01/15/08 – David Beito – The Scott Horton Show

Certainly, there are too many cases of proven zombies to claim they do not arouse people who have been allegedly dead.
Hi, my friends.
Welcome to Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
And our guest today is my good friend, David Beto.
You may have noticed we've written some articles together for LewRockwell.com and a couple of other places.
He runs the Liberty and Power Group blog at the History News Network.
And he's got this new article that's running in the Independent Review.
Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty David T. Beto and his co-author, Linda Royster Beto.
Oh, his wife.
Hi, David.
Hi.
Hi, Scott.
How are you doing?
I just noticed there was another name on here.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I need to give my co-author proper credit.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
This is a great article.
I've just been going over it.
I read it yesterday, but I wanted to go over it again and see if I could actually learn some things and have them stick in my brain so I could ask you questions about them.
This is a really interesting article.
It's about this trio of American authors from, I guess, the middle part of the last century who were individualists, were, I guess, almost near anarchists, or were very much laissez-faire individualist libertarian types, part of what's termed the old right.
And I guess if we could just start and you could give us a brief biographical sketch of these three women, who they are, Isabel Patterson, Rose Walder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Sure.
Isabel Patterson was born, I think I've got the year right, I think it's 1887, 1886, something like that.
A very good biographer of hers by Stephen Cox, who's the editor of Liberty Magazine, which I would highly recommend, just came out recently.
She wrote a column for the New York Herald Tribune book section, which was in the 30s and the 40s, really big.
If you were any author at all, you would have to know Patterson.
You'd try to schmooze her as much as you could.
She wrote this column until about 1949 for the 1920s, and also wrote several novels.
I haven't read them, but I'm told that some of them have political themes.
And was pretty successful, but was best known as a critic.
And, you know, sometimes wrote about politics, but very often did not.
She was somebody that, you know, read everything and was very witty, very acerbic, could turn a phrase.
Cox has some examples.
She's very, very quotable.
But she was pretty much, you know, I wouldn't say pretty much, she was a libertarian.
And she was very much opposed to the New Deal.
She was something of a feminist, but of an individualist variety.
And she was anti-war against Roosevelt's foreign policy and opposed dropping in the atomic bomb.
About the same time she was born, Rose Wilder Lane was born.
And she's best known today, perhaps, as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who did The Little House on the Prairie books.
You know, it's interesting.
When I was first reading about her in Justin Raimondo's book, Reclaiming the American Right, I actually saw the rerun of The Little House on the Prairie, where I guess it's the oldest daughter has grown up.
And she's laying in bed pregnant and saying, if it's a girl, I'm going to name her Rose.
Well, Rose Wilder Lane does not get enough emphasis because basically she, there's a book called Little Ghostwriter, I forget it, Ghostwriter on the Prairie or something like that, I've got a citation here.
But it's the biography of Lane, which was done about 10 years ago.
And basically Lane co-authored those books, did heavy work on those books, promoting them, made those books possible.
Yeah, Justin gives her the lion's share of the credit for those, even though I guess her mom's got her name all over them.
I think her mom provided the information, probably wrote a lot of the drafts.
So I think her mom was key, but I think Lane also just heavily edited them and really made it possible.
I like being able to connect that to something people know.
This is the oldest daughter on Little House on the Prairie that everybody watched when they were a little kid, sick home from school or whatever.
This is her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane that we're talking about.
She was appalled by the way they handled the books, which are much, again, I haven't read a lot of Little House on the Prairie books, but there's a kind of, she doesn't over-romanticize the frontier experience, which sometimes the TV show does.
Her literary heir was Roger McBride, who was the first Libertarian Party candidate, or the second one, back in 1976.
But he sort of sold control of that series to Michael Landon, is my understanding, and Landon kind of transformed it.
Yeah, well, as to be expected, right?
The book and the movie.
But she was a novelist, wrote a lot of essays, wrote a couple political works beginning in the 1930s.
One was called Give Me Liberty, which was sort of her personal journey away from communism.
She had been sympathetic to communism.
And then wrote Discovery of Freedom in 1943, same year as Atlas Shrugged, or same year as The Fountainhead, and Patterson's book called The God of the Machine.
And those three books are considered just foundational works in the modern libertarian movement.
In fact, Lane probably coined the term, libertarian movement, and was active in the 40s and the 50s, and was kind of a rebel, and an activist, and really a feisty woman.
Tell me about her leaning toward communism, and then what changed that.
In 1919, there was just this incredible faith that this was the wave of the future.
She had her, I can't remember her first name, but Reed, who was portrayed in the film Reds, she heard him speak, and was just sort of carried away by all of this.
In a way, I guess she thought that this was the way to achieve liberty, was communism.
Then she went to the Soviet Union, and she said, God, this is awful.
In a lot of ways, she sort of returns very quickly to her roots, which are individualist and anti-statist.
She went to Russia, and she would see these peasants in these local communities.
They had kind of a communalism, but they were very anti-communism.
They were very anti-statism.
She recognized that it was just impossible.
It couldn't work, and it would be destructive towards liberty.
I think you even, in your essay, don't you quote her quoting one of the Russian peasants?
Explain to her that, listen, you get a bunch of men in a room, and try to combine all their brains together, and assume the Politburo, and think that somehow they're going to figure out all the different things that need to be done.
It can't be done.
Only God knows Russia.
Yeah, you can't have one big head trying to combine everything to one big head.
In Moscow, I think he said something to that effect, right?
It's sort of this collective brain.
Rand sort of makes that argument, too.
I think in The Fountainhead, she uses that terminology.
You can't have a collective brain.
I think Lane and Patterson were tremendously influential on Ayn Rand, who comes along later.
Anyway, the third person is Zora Neale Hurston, who is not often grouped with Lane and Patterson, but I think really had a lot in common with them.
She was black.
She was the best known of the three, really, if you were to ask the general population, whose books sell the best, who's better known, who's had more impact.
It would be Hurston.
She was born about the same time in this all-black town called Eatonville, was a folklorist, was involved in the Harlem Renaissance, was a novelist, and wrote a classic American work that was made into a movie a few years ago by Oprah called Their Eyes Were Watching God, but was also an individualist, also an anti-statist, very much against the New Deal.
A lot of people have recognized her talent, but have been very uncomfortable, because most of her fans are on the left with the stuff that they read, where she applauds Robert Taft, for example.
She attacks Eleanor Roosevelt, and she sounds a heck of a lot like Lane and Patterson.
Well, now, what was the problem of these three women?
Everybody knows that the New Deal was wonderful and saved America from the Great Depression, and you'd have to be some kind of Nazi to be against the New Deal, right?
No, I don't think they saw it that way.
They thought Roosevelt was...
Oh, I'm sorry, that's what I learned in my New Deal government school.
Well, Lane...
I mean, Hurston, some of the stuff she wrote was just devastating, pointing out that Roosevelt was trying to exploit the black vote, trying to create a welfare state, and was a cynical figure, was trying to destroy this sort of rich tradition that Hurston was well aware of, of people helping themselves, of mutual aid, of entrepreneurship.
I mean, this was a rich tradition, and it wasn't just Hurston.
There were a lot of people that believed in this, and she thought Roosevelt was going to destroy this.
And, of course, Lane and Patterson sort of thought the same thing, and they said that this guy is going to undermine American liberty.
Well, and how so?
I mean, when you say welfareism, you sort of say it in a way that implies that we already know what's wrong with it, or something like that.
But I would just, you know, I guess feigning ignorance, I would think that this Zora Neale Hurston woman would want the government to help the poorest and most helpless among us, especially in times of economic crisis like the Great Depression.
What specifically is the problem here?
Well, she thought that what Roosevelt was up to was not really helping anybody.
And, of course, you know, Roosevelt prolonged the Depression much longer than it needed to be, the longest depression in American history, that Roosevelt was looking out for his political power base and was trying to shovel a lot of money in to basically keep blacks dependent, keep them beholden to the New Deal and manipulating them.
And she provides some interesting examples.
This is a fascinating one, not so much related to welfare, but it relates to this manipulation.
And a lot of people, and I don't know if you've heard of this, have heard of the kind of Marian Anderson affair.
Marian Anderson was a well-known black opera singer, and she tried to get the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939, denied her a venue to sing at Constitution Hall.
They owned Constitution Hall, and that's bad.
I mean, you know, that's terrible.
But Eleanor Roosevelt was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
She took the opportunity to resign and make a big deal about this and really exploit the issue.
But what was left unsaid was that Anderson, at the same time, had been denied an opportunity to appear at the local high school in the District of Columbia, which was under control of the federal government, which of course meant Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress, and that Eleanor Roosevelt refused to address that.
In fact, by taking her public stand, she, in a way, well, the effect of it was to lead everyone to forget that this happened at the same time as the Daughters of the American Revolution.
And Hurston points out that Eleanor Roosevelt actually had the power to do something about the District of Columbia, because that was under the control of the federal government, namely her husband and a Democratic Congress, and she did nothing at all.
So a lot of it was exploitation.
Hypocrisy, right?
Hypocrisy.
Cynical exploitation of people.
Now, tell me about this town Eatonville.
I'd never heard of this before.
This is a town that's not terribly far from Tampa.
It's very small.
It's an all-black town.
There were several of these in the 1890s.
As blacks were kind of screwed over by Jim Crow, what they would do, and you see these towns in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and elsewhere, a black entrepreneur typically would try to get together with some other people, and they would purchase some land, and they would start their own towns that they could govern themselves.
And Eatonville is an example of this.
Hurston's father was mayor of Eatonville.
He was one of the founders of it, and it was a self-governing, all-black town.
And she grew up in this atmosphere where she was perfectly aware, don't tell me that blacks can't govern themselves.
They can't.
And this was one of the reasons she was worried about this.
She said, look, it's better for us to help each other to not be dependent on the white man, to not be dependent on the government, and we have this community here which shows that we can do it.
And here Roosevelt comes along, and she sees him as trying to destroy this.
You know, it's interesting.
I talked with Charles Featherstone on the show last week, and he explained that when Otto von Bismarck created Social Security in Germany, that the purpose of it had nothing to do with helping poor people or anything, that its purpose was to tie the individual to the central state.
And it's funny.
In this article, you quote one of these ladies arguing against the idea that, oh, yeah, we should go over to Germany and teach them about the American system.
What are we going to teach them?
You guys ought to have Social Security.
Yeah, well, that was a controversy during the war.
I mean, World War II was a bad time for civil liberties if you were a critic, had been a critic of Roosevelt's war policy.
Roosevelt wanted to bring up some of the key anti-war people on the right up on sedition charges, and some of them were.
He was only constrained by the fact that his attorney general kind of, you know, was able to hold some of that back.
But during the war, Lane wrote a postcard.
She heard a radio show with a guy from the New Republic magazine, which we've read about lately.
And this guy basically said, well, we should go to Germany and send teachers there after the war to teach them about democracy and an example of democracy is Social Security.
She wrote on a postcard.
No, it isn't.
You know, that started in Germany, and it was used to destroy the independence of the workers and to tie them to state.
Hitler is a big advocate of this kind of thing, you know, and she wrote this angry postcard.
Somebody saw it, and they reported her to the FBI, and the FBI opened up a file on her and investigated her because of this, but she held her ground, and that was not an easy thing to do in 1943.
She said, look, I have a right to say this.
This is ridiculous.
Well, and you draw a great scene in your article.
You paint the picture of her confronting the goons on her doorstep and screaming in their face.
Yeah, yeah, and, you know, basically cross-examined the state trooper.
They sent a state trooper.
The FBI sent a state trooper there, and he sort of was asking her about this, and she said, well, do you think this is subversive?
And he said, yes, you know, what she had written on this postcard, and she said, well, then I'm subversive as hell, right, and just drove this guy basically off her property.
And then when he said, well, you're a writer.
It's okay, I guess, for you to say things like this.
She said, I have a right to say this because I'm an American.
It's like this guy just had to get out of there as soon as he could.
Yeah.
Well, I have a very visual imagination, so I don't really know what this lady looked like or anything, but I can imagine some lady screaming at this guy and him kind of sheepishly saying, you know, he's trying to let her off the hook, but his reason for letting her off the hook isn't good enough either, so she's still screaming at him as he's leaving.
Well, she also had a public protest against rationing, again, something that was, you know, you just didn't do this if you wanted to be careful during the war.
It was very risky where she refused to cooperate with the federal government's rationing program and grew her own food and made a very big public deal about it, that she was breaking all ties with the federal government in that respect.
In the middle of World War II?
Yes, right in the middle of World War II.
Wow, and they didn't hang her or anything?
No, they didn't.
And I think J. Edgar Hoover, he was a bad guy, definitely, but I think Hoover kind of had his moments where he was reasonably lucid.
Like, for example, he didn't want anything to do with the Japanese internment.
He thought, you know, he wasn't a civil libertarian, but he said, you know, I don't want to fool with this crap.
And I think he looked at this and said, look, you know, this woman is no threat.
Even though he sort of made a big show about defending the FBI in private, he said, this is ridiculous.
Why do we even send someone to talk to this woman?
Yeah.
And now another interesting thing about all these women and really the rest of the old right movement of that time is that, well, I'm sorry because I don't mean to skip their criticisms of the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but these are all fiercely anti-communist individualists, private property, laissez-faire libertarians, and yet all of them opposed the Truman Doctrine containing the Soviet Union and the Cold War against communism.
And I think, you know, people who are interested in this kind of history understand good and well why that is and so forth, but I think probably for the average listener, that might be a surprise to find out that the most, some of at least, the most fiercely anti-communist writers and opinion makers in this country opposed Truman and opposed the Cold War.
Yeah, and I think that they thought and accurately, I think, that our effort to prop up these colonial empires was actually aiding communism because, I mean, we see plenty of examples of that.
We come in and bail out the French and Indochina.
We bail out these other colonial empires and the result of that is we are identified with the empire and it ends up undermining our whole effort.
And a lot of them emphasized that.
Another fear that they had was that this was going to be destructive to liberty at home.
This is going to bring conscription.
This was going to undermine civil liberties at home and was going to be counterproductive.
And that they were critics of totalitarianism and a lot of them made the argument that Stalin was just as bad if not worse for Hitler and we keep playing favorites.
And so our best solution is to just stay out of these foreign conflicts as much as possible and avoid them because it's going to lead to unintended consequences.
They are critics of central planning and I think that a lot of that insight, they apply to foreign policy.
They say, look, if we try to do central planning at home, it's not going to work because there are going to be all these unintended consequences.
One person can't plan this.
If we try to do it overseas, we're going to even redouble this problem.
Well now, weren't they afraid that the Soviet Union was going to take over the whole world including the United States?
No, I don't think they particularly were because I think that all three of them understood that the Soviet system was a failure.
That it was, in a way, something of a paper tiger and that it was all very, very hollow.
And they would have not been surprised by the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union.
So they thought, in some sense, Truman is creating a kind of war scare by building up this enemy that is not quite as powerful as he makes out.
He's building it up for his own political purposes.
See, that's part of it too.
They didn't like Truman, they didn't like Roosevelt, they didn't trust them.
Well, and we know that Senator Vandenberg told Harry Truman, go out there and scare the hell out of them, Harry, and tell the American people that the Soviet Union that just lost 20 million people in this war against Hitler is now bent on world domination and must be stopped.
Well, if we look at Robert Taft, who Hurston supported quite strongly, and you've played the tape before and I'd urge you to play it again if you ever have a chance, at least the excerpts.
Taft, during the height of the Cold War, got up there and said, look, we're provoking a war with Russia.
Why are we doing this?
This is dangerous talk.
We're encircling them.
And they have national interests, they have historical national interests, and what we're doing is we're putting bases on their borders, a little like what's happening now.
One way we could have maybe handled the end of the Cold War, I'm no great fan of NATO, but this might have been a way to do it, is let Russia and NATO bring them in, accommodate them.
Now that opportunity is gone because we were going to rub their faces in it after the end of the Cold War.
We were going to create this sort of, I mean, Bush's term, this new world order, and we were going to dominate it.
So Russia really had no place in it other than as kind of, I guess, they were supposed to listen to what we told them to do because we underestimated them in a way.
Yeah.
You know, I always thought that the new order would include bringing Russia into NATO, and I was glad to see that they didn't, but I'm not so sure that the opposite is better in the situation we're in now.
Yeah, I think it would have been a better thing.
I mean, obviously I'd like to just get out of NATO, but if we'd have brought them in, I think it would have, in a way, neutralized the dangers that NATO could present because Russia could have been a check possibly on some of the things that have gone on.
And, you know, it's interesting, too, when you look back at these people who were, you know, the laissez-faire libertarians who were opposing the Cold War at its onset, it's funny to see really how right they were, especially when you talk about, you know, Ludwig von Mises and these three women, for example, who had no faith that the Soviet system was even, you know, a danger because they understood how inherently faulty it was.
There's this book, Overblown, about the terrorism threat by Professor John Mueller, I think from the University of Chicago, and one of the things he talks about is the containment policy of the Soviet Union and that really it was after the Vietnam War when the American people were basically just so fed up with the containment policy that they kind of switched to detente a bit and they ceased containing the Soviet Union.
They basically let the Soviet Union start propping up revolutions in Africa and South America and encouraged their invasion of Afghanistan.
When they stopped containing them, in fact, encouraged their expansion, that was what broke the back of the Soviet Union.
When they finally, because of the will of the American people to continue the policy, was gone coincidentally or, you know, incidentally from the Vietnam War, that's what killed them.
That's what made the Soviet Union fall apart when they expanded their empire and then they had an even bigger empire to try to maintain.
They just couldn't do it.
Well, some of the early apologists for the Cold War weren't particularly, you know, a pro-free market.
You know, you mentioned Vandenberg.
You could mention, you know, a lot, you know, Dewey and people like this, these sort of Republican, moderate Republican politicians.
They didn't particularly understand and appreciate a free market and had their own sort of faith in government planning.
So this led them in a way to overestimate the Soviet danger.
And people like Lane and Patterson were smart enough to realize, look, this system is screwed.
It can't last.
It's unnatural.
And why are we so worried about it?
Because it is going to self-destruct eventually.
You see that thing, even in Ayn Rand, really, you see that to some extent.
Oh, look, she's much more of a Cold Warrior.
But Rand, you know, in the early 80s predicted basically the fall of the Soviet Union.
He said if we went to war with them, the Soviet troops would turn their guns around on their own government.
They would refuse to fight.
Yeah, I mean, this was in the early 1980s when nobody was really thinking about it.
Very few people, you know, the conservatives just thought this system is just a colossus.
You know, they're going to undermine us, you know, if we don't watch out.
Right, yeah, hey, that's the way I was taught when I was a child in the 80s.
The Soviet Union was a giant permanent thing that was going to exist into the imaginable future.
These are not typical, though.
You get some interesting nuances that made me think, actually.
One thing about Lane, and I didn't write about this because, you know, I limited space.
But during the war, her solution was she'd opposed the war, but she said, well, this U.N. stuff is ridiculous.
We shouldn't have, you know, she was against the U.N.
But her alternative was, why not let these countries come in and join the United States if they want?
They want to come in as states, fine.
And, you know, then we can, you know, this can be the triumph of liberty, right?
You know, they can come in as states if they choose to do so.
I thought, well, that's different.
And, you know, there's some argument to be made for that, I suppose.
But that was her, that was sort of the solution she ended up touting by the end of the war.
That's funny.
Well, I'd take the American Constitution over the U.N.
Charter any day if that was my choice.
That was her argument, yeah.
This is the way to liberalize the world, I guess, and just let them come in as states.
And, well, okay, I mean, I could see an argument there.
In that circumstance, at least the national government would have the mandate to guarantee to them a Republican form of government.
Yeah.
And we'd bring them in as equals, right?
We wouldn't bring them in as inferiors.
They would have, you know, so I wouldn't necessarily shoot that idea down.
It's better than some others.
Personally, I'm for secession and going back to the articles.
Yeah, I agree.
But, listen, let me rewind back to the end of World War II here.
I'm sorry I skipped ahead, but I wanted to let you talk about Isabel Patterson, Rose Walder Lane, Zora Neale Hurston, and their views on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Well, we don't have a record of what Lane thought, but I suspect she would have been against it based on everything else.
But Patterson and Hurston wrote about this, and Hurston called Truman the butcher of Asia because of his dropping of the atomic bomb.
And Patterson was very critical.
She said, look, you know, this was unnecessary.
Japan was – we had an economic stranglehold on Japan.
If we had maintained that, you know, we could have had surrender.
And she was for the idea of a conditional surrender.
Why do we have to do this?
This is mass murder.
You know, we're killing Japanese babies needlessly.
And there were a lot of other conservatives that said the same thing, or libertarians, really, but conservatives as well.
If you look at National Review, you find some examples of people saying this.
Well, MacArthur and Eisenhower both opposed it, right?
Yeah, a lot of people opposed it.
You find the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education opposed it.
And you also find that a fair number of people, among them Patterson, I believe, opposed the Japanese internment as well.
So the primary opposition that Roosevelt had really was on the right, or the old right, to his – or, I mean, Truman and Roosevelt had to their policies of mass murder and violating civil liberties.
You know, I was having a conversation the other day about the switching back and forth of the ideologies and party loyalties and so forth, and how it's interesting that the Democrats were, I guess, in a way they were more or less the libertarian party or something to a degree, or the more libertarian of the two, I guess, would be a much better way to say it, up until Wilson.
And then Wilson was this, you know, what we would now consider to be a socialist, basically, and that the Democratic Party has basically followed the Wilson model ever since then.
And yet somehow it took these right-wing redneck hicks, you know, what, 80 years to finally switch from the Democratic to Republican Party and make the Republican Party the party of the conservatives and whatever.
And the reason simply was race.
It was because the Democratic Party was still the party of keeping blacks down in the South.
And that was the most important issue.
You get, you know, I guess you have the Dixiecrats and the split votes here and there, but basically you had a bunch of right-wing rednecks supporting the party of Bobby Kennedy simply because they were the party of Jim Crow from Woodrow Wilson and all the way through.
Is that about right?
Well, that's right.
James Eastland, one of the most segregationist senators in the South.
I mean, the most, really, I would say.
He supported Kennedy in 1916.
There's a very interesting book called The End of Southern Exceptionalism, which makes good argument that actually often people say that the Wallace vote went over to the Republicans.
And he finds good statistical data indicating the Wallace vote went over to Jimmy Carter in 1976.
And that, as a matter of fact, the Republicans in the South really had a very, you know, something of a different constituency.
But that's kind of a separate issue.
But one thing about race that I find fascinating about Hurston and Lane especially, but also Patterson, is all three were extremely anti-racist.
Lane, though, who was white, wrote for the leading black newspaper in the country during World War II.
And to my knowledge, nobody had looked closely at this stuff, or at least had not written about it.
But she had a regular column in this paper where she was trying to sell laissez-faire to a black audience.
It was her largest single audience.
She reached far more people through this column than she ever reached through any of her books during her lifetime.
Wow.
And you go on at length in this article.
And, again, the articles coming up in the Independent Review is the next issue?
Yeah.
It's Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on war, race, the state, and liberty.
And I got in a big fight with a collectivist friend of mine because the way I said that libertarianism was the number one antidote to racism, as racism is a form of collectivism.
And I tried to add the disclaimer that collectivists have done a lot of great things for minorities in protecting their rights from the majority in this country.
It's just my personal belief that the principles of libertarianism are the ultimate antidote to the race problem, despite all the great efforts that collectivists may have done on the part of minority rights and collectivists within those minorities as well.
Yeah, well, you could also point out that the founder, I mean, the first president of the NAACP, Moorfield Story, was a classical liberal.
I mean, you know, a defender of free trade, critical child labor laws, you know, defender of the gold standard, and Oswald Garrison Vallard.
Now, you know, I think you're right, though.
I think that a lot of the libertarians, a lot of the individualists, should have done a lot more in the 1940s and 1950s.
That's why I really applaud Lane.
She was trying to do this, and it was very inventive, where she tried to link laissez-faire to anti-racism, and very effectively.
And it's too bad, in a way, that there wasn't more of that.
You know, people going into the trenches and trying to help people, you know, help things like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, which was an extremely libertarian cause, I think, that they were pushing.
I think that there was a, we can overestimate how much, you know, how little they did.
But we don't want to, you know, we don't want to, we want to give them credit as well for what they did.
Well, now, when you say that she went to these lengths to connect laissez-faire with anti-racism, in what way?
Elaborate.
Well, she pointed out that racism was collectivism, and said that this is like nationalism, this is like class warfare.
You want to deal with people as individuals.
But she did a lot of soul-searching, because before this, I don't think she had had much contact with blacks.
And she read a couple copies of this newspaper, which was really quite an eclectic group of people that they had as columnists, and she really liked it.
And she was hired to write a regular column for it, and she would start using examples of black entrepreneurs.
She would say, okay, we had Henry Ford, we had this guy, you know, this black entrepreneur.
And even sort of anticipated the sit-ins in a very small way, where she said, well, how do we deal with discrimination?
She said, well, when I was a young woman, a lot of us couldn't smoke.
We were not allowed to smoke in restaurants.
What do we do?
We went in and we started smoking anyway.
We were told to leave, but we left.
But then we came back again.
We came back again over and over again.
And eventually we undermined this prejudice against smokers.
I don't know what you'd think of what's happening now to smokers, but she used that as an example for ways that blacks could undermine private discrimination.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I was just thinking, I kind of feel like going and smoking on somebody's property right now, but I guess I've got to respect that's kind of different.
I guess back then smoking was allowed for men, just not women or whatever.
Yeah, and she wasn't calling for just sitting there and not necessarily like the sit-ins in a way.
She said, all right, you leave, but you take your time about it and you make your point, right?
We should all go smoke in government buildings.
That'll teach them.
Yeah, yeah.
I wouldn't do that anymore.
I think that's a cause.
Unfortunately, it's a lost cause it looks like right now.
Now, I have to tell you, well, and as you already know, I'm a firm believer in this idea that, well, if we had the most libertarian society, that that would be the way for us to have the most egalitarian society, rather than some sort of central planning.
I think the whole idea that, oh, we're your betters and we wear top hats and coats and you don't, and we get to treat you like dirt and et cetera.
I think that's kind of the whole history of all mankind.
And it's the libertarian idea of private property rights and of contract that end up basically killing that, because under a system of a rule of law, a contract, even if you're scum and the guy that you made a contract with is born rich, presumably your end of the contract is still 100% enforceable against him.
And the playing field is quickly leveled out.
You have the ability of people to go from dirt poor to having some substantial wealth.
And you also, I think, will break down in terms of racial inequality.
It will ultimately break it down.
There was a libertarian, I don't know if I call him, he was an old right guy named George Schuyler who was black, wrote a book called Black and Conservative, another critic of the atomic bomb, another participant in the Harlem Renaissance, a friend of Hurston.
And Schuyler, like Hurston, thought these racial distinctions were completely arbitrary.
I mean, he thought that they were foolish and so did Lennon Patterson.
But Schuyler's solution was, he said, well, ultimately if you just leave people alone, you have all this intermarriage and you'll wipe out all these race distinctions.
In fact, his wife was black.
And he would often write about intermarriage.
And he said that all these arguments against intermarriage are ridiculous.
The view that people have an aversion to each other based on race.
If you leave people alone, that just breaks down.
And I think that that's just great stuff.
And it's too bad it wasn't emphasized more.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny.
You may have heard in the news about the head of the NAACP has defended Ron Paul.
I interviewed him last August about it.
But he was saying he knows Ron Paul.
He's known him for a long, long time and basically was defending his character.
His biggest complaint about libertarianism is that the libertarians, even though he knows us, he knows what we're about.
He understands the philosophy well.
You know, like I say, he's known Ron Paul this time and he's checked out all our stuff.
You know, he's read his Rothbard and whatever.
And he says, you know, the problem with libertarians is you guys don't focus enough on why poor people, for example, poor black people ought to be libertarians.
It's like you're only trying to convince each other.
You want to sit around talking about the Civil War all day, but you don't want to attack, for example, the drug war for how biased it is and how racist its application is, the criminal justice system in this country.
You don't want to focus on why and how poor black folks ought to embrace the idea of private property rights and capitalism as that's the best way to help themselves and what have you.
And why would you expect poor black folks to support the Ron Paul candidacy or the libertarian movement in any sense when they don't hear you addressing them ever or barely ever?
Yeah, and I think it would be great if Ron Paul now every day or every week had a new press release out about things that he could do, such as maybe there's some presidential power he would have to issue partial pardons to help restore voting rights.
I mean, that's largely a state matter, but I think a lot of the states have laws that say, look, we will deny voting rights to someone who is convicted of a federal felony.
There might be some people that you could restore their voting rights, things like that.
I think that we don't pay enough attention to voting rights in a way, at least historically, because if you were black in the South in the 1950s, you were screwed.
And a big reason you were screwed is if you look at Mississippi, which is one of the worst, 90% plus couldn't vote, and therefore you couldn't be on juries, and therefore you just had nothing if you were being screwed over by the state apparatus other than you had to go in and have a kind of patronage relationship with some white politician who might say, okay, I'll look out for you, I'll throw you some crumbs.
And it's a means of self-defense.
And those that needed it really the most in American history in the 20th century were blacks, because you were just screwed.
You didn't get anything.
You were locked out of everything.
Now, let me ask your opinion on the Civil Rights Act.
I always have trouble with this one, because if individual liberty is the most important thing and it's being absolutely and routinely violated on such a scale, all of a sudden I care much less about the reserve powers of the states and the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and if the federal government has to do something about it.
I'm kind of leaning that way.
I wasn't born until the 70s, but from what I understand about the 19th and 20th centuries in this country, something had to be done.
And yet there's been a hell of a slippery slope, and I kind of wonder whether the national government went too far in not just abolishing with federal power any state government laws enforcing Jim Crow, but in also banning discrimination on private property, lunch counters, and et cetera like that, because it seems like it's given the national government inroads into our society that are just incredible.
I mean, nobody even has a doorknob anymore, because the national government won't let you have a doorknob.
It has to be a flat bar, because based on the slippery slope that, well, it's publicly used, it's open to the public, and so we get to decide everything about it, that sort of thing.
So I just wonder what you think about that.
If they hadn't abolished or outlawed discrimination on private property, do you think that it just wouldn't have gone far enough, or I don't know?
Well, let me give a—it's complicated.
Let me give you a little bit of a semi-long answer.
One part of this is I think the states are too damn big.
And what you often saw in the 50s was local communities, as in the case of Little Rock, were more willing to integrate to schools.
In fact, were willing to go ahead with it.
Or Tuskegee, for example, where you ended up getting a lot of black voters, but the state governments came in and stopped it.
So my ideal would be something like—if I had my perfect world, it would be something like the Swiss model, where you have a lot of very small local units of government.
And therefore, if you've got some bad situation, people can always flee to the next community, and it tends, I think, to break down centralization.
But let's look at the reality of American history.
I think there were a couple of ways to go in the 1950s and 1960s that would have been an improvement.
One way to go that a lot of people—I mean, some people pushed for was pushing for voting rights.
And, you know, we do have a 15th Amendment, right?
We do have portions of the Constitution that basically say, you know, if you deny a Republican form of government, you know, that you lose representatives in Congress.
Right.
That's right in the main body of the Constitution itself.
And somebody should have—you know, so if we got a Constitution, fine.
Then, you know, I think that pushing for enforcement of voting rights was a legitimate way to go.
But unfortunately, that didn't happen until 1965, really.
I mean, there was some effort.
That was after the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
I tend to agree with Goldwater on the Civil Rights Act.
Goldwater's view was he supported it, but he didn't like the sections on private discrimination.
But he supported it to, you know, to be applied to schools, to be applied to public accommodations, and that kind of thing.
Now, you know, there's a danger to that.
But I think that, you know, racism is such an insidious form of collectivism.
Government racism.
Government-mandated racism.
That's what you had there.
And you had, you know, until Alabama, you had school segregation until the 1970s, right?
Yeah, sure.
When I was in fifth grade, David, my teacher, Mr. Harlow, explained to us all that when I was y'all's age— and I know you think I'm from the olden days, but really I'm not that old.
It was just yesterday to me.
There were black-only bathrooms and water fountains, and they couldn't come into the same restaurants as us.
And it was—you know, and he taught us all about it in a horrified way.
He was a little kid, and he was horrified when he was a little kid at growing up like that.
He never understood it and always thought it was wrong when he was a little kid.
And that, to me, when I think back now, he was right.
When I was in fifth grade, that was the olden days.
But now I realize how not long ago at all that was.
Oh, yeah.
There are people that, you know—well, my wife.
My wife is black.
She went to an all-black school, grade school.
But, you know, they had not integrated yet.
Now, it wasn't the end of the world.
I mean, sometimes you got some very good teachers in those schools.
You had certain advantages.
But part of the problem—the main problem was this race is just so arbitrary.
And this is something I think that Lane pointed out, that Patterson pointed out, that, come on.
You know, there's no basis for this, right?
Right.
It makes no sense.
People are mixed up anyway, right?
If you go back far enough.
And, I mean, if you ask a biologist or somebody who's actually a scientist along these lines, hey, the chromosomes that, you know, control melanin content and hair texture, are these the ones that determine people's character or intelligence or anything else?
Of course they're not.
Yeah, I mean, it's a fallacy to believe that there are these distinctions.
And that is to Hurston—well, it's understandable she would see this as a fallacy, but so did Patterson and Lane and wrote about this.
And they were rejecting a lot of these theories of white racial superiority at the time when a lot of intellectuals, really most intellectuals, still believed them.
And they thought this was bunk.
They thought this was nonsense.
And so they were consistent in the rejection of this form of collectivism.
But they also linked it with class in an interesting way.
We talk about classism a lot now.
They were against classism in a way because they said, well, if you have class warfare, you're judging the people on the basis of group orientation.
This is what the Nazis did.
This is what the communists did.
And all three of them used that expression, class.
Class and race.
She said, we don't believe in either.
These are fictions.
Yeah.
And see, this is the thing.
A lot of people scoffed at Ron Paul on his CNN interview where he said, man, I'm a libertarian.
Don't you understand it's physically impossible for me to be a racist, right?
Like he would implode in a poof of logic.
I'm sorry.
I plagiarized that from somebody.
I don't know.
But he would just vanish if somehow he was an individualist and a bigot, too.
It just doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make any sense.
And people say, well, you could be a bigot and be a libertarian.
I suppose you could support, you know, having the view that, oh, we don't like this and this and this.
Libertarians don't like that.
But I don't think you can be a libertarian.
I'll just say that.
I don't think you can be a libertarian and be a racist.
Now, all of us have dark thoughts, you know, that kind of thing, which we try to constrain, right?
But you can't be somebody who just goes out there and defends racism and be a libertarian.
Yeah, it just wouldn't make any sense to me.
I couldn't understand.
You could be, I guess, something.
I don't know.
Conservative of some sort.
I don't know what you'd call somebody like that.
But I would not call them a libertarian.
Right.
I mean, that's the whole thing.
It's funny, too, that or I don't know how funny it is.
I think it's a really good thing that probably nowadays the most commonly thought of or the most popular, you know what I mean, the one people would think of where somebody is explaining specifically the individual, the principles of individualism.
It's Martin Luther King.
And I have a dream speech, the one where he says, hey, man, supposedly the creed of this country is that everybody's an individual.
And they're, you know, all born free and to be judged as individuals.
And, you know, it's the civil rights movement.
Just all they did was, you know, quote Thomas Jefferson back in America's face.
Yeah, that movement, I think, was making essentially libertarian.
Now, I wouldn't argue they were libertarians necessarily, but they were making essentially arguments we'd like.
Right.
Absolutely.
If you would look at 99 percent of it.
And I would recommend that people read King's book from, what was it, 1957 or 58 called Stride Toward Freedom.
Rarely read or rarely cited.
But she's got stuff in there that, you know, that sounds like Hayek or sounds like Rothbard even, where he's criticizing the totalitarian state and the destruction of individualism and so forth.
I mean, I wouldn't, you know, make too much out of this, but I do think that if you look at the early Martin Luther King, you see a lot of individualist arguments, a lot of good stuff.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think later, and maybe part of the problem was that more of us weren't out there helping him out, is that he does go to the left.
And by the time he dies, he's a socialist.
But is he early on?
Well, if he is, he's not talking that way very much.
He's talking about the endorsement that didn't get the call back and went the other way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The whole thing.
Well, King had voted for Eisenhower in 56, right?
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, he said so.
This is the story of my life this week is, you know, stories of people who tried to make a connection and were ignored and then went and joined up with a different group.
And it does go back to my argument with my leftist friend.
Here, it's the collectivists who've stood up for black folks in American history, not the individualists, with the exception of the few that you cite in your article.
I mean, they're the exception that proves the rule.
Most libertarians don't put race at the forefront.
Yeah, but on the other hand, you see some interesting examples in the Civil Rights Act of 1957, 58, 57, I think, which was very watered down, and it would have had some pretty stringent provisions, especially on voting rights.
This was watered down by Lyndon Johnson.
And if you look at who wanted the tougher version of this bill, it tended to be the conservatives.
It tended to be, you know, a lot of the conservative Republicans.
And Eisenhower was really pissed off, but he felt that he had to get something, so he signed it.
But Johnson had basically made that bill kind of a joke and had taken away a lot of the stringent provisions.
So, you know, you don't want to be oversimplistic on this in a way, too, but I do think that there's some problems there with, you know, with our side and not stepping up to the plate more.
You can go overboard, you know, and give the collectivists too much credit as well.
There's one more issue I'd like to touch on here in you and your wife's great article, Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on war, race, the state, and liberty, coming out in the new Independent Review.
You talk about their views of capitalism and capitalists, and I think this is a very important subject.
The libertarian movement as a whole, I think, is probably seen by the general public as simply apologists for the worst corporations in the world.
In fact, I've been told before that I'm worse than Dick Cheney.
At least Dick Cheney knows you have to have welfare to take care of the poor people and stuff.
All you want to do is all the things that Dick Cheney does for corporations, only without any of the good stuff for everybody else.
And I like the way you talk about in your article how all three of these women were for laissez-faire, and yet they blame the capitalists.
They didn't like capitalists at all.
Blame them for the New Deal.
Well, yeah, Patterson is some very quotable stuff.
She was attacked by Franklin Roosevelt.
She gives you a little bit of a sense of her prominence.
At some news conference where he said, oh, this woman believes in monopoly, right?
If she had her way, we'd have monopoly.
And she answered back and said, no, you're the one perpetuating monopoly, because the monopolists like your supporter Joseph Kennedy, big New Dealer.
And these people, they want to be in bed with the government, because that's the way they can empower their monopolies.
That's the way they can guarantee their monopolies and their subsidies.
And so she pointed that out.
And she constantly said, look, we need to create a movement, a libertarian movement.
She tried to reach out to business people, and she just thought they were idiots.
And she said, you know, the wealthier, the more idiotic in a lot of ways.
And she at one point said, these people don't believe in capitalism.
As far as I'm concerned, she wrote this in a letter, you know, if they're put up against the wall and shot during the revolution, I'm not going to care.
And, you know, they're cutting their own throats, basically.
Or worse than that, they're going out there and trying to get subsidies.
Rand would sometimes over-romanticize the capitalist.
And you did not see that with Patterson, and you did not see that with Lane or Hurston.
You recognized that this is a system that's going to benefit the little guy the most, because he'll have an opportunity to start making some money and move up.
Yeah.
And, yeah, that's so important.
And I'm glad you brought up that thing about Rand, too.
That's why I never took an interest in any of her books.
I don't even think I got a third of the way through Atlas Shrugged before I put it down and started reading nonfiction again, because it's sort of the story of how the robber barons never meant to hurt anyone, and they're just nice guys like the rest of us and whatever.
And it's all a celebration of the biggest titans rather than the little guy.
The little guy is seen kind of in a contemptuous manner by her, I think.
I think you're right.
And early Rand, though, and Cox pointed this out, was very influenced by Patterson.
In fact, if you look at some of Patterson's critique of altruism, or at least state-mandated altruism, if you mean humanitarianism, it sounds a heck of a lot like Rand.
And Rand recognized this and acknowledged the influence.
And if you look at the early correspondence between Rand and Patterson, you see somewhat of a more thoughtful Ayn Rand, more willing to consider points like you just raised.
Later, it becomes cult-like, and she gets a kind of rigidness where she does start saying these things that just aren't true, that business people are great heroes, necessarily.
Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Very often, not.
I mean, how much support did Ron Paul get from the Fortune 500?
I mean, none.
Right, yeah, absolutely none.
And that's what I always said, too.
If libertarianism is the rich white man's anarchy, how come the presidential candidates can never raise even a million dollars when they're running for president?
Seems like it's the Republicans and the Democrats that are the rich white man's anarchy to me.
Exactly.
Like Anthony Gregory wrote that great article for StrikeTheRoot.com that was, well, at least George Bush is free to do whatever he wants.
There's liberty.
That's what Stephen Colbert said, too.
He said the reason he was running for president, he went through the entire list of all of George Bush's totalitarian powers and said, I want to be free, and I'd be crazy to let someone else have that power over me.
Yeah, George Bush doesn't have to get up at a certain time in the morning.
He doesn't really have to worry about stockholders or anything now.
He's just in there.
Or cops.
He can torture people and then say that the law doesn't apply to him and nobody bats an eye.
Exactly.
You have the ultimate freedom.
All right.
Well, I think we've identified in this conversation, David, a couple of places where libertarians can improve their propaganda, and that is, one, criticizing always the richest of the welfare cheats first, not the poorest.
When I see libertarians attacking single moms on welfare and neglecting to mention Lockheed, it's pretty annoying to me and kind of ridiculous, frankly.
And the other thing is race, too.
If people are going to be equals in this society, they have to all have that equal right of contract, and we have to explain that correctly or we're going to go nowhere.
And we've got to go out there.
And this is one of the things that I think was a problem with someone like Goldwater, who had some libertarian inclinations, is he said, well, boy, you know, if I push this race thing, I might lose me votes.
And now, well, okay, that's part of the problem with politics.
But maybe if smart politicians go out there and actually win votes by pushing this.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, too.
If you're doing what's right, it's probably going to work out for what's best rather than hurt you, you know?
I think we've seen that in the Paul campaign, which, you know, one criticism I'd have of it.
I mean, there are others I'd have, too.
But one is why wasn't, you know, why aren't there more ads defending civil liberty?
Why aren't there more ads on race?
Why aren't there more ads on the war?
He's saying some great things in the debates.
And I just hope and I would urge people in the campaign to go out with a flourish.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
You've got 20 million bucks.
Go for it.
Yeah.
That's what I'm saying.
You know, I was having an e-mail conversation with a friend of mine, and he sent me the transcripts of all the new Paul ads, and none of them mentioned the war.
They were all just about taxes and make him.
It's like the whole argument is, yeah, he's a Republican just like the rest of them, rather than look at how different this guy is and emphasizing the differences.
And that just, to me, just kills me.
He's not going to win.
I couldn't afford to donate the money I did.
Okay, go for it, man.
You might pay off, right?
This isn't going to pay off, even in practical terms.
Yeah, no.
They've got to, you know, if there's one thing that the Paul campaign can do right now to fix something, fire whoever is in charge of the TV and radio ads and find somebody who, you know, is actually ideologically like Ron and wants to emphasize the war and the Patriot Act and so forth.
I mean, here's a guy who they named it the Patriot Act, had anthrax going through the mail, they gave nobody a chance to read it, and what, 99% of the senators and congressmen voted for this thing?
98?
And Ron Paul said, hell no.
And that's not in his ad?
I mean, come on.
Well, I mean, you can imagine a wonderful ad showing scenes of prisoners, showing the prison system at work, and just saying, you know, this is a war on drugs.
And just go, I mean, boy, that could be hard-hitting.
And all the destruction that that has done to poor people and to poor communities.
You know, if you lock somebody up for 20 years, they're never going to get married, or if they do, they're never going to have a family, they're never going to be stable, they're never going to be able to have a career, they're never going to be able to be an entrepreneur.
You know, I mean, what is more destructive than that stuff?
Yeah, I'm with you, that's what I'm saying.
You know, if anybody at the Paul campaign can hear me, you know, don't hold back, and don't emphasize the sameness, emphasize the differences, for God's sake, man.
And, you know, I know, I've heard Ron Paul for years and years, because I've watched him since 97 or so, I guess is when I became familiar, and I've heard him for years and years denounce the inequality and unfairness in our criminal justice system and the drug war.
And, you know, you could go back, you could make a 30-second ad that's a medley of clips where his hair goes from brown to gray, as he says the same thing over and over again.
You know what I mean?
And saying the greatest stuff.
Well, have you thought of asking him back on your show again?
And that might be an opportunity, especially if there were time for callers to call in to say, you know, to politely suggest this stuff.
Yeah, I could try.
I could try.
Thank you very much for your time today.
This has been incredibly interesting.
Oh, I loved it.
And I urge everybody to check out the Liberty and Power Group blog at the History News Network.
And it is the upcoming edition of the Independent Review, right?
I'm not sure.
I think it is the next one.
I think it will be in the spring sometime.
Okay, and that's Isabel Patterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Zora Neale Hurston on War, Race, the State, and Liberty by David P. Beto and Linda Royster Beto.
Thanks very much for your time today.
Thank you, Scott.