LIBERTARIAN
AND GEORGIST
Frank
Chodorov (1887-1966) could well be called a libertarian's libertarian.
The eleventh child of Russian immigrants on the Lower West Side of New
York, he was named Fishel Chodorowsky but was "always known as
Frank Chodorov."1 A 1907 graduate
of Columbia University, he had a textile business, followed by a
mail-order clothing business, which succumbed to the Great Depression.
After this disaster, he went into saleswork, but came to be best known
as a promoter of libertarian ideas. An
important influence on Chodorov was the writings of Henry George,
apostle of free trade, free markets, and – unfortunately, some
would say – the "Single Tax" on land, which was
supposed to alleviate the evils of rent and private land-ownership.
Sometime in the 'teens he read George's
Progress
and Poverty, which had a profound impact on his
world-outlook. In 1941 he wrote of George: "His is the philosophy
of free enterprise, free trade, free men."2
Another important mentor to Chodorov was the renowned essayist Albert
Jay Nock, himself an extreme libertarian – I do not mean the word
"extreme" as a criticism – and Georgist.
AN
'ISOLATIONIST' PAR EXCELLENCE
In
this space, I am of course most interested in Chodorov's views on
foreign policy. Along with that whole generation of libertarians,
republicans, and conservatives we call the Old Right, Chodorov was
strongly committed to nonintervention. As World War II took form, he
wrote many antiwar editorials in the old Freeman, a
publication of the Henry George School. For his pains, he was purged
as editor in 1942. He founded his own broadsheet, analysis in
1944. In this little journal, he could truly write what he thought.
(There is some resemblance between analysis and Dwight
MacDonald's Politics – in the latter's left-wing pacifist
phase.)
Financial
difficulties led to the merger of analysis with another little
journal, Human Events, in 1951. In 1954-1955, Chodorov edited
the new Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic
Education (FEE). Another outlet for Chodorov's energies was the
Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, founded in 1950, later
renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (if I understand the
institutional continuity correctly). The latter is still in existence.
CONSISTENT
NONINTERVENTIONISM DOWN THE YEARS
Chodorov
had opposed US entry into World War II. Like many on the Old Right who
had had no illusions that the great crusade would produce a better
world, he saw little reason to enlist in the sequel, the cold war. In
early 1947, Congress debated the Truman Doctrine – US aid to any
government anywhere, that claimed to be menaced by our erstwhile
heroic allies, the communists – and, specifically, the proposal
to aid Greece and Turkey. Chodorov foresaw "a Byzantine Empire of
the West," if Truman's policy prevailed. He warned that "poking
into Europe's business would directly impact American liberty: "Already
there is a Red witchhunt afoot, and experience tells us that when the
exigencies of the situation require it the definition of 'Red' will
include every person who raises his voice against the going order."
In the end, "when our imperialism comes to grips with the empire
of the commissars, ... our liberties will vanish into –
communism."3
Of
course that battle against the Greek-Turkish Aid Bill, like so many
others, was lost. In "Misguided Patriotism" (March 1951), we
find Chodorov questioning the role of big business in assisting the
political establishment. The case of Charles Wilson of General
Electric was "illustrative": "He was called by Mr.
Truman when the Korean affair started.... Mr. Truman could think of no
way out but the regimentation of private life – the only cure-all
in the politician's pharmacopia... He reached out into industry for
help." This "mesalliance" between business and state
could only strengthen the state at the expense of liberty. Chodorov
wrote: "To put it bluntly: Communism will not be imported from
Moscow; it will come out of Wall Street and Main Street" –
if business itself failed to make the proper distinction between state
and market.4
OLD
RIGHT VERSUS NEW RIGHT
In
the August 1954 Freeman there was something of a debate
between young William F. Buckley, Jr., paladin of the interventionist
new right, and Chodorov. Buckley wrote that "to beat the Soviet
Union we must, to an extent, imitate the Soviet Union" –
with conscription, higher taxes, and bureaucracy. He dismissed the
non-interventionists' fear that "we shall totalitarianize
ourselves to a point where life in the United States would be
indistinguishable from life in the Soviet Union, save possibly for an
enduring folkway or two."5]
Chodorov
"replied," in effect, that communism was an idea,
that could not be killed by military means. All we could kill would be
"natives" of other countries, who happened to believe in
that unworkable idea – if, for example, we should ever be so
foolish as to "send an army into Indochina." No, we should
stand firm for the ideals of private property and freedom "and
let all natives live."6 At this
late date, I think it safe to say that Washington did what it could to
make life here "indistinguishable from life in the Soviet Union"
and, as for the "enduring folkway or two," the entrenched
academic and bureaucratic left are bent on denying us even those.
As
the battle for the soul of the right wing continued, Chodorov made
related points. He noted that we now suffered increased public debt,
high taxes, the "involuntary servitude"of peacetime
conscription, and "a bureaucracy that compares favorably with in
size with that of the Nazi regime." In the cold war, as in hot
war, "the State acquires power... and because of its insatiable
lust for power [it] is incapable of giving up any of it. The State
never abdicates." (Congressional Republicans, take note.)
Overseas, our rough-and-ready Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles,
was leaning on France to join the European Defense Community. This
reflected "a new kind of imperialism" based on bribery and
manipulation.7
Now
came William S. Schlamm, right-wing immigrant and former leftist, to
argue the cold warrior's case in The Freeman. Setting up the
straw man of an "unarmed U.S., minding its own pleasant business
of freedom," he asked how we "could avoid being overrun by a
communist world monopoly of military power"? Evidently, the
non-interventionists were relying on "hunches" that the
communists weren't serious, or that God would bail them out. But the
commies were about to add "the gigantic industrial powerhouse of
western Europe to the manpower and natural resources of Asia":
against this terrible threat the "unarmed US" – again
his ungrounded assumption – could never prevail. No, he would
rather "pay with the recoverable loss of some of my liberties for
a chance to avoid, for centuries, the total loss of freedom."8
Well, we can't all plan so many centuries ahead, but it seems clear
that if the commies had overrun western Europe and managed "the
gigantic industrial powerhouse" according to their theory and
praxis, they would have run it into the ground, quickly reducing their
threat to manageable proportions. But, alas, word of the problem of
economic calculation under socialism, as formulated by Ludwig von
Mises, seems not to have come to Mr. Schlamm. As for "recoverable
loss" of freedoms, I merely ask the names of those recovered in
recent memory. There may be some, but I doubt the list is very long.
In
reply, Chodorov went over the ground methodically. We were being told
to be afraid, that war was inevitable (again). But as "the
articulate fearers" admitted, their program required
conscription. This suggested that they knew that Americans would never
volunteer "to fight a war with Russia on foreign soil."
Americans had been conscripted in 1917 and for World War II. This
raised "the pertinent question: if Americans did not want these
wars should they have been compelled to fight them?" (As often
happens, here the right-wing anti-statist sounds rather more "democratic"
than his opponent.) People who would compel Americans to fight Russia
"have the dictator complex." Giving up our freedom to an
American leviathan – in the name of stopping a hypothetical
foreign leviathan – seemed a stacked deck to Chodorov. Either
way, we got leviathan. Actually, US withdrawal into our own hemisphere
would be advantageous by forcing the Soviets to lengthen their supply
lines – if they really were bent on attacking us. As for Europe: "it
would be hard on the Europeans if they fell into Soviet hands; but
not any worse than if we precipitated a war in which their homes
became the battlefield."9 Quite
a few saved-by-being-destroyed villages later, I think we can see that
Chodorov had a point.
VOX
CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO
hodorov's
cause was the anti-interventionist and antistatist faith of the older
right wing. In the hysteria of the high cold war – Truman
doctrine, the "fall" of China, McCarthyism, Korea – the
interventionist new rightists stampeded their constituents into
another cosmic crusade, at the successful conclusion of which they
would get their liberties back, no questions asked. I suppose it would
be rude to ask for them now, even though the proximate justification
for their surrender fell of its own weight – and lack of rational
economic calculation – ten years ago.
In
1962, Chodorov summed up his foreign policy ideas in his
autobiography. "Isolationism," he wrote, "is not a
political policy, it is a natural attitude of a people." Left to
their own devices, the people "do not feel any call to impose
their own customs and values on strangers." But "interventionism
is a conceit of the political leader" who finds too little for
himself to do in just presiding over a self-regulating civil society.
As a result of successful campaigns for intervention in the past, we
had – not a better world – but "a monstrous bureaucracy
with a vested interest in intervention" and a nation "committed
to a program of interference in the affairs of every country in the
world." Alexander had imposed Hellenism on western Asia, the
Romans imposed the pax Romana wherever they could, and
Napoleon imposed "liberty, equality, fraternity" on Europe.
Hitler spread Aryanism. Britain gave "a taste of English
civilization" to natives the world over. Chodorov saw folly in
all these imperial forms. Since we all work now in the shadow of the
fellow with the mustache, I hasten to add that I doubt Chodorov found
each empire the exact moral equivalent of the other. What he did hope
was that Americans would listen to a world tired of our overseas
therapies and know-how and "return to that isolationism which for
over a hundred years prospered the nation and gained for us the
respect and admiration of the world."10
[1]
Charles H. Hamilton, ed., Fugitive
Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (Liberty Press:
Indianapolis, 1980), "Introduction," p. 13.
[2] Ibid., p. 14.
[3] Frank Chodorov, "A Byzantine Empire of the West," analysis,
April 1947 (placed in The Congressional Record, vol. 93, part
II, pp. A2015-16, by Congressman Howard Buffett).
[4] Frank Chodorov, "Misguided Patriotism," Human
Events, March 14, 1947, pp. 1-4.
[5] William F. Buckley, Jr., "A Dilemma of Conservatives,"
The Freeman, 5, 2 (August 1954), pp. 51-52.
[6] Frank Chodorov, "Reds Are Natives," ibid., pp.
45-46.
[7] Frank Chodorov, "The Return of 1940?", The Freeman,
5, 3 (September 1954), p. 81, and "The New Imperialism,"
ibid., 5,5 (November 1954), p. 162.
[8] William S. Schlamm, "But It Is Not 1940," ibid.,
pp. 169-171.
[9] Frank Chodorov, "A War to Communize America," ibid.,
171-174 (my italics in the last quotation).
[10] Frank Chodorov, Out of Step (New York: Devin-Adair Co.,
1962), Ch. XI, "Isolationism," pp. 113-123.
