Frank Chodorov: Champion of Liberty
Aaron Steelman
[Reprinted from: The Freeman, December 1996]
December 28,1996, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of
Frank Chodorov, one of the giants of the American Old Right. It seems
appropriate to look back at his life and career, not only to pay
homage, but also to rediscover some of the fundamental insights he
brought to the fore in his many books, articles, and speeches.
Frank Chodorov had a profound influence on the postwar American
Right. Murray N. Roth bard, William F. Buckley Jr., James J. Martin,
and many other exponents of the free market have cited Chodorov's work
as vital to the formation of their worldviews. Indeed, Buckley once
said, "It is quite unlikely that I should have pursued a career
as a writer but for the encouragement he gave me just after I
graduated from Yale." [1]
Born in New York City in 1887, Chodorov graduated from Columbia
University in 1907, and spent the next 30 years working in a variety
of jobs, including a stint as an advertising representative and
running a clothing factory. "From four to seven years was about
all I could take of any occupation throughout my life. I went at each
job I undertook with verve, mastered it and when it became routine I
lost interest and went looking for something else," Chodorov
wrote in his 1962 autobiography, "Out of Step." [2]
Besides working in various fields, Chodorov read widely in the
literature of liberty, and was particularly impressed by the work of
Henry David Thoreau, Albert Jay Nock, and Henry George. By the time he
was offered, and accepted, the directorship of the Henry George School
of Social Science in 1937, he counted himself firmly within the
classical liberal tradition.
For the first time -- at the age of 50 -- his position afforded him
an opportunity to write and speak widely in the issues of the day and
to spread the anti-statist gospel. He and his students started a
school publication, The Freeman, borrowing the name from the then
defunct journal Nock had edited in the 1920s. In its pages Chodorov
found his ultimate calling: journalism with an intensely personal,
individualist flair.
Chodorov pulled no punches in his many articles for The Freeman. He
viewed the state as the greatest threat to individual liberty and
human happiness. In the tradition of Cobden, Bright, and Nock, he did
not limit his disdain for the use of state power to domestic actions;
he feared the state's ability to conscript its citizens and use them
to wage war as much as, if not more than, he did its ability to
control the economy. This intellectual consistency eventually gained
Chodorov many devoted followers but, for the time being, it attracted
some important opponents. "In The Freeman I took delight in
attacking the New Deal and Mr. Roosevelt, mainly on economic grounds.
That went well until Mr. Roosevelt started preparing the country or
war, in 1939. Prudence should have prompted me to avoid the war issue,
but prudence was never one of m virtues, and I continued to hammer
away at the war measures right up to Pearl Harbor.[3] The school's
board regarded his principled and steadfast opposition to American
involvement in the war as too controversial and too frightening to
potential donors and, therefore, relieved Chodorov of his duties in
1942.
Fulfillment of a Dream
Following his dismissal, Chodorov looked for a new medium for
spreading his ideas. The result was his creation of Analysis, which he
later called "the most gratifying venture of my life." An
unpretentious four-page broadsheet published from 1944 to 1951,
analysis was hard-hitting and uncompromising, just like The Freeman.
Unlike The Freeman, however, Analysis did ot actively solicit articles
from outside writers: nearly every issue was written entirely by
Chodorov.
In an early promotional letter to would-be subscribers, Chodorov
summed up his paper's editorial position concisely and accurately:
"... Analysis... stands for free trade, free land
and the unrestricted employment of capital and labor. Its economics
stem from Adam Smith and Henry George. ... Analysis goes along with
Albert Jay Nock in asserting that the State is our enemy, that its
administrators and beneficiaries are a "professional criminal
class," and interprets events accordingly. It is radical, not
reformist. In short, analysis looks at the current scene through the
eyeglass of historic liberalism, unashamedly accepting the doctrine
of natural rights, proclaims the dignity of the individual and
denounces ail forms of Statism as human slavery.[4]
In issue after issue of analysis, Chodorov kept the flame of the
anti-statist, antiwar cause burning during some of classical
liberalism's darkest nights. He approached myriad topics from the same
perspective: voluntary, peaceful actions are moral and productive and
should be encouraged; coercive actions are immoral and should be
condemned. As both an anti-statist committed to individual liberty as
a great moral ideal and a social scientist examining past events
objectively and empirically, Chodorov was a formidable and prescient
critic.
The "Hatchet Effect" Theory
For example, in the 1940s Chodorov hit upon the "ratchet effect"
theory to explain the growth of government, thereby setting the stage
for some of the most incisive and probing work by classical liberals
in the decades to come. In the August 1950 issue of analysis, he
wrote: "All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the
authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never
abdicates. Note how the 'emergency* taxes of World War II have
hardened into permanent fiscal policy. While a few of the more
irritating war agencies were dropped, others were enlarged, under
various pretexts, and the sum total is more intervention and more
intervenes than we suffered before 1939." [5]
In a pamphlet distributed by Human Events, he struck a similar chord,
using the ratchet effect theory to explain the rise of direct taxation
in the United States:
"When war or the need of ameliorating mass poverty
strains the purse of the state to the limit, and further indirect
impositions are impossible or threaten social unrest, the opposition
must give way. The state never relinquishes entirely the
prerogatives it acquires during an "emergency," and so,
after a series of wars and depressions direct taxation became a
fixture of our fiscal policy, and those upon whom it falls must
content themselves to whittling down the levies or trying to
transfer them from shoulder to shoulder. [6]
On education, Chodorov was ahead of his time, developing a radical
critique of government schooling long before the so-called "school
choice" or "voucher" movement got on its feet many
years later. To Chodorov, it was no surprise that students were
receiving subpar educations at government schools. As he saw it, the
purpose of the public school was not to educate children, but to turn
them into "good citizens" -- schooled in the ways of the
democratic system and taught that "they were the government"
despite the obvious absurdity of such a claim. By controlling the
schools, the state could control, to a large degree, the minds of
future generations, thereby limiting the possibility of dissent.
In Chodorov's mind, the only solution to the education problem was to
separate schooling completely from politics: "If we would reform
our education system basically, we must desocialize it. We must put it
back where it belongs, in the hands of parents. Theirs is the
responsibility for the breeding of children, and theirs is the
responsibility for the upbringing. The first error of public schooling
is the shifting of this responsibility, the transformation of the
children of men into wards of the state.[7]
Editing analysis brought great joy to Chodorov, but the journal was
financially shaky. At its peak in 1951, it had no more than 4,000
subscribers. Edmund Opitz recalls that Chodorov was pouring so much of
his own money into his enterprise that he was sustaining himself on
one meal a day."[8] In 1951 analysis was merged with Human
Events, a Washington-based publication founded in 1944 by Felix
Morley, Frank Hanighen, and Henry Regnery. Chodorov became an
associate editor at Human Events and stayed there until 1954, when
Leonard Read chose him to edit a revamped version of The Freeman,
which Irvington Press (a subsidiary of FEE) had recently purchased.
The Later Years
By the early 1950s, Chodorov was already well established as an
individualist writer of the highest quality. In his view, the movement
he had helped to preserve and shape in the 1940s was not "conservative";
it was "individualist." [9] He was disturbed by the growing
influence of a system of thought he viewed as fundamentally
majoritarian in nature. The "new" conservatism of Russell
Kirk, Walter Berns, and Many Jaffa did not in any way resemble the
historic liberalism that Chodorov and other prominent Old Right
figures held dear. This new strain of thought held that unbridled
individualism, not an omnipotent federal state, posed the greatest
threat to the social order. Moreover, Jaffa and company believed that
the Soviet Union placed the United States in imminent danger and that
decisive federal action was needed to thwart Soviet expansion.
Over the next ten years, Chodorov spent as much time trying to check
this new brand of conservatism as he did refuting the myths and dogmas
of the Left. In Chodorov's mind, only individuals themselves could,
and should, make all relevant personal decisions. To rely on the vague
notion of the "community" to make such decisions, as Kirk
and others urged, was to subjugate the individual to the collective,
and this subjugation was to be avoided at all costs.
The Cold War
Chodorov's unwavering defense of individualism and the minimal state
also led to clashes with other American rightists regarding foreign
policy. By the late 1950s, most conservatives agreed that
noninterventionism no longer constituted a viable option; Soviet power
was so immense and threatening that the United States needed to
prosecute another expensive war, the Cold War. Chodorov balked. The
Soviets, he argued, were a threat to the United States only if
Americans allowed them to be. The real danger was not that the Soviet
Union would conquer the United States militarily but that in the name
of a "strong national defense," the United States would take
actions that would thoroughly collectivize the nation-this time, for
good. Increasing the power of the state in response to the Soviet
menace would not defeat socialism in Russia but bring it to the United
States.[10] For these reasons, he called the Cold War a war to
communize America,"
In a brilliant essay on "Isolationism," Chodorov once again
stated his position for those who had ignored it the first time. He
believed that isolationism was not only the type of foreign policy
that kept the state to a manageable size, but also the one compatible
with the makeup of human beings. "It is in the nature of the
human being to be interested first, in himself, and secondly, in his
neighbors." To ask someone in Michigan, for example, to be
interested in the affairs and political stability of Tennessee is
slightly un- reasonable; to ask that same person to be interested in
the affairs of a far-off Latin American country is simply absurd. For
Chodorov, a noninterventionist foreign policy was incompatible with
protectionism or a restrictionist stand on immigration.
Noninterventionism restricted the power of the state; tariffs and
immigration quotas expanded it. Noninterventionism, free trade, and
open borders belonged in the same package. To accept one part of the
package while rejecting the others was not only to give in to the
state, but to flirt with nativism. In chastising the America First
Committee's defense of trade and immigration restrictions, he wrote:
"One flaw in their program was a tendency toward
protectionism; the anti-involvement became identified with "Buy
American" slogans and with high tariffs; that is, with
economic, rather than political, isolationism. Economic
isolationism, tariffs, quotas, embargoes and general governmental
interference with international trade is an irritant that can well
lead to war, or political intervention ism. To build a trade wall
around a country is to invite reprisals, which in turn make for
misunderstanding and mistrust. Besides, free trade carries with it
an appreciation of the cultures of the trading countries, and a
feeling of good will among the peoples engaged. Free trade is
natural, protectionism is political.[11]
Chodorov also parted company with most of the conservative movement
regarding big business. Unlike many of his colleagues, Chodorov did
not hold a romantic view of corporate America; and he certainly did
not agree with Ayn Rand's belief that big business is "America's
most persecuted minority." Instead he saw big business as all too
willing to compromise with big government, producing a disastrous
result for most Americans. In this way, he foreshadowed the arguments
made by William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko in the 1960s.
Chodorov argued that "in America it is the so-called capitalist
who is to blame for the fulfillment of Marx's prophecies. Beguiled by
the state's siren song of special privilege, the capitalists have
abandoned capitalism."[12] And to abandon capitalism was to
abandon the very system necessary for the preservation of individual
liberty and the attainment of human happiness.
Despite Chodorov's differences with many on the Right - and there
were a number of significance -- he maintained a position of
prominence even after he left The Freeman in 1955. This was largely
because of the Inter-collegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), which
he founded with Buckley in 1953 and continued to oversee until his
death in 1966.[13] "ISI was the first large free-market
organization to focus its efforts on influencing college students. Its
goal was to be an effective antidote to the well-organized
Intercollegiate Society of Socialists. It attempted to accomplish its
mission by distributing free-market books and pamphlets to interested
students, sponsoring classical liberal speakers on the campuses, and
organizing discussion clubs. By the early 1960s, more than 40,000
students had taken part in its programs.
ISI was an important part of Chodorov's strategic program for turning
back the tide of statism. Having tired of attempts to directly
influence the political process (he did not vote after 1912), Chodorov
became convinced that the only way the individualist tradition could
be saved was by spreading classical liberal ideas among young people,
who would one day be the opinion-shapers. Students, he believed, could
be influenced and, thus, attention should be directed toward them. "What
the socialists have done can be un- done, if there is a will for it.
But, the undoing will not be accomplished by trying to destroy
established institutions, it can be accomplished only by attacking
minds, and not the minds of those already hardened by socialistic
fixations. Individualism can be revived by implanting the ideas in the
minds of the coming generations.... It is, in short, a fifty year
project."[14]
Unfortunately, Chodorov did not have 50 years left to see what would
come of his prediction. He suffered a stroke In 1961 while teaching at
Robert LeFevre's Freedom School in Colorado. The stroke limited his
activity sharply, and his output dwindled continuously until his death
five years later. Yet, in many ways, his work had already been
accomplished. He had done more than his part to ensure that the great
American tradition of individualism would not die at the hands of
either the socialists or the growing legion of conservatives who saw
little value in the ideals of classical liberalism. And he had built
upon the intellectual foundations of this tradition himself, adding
many keen and original insights.
As libertarians continue to wage an intellectual war against the
omnipotent state, they would be wise to consult Frank Chodorov's
writings. For as William F. Buckley Jr. has said, everybody "is
bound to benefit from exposure to his purist and dogged battle against
institutionalized power, and the case he weaves for the presumptive
denial to the central government of every additional BTU it asks for."[15]
Notes
- Cited in George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement
in America Since 1945 (New York, Basic Books, 1976) p.380
- Frank Chodorov, Out of Step, the Autobiography of an
Individualist, (New York, Devin-Adair, 1962) p. 75
- Ibid., p.79
- Cited in Nash, pp. 17-18
- Charles H. Hamilton, Ed., Fugitive Essays, Selected Writings of
Frank Chodorov (Indianapolis, Liberty Press, 1980) p. 363
- Frank Chodorov, Human Rights Pamphlet No. 15, Taxation is
Robbery", (Chicago, Human Rights Associates, 1947) p. 9
- Hamilton, p.239
- Cited in Nash, p. 353
- In a 1956 letter to National Review, Chodorov stated, "As
for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the
nose. I am a radical." Cited in Hamilton, p. 29
- In Chodorov's mind, the Soviet Union was not a viable
experiment; it would eventually implode. Thus, the United States
didn't need to wage an activist battle against it. As he liked to
state: "Private Capitalism makes a steam engine; State
Capitalism makes pyramids." To him, the Soviet Union was in
the process of making pyramids, while neglecting the production of
things that sustain a society.
- Out of Step, p. 119
- Hamilton, p. 119
- ISI was renamed to Intercollegiate Studies Institute after
Chodorov's death and remains in operation to this day.
- Out of Step, p. 248
- William F. Buckley Jr., "Nay-Sayer to the Power- Hungry",
National Review, December 4,1962, p. 447
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