A Remembrance of Frank Chodorov
Murray N. Rothbard
[Reprinted from Left & Right: A Journal of
Libertarian Thought, Vol.3, No.1, Winter 1967]
It was almost twenty years ago that I first met Frank Chodorov. It
was at one of those luxurious but terribly dreary cocktail parties
that have long served as rallying ground for the intelligentsia
of the American right wing. There the more articulate of the rightists
are wont to gather to declaim at each other for the umpteenth time on
the perils of inflation, the immorality of welfare recipients, and the
clear and present menace of Walter Reuther to the vitals of the
American Republic. These and similar clichés have long provided
the feeble structure of application for the glittering but always
vague generalities on "free enterprise", "limited
government," and the American Way. The men of the Right have long
been content to set forth this windy rhetoric as a convenient and
almost "non-controversial" substitute for hard-edged ideas,
while on the back stairs they dicker with the brokers of Big
Government for an increase in their subsidies and privileges and a cut
in their fiscal burdens.
In that crowd of time-servers, Frank Chodorov stood out like a blaze
of radiant light. He stood out at that cocktail party, too, the only
person alive and ablaze amidst the whole gaggle of one-dimensional and
identical men around him. There he stood, his tie askew, his balding
head disheveled, the ashes from his beloved pipe flying all around,
his intelligent and merry eyes twinkling as he scored some outrageous,
logical, and beautifully penetrating point to some clod who couldn't
tell the difference between the host of cardboard "individualists"
and this one genuine article.
For Frank was sui generis, and the vast gulf in the quality
of mind and the rigor of ideas between him and the other "rightist"
intellectuals was, in a sense, embodied in that other gulf of spirit
and outward form. Unflinching honesty, courage, love of the intellect
and the products of the mind, these are some of the things that
distinguished Frank Chodorov to the very core of his being and set him
many light years above his confreres. While the others prattled on
about liberty and individualism, Frank Chodorov really meant
it; he was an individualist, and when he died in late December 1966 an
entire era died with him. The outstanding disciple of his beloved
mentor, the great libertarian Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, again
unlike his "libertarian" colleagues, never forgot for an
instant that the State is the great predatory enemy of the human race,
that the State is, in its very being, the organization and
regularization of predation, exploitation, and robbery. He did not, as
do most classical liberals and alleged libertarians, merely regard the
State as another instrument of social utility, which in proper measure
might be useful and even praiseworthy. Scorning evasion and
compromise, Frank Chodorov saw the State, from early days to last, as
a profoundly anti-social institution, the canker in the heart of any
attempt at peaceful cooperation by free individuals in society.
I shall never forget the profound thrill - a thrill of intellectual
liberation - that ran through me when I first encountered the name of
Frank Chodorov, months before we were to meet in person. As a young
graduate student in economics, I had always believed in the free
market, and had become increasingly libertarian over the years, but
this sentiment was as nothing to the headline that burst forth in the
title of a pamphlet that I chanced upon at the university bookstore:
Taxation is Robbery, by Frank Chodorov. There it was; simple
perhaps, but how many of us, let alone how many professors of the
economics of taxation, have ever given utterance to this shattering
and demolishing truth? Frank was always like that; while the
pusillanimous rightists pleaded with our rulers to cut the income tax
by a few percent, Frank had the perception and the profound honesty to
"tell it like it is."
While the general run of rightists decorously deplored the increase
in the public debt and urged the government to retrench a bit, Frank
Chodorov boldly and logically exhorted his readers: "Don't Buy
Bonds!" Since he was a real individualist and not a would-be
member of a team of White House advisors, Frank's "alienation"
from the government of the United States was total; hence, he was the
only one of the host of ostensible believers in the free market
economy in this country to call for the out-right repudiation of the
public debt, and to see that such repudiation is infinitely more
libertarian and infinitely less criminal than looting taxpayers to
redeem that debt.
Being a genuine individualist, Frank again pursued the logic of
liberty without flinching to arrive at an even more dangerous
position: "isolationism," in short, absolute limitation upon
government action in the foreign as well as the domestic sphere. This
brand of "isolationism" meant, quite consistently, economic
and cultural exchange to the uttermost (free trade, freedom of
migration, friendship with all foreign peoples), coupled with the
political isolating of the US government from all forms of meddling
with and pushing around of the people of other countries.
He abominated militarism or conscription in any form. For his
intransigent opposition to American imperialism's entry into World War
II Frank Chodorov was obliged to leave his post as director of the
Henry George School of Social Science in New York, and to eke out a
precarious living as the owner, publisher, editor, and distributor of
analysis, one of the best, though undoubtedly the most neglected, of
the "little magazines" that has ever been published in the
United States. Over a decade later, and toward the end of his writing
career in 1955, Frank, as editor of the revived Freeman, did
his best to reaffirm the values of isolationism and to stem the
headlong and tragic rush of the right wing toward the even more
disastrous imperial crusade of the Cold War. Also toward the end Frank
tried his valiant best to stem the concomitant rush of the right wing
to adopt the label of "conservative." Frank knew his
intellectual history; he was and always would be an "individualist",
and he recognized "conservatism" to be the embodiment of the
creed of the ancient Statist enemy. Writing to protest the designation
of himself as a "conservative" in the pages of National
Review, Frank retorted: "anyone who calls me a conservative
gets a punch in the nose." His cri de coeur, alas, went
unheeded; and a lot of deserving folk remain unpunched to this day.
Analysis was the crown of Frank Chodorov's achievement. The
chief writer as well as editor and publisher of this four-page monthly
broadsheet, Frank, sitting in a dingy loft in lower Manhattan, month
after month, published his beautifully written, penetrating, and
infinitely logical - and hence radical - essays. As a stylist he was a
distinguished craftsman, emulating Albert Jay Nock; his characteristic
mode was the quietly penetrating parable.
And so: the attacks on taxation, on public schooling, on government
debt, on militarism; and the loving evocation of his heroes - Nock,
Thoreau, Spencer. Going through the back files of analysis
will not take much time; but the reward in communicating with the mind
of a keen and fearless and clear-headed individualist at work will
make this an experience infinitely more educational than years of
courses at the multiversity.
For Frank as a person, one adjective - corny though it may seem -
persists in crowding out all the others: "lovable." All of
us loved Frank, and loved him deeply; even those who were scarcely fit
to be in the same room with him, even those who used him only to
betray everything he stood for, even they realized that here, above
all others, was a man. Wedded to that keen intelligence and merriment,
to that fearlessness and candor, was an infinite gentleness of soul,
an almost childlike simplicity and open-heartedness that poured forth
his generosity and his spirit to the eager young. From that very first
meeting at the cocktail party I was drawn irresistibly to Frank, and
would sit at his feet imbibing his wisdom and his unvarnished insight.
Always eager to give young libertarians their start, he was the first
to publish my own fledgling work; I remember proudly my first article
in print: a review of H.L. Mencken's A Mencken Crestomathy in
the August, 1949 issue of analysis.
One of Frank's great attributes was his love of intellectual
discourse, of the play of ideas and the life of the mind. A son of
rough-and-ready days of Old New York, Frank cut his eyeteeth in
intellectual discussion and debate when these flourished in the
cafeterias of the Lower East Side in the early decades of the century.
It was characteristic of Frank that he once lamented to me that there
didn't seem to be any Marxism around anymore. With Marxists one could
argue and converse; one could slash away at the labor theory of value
and make an impact. But what can you do, he went on, with pragmatists,
with men whose statism or socialism is not grounded upon any logic or
principle?
It was a sad, sad day for me and maybe for Frank as well when his
wonderful one-man publication died; it was like the death of a dearly
beloved member of the family. Officially, as with almost all
publications these days, analysis did not die, but was merged
with the Washington weekly Human Events. In those days Human
Events was not the conservative puff sheet it was later to become, but
a newsletter of some distinction; but still, the loss was irreparable,
even though Frank continued to write frequently for Human Events
as associate editor.
I shall never forget the last time I saw Frank as he was packing to
make the move to Washington, a move that was for him truly cataclysmic
for he was going, he said a bit fearfully, into the heart of the State
itself, into an environment of almost pure statism, and he hoped that
he would he able to remain uncontaminated by the deadly atmosphere.
Frank, in those days, was far more unsentimental and radical about
politics than I. I was an ardent "extreme right-wing Republican",
in the days of course when this term meant isolationist and at least
partial devotion to the liberty of the individual, and not a racist or
enthusiast for the obliteration of any peasant whose ideology might
differ from ours. But Frank, even then, would look at me quizzically
and want to know why I was concerned with political claptrap; he
personally had not voted for decades and had no intention of ever
voting again, regardless of the degree of statism of the particular
candidate. I replied that extreme right-wing Republicans, though of
little hope in rolling back the statist tide, at least would keep
things from getting worse. "What's wrong," Frank countered, "with
things being allowed to get worse?"
Frank remained a few years an exile in Washington, and then returned
to New York for an all-too-brief stint as editor of the Freeman
during 1955. Our paths crossed when I had the honor of succeeding
Frank as Washington columnist for the now totally forgotten "little"
West Coast magazine, Faith and Freedom. After 1955, however,
Frank's great voice was stilled. Partly for lack of suitable outlet,
then largely from the tragic illness that was to cut him down
following the death of his beloved wife, shortly after their golden
wedding anniversary. Frank's final flowering was his last ideological
testament, the brilliantly written The Rise and Fall of Society,
published in 1959, at the age of 72. For the rest, we must hastily
draw a veil over these years, not only because of his lengthy illness
but because of the betrayal of his name and his ideas in the latter
years by those whom Frank, in his nobility of heart and simplicity of
soul, embraced and trusted implicitly.
The mark of Frank's life now transcends all of that, as a giant blots
out the pygmies that might attempt to surround him. And yet it will be
a long time before they can be forgiven. One of the last times that I
saw Frank I recalled to him how much I had loved analysis, and how
much it had meant to me, both intellectually and personally. A gleam,
a strong hint of the old merry twinkle, came back into his tired eyes,
and he said, wistfully: "Ah yes, analysis. That was the
one time in my life I could write what I really believed." As we
gathered a few weeks ago at Frank's funeral, we old acquaintances,
friends, and enemies, there was a very real sense that in paying last
respects to Frank we had found a life with a very special meaning, a
meaning that could transcend the very real grief at his loss. Surely
one part of that meaning is that we must all pledge to fight to bring
about a world where a Frank Chodorov will receive all the honors, all
the acclaim and even all the simple honesty of treatment, that is his
just due.
And especially we must do what he wanted us to do above all: to hold
high the torch of liberty, and to pass it on to succeeding
generations. We mourn and grieve his loss; but we are proud that Frank
has joined the Immortals. Above all, we are proud and privileged to
have known him and loved him as a friend.
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