79. My Intellectual Odyssey

79

RICHARD W. WILCKE

MY INTELLECTUAL ODYSSEY

MY FIRST MEMORY OF POLITICS is from 1948. When I was told one night that my father would be late for supper because he had to vote, I excitedly met him at the front door to ask for whom he had voted. The reason this incident remains in my memory is that I was hurt and disappointed when he declined to tell me, saying only that he had voted for “the best man.” I was anxious to know because I had begun kindergarten that year and was desperate to declare my political allegiance. My mother, who was born in Brooklyn, had kindly explained that we were Dodger fans rather than Yankee fans, and I now wanted to know whether we were Dewey fans or Truman fans. But my father was a family physician who was still building his practice in our city. While his attitude changed markedly in a few years, at that time he still kept his politics private. He imagined, I suppose, that my classmates would run home saying, “Wilcke is for Dewey!”

In 1952, we spent hours of a family vacation in the mountains listening to the national Republican Party convention on the radio of our station wagon. My family was in favor of Taft, but I am sure we were not upset by the nomination of Eisenhower. I had learned by then that my father had voted Democratic only once in his life, when he cast his first-ever presidential ballot for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, a fact that he, like H.L. Mencken, always regretted. By the time Ike was running for president in 1952, my father had openly declared his political affiliation. In fact, he even had a GOP “I like IKE” campaign poster hanging in the waiting room of his office. Apparently, he had enough patients by then that he no longer was worried about offending local Democratic sensibilities, which were pretty deep-seated in our mill and factory town of upstate New York. In school, we soon divided ourselves by party, but it was never as important to us as our endless arguments about the relative talents of Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider.

Thanks to my family, I survived the 1950s with a strong identity as a Dodger fan, a Lutheran, and a Republican. I read everything I could about the Dodgers, and, thanks to Sunday school and confirmation class, knew quite a bit about being Lutheran. But there was no substance to my political identity until 1959 when my father brought home two issues of Human Events. They had been given and recommended to him by a patient who had urged him to study the lengthy profiles of U.S. Senators John F. Kennedy and Barry Goldwater. My father, unless he were on vacation, never had much time for reading non-medical material, although he did own many books, including some favorites by John T. Flynn. I cannot imagine what impelled me as a high school junior to read these papers, but the ideas of individual freedom in the laudatory essay about Goldwater appealed to me. From that moment on, I was a self-aware conservative and, to the extent that I understood it, a believer in individualism. In adolescent pretentiousness, I immediately informed my father that I was interested primarily in ideology, not in blind allegiance to the GOP.

During the 1960s, as the saying goes, I forgot nothing and learned nothing. I went to Kansas State University and joined Collegiate Young Republicans, a huge club on that campus, hence a wonderful place to meet girls. In 1962, I joined the Marine Corps and endured a summer-long Platoon Leaders Class (PLC), the initial step toward becoming a Marine officer. My platoon mates and I were shocked to discover that, while we had assumed America was at peace, the Marine Corps was actively preparing to send many of us to Vietnam, a place we knew nothing about. Over the next 18–24 months, of course, that southeast Asian country emerged as a foreign-policy crisis area. Although I graduated with excellent scores from the PLC, my new goal became to attend college in California. Therefore, I resigned my chance at a commission and opted to become an enlisted reservist. By the fall of 1964, I was going to school at San Luis Obispo, where I volunteered for the Goldwater campaign. I read the Conscience of a Conservative, but that’s all. Satisfied that I was a conservative, I supported the Vietnam War, as did most loyal Marines.

By the late 1960s, I was married, teaching high school and coaching football, and growing uneasy about the justification and number of American deaths in Southeast Asia. As a Republican, I hadn’t trusted the Johnson administration, but I was beginning also to doubt Nixon. Then, in 1968, my last few months as a Marine Corps Reservist, I went on a large regional exercise in the Catskill Mountains. By the remotest of chances, I ran into a member of my original 1962 PLC platoon, who, unbeknownst to me, had also chosen enlisted duty rather than second lieutenant bars. I was shocked that he, also a high school teacher, was now openly and fiercely opposed to the war. Standing there in our Marine uniforms, we seemed sort of disloyal to be discussing it, but then he told me that he had looked up the service records of our platoon. Of the 42 graduates, including him and me, 30 had been killed while serving as combat officers in the initial years of Vietnam. He produced for me a typed list of their names, and as I read them, suddenly remembering their faces and the experiences and laughs we had all shared, my feelings about the war were altered from unsettled to firmly against. He and I reminisced and talked about foreign policy for several hours.

I ended the decade of the 1960s believing that, in general, our choice was to be a conservative and support America’s wars, or to be an anti-American. However, I had convinced myself that this particular war was an unfortunate exception to previous glories, and so I opposed it. In January of 1970, we moved back to Topeka, Kansas, where I took a job with a radio and television station. Several months later, following a regional fair committee meeting during which I had spoken in defense of free enterprise, a man who owned several area grocery stores approached me. He asked if I were familiar with the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). When I said no, he offered me several back issues of The Freeman, and informed me that there would be a weekend seminar in Topeka soon, to which there would be scholarships available. If I had any interest, he would be happy to help me qualify for one of those. I took the magazines home and looked at them with only moderate interest, as I recall, but I called the man a few days later and I told him I would consider going to the seminar, as long as there would be no out-of-pocket costs for me.

A local hero of mine at the time was Kenneth McFarland, one of the most spell-binding speakers in the country. He lived in Topeka, but traveled the country as part of a General Motors speakers program to sell “Americanism” to Americans. On the morning of the FEE seminar, as I was signing in, I happened to hear a man behind me say, “Hello, Leonard, welcome to Kansas.” As I knew the name of the president of FEE was Leonard Read, I listened intently. Read informed his greeter that he had just had breakfast with Kenneth McFarland, a fellow he had never met but with whom he had corresponded off and on for years. I hadn’t been totally comfortable that I understood FEE’s mission, so I was happily relieved to hear that the head of the organization was a personal friend of my hero. However, to my shock and amazement, I heard Read say, “It was a total waste of my time. That guy is nothing but a narrow-minded flag-waver.” I could not believe my ears. What on earth was I getting myself into? Maybe friends were right when they warned against falling in with radicals. Because of this, I was primed to listen extra carefully.

Because of this mindset, I absorbed every word and every nuance of every speaker—Read, Hans Sennholz, and Ed Opitz—as if I were a desert plant desperate for moisture. That weekend for me was not a discussion of economic ideas as much as it was a life-changing experience. It seemed to me that I had been preparing all my life to hear these ideas and almost everything that was said seemed to filter deep into my consciousness. In a flash of insight, like Paul on the road to Damascus, I understood principles that would explain Goldwater and Vietnam and free enterprise and McFarland and everything else I had been unclear about. I became a loyal disciple of Leonard Read and began devouring every book and magazine that FEE had available, and every book in the Topeka Public Library by anyone whose name I came across in these books and other publications.

A year or so later, I attended a second FEE seminar in Salina, Kansas (at my own expense this time), where I recorded every word. Involved in agriculture, I met some young farmers from Nebraska. They were the first to speak to me about FEE’s “foolish” beliefs in a limited government, and recommended that I read such authors as Robert LeFevre and Murray Rothbard.

Also on that weekend, I met George Pearson, a Grove City College student of Sennholz who was working in Wichita for Koch Industries and fundraising for the Institute for Humane Studies. We became friends and I absorbed a great deal from him about the history and personalities of the movement. In those years, he and Charles Koch were much enamored of Murray Rothbard’s strategic vision, and George gave me a number of books and booklets from Murray and from IHS. About that time, he and Charles started a Libertarian Supper Club in Wichita. It was about 120 miles from Topeka but I always tried to go. There, I met and heard LeFevre for the first time. I had my wife, Janny, with me that night, and he converted her to anarchy in about 30 minutes. Others I heard and met for the first time at that club included Ben Rogge and Lew Rockwell, both of whom later became good friends. All of these experiences, in combination with my continual study—I even began taking more economics courses at Washburn University to make up for the things I had ignored as an undergraduate—developed and firmed up my philosophy.

By 1976, I had conceived a novel organization that would analyze food, farm, and development policy from a distinctly market perspective; an area that I felt the USDA-Land Grant system would never explore sufficiently. After all, most agricultural economists were sequestered in special departments in the agricultural schools and working for the USDA. My dream was an independent institution. Naturally, I was hoping that Charles Koch, who was by then launching the Cato Institute, would see fit to fund my project as well. In 1977, I left my job in Kansas and Janny and I took our three kids and moved near our parents in upstate New York to work full time on this project, called the Institute for the Study of Market Agriculture. I was privileged to be invited to Cato’s first summer seminar at Wake Forest where I met many who have remained my friends. My favorite lecturers, without question, were Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, and Walter Grinder. In the meantime, I began graduate study at the State University of New York under Arthur Ekirch, libertarian intellectual historian, taking every graduate class that he taught.

In 1979, several businessmen including Koch asked me to set aside my agricultural institute and go to Washington to serve as the president and spokesmen for a new business organization to be called the Council for a Competitive Economy. The primary goal was to create a visible distinction on Capitol Hill and within the business community between the terms “pro-market” and “pro-business.” For five years, we struggled to enlist corporations and executives as members and donors even as we continually and openly criticized any of their actions that seemed to us to undermine the case for a free market.

We also put forth the best possible solutions to business issues, regardless of political feasibility, from repeal of Glass-Steagall to elimination of the corporate income tax. Thanks to my committed and like-minded staff, I was able to keep the Council pure enough that both LeFevre and Rothbard became supporters and cheerleaders. My staff included, at various times, such notables as David Boaz, Joe Cobb, Cindy Ingham, Tom Palmer, Sheldon Richman, Katsuro Sakoh, Fred Smith, and Barbara Stevens. While in the end the Council did not survive, the experience for me was an uplifting one, and the culmination of my intellectual odyssey. How many ever get to advocate anarcho-capitalism there within the belly of the beast?

Rich Wilck is a faculty member in the College of Business and Public Administration at the University of Louisville.