The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
When the libertarian movement we know today was launched during and just after World War II,
the founders were men and women who ranged in age from their 30s to their 60s.
They represented, really, two different generations. The first group, born in the 1880s, included
Rose Wilder Lane and Isabelle Patterson, both born in 1886, as well as Ludwig von Mises,
born in 1881. The members of this first group served as mentors and teachers for the members
of the second group, who were all born around the turn of the 20th century and were therefore
were young enough, or almost young enough, to be the sons and daughters of the members
of the first group. Thus Mises was teacher to Friedrich Hayek, born 1899, as Patterson
was teacher to Ayn Rand, born 1905. Leonard Reed, born 1898, learned from both Lane and
Mises, though at a distance, rather than close at hand. Ayn Rand, the youngest of the founding
The founding group was 38 years old when her individualist novel The Fountainhead became one of the founding documents of the new libertarian movement.
Rose Wilder Lane and Isabelle Patterson were in their late 50s that same year, 1943, when their books, The Discovery of Freedom and The God of the Machine, became founding documents of the same movement.
Friedrich Hayek was 45 a year later when his book, The Road to Serfdom, became an international
best-seller and probably the only book of its type ever to become a Reader's Digest
condensed book. Leonard Reed was 47 when he opened the doors of the Foundation for Economic
Education, the original libertarian think tank, in 1946. The oldest among the founding
The Austrian economist and social theorist Ludwig von Mises was 68 when his magnum opus
Human Action was released by Yale University Press in 1949.
These people grew up in a world without a libertarian movement, as did the generation
that followed, the generation of people born in the 19-teens and the 1920s.
For people like Robert Lefebvre, born 1911, Carl Hess, born 1923, Murray Rothbard and
Joan Kennedy Taylor, both born in 1926, and Nathaniel Brandon, born 1930, there were no
libertarian institutions in existence until they had reached high school or college age
or had moved into the working world, and new libertarian books were few and far between
before then too.
It's only Americans born during and after World War II who grew up in a world in which,
by the time they were old enough to become interested in ideas, there was at least an
embryonic libertarian movement already in place to help guide them to the ideas and
the people they'd probably be most glad to learn about.
A movement that could help make sure they could find the classics of libertarian thought
in cheap, reliable editions, a movement that could help make sure new libertarian works
of importance were published and made available to as wide an audience as possible. It's
only Americans born from about 1939 on who grew up taking some sort of libertarian institutional
infrastructure for granted, as something that seemed always to have been there.
The libertarian movement that these war babies and baby boomers grew up taking more or less
for granted grew gradually through the 1950s and early 1960s.
The Foundation for Economic Education and the William Volcker Fund were joined by Robert
LaFave's Freedom School and Rampart Journal, then by the Nathaniel Brandon Institute with
with its courses on the philosophy of Ayn Rand and Andrew J. Galambos Free Enterprise Institute.
Thousands of teenaged proto-libertarians all over the country had contact of one sort or
another with these institutions or their publications.
A few made pilgrimages to Colorado and New York City and served summer internships or
attended summer seminars, becoming acquainted with the people behind this libertarian infrastructure,
In the 1960s, as this new libertarian generation began percolating through America's college
and university campuses, its members found that while New Leftists had a student organization,
Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, and young conservatives had a student organization,
During Americans for Freedom, YAF, there was no libertarian student organization.
Some of the libertarians drifted into SDS, where they found plenty of people who agreed
with them about the draft and the Vietnam War and the marijuana laws, but few who grasped
the importance of the free market.
More libertarians drifted into YAF, where there seemed to be plenty of enthusiasm for
of the Free Market, as long as it wasn't a free market in marijuana, and where the draft
and the Vietnam War were oddly popular among a group who styled themselves as advocates
of freedom.
Neither alliance could hold for long.
By 1969, both had unraveled.
The libertarians were purged from both organizations at their separate 1969 national conventions
in St. Louis.
But the larger of the two newly disaffiliated groups, the members of the former Libertarian
Caucus of Yaff, attended another meeting right there in St. Louis before they left town.
This other meeting was with representatives from the Society for Rational Individualism,
a small objectivist group with aspirations to national significance, headquartered in
suburban Washington, D.C.
By the end of this meeting, the Society for Rational Individualism had taken on several
of the old YAF libertarian caucus leaders as directors and transformed itself into the
Society for Individual Liberty, SIL, the first libertarian institution established
by the first generation of libertarians for whom the libertarian movement was already
a fact of life by the time they got old enough to be interested in ideas. What you might
call the first generation of modern libertarians.
SIL grew rapidly at first.
Brian Doherty reports in his book Radicals for Capitalism, a freewheeling history of
the modern American libertarian movement, that within a year of the new organization's
founding, that is, by some time in the late spring of 1970, there were more than a hundred
SIL chapters on college and university campuses across the country.
In November 1971, which Doherty describes as probably the high point of its draw, SIL
threw conferences in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, drawing nearly 500 in Chicago,
slightly fewer at the others.
But decline set in quickly. The end of the draft and U.S. withdrawal from the Civil War
in Vietnam killed off support on campus for any kind of political agitation, and killed
pulled it off with stunning suddenness. SIL had started out building its approach around
student activism, but it ended up engaging in a kind of basic libertarian education that
was similar in many ways to the kind of thing Leonard Reed's Foundation for Economic Education
had always tried to do. According to Doherty, during the 1970s and 1980s, SIL mailed out
and tens of thousands of small fold-over pamphlets explaining libertarian ideas and positions.
Meanwhile, up in Canada, another story was unfolding. Vincent H. Miller had been born
in suburban Toronto late in 1938. Though technically he was born shortly before the
outbreak of World War II, he was born late enough that, if he had developed an interest
First in social and political ideas as a teenager, while he was in high school, there would have
been the rudiments of a libertarian movement already in place in the United States to give
him guidance.
As it turned out, however, Vince Miller was apolitical for the first three decades of
his life.
He was more interested in running, playing the guitar and getting rich in business than
he was in anything political.
Then in 1971, at the age of 32, he met an actor and former high school English teacher
named Marshall Bruce Evoy. Evoy had been the Nathaniel Brandon Institute's official business
representative in Toronto in the 60s. In the 70s, he would found the Libertarian Party
of Canada and a monthly magazine called The Libertarian Option, and would become a fixture
at Libertarian Conventions and Gatherings, both in Canada and the United States, playing
Patrick Henry in period costume, delivering his Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech.
I suppose you could say that Evoy took Vince Miller along for this libertarian ride. He
gave Vince a copy of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Then, once it had worked its predictable
and Magic.
He began integrating Vince into his various libertarian projects.
He made Vince an editor at the Libertarian Option, got him involved in party politics,
and encouraged him in his decision to run repeatedly as a Libertarian Party candidate
for parliament.
Before the 70s were out, Vince had become president of the LP of Canada.
He had also taught himself typesetting and offset printing, and had gone into business
When that project ran out of money, Vince moved on to what turned out to be his best
A Non-profit organization that would host a series of international libertarian conferences.
The conference would be held in a different country each time it took place.
This organization could also spread libertarian ideas from the English-speaking world, where
they had their largest following, to the rest of the world.
It could, for example, arrange for translation of classic libertarian works written in English
and their distribution, perhaps even their free distribution, in countries where English
was not widely read or spoken.
Vince Miller decided to name the organization the Libertarian International.
The first Libertarian International Conference took place in 1982 in Switzerland.
Over the next few years, subsequent conferences took place in Scandinavia, Paris, Swaziland
and Germany.
In 1989, the Libertarian International merged with the Society for Individual Liberty and
became the International Society for Individual Liberty, ISIL.
Vince Miller was president of ISIL for the rest of his life, for 19 years all told, until
his death two years ago this month in 2008 at the age of 69.
Add in his nine years as president of the Libertarian International and you see that
Vince devoted 28 years, more than half his adult life, to the task of promoting libertarianism
to an international audience.
No one who knew him during those years, 1980 to 2008, is likely to forget him.
Vince was genial, good-humored, cheerful, always eager to lend a helping hand, the kind
of Guy You Couldn't Help Liking, especially when you learned that his dedication to libertarian
principle was as pure, as hard-core as you'd find anywhere. He was a gun enthusiast who
loved his weekly Sunday morning visit to the firing range. Going to church, he called it.
As president of ISIL, he oversaw successful conferences during the 90s and the early years
of the New Century in Russia, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Mexico, Athens, Rome, Berlin,
and New Zealand, among other locations. He worked to introduce thousands of students
in other countries to libertarian ideas. He sponsored translation and publication of English-language
libertarian classics in former Iron Curtain countries and in other countries where libertarian
and ideas had made little headway up to that time, and, true to the SIL tradition, he
published and distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets, brief introductions to the most
basic libertarian issues, succinct overviews of those issues, typically printed on both
sides of a single 8-1⁄2 by 11 sheet, and he distributed these leaflets everywhere.
He accomplished a lot in the nearly 30 years he devoted to this work, and, as I say, those
who knew him will remember him both long and fondly.
But individuals die in time, and their memories with them.
Vince Miller is far from the first member of the first generation of modern libertarians,
the generation of libertarians born between the late 30s and the mid-50s, to go to his
his final resting place, and as the rest of us gradually succumb to the inevitable and
follow him, though the organization he left behind is still very much with us, Vince's
memory will fade. This is inescapable. It could not be otherwise. Yet there's a sense
in which I for one lament the loss. Vince Miller was, after all, one of the most notable
All of those who have worked over the past sixty-odd years to maintain and extend the
institutional infrastructure of libertarianism that was first built in the 1940s.
Those of us who are glad there is a libertarian movement and are glad to be a part of it.
We owe people like Vince Miller a debt of gratitude.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.