Clifton Knox

 

 

28 March 2016

Who was Robert Lefevre?

Of all the forgotten philosophers of the early libertarian movement of the late twentieth century, it is perhaps Robert Lefevre who deserves to be rediscovered the most.  Few did more in those early days to plant the seeds of liberty across the North American continent.  Lefevre influenced people from coast to coast in both the United States and Canada.  The ideas and philosophy of Autarchism were a major component of the libertarian dynamic in those days.  This site is dedicated to Autarchism and its ideas and philosophies, and therefore, it is fitting that a page dedicated to Robert Lefevre should be presented.  For this purpose, an essay written by Jeff Riggenbach for his new book Libertarian Tradition has been conscripted to give visitors to this site a nice overview of Lefevre.  It is an excellent short biopic, and we here at the Center For Self-Rule applaud Mr. RiggenBach for his wisdom in including someone as important and overlooked as Lefevre.  His book is excellent and is available on Amazon.com. 

 

     

Being There: Robert Lefevre (1911 - 86)

By Jeff RiggenBach

 

     SOME OF US have always been libertarians. We were never “converted” in any meaningful sense from any earlier unlibertarian belief, for we never held any unlibertarian beliefs —at least, not consciously. The process of being “converted” to libertarianism was, for us, a mere matter of learning the words that described and the arguments that proved what we felt we had always believed. Those of us who followed this path can say of the libertarian movement what the Vorlon diplomat Kosh said of the space station Babylon 5: “I have always been here.” Others of us have had to find our way here, and sometimes the journey has encompassed many mistakes and consumed many years, as in the case of the once-celebrated libertarian writer, thinker, and teacher Robert LeFevre.

 

I say LeFevre was “once celebrated” because he was. Robert LeFevre, believe it or not, used to be a name to conjure with in the libertarian movement. In the early-to-mid-sixties, when the population of the movement was already too big to fit in Murray Rothbard’s living room but was still very small by today’s standards —probably no more than a few thousand people —LeFevre’s Freedom School, in rural Colorado between Denver and Colorado Springs, was one of the most important libertarian institutions going. Everybody in the movement knew who LeFevre was. Many had read one or another of his books. A few had trekked out to Colorado for the Freedom School’s prime offering: a couple of weeks of studying libertarian political economy at the equivalent of a scenic mountain resort. In the wake of the Rand-Branden split that suddenly swelled the ranks of the movement with disaffected former Objectivists in the late 1960s and early ’70s, LeFevre arranged for the funding to send a young Southern Californian libertarian pothead and folksinger named Dana Rohrabacher on a nationwide tour of college campuses, where he sang libertarian folksongs of his own concoction and worked to convert campus chapters of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as campus Ayn Rand clubs, to chapters of a new, loosely organized, nationwide Libertarian Alliance.

 

This Libertarian Alliance didn’t last, unfortunately; it was history within only a few years. But in the early-to-mid-seventies, especially west of the Mississippi, Robert LeFevre was at least as well-known as Murray Rothbard, whom he had helped to introduce to a new generation of libertarian students by inviting him out to lecture at the Freedom School. Time was when all this was well-known to virtually everyone in the movement. Yet when October 13, 2011, rolled around —the date that marked the hundredth anniversary of LeFevre’s birth —the event went virtually unnoticed, even in the libertarian world. What does this tell us about the decline of Robert LeFevre’s reputation? LeFevre built that reputation pretty much from scratch during the second half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. He started out with a bang —emerging, as it were, out of the middle of nowhere in the early 1950s as the newly appointed editorial-page editor of R.C. Hoiles’s second-biggest newspaper, the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, which was published by his younger son, Harry Hoiles. R.C. Hoiles, the founder of Freedom Newspapers, was one of the most interesting and controversial newspaper publishers in the history of American journalism. A full-length biography of the man is long overdue. Hoiles came out of Ohio during the thirties, already a newspaperman, but one with bigger ideas than just being the owner and editor of a couple of small papers in small, Midwestern towns. He had set himself up in a bigger town in California, about fifty miles south of Los Angeles, where he had become publisher of the daily Santa Ana Register.

Hoiles had worked out a version of libertarianism all his own, based mostly on his reading of Herbert Spencer and Frédéric Bastiat, but based also on some years of his own hard thinking. He didn’t call himself an anarchist, but he was one, all the same —he had no quarrel, after all, with Spencer’s infamous “right to ignore the state” —and he demanded that those writing the editorials for his papers argue consistently and persuasively for something very close to what today we call “anarchocapitalism.” R.C. believed —and his sons Harry and Clarence agreed with him —that no legitimate government can possess any powers that aren’t delegated to it by the people, and since the people as individuals have no rightful power to force other people to support schools they don’t choose to support or to lock up people for being of Japanese ancestry, therefore neither does government. But of course, people as individuals have no rightful power to force anybody else to accept them as monopoly providers of defense and judicial services either.

 

Hoiles’s papers also never endorsed candidates —first, because, in the words of a properly anonymous editorial writer at the Clovis (New Mexico) News Journal early in 2008 (at which time the paper still belonged to Freedom Communications, the company R.C. Hoiles founded), a

newspaper’s endorsement of a candidate amounts to an endorsement of a political system that too often is a concentrated application of force, wielded by a majority or a party or an incumbent to deny an individual’s freedom rather than protect it and enlarge it.

  Moreover, the Clovis editorialist pointed out,

a candidate’s future behavior is hardly predictive —even if the candidate has a track record of votes and a well-articulated philosophy. Who would have guessed that the George W. Bush of 2000 would become the biggest government expansionist and spender since LBJ?

 

Only the day before, the opinion-page editor of another Freedom newspaper, the Victor Valley Daily Press of Victorville, California, had defended the policy of not endorsing candidates by making the same argument in a somewhat harsher way, and with a different case in point. “Politicians as a general rule can’t be trusted to adhere to the promises they made campaigning once they’re elected,” Steve Williams wrote. “George H.W. Bush’s ‘Read my lips’ statement regarding taxation (‘No new taxes’ was his promise back in 1988) reinforced our belief in the correctness of the policy.”

      Robert LeFevre was R.C. Hoiles’s principal editorial spokesman for a decade, from 1955 to 1965. But he didn’t move into that position overnight, after materializing in Colorado Springs as if from the middle of nowhere late in 1954. After all, it hadn’t been that long since LeFevre had advocated rather different political ideas. He reports in his autobiography that when, in 1949, he began considering a run for public office —for Helen Gahagan Douglas’s seat in the US House of Representatives, to be exact —he was naturally attracted to the Republican Party.

The Democrats seemed to confuse "liberal" —a word originally serving to identify a supporter of liberty —with generosity. They were willingly generous with the taxpayers’ money. Thus, liberal Democrats were generous Democrats. They rarely gave away their own funds. They scooped in dollars from the public, and then distributed it as largesse.

 

     And a chance meeting with Ronald Reagan at one Republican gathering (the actor, LeFevre tells us, “was thinking of bolting the Democratic Party and putting on the dress of the GOP”) convinced him “that there were some very fine people attracted to the Republican organization.”

     As a candidate, LeFevre espoused “equality of opportunity under the ‘opportunity state,’ lower taxes for more take-home pay, loyal Americanism, better atomic defense, [and] fair treatment of veterans.” He reports in his autobiography that he was “dismayed” at his Democratic opponent’s record. “She was the number one absentee in Congress,” he wrote.

And when she did show up, she almost invariably cast her vote in favor of more controls and more taxes levied against business. I suspected that she was sympathetic to socialism, if not communism.

     By contrast, the Robert LeFevre of 1949 and 1950 looked approvingly on Richard Nixon, because “we all knew he stood foursquare for private enterprise.”

     Nor did LeFevre take kindly back in those days to criticism of the public schools, as when one of his financial backers told him that “the real danger to this country comes from the government itself” —more specifically from “one agency of government viewed by nearly everyone as sacred that is engaged in wrecking everything,” namely “the public school system.” In those days, as LeFevre himself acknowledges in his autobiography, “my own view clung to the popular notion that it was Russia and the ‘foreign influence’ of ‘communists and communist sympathizers’ in government that was responsible” for the serious problems he saw besetting American society. “The ‘International’ Trade Union movement [also] appealed to me as a far more logical bulls-eye for the crusade target.”

 

     After the failure of his political campaign, LeFevre worked for a couple of nonprofits in quick succession. The first was an anti-union outfit called the Wage Earners’ Committee; the second was a tax-reform outfit called the United Taxpayers of California. For both of these organizations, LeFevre provided the kinds of services that today would most likely be provided by someone called the director of communications or vice president for communications. Meanwhile, he was reading. In 1949, the year he had launched his abortive political campaign, he had also begun an extensive reading program —one that he hoped would remedy his ignorance in certain subject areas and make him more self-assured and at ease in political and economic discussions. Using the resources of his local branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, LeFevre reports in his autobiography, “I studied history and philosophy while concentrating on political theory.”

 

     In the course of his reading, LeFevre encountered one book that had a particularly enormous impact on him —The Discovery of Freedom, by the well-known novelist and journalist Rose Wilder Lane. He learned that a man named Leonard Read had started a new “think tank” (the phrase was, of course, not yet widely in use) called the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and “was making it [The Discovery of Freedom] the centerpiece of his newly formed organization.” LeFevre quit his job on the West Coast and made plans to move his family to New York; he simply had to find a way to work for Leonard Read at FEE.

     That wasn’t to be, as things turned out, but he met Leonard Read while he was in New York looking for a job, and also Baldy Harper, who told him, “We’ve all been wondering just how much government is needed. Some of us here are now thinking that perhaps the correct amount is no government at all.” LeFevre’s biographer, Carl Watner, reports that “such a radical idea shocked” him: despite his enthusiasm for Rose Wilder Lane’s Discovery of Freedom and for the editorials he had begun reading with pleasure in the Santa Ana Register not long before leaving Los Angeles, he wasn’t ready for that step yet. Neither, of course, was Leonard Read. And over the next ten years the bad blood that already existed between Baldy Harper’s growing anarchist faction and Read’s minarchist faction (which did not want to ask FEE’s financial backers to support an anarchist enclave) finally became bad enough that Harper left FEE altogether and started his own think tank, the Institute for Humane Studies.

 

     But that’s another story for another time. I digress. We’re back in 1951 right now, and Robert LeFevre has just given up on his hopes of working with Leonard Read and has decided to go back into broadcasting. He had worked in radio off and on, mostly in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, since he was in his early twenties. He hadn’t had any luck at finding anything lately in LA, true enough. But maybe he could find something in another state with lots of sunshine and mild weather —say, Florida?

 

     He could. WQAM in Miami snapped him up. But WQAM had LeFevre for only a couple of years before he was snapped up again, this time by WFTL, a new TV station in Fort Lauderdale that wanted him to be its news director, anchor its six o’clock news, and write a daily commentary on the news that he would deliver on camera each evening at ten o’clock. Then, after three years in South Florida, LeFevre picked up and moved again, this time to New York, where he had landed a job directing communications for yet another nonprofit, Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council, a more-than-somewhat-dubious conservative organization. After little more than a year in the Big Apple, he was job hunting once more. But this time, he landed a position that he held onto for a decade —one that transformed him from a moderately successful (if rather confused) conservative spokesman into one of the most radical and influential libertarians in the land.

 

     He blew into Colorado Springs in November 1954, and it probably seemed to a lot of people who read his editorials in the Gazette-Telegraph over the course of the next year as though he had materialized out of the middle of nowhere. For here, quite obviously, was a major new libertarian talent that nobody had ever heard of before. At this point, LeFevre made no distinction in his own mind among words like “conservative,” “libertarian,” and “right wing.” And up to the end of 1954, the associates he had cultivated and the organizations he had served were all conservative and right wing, not libertarian. There would have been little reason for any libertarian in the early-or mid-fifties to have heard of LeFevre —or to have remembered him if they had heard of him. In the early 1950s LeFevre sounded too much like every mealy-mouthed Republican of the time to make any real impression on a libertarian listener.

 

     Why would Harry Hoiles hire such a man to run the editorial page of his newspaper? Put yourself in Hoiles’s position. You’re a libertarian; you want your paper’s editorial policy to be libertarian. But libertarian writers —already-libertarian writers —are few and far between. Sometimes the best you can do is find a person who has shown some facility at writing and takes the right position on certain important issues, and try to train that person to write libertarian editorials. And so it was that on his first day at his new job, Robert LeFevre met with his new boss and was informed (as he recalled it nearly thirty years later in his autobiography) that the paper was a "Freedom" paper. That meant the editorials would be about freedom. Everything I wrote, if Harry were to approve of it, would have to support the concept of humans as free beings.

 

     Moreover, “I was to be consistent in everything I wrote.” In fact, he was to “be above reproach in matters of consistency” and “to refrain from contradiction.” And LeFevre found that this requirement was far tougher than he had anticipated. “He tripped me up on one inconsistency after another,” LeFevre wrote thirty years later of the Harry Hoiles he met in 1954. And that meant that LeFevre had to rewrite. But gradually he got the hang of the libertarian editorial-writing thing —which meant, of course, that he had gotten the hang of libertarianism itself and had come to understand why libertarianism has nothing at all in common with conservatism. He had come to oppose the public schools. He had come to oppose taxation. He had come to oppose voting. He had come to oppose violence of any kind, even when it was employed in self-defense. He had come to oppose coercive government, mandatory government —the state —without reservation. And he had become convinced that what was really most needed to advance the libertarian idea in American society was a school that taught the essentials of libertarian political economy. Late in 1955, about a year after joining the staff of the Gazette-Telegraph, LeFevre felt sufficiently at home with libertarian thinking that he felt he could do his job in fewer than forty hours a week, so he asked Harry Hoiles for some time off to work on putting his “freedom school” together. Hoiles was skeptical, but gave LeFevre the time off he needed in return for his guarantee that he would keep up with his work on the paper and not neglect it in order to work on his project.

 

     The rest, as they say, is history. The Freedom School was, judged by standards appropriate to the times, a remarkable success. It attracted students and funding, and its guest lecturers included Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Frank Chodorov, and Rose Wilder Lane, among many others —all the libertarian stars of the time and all the newcomers on their way up. Roy Childs was an instructor at the Freedom School while he was still in his teens. Butler Shaffer was on the faculty at the same time when he was in his early thirties. LeFevre himself, at the time I refer to —the mid-to late 1960s —was in his late fifties. He had quit his job at the Gazette-Telegraph by then (though he still wrote a regular op-ed column that was syndicated to all the Freedom Newspapers coast to coast) and had put all his economic eggs in one basket, the Freedom School. So when a disastrous flood virtually destroyed the campus in 1968, he had nothing to fall back on to ease the path toward recovery.

 

     He closed the Freedom School (by then its name had changed to Rampart College) and went back to Los Angeles. Not that he had come from there, mind you. He had come, as I’ve said, from the middle of nowhere. LeFevre was born in the middle of nowhere, in what he described in his autobiography as a “miserable shack” a few miles outside the then-tiny town of Gooding, Idaho, where his parents, pioneers from Minnesota, were trying to homestead some “free” land. They gave up not long after young Robert’s birth, abandoned their claim, and headed back to Minneapolis, where Robert grew up and went through high school and what college he could get through before the necessity of earning a living broke in on him. He spent a couple of years working with his father in sales, and then, just before his twenty-first birthday, in 1932, went out to Los Angeles to become a movie star. He never got past the studio gates, though he did find some paying work in theater and radio.

 

     A year and a half later, he slunk back to Minneapolis with his tail between his legs, only to discover that there, back home, he was something of a conquering hero. He immediately secured a radio gig and within two or three years was a prosperous and much-admired local morning host. He didn’t want to stay in Minneapolis, however. He wanted to return to the West Coast, and he found his opportunity when he met an entrancing woman who devoted herself to a rather bizarre religious movement or cult called “The Great I Am.” LeFevre followed her to San Francisco, where he insinuated himself into the cult hierarchy and became, in effect, its director of communications and emcee of its public lectures and meetings.

 

     Enter World War II, much of which he spent in Officer Candidate School and as a communications officer in London and Paris. After the war, back in San Francisco, LeFevre tried his hand at business —a restaurant, a hotel, an apartment building —and failed at all of it. He felt his efforts had been defeated, not only by his inexperience as a businessman, but also by the power labor unions wielded in the San Francisco Bay Area and the expenses forced on businessmen by local regulations and taxes. He went back to Los Angeles, where unions were weaker and business regulation was less costly and intrusive, and there he was when 1949 rolled around and the idea of running for Congress occurred to him.

 

     He returned to Los Angeles a final time in the late 1960s after the failure of the Freedom School. He set up a much-reduced version of Rampart College in some office space in Orange County, and from there he offered a home-study course. Also he offered to take his basic course on the road and teach it to groups of business executives. During his time in Colorado, the executives had come to him for specially organized and scheduled presentations of the basic course; now LeFevre would go to them.

 

     He did this for another decade or so, then retired. A few years later, on the 13th of May, 1986, at the age of seventy-five, he died in his sleep in a motel room in Flagstaff, Arizona, while on a cross-country auto trip with his wife. It had taken him a long time to learn that teaching was his strong suit, the work at which he really excelled, just as it had taken him a long time —until he was in his mid-forties —to find his way to libertarianism. He left half a dozen books behind him, his mammoth (more than 1,100-page) autobiography and at least five earlier books of much more modest dimensions. The first of these to see print, The Nature of Man and His Government (1959), is of interest largely because of what it tells us about newspaper-editorial writing in the late 1950s: the book’s text is mostly compiled from editorials LeFevre wrote for the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph during the years between 1955 and 1958. Constitutional Government Today in Soviet Russia (1962) is a gentle reminder to LeFevre’s former conservative allies that merely having a written constitution that proclaims freedom is no guarantee of actual freedom. The Philosophy of Ownership (1966) is a good snapshot of the sort of intellectual content LeFevre’s Freedom School offered at the peak of its influence. But Robert LeFevre’s main talent was not for writing; it was for teaching —for public speaking and for the give-and-take of group discussion and for fielding student questions on the fly, thinking quickly on his feet. LeFevre’s books and other writings don’t really capture what made him so good, so influential. The memory of a great teacher fades faster than the memory of a great writer. To fully grasp Robert LeFevre’s significance in the Libertarian Tradition, I guess you had to be there.

 

 

Work Cited

 

RiggenBach, Jeff. The Libertarian Tradition. Saint Michael, Barbados: Liberty.me, 2015. Kindle file.