, served 19 00:01:43.980 --> 00:01:50.420 as the site of the University of Idaho, founded one year earlier than Washington State. 20 00:01:50.420 --> 00:01:56.680 Then as now, the population of Moscow was about half accounted for by students, faculty 21 00:01:56.680 --> 00:01:59.840 and administrators from the university. 22 00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:04.480 Then as now, the whole area was permeated by students. 23 00:02:04.480 --> 00:02:10.080 It was and is an area in which higher education is a major industry. 24 00:02:10.080 --> 00:02:15.540 And though the combined population of Moscow, Idaho and Pullman, Washington, when Suzanne 25 00:02:15.540 --> 00:02:20.060 Susan LaFollette first saw them was no more than around 5,000. 26 00:02:20.060 --> 00:02:25.220 It probably seemed urban and sophisticated to her when she arrived there at the age of 27 00:02:25.220 --> 00:02:30.160 12, a brand new import from the farm. 28 00:02:30.160 --> 00:02:36.040 Suzanne finished high school in Pullman and at the age of 16 enrolled at Washington State. 29 00:02:36.040 --> 00:02:40.940 But she had only about a year there before her family was uprooted again. 30 00:02:40.940 --> 00:02:46.100 Her father was elected to Congress and they all moved to the other Washington, the one 31 00:02:46.100 --> 00:02:47.740 on the Potomac. 32 00:02:47.740 --> 00:02:53.740 Now at this point I should interrupt the flow of my narrative to clear up a possible confusion. 33 00:02:53.740 --> 00:02:58.300 Suzanne LaFollette's father was not the famous LaFollette. 34 00:02:58.300 --> 00:03:04.540 The famous LaFollette was Robert M. Fighting Bob LaFollette, the progressive Republican 35 00:03:04.540 --> 00:03:09.820 from Wisconsin who served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives in the late 36 00:03:09.820 --> 00:03:15.940 In the late 1880s and early 1890s, two terms as governor of Wisconsin in the first years 37 00:03:15.940 --> 00:03:22.660 of the 20th century and two decades in the U.S. Senate between 1906 when he left the 38 00:03:22.660 --> 00:03:27.980 governor's residence and 1925 when he died. 39 00:03:27.980 --> 00:03:30.840 Suzanne's father was William LaFollette. 40 00:03:30.840 --> 00:03:36.740 He was fighting Bob's first cousin and his junior by five years, but he was not like 41 00:03:36.740 --> 00:03:42.180 Like fighting Bob, a professional politician, apart from two years in the Washington State 42 00:03:42.180 --> 00:03:47.300 House of Representatives at the turn of the century and some time on his local school 43 00:03:47.300 --> 00:03:54.060 board, William LaFollette confined his political career to the second decade of the 20th century, 44 00:03:54.060 --> 00:03:56.820 when he himself was in his 50s. 45 00:03:56.820 --> 00:04:02.380 But that single decade in Washington, D.C. was an eye-opening experience for his daughter 46 00:04:02.380 --> 00:04:03.500 Suzanne. 47 00:04:03.500 --> 00:04:09.320 She was 17 when she arrived in the nation's capital and 26 when she left. 48 00:04:09.320 --> 00:04:14.820 She worked part-time in her father's congressional office and in her cousin Bob's senatorial 49 00:04:14.820 --> 00:04:22.040 office while finishing up her degree at Trinity College, now Trinity Washington University. 50 00:04:22.040 --> 00:04:26.420 She witnessed Woodrow Wilson's two terms in the White House from what amounted to a 51 00:04:26.420 --> 00:04:33.420 front-row seat, including his disastrous decision to intervene in World War I and his attempt 52 00:04:33.420 --> 00:04:40.580 To suppress the dissent, that decision naturally touched off all over America. 53 00:04:40.580 --> 00:04:45.760 For the first four years of her father's time on Capitol Hill, Suzanne lived in what 54 00:04:45.760 --> 00:04:52.340 she later recalled as a huge old house on 16th Street, with her parents, those of her 55 00:04:52.340 --> 00:04:58.580 siblings who were still living at home, fighting Bob and his wife, and their three youngest 56 00:04:58.580 --> 00:04:59.780 children. 57 00:04:59.780 --> 00:05:05.540 For the first three of those four years, fighting Bob's youngest kids included Robert LaFollette 58 00:05:05.540 --> 00:05:09.020 Jr., two years younger than Suzanne. 59 00:05:09.020 --> 00:05:14.860 The younger LaFollette moved back home to Madison in 1913 to attend the University of 60 00:05:14.860 --> 00:05:21.480 Wisconsin, then succeeded his father in the U.S. Senate in 1925 and spent more than two 61 00:05:21.480 --> 00:05:24.020 decades as a senator himself. 62 00:05:24.020 --> 00:05:33.020 Meanwhile, his cousin Suzanne had decided to leave Washington altogether for what she hoped would be greener pastures in New York. 63 00:05:33.020 --> 00:05:42.520 She had decided to try her hand at journalism, and by 1919 she had landed herself a job at a weekly magazine called The Nation, 64 00:05:42.520 --> 00:05:52.020 which was owned and edited by a tireless advocate for civil liberties and against imperialism named Oswald Garrison Vallard. 65 00:05:52.020 --> 00:06:04.720 I'm tempted to describe Villard as an un-reconstructed classical liberal, except that he was in the process of being reconstructed when Suzanne LaFollette met him in 1919. 66 00:06:04.720 --> 00:06:15.620 His commitment to civil liberties and anti-imperialism remained stalwart, but he had been seduced by the supposed triumphs of Woodrow Wilson's war socialism, 67 00:06:15.620 --> 00:06:21.700 and was becoming convinced that government could plan and administer an economy that would work 68 00:06:21.700 --> 00:06:28.260 better than what would result from a policy of laissez-faire. At The Nation, Suzanne met a fellow 69 00:06:28.260 --> 00:06:34.340 staff writer and editor much older than she, almost as old as her father, certainly old enough 70 00:06:34.340 --> 00:06:39.940 to be her father. He was a former Episcopal clergyman who had enlisted in the ranks of 71 00:06:39.940 --> 00:06:46.180 of Radical Journalism, a decade earlier, working on the American Magazine with Lincoln Steffens, 72 00:06:46.180 --> 00:06:48.980 Ida Tarbell and John Reed. 73 00:06:48.980 --> 00:06:53.880 He was erudite, aloof, sardonic, utterly fascinating. 74 00:06:53.880 --> 00:06:57.940 His name was Albert J. Nock. 75 00:06:57.940 --> 00:07:03.700 Nock immediately recognized the talent and intelligence of this fresh-faced 26-year-old 76 00:07:03.700 --> 00:07:05.160 from Washington. 77 00:07:05.160 --> 00:07:10.100 He took her under his wing, became her mentor, made her his protege. 78 00:07:10.100 --> 00:07:16.020 A year later in 1920, when the financing came through for a new weekly magazine of which 79 00:07:16.020 --> 00:07:21.800 Nock would be editor-in-chief, The Freeman, it was to be called, he took her with him 80 00:07:21.800 --> 00:07:24.220 and made her managing editor. 81 00:07:24.220 --> 00:07:29.780 The Freeman was a Georgist paper, and its editorials, which Nock himself wrote, took 82 00:07:29.780 --> 00:07:35.780 Nock a more or less Georgist line, though never really an orthodox Georgist line. 83 00:07:35.780 --> 00:07:38.740 Nock was never really an orthodox Georgist. 84 00:07:38.740 --> 00:07:44.020 Moreover, Nock brought in many non-Georgists to write for the magazine. 85 00:07:44.020 --> 00:07:48.820 He really didn't care what their opinions on political economy were if they weren't 86 00:07:48.820 --> 00:07:51.140 writing about political economy. 87 00:07:51.140 --> 00:07:56.280 As his literary editor, Nock hired Van Wick Brooks, who had spent the war years as an 88 00:07:56.280 --> 00:08:00.920 and a supporter of Eugene Debs. 89 00:08:00.920 --> 00:08:06.540 As one of his most frequent contributors, Nock chose Lewis Mumford, who later served as one 90 00:08:06.540 --> 00:08:12.160 of the real-life models Ayn Rand relied upon when she created the character of Ellsworth 91 00:08:12.160 --> 00:08:15.580 Toohey in her novel The Fountainhead. 92 00:08:15.580 --> 00:08:21.360 At one time or another, Nock recalled two decades later, when he wrote his autobiography, 93 00:08:21.360 --> 00:08:23.760 The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man 94 00:08:23.760 --> 00:08:28.500 We printed quite a bit of stuff that none of us believed in, but it all conformed to 95 00:08:28.500 --> 00:08:30.620 our three conditions. 96 00:08:30.620 --> 00:08:36.840 The three conditions Nock refers to here are the three requirements of the Freeman's editorial 97 00:08:36.840 --> 00:08:37.840 policy. 98 00:08:37.840 --> 00:08:41.240 The first one, he wrote, is that you must have a point. 99 00:08:41.240 --> 00:08:43.520 Second, you must make it out. 100 00:08:43.520 --> 00:08:51.600 The third one is that you must make it out in 18-carat impeccable idiomatic English. 101 00:08:51.600 --> 00:08:57.000 Nock acknowledged in his memoirs that he had never believed the Freeman could survive and 102 00:08:57.000 --> 00:08:59.840 was not surprised when it met an early death. 103 00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:05.880 I had no illusions about the enterprise, Nock wrote, for I knew it had no prospect of ever 104 00:09:05.880 --> 00:09:10.760 even beginning to pay for itself and therefore it could not last long. 105 00:09:10.760 --> 00:09:15.280 The venture did, however, present the chance of what I thought might be an interesting 106 00:09:15.280 --> 00:09:20.480 experiment, which turned out to be so, far beyond my expectations. 107 00:09:20.480 --> 00:09:25.920 The idea was, first, to see whether such a paper as we had in mind could be produced 108 00:09:25.920 --> 00:09:27.120 in this country. 109 00:09:27.120 --> 00:09:29.040 I did not believe it could be. 110 00:09:29.040 --> 00:09:35.400 I doubted that there was enough latent literary ability of that grade to supply us with contributors. 111 00:09:35.400 --> 00:09:37.960 I was soon proven wrong about that. 112 00:09:37.960 --> 00:09:46.720 Then, second, we propose to see whether the quality and character of the paper could be successfully held up from issue to issue. 113 00:09:46.720 --> 00:09:55.320 Jumping three or four hurdles of the same height is perhaps no great feat, but jumping 52 at a stretch is another matter. 114 00:09:55.320 --> 00:10:01.260 Again, I had sturdy doubts that this could be done, and again, I was proven wrong. 115 00:10:01.260 --> 00:10:06.340 Finally, we thought that the paper's distribution might give us some sort of rough measure of 116 00:10:06.340 --> 00:10:10.620 the general level at which the best culture of the country stood. 117 00:10:10.620 --> 00:10:17.020 I had my own ideas about this also, and for once I was approximately right. 118 00:10:17.020 --> 00:10:22.420 Anyone who remembers the state of the public mind in the early 1920s does not need to be 119 00:10:22.420 --> 00:10:27.980 told that we launched our experiment under as unfavorable circumstances as could well 120 00:10:27.980 --> 00:10:43.900 Their success was modest, certainly. 121 00:10:43.900 --> 00:10:47.220 They never attracted more than a few thousand readers. 122 00:10:47.220 --> 00:10:50.320 The Freeman never began to pay for itself. 123 00:10:50.320 --> 00:10:55.300 For four years, its losses were picked up by the sort of financial angel a magazine 124 00:10:55.300 --> 00:11:03.140 In this case, it was the heiress to the swift meatpacking fortune. 125 00:11:03.140 --> 00:11:08.220 She had married a Georgist and decided she wanted to use her wealth, or at least some 126 00:11:08.220 --> 00:11:11.180 of it, to promote Georgist ideas. 127 00:11:11.180 --> 00:11:16.900 But after four years, the Freemans benefactor tired of reaching so small a readership and 128 00:11:16.900 --> 00:11:21.020 announced that she was withdrawing her support from the project. 129 00:11:21.020 --> 00:11:27.260 As the year 1924 got underway, the staff of the Freemen scattered to the four winds and 130 00:11:27.260 --> 00:11:32.800 the demands of different careers that no longer shared a single track. 131 00:11:32.800 --> 00:11:39.060 There is a sense in which Suzanne LaFollette spent the rest of her career trying to recapture 132 00:11:39.060 --> 00:11:46.220 what Albert J. Nock had put together and managed to hold together for four years there in Manhattan. 133 00:11:46.220 --> 00:11:49.560 For Suzanne, it was the best job she ever had. 134 00:11:49.560 --> 00:11:52.600 The high point of all her years in journalism. 135 00:11:52.600 --> 00:11:56.600 She had loved working with and for Albert J. Nock. 136 00:11:56.600 --> 00:11:58.840 She had learned so much from him. 137 00:11:58.840 --> 00:12:03.720 She had wanted it to go on forever until she was well into her 60s. 138 00:12:03.720 --> 00:12:10.360 She worked indefatigably to find financial backers who would underwrite a reborn freeman. 139 00:12:10.360 --> 00:12:17.320 Twice, she actually brought something of the kind off, or at least helped to bring it off. 140 00:12:17.320 --> 00:12:24.560 In 1930, six years after the original Freeman had ceased publication, at the age of 37, 141 00:12:24.560 --> 00:12:29.520 she became founding editor of a weekly magazine called The New Freeman. 142 00:12:29.520 --> 00:12:32.080 By all accounts, she did a fine job. 143 00:12:32.080 --> 00:12:35.520 She even managed to lure Knockback to write a column. 144 00:12:35.520 --> 00:12:42.240 But again, the financial angel for the project backed out, this time after only 15 months. 145 00:12:42.240 --> 00:12:48.000 But it was nearly two more decades before Suzanne was able to bring off anything comparable 146 00:12:48.000 --> 00:12:51.640 in her ongoing effort to resurrect the Freeman. 147 00:12:51.640 --> 00:12:58.440 In 1950, at the age of 57, she joined with Henry Hazlitt and John Chamberlain to found 148 00:12:58.440 --> 00:13:02.000 yet another fortnightly version of the Freeman. 149 00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:08.060 She served as managing editor as she had on the original Freeman back in the 1920s. 150 00:13:08.060 --> 00:13:13.460 This latest version of the magazine attained a larger paid circulation than either of its 151 00:13:13.460 --> 00:13:18.860 predecessors, and this latest version of the magazine also survived longer than either 152 00:13:18.860 --> 00:13:20.540 of the previous ones. 153 00:13:20.540 --> 00:13:27.520 It was 1956, before it was sold to the Foundation for Economic Education and transformed into 154 00:13:27.520 --> 00:13:34.380 a monthly of a very different sort, a kind of reader's digest for radical free-marketeers. 155 00:13:34.380 --> 00:13:42.080 But by then, the end clearly in sight, Suzanne had moved on, becoming, at the end of 1955, 156 00:13:42.080 --> 00:13:47.740 the managing editor of yet another startup, a fortnightly magazine edited by a young man 157 00:13:47.740 --> 00:13:54.460 named William F. Buckley Jr. and called The National Review. 158 00:13:54.460 --> 00:13:59.580 That job at National Review was the last job Suzanne La Follette ever took in the world 159 00:13:59.580 --> 00:14:01.620 of magazine journalism. 160 00:14:01.620 --> 00:14:07.220 Four years later, in 1959, at the age of 66, she retired. 161 00:14:07.220 --> 00:14:13.420 She began almost immediately to fade into the obscurity that remains her lot today. 162 00:14:13.420 --> 00:14:19.380 To the extent that she is remembered at all 118 years after the year of her birth, it 163 00:14:19.380 --> 00:14:26.260 is as a protege of Albert J. Nock and a figure of some consequence in American magazine journalism 164 00:14:26.260 --> 00:14:29.020 of the first half of the 20th century. 165 00:14:29.020 --> 00:14:32.660 Perhaps, however, she should be remembered for more than that. 166 00:14:32.660 --> 00:14:38.300 You see, for most of her career, Suzanne LaFollette was not a magazine editor. 167 00:14:38.300 --> 00:14:43.320 For most of her career, she was a freelance writer, contributing to magazines like The 168 00:14:43.320 --> 00:14:48.260 American Mercury, The Nation, The New Republic and Scribner's. 169 00:14:48.260 --> 00:14:54.040 In the late 1920s, in the years just after the dissolution of Knox Freeman, she also 170 00:14:54.040 --> 00:14:56.020 wrote a couple of books. 171 00:14:56.020 --> 00:15:01.140 The later of the two, Art in America, was published in 1929. 172 00:15:01.140 --> 00:15:05.300 The earlier of the two came out in 1926. 173 00:15:05.300 --> 00:15:09.380 It was entitled Concerning Women. 174 00:15:09.380 --> 00:15:15.540 The libertarian social psychologist Sharon Presley, in an essay on Suzanne Lafollette, 175 00:15:15.540 --> 00:15:21.500 tells us that the most important influence in writing Concerning Women was Knock, rather 176 00:15:21.500 --> 00:15:24.300 than the contemporary feminist movement. 177 00:15:24.300 --> 00:15:30.140 It was Nock who encouraged LaFollette to write it, and Nock was well pleased with her efforts. 178 00:15:30.140 --> 00:15:35.540 I knew it would be a good book, he wrote in a letter to a friend, but I assure you it 179 00:15:35.540 --> 00:15:41.900 is so far beyond all my expectations that I cannot say enough in praise of it. 180 00:15:41.900 --> 00:15:45.700 If I am any judge, it is a truly great book. 181 00:15:45.700 --> 00:15:51.500 I expect Nock felt this way at least partly because Suzanne's analysis in her new book 182 00:15:51.500 --> 00:16:04.420 It is impossible, she wrote, for a sex or a class to have economic freedom until everybody 183 00:16:04.420 --> 00:16:11.380 has it, and until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom 184 00:16:11.380 --> 00:16:12.940 for anybody. 185 00:16:12.940 --> 00:16:19.860 Without economic freedom, efforts after political and social freedom are nougatory and elusive, 186 00:16:19.860 --> 00:16:25.240 Except for what educational value they may have for those concerned with them. 187 00:16:25.240 --> 00:16:31.140 She wrote of the cynical disregard of both law and principle which government in America 188 00:16:31.140 --> 00:16:37.720 regularly exhibits, and warned feminists of the 20s that under these circumstances no 189 00:16:37.720 --> 00:16:43.480 guarantee of rights is worth the paper it is written on, and the women who rely on such 190 00:16:43.480 --> 00:16:49.240 Such guarantees to protect them against prejudice and discrimination are leaning on a broken 191 00:16:49.240 --> 00:16:50.240 reed. 192 00:16:50.240 --> 00:16:55.880 They will do well to bear this in mind as they proceed with their demands for equality 193 00:16:55.880 --> 00:17:01.400 and to remember that however great may be their immediate returns from the removal of 194 00:17:01.400 --> 00:17:08.240 their legal disabilities, they can hardly hope for security against prejudice and discrimination 195 00:17:08.240 --> 00:17:15.600 until their natural rights, not as women, but as human beings, are finally established. 196 00:17:15.600 --> 00:17:21.560 La Follette believed that even if the feminists of the 20s gained all their objectives, we 197 00:17:21.560 --> 00:17:27.360 are obliged to face the fact that under such a regime, women would enjoy precisely that 198 00:17:27.360 --> 00:17:33.920 degree of freedom which men now enjoy, that is to say, very little. 199 00:17:33.920 --> 00:17:39.720 The ultimate emancipation of women, she wrote, will depend not upon the abolition of the 200 00:17:39.720 --> 00:17:46.200 restrictions which have subjected her to man, that is, but a step, though a necessary one, 201 00:17:46.200 --> 00:17:52.760 but upon the abolition of all those restrictions of natural human rights that subject the mass 202 00:17:52.760 --> 00:17:57.040 of humanity to a privileged class. 203 00:17:57.040 --> 00:18:02.820 And of course, the institution that had subjected the mass of humanity to a privileged class 204 00:18:02.820 --> 00:18:05.860 This was none other than the state. 205 00:18:05.860 --> 00:18:11.080 It is evident from the very nature of the state, Suzanne wrote, in a passage one can 206 00:18:11.080 --> 00:18:18.260 only call knock-in, very knock-in, that its interests are opposed to those of society. 207 00:18:18.260 --> 00:18:23.820 And while the complete emancipation of women would undoubtedly imply the destruction of 208 00:18:23.820 --> 00:18:30.940 the state, their emancipation, far from destroying society, must be of inestimable benefit to 209 00:18:30.940 --> 00:18:32.540 it. 210 00:18:32.540 --> 00:18:37.500 What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the first book since Mary Wollstonecraft's 211 00:18:37.500 --> 00:18:45.340 Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 to lay out the case for individualist or libertarian 212 00:18:45.340 --> 00:18:49.940 feminism, and it's a thoroughly Nakhian case. 213 00:18:49.940 --> 00:18:58.220 Feminist scholar Alice Rossi wrote in 1973 of Concerning Women that on issue after issue, 214 00:18:58.220 --> 00:19:03.920 comes down on the side of the least degree of state interference in the lives of men 215 00:19:03.920 --> 00:19:10.200 and women and a consistent belief that it is only through full economic independence 216 00:19:10.200 --> 00:19:15.700 and personal autonomy that sex equality will be achieved. 217 00:19:15.700 --> 00:19:21.340 This is a book that should be better remembered and treasured as an important contribution 218 00:19:21.340 --> 00:19:24.180 to the libertarian tradition. 219 00:19:24.180 --> 00:19:39.180 This is Jeff Riggenbach.