The Original Student For Liberty: Leonard Liggio

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On September 2, 2010, I sat down with Leonard Liggio, currently the Executive Vice President of Academics at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.  While there have been students for liberty as long as there have been students, it’s fair to say that Leonard was one of the original students for liberty of the modern era, being one of the leaders in the 1952 Youth for Taft effort, literally working against the continuation of FDR’s New Deal policies, starting the first chapter of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, and going on to be one of the pivotal leaders of liberty in the movement since graduating.

In this interview, we cover topics ranging from what the political climate was like when he was a student, ISI’s shift from libertarianism to conservatism, his experiences with Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, and his advice to today’s students.  He did his undergraduate studies at Georgetown University from 1951-55, followed by time at Columbia Law School and Fordham University where he pursued a PhD in history.

You can read the full interview below or download a PDF of the interview here.

Alexander:  Let’s begin with the beginning.  What got you interested in liberty?

Leonard:  I became interested in political events before WW II started, during elementary school.  There were a lot of discussions and debates; and at the time, the 4 radio networks had between 6-8 different opinion programs with the same person every day from 6:00 pm.  So you had a choice of more than a dozen points of view.  Because I lived in NYC, there were also left-wing stations, with Communists if you wanted that point of view.  My parents were very interested in politics so I listened in and they had different perspectives.  My father had been a Democrat who supported Roosevelt, whereas my mother was very opposed to Roosevelt, the New Deal, and progressive education. She was very much opposed to state projects of that sort.  She was very much opposed to U.S. intervention in the Second World War, and I agreed with her conclusion that it was a big mistake.  I agreed with what Hoover and Taft said, which was that the First World War led to 200 million people being under Communism and a Second World War would lead to a billion people being under Communism, and it did in China and Eastern Europe.  The New Deal people were all friends with the Communists, so they didn’t think it was a danger; they thought it would be great if we led more people to Communism and the U.S. could follow one day towards this utopia.  So I was very interested and followed the debates leading up to the Second World War and the diplomacy during the war and post-war.

When I went to college, it was 1951, so it was the beginning of the presidential campaign, and I was a big supporter of Senator Robert A. Taft.  I was a member Youth for Taft, and was very engaged in that campaign where I met future libertarians like Ralph Raico and George Reisman, who were finishing high school at the time.  So being in Youth for Taft led me to being in contact with similar thinking people.  And being at Georgetown was a big help.  Immediately after the 1952 Republican Convention, Youth for Taft people were contacted by a group in Los Angeles that had been set up by Henry Salvatore, and that was the National Student MacArthur Clubs, supporting MacArthur for president, although he was not campaigning.  They had set this up and had funding to publish a newspaper and pamphlets. When they contacted us, we merged into what became Students for America and Youth for Taft became the Eastern Regional group.  There were also Midwest, Southern and Western regions.  They were more interested in dealing with Communists in government, which was a good position, but not very deep.  Right after that, Ralph Raico and I went to visit FEE [the Foundation for Economic Education] at Irvington-on-Hudson in the summer of 1952 and became acquainted with them, so I had the idea that FEE could send their monthly pamphlet to our Eastern mailing list.  At the time, FEE published a lot of pamphlets against inflation, price controls and conscription so they agreed to mail them monthly to our list so we had a deeper education going on than just the stuff coming from Los Angeles.

At that time also, in the spring of 1953, during Georgetown breaks, I went to sit in on Mises’ seminar at NYU graduate business school.  There, I met Murray Rothbard with whom I had increasing contact.  I’d say some time around then, I also had contact with Frank Chodorov, who had long been involved in freedom ideas.  He had been coeditor with Albert J. Nock in a late attempt to re-start The Freeman in the late 30’s.  He and Nock planned to have a newsletter, analysis, when Nock died in September 1945; Chodorov did start it and he merged it in 1950 with Human Events.  Human Events had been founded by Frank Hannigan and Felix Morley. Morley had been a Pulitzer Prize editor of the Washington POST, and president of Haverford College. Henry Regnery was also involved. Starting in 1945 they published two 4 page newsletters each week.  The first four pages were news like “Social Security will be repealed next year”, future news or “hopeful news” you could say.  The other 4 pages were always an essay by someone like Mises, Hazlitt, Hayek, George Morgenstern on revisionist history, etc.

Chodorov had written one essay on the idea of having Adam Smith clubs on campus to challenge the left wing bias.  He noted that beginning in early 1900’s Walter Lipman and others at Harvard had started the Inter-Collegiate Society of Socialists and out of that came a lot of Wilsonian Progressives.  Adam Smith clubs could do the same thing for the other side.  J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil liked the idea and sent him a check.  But Chodorov didn’t have any Adam Smith clubs.  It was an editorial, not a fact yet.  But Frank Hannigan told him, “Don’t send back a check.  If you have a check, let’s start Adam Smith clubs!”  So he decided to create the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists.  Since William F. Buckley and his father were close with Nock, they were also close with Chodorov.  Buckley’s God and Man at Yale was a best seller at that point, so he was identified with challenging leftists on campus, and he gave his name to help the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists.  But they still had a problem: they didn’t have any products.  So I had a meeting with Chodorov about it and said: “Do what I did with FEE, and FEE will send pamphlets every month to members of ISI and that will be a product, and later on you can catch up and figure out what you want to do.”  So I started the first ISI chapter at Georgetown, and Chodorov introduced me to people in Washington on Capitol Hill.  I was in charge of getting speakers for a club on Georgetown’s campus, so I would invite them monthly to speak.  By 1954 The Freeman magazine had internal disagreements like Human Events had in 1950, and in 1954 The Freeman was about to end.  Leonard Read came in, bought it for $1 and brought it to FEE to be a monthly magazine with Chodorov as editor. Chodorov went to FEE and he began to edit The Freeman there.  But they had two very different personalities.  Chodorov was a very New York, Manhattan person who liked to discuss things.  Read was originally from Michigan, more quiescent, and wanted to be the main person at FEE, to be the center of attention.  Chodorov didn’t understand that.  He thought, “We’re here to discuss liberty, so let’s discuss it.”  But Read thought he should set the agenda.  There was a culture clash.  Read decided to change it from a magazine to a Reader’s Digest size Ideas on Liberty to reprint old pamphlets, so he didn’t need Chodorov.  That triggered Buckley to start National Review.  He had the idea for a while, but didn’t want to start another magazine while Chodorov was editing; it was out of respect.  When Chodorov wasn’t going to continue at The Freeman, Buckley went ahead with his ideas and plans about National Review in 1955.

ISI and ISI’s campus traveler, E. Victor Milione had moved with Chodorov to FEE which already was mailing its materials to ISI students. When Chodorov left FEE, ISI moved to Philadelphia.  Mr. Pew put them up in the Ledger building; Chodorov was in NYC and nominally involved in what they were doing.  FEE continued to be a center of focus. We students went there a couple times a year for seminars. Dr. F. A. Harper was the FEE senior economist and several of the economists had been his graduate students when he was a professor at Cornell University. Harper was the most interested in ideas and interacted with the visiting students.  [F. A. Harper went on to found the Institute for Humane Studies.]  I graduated Georgetown and started at Columbia Law School.  One of the guys from Georgetown who was the year ahead of me at Columbia and I and another fellow from University of Florida wanted to have an ISI chapter at Columbia, so we applied to start one.  We joined with the Republican Club to bring in Senator Malone from Nevada, a friend of Goldwater, to speak on campus.  We were called in by the provost of the university and told they didn’t like the idea of an ISI chapter, so they did their best to squelch the idea.  There was more repression than tolerance in the left wing way of doing things then.

Alexander:  Going back to the start of your undergrad studies at Georgetown, Youth for Taft, for people who may not be familiar with what was going on, what got you involved?

Leonard:  One thing was that there was a lot of disappointment from 1948 when it was expected a Republican would win the White House, but lost to Truman. In 1946 you had a Republican sweep of the House and Senate, so for the first time since the New Deal, you had the Republicans in control of Congress.  For example, when Robert A. Taft was in charge of the Labor Committee they ended price controls and all kinds of regulations.  So the expectation was that Republicans would win the White House in 1948, but they didn’t.  It was felt, rather similar to today, that the Republican leaders, not Congressmen, but the real leaders (the elite, who put Dewey in as the candidate in ‘44 and ‘48 who ran the “Me Too” campaign that Republicans would do the same as the Democrats) would change faces, but they wouldn’t challenge any of the left wing policies.  So the idea was that things needed to be changed, so by 1950 there was a big setback for the Democrats because of the largely unpopular beginning of the Korean War.  Truman in 1950 went fully into the Korean War, which led to lots of criticism and strong conflicts.

Taft campaigned in running for 1950 reelection to the Senate on the constitutionality of what Truman had done because he sent troops to Korea without Congressional mandate, and this was a violation of the Constitution.  The Republicans did well in the Senate, defeating committee chairmen and the majority leader.  They didn’t actually control the Congress, but in essence, they did.  There was a lot of collaboration with southern conservatives in congress. Truman seized control of the steel mills in order to provide higher wages to the workers, because while there were wage and price controls, the unions wanted higher wages.  So he seized the steel mills to give higher wages and not raise the prices for steel companies, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.  So there was a lot going on and the idea was to have Taft nominated and run against Truman’s policies. At the 1952 convention, Taft people thought it had been stolen by Eisenhower or the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Rockefellers.  In the summer, the Eisenhower campaign didn’t go very well, so in September there was a meeting in Morningside Heights between Taft and Dwight Eisenhower.  Eisenhower was president of Columbia University at the time so they met there.  Eisenhower agreed to a Taftite program to mobilize the Taft people.  In August the newspapers had said the Eisenhower campaign was running like a dry creek, no momentum.

Alexander:  After Youth for Taft, you teamed up with other students to start Students for America.  Can you tell us a bit about that?

Leonard:  It lasted until about the time I finished at Georgetown, but I was much more interested in ISI by that point.  Students for America came to an end because people graduated.  ISI was about ideas, and was a libertarian organization, based on Chodorov’s conception of individualism.

Alexander:  ISI, today, is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.  My understanding was that it was because of Buckley’s influence.

Leonard:  They changed it in the mid-60’s.  But, no, the president who changed it was Vic Milone.  He felt that donors thought “Individualists” were the protesters on campus in the 60’s and so they changed the name.  I wouldn’t say Buckley was that involved.  Milone was the president and he was trying to get new donors and he felt as though individualists sounded like the student protesters and he wanted something else.  Buckley had his own direction for the National Review, and he certainly was not against what Milone was doing, but it was Milone’s initiative.  Chodorov also died right around 1966 or ‘67 and had been ill for a while, so was out of the picture and Milone changed it once he was no longer active.

Alexander:  With ISI, you talked about how they emphasized ideas more, and you got FEE to send pamphlets to Students for America when you were in charge. Why do you think ideas are important, coming from Youth for Taft?

Leonard:  Well, politics is for ideas.  It is a way to introduce ideas or the consequences of ideas into what is going on in national life: blocking bad legislation, bad decisions.  Understanding that decisions, legislation, come out of public opinion, means ideas are a way to get public opinion more focused.  F.A. Hayek told Antony Fisher (the founder of Atlas Foundation) that politicians are like corks on the water: public opinion is the water that needs to be moved in the direction that will carry politicians, otherwise they will float in another direction.

Alexander:  What was it like to take Mises’ seminars?

Leonard:  It was very stimulating.  They happened in New York City while I was at Georgetown, so I only went on vacations; they dealt more with socialism and the economic calculation debate.  When I moved to New York after Georgetown, Mises was dealing with the manuscript of his forthcoming book, Theory and History, which was particularly interesting.  He was dealing with the social sciences.  There were a lot of people there too.  The seminar was made up of registered students who were usually accounting majors, and Thursday night might be the only time they could take the course. But they had no other reason to be there than the credits.  And there were some people who came for 20-30 years who were auditors.  Since the registered students didn’t know why they were there and didn’t ask questions, the questions came from the auditors.  So there was a situation where the auditors were the real students.  A group of us usually went out for coffee afterward nearby, spending another hour or so discussing the seminar.  Subsequently, one of the regulars helped start a monthly dinner at a NYU faculty club and Mises would invite different people like Hayek, Fritz Machlup or Henry Hazlitt to speak.  That was a kind of unofficial Mises group.  It intersected a bit with FEE because Bettina Bien Graves came for 30 years or so and kept records of the seminar for FEE.  When I went more regularly in 1955, Don Lipsett, who was later the secretary of the Philadelphia Society, and Stan Evans, were both at FEE, and they came down every week for the Mises Seminar.

Alexander:  I understand you also participated in some of Ayn Rand’s weekend gatherings.  Can you talk a little bit about that?

Leonard:  I and a few other students were sometimes invited to Rand’s apartment on Saturdays for discussions.  Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 and caused a stir.  When it came out, Whittaker Chambers wrote a very critical review of it in National Review, which brought special attention to it and sparked my interest.  Murray Rothbard wrote a defense of the book to National Review, and Rand invited us to visit her group. Rand was a night person. Her gatherings would run from 9pm until 2 or 3 am quite often.  At this point, I was studying for my Ph. D. in history at Fordham. Brian Doherty accurately pointed out [in Radicals for Capitalism] that I fell asleep one time at 3am during a lengthy exposition by Rand.

Alexander:  Today, a lot of us, especially students, see the work that you and the people you talked about already as the start of a movement for liberty.  At the time that you were engaged in this student activism and doing all this work, did you think of yourselves as starting a movement?

Leonard:  We saw what we were doing as holding on to a movement.  The 1948 election was a loss for Republicans and there was a big economic turn down.  The momentum for the Goldwater campaign was that things were beleaguered.  During the time, there was an organization called the National Student Association that tried to gain prominence.  When it first came about, people didn’t realize it was really a CIA funded group.  It ostensibly was about building cultural bridges and developing students, but it was the way the CIA recruited students on campus.  The CIA was generally an Ivy League only organization, but it would use the NSA to send students to congresses in other countries and conferences to get them involved.  They generally took a position against the free market.  At the time, the CIA’s strategy was to get others to reject communism by endorsing a mixed market solution.  It was not pro-free market.  At the time, Buckley was a CIA operative and tried to get the CIA to endorse the free market in working with people, along with a cadre of others.  However, when his side lost, they all left the CIA and many of them went with him to National Review.  I was on student government at Georgetown and blocked us joining the NSA early on.

Alexander:  Was the word “libertarian” commonly used when you were a student?

Leonard:  Yes.  FEE basically led libertarianism and Leonard Read brought the name to prominence.  It was also directly in contrast to conservatism that was based much more on hierarchy at the time.  Russell Kirk’s conservatism was very much about Europe, and libertarianism was much more about the U.S.  Kirk and others based their thinking on the feudalism and subservience of Europe.  Kirk toured Scotland at one point and became infatuated with the hierarchical structure.  If one wanted to support the start of a U.S. movement, libertarianism was the option.  Conservatism was for those who wanted the U.S. to be more like Europe.

Alexander:  Given everything you have experienced, do you think we are more or less free today?

Leonard:  Oh, we are much less free today.  Things are much worse today.  That’s why we are seeing the Tea Party movement take off.  They are an example of people being unhappy with excessive government intervention in their lives.

Alexander:  What happened after you graduated?

Leonard:  The 60’s were flat.  ISI was going conservative at the time.  The Volcker Fund in California was the big place for libertarianism.  They had funded scholarships and provided support for students to work with Hayek and Mises and attend conferences.  I taught for a year.  Then I went to work for the Volcker Fund.  After that, I went to another center.  Then I ended up teaching at CCNY.

Alexander:  If you could give one piece of advice to today’s students, what would it be?

Leonard:  It depends on what you want to accomplish.  A lot of times, students want speakers to bring hundreds of students out to an event.  They think the only measure of success is the number of people who attend.  They want large crowds that look nice.  So they bring big names and pay lots of money for a one hour event.  But when you do that, you’re really just bringing a show to campus.  You’re not educating people to make a difference.  ISI never did that.  Bringing in academics to campus for a room of 20 people who are really interested in the ideas to learn was fine.  The goal was to educate people.  Bringing a show to campus doesn’t convert people.  Engaging people is what matters.