The Freeman has a long and distinguished history in the cause of liberty.
One finds its origins deep in the classical liberal movement. In 1865 William Lloyd Garrison closed his famous The Liberator with passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. But, a number of leading figures felt that the War Between the States had created new challenges to Laissez-Faire and founded The Nation with the Irish-born, Edwin L. Godkin (1831-1902) as the editor (and young William Garrison, as deputy editor). However, as financial support thinned, railroad executive, Henry Villard, stepped in as publisher; Villard was married to the daughter of William Lloyd Garrison. His son, Oswald Garrison Villard, succeeded him as publisher, and in his opposition to Woodrow Wilson’s First World War, appointed Albert Jay Nock as editor. In 1918, the Postmaster General barred the US mails to The Nation because of Nock’s criticisms of the Wilson administration.
Nock was joined by an English Liberal Party MP, who had opposed the war, in founding The Freeman to express his literary as well as political ideas. Nock made The Freeman the magazine for advanced thinking. When the financial situation changed and Nock departed for Brussels, H. L. Mencken took up the role with the American Mercury. Nock kept the spirit of The Freeman in his heart, and it was revived briefly in the 1930’s with Frank Chodorov entering the scene.
During the Second World War, Nock was living partly with William F. Buckley, Sr. in Sharon, CT, and Chodorov was working with him when Nock died at the end of the war with Japan. Chodorov launched analysis. Murray N. Rothbard reported that he discovered analysis on a newsstand near the New York Public Library surrounded by all the communist and socialist publications of the day. He said it was a major influence on him. William F. Buckley, Jr. had imbibed Nock’s thought and became disciple of Chodorov.
About 1950, two events occurred. Felix Morley had left the presidency of Haverford College and joined Henry Regnery and Frank Hanighen in founding Human Events in 1944. In 1950 he resigned and he was replaced by Frank Chodorov who folded analysis into Human Events which was a weekly: four pages of newsletter of foreign and domestic policy from Capital Hill and a four page essay by an author such as Freda Utley, Ludwig von Mises, or Sen. William Jenner or Chicago Tribune stalwarts, such as George Morgenstern, Chesley Manley, or Walter Trohan.
Meanwhile, on October 2, 1950 with Truman administration proposing National Health Insurance and going to war without Congressional authorization, a new fortnightly Freeman was founded. The editors included Henry Hazlitt, John Chamberlain, Forrest Davis, and Suzanne La Follette (who had been on the staff of Nock’s 1920s Freeman).
Its launching preceded a major victory against Truman’s domestic and war policies: the defeat of four senior Democratic Senators in the November election, including the Democratic majority leader, Scott Lucas, who was defeated by Everett McKinley Dirksen. Mr. Republican, Robert Alfonso Taft, was reelected in Ohio defeating ‘Jumping Joe’ Ferguson, who was financed by Organized Labor, due to the Taft-Hartley Law.
The Freeman contributed to the growing climate of free market and constitutional ideas. Its editors created a core around which challenges to the dominant Left ideology was formed. Authors included: Ludwig von Mises, F. A Hayek, Wilhelm Roepke, John Dos Passos, Roscoe Pound, George Sokolsky, John T. Flynn, and William Henry Chamberlin, author of America’s Second Crusade. But, by 1954, there were differences of emphasis among the editors and The Freeman was purchased by Leonard Read. It was changed from a bi-weekly to a monthly published by the Foundation for Economic Education with Frank Chodorov as the editor. Chodorov who had founded the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI) for student activities in 1953 relocated to Irvington-on-Hudson bringing ISI with him to FEE.
I had worked with Chodorov in developing ISI when I was at Georgetown College. I had been an officer of earlier Right-wing student group and I had drawn on the generosity of FEE to send monthly “In-Briefs” to the student members. FEE continued this with ISI sending ISI students hardcopy materials. Now, FEE provided a home for ISI. Chodorov was a major influence on my thinking as I visited him at the offices of Human Events and after; he provided me with contacts on the staffs of Republican senators, such as William Jenner (IND) and Molly Malone (NEV), who became speakers at events I organized at Georgetown. Chodorov was a major influence on the thinking of William F. Buckley, Jr. who joined Chodorov in the founding of ISI.
Devin Garrity was the publisher of Devin-Adair, which published Chodorov’s four books. “Devin A. Garrity recalls Chodorov’s delight in saying that no one was further right than he …. The importance of Chodorov’s influence and the quiet way in which it spread are both evident in an anecdote told by M. Stanton Evans … While an undergraduate at Yale in the early 1950s, Evans discovered One Is a Crowd. It was the first libertarian book he had ever read, and it “opened up more intellectual perspectives to me than did the whole Yale curriculum.” Evans came to believe that Chodorov “probably had more to do with the conscious shaping of my political philosophy than any other person.”” (George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1979) p. 355. In 1954 Devin-Adair published Chodorov’s The Income Tax: Root of All Evil.
In 1955, FEE chose to change the format and style of The Freeman. The articles were drawn from the staff of FEE and represented their areas of research. It became directed to FEE’s mission of long-range education rather than current issues.
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Leonard, thank you for this capsule history of those long-ago days. I hope that some historian will be able to sort out as swiftly the “multiplatform” chatter of today.